My Dating Rules

Just when you think you are done with girls, you get sucked right back in…

There is a really cute girl, let’s call her Wilma, that I have been crushing on for about a month. She is beautiful; she has a great smile, and has a sense of humor and a personality that I am especially attracted to. She also lives somewhat close to where I will be working when I start my new job. I have decided against my better judgment that I will take her on a date and see how it goes.

This dating thing will probably be more of the exception rather than the rule. I’m not anticipating myself going on a lot of dates over the next year.

The problem is that I told myself I was done with girls and dating until I get myself where I want to be. After watching a crappy romantic comedy in the middle of the night, I decided that I don’t want to change who I am to make someone else happy. There will never be a right time or a right me to start wanting to see other people, and some of the best self improvement I have ever done was while I was dating/seeing other people.

I need to meet myself halfway though. Getting in shape is the most important thing I want to do for myself, and I think that is the paramount thing that needs to happen for myself. I have lived for too long as moderately in shape, but I have never respected my body. That needs to change big time.

The year after I broke up with She Who Must Not Be Named, I went on a dating frenzy, trying desperately to replace what I had lost. I had some success, but I was grasping at straws for the most part. If one does something aimlessly and without goals, they are usually destined for failure. So, some ground rules need to be in place if I am going to do the dating thing right this time.

1) No Online Dating.

There is a temptation there that the girl of my dreams is somewhere out there on the internet. After giving it a solid try, I can safely say that my odds of finding someone worthwhile out there are pretty slim.

Not many people have their shit together and are legitimately looking for someone to start seeing. Half the people were probably like me, not much direction and doing it a little compulsively. The other half are bitches, plain and simple. I’m sure this goes for the other side of the coin. From what I hear, probably more than half of internet dudes are douchebags.

If I date people I meet from reality, less of the mystery is spoiled by all the stalking that goes with online shopping which is what I want to get away from. The internet feels more like a store than a place where real human beings exist on the other end of the tubes. Meeting people through friends or mutual interests is a much better springboard to go from, instead of “I looked through all your pictures first and then read all 23 paragraphs of your profile, and sent you a message that you probably didn’t read completely.”

I’ll check my OKCupid profile from time to time, but that is mostly just people porn. It’s fun to see what other crazy females are out there, but they require way too much energy to actually meet.

2) Work Out or Die.

If I am going to allow myself to date, I must first be disciplined enough to take care of my health. If I can’t follow this rule, I have no business including someone else in my self neglect.

I might be too hard on myself, but I’m big on self improvement, and in my mind this one has been put off for far too long. If I haven’t been to the gym 3 times within one week, no weekend girl times.

3) Don’t Plan the Second Date While In the Middle of The First Date.

I’ve fallen in this bear trap so many times, and it has resulted in a lot of crappy second dates, and it’s mostly been because I was thinking with my dick instead of actually having a good time. Yea, even I want to segue a date into the bedroom; guys are like that. If you are ever out and the guy pulls this trick, it’s probably because he likes what’s under your clothes.

Nobody wants to be rude on a date, especially girls. If a guy starts talking about places to go next time, a girl can’t help but play along and agree to go even if she doesn’t want to see the dude again. It also puts the other person on the spot and in an awkward position.

Take a day in between when the date ended and when you get in touch again to go out. If she is still interested, she will say yes. If not, she will rudely ignore your phone calls/emails, and you will know that she doesn’t want another free meal.

4) The T-Shirt Litmus Test

My wardrobe is composed of a lot of T-Shirts, and most of them have something nerdy and funny on them. Very seldom a girl will actually take time to look at my t-shirt, or remark about it, or complement it. I’m not saying that I am a fashion genius, but I think the shirts that I wear are awesome and at least cute and funny, but as an extension reflect my personality of being cute and funny.

Ladies, you know I love you, but the fact remains that a lot of you are really wrapped up in yourselves and you don’t tend to notice much about the guy that you are going on a date with, let alone anything outside a five foot radius.

This isn’t a dealbreaker but if a girl that I go on a date with actually says something about what I am wearing and thinks it’s clever or it makes her laugh, I might break rule #3. This is the exception.

5) Go on interesting dates.

I’ve planned some pretty lame dates in the past but I have definitely improved this skill as time has gone on. A good date is something that both people find fun and interesting, and the primary purpose is to HAVE A GOOD TIME and maybe investigate this other person a little bit as well.

The tried and true dinner and a movie kinda doesn’t fit today’s modern scene anymore. It feels way more like an interview than an actual evening where two people enjoy each others company. One person asks a question and the other responds, and then the second person gets a turn to ask a question. It’s become extremely inorganic, and bordering on lame. The movie dinner date has its merits, but I would reserve it for people that are going steady, and those already committed to each other.

Speed dating seems much worse where you are taking pretty much all the fun out of the already painful dinner date and just shooting each other full of holes with questions. Get to know this other person first and figure out what they like before asking them out. Generic dates = no second dates.

Rules complete. Now to abide.

10 Things that can happen on a roadtrip

Inspired by the Ten Things I Have Learned blog (www.tenthingsivelearned.com) I thought of 10 things that have happened over the last month or so:

1) I have driven about 8000 miles with about 600 to go. This includes two oil changes, about $1000 worth of gasoline, and about 112 hours of driving time.

2) I have visited 4-5 cities that I would consider moving to: San Diego, Sacramento, Portland, Montreal, New York City. Maybe Omaha, this place seems like a pretty awesome scene.

3) I interviewed for 2 jobs on the road, much less than I was anticipating, but I'm okay with that considering the typical speed of most HR departments. The interviews that I did manage to get had pretty fast turnarounds all things considering.

4) A lot of my WoW friends let me crash and sleep at their houses, eat their food, take up their time, having them show me around their cities, and let me buy them dinner or beers. In fact the only people that I saw on my trip who I didn't meet through the game were my cousin in Minneapolis, my aunt, and my mom.

5) It's really interesting seeing various parts of the country. The landscapes, the accents, the chain restaurant of choice. I still have no idea what Bob Evans serves, I ate a donut on both coasts from good donuts places, and had a lot of good local food. I ate at a Chipotle where there were all white people working behind the counter and I felt a little dirty.

6) I have a love hate relationship with the french language. I had really low blood sugar while I was in Montreal and fucking could not stand that everything was in French and that I had a hard time moving the lever into the french position in my brain's language center. I eventually had a chai and a wrap, and felt a lot better. That city is bi-lingual, but my comprehension is just slow enough where someone would say something to me in french and my brain would not understand it until after they began speaking to me in English. A little quirky, but I could see living there and having french training wheels.

7) I think I have a new hobby thanks to my NYC WoW friends. I guess I have a good eye for photography, so I need to invest a little time in Lightroom, and a little money in a good camera. I think this will be really useful in whatever place I end up, not only helping me explore the city but I could really get some beatuful photos out of it. If I get really good, I want to make prints and give them to local coffee shops and galleries for pretty things to hang on their walls.

8) Having out of town guests is the best excuse to call in sick or take a day off from work. The people that let me stay showed me around their cities and states, sometimes doing stuff that they had been meaning to do for a long time, but just never got around to doing. One of my buddies had lived in NYC forever and had never been to the Empire State Building. Mischief Managed.

9) The Minneapolis Art Museum was gorgeous, and I am really sad that I only got to spend an hour there before it closed. I want to go back and spend a whole day there soaking everything in.

10) I miss Colorado, but I am excited to travel somewhere new when I decide what job I want and where I want to live. It doesn't really even matter where!

So yea, 10 things. I like these posts. Kudos 10things dude.

Motivation

I thought of an idea before falling asleep last night that I am surprised I still remembered in the morning. You know how it is, you have the most brilliant ideas either in the shower, in bed, or while you are hanging from your toes on a slave boat somewhere. Yea, that.

So, I made one of my goals for myself getting back in shape. I want to stay healthy and not have like a million problems wrong with me when I am in my 40s or whatever. That would be nice. I can already feel myself getting old when it come to what I eat, and how my stomach responds to food. I love spicy things, but if I overdo it my body rebels in not so nice ways.

I also want to look good. I've always had a fat stomach, and that is something that really needs to change and make me feel like I have made progress towards being a better person. Vanity has never been my thing; I am incredibly humble, and I think that my body has been fostering that attitude. I want to be more confident.

My grand epiphany is that I am not allowing myself to date or pickup women until I bring my weight down. I want to be about 205 before I will start looking to date again, and a goal weight of 185. This will allow me to have some muscle tone and lose my belly fat. I think by taking women and relationships off the table will allow me to focus exclusively on myself and being a little vain. I need a little narcissism.

Getting in shape and getting more good looking will put me in a much better position to be more selective about dating. I met a lot of girls this summer, but nothing really went anywhere because I just wasn't being very picky about who I dated. I went out a lot and really wasn't very interested in whom I was seeing.

I'm going to take this time as well to get better at understanding and interacting with women. I'm one of the stereotypical dudes who has always put women on a pedestal, seeing that they can do no wrong. Recent history has contradicted this, and now I don't hold women in general in such high regard; not a women hater though. I can have really great conversations and have a lot of fun with women when I'm not attracted to them very much, or that element of nervousness is gone. If I am not actively trying to impress girls that I see as potential dates, then I can get to know them a lot better than if I was.

I'm also going to look into some books about gender studies and relations. I can't put my finger on it, but the equal rights movement has taken a lot of wind out of the sails of men in terms of gender equality, and it seems the pendulum has swung a little too far. Men don't provide the same value as they used to in terms of being the bread winner and the provider of the family. Our culture has shifted away from more romantic and selfless values of family, love, and happiness and replace them with more self and tangible ideas like money, success, and sex. I'm not saying that any of that is bad, as a balance must be struck.

Men who at one time could attain value to women through being the breadwinner and champion of the household, now don't have as much worth to society when women being able to do the same work as men. Men are the gender that is wired to procreate, and the mechanism in the past has been through being the dominant gender; with the genders being more equal I don't see people having children. I'm worried that the US will start to go through negative population growth in the next 10-20 years due to US citizens not having children, and the only growth is experienced through immigration.

This has already gone on way too long, but I also think more and more people are single because there are exponentially more avenues of expression than there have ever been before, and it's exponentially more difficult for two people to have some common ground and interests on top of being attracted to each other. Or I could just be a hater, and think that only really attractive people are getting together and having babies while the rest of the population isn't very good looking, but has false high expectations of a mate driven by popular culture.

Ultimately I'm a romantic, though I feel that I have to change who I am to find someone else.

The Black Box.

I can get into a good mystery. I make a really good sleuth; a crime is committed, various parties come and go into the situation, and someone has to come into the crime scene and sort out all the clues and piece together the truth, and what happened. It’s like putting together a plane crash after all the dust has settled and the black box is recovered.

Mysteries are good fun, simple ones at least. Sadly nothing is ever very simple; even more frustrating is when the mystery is your life and through all the sleuthing and deducting you come to the conclusion that the crime cannot be solved. The last year has been a crime scene where I have picked every nit and examined every piece of burning wreckage that was my relationship with Erin.

I came to the conclusion last year that I will never get closure from that relationship, and that only one person who could tell me the truth is the one person whom I had written off and someone whom I could not trust. Even now, I debate with myself if I asked her to tell me the truth, would I be able to trust its validity.

This didn’t sit well with me, nor will it ever. I needed to know what happened. I was consumed by the absence of that knowledge. Honestly I have been obsessing over that for longer than I want to admit to myself, some of it while the relationship was still intact.

Putting on my detective’s hat for a second, here is what I have pieced together what happened with little clues I have to work with. Erin cheated on me about halfway through our relationship, and covered it up and lied to my face that she loved me and needed to slow down the relationship. We got back together, got engaged, but she was still seeing her suitor on the side. The situation eventually exploded and the other man presented himself and I chose to believe her over his word. Things oscillated between better and worse while our sex life was on life support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was one of her high school students. I have a picture from her journal where she curses me for wanting to improve our sex life, and on the same page claim that she had fallen for one of her students. Couple this with an uncommon amount of time she spent with him, hundreds of texts between them, and that she flat out did not come home one night from a student study session. I started to think that I picked the wrong horse when her previous fuck buddy came out of the closet.

But what to do? I was at an impasse with myself; the worst rock and hard place that I have ever had to be between in my whole life. I think Captain Ahab and I would be fast friends and have a good time over beers.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was not only breaking up with a girl, but I was also breaking up with an idea. My view of the world has changed since then, not by choice but by necessity. I’ve realized that my view of the world pre Erin was extremely idolized. I pretended to live in a world where nobody cheated on their partners, where honesty is the best policy, and where people treated each other with respect. If you don’t believe me, go read the news. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

The end of my relationship with Erin was also the end of my innocence.

That sounds really dramatic and hyperbolic, but it’s the way I feel. I don’t look at people the same way as I used to. Everyone I meet is a just another liar, cheater, or just in general bad until I get to know them. The world has shown its true face, and that presentation process has been painful, but educational.

In and ironic twist, I empathize and feel a strong connection with her mother, whom she has been a shoulder to lean on through the hard times during the relationship, and after I discovered that she was married and pregnant a little over a year after we broke up. Gretchen and I are somewhat casualties of infidelity. I’m also curious how much or how little her mother knows about what really happened.

She emailed me last year, and I have considered responding. It was short, sorry, and probably made her feel really good about herself for sending it. It ended with the mother of all cop outs:

“I honestly am sorry about how things ended with us, and I sincerely hope that you find the happiness you deserve.”

Sorry doesn’t even begin to make up for what she did. No admission of wrongdoing, and just a hollow apology in a pithy little statement. Finding happiness that I deserve? I was extremely happy with our relationship until she shit all over it and stopped being honest with me and honest with herself. I want to be happy, but that is all in the past now, a past where nobody cheats, and where truth is the currency. If anything that’s the happiness I deserve and I know I will never have it. It might very well be dangled in front of my face for the rest of my life taunting me, and haunting me. I don’t think I live in that world anymore.

I’m happy with my life though, and I don’t want to make it sound like I am going to go cut myself after posting this. Like I said, my life view has changed out of necessity, not by choice. I will find a way increase my happiness over time.

Warm Bodies

Talking to friends in fresh places really has a profound impact on ones thought processes.

I'm good at WoW. In fact, probably too good at the game. I could take 24 warm bodies, unskilled players, mouthbreathers, windowlickers and fartsniffers into a raid and we would be successful and get loot. Call me arrogant, but if you have played the game with me, you would agree that it is true.

Maybe that's why I feel burned out and unchallenged. I have no peers that play this game currently. I'm reminded of a quote from Big Bang Theory:

Leonard: Do you realize that if Penny wakes up there is no reasonable explanation as to why we're here.
Sheldon: I just gave you a reasonable explanation.
Leonard: No you gave me an explanation; its reasonableness will be determiend by a jury of your peers.
Sheldon: Don't be ridiculous... I have no peers.

I am the Sheldon of WoW. I make it rain.

Who.

I talked with a friend recently who wondered why that more people weren't smarter in general; not that people are stupid intentionally, but don't take that marginal effort to learn or be better people. We both came from serious relationships and grasping at what kind of person we wanted to be with next.She is extremely smart, going to be a doctor in fact, but felt slightly isolated from the world by her intelligence. Even though she wanted to find someone awesome, she wouldn't compromise herself in brilliance in order to find someone she wanted to be with.

We argued, and came short on understanding what exactly she was looking for, but it got me thinking about myself.

Smart people generally are a little arrogant about how smart they are. They take solace and shelter in the fact that they are better thinking than everyone else, probably similarly to how really attractive people take refuge in their good looks. The rub is that if you are especially gifted in one area (looks, brains, personality, endowedness) that almost everyone you meet will fail to measure up in that area to you.

I compared it to a bell curve. Sure, I am smart. If I had to give it a number, I would be in the 95th percentile of people around me; there are very few people that I know who are as smart or smarter than I think I am. So, if that is the thing I value the most, then I will only be looking in a small bandwidth of people around me for smarties, not to mention other attributes that I want (physical, chemistry, emotional).

This is who I am. I'm a funny, smart, decently attractive guy who is dynamite in the sack (or so I have been told). The stars could align and I could find someone who is looking for all those things. All the things I feel about myself are all at the very tip of the bell curve. Great, but I don't think that is what people are looking for; if I want to catch the most fish, I gotta fish with the best bait. You don't want to wait for someone to perfectly match.

So I ask a question of myself.

Who do I want to be? Do I want to be less smart, but more common?

Do I shoot for the masses, where the venn diagram has the largest intersection? Tailor myself to be what the most people are looking for: a marginally smart, marginally funny, very physically attractive with nice clothes and always looking like I have something that I can offer or give them? This person can sleep with whoever they want, talk about vapid or topical stuff with anyone.

Or do I shoot for something similar to me and take the road where I already know I will be more isolated from the world. I feel my friend's pain too. I feel that I'm imbalanced, too much brain, not enough in other areas.

When a song hits it on the head.`

What do you do if there comes a day when I lose my way? What will you do?
Oh I would stand by you (Word?)
Pray for you (Oh yeah?)
If it would help I’d even die for you?

Oh yeah? That’s what the last one said
Unfortunately I was mad misled
I ran on E until no more gas was left
The most I got from her was ass and bread
The trust was lost like Kanye’s fashion sense
Accidents happen when you live with the weak
But it’s not an accident when you make a conscious decision to cheat
That’s enough reason to get into beef
Throw all your spouse’s shit on the street, quit and retreat
But these are the breaks, it’s told by Kurtis Blow
So please for my sake, stay by me, this earth is cold
And I’m freezing like I’ve been laying in dirt and snow