xkcd – Grownups (Source)
And another:
xkcd – Dream Girl (Source)
And Jake, here’s a video of the Cambridge meetup that resulted from the Dream Girl comic (and a newspaper article about it)
After a few minutes a very tall girl with long brown hair who I would later learn was a Parsons design student, broke social convention, turned to her fellow benchmates, and said, “My God, wasn’t today beautiful.” At first she just got a few quiet affirmations,”yeah, gorgeous”, “best day yet” etc, but then a young woman in a business suit again broke social convention and revealed personal information: “It was so nice, when I woke up I decided I didn’t want to feel miserable about anything, and broke up with my boyfriend. I ditched him at 7:30 in the morning. He didn’t know what hit him.”
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the unspoken walls that prohibit conversation between individuals in public. I’ve experienced this in many places in America, but it’s become more noticeable to me in Seattle particularly with the daily hour-long bus riders to and from work. Unless you speak to a person first or have previously established a rapport, people are hesitant to speak to you. The omnipresence of cell phones and iPods doesn’t make this any easier.
On the bus, I must have a presence of unapproachability (as stated, the iPod doesn’t make this easier). I find myself oftentimes being one of the last bus seats to acquire a second person when the ride gets full. Do I look like a big (overweight) scary (frowning) white guy?
(Insert pause for a runaway train: I originally found the Heading East post from Raul via Kottke. I started browsing through some of the art and photos on Heading East and got distracted by this photo. It’s one of the best I’ve seen.
I ended up browsing through Eliot Shephard’s other photos on Flickr also. Additionally, I ran across an interesting art project called 20×200.
This is as close as the internet can get to ______________. IM, IRC, forums, and Digg don’t count. Try listening to The Album Leaf while you’re on the train.)
Return to the tracks: Martin has been working on talking to women lately. During his brief period of unemployment while he’s waiting for his new job to begin, he set a goal for himself of talking to three women a day. He took to the internet in search for advise.
Now, I probably wouldn’t do it this way, but he found some advice columns from various male resources. Apparently some of these tricks work:
• talk to the woman within three seconds of making contact (eye-contact, arriving next to each other, whatever)
• say something funny (sarcasm doesn’t count… sorry, guys)
• say something belittling — now, this is one step I wouldn’t be likely to use myself, but I guess some girls respond well to this. e.g. “I like your outfit, that’s pretty cool. Although, I think blue would be a better color on you.” (I would never try to give out fashion advice.)
Apparently the idea is to get them to want to earn your interest instead of vice versa.
Instead of just trying to pick up girls or get their attention, I’ve made a few general attempts of spurring conversation the last few days. I managed to discuss the weather and daylight savings time with one of the men who waits for the same bus I do when heading downtown.
While actually on the bus, I’m still working on it.
One man who rides the bus apparently isn’t afraid of breaking taboos. He sits in his seat talking on his cell phone no matter who is around or what’s going on carrying on lengthy conversations. At the end of one of the phone calls, he wished the other person a happy birthday. While holding the phone in his left hand a few inches from his face, he took out his harmonica, held it to his mouth, and played a rendition of the Happy Birthday song.
But I’ve never seen harmonica-man talk with anyone on the bus.
From the OLD, OLD, OOOOOLD archives, here are some of my favorites. Please share your favorite memories in honor of my sometime-around-now 5th anniversary of blogging. (Note: The posts chosen below represent recovered posts from October 2002 through the end of 2004.)
- yay. – my oldest recovered post (although I actually started in/around September 2002)
- Hobo Art – one of the few lingering hobo related memories from my site (I can’t find the rest of the oldest posts)
- Holy Expletive, look at that squirrel!
- Tired Road – a poem about the time I pulled a 540 degree turn on the interstate at 70mph while trying to take Alien Ant Farm out of the CD player in my blue ’92 Ford Escort hatchback
- Grits – Ooh Aah lyrics – this song will always be awesome
- Modiglian – my favorite memories of this poem are of sitting in Jenny’s dorm room in Kaufmann and trying to read through it without running out of breath. At various points I remember Jake, Jenny, Rachel, and 4L all giving it a shot. Rachel got through the whole thing in one go.
- KJ-52 Followup – the only KJ-52 post I still have
- Valentine’s Special: Date the Jake – ladies, he’s still single! Waste no time, date the Jake NOW!
- Still Waiting – leaning towards emo?
- Jax STP 2004 – oh, the memories
As a brief update on the situation with the archives, I’m still missing a lot of old posts and there’s about six months from January 2005 through June 2005 that I probably won’t be able to recover due to an error in my backup of those months. But please enjoy the ones that have come back! Also, I’ve done my best to edit the archives to remove any full names (other than maybe Double-J and Luebbe and a couple references to Jake). If you want your name further hidden or expunged from any specific post, let me know.
Go play Balls, a free flash game. It’s kinda fun. I totally rocked it my first try so I’m not gonna bother trying again until somebody gets further than level 18.
