Depressed Friend

I have a friend F that is depressed, she’s been sick for about a year over a guy D that swept her off her feet. In the mean time she’s been leaning on another guy M. M has a girlfriend, and for a while has felt that F has been too needy, sending him text messages on his cell all night and emails and the like. The other day he told her he couldn’t take her emails and texts any more, and now she’s sick from two guys. I’m married, and have commitments of my own. How do I avoid being her life support system, while still staying her friend?

Smiling More

 Recently I’ve been smiling more. On purpose. For a long time my smile felt really unnatural to me, but when I got married I had to basically smile for about a whole hour while the photos were being taken. It still felt unnatural, but when the photos came back I realised that they looked ok. I saw on a television programme a while back the guy who was in the house of lords, with the curly hair, who did that BBC show on the human body. Anyway he said that most people can’t consciously tell the difference between a forced smile and a real one. Case in point.

 I also read something by leil lowndes on about smiling when you walk into a room, so that everyone can tell that you’re somebody. Recently I’ve been doing this, forcing a smile as I walk into a room. Especially when I go out for a coffee. I’m getting some good responses from people. Smiles anyway. But how do I tell if they are forced smiles?

A night out on the town

So tonight, I went out for “dinner” with some friends of my wife. One of them is a chick that I’ve kinda been putting the moves on (casually, not like some of my wife’s other friends) she peed on this guys carpet, so it’s like, yeah, you’re cute, and you are kinda funny, but you ain’t toilet trained. So yeah, we’re out and I’m liquored up so I’m a bit better greased socially than I normally am. This is an excellent time for me to run some social experiments that I have been to scared to run prior to this moment. I see a girl giving me heaps of eye contact so I walk past her on the way to the toilet, and I say how’s it going? She puts out her hand and tries to introduce herself to me. Unexpected. And my wife’s friend, (a single guy) is going to my wife “what the fuck, your husband is out picking up, what the hell am I doing?” a valid question in my opinion.

I’ve been drinking.

It’s time for a shower and sleep (it’s 1:17 am here)

I’m feeling a little off.

I’m feeling a little off today. Having a low day. A slow one. I can’t really think why.

Okay, so I’m trying to get into the habit of being social, so I’ve been walking to work. Where I live means that’s about an hour walk, and I go past a hospital, so there are a few people that go the opposite way as I go past. Anyway I try to smile and say hi to people, but today I was just having an off day. I’d smile, but I’d feel that my eyes weren’t smiling, and it didn’t feel right. I would go and make eye contact with someone, but not be able to keep the smile, or I’d be able to smile, but would forget to keep eye contact, and I’d look and feel shifty.

Does anyone else have an off day?

Smart Casual

So this weekend I went to another party. It was a 21st so there were plenty of young and cool people. I really enjoyed myself, but one of the reasons I did was that I went in there prepared to own the party. I picked out some really cool clothes for myself, and tried to keep my body language cool, and then went out of my way to be friendly and meet as many people at the party as I could. By about 10pm I had met almost everyone, and I felt like I was a local celebrity. I had a really good time.

One of the really great things for me about the night was the number of cool women I got to talk to. You know, putting myself out there like that showed me something that I didn’t 100% believe, and that’s that I am a likable cool person. All I have to do for people to like me and see that I’m a cool person is to put myself out there and also to be interested in talking to everyone. At the end of the night on my way out I asked a girl that I had been talking to for her number. She gave it to me, and I texted her briefly today. Also while I was asking her for her number, another girl who was one of her friends was flirting with me, calling me a dirty slapper. I explained to her that while I was a slapper, I wasn’t dirty. It was a real eye opener to see that I could set out to create a social condition like that and come out being right where I wanted to be, as the cool guy in a social scene.

Girls and Guys

I’ve been thinking about the difference between girls and guys. Aside from the obvious I mean. From my perspective, A guy can never really be friends with a girl, either he likes her, and wants to get into her pants, or he really isn’t interested. It’s a strange thing how guys are always stereotyped as being interested in one thing, but I tend to think that’s ok.

So the other night I went out to a party with my wife, it was the Saturday before Guy Fawkes, and so there was fireworks, and a bunch of people were invited over to celebrate at a friend of mine’s. Anyway this guy works in a call centre, so he knows a bunch of women. Great angle if you use it, but he doesn’t. Anyway for as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in interaction with other people, especially how some guys seem to get all the girls. So I try to figure out what it is that these guys do, and do it myself. I do this when I’m out at a party, particularly if I don’t know a bunch of people there. This is what I think about a great majority of the time.

Anyway the bread and butter of my routine right now is getting me into interactions with women, you have to start somewhere right? so about for the last year I’ve been trying to get over what some people call approach anxiety. I was living in Wellington where the public transport is really good, and so some days when I had some courage, I’d sit next to a hot chick (or any chick), and try to get myself to start a conversation. This gets easier I promise. I’m not 100%, but I don’t feel like I want to puke when I talk to a strange woman any more. In fact it’s a real buzz when you have a great interaction with a woman.

I’m pretty sure women don’t think about things like this so much, so I guess that’s another difference between guys and girls.

What the!!?

Yeah, so this is my first ever blog and Leroy Kirk is a pseudonym, so if you thought you knew me back in school or something, you didn’t. That’s not my real name. I don’t know what people usually do on these things, but maybe I’ll say what kind of things I do with my life, share some feelings, thoughts or comments about random stuff. So anyway, a few months ago my wife and I decided to shift back to the town where I grew up, to start a family. Being a mum is something that she’s always wanted to do and I realised after thinking for a while that as the man in our growing family, it was my job to make decisions like this. So I gave up (temporarily at least) my career as a programmer in New Zealand’s budding game development industry to move back to Hamilton, and try and find a “real job”.

So I kind of initially greeted the whole being a dad thing with a little excitement, but mostly dismay. Like, recently I decided that I didn’t want to force my wife to do anything that she didn’t want to do, and I knew that I had been holding her back from having kids. I knew it. So finally I was like, look I can’t make you take your pill, and she went off it straight away as though I had been making her take it. Big deal, anyway this whole thing brings me to why I had a lot of dismay about starting a family. Commitment.

Now I think I’m probably in the same boat as a lot of guys when I say that commitment scares the shit out of me. Maybe that’s wrong for me to say that. Are guys allowed to talk about their feelings when they are scared? I don’t know. Anyway I love my wife, she’s great. What scared me is that she would somehow use having kids to compel me to do something I didn’t want to do, or stop me from doing something that I did want to do. I’m really honest with her about everything, especially about sex. It’s the biggest thing in my life right now. 

I read somewhere that guys on average think about sex about once every six seconds. I don’t know where this figure came from. I do like women though, and I think about women a lot. Anyway this comes back to the whole commitment thing that I was talking about a moment ago, my personal view is that guys don’t want to commit to a single woman. It just seems totally wrong in my bones. While I love my wife, the idea that giving up every other opportunity to have encounters with other women just seems wrong to me.

I look at it this way, I’ve always been good, I never hurt anyone, I never try to force my beliefs or opinions on anyone, or make anyone do something they don’t want to do, mainly because its one of my strongest values that people should be left alone to do their own thing as much as possible, provided they aren’t hurting anyone else.

 Now the point of contention for most people is that If I was to say sleep with another woman, someone other than my wife I mean, is that it would hurt her. But this isn’t the kind of hurt that you get when someone hits you in the ribs with a mallet the size of a football. It doesn’t hurt like a bee sting. It’s a kind of visceral, emotional hurt, which isn’t exactly tangible, but it still hurts like a motherfucker. Now this is the hard bit, because If I want to be loved for who I am – which I believe that everyone needs to be, then I have to be seen accurately. It’s a fact. If I want to be loved for who I am, then I also have to be honest about everything about me. And I love my wife. And I want her to love me. So I’m honest.

But it hurts. And it’s real fucking scary. Telling a woman that you love honestly and sincerely that you want to pursue other women is really hard. Partly because you need to be seen accurately, and loved for who you are. And if you’re honest about who you are, and it hurts them. Then you could get rejected. Hard. Just for being honest about what you want to do with your life and your time.

Anyway I just thought I’d put that out there.