How are you?

Say these words in your head: "How are you?". How did they sound? Concerned? Interested? Bored? Insincere? Quizzical? Like Joey from 'Friends'? Hmmn? It's impossible for you to know how I meant them to be read/mentally said because I typed them and you read them. According to semiotic theory they are arbitrary signs to which you, the reader, attach a significance according to your cultural bent. Phew, I'll stop showing off now.

Anyway, I'm suffering a similar problem at the moment because I'm finding it impossible to read emails. Ok, I can read them, but I can't read them. I'm emailing a bloke via an internet dating site and I can't tell whether his responses are quite amusing or dull as ditchwater because I can't tell whether certain phrases are ironic or not. In person this would be very simple, I could use verbal and non-verbal clues to work it out. On my laptop screen they are a befuddling mix of 'does he mean this or that'? Is there a wry wit or is it dry shit? The worst part of it is that I always find the wrong thing funny. Not like laughing at old ladies falling over (although I would and so would you) but at films. A marvellous friend with whom I go to the flicks says that half the fun of the film is me guffawing away in the bits of the film where nobody else is laughing. I find that bit of film funny so I cackle. Semiotics again. But what if these emails aren't truly amusing, it's just the significance I attach to them?

It's all very difficult. Of course if I wasn't a grade A wimp I could just email and say meet me for a coffee in town. But then that would make me have to trade my nice, safe virtual world for the real, frightening world where I might have to meet a real stranger and say 'Hello, how are you?".