Six to Midnight, Part 2

Seems like I have a choice, between bitching about my dating situation, or changing it, and this time I'm choosing the latter.  I know...no long diatribes about...girls or whatever.  I don't really remember what I used to write about...I think I was just frustrated because I hated my job at Amazon.  Anyway.


Appearances are Everything

So, hair.  Fucked that up big time.  Or, to be more positive, I elected to do an experiment to find out if it is ever a good idea to cut your own hair (its not) and the results were very conclusive, even with a sample size of one.

Body.  I am doing this crazy new workout strategy where I stop exercising when I feel pain.  It was a little depressing to see how little activity I must do if I go to the gym every day, (i.e. only 5 miles on the fake bicycle) however my knees no longer feel like they are getting stabbed with hot knives when I walk up stairs.  Still have a soda belly, which is disappearing extremely slowly.

Clothing.  Yeah...I'm not even going to tackle that yet.


Balls

Kickball.  Awesome.  Seriously:  co-ed sports that people don't take that seriously...where have you been all my life?  I mean I tried the sports thing repeatedly in philly..something was off.  Maybe I was too shy back then.  Maybe it was because there were always lots of old people.  Somehow the entire leagues I play in are younger people.  Also maybe it helps to join as an individual and be placed on the team of leftovers, where everyone wants to meet people.  Oh wait, I know:  in philly, I was always trying to play volleyball.  Volleyball is not the best sport for meeting people.  First of all, too many dudes play.  Secondly...well actually that was it.  That was the problem.

Today one of the girls on our team decided that four blocks was way to long for me to walk to my bike and gave me a ride from the kickball field to my bike.  She emailed me later to tell me that my Falco is awesome.  Unfortunately, and I didn't tell her this, but I actually have no idea if Falcos are that awesome or not.  So I just read the Wikipedia page on them...and I'm still not sure.  Apparently Falco isn't really a sportbike, but more of a "sporty roadster."  This is kind of funny, because Wikipedia said my Ninja 250 (which I also bought second hand) was a "sporty standard."  I wonder if I'll ever get a true sportbike?  All I know is, the first time I saw a Falco it was butt ugly, however mine grew on me.  The real question?  How would Donald Draper take a compliment on his Italian motorcycle?

Then, tonight, I was putting gas in the bike after just having come back from kickball.  I kept my helmet on and just flipped the visor up.  I was wearing shorts, because of kickball, and some girl behind me said something like "nice bike...you should wear pants though."  In shock, I spun around to flip her off for telling me to wear pants, but stopped myself at the last second because I was suddenly concerned that if I flipped her off she assume I was being a dick just because I'm just an asshole, and not because she told me to wear pants (when I give people the finger, it is very important to me for the recipient to know exactly why).  By the time I thought it through and concluded that my fears were ungrounded, she had already turned away and moved on.  I've thought about this, and obviously the correct thing to do would have been to give her the finger without looking.  That way, they can only assume it was because of telling me to wear pants.  I'm going to do that next time.

On a completely unrelated note, I hope to never again ride a motorcycle unless I'm wearing pants.  Shorts leave me feeling way to exposed and I nearly burned myself on the frame at least twice.


Digital Love

Dating sites:  Craiglist.  There was a time, when, instead of going out and meeting people, I tried to meet girls via craigslist.  That time was called college, sadly.  Yeah, I hung out with a bunch of church people whose idea of parties did not involve three handles of captain  (fun fact:  chicken is fucking delicious when marinated in Captain Morgan 100 Proof and some italian dressing).  I eventually got so good at weeding through the spammers that I found the actual girls that post (who I met in real life).  Five years later, the spammers have upped their game.  Instead of using the same paragraph over and over again, or trying to spin their bullshit in broken english for fake text speak (lol how r u) they are pushing out ads that are more believable than the ones made by real girls.  To make matters worse, the market for girls is so competitive that when men respond to an ad they also flag it as spam simply to block other men from responding.  So craigslist's anti-spam measures are steadily being trained to stop and block genuine posts from real girls.  OkCupid is also still a waste of time, however a friend is going to help me with some profile pics, and I'll try to get her to help rewrite the words on my profile also.  I typically only look at pictures, but it is my understanding that girls actually read the profiles.  PlentyOfFish is a little better.  A large number of ugly girls, and 2 cute ones, expressed an interested in meeting me.  I sent some messages to the cute ones back and forth until both of them blew me off, and for the second time ever I had to cancel a reservation at the "speakeasy" bar (its not a real speakeasy: its not secret and they are clearly obeying liquor laws) near my apartment.  Someday, I will take a girl there, and I will sample fun cocktails from the prohibition era.  I mean I could take a dude also, but that would be lame.  Maybe the fact that those girls blew me off has something to do with my email game...for all I know there was something I was supposed to do or not do, but I no longer have the time or interest to try to guess.  I just don't care.  Its too easy by comparison to meet girls in real life.  It is my understanding that on PlentyOfFish I am mostly competing with broke, jobless dickheads who live with their parents.  If these girls can't recognize....blah blah blah something that ends with the phrase "their loss."


Fuck dancing.  I just want girls.

My ex girlfriend managed to make me bored of salsa without even going with me...ever.  She claimed she liked going, but I got tired of trying to encourage her to go.  I admit some of this was my fault for getting is distracted on the way out the door, but this post is only about things that I can blame on her.  Anyway, apparently thursday nights are just, you know, so late.  Unless of course we are going to the third floor of the gay nightclub, to her favorite spot deep in the back behind the stripper pole.  Then thursday nights aren't too late.  Anyway, my attempts to get good at salsa, for real, and my inability to find a salsa partner, were also frustrating.  Also, the damn private lessons cost me a shit ton of money, and I basically wasted it all because I had no one to go dancing with (and no time to go b/c I was with my gf) and so I just forgot everything I learned.  The only thing I remember is the part where I'm apparently doing everything wrong.

I think, instead, I'm going to abandon my quest to actually get good at dancing, and instead just get good at meeting girls while dancing.  For those of you who dont salsa, I will inform you:  these are very different skills.  If you actually like to dance, you probably want to show up at clubs late when the regulars appear, and you wouldn't waste your time on beginner lessons, and you won't have a chance at conversation while you're actually dancing with a girl.

If you care more about girls then dancing, well, that's when you show up early, to catch the girls that just came to the club for the "lesson."  In fact you probably want to avoid the regulars...seeing the same old dudes every week is flat out depressing.  Also, you don't really need that many skills--there aren't many real salsa moves you can do while talking to a girl anyway.  Furthermore, you should be taking classes.  Beginner, group classes, all the time.

Except I still don't feel like it.  There is something stale about the salsa scene in Seattle.  I see the same lame people every night.  I went to Vancouver for one fucking night and showed up at a club wearing a tiger hat I'd just bought, and managed to bring a girl back to the hotel.   I've been living in Seattle for roughly 1580 nights and that still hasn't happened.  Seattle.  Fucking.  Sucks.

While we're tossing around numbers, its been 45 days since the breakup.  Still miss her.  I think about her every weekday when I get coffee because that's something we did together.  I like to fantasize about running into her and giving her the finger from across the street--or, if she's with her next boyfriend, running into her but being obvious about not acknowledging him as a human being.  Every time this happens I force myself to also fantasize about accidentally running into her and smiling and waving, because that's what Good Guy Greg would do, but its never as enjoyable. 

I definitely am not as hurt anymore though.  I've been trying to figure out at what rate my feelings for her are subsiding, and what a graph of my feelings toward her would look like.  They subsided slowly at first, then a little quicker, but now the last traces are slow to leave again.  It's definitely not exponential or logarithmic decay.  It might be a kind of quadratic decay where the term with the square has a negative in front.  Hmm...yeah I'm seeing some polynomial decay functions that resemble how I feel.  Its probably one of them.  Without an empirical way to measure how I feel (the closest I've gotten is a scale from My Life Sucks to Throwing Recyclables in the Trash Just to Spite Her*) its kind of a moot point.

Probably, the next steps are to actively avoid thinking about her.  It will probably be a lot like meditation, except I'm still allowed to think about other things.


*she cared a lot about the environment.  Not in a save-the-planet kind of way--probably never heard of a thorium reactor--but more in a sort of what-meaningless-activities-can-i-inconvenience-myself-with-that-will-have-no-effect-on-the-environment.   Once, we got in a big fight because she wanted me to put asparagus--a vegetable that does not have a skin that is peeled off--directly into the dirty store basket that was probably not cleaned since...ever.  I don't consider myself a germaphobe, but I typically don't put things in my mouth after resting them on dirty shit that strangers might have peed on.  She flipped her shit though.  I later figured out that it was her ineffective bias against the plastic bag I wanted to put the asparagus in, and I rehearsed a long argument involving a graphic description of a 40-year-old trucker in the bathroom after taco bell but before not washing his hands and using the very basket she was holding.  Sadly, I never got a chance to make this argument, but I rehearse it to myself every time I buy asparagus.  One day, I fucking hope I will be in the grocery store near some stupid environmental bitch being a cunt to her boyfriend over a plastic bag, and when that day comes, I will tell both of them my made up story about a 40 year old shitstorming trucker that doesn't wash his hands before handling baskets as whole foods.