Excuse me sir, but your desperate need for acceptance is showing.

I had a pretty fun day yesterday. My kids are up in Alaska visiting my former wife’s parents, so I have the freedom to hang out and do nothing for a week. My church has a service on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, so I went to both. It was great. Curt, (the pastor) asked us to think about the aspect of our life where we didn’t feel Christ was meeting our needs fully. Such as finances, relationships, etc. We grabbed another person and prayed through that issue with them. Mine was romance. Like I stated earlier, I just have this gnawing desire to give it, but no appropriate outlet for it. Then the sermon was about loving God. He actually used the word ‘romance’ right at the beginning. Which was interesting, since he hadn’t the night before. I still don’t know how to ‘romance’ God. There are a few obvious differences between Him and a woman. Let me just calculate here…. Hmm, yeah, approximately 12 quabillion differences. So I don’t know how analogous I can get with that. But I do know that God has met my needs in every other area of my life, so I’m pretty confident He won’t let me down in this one.

Speaking of letting me down, let me tell you what a desperate fool I am. But not in a self deprecating sort of way. I was hanging out at this house where a bunch of girls from church live. We watched Big Fish, which was really cool. Afterward people were just hanging out being board and silly. This is always dangerous territory for me, as I have a tendency to let myself go when others are relaxed like that. This social retardation takes the form of dry, sarcastic humor that most people don’t think is funny. Especially when they can’t tell that I’m joking. Well there was this one girl who seems very similar to me in that respect. She ‘got’ it. Then there was another one, I’ll call her Princess. (Which makes sense, because her name is Princess.) I totally thought she was ‘getting’ it. But I guess not. She got really annoyed with me and let me know it. The conversation went something like this:

Princess: “I hate it when people act all sarcastic all the time. I know this one guy who is always lying about everything.”

Me: “Well, I was just joking. I don’t lie about important things.”

Princess: “You can never know when to take him seriously.”

Me: “I can be serious… I mean, I know I’m a bit pathetic when I….”

Princess: “Grrr! I hate it when guys aren’t self-confident!”

Me: “I was just joking about being pathetic.”

Princess: “Now you’re lying again!”

Me: (Crap, she’s right!) “I think I’ll go stand outside now.” *Goes and stands outside*

So she kept putting the hoops up, and I kept jumping through them. Don’t get me wrong. She is a cool girl and seems like she could be a lot of fun. We just didn’t ‘click’, which I feel bad about, since the main reason was me being too sarcastic.

But this conversation makes me ponder a something. Why did I keep jumping through all the hoops? The only reason that comes to mind is that I just wanted to be accepted by her. Not necessarily her as an individual, but by proxy, everyone. I tend to view myself as a non-conformist type who doesn’t care what others think. Obviously, the verbal gymnastics I went through prove that this is a delusion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Epic Weekend

Image
Wow… I am worn out.  My team’s big project at work is live now, and we just released a big patch to fix some terrible difficulty spikes.  The last time we released Super Adventure Box: World 1 it got pretty universal praise.  (Which I put up here back in April)  Since then our founder/president has used it (Along with the Mad King Clock Tower I designed and built back in October 2012) as examples of content we release that raises retention rate, and therefore revenue.  So expectations were high for this World 2 release which came out on Tuesday.  The day after Labor Day and the Penny Arcade Expo.     Saturday (3 days before SAB World 2 launched) my company held a party at a hotel near PAX for fans, and my project, Super Adventure Box was the main feature.  We were running speed run competitions all night where players tried to be the first to get to the end of the new zones.  I ended up MCing the whole night.  I guess there...
Read more

Covid: 4 Years Later

Image
Before I begin let me quickly sketch the readers I'm writing this for, so you can decide if it's worth your 10 minutes. Firstly, this is for those of you who are at least somewhat sympathetic to people who are still worried about Covid and are sincerely curious why we are this way. I'm trying to present our case as coherently as I can, with references. (As well as I, a not-quite-professional writer can.) I'd like to convince you our stance is not based on fear, hypochondria, conspiracy theory, etc. But based on peer reviewed science. I'm also writing for myself and other folks who are taking Covid very seriously. I'm an ambassador by nature, so I like to facilitate understanding between groups where there is none. Many in my cohort simply cannot fathom how most of the world is not seeing the problem. Here's the agenda. First I'll quickly cover history of this pandemic, then some of what the science says about infectious disease and protecting ourselves....
Read more

A Covid Mask Prediction

Image
In speaking with several other covid conscious people I got a very nicely detailed prediction I wanted to record for posterity. They do not want to be credited with this out of concern for messenger-shooting. So I asked them if I could post it here anonymously and they agreed. Anon:"We are going to have mask requirements. I've done the math on all the possible interventions, and masks are the only one which can get the Rt down below 1 and actually stop the pandemic. Without masks, you can't do it; the other tools put together just aren't good enough (the best one, air filtration, maxes out at 80% effective, and so does Far-UVC, and this simply isn't enough with the infectiousness of Covid -- short-range transmission, which neither intervention stops, will keep it going at pandemic levels). Therefore we're going to get masks. I don't know how many maskless people will die before we get masks. But the math is inescapable. We start using respirator masks. Or m...
Read more