"The universe is indifferent."
--Donald Draper
Focusing on people is surprisingly difficult. As an example, there is a popular british tv show about a man who time travels in a space ship disguised as a blue police box. One of the plot devices in this show is a "perception filter" which prevents people from noticing something. Sometimes, it feels like such a filter is on my mind. When I try to think about other people, my mind keeps trying to focus on other things, like me, or things I could do, or places I could go, or strategies I could use and archetypes of people I could meet. Maybe I'm just too used to solving problems, which is bad because when it comes to girls sometimes the problem solves you.
Anyway, kind of getting the hang of it. And when I talk about people, this time, I don't mean just girls. Its kind of cool. There is this guy I see at work and he seems happy when I ask him how his day is going. This surprises me, because typically when someone asks me how my day is going, my brain flags the conversation as spam, and my subconscious feeds them some crap like "good, how is yours?" while I think about pirates. Other people though...seem to appreciate the three seconds I spend taking an interest in their life. So...good for them. I can do that.
Unfortunately, as I've complained about before, having a social life is preventing me from fixing my body. I specifically quit the gym near my house, and signed up for the gym at work, even though it was three times as expensive, because I wanted to make it as easy as possible to go to the gym after work. Now, though, I have social-ish shit going on every night after work. And so I can't go to the gym anymore--at least not for cardio. The main problem is that cardio makes me sweat ridiculous amounts, and according to what I've read, is most useful if you do at least 30 minutes, three times a week. The other problem is, the gym at work closes at like 10pm, so I can't go to the gym at 2am like I had been at the old one. My plan was to make cardio part of my lifestyle before graduating to weight lifting. Also I wanted to get done with private salsa lessons before I started paying a personal trainer to teach me to lift. So. My best idea at the moment is to get this thing which I hope will allow me to at least get my heart rate up at home for 30 minutes, even if I couldn't get to the gym that week. I've also tried doing an easier cardio workout (just run for the minimum 30 minutes instead of the 3 miles that is my usual goal) on the same night as salsa night. That works ok, unless my work friends convince me to get sushi instead of going to the gym. Anyway. My next idea, is to try to do a salsa private lesson and band practice on the same night. Its kind of logistically impossible, but I might find a way. And then, somehow, we start the fucking weight lifting. Some guys have been telling me that with lifting you can do twice a week. I think I can pull that off--especially if lifting doesn't make me sweat the way running does.
So. That was completely off topic. Back to girls.
Ummm.....yeah. So lets catch up on my complaining. First. Girls are a pain in the ass. I'm specifically talking about how they show if they're interested. There is a girl who works the coffee shop at work. I was pretty sure she was into me, because she always acted friendly, and excited to see me, and we always talked, and she would share things that were slightly more personal than I'd expect to hear if I'm just another customer, and I didn't see her acting that way around any other guys, etc. Well. Turns out she has a boyfriend and was just being friendly. This is fine. I mean I was devastated for about 3 minutes, but finding out the hard way that girls have boyfriends...that's like a sport for me now. Anyway. Here is the problem. A few weeks ago when I went salsa dancing, there were these two girls who seemed interested enough in dancing and talking to me, but I wasn't getting strong vibes from them. I ran into them as they were leaving, and instead of asking for the one girl's number, I said something gay about hoping to see them again. Then my friends, said, out loud, in public: "Why didn't you number close?" This surprised me because I did not know that Pickup Artist Nerd Talk had become mainstream enough to enter polite conversation. Anyway all my friends yelled at me for like 5 minutes about not asking for the girls number, and telling me they were into me, but the reason I didn't ask for her number was because she only showed 1/100th of the interest that the uninterested coffee shop girl showed. How the fuck am I supposed to figure this shit out? Fuck girls.
Second...I don't really have a second one. Oh wait I do. Basically, every time I put effort into meeting girls, it doesn't seem to work. All of this reading, and self reflection, and effort, and etc., and pretty much nothing. But then everyone once in a while the universe just drops something in my lap, and I get something really good without doing any work. I just rolled some dice and got lucky. Yeah. Dice. That's all it is. Tonight I basically struck out at salsa...all of my male friends pussied out, and the hot girl that I met while pretending to take the intro lesson had a boyfriend, who I shamed by dancing with the hot girl, until she asked if I was gay, which she suspected because I knew how to dance. By 10:40, again, the club was crawling with dudes and most of the female friends I brought had left and I couldn't find any more girls to dance with so I bounced. Then I bought pizza from my favorite pizza shop on the way home and elected to eat it there because I was feeling sociable. Then two drunk girls sat down next to me and we started talking about pizza or some bullshit, and then the cute one introduced herself, gave me her number and told me she has some great ideas for making an app, which I am excited about because for at least three years now my friends and I have been unable to think of a good idea for an app. Yeah. That's how it works. I spent hundreds of dollars cleaning up my salsa technique and all this effort trying to network friends together to go out regularly, but being hungry is the reason I make a social connection.
In conclusion: nothing makes sense.
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