Making some progress today. Had an appointment with some of my medical team this morning; they’re very happy.
Am I? I don’t know. All of this is different for me. I lived for so long in a tough situation that I really have trouble appreciating what progress I’ve made.
I decided to look at what I’d written twenty years ago today. It was a review of a book I’d read…..and I have no idea what book it was. How sad is that?
Bad read
Read a promotional book sent to the station last night while I waited on Debian to finish downloading (building a small server to act as an Appletalk to windoze gateway)….
Basically this was a book that tried to be different than most “How to pickup chicks” manuals. It was interesting, but only in its superficiality. Everything a man is “supposed to do” to pickup chicks seemed fake to me — impossible to do. If someone expresses an irrational feeling, *why* should I validate it? If it’s something petty, I’ll just keep my mouth shut and let it slide. If it’s something totally foolish or idiotic, that *needs* to be said.
In essence, though, the book teaches men self-denial. Denial of desire, denial of self-worth, and denial of reality. Admittedly, I’m not one to share what I think of a member of the opposite sex readily to others. In fact, I’m often dismissive about those I’m attracted to. It’s nobody’s business but my own, really (okay, so maybe it’s her business, too). But establishing a friendship with a woman in order to eventually to get sex from her or her friends seems like false pretenses to me; even if this sure-fire method makes *them* the initators.
Tom Leykis has his Leykis 101 series. That is unabashedly about getting more tail for less money. But he doesn’t take the step of playing a phony and leading women on into being friends. He says, take ’em out, don’t act overly interested, don’t spend more than forty bucks for a date, let them know that they’re not the only game in town, and if you ain’t gotten any by the third date, you don’t see her again. None of this petty mindgames bullshit.
Ho-hum. I don’t necessarily subscribe to Leykis’s techniques, mainly because I don’t view sex as a casual matter (damn objectivist thinking comes into play…). But the brutal simplicity of it makes it respectable. And you don’t have to lie in the process.
I really wonder what the book was, and whether my take on it would have changed very much.
At first, I thought it might be something related to some philosophy class I had, but it was after I graduated, so can’t be….
It fit in with discussion with my psychologist’s take on this podcast.
There’s no single way to do most things.
Figure out a way to do something, document it, and change it as appropriate.
This sort of attitude is really frowned upon in government work.