6/21/2006

I realized today how much time to think you can have when you are doing a mindless task like mowing a lawn or doing other yardwork. In the three hours I worked outside today I had a lot of time to think about things, and a quote popped into my head that I read a couple of weeks ago.

You see, over the past week I have had several chats with old friends from high school and I have had a very similar conversation with four different female friends. In our conversations, all four of them found some way to say that I was "great friend material, but none of them ever considered me as boyfriend material", "a big teddy bear", "the guy who they know they can always come to for help and advice", and "the kind of guy that women bring to clubs to act as a bodyguard to keep the creepy guys away" (or some similar comment to the same effect).

After all of these conversations, my mind took the three hours of yardwork to sort through how I got categorized as the "great friend, but not boyfriend" type. . . and I think I got it.

I am a weird guy, I am fully willing to admit that, but to counter that weirdness I have spent most of my life developing the nice guy image I have. I don't act the way other guys tend to around women, and I think that is my problem.

In my attempt to be a gentleman I have done the following:
I put myself out and give up chairs to women without any thought of gaining anything.
I take the bait whenever a female friend goes fishing for compliments.
I make no untoward comments unless I know all present females will not be offended.
I focus on a woman's face (that is right guys, women have faces) and not on other assets when talking to her.

When you add up all of these little things, and thousands of other tiny things I have trained myself to do over the years to make girls actually feel comfortable around me have backfired. They now feel too comfortable around me. No one feels that they have any reason to worry with me around, because they know I won't try anything.

Hell, I can wander the halls of the women's dorms and the only thing Security or the RAs will say to me is "Hey George".

At one point right after Christmas break, someone made a joke about me giving up my seat to a female because I wanted to get in her pants and she responded by saying, "George isn't the kind of guy who tries to get into girls' pants."

Telling these stories about myself sadly reminds me of a story my mom told me about one of her friends at college. This guy was so openly gay that he was allowed to sleep over in the girls' dorms because the RAs knew he wasn't doing anything with the girls. That sounds way to close to my stories for comfort.

I have made myself seem so nonthreatening and normal that I think I finally understand why kings used to trust eunuchs to guard their harems. If a guy shows absolutely no overt signs that he realizes when women are attractive, he is considered harmless. . . which brings me to the quote that I thought of earlier today -
There's nothing worse than the girl who is considered charmless, except the man who is considered harmless.


That is right people, I am the saddest thing in this world. I am that man who is considered so harmless by women that I might as well be a eunuch. Hell, I might even get women to show more interest in me if I actually castrated myself. At least then I would have that whole "crazy guy who cut off his own balls" edge going for me.

Luckily for me, not everyone sees things in the exact same way, and one of these days I am going to find that woman who doesn't see me as a eunuch. . . hopefully.

6/18/2006

What is this feeling?

Loathing . . . unadulterated loathing . . .


I hate my coworkers . . . ok, so it isn't exactly hate. I can truly say that I only hate two people in this world (my adopted sisters . . . aka the queen bitches of hell). What I feel for the majority of my coworkers though, it has been coming close to hate lately. I can't even bring myself to have a conversation with most of them the past week or so. They are literally the most immature people I have ever met.

Picture the horniest thirteen year old boy you have ever met, then make him 20 or 22 but keep the hormones raging and the stupid peurile jokes. That might come close to being the three guys I work with who are around my age. I went to school with these guys, and they haven't changed a bit since then. Every single night is nothing but an endless line of "George check out that chick", "Did you see the rack on her?", and "Holy Hell! I want to be outside right now instead of working" comments. I mean sure, there are quite a few attractive women who come out to watch movies at the drive-in, but I don't need to hear comments about each one of them or get a play-by-play of what is going on in the pants of my coworkers when they see these women.

I have tried ignoring the comments. I have tried going along with them and making the stupid jokes and remarks. Hell, I have even tried telling them to their faces that they are acting like thirteen year olds who are just noticing that women have boobs, but nothing works. They keep doing it, and sadly those comments are just the tip of the iceberg.

On weekends, there are two young girls who work out at the drive-in with us. I say young girls because one is 16 and the other just turned 17. One of the guys' favorite pasttimes is making jokes about the two girls being jailbait . . . oh and did I mention that one of the guys was recently dating the older of the girls. I mean for pity's sake, there are a few things that you don't joke around about, and in my book, sex with underage girls is one of those things. When you add in that the girls really like to flirt with all of the younger workers you just have a recipe for trouble.

So I spend most of my time talking with either my boss (and father of two of the other workers out there), or some of the older women who work out there. It is sad when you find that you have more in common with people twice your age than with people within a five year span of you.

It is now just a counting game for me. I am already counting down the days until I head back to campus. I miss being able to have a conversation, whether serious or not, without having to resort to "Damn she is hot" or a fart joke to connect with the person. I miss sitting down to have a bite to eat with someone and ending up spending an extra half hour at the table because we are just chatting. I miss going for a walk and ending up running into half a dozen people I can just hang out with for a while to keep my mind off things. I go for a walk here at home and end up doing nothing but wandering around and singing to myself.

At some points I have just gotten so bored and/or lonely that I will just pull my phone out and call the first person that comes to mind. I have spent more time on my cell phone in the past week than in the two months before that.

And as I finish this, my MP3 player decides to chime in with "Home" by Michael Bublé.

And I’m surrounded by
A million people I
Still feel alone
Oh, let go home
Oh, I miss you, you know

Let me go home
I’ve had my run
Baby, I’m done
I gotta go home


I'm right there with you bud.

6/02/2006

What's in a dream?

Ah dreams. Most people dream every night and at least vaguely remember most of their dreams. I, on the other hand, rarely remember my dreams. In fact, I have had a total of two dreams in the past year that I have remembered (and both of those were in the past two months). In the past when I had dreams that I remembered, they tended to be prophetic.

Shortly after I turned 3 I woke up crying and ran to tell my parents that I had just had a dream that my grandfather died. The next morning we got a call that my grandfather had a heart attack and was in the hospital. He died two days later. Dreams - 1. George's sanity - 0.

When I was a little kid, I had a dream about my cousin being sick, walked into my parents' bedroom at 3am and told them to call my aunt and find out what was wrong. Of course, thinking that I had just had a strange nightmare, they shuffled me off to bed with promises that we would call "in the morning". So I got up at 7am and made them call. Sure enough, my cousin was admitted to the hospital at 2:45am. Dreams - 2. George's sanity - -1.

Over the years I had several more similar experiences. My dad had a health problem when I was out of town with a friend and I knew about it from a dream befure my mother called me to tell me. During my freshman year of college my little brother had health problems and I knew about them as soon as he got admitted to the hospital.

Health problems haven't been the only times I have had this kind of dream. Often times I will remember a seemingly random dream, only to have it come to pass years later. Once, I had a dream that I was at a movie with a female friend of mine and her family, and her little brother asked an embarassing question about the film. Two years later I was working at a theater when "Me, Myself, and Irene" was on and I sat next to this girl, her mother, grandmother, and little brother while it was on. Sure enough, when Jim Carey started playing with the dildo, the brother leaned over and went "Mom, what is that?"

Later that year I had a dream about helping a friend move from one house to another. Three months later this friend's family was forced to sell their house and move.

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Now, the reason I talked about these past dreams is because these two most recent dreams pertain to events years in the future. The first one approximately 25 years in the future, and the second around 5 years from now.

The first dream I had about a month before the end of school. I have already told several people about it, but I will go ahead and retell it. The dream begins with me pulling my car onto the Saint Joseph's College campus to visit my daughter. She meets me outside of the dorm and we head to the Halleck center to eat lunch together in the cafe (the food was much better then than it is now). While we are sitting together eating, four young men walk up and join us. She introduces them, but as she does so I immediately recognize them. I cannot for the life of me remember their names, but I know they were the sons of Jelly, BJ, Sam (and Jen), and Mothball (and Babe). Note that there are no names beside Jelly or BJ to denote a wife. I don't know who either of them were married to, nor do I have any clue who I was married to. I don't even know what my daughter's face looked like or voice sounded like. It was the oddest feeling ever.

The second dream also pertains with my future wife. The first thing I remember about the dream is running down the hall of a hospital thinking that I shouldn't have gone to work that day. As I reach the room I am looking for, the thought that I am going to be a father flashed through my head. I remember rushing to my wife's side, but I don't remember any of the actual labor process from the dream. The next thing I remember is the nurse handing my daughter (note that it is a daughter again and not a son) to my wife. Looking down at my wife with my daughter in her arms is the first time I remember seeing my wife's face in this dream. Then the weird part of the dream started.

As I looked at my wife's face and recognition dawned upon me (apparantly my subconscious is complex enough to age people in my dreams), I realized who it was and she looked absolutely radiant holding the baby in her arms. Then, before my eyes, she changed into someone else who looked content and tired holding the baby in her arms. The face then changed to someone else and she had a smile on her face that was warm enough to melt a glacier. My wife then changed to someone else, whose look told me that she was never going to go through that experience again and if I wanted more kids we would have to adopt. Once more the face changed to another person I know who looked extremely pleased with herself. One final time my wife's face changed . . .

And this time it was into a woman I have never seen before in my life. All five other incarnations had been people I knew either from college or high school. Two of these girls I had never held any romantic feelings towards that I knew of. This woman however, I have never seen, although I wish I had. She was . . . in a word, perfect. She wasn't the most physically attractive woman I have ever seen, but she was beautiful, and there was something about her and the way she made me feel in the dream that told me that she was perfect in every way that mattered. Then in my dream she looked at me with those emerald eyes, smiled at me (the most beautiful smile I can ever remember seeing, in reality or a dream), and held my daughter out to me. I leaned down and took my daughter in my arms as my wife gave me a kiss on the cheek . . . . and then I woke up.

It has been about a week since I had this dream, and I can't get this face out of my head. At first I thought that perhaps this face was just an amalgamation of the other five faces in my dream, but there are too many features that this woman had that look nothing like the features of the others. Even soaked in sweat and obviously drained of energy after labor in the dream, there was just something about her that made my heart soar. I don't know if I will ever see her. Maybe this is just my subconscious letting me know what I think the perfect woman looks like, but maybe, just maybe, it is another prophetic dream.

I hope so, I really do. And I hope that if it is, I meet her soon. I don't really care if the first dream is prophetic (it would be interesting if it was, but it really isn't all that important), but that second one . . . .

6/01/2006

Sometimes, when life keeps throwing lemons at me, I wonder "why me?" . . . and then I realize that while life is throwing lemons at me, it is throwing rocks at other people.

Sure, I have a crappy job, and I would rather strangle some of my coworkers than have a conversation with them. The thing is . . . I have a job. I have a source of income, and my parents are still helping with a large portion of my bills.

Sure, I pulled a muscle in my diaphragm earlier this week, but I pulled it moving air conditioners into my house. There are plenty of people who don't have air conditioning, and I pity them this summer.

Sure, most of my friends from high school are either always working, out of state, or otherwise unavailable to hang out with, but I have access to plenty of people over internet communications and I have my family here at home to keep me company.

To keep myself from stating dozens of other such things, I will boil the entire idea down. I am one lucky bastard, yet I have seen fit over the past year or so to complain about things. I have little or no right to complain about anything, but I still did it. I came to this conclusion after seeing some of the people who come out to the drivein as their big family outing of the month and then have to share a medium popcorn with the whole family because they can't afford any more (admission to the drivein is only $5 a person, and a medium popcorn is $3).

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So, all that in mind, things are going pretty well for me. I am finally catching up on some reading I have been meaning to do (17 books down 22 to go). My little brother's legs are getting stronger and he is now able to make it up to his room at night, so he doesn't have to sleep downstairs in the den. Also, I only have a little over 2 months until I get back to SJC. I also got myself a nice little MP3 player the other day. 4gigs for $79.99.

So, all in all, things are good and I am a happy guy.