Making New Friends

Meet New People!
Sounds easy enough, but I think this is one of the most difficult tasks for us twenty-somethings. We've got our usual crowds, our usual jobs, our usual friends, and nothing is going to change our perfect little worlds--except the fact that we're bored out of our minds with the same old, same old.

Artemis told me that instead of being brave and accepting offers to go do things with people she didn't really know yet, she would usually choose to do nothing and go nowhere with her usual buddies. It's a lot easier to stay in your comfort zone. It's WAY easier to just hide at home and watch TV. But the reality of the situation is that watching reruns almost never promotes a robust social life.

When I moved to a new city for graduate school, I didn't know anyone. Then I met this girl in class who lived a couple blocks from me. We didn't really know each other, but low and behold, she CALLED me later that week. Me. Someone she had just met. She asked me if I wanted to come over and have dinner with her and her roommates. Eureka! And then after that, I called her to go out one time. And each time we hung out, the more we knew each other. After only a matter of weeks, I considered her my........FRIEND. And I was hers. And I was also friends with her roommates and their friends. It just went on and on.

I thanked her one day for asking me to hang out and told her how it pretty much saved my life. And she looked at me with a 'you idiot' look on her face and said, "Well, that's how you make friends".

Deadlines

So, I've met a bunch of women who have utilized deadlines to make their lives more sane. I personally have set a date on when I can make this whole situation I've been experiencing a legitimate part of my life. My friend Artemis has told her muse that they will not be having sex until August 1st, at which time they will decide where their relationship is headed. Another friend, Matilda had to give her Turkish-Muslim boyfriend of six years a deadline to choose whether or not he wants to marry her, and thus, cause distress in his relationship with his parents forever.

I think when you're dating someone casually, and one of you is not really happy with the progress, setting a deadline is ideal. If you want something to go somewhere, you need to know when to say "stop" or "go". If you've set a date for this evaluation, you can feel confident in knowing that you gave yourself a certain number of weeks or months before coming to a conclusion. It also forces people to move away from that stagnant state of nothingness or to just jump ship completely.

Besides moving something forward, deadlines can also help you take your time. If you decided not to do something until a certain date, it allows to you experience a situation with control. You have space. You have sanity. For someone like me, who is continually a fool rushing in, this makes me feel like people have less grounds to judge me. And BY THE WAY, cut it out! I had no intention of these things happening, but by some weird fucked up trick of fate, it did. I thank whoever is in charge for making it happen, but now, people are not happy. Artemis said, "Hey, your single girl blog lasted a whole week. Good job". Artemis, meet you in the underworld. But if you need a scapegoat, I'm all yours.

Lesson 8

Lesson 8: Sleep is an eventual necessity for living.

I estimate that in the last six nights, I slept a total of 26 hours. Normally, I would demand at least 48 hours in six nights—but I gave up that fight last week. Throughout the previous nine months, in the best interest of my career, I always had to say, “I’ve gotta go to bed. I get up at 6:00am. No, sorry, I’ve got to work”. And now, I can say “YES! I will stay out late with you guys, I will drink on a week night, I will not go home so I can pack my lunch”. And it feels good. This is my reward for going to graduate school, working with an extremely challenging population, and agreeing to be underpaid for the rest of my career. The best part of this reward is that I experienced what it was like to get so over-tired my irises morphed into ellipses.

Luckily, after about six days of that, one must concede. I went to bed last night at 9:00 and I feel fabulous today. So fabulous, that I think I might stay out late tonight.

Lesson 7: Chance Occurrences

One of my favorite psychology professors from Geneseo gave me a piece of advice during my senior year of college while I was working as her teaching assistant. She recommended that you develop life goals and make plans, but not to the extent that you leave out room for chance occurrences.

This sounded unusual coming from a woman who was in a successful marriage, attended Stanford University and then completed her Ph. D. in experimental psychology at the University of Michigan, raised two daughters while teaching, and was continually writing text books (five to date?), three of which have gone through at least seven editions. Talk about being goal oriented. But I’ve found that what she said keeps coming into play in my life and every time it does, I think about her and how right she was.

My professor was referring to the idea that no matter how much planning we do, we have to realize that sometimes the best opportunities arise serendipitously, and we have to have the mental flexibility to just roll with it. Instead of thinking that you already know what you need and then barrel through life towards some idealized destination, maybe we should try to sit back, relax, and really open our eyes to the possibilities. Free of judgment, free of expectations, free of obsessive control.

And of course, as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have been known to say:

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well you might find
You get what you need
Oh yea-ay

A Survey

Semantics can be sexy!

Some of the manly men on our team were sitting around gossiping yesterday and it came to light that there is some confusion about verbs used to describe sex/foreplay--related acts. It seems that regional dialect and date of birth had a significant effect. Those born in the dark days of the 1970s used vastly different terms than the much more connected and technologically savvy 1980s babies.

The most profound differences were seen between groups that attended different universities. The U of R alumni could barely communicate with the RIT alumni. Observations indicated that crude hand signaling and bodily gestures were the only way these two groups managed to describe what happened last Saturday night. Ow ow! And once RIT figured out that U of R was saying "We hooked up", they still didn't know what happened.

Regardless of who you're speaking with, there are some major confusions about what someone means when they say "We hooked up" or "We made out". My feeling is that you say "I hooked up" when you really didn't have sex, but you want people to think there's a possibility that you did and you want to remain mysterious--but then of course, you could have had sex...nobody will ever know! I don't think "made out" EVER implies sex happened.

Just to be sure, let's refer to urbandictionary.com. These were the most popular definitions:

MAKE OUT
"the act of swapping spit with your significant other... or perhaps just some hottie you met at a party, but anyway, you just sit there sucking at each other's faces for an extended period of time and if you're lucky there might even be a little roaming around of the hands if ya get my drift :p"

HOOKING UP
"An incredibly ambiguous phrase that drives me absolutely insane when people use it."

Well, there you have it. What do you say?

Lesson 6

Lesson 6: Self-Confidence—Repeat after me, “I rock the hizzy”.

It’s an obvious essential element for women no matter what the aim. If you’re just interested in playing around, then it’s even more important because there’s a good chance other people just want to play with you too. This is the wrong time to rely on someone else for validation. Most (ok, who am I kidding—all) compliments are given because someone wants to get into your pants—not because some guy really thinks you’re “the most beautiful woman at this bar” (Oh, that one get’s me every time!)

But instead, if you already realize that you’re a successful, smart, beautiful, attractive woman who doesn’t need someone else’s approval to feel good—then you’ll be fine when something doesn’t work out. You’ll be fine when someone tells you they love you, but they’re not in love with. You’ll be fine when you have to shimmy under someone’s bed to retrieve your bra. You’ll be fine when you do the walk of shame down Park Ave. You’ll be just FINE.

Can you just wake up one day and be confident? My feeling is that you’ve got to develop it and you’ve got to really believe these things about yourself. And no, you’re not a pretentious bastard if you think you rock. Our society wants people to be self-deprecating AND confident. No wonder it takes so goddamn long to develop this sense of self. This is the first time in my entire life that I have been able to look at myself and say, “I’m fine”. So, I’ve given myself permission to play. But the minute I let someone else define me, game over.

Lesson 5

This is what happens when you ignore lesson #4:
I violated my own code so that others may learn from my blunders--not because I lost sight of the goal...not because I was under the influence...not because my brain stopped functioning. I did it ONLY so that my lessons would become validated in the eyes of my readers. I did this for you. (That was one big fat rationalization)

I made some poor choices last night which include a.) making out with Tall Boy 1 who only has a single degree of separation from myself b.) making out with Tall Boy 1 who also happens to be on my team (observe degrees of separation whithering away) c.) Drinking a little eensy weensy too much d.) causing an interpersonal rift between Tall Boy 1 and his house-mate/my teammate. Crap.

Instead of being an angelic ray of light and joy to others, I was more like a tsunami that destroyed a peaceful native fishing village. I feel guilty because I made the pursuit of make-outness a priority over a friend's feelings.

Lesson 5: Be ready to accept the consequences of ignoring the lessons. I guess all I can do now is face what happened and keep in mind that I didn't do anything out of malice. I really wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but now I've got to do some damage control. Talk with some people, try to get things on a better path. As Anne Taintor said, "Someone was going to have to set a bad example". And that I did.

Good Or Evil...With a New Purpose

Embrace your freedom
(without becoming a flipping whore).
This is the eternal quest of any woman who finds herself free of the eternal demands of a boyfriend/partner/husband/child/parasite. Labeled as a serial monogamist, I finally have found myself in a place where I am a.) 23 years old b.) single c.) not ready to settle down and d.) flaming hot. What to do? I have no experience in this field. I feel like I am in middle school again--curious about that cute boy, but waaaay to scared to talk to him. So as I find my way out of these woods, I will share my experiences with you. Hopefully we can all learn from my mistakes and laugh at the idiot things I do. I'm up for it.

The scene: Two weeks ago, out for an early drink with my friend, Jessa.
Jessa is my extremely forward thinking friend from Boulder, CO. She's 29, and a seasoned veteran of dating, being single, being engaged, breaking engagements, and finding the one she wants. I worship the ground she walks on. Her confidence is radiant. Jessa is my very first lesson.

Lesson 1: Find someone you admire and respect. Learn from them, emulate them. My relationship with Jessa led me to one of the most enlightening conversations I've had about casual dating. The advice she gave me that afternoon was, "Find someone HOT, there are so many HOT people out there. After I stopped dating so and so, I made out with lots of hot people."
Then I asked her, "Did you have sex with any of them?"
"No. Just make out."
Ok, sounds easy enough. And it was. That night, I went to a BBQ with some people from work and I got drunk and this Hot Boy got drunk, and we went back to his place and made out. Done and done. I had never done this before, but it was so easy. And my night with Hot Boy #1 leads me to...

Lesson 2: Don't have sex because then they'll have a lot of leverage and you'll feel used. I told him on the way home that sex was out of the question, and he said, "Fine". And that was that. I learned even more the morning after.

Lesson 3: Keep track of your shoes. Drunk people don't care where their purse, left shoe, or bra end up. You should, because when you're getting ready to leave, you don't want to have to search under the bed for these things. Just contain your personal belongings and you can make a smooth exit. I just said, "Hot Boy, I'm going to leave". We kissed, said goodbye, and I walked back to my house. Done and done.

After some reflection on the night, I tried to highlight why this situation worked out so beautifully. It was because certain factors were in place. Here is one of them.

Lesson 4: [Qualifications] Degrees of separation (DOS) between you and Hot Boy are ideally greater than or equal to 2, but less than 4. Examples:
Your best guy friend (DOS = 0 = Bad idea).
Your friend's best friend (DOS = 1 = bad idea still).
Your friend's friend from work- not YOUR work (DOS = 2 = approaching acceptability, especially if you're both tanked).
Some random person from a bar that you have never met in your life and for whom you've never completed a background check (DOS= infinite = poor decision even while under the influence).