Meeting people

I am now fully moved into my new place out in Venice, Los Angeles. It's a few miles from Venice Beach, about six miles from work, and central to a lot of cool places in the area. I'm excited to get exploring. I should be able to do that, considering I no longer have to spend 2-3 hours in my day getting to and from work. I had to do that while staying with my sister, and being this close to work gives me a lot more free time than I've had in the past five months. It's an exciting period of my life.

I have two housemates, Jim and Gloria. Jim is a video-game tester at Activision, aspiring to be a game programmer. He smokes a lot of pot. Gloria is a bartender at Q's on Wilshire, finishing school at SMC. They are both super chill, and the apartment is really great. So far, so good. I hope this living situation will be a good one for me.

Gloria went on a date tonight. This was a curious situation to me because Gloria and I had talked about dating not being an ideal situation for either of us in meeting people, a few weeks ago before I moved in. I asked her why she was going on a date. She responded with "How else are you supposed to meet new people?" How indeed?

I never liked the idea of dating. It seems like a very outdated social tradition in which two people figure out the best way of facilitating the removal of clothing in order to have sex. At least from my, a guy's perspective. A man has to appear well put together and not too idiotic for the girl to feel that he could be a good potential long term relationship candidate, and the girl has to be sexually appealing in order to keep the man's attention for a decent period of time.

Sometimes first dates end with sex. I have no problem with that, although I lose interest after that happens. If there is a lot more substance to the girl than I realized, or if she's attractive enough, I might stay interested, but the problem is just that the sex is the main incentive, biologically at least. If it happens too soon, the natural reaction is for me to look elsewhere for my next conquest.

Given this outlook that I have, and if one knows my propensity to search for a deeper meaning to everything around me, one might be realize why I would have a problem with dating. Sex is nice, but it confuses the issues so much as I see any interaction between a man and a woman to indicate sexual interest. And usually I'm right. It's a constant struggle to keep my intelligence higher than my belt-line. How to meet women and not feel like each encounter is just the means to a sexual end? Am I really interested in the person, or am I just interested in creating seduction strategies?

Sex & the City

IT'S A GOOD SHOW, WHAT!

And, I'm excited to see my lady Sarah Jessica Parker up on the big screen for this flick. I've never heard of any straight guy who loves her but me. I don't care, she's hot.

Anyway, the reason for this entry is because I'm watching the episode after Aidan gets back together with Carrie. Carrie had, awhile ago, cheated on Aidan with Mr. Big. She decided she wanted him back, which was the struggle she was having last episode. After being berated by Aidan on his front porch, she ran home thinking there was no hope for their future. However, as expected, Aidan eventually came around.

This episode was all about how Aidan and Carrie reconcile their latent feelings after getting back together. It was really painful to watch. After going through what I've gone through in the past few months as well as last year, it was difficult to watch the show without mirroring my own experiences in the two characters.

One of the things that really struck home for me was Aidan's emotional separation from Carrie. After being hurt so deeply by her, he wanted to be with her, but couldn't bring himself to commit the way that he had before. As Carrie expressed in the show, can you forgive if you can't forget? That's something with which I still struggle, and have no idea whether or not I would put myself in such a vulnerable position again. The soul would love to, but the mind wants revenge and the heart wants to be left alone.

It was very awkward to watch Carrie as she struggled to be the best girlfriend she could be, walking Aidan's dog, reminding Aidan what a great guy he was, and putting herself out there over and over again, even though she could see in his eyes that he was fighting to keep himself from saying all the things that he wanted to say. Would it be a more manly thing to do to keep all the hurt inside and pretend nothing was wrong, or to let it all out and say everything that is eating you up inside?

Another poignant moment was Carrie begging Aidan for forgiveness with her tears. Is that what I want? Do I want tears? Do I want someone to beg for forgiveness? Or do I want more than that? A revenge fuck maybe? At the very least, feel better about myself as a person fuck. How long will it take to go away?

I already know Carrie is going to marry Big in the upcoming movie. I think it should be Aidan. I want the great guy to win.

There is a saving grace to this major plot flaw though. In an industry where the media is flooded with "nice" guys that happen to all be independently wealthy and eligible and win the girl, I think this will portray a reflection of how the world actually is. Great guys don't win. Rich guys do. Because women want security more than anything else in the world. If the guy happens to be halfway decent to her, they luck out. But they're not above selling a little bit of happiness for the house and the Mercedes.

How to stay happy when you don't want to be

I want it. You want it. We ALL want it. We're just searching for a way to have it. Happiness.

I've come to believe that happiness is not a place that I am trying to get to. Rather it's a choice that I have to make to BE. I want to BE happy, not have happiness. Thinking that I can have it, to exercise control over it, is unrealistic and utterly impossible.

The problem is that in order to know what being happy is about, you have to experience unhappiness. I've experienced a lot of it in my life, and I've fallen into a sort of Catch-22 situation. I'm so used to being unhappy that I'm afraid to choose the other side. Because when you're in a bad place, you know you where you are. You're at the bottom, and anything else that happens has to be good. Once you're in a good place the only place left to go is down. So I want to be happy, but I don't want to risk the chance of unhappiness occurring again.

It's easier to choose misery because choosing to be happy requires so much inner strength and I'm not sure I have that quite yet.

Finding a place

I haven't done much blogging the past couple of weeks because I've been on a mad quest to find a place to live. Currently, I reside with my sister Jane in my hometown of Arcadia. Working in West LA, my morning commute is enough to make me want to stab some people in the chest. (Just people I'm not particularly fond of. Although it has been grating more on my nerves recently, thus perhaps motivating me enough to want to stab a few people of whom I'm moderately fond.) The gas prices remain insane, and my fill-ups are quickly approaching the 50 dollar mark. Is there no respite to the torture it has become to visit a gas station? I liken it to... having to go take a dump, but having every bathroom you enter have shit all over the seats. You've got to go, but getting to the destination is very pricey.

The search has been grueling. The places to live that I've visited haven't been the ideal locations of course. There are three types of people I've noticed at my potential residences. The first are college kids looking to fill in a room left by a graduating student. These are usually not too bad. The only major downside is that most of them do not know how to take care of a place, or to make it feel like a home. It is a temporary place for them, and they treat it that way. The second type of people are post graduates or older folks who are still moving from place to place, looking for random people to help drive down their rent. These places I found were the sketchiest to view. They clean out a closet to rent or put up a curtain in the living room, claiming privacy and lots of space in order to get suckers like me to come and actually pay them money for any living space. I am not (yet) that desperate to move out to LA. The third group are people who own homes. They rent out their rooms for a variety of unknown reasons and seemed overall pretty odd.

None of these places would do. As much as I hated driving out to LA every day, most of the time in grueling amounts of traffic, I knew I would hate it more if I ended up taking a place that would be dreadful to come home to. I figured if I kept searching long enough, something really good would pop up.

There were a couple of close calls of course. Two different places in an ideal location. The first one I was interested in, I was passed over for a girl. The apartment would've been with two nerdy asian guys, whose only method of getting a girl in their general area was to have her live with them. Their last roommate was a girl, and their most recent choice appeared to reinforce my conclusion. The second place I was late by an hour. They had had a fellow say that he would take it before I had a chance to check it out. I was obviously bummed out about the turnout, but I kept pressing forward.

And it paid off. To make a long story short, I found a place to live with people my age, at the same place in their lives, and the girl that lived there the longest had decorated the apartment to make it feel like a home. Did I mention that she happens to be gorgeous? Jackpot. I mean, the place to live was nice, but living with an attractive female definitely ends up on my list of pluses. I'm glad I decided to stick things out and keep searching. Tenacity definitely pays off.

There's no deeper lesson here. Just... it sucks not having a place, to live specifically, and to belong in general.