My brother posted a blog post recently, and in it, he expressed his disdain for the way women tended to treat him. His emotions and feelings were pretty familiar territory for me, as I’ve been treated as “just a friend” (as I’m sure many men have) on several occasions. Here is the response that I wrote to him: It’s rather unfortunate that so many women are exactly as you describe; but take consolation in the fact that not ALL women are like that. Every guy, with the exception of the aforementioned assholes and “models”, have been jammed up in “friend mode” on several occasions. While I don’t have issues with it now, I’ve been considered “just a friend” on several occasions, and it’s quite frustrating. The best advice I can provide on avoiding the friend category, as hard as it sounds, is to make sure that the woman that you’re interested in is aware of your intentions. If you like her “that way”, you need to bluntly (and preferably, when you first meet) tell her that your intention is romantic in nature. That sets the tone initially, and she will then know that your actions are working toward that goal.

Continue readingThe dreaded ‘friend category’, or, women can be cruel

Every morning I ride the bus in to work. The ride is about 45 minutes, and I spend most of it listening to music and/or reading a book. There’s a particular corner, near Clinton Street Pub, that has a stop sign. I pass by it every day. On the stop sign is a little sticker, about average bumber sticker size, that says, “Now is all you have”. I can’t seem to keep myself from reading this same sticker every time the bus drives past it in the morning. I also can’t help myself from feeling a bit depressed after reading it. I mean, here I am, I’m riding a bus in to work, selling my “now” to the highest bidder so that I might have a comfortable living. I guess I should be happy that I do have such a good job and that I do live comfortably, but that little sticker seems to be taunting me every day.

Man oh man. I always say that I work best while under pressure. It’s entirely true, I do work best when I have a specific deadline (and even better if it’s looming over me), but I’ve quite literally felt like I’ve been under the gun for the past several months. I haven’t been to the point of “overload” just yet, but there have been a few moments in the past couple of hours (while coding an e-learning website for work), where my brain has seemingly fizzled and stopped working for a moment or two. Very strange. Sigh. Anyway. I have a presentation due tomorrow that will be shown to a large number of trainers, supervisors, and managers. In other words, it will be very bad if I fail. Back to work, I suppose.