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Doing Science: Biscuit’s Behavior
Biscuit
Most of this holiday I have been laid up with the ills. 3 weeks and counting. Whilst this may have brought joy to some as I have lost my voice completely several times, it has been somewhat wearing on me and hasn’t exactly encouragedme to pursue girls as I have been feeling less than sexy. The inability to do any exercise has also destroyed my enthusiasm to do anything productive whatsover.
I also pretty much lost my voice when I was on the last date with Little Miss Naughty so social occasions anywhere I have to talk much or raise my voice above very low conversation are pretty much out of the question.
I don’t mean to whinge (well, maybe a little), I’m just painting you a picture of why I may be somewhat less than active with dating or writing.
I’ve also had a bit of a ribbing from Toast about my marriage percentage for Little Miss Naughty falling. He’s noticed a pattern whereby I get very enthusiastic about someone, then seem to lose interest and follow the next shiny thing.
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought because I don’t want to be one of those people who only pursue the unobtainable and get bored once they are interested. It’s a very unattractive quality in a person so I have been mulling over the girls who I have shown significant enthusiasm. In an effort to establish a pattern I have decided to do some science. Get your lab coats and safety glasses on and turn to page 312 of your copy book.
Lashes - I have stopped pursuing her because I am not really getting signals back from her anymore and have been tentatively warned off by a mutual friend because she is a bit of a heartbreaker.
Summary: Still interested but she’s evidently not.
Noir - I WAS rather keen but have cooled off over a few dates as I found I enjoyed spending time with her but have not been excited about dates so have cooled it off.
Summary: Was over keen, gradually lost romantic interest.
Elizabeth - I was over keen, then realised I just didn’t fancy her when we met up for a date.
Summary: Was over keen, suddenly lost romantic interest.
Fuckwittery - We got on like a proverbial burning abode before we even met, had a few very fun meets but both the complexity of her knowing about the blog in advance and her rather erratic careering between extremes of emotion made it obvious that being chums is a much better course of action.
Summary: Got on far too well and was over keen.
Cola Lollies - I was very interested but always felt like I should have been way more keen. Given how generally awesome she is it totally baffles me why I am not more romantically interested in her.
Summary: I WANT to be more into her but don’t understand why I’m not.
Stripy Dress: This was the first girl in a long time I was very interested in. I still would be if she hadn’t dicked me around a bit and suddenly gone really cold with no explanation.
Summary : Very disappointing, was interested in taking it further with her.
Totals:
a) Was keen but no longer romantically interested in girl: 3
b) Girl lost interest even though I was still keen: 2
c) WANT to b more interested in the girl but am not: 1
Conclusion
Both categories ‘a’ and ‘b’ fall within the behaviour pattern of ‘being interested until a girl is interested back then losing interest’. Just because 5 out of the 6 girls, on the face of it, fall within this pattern it does not necessarily mean that I am succumbing to this behaviour, but it does not bode well. No wonder Toast is not overly keen about me dating any of his friends.
I do genuinely believe that if Stripy Dress had not been such a spaz then I would not have lost interest. I was still very keen when it looked like she was reciprocating the feelings. Notably if I cast my mind back to the very start with cupcake I sustained the keenness when she was interested too.
It could be that I have just not had the right girl reciprocate my interest yet, that the ones I have not sustained romantic feeling for are just not right for me.
It could also be that I have to face up to some bad behaviour that will not be getting me married any time soon.
Lesson to learn
CALM DOWN!!!! Seriously, at least until I have had a couple of dates with the girl, then I am allowed to get break out the party poppers and make Toast do that glazed look where I waffle on about a girl ad nauseum (in between waffling about my favourite gun in Borderlands).
Whilst I can’t control how I feel about someone, if I keep calm then hopefully I can avoid my disappointment, prevent theirs and potentially sustain my interest.
Thing is, I REALLY have no self control! Perhaps I need to use some kind of adapted sexual climax delaying technique like thinking of dead kittens when I get too excited.
Oh… I don’t think of dead kittens when I…err… never mind.
A diagram showing why Toast is single
Toast
Diagrams are great, they are good because they let you express complex ideas in a clear way.
Here is a useful diagram that explains why after 9 month of the contest neither one of us is close to winning the bet. Or I suppose at least why I’m not any closer to winning the bet. Getting married is hard.
It all seemed so much easier when the wager was first made. We were at that wedding after having watched the least likely husband we knew (He was known as ‘sickboy’ to us) gleefully stride down the aisle.
Later at the reception the wager was being formulated over slightly too many bottles of wine.
“It is simple,” I said to Biscuit, “Find a woman who is slightly too good for you, convince her otherwise and then marry the shit out of her.”
I do tend to get a bit dramatically sweary when I’ve had too much Merlot, but the point is valid.
Dating advice from mum
Toast
My mother just emailed me some dating advice. I thought I’d share it because it made me laugh.
‘It’s probably time you went out with someone who wasn’t
a) So incredibly dazzlingly beautiful men crash their cars when she walks down the street and
b) An evil devil-woman.
It’s just a suggestion… Love Mum
Yes, she has met a few of my ex-girlfriends.
Dating science: Dating for Samurai
Toast
When I was young
I never needed anyone
And making love was just for fun…
*ahem*
Sorry. When I was young, I used to read about Samurai. Look I was young and male, so I was genetically programmed to think that Samurai are cool.
I mean they are men, with swords who dress in an excellent way. They would stride around in good trousers, write poems and then totally chop someones head off in the name of honour. Skill.
Anyway, Samurai were feared because they didn’t care what happened in battle. They had the power of meh. Using special Samurai logic they had worked out that any fight had three possible outcomes.
1) The Samurai defeats their foe. Epic Win.
2) The Samurai gets all stabbed up to death leaving the foe to steal their hats. Epic Fail.
3) Both people in the fight get stabbed up and die, possibly covered in cherry blossom. Poetic Fail.
So most fights would end in a fail, and thus a Samurai could go into battle with the sort of casual indifference usually reserved for teenagers. I can’t remember why this made them so fearsome but it definitely did.
Dating is a bit like that. Why? Because any date has four possible outcomes.
1) You and your new chum fall passionately in love, marry and spend the rest of your lives being smug. Epic Win.
2) You really fancy your date but they aren’t into you. Unrequited fail.
3) You don’t like your date, but they love you. Stalker fail.
4) Neither of you like each other and so you both pretend the date never happened. Epic Fail.
So since your date is 75% likely to not go well, why stress about it?
Just enjoy the evening and be glad it’s not going to end in actual death. Or perhaps if you are a really lucky la petite mort.
Dating the infinite woman
Toast
London is huge. For people who don’t understand the city, it’s a vast collection of villages. Each one is slightly different, different people, different clothes, different pubs.
It is also home to a lot of people, loads of them. Think if the most people you’ve ever seen in a room and double it, and you aren’t even close.
So big, but also specific. If you want to met a certain sort of woman locating her is just a matter of finding the right area of London and then going out there until you meet her. I like this about London.
It’s like take-aways but with dating. Fancy an edgy girl with coloured hair who makes jewellery and drinks tea out of chipped mugs? There is a postcode for that. Or if you’d like most of the above but would like her to wear summer dresses and have long dark hair. Just move a few streets north and west and you will find her.
The different dating postcodes of London is probably worthy of a post in itself but for now I want to talk about how London is just full of women (and men I suppose).
This is good and bad. It’s good because unlike the real sea, there are plenty more fish. It’s bad for roughly the same reason.
If you discover a type that you like it’s possible to just date variations on that theme. So if you have a fatal attraction to drummers with long hair, or moxy brunettes but it never seems to work out? Well you can just go about making the same mistake again and again and again. There are loads of them out there, so just keep trying until you get it right.
I mention this because Biscuit met someone who was very like Cupcake (in looks at least) on Wednesday and now they are frantically Facebook messaging each other. Oh dear.
I can’t really talk, almost everyone I’ve ever dated has looked roughly the same. If you got them all into a room together it would be like a casting call for a very exacting director. Actually I did get a lot of them in a room together once at a party, it was weird and far less sexy than I expected.
Inception: Your mind is the scene of a rather lovely afternoon picnic
Toast
Biscuit is off at a wedding with both Cola Lollies and Cupcake so I thought I’d do a state of play post too. From the slightly garbled text messages I’ve had from Biscuit it sounds like the events of the wedding will be amusing. I’m looking forward to finding out what happened too.
I’ve not heard back from Mia, so we can only deduce that Internet Rats ate the message. There is no way of contacting her again without seeming like a total mental so I think I’m going to have to leave that one.
However in Toast DreamsTM we have been going out for ages. I’m not talking about day dreams (I hardly know her) but actual proper dreams. In dream world we’ve been going out for months. It’s all a bit Inception really.
Last night I dreamt we met a load of her friends at the Tennis Club. I was wearing a red suit which seemed a bit off, but worked well against the green of the lawns. I was late to met her at her imaginary flat in East London (I couldn’t find it on Pretend Google maps) and she wasn’t ready so I had to go on with out her.
Her friends were nice, if a bit awkward because I’d never met them before and Mia wasn’t there to introduce us.
Eventually she turned up wearing an excellent plum coloured summer dress. She was delighted to see me and we danced in the afternoon sun to a band playing in a big white tent. We drank champagne and ate cucumber sandwiches in between songs. It was terribly civilised, and a complete mirage.
I have dreams like this most nights. Let’s not talk about what happened when I got a bit drunk meeting her brother that she might not have. Honestly, if I ever bump into Mia again it will be a bit awkward because she will feel like an ex.
On the rest of the dating side of things it’s gone a bit quiet. There was the girl Scalene and I met in a bar. I’ve now contacted her on a vaguely flimsy work-related pretext, well quite a good work related pretext but something she couldn’t get involved in and so we are in the hinterland. The awkward pause in a conversation. I think I’ll leave it for now. I don’t need anyone else to be haunting my dreams.
Girls are stupid.
Biscuit
Bah!!!
In my head ‘boy meets girl’ situations should go like something like this:
Boy meets girl > go on fantastic date > do great kissing > arrange another date > get married in Vegas in a Star Wars themed wedding*
What SEEMS to happen instead is this:
Boy meets girl whilst very drunk and is bewitched by sexy eyes > boy asks girl for date > girl messages a lot, is really interested and suggests date time > go on fantastic date > do great kissing > Boy says “I’ll DEFINITELY call you”, girl says “You’d better!” > Girl goes suddenly very quiet and barely responds to contact.
So, here I am in limbo. Not the fun kind with singing and booze which results in chiropractic appointments. The kind where you can’t really do anything more and float around in a gelatinous goo of confusion and frustration until you either call it quits or get a meaningful response (although it could be the Internet Rats).
Bah!
As things stand, there is still a standing offer of a lift for Stripy Dress and her friend with me and Dragonforce to Sonisphere on Thursday if they are stuck. That’s a reasonable enough catalyst for contact so I just need to sit tight and do distracting things.
…does anyone have any spare thumbs I can twiddle? I seem to have worn these ones out.
*Theme can be varied to taste.
Keep it in the family.
Biscuit
After something of a lull, I have returned to the glory days of date filled weekends.* Quite coincidentally last weekend I had two dates on two consecutive days.
Friday
I went for the date with the local girl who I had found out (via facestalk) was actually the sister of a semi-chum.
If you follow that link then no, it’s not the sister of the actual chum who I referred to on the same Sunday’s antics (with whom I had a rather humbling experience akin to one of those “well that’s never happened to ME before” moments) but the girl who I met for the first time during Sunday’s antics and who I thought was rather cute so arranged to go for a drink with (blimey, that’s a hell of a sentence).
Being the end of a lovely sunny day we got drinks and sat on the sea wall looking out over the beach and slowly setting sun. Unfortunately, being the ‘home town’, between us we knew about every third person to pass so chats were constantly interrupted.
I casually weaved the conversation round to the subject of siblings so I didn’t have to pretend that I didn’t know about the family connection. It turns out that she hates a rather good friend of mine (an ex of her brother). Hmmm, never a good start.
After moving inside the pub as it got chilly, several of her friends turned up and sat at the next table. Then HER ex turned up. We relocated to another pub to escape the viscous atmosphere. At the second pub I bumped into the brother of the other sister (mentioned earlier) whopresumably still wants a little word with me.
I mean.. seriously…HEY-ZEUS… could this place BE any more incestuous??? It may be evident why I need to move away now.
Anyway, I made a promise to call and we parted ways when I had to dash for the train home. There was an almost kiss as I went for the cheek. It was sort of a cornery-mouth affair when a lip kiss didn’t quite engage. The date was fun but crumbs… I’m not sure I can deal with all this complication.
Marriage percentage: 15%
Saturday
This was the second date with Maple. I was heading into London early to join a demo about politikz. After a few hours of dissent and government-overthrowing I toodled off to meet Maple at a galley. We planned to do some ‘looking at things people had made’ before going for food and pub. To be honest I was not overly impressed with lots of the things people had made, but the wandering around together would have been amusing. However…
I am quite loud. It has turned out in recent times that I am actually quite loud because I am a bit deaf. Not too deaf, but deaf enough to make it difficult to hear people in places where you have to be quiet and there is a simmering of background noise. Apparently this is the literal description of the atmosphere of a gallery.
Because of this the gallery was utterly exhausting. The constant concentration needed to follow hushed tones of conversation is really quite draining. I’ll save this topic for another time but all-in-all it made the gallery not very fun and I was glad to leave for the cacophony of a London street.
Heading for safe territory we struck off for a pub. On the way I bought some Indian sweets from Brick Lane, which made for plenty of giggles as Indian sweets are weird.
Pub was followed by a trip to a Vietnamese restaurant for food. I enjoy spending time with Maple but was stuggling after politikz, gallery and a generally long day. Although I was having fun the fatigue started to show and all I really wanted to do was go home to a cozy bed. In fact I was so dozy by that point that I ended up missing my stop on the bus and taking a VERY circuitous route home.
I think that Maple and I are probably better suited as chums than romantic co-conspirators, which is a shame as last date was very promising.
Marriage Percentage: 25%
Note: ‘glory days’ may not contain actual glory.
How do you tell if you should marry a girl?
Toast
Right. I have a girlfriend. This is not unusual, but typically this situation only lasts for about six months. Then it goes wrong and I get some new material for a stand-up routine. So how do I tell if this girl is a keeper? What are the tests?
The Internet, help me out. What sort of things should I check before I get down on one knee? I know she should meet my friends so they can provide an objective assessment (I historically have terrible taste in women) and we should do the whole family thing, but what else?
At the moment I fancy her a lot, find her fascinating and like making her laugh but I’m not sure that is enough to go ring shopping. We need to work out a schedule of tests. Go Team!
Dating Science – The three speeds of male dating
Toast
Yes it’s been quiet of late. The reason being that I haven’t seen the Fez because of work and currently I don’t really want to see anyone else.
I know this is a dangerous tactic, but I am a fool, it’s a defining characteristic.
Anyway. Biscuit and I were talking about girls and things and we realised that men have three speeds or modes when it comes to dating.
1) I Wouldn’t touch you with someones else’s naughty bits.
2) Don’t want to marry you, but would touch you with my wink-wonk when drunk.
3) MARRY ME.
Girls have an extra stage 1.5) I don’t fancy you but I’ll let you take me out for lots of meals and buy me presents. Then when I meet someone I fancy I’ll say ‘lets just be friends… so I can tell you in excruciating detail what a shit they are while still dating them.’
Not that I’m bitter.
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