No point, just a lot of words. in Journal of life stuff

Boy do I ever have stuff on the brain. Let’s jot down some topics to hit:

-Dating vs sugaring
-Eating habits
-Job (done)
-Stress level (probably covered in one of the above)
-Moving
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I have my work laptop. I am officially an employee. It feels really weird to not have any co-workers. And what I mean by that is to not drive into an office and see people and have that drive in during the mornings be the ‘start of my day’. I’m literally able to roll out of bed and start working within 10 minutes. I can munch on breakfast while catching up on e-mails. Ok, sure, I could do that with my previous employer as well, but I still had to drive in, and that made the morning work somehow less…actually it didn’t do anything at all to the morning work. I just viewed the fact that I had to drive into the office as making my work ‘real’.

The realization has come to me that I could very easily travel around the country and spend a week in a different city until I found somewhere I really liked. I could put my treadmill and my desk in a storage unit somewhere, along with my bed and most of my non-clothing possessions, pack my car with my clothes, and just start driving. Bills would be a pain, not having an address would be a pain. Yea, there are more than a few problems with this plan. It would also be expensive. If I budgeted $100/night for a hotel, that’s $3000 a month in ‘rent’. It’s not easy to find a hotel for less than $50/night now-a-days, and the hotels I have found around the $40-50/night range all suck. They aren’t well cleaned, they lack water pressure, they have a lot of noise after hours, etc.

But the complete lack of boredom during the day would be nice, because I’d be utterly free to go out and explore the place I was in after hours of work. I could also probably swing eating one giant meal per day, or eating the free breakfast and then eating one giant meal around 1-2pm. When you don’t have any groceries and all the stores are closed, it’s a lot easier to go to bed hungry than when there’s something sitting on the shelf next to you. And that fear of feeling hungry also helps one to go to sleep on time instead of always staying up later and later.

In the back of my mind there is a worry that I’m somehow going to fuck up this pretty much perfect job I’ve landed and get humiliated as I’m laid off again. This…this is the anxiety I’ve had all my life and never really acknowledged or understood. The first time it really showed itself was when I moved out on my own to my first job and I call Rachel that first night in town because I was having a panic attack (I didn’t know that at the time). It showed itself again when I was moving out of that town to where I’ve been for the past 7 years. Rachel saw me have a breakdown right in front of her eyes because the terror of the unknown was consuming me. She had no idea what to do or how to react. She’s always seen me as a wall of iron, and to see I was human…I don’t know that she was ready for it.

My first day was meant to be Tuesday, but I didn’t get my work laptop until noon Friday, so I basically start work Monday, for all intents and purposes. I still have some HR and onboarding stuff to wrap up (picking benefits, mandatory sexual harassment/HR training, SOX compliance, etc). I don’t have the dongles for my laptop so that I can use my walkstation. That doesn’t mean I can’t use it, it just means it’s really annoying to use it. Basically, to type on the laptop I have to have the 13” screen about 3 feet away from me, which makes everything quite hard to read while walking. First world problems, I know, but allow me my moment of annoyance. I’m human too.

That dread that I’m going to fail or fuck up my opportunity won’t really go away until I complete my first work task. Whatever that is. Provisioning some VMs, scripting something, writing a procedure. The sooner I can get something done and get approval from my leaders/peers the sooner that dread will go away. All I can do then is try to not think about it and manage the stress as best I can.

Dating vs sugar:

I’m stuck. Do I date, or do I sugar? I don’t know what my rent is going to be yet. I had calculated that with a $750/mo rent, and my new, higher, salary, I’d be able to save around twice what I was when I was working downtown Boston. This would open up a whole new level of sugaring for me if I chose to go that route. Of course, ‘whole new’ is something of a lie. To my engineer’s brain, how much money someone is paid determines their happiness. In reality, give the same person $1000 to sit in a room with flat white paint, no accents, basic carpet, and a cheap chair and they will hate it far more than the same person given $100 to sit in a room with vibrant paint, interesting paintings, soft shag carpeting, a comfy chair, and accent pieces typically only seen in mansions. What draws people to money isn’t the money, it’s that image of wealth.

In that sense, I make a terrible sugar daddy. I roll up in an old car that, while reliable, looks like everyone else’s. My clothes come from a chain store and are bog-standard. I like to stay in hotels that are cheap to the point that even I don’t like them (I need to fix that).

The place I’ve been stuck in my mind is a fundamental question, do I want to date, or do I want to just stick to sugaring. I haven’t been able to decide. I’m a catch in both circles, but in the normal dating world…if you saw a photo of me you’d understand why so many people swipe left. I’m not ugly, I’m just not beautiful. I don’t have toned arms or a fit, athletic, body. I don’t have dark hair or a scraggly dark brown/black beard/scruff. I’m not over 6 feet tall. And to be clear, height insecurity remains a totally foreign concept to me, along with why the hell women claim to care about it. Wtf? I like C-cups too, but that doesn’t mean I instantly say no to A-cup people. This is why it confuses me.

I’m totally average, and for a guy in online dating, being anything less than maybe an 8/10 means you’re a 0. There are simply too many 8/10s for women to even consider the 7/10 guys. I am overweight. I need to lose 50lbs to get back to where I was at my lowest. 50 lbs. Fuck me. On one hand, it took me 3 years to get here. On the other hand, fuck me, I haven’t gotten a handle on my weight gain in 3 years?! What happened?

I keep asking myself that. Over and over and over. What happened, what went wrong, why can’t I fix it, why can’t I see a solution?

And the answer I keep coming back to is do I date or sugar? It’s a cyclical problem. Because it’s a circle, I need to just start explaining it to you somewhere. So here goes.

If I make an online dating profile, let’s say on okcupid, that profile will get matches. They always do. Out of 100 matches, 70-80 will be from people in the Philippeans, Thailand, or Vietnam. Of the remaining 20-30, 15-25 of them will be obese. Of the 5 remaining, they will be people I’m just not interested in (political, ideological, or other beliefs; maybe they just aren’t attractive to me, maybe they are disabled, you get the idea). Out of 200 matches, I might get ONE that I actually want to talk to. And in order to see that one person, I have two options:

1. Swipe through no less than 3,000 profiles because I’m on a free account and they both want to keep women on the site and also get me to pay.
2. Pay them for the ‘privilege’ of seeing who likes me.

The one time I actually got a date through OKC was the one time I paid for it. I hate the concept of buying the ‘opportunity’ of something that might not happen. If I am going to pay for opportunity, then why not sugar? I’d much rather give someone rent money and know they’ll give a damn about that then give a website/company money just so that they can remove an arbitrary wall THEY THEMSELVES CREATED IN THE FIRST DOGGAM PLACE!

But, but, during this time of all this filtering and matching, two things are in the back of my mind:

1. I did an experiment in 2015. I took some photos of a guy I went to college with off facebook. He was about as attractive as Owen Wilson, crooked/overly large nose and all. I made not changes whatsoever to my profile text, in any section. I answered every single question IDENTICALLY, including explanations, to my own profile. But I used his photos. In 16 hours, he got more messages from women than I have gotten in 10 years. And of those messages, I would have wanted to talk to at least 80% of them. Knowing that the level of beauty needed to get any attention at all on these dating sites is higher than I could obtain even if I was at the ideal weight and had a 6 pack just…frustrates the fuck out of me.

2. I will be matching with people I really hope match me back. And none of them will. Not.one.ever. The one date I had? She matched with me, I didn’t match with her. That is to say, she found me. So the entire time I’m using this website, it’s 3000 rejections to get one person to maybe say yes, all while paying money for the privilege of being rejected over and over and over. LinkedIn at least has the good sense to be completely free and fair about getting a job and leaves their premium bullshit relegated to headhunters and other desperate types.

This is why I consider sugar so strongly. Sugaring is so much more expensive, but there’s so much less bullshit. In one month on a sugar dating website I’ll get 3-5 dates with women way more attractive than those I would ever get to date normally. And I get to choose from them, because I have yet to meet the SB who meets me and thinks I’m not legitimate. They all know I’m that super rare real-deal.

The problem, the thing that gives me pause, is twofold:

1. Marrying someone you meet and date while sugaring is about the stupidest idea I can think of, second only to, maybe, sticking your dick in a blender.

2. Many people in the sugaring world expect sex to be part of the arrangement. If you say that’s going to happen organically, or anything like that, you lose a lot of potential candidates. I think I know a way to get around this problem without me having to have sex. But…I can’t handle being rejected by things I am interested in. That’s the gist of it.

I should explain #2. The thing I haven’t resolved for myself yet is this problem: What if, some time from now, I finally meet that perfect person for me. She’s my age, attractive, a true peer of mine. The person I didn’t think existed. But she stayed a virgin until marriage and never gave up on her dream, and I did. Could I look myself in the eye after failing? Would I ever be able to feel worthy of her, or forgive myself? I honestly think the answer is no. And that says a lot about me that I can’t handle a wife who I perceive as being ‘greater’ than me in any capacity. Different is fine, but greater? That I can’t handle. Bad thing? Feminist tumblr bloggers will say so. Rational people? Less certain. To be clear, for me to do anything other than ignore you on this topic you have to write from the perspective of how you thought this way and dealt with it, rather than how it’s inherently wrong. It isn’t inherently wrong, and no argument to that effect holds any weight or merit. It’d be like trying to argue that depression is inherently wrong, or that running red lights is inherently safe.

Anyway, yea, sex and sugaring. You can, in theory anyway, have a sugar relationship without sex. Heck, a lot of SBs would love nothing more. The problem I have with it is that the SBs tend to view it as ‘I don’t have to be attracted to this person, I just have to exist!” And that is the exact opposite of what I want. I want to feel valued and desired. I want to feel important to them. I want to be able to make them happy by doing things other than giving them money.

What it comes down to is that I’m willing to pay. Either the person, or the service, but only if the quantity of rejection I face is kept to a reasonable level and the matches I do get are of sufficient quality to make me feel like I’m not wasting my time or being taken for a ride. And that’s where I can’t decide between the two paths forward.

The dream, since I was age 15, was to provide for someone and have that be the thing they loved me for. Family or not, house or not, location, all of that could be left to chance, but providing for someone. Making sure we had somewhere safe to sleep, reliable transport, money for food, clothes, travel, fun, etc. Those are things that are ‘real’, those are the problems I can actually solve. But I can’t find anyone who values that who isn’t also either obese or Canadian. Nothing against Canadians, I just know nothing about the immigration process, and would never consider moving to Canada. But Canada does have a LOT of attractive single ladies. It’s nuts.

I feel like both of these options suck, but I have had no luck using other options. Meeting women in video games, or other online groups? No dice. Meeting people in meetups IRL? All my hobbies are so male dominated that they get one girl per year, if that.

Right, so I said this was a cycle? Well, I keep eating because I have anxiety and stress. Part of that is the job, part of it is the move, part of it is Corona making everything not work the way it’s supposed to and making it hard for me to plan said move. I used to KNOW that if I had someone I loved, and who loved me, that I could conquer any personal problem. I think back to the (very short) days when Trisha and I were dating. We only ever went on 4 dates. But I felt hope. I thought I had found a peer; that person I didn’t think existed. She never did tell me why she decided she didn’t like me. I suspect she just didn’t think I was attractive enough, and even though I could prove I’d lost 10lbs just while dating her, and she needed only wait a few more months for me to finish losing the weight (back then, I was only 30lbs away), she…just couldn’t, for whatever reason.

And I don’t know if that’s where my hope in being happy went away or not. It’s why I’m not certain it’s a cycle, or if the machine is just plain broken. I don’t know how to make myself happy anymore EXCEPT to eat. Eating is the only thing that works. The hope of a wife or girlfriend making me happy…that doesn’t work anymore. The reality of a girlfriend existing and being great? No idea if that would work or not. My new job is about as good as a girlfriend whom I thought didn’t exist suddenly proving that it does exist. Yet, I don’t feel motivation from that to fix myself.

My entire life I’ve always seen the way out of my problems. I’ve seen a path to get better. What has crippled me for the past 3 years is that I no longer see the path to fixing myself. I don’t see the way to recover. I don’t see the way to move forward. I don’t see the way to get better. I don’t even see what truly went wrong, and why. I know when, I know the events that happened around that time. But I don’t see the actual problem. I don’t see the root cause.

Or maybe I do, and it’s just so abstract I can’t see a way to fix it. A root cause like “the world stopped making sense” is not something that can really be fixed.

I explored Houston alone and I actually enjoyed myself. Sure, by the end, I wanted someone to explore with, but I was also glad to be alone, because it meant I could sit on a bench and not worry about them not being as tired as I was, or not finding the heat as oppressive as I did. I have never enjoyed being somewhere alone. Ever. The fact that I did bothers me more than a little. On one hand, it’s super liberating. I could travel all over and no longer have to beg, borrow, and plead to try and find someone to go with me so that I wouldn’t be miserable. At the same time....I really don’t like a version of myself that no longer feels a need to give a shit about my fellow man. My concern for others was simultaneously deeply rooted and tenuous at best. If that’s getting worse? I may become the very thing I spent so long hating.

Yea, ok, this dating rant more or less hit all the other topics I wanted to cover as well. I’m annoyed that I got no closer to a solution, or…well, anywhere really. But I don’t see where to keep digging. I need to just start trying random things I guess. Damnit.