A single new year

I am so ready for 2010. There is a lot of deceit and sadness to leave behind. I am already a lot better off than I was when I was being jerked around.

I have several goals for myself, and I am now coming to accept that I will probably be achieving them without somebody with whom to share the accomplishments. I have pretty much found the online dating thing to be a fruitless endeavor. I will still try, because I have faith in myself, and I have set for myself a date of September to stick it out. I have made some interesting observations and discoveries about the online dating world in general, and my local pool in particular. I may need to drop my current service and try one with a different crowd. I probably also need to come to grips with the reality that the Bay Area really isn't for me. I may need to choose to leave the job that I enjoy (and often love) for a place that I can be happy, with whatever job that I can find.

But I have more than enough time to see if anything comes of the Bay Area scene, nine months is a fair shake. There is a lot to do during 2010 in my hopper already, and it may be that by the time somebody decides to really find out how awesome I am, my dance card will already be full of single-me trips. Better for the dog, she gets a lot more attention :D Maybe I'll give her a kiss at midnight...

A single Christmas

Well, One more first out of the way. My first Christmas as a single in 6 years. Thank God for family!

Service with a smile

I'm finally being served! The mediator JUST got around to filing the petition on behalf of my FW (We decided she should be petitioner and me respondent). Now I can be served. Then I can respond. Then we sign some disclosures. Then we wait for judgment, assuming the papers pass the clerk reviews.

FW and I had a nice long conversation today after returning from the mediator. She looked to be in better health than in the last few months, when she had a stream of colds and such. My health, knock on wood, has been great. I have my interpretation of those facts, but I don't bother to share that with her...

In any event, I am totally ready to move on. I feel great about myself and I am over wanting her. Once we have the judgment, I can get to work trying to start my side business without worrying about some lingering entanglement.

Now I can be divorced! I'm a real boy! Broken, but no longer in limbo. Out of the ether and into the scratch and dent bin with the other divorced masses.

Cowboy Chili: An Engineering Lesson

A young cowboy walks into a diner. He sits at the counter and notices an old cowboy with his arms folded staring blankly at a full bowl of chili.

After fifteen minutes of just sitting there staring at it, the young cowboy bravely asks the old cowpoke, "If you ain't gonna eat that, mind if I do?"

The older cowboy slowly turns his head toward the young wrangler and in his best cowboy manner says, "Nah, go ahead."

Eagerly, the young cowboy reaches over and slides the bowl over to his place and starts spooning it in with delight. He gets nearly down to the bottom and notices a dead mouse in the chili. The sight was shocking and he immediately pukes up the chili into the bowl.

The old cowboy quietly says, "Yep, that's as far as I got, too."

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You might be surprised how many seemingly great ideas have a fatal flaw that you don't see until you dig deeply enough into the details. Sometimes somebody has already treaded that turf and found out. If you are lucky, they will let you know before you waste too much time.

Winter weather

We had a dusting of snow yesterday morning, an unusual, but not unheard of event (the picture is not of this dusting, but of snowmen at the Sapporo snowman festival). This has reinforced my irrational desire to make a snowman. I don't know what prompted it, but about a month ago, I got the thought into my head as something that I need to do this winter. I don't think that it has gone full-blown, Richard-Dreyfus-with-the-mashed-potatoes yet, but I want to address it before it gets there. Maybe this weekend. I have some fun ideas so far. I might think something up on the drive as well.

Online dating good, bad, and scary

Here are some online dating blogs that I have come across, with interesting perspectives and anecdotes.

http://100emails20dates.wordpress.com/ - A San Francisco woman's challenge to herself to give online dating a chance 100 emails and 20 dates. Pretty interesting. I think that I may have offended her with a post that I put up there, because it has disappeared. I wished her luck, but not too much (so that she would keep blogging). One interesting feature that she has is the Bros Round Table, where she interviews her male friends to find out what makes them tick. I think that she misses the point by asking unmarried friends, and therefore she might not get insight from a person that is down the path that she would like to go down. She has sworn off engineers, so it's good for me to know what "type" (to the extent that a "type" can be defined) will not be a good match. [edit: Apparently my comment went into a moderation queue, and I didn't offend her, which is a relief, because that was not my intent at all. It's funny that she has sworn off engineers, because overall, she seems pretty cool to me. See the last pre-edit sentence again...]

http://breadandboys.com/ - Another San Francisco woman's take on things. Some interesting anecdotes, and a bit of a different perspective. I am still trying to figure out the bread metaphor.

http://datingismiserable.com/ Yet another San Francisco woman's take on things. Poor girl really seems to be hard at work trying to find "him" and getting a pretty poor sampling of men in return.

I seem to have found the San Francisco woman section of dating blogs... Perhaps that is fortunate. It is interesting to see. I also kind of find it validating that their experiences match what I had somewhat suspected. I see the kind of men that they are meeting, and how they feel before, during, and afterward, and I see how that scene does not excite me. I doubt that I fit in with that crowd, and I wonder if I need to accept that my real life and online experience will probably be square-peg-in-a-round-hole in this market. Along those lines, I present a less-serious blog...

http://whytherearenogirls.blogspot.com/ - Why There are No Girls in San Francisco, a guy's take on what makes the S.F. dating scene kind of broken. Many observations are cartoonish and obviously meant as sarcasm. Pretty funny stuff, especially when he has a good kernel of truth underlying it.

http://www.gkdating.com/ - I found this one because he apparently dated the woman from Bread and Boys (above) once or twice, and she discovered his blog and job. Kind of creepy, he's a dating coach in San Francisco. I haven't read much, and not sure that I will. Good to know the competition, but it may turn me even more off to the scene.

At this point, I should say that, just as the city itself is, the S.F. dating scene is the focal point and influential for the rest of the Bay Area, but it is its own world. A world that I did not think that I fit into before, and certainly do not feel like I fit into now. Interesting reading though. I found the sites by navigating from one blog's links to the next, so I will probably do the same for a Silicon Valley set of blogs when I run across that. That seems like the dating scene that I will be having to [endure, survive, suffer through].

Yuck.

On the bright side, I found this set by first looking up reviews of Crazy Blind Date, which is something that I might well try (as well as speed dating). Something completely different than I would have dreamed of ever trying or having to try.

The in-between

I did pretty well for the rest of the 40 days since the last post...

Day 40 passed almost without incident on November 24. Almost. At about 11:40PM, my phone rang. I was already asleep and didn't get it in time. I saw the number, and didn't immediately recognize it in my haze. I hit send to dial it back, and just as it dialed, I realized whose number it is. FW's boyfriend's number! I let it ring, and who picks up, but FW. Somewhat embarrassed, she tells me that she mis-dialed my number while trying to call her phone (our numbers differ by the trailing digit) because she got a new ring tone. She apologizes, then I say OK and we say goodnight. UNBELIEVABLE. She knew nothing of my 40 day campaign (I think), so this was just kind of serendipity. There is an interesting symmetry in that I found out about the nature of this relationship when she accidentally sent me a text that as meant for him. The message I got then as I did now was God telling me that I can let her go.

There were three more signs that evening. The first was that I checked my email since I was awake and found that I had received a response to an online dating email that I had sent. I take that as another sign from God to move on... The second was that a little before 1AM FW's boyfriend sent an apologetic text message, obviously very embarrassed and a bit ashamed, assuring me that this would not happen again (as if this was within his control...). I don't know what that means, but it is interesting. The final sign was that overnight my aunt in Portugal, who happens to be a nun, sent me a nice, unsolicited email, wishing me a blessing. Amazing. I perhaps read too much into these events, but I have experienced enough other unusual phenomena that I cannot discount the evidence of God.

The next morning, I sent FW's boyfriend a return text telling him no worries, and that I completely understand.

So I am now moving on with my life, trying my hand at the online dating thing (yuck) with a don't touch-me-with-a-10-foot-pole relationship status that reads "currently separated," until the divorce becomes final, at which point I will gladly change it to "divorced" and keep trying.

So, I will post a little about what it means to try and date for me, and I will try to keep things focused on myself and not expose details of anybody else's life. That is, unless I run across something epically bad or astoundingly wonderful. Then I will be as discrete as I can.

I found some interesting dating blogs, and I will share links to them in another post.