Bits and Pieces

So I made it back from San Antonio in one piece.  My complicated feelings about Texas are now even more complicated due to the fact that my feelings about San Antonio are extremely not complicated.  That’s one hell of a city.  I love the place.

There’s an interesting thing about Texas for those who don’t know Texas.  There’s no such thing as a single, monolithic Texas.  The place is just too big and too spread out for that.  Dallas/Fort Worth is like a crappy attempt at a big Midwestern city with a lot of overcompensation in the form of Texas state flags and pickup trucks.  Austin is a college town.  Galveston is a low-rent New Orleans or Mobile, Alabama[1].  Houston is a big traffic jam built in the path of hurricanes.[2]  San Antonio is a lot more on the Mex side of that Tex-Mex equation.  It just had a totally different vibe than the other Texas places I experienced in Texas and it had a vibe I really, really liked.

The Alamo is totally disappointing, though.  I was much more impressed with the Menger Bar, due to the fact that it’s where Teddy Roosevelt recruited many of the Rough Riders.  I raised a bourbon in honor of TR.  Because if I didn’t I’m pretty sure his ghost would have haunted my ass and I did not want.

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Anyway, now that I’m back and recovered, I’ll be returning to some form of regular blogging.  I’m also working on a couple of other projects that I’ll hopefully announce in the near future.  So there’s that.

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On the subject of projects, you might have noticed that the Dancing Monkey Project has, thus far, been naught but sound and fury, signifying nothing.  So far I’ve done one thing that ended up being completely and totally not worth writing about.  Then I spent a week out of commission.  And I can’t believe January’s not over yet, since I feel like it should be March by now.  Life’s like that sometimes, though.

I’ve realized a few things over the past couple weeks, however.

First, the absolute best thing you can do for yourself in a dating context is to simply put yourself out there.  It’s a pretty obvious conclusion, but one that I seem to have missed.  I did, however, recently find myself in a situation where there were a bunch of guys and a few women.  Most of the guys clumped up, put their heads down, and just kind of interacted with each other.  Two of us, however, talked to women.  Nothing came of it, but two of us had opportunity and the other guys didn’t.  So, y’know, duh.

Second, it’s deeply important to work on yourself.  I am the sort who would be referred to as his own worst critic in most situations.  This is problematic.

Due to a large number of factors I felt like I returned from Texas with my tail between my legs and have been, for all intents and purposes, damaged goods since my return.  That’s not really the case at all, but it’s been my self-perception[3].  It’s also the sort of self-perception that really gets in the way of getting anything accomplished or feeling really comfortable professionally.  I’ve gotten a lot accomplished since my return and everyone is glad to have me back, but I haven’t felt like I’ve really been bringing anything to the table.

While I was in San Antonio I admitted that was how I felt.  This is the first step towards fixing the problem.

That same night I had a dream.  In that dream I ran in to Her because she had started working in my industry.  We started dating.  Then I woke up thinking, “Srsly, WTF?”  It bugged me and when a dream really bugs me I figure it’s my brain trying to tell me something, so I picked at it for a while.  Eventually I realized that I had that dream at the same time I’d admitted to the damaged goods thing and I realized that no one has ever made me feel like damaged goods quite like she did.

When you feel that way you just kind of get locked in to a pattern of bad behavior.  Even if you leave a bad situation behind you tend to fall back in to the attitudes and patterns that put you there in the first place.

So…yeah.  Take that for whatever it’s worth.

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[1]I liked Galveston.  I liked New Orleans and Mobile a whole hell of a lot more.

[2]I did not much like Houston.

[3]Have you noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of writing about perception of late?

Comments

[The Everlasting Dave]

Everyone starts off as "goods". It's the damage that makes one worthy of attention and interest.

[Geds]

I don't think it's the damage so much as how one responds to the damage. And that's where I've been falling down repeatedly.

[The Everlasting Dave]

That's actually exactly what I meant. The damage isn't what happens to you; that's just an incident or accident or disaster or what have you. It's how you react and how incidents change you that I define as damage. Case in point: The lasting damage from cancer, for me, was not the loss of half a lung, the injury to my vocal cords, or the loss of 20 pounds. The damage was a crippling opiate addiction and a weirdly irrational sense of immortality. In your case, the literal events of Her and women before and after aren't damage. It's the biases masquerading as lessons learned that get you.

[The Everlasting Dave]

(I should add that I think your current blog project/ theme/ motif, and in fact much of your made-public thinking, shows an awareness of these biases and a solid effort to combat them. Didn't mean to come off as saying you were unaware of these things.)

[Geds]

Fear not. The thing about damage is the very definition of a semantic discussion. We're on the same page, but using the exact same word to describe to very different ideas.