ok, good morning everybody...
@|ngenius: i'm also not shy at all, so i don't exactly expect people to think i'm boring or hate my company. usually when i'm introduced to a friend of a friend i manage to be classified as enjoyable, and actually most of the girls i've had i met through friends of mine. however, my social skills also depend a lot on where i am focusing my attention: a friend's friend is supposed to be someone in my league: not a 16-y-o dance-club freak with a vocabulary of 500 words, not a 35-y-o single mother working part-time at macdonald's either. if i were to try and chat up any of the above i'd end up being rejected 9 times out of 10 due to abysmal differences in our outlooks on life. this just to say that is clearly way easy for me to make
you (people on this board) understand the main issues revolving around my discontentment or need for quality conversation and caring, because if there were abysmal differences between our lifestyles you wouldn't even be reading this rant in the first place.
as for relating to each other (hypothetically, that is) in real life, of course i'm not shunning the
a posteriori part, it's just that noone has the time to give second/third chances to everyone they meet. gee, my life is already wrapped in "to do" lists without actually seeing anybody.
i asked that question because i often wonder how "peculiar" the present situation can be. we get along - or we don't - through writing and acting more or less kindly to each other, but this is not what happens in real life, where maybe i'd be nonplussed by the way siren laughs or the way mousewings walks. all these criteria here are non-existent. so when i say to myself: oh, how fun would that be if i could go out tonight with the decent, fairly (
) interesting people i meet on the board?, i might not be taking into consideration the chance that some of those that
do live in my area could be as decent and interesting, but i'm giving them the cold shoulder because they seem uninspiring.
@siren; @thanatos: i don't have enough time to go to lectures, and for more entertaining occasions i guess i'd like to be hanging out with someone for a start, like, not going there alone to sit in a corner... but who can i take with me?
@violet baudelaire: i'm familiar with environments where the most inane things are used as catalysts to bring people together, and it must come as no surprise that i tend to despise them because of the poor value inherent to the activity, which therefore tends to attract useless people. however, i find that this situation was definitely more common when i was in high school. the school i went to was one of these hypocritical pseudo-left-wing institutions where most students used to belong to families of doctors or lawyers or businessmen that went from rags to riches in the previous decade or something. their youngsters had all the arrogance and the greed for money of their parents, while at the same time coating themselves with pc causes and standardized, conformist behaviour.
under a lot of respects, university is no better, especially the whole human sciences department. aggregation is more sparse and scattered though, so that you get to see football freaks hanging around together, goths hanging around together and so on. not that i would join either group, or any group for that matter. so while i didn't precisely sit in a corner alone when i attended lectures back in my days (heh
), i only got to meet people who were loners like me. the risk with them is they're not always loners because of some conscious decision as to how to allocate their time: they
would like to fit in but they've got some reason why they can't, and often this is not a good thing either.
of course this didn't help to explain how to improve social results, but it was more articulate than just telling you that i don't know.
@mr. no reaction: the problem is that following these guidelines i'm not likely to be approached by people with similar tastes in music, because i don't really dress like a metalhead - except for the occasional dt t-shirt. and aside from the fact that it's true that people with similar tastes in music can be pricks like everyone else, i'm also asking myself if i really should target those individuals at all. i know that possibly the first steps into a conversation would turn out to be far easier, but then what? i'm already interacting with a pretty large number of metal fans, so i'm not really missing the additional two cents of a new guy/girl in the field. a reason to do this anyway might be that i could be interested in approaching a good-looking girl who happens to be a metalhead, with the main purpose of having fun while keeping things on a fairly superficial level. yet i feel i could miss a lot of different chances and occasions for widening my views if i should decide to stick to that formula.
@salmy: thanks god you don't wink when you say it, otherwise you'd also be losing your eyesight.
@mousewings: may i criticize your attitude without you taking offense? you often more or less humorously make remarks about your favourite kind of guy (aesthetic-wise), and the case you presented seems to be a fairly good example of what sets off your attention radar. the thing is, i get the impression your view on the subject is quite limited. it's ok if you like guys who look very metal or who have music tastes in common with you, but it's not like every good-looking dude with a slayer shirt should be entitled to "judge" your normality level. all those who are really really interested in you having "the right look" and actually basing their decisions on how trustworthy your metal heritage appears are, frankly, people you won't be missing. sorry if i've been too straightforward here.
rahvin. (wasn't that long?)
