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 It seems like a very outdated social tradition in which two people figure out the best way of facilitating the removal of clothing in order to have sex.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?