So ends a weekend fraught with foolishness.

I had two dates with two different women over the weekend.  One went very well.  One went very poorly.  And by the time Sunday night faded into the wee hours of Monday morning, the first woman had sent me a message to the effect of "that was a great date, but you're not someone I want to be involved with."  The long version's a bit thornier, but most of you following this blog heard the story elsewhere.

What are the lessons to be had here?  Well, I think there are three big ones:
1) I'm at least charismatic enough and resourceful enough to find dates, which is the real meat of the battle when one is trying to find a companion.  Plenty of fish in the sea and all that.

2) I'm too dumb to keep my mouth shut when my natural-born storyteller instincts collide with my encountering situations best kept quiet (as in, there's a woman I quite like but she's been privy to other adventures thanks to her own inquisitive nature and ready access to me.  This is probably not newsworthy.  If it becomes so, forgive me in advance for being evasive about it.)

3) And finally, my relentless confidence coupled with a resolute desire to use the lessons of my failures to better myself...well, if nothing else comes of my life, it will be mighty nice to develop a skill set that I've allowed to lay dormant for far too long.

All this would be easier if I were some kind of machine and not a human being with needs and desires.  Sometimes I curse my very humanity.

On stress and foolhardy ventures.

Earlier today, somewhere between about three and four in the afternoon, I was sitting on campus playing a video game on the laptop and trying to make sense of a thousand external stimuli that had popped into my life all at once, trying to balance them, sort them, and get my mind to stop obsessing over them.

In the past week, I've interviewed several candidates for various radio projects I'm working on for the bigger Internet radio project, talked to actual local business leaders about my vision, made three new friends, in one of whom I have a budding romantic interest that may or may not pan out after my date this Saturday, done a project with four other members of my accounting class, had a stretch where I went nearly 48 hours without sleep, dug myself into a social hole with a group of people on campus who hitherto have relied on me to be their go-to guy but for whom I can no longer fill that role (and nobody's happy about it), been pushed to and past my limit twice, damn near managed to get my electricity shut off due to a snafu with a bill-payment system and a bank account I'd closed (gotta get that taken care of tomorrow), and ventured perilously close to a nervous breakdown from burnout in the process.

As well, I've managed to realize that there's still a lot of stuff I've got stuck in the corners of my mind that haven't quite sorted themselves out but may as well be live grenades in my brain.

Never before in my life have I been so many places on the emotional spectrum at the same time.  My sense of self was really revealed to me in a way with which I am not entirely comfortable.  All I can do in the meantime is hope that I don't blow it up before I can get it all sorted.  But after Tuesday was (for a variety of reasons) one of the best days I've had in a very long time, Wednesday couldn't possibly have gone any worse.  If my life was the stock market, it would've gone up 700 points on Tuesday and dropped 300 on Wednesday.  Who knows what's going to happen Thursday?

Social Misadventures IV: Re: Public Cans.

As readers of this blog and interested parties who care enough to ask me about it (and you lurkers who dare fly below my radar, I'm watching you! OK, not really, I don't believe in using tracking features on something not for commercial purposes---it's offensive) know, my life is a wide-open book, a sort of intentional invocation of the Truman Show's core conceit, and I make absolutely no efforts to hide myself from the world at large because frankly, if I'm not to become truly famous, I can at least become a reasonable facsimile on the Internet (at least until 4chan starts sending the mail bombs.)

So what happens when a prospective date looks you up on Google, finds your blog, and reads the Social Misadventures series from late last year in which I confessed my borderline autism to the world?  (and thanks, everyone, one of the big issues I have is social anxiety, so friends and affirmations rock me to my very soul in ways too awesome for words.)  What happens when the charisma that is my soul's very illusion comes right out and says "HEY!  The rabbit's underneath a false bottom, it's a two-headed coin, and your card is the five of clubs" at the very start?  Does the magician's illusion (and I mean that both in terms of reality and fantasy) drive the perceived image?

I ask because previous to this point, the perceived image, the illusion, and the underlying reality have been so intertwined as to exceed on occasion my own capacity to distinguish the three.  But to have everything (at least so far as I have presented it to you, the viewing audience) on display and archived?  Several hazards enter into the picture.

The first is one of honesty.  Anyone who can juggle a series of intentional creations of fantasy for every possible audience in a way contrived to generate maximum effect in each and still maintain enough internal consistency not to bring the entire house of cards crashing down upon them is a far better liar than I am.  This probably bodes well for me; indeed, it probably proves to the satisfaction of a psychiatrist that I am not, in fact, a sociopath.  Selfish bastard ruled by his id more often than not, yes.  Sociopath, no.

The second is one of image.  When the false bottom with the rabbit underneath it is revealed to the viewing audience via a clear polycarbonate table underneath the hat, the expectation of the trick is completely different.  Now it no longer falls to the magician to wow the audience with the illusion; the illusion is no longer interesting (and substitute a more elaborate trick than the rabbit-in-the-hat trick since we all know damn well how it works) and it falls to the magician to come up with a better means to entertain the audience than a simple "hey look, a rabbit."  More on this in a minute.

The third is simply one of convenience for the illusionist.  Some articles of illusion are quite easy to maintain and can be memorized by rote (repeat after me, guys: "No, of course your ass doesn't look fat in that dress!  You look gorgeous!  Now let's go, we have a reservation.")  Others are a waste of time.  I've thankfully been able to steer clear of this one since I've always lived my life in the belief that life is best lived in a way that sounds really awesome when stories are told of it later.  Any bullshit that creeps in is purely a function of the natural inflation of one's glories over time in one's own mind (ten bucks says my fastball wasn't as fast or my curveball as sharp when I was 14 as I claim it was, but it's how I remember it...and I was pretty good.)

But back to the image argument for a minute.  Perhaps the ultimate reason why illusions aren't worth the effort put into them and why using clear polycarbonate tables for magic tricks works so well (q.v. Penn & Teller) is that the trick is no longer the show.  The magician is the show, and in the role of magician I can then turn around and really have to focus on those elements of myself that even if I had nothing but an empty room and a clothed girl I'd never met before, would be able to, by the end of the night, have convinced her not to have sex with me (that is easy once you've been spotted the motive, means, and opportunity of having an attractive girl and a captive audience) but to fall in love and stay in love.  I suspect that my position is stronger for its openness than it would be if I went the beer-commercial approach of dispensing bullshit if only because I can't lean on those tropes as a crutch (unless, of course, I don't want the girl to fall in love but only to fuck, in which case all bets are off and anything plausible is open season.)

In business, there are two types of customer models; either you catch the transient customer and soak him because you don't have to worry about seeing him again (the concept behind how most impulse-driven---like a slot machine in a truck stop---and tourist-trap businesses work) or you build customer relationships based on openness and trust between merchant and consumer.  And since I think all of life is ultimately a metaphor for business (which, after all, is itself merely a distilled form of social interaction for a specific set of circumstances, at least in businesses with a personalized component and client relationship), this only makes sense in the personal application.

What's my point?  I have a date Saturday evening.  She's read my blog and did so before I got the date.  She even said "I agree with your Core Humanities professor".  She knows about the ex-wife.  I don't know quite how far she's gone into my archives, but she'll probably get there in time...and yet she still wants to go on a date with me.  Thinks I'm amazing and everything.  How in the black pits of hell did that happen, and should I be making offerings to the gods?

Just like livin' in paradise.

Another weekend completes its long day's journey into night, and all I can say to that is "one down, fifteen to go, and in the metaphorical football game I'm one W closer to the playoffs."

Sometimes I allow myself the indulgence of just naked unadulterated daydreaming (the daydreaming's naked, not me.  Unless you're cute, available, and don't mind a squinty-eyed introvert.  Then you can rip my clothes off and everything.  Ahem...where was I?  Right.  Fantasyland.  Where there are tons of cute girls wanting my dumb white ass.)

Then again, half the fun of daydreaming is that I get to be rich and influential with my multiple master's degrees and super high-paying jobs and jet-set lifestyle and girl in every town and damn if it ain't my motivation right about now.  The thing that's jumped out at me the most over the past two months since my marriage went kablooey due to my rapidly changing values system and that of my now ex-wife is just how much the life I left behind in 2003 was waiting for me and all I had to do was pick it up and blow the dust off it.  Freedom feels good.

The fun part? No unicorns required (I'm going to beat that trope to and beyond death.)  Just goal-setting, a little dreaming, a lot of hard work, and an indomitable spirit guaranteed to laugh off even the most catastrophic of apparent setbacks.

Clinical brain death made easy.

Some quick takes from the first week of school:

- I may be too old for them, but hot damn, are there ever some beautiful 18/19/20-year-old girls around here!

- My current schedule includes six classes, study groups for a couple of them, homework, trying to launch a radio station online, trying not to get my friends to phone in missing persons reports on me, writing my online stuff and venting for the sake of my sanity, and doing all of the above with a raging constant case of insomnia and the hope, however faint, that I don't die of a heart attack before it's all paying off for me.

- Books were much cheaper this semester.  Knowing people who have taken the classes I'm in and who are willing to let me have their copy of the book is a fine way to cut costs!  Instead of spending a month's rent, I spend...almost a month's rent.

- Did I mention the cute girls?

Up next on Food Network: 1,000 Recipes for Unicorn.

Third in a series:

I love Facebook sometimes.  OK, I love Facebook most of the time.  I'll shamelessly admit this.  Not only is it leaps and bounds better than Twitter as a content delivery platform (wait, I can go to 420 characters, post links, and interact with my friends and followers in ways that Twitter just doesn't make possible?  Really?), it also leads to stuff like the events of the last couple months.

To wit: Last semester there was a girl in one of my classes on whom I developed one hell of a crush (yes, even while I was still married, but there's a reason I didn't act on it then.)  Under ordinary circumstances, the semester would've come and gone, I never would've seen her again, and that would be that, another cute girl to be forgotten about in as much time as it took me to catch the eye of another one.

Enter Facebook.  I "friended" her, and through the wonders of Facebook's chat feature (and the comments section on her posts and mine), I come to find out she's single...and lo and behold, enter the unicorn from last week.  Still, I suspect my well-rusted-out "talking to girls" abilities should probably get a coat of polish.

See, while flirting with her, I suggested that spending a day in my life would be something she'd enjoy.  Said she: "I dunno, I might think that was scary."  To which I replied, "Well, it's an adventure you wouldn't soon forget.  Offer's on the table if you want it."

Mind you, at the time I was talking to some other friends live via Skype, and their response to the running commentary I gave of the events as they unfolded was "Oh, that poor girl.  You're going to blow her mind."

You'd think I'd have figured out by now that "an adventure you won't soon forget", coming from me, is high-octane nightmare fuel!  I hope I didn't traumatize the poor girl---she's sweeter than diabetes, cuter than a basket full of kittens...in other words, exactly the kind of girl that, per last week's commentary, I absolutely develop monster crushes on at the drop of a hat---and by "monster crush" I mean some sort of equivalent of those things they put cars in at the junkyard!

Thing is, a day spent following me around as I go about the more interesting parts of my life is...well, it's certainly not something one soon forgets!

Transcendant triumph.

OK, so there's nothing triumphant exactly about simply continuing to exist, but with a single turn of the calendar to Monday morning I have gone from almost depressingly idle (not to say I don't love video games, but...) to a renewed sense of purpose.

Some highlights from Day 1 of spring semester:

- I broke a record for "fastest time to a teacher saying 'Class Dismissed...not so fast there, Fox.'  My Core Humanities 203 (US History) professor, the same teacher I had for CH202 (Modern European History) last semester, wanted to talk about my work on the final exam, a 4,000-word magnum opus I turned in on the last day of class.  He became the I-lost-count-how-many person to tell me that "you're in the wrong major, you should be a writer."  Said I: "I'm not smart enough to write for a living, and majoring in the humanities and taking classes beyond these simple core-overview classes would only out me as an ignorant fool who's way out of his depth trying to operate on the same level as real intellectuals.  For all my so-called talent at writing, I'm actually much better at accounting and finance."  The professor's response was to fire back at me claiming intellectual laziness on my part.  That's as may be, but I still contend I am not that sharp, merely a fortunate beneficiary of having my extremely limited intellect be well-suited to the tasks I ask of it.  Call me a genius or any other sort of compliment in that vein and I'm likely to think you've got me confused for someone else.

- Answering the question of "what did you do over winter break" leads to interesting replies when the bulk of it is "trimmed some financial deadweight from my life and finalized my divorce."  At least people laughed when I told the story!

- I'm beginning to think that the bulk of the accomplishments I ring up to my name on these day-night doubleheader days on Mondays and Wednesdays will primarily be via the video games I've got installed on this laptop...at least when I don't have a paper to write.  This being the introductory phase of all six of my classes, it becomes quite clear that having three hours to kill every other day will be an up-and-down experience.

- I took one look at the syllabus for SOC 205, including the requirements outlined in the research paper assignment (due later this semester), and my first thought was "Oh, shit."  If I get anything better than a B-minus in that class I will be thrilled.  My chances of maintaining a 4.0 just bade me farewell and hopped on a bus out of town.