Here You Go

People have been clamoring for an update on this weekend, so I guess I should talk about it. Things didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but they didn’t go terribly either, and I’m okay with how it turned out but a little unsure of what to do now.

We got in Friday night and checked into the motel. Girls 1 and 3 arrived Saturday morning and met us at Event X around the time it started. We had lunch with them and some other people, and were around them a lot for the rest of the day. Since I had dealt with my earlier dilemma by deciding to go all out for Girl 1, I talked to her as much as I could, and she was very friendly and seemed interested in being around me, which seemed like a good sign.

Girl 2 showed up just as Event X was ending for the day. Her behavior around me was markedly different from previous times I’d seen her; she was polite and friendly, but not at all flirtatious, and she didn’t pay much attention to me. This could have been because she was aware of my conversation with Girl 1, but there were also a lot of other differences between this situation and the previous times I’d seen her, so there are too many possible confounding factors to say for sure. It’s also possible that I was totally misinterpreting her previous behavior. One thing I was sure about, though, was that I’d made the right decision in going for Girl 1. Interacting with Girl 2 when she wasn’t showing a whole lot of interest in me made me realize that the main reason I had liked her before was that she seemed to like me, and once that was gone there just wasn’t anything in particular about her that caught my interest.

At this point, so far so good: Girl 1 seemed interested and Girl 2 didn’t, which removed what I had been worried could be a problem. A new problem arose, though, in that once all three girls were there they sort of withdrew into mostly hanging around each other and not paying as much attention to the rest of us; I kept trying to talk to Girl 1, and she was a lot less engaged than she had been. Weirdly, this was the case even when the other girls weren’t around. I was worried that this might be because I had pissed her off somehow over the course of the day, but given subsequent developments I don’t think that’s a very likely explanation. Still, it was very odd, and it was a big blow to my confidence that she didn’t seem to be responding as well to me as she had before.

Our plans to go out Saturday night were somewhat (though not entirely) stymied by the fact that a couple of the people with us were under 21, so we spent most of the night drinking whiskey in our motel room. This was not what I would have preferred, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I ended up not even trying to do anything with Girl 1, and eventually we all just went to bed.

Sunday morning Girls 2 and 3 left and Girl 1 came with us for the second day of Event X. I talked to her some more, and she was just like she had been the previous day: attentive, engaged, apparently interested in being around me. I found this quite odd (and a pleasant surprise) in view of her behavior the previous night, but there wasn’t any time to do anything about it before the event ended and we all left. When I said goodbye to her I told her we would keep in touch, and I do intend to, but I don’t know when (if ever) I’ll see her again.

So that’s the story. Virginity still intact. I’m slowly realizing that events like this really aren’t the best venue for love, because there’s basically no privacy and not a whole lot of downtime, but it’s very frustrating nonetheless. At this point there won’t be any more, so it’s not really an important issue anyway.

What I do need to decide, though, is what to do about Girl 1. I realized from seeing her this weekend that I really, really like her, and I really want to see her again, but I don’t know when that’ll be possible. I do intend to keep in touch with her online, but I don’t know how successful that’s going to be given that she’s not very reliable about things like replying to messages. I wish I could figure out how she feels about me, but her signals are very hard for me to interpret because she’s kind of vague and evasive. Ordinarily that might be a sign that she’s just not interested, but for her it seems to be part of her way of interacting with people in general.  I think she knows how I feel about her from the conversation I posted about before, but she hasn’t even come close to indicating how she feels about that (at least as far as I can tell).  Advice about how to deal with this is welcome.

So that’s the story and the way things stand now.  It’s a pretty common pattern in my life, actually, but it never seems to work out well.

Good For Her

I don’t read Gawker regularly, largely because doing so would take so much time and I don’t know who any of the people they talk about are anyway, but I do stop by there from time to time.  One such times was earlier tonight, when I happened upon this post in which Emily Gould strikes back at some commenters who were criticizing her appearance in a video linked in an earlier post.  It’s crap like this that makes me skeptical of certain men’s claims to be shocked by the idea that men could be blatantly and offensively critical of women’s looks in a totally casual way.

So Much For Productivity

I got my computer back today.  It seems to be working.

Let’s Try This Again

I’m feeling a lot better about this, even though I haven’t done anything else about it, but I have a couple more things to say that might clarify my attitude toward the whole thing a bit.  I think I may have started the discussion in that thread off on the wrong foot with the way I phrased comment 23; basically, the piece of information I want to know is whether Girl 1 likes me, assuming Girl 2 definitely does (which is not necessarily the case since I could of course be totally misinterpreting her behavior,  but it seems pretty clear).  If Girl 1 does like me, then I definitely want to hook up with her, and Girl 2 is a potential problem that I need to figure out how to work around.  If Girl 1 doesn’t like me, on the other hand, then I want to hook up with Girl 2, who is not a problem at all.  The issue is how to tell if Girl 1 likes me.  I could just ask her, which is fine if the answer is yes, but if the answer is no that would result in a certain amount of awkwardness that could easily be avoided if I could learn that from another source (Girl 3, for instance) and go straight for Girl 2 without her finding out that she’s the second choice.

So that’s basically where I’m starting from in looking at this.  As for why I like Girl 1 better, it’s really just that I’ve known her a lot longer and have a lot more in common with her; I don’t have anything in particular against Girl 2, but we don’t have much in common and she’s not really the sort of person I ordinarily find myself strongly attracted to.  And yes, I realize this is silly and that I should probably broaden my horizons and all that.  I think a lot of the reason I’m worrying about this sort of thing is that I have this vague sense that I want my first time to be with someone I really like, especially given my age and how much bigger a deal still being a virgin seems to be now than in, say, high school.  It’s like, having your first time be with someone you don’t care that much about isn’t all that problematic (or uncommon) when you’re a teenager and everyone’s just starting out and experimenting, but once you get into your twenties it starts to feel vaguely unsettling to do that sort of thing since everyone else seems to have so much experience and to know what’s what, so you want to make it as special as possible.  I realize the logical connections there are shaky at best, but this is really just an inchoate feeling of mine and not something I’ve thought out rigorously.

So that’s sort of the background to this whole issue.  Like I said, though, I’m feeling a lot better about it now and it no longer seems so daunting, even though I’m still not sure how it’s going to turn out.

For Real This Time

So it seems that spring is finally upon us; most of the snow from the beginning of the week has melted, and it’s been warm and sunny all today.  Around here, that means the winter coats come off and the frisbees come out.  My reaction is mixed.

So Anyway

I guess I might as well explain the changes in my life lately that I’ve been hinting about for a while.  No, I didn’t get laid, but my continued virginity doesn’t bother me as much as it did before precisely because of the new perspective (I suppose you might call it) that I seem to have shifted into in the past few weeks.

The big event in this process, of course, was the conference we hosted here.  I was the main person in charge of organizing the logisitics, so I was in touch with all the presenters via e-mail for weeks ahead of time and then was the main contact for everyone once they got here.  I’m also the only person in the organization who has a car, so I spent a significant amount of the weekend picking people up at various airports (next year, I’m going to tell the organizers to only pick people up at the local airport; the other one is just ridiculously far away), which also led people to get to know me better.  Basically, everyone knew who I was and kept in touch with me throughout the weekend, which is something that’s rarely if ever been the case in my life and really gave me a lot more confidence in my ability to interact with people than I’ve ever had before.  So that’s one thing that the conference did for me.

There’s also the people I met, who were without exception extremely cool and fun to be around.  It was great to be part of a large group of people who all had things in common and could relate well to each other, which, again, was largely new to me; I’ve often been around such groups, but I’ve rarely felt like I belonged in one.  A few people in particular I got to know really well, and have kept in touch with since then, and the kind of bond I’ve formed with them has made me realize in a way I never really had before that close friendships are actually really nice to have and can fulfill a lot of the needs for emotional intimacy that I had previously been looking (unsuccessfully) to romantic relationships for.  It was like I suddenly realized that, yes, this sort of interpersonal connection really does have value in and of itself, and I should stop thinking of it as an inferior alternative to romance.

Being able to rely on friends for some emotional support has also taken a lot of the pressure and urgency out of my search for a girlfriend, and in fact I’m now wondering if a serious relationship is really what I want right now or if I might be better off with random hookups, given that I only have a few weeks until I graduate and then I’ll be moving away and everything.  The problem with this approach, of course, is that I know even less about hooking up than I do about dating, but I’m working on it and I feel pretty optimistic about my prospects.

Part of what’s fed my optimism is that two weeks after our conference there was another one, in Canada, that was attended almost entirely by attractive but sexually frustrated women, because as far as we can tell male linguists up there are all either married or gay (seriously, we literally didn’t meet a single one who wasn’t).  I wasn’t actually able to take advantage of that situation for a variety of reasons, but I don’t feel too bad about it because there is yet another conference coming up in a couple weeks which will be attended by many of the same people, and this time I’m going to do my best to make the most of it.  I’m still not sure exactly how it’s going to turn out, but I’m feeling pretty good about it.

So that’s what’s been up with me, and why I’m in generally good spirits these days.  In case anyone was wondering.

An Open Letter

To the editors of the Teo U. student newspaper:

Look, I know your most famous alumnus just died, and I realize he was a very prominent novelist and a strong supporter of your publication.  I totally understand the impulse to commemorate his passing and talk about his prominence and his connections to the school and the paper.  Still, was it really necessary to devote quite so much space to him for two days in a row?  Like, front page coverage plus several articles inside?  It’s not like there was anything new to report today after your front-page article yesterday about his death, and the poorly written remembrance on today’s front page (bylined “staff”) contained little that was new or interesting.  I suppose that doesn’t particularly distinguish it from the usual stories on the front page, but at least they usually feature a variety of topics.

Obviously, I’m not a huge fan of your paper, but for some reason I seem to read it just about every day, if only for the comics page featuring three-week-old Doonesbury strips and a narrow variety of years-old and endlessly repeated strips that aren’t being written any more and weren’t even funny when they were new.  And yet despite the many defects of the publication, I still continue to read it.  Must be because it’s free.

All the best,

teo

Polysemy

Despite the well-known fondness of the early settlers of Upstate New York for Classical names, Seneca Falls and similarly-named places in the area were in fact named after these guys (who are still around) rather than this guy (who is not).

A Bunch Of Stuff That Happened

So, um, yeah.  I haven’t been around the blogosphere much, for a variety of reasons that I might as well discuss now.  Last things first, my computer broke down on Thursday and since then I’ve had to go to campus to use the lab, which obviously cuts down on the amount of recreational internet time I have.  This has actually been really good for me, since it’s freed me from distractions so that I can work on the things that I really should have been working on for months now (like, say, my thesis).  It’s really remarkable how much work I’ve gotten done in the past few days.

Of course, that only explains my absence from blogs for the past few days, when I’ve actually been largely gone for weeks now.  That’s due mainly to my insanely busy schedule during that time, starting with our conference (which, as I mentioned, went really well) and continuing with Spring Break and a whirlwind trip home, then another conference that next weekend, then a trip to visit family the weekend after that.  All of this was really great, but it left no time at all for blogs.

As a result of all this, I’ve fallen way behind on blogs and I have no intention of even trying to catch up.  I’ll still read the ones I like best, but I’m not going to obsessively follow the comment threads the way I used to, and I won’t be as frequent a commenter as I was in the past.  This doesn’t really have anything to do with the feelings of alienation I had talked about a while ago; I do still like blogs and blog people, I’m just not able to maintain the level of participation in this world that I had kept up before.

So that’s what’s up with me, in case anyone’s been wondering.  I’m doing fine (in fact, I’m doing great, and may do another post soon explaining why), I just can’t devote as much time to blogs as I used to.  And, to be honest, I was devoting way too much time to blogs and not enough to other things for a long time there.  I think this arrangement is better.

The Thing You Need To Know About Teoville

…is that it’s snowing right now.