This guy on okcupid just sent me an email saying, among other things, "you clean up really well."

No, right? No. I think perhaps jessica_dwg and I should circulate a helpful pamphlet: Things Not To Say To Girls You Have Just Met (On The Internet).

I made my first cup of coffee in the new apartment this afternoon. The apartment is hereby christened. Now, I'm going to take a shower (yes, at 5 in the afternoon) because I was up at 7am, flea-marketing and grocery-shopping and completely-unplanned-detour-hardware-store-plant-shopping.

Oh, and on one of the parallel streets to the hardware store, there was this street fair thing, complete with rides. And around 3 pm, when I was at the store, there were a total of two visitors for the whole fair. And they were just going around the tilt-a-whirl thing by themselves. It was a depressing scene. The operator of the mini-ferris wheel looked like he wanted to punch someone.

I started to get a little wordy in my response to gfrancie in the last entry, and decided it was worth making into a whole new entry. Yes, my tl;dr comes in volumes. You are so lucky.

First, let me get to the breakthrough, the epiphanic moment that I had the other day about being a girl who is lame when it comes to approaching guys and dating them: Why do I have to be lame? Why, exactly, am I lame? Also, why do the guys get to have all the fun and run game? The epiphany was, essentially, Why can I not also run game?

I don't mean that in a sleazy Player's Club kind of way, but I was thinking about that pink scourge of the bookstore, He's Just Not That Into You and wondering, why does HE get to be not that into ME? What guy sits around hoping that if he wishes it hard enough, or smiles just the right way to a random stranger, or some other bizarre juju, that a girl will want to have a relationship? That is bogus. Why do the men get all the agency (sorry, lit majors) here? Why can't I start at the same level that they do, assuming that I'm hot and awesome and that I will make my moves and run my game until they realize how hot and awesome I am?

It was my Helen Keller under the water spigot moment (yes, I've had a lot of those). Oh! WATER!

Yeah, so I was like, look, I am going to go out there and start chatting up a ton of dudes and not doing the stupid girl thing where I single out one person and put all my eggs in that basket and probably have all that weirdness come out in the communicating and then get immensely crushed when it goes south because I have put all my eggs in the one basket. . .etc. No more!

So, there was that. But, as I was mentioning to gfrancie, I've now run into the problem of ABSOLUTELY NOT KNOWING how to effectively run my game. Because I know what image I'd like to project, but I have also been told recently that I am hard to read. And because the person who told me is a total BFF who I have known over ten years and even lived with at one point, I gave that opinion a good deal of weight.

So I don't WANT to be hard to read. But I'm not intentionally being hard to read, so I'm not sure exactly how much more expressive to make myself. I just emailed this guy that he was cute. Which is true, but normally something I'd never do. Normally I'd interact with a cute guy the way I'd interact with my aunt, waiting for. . .what, I don't know. Possibly, some embarrassing Romantic Comedy Moment where it all goes from 0 to 60 in a scene change! Oh, I am so ashamed of myself. Okay, that is enough self-exploration for tonight!

So. . .Cute Guy Is Cute. I tell him that. Is that too much? Not enough? OMG I don't know!! I'm totally happy to do MORE, go FURTHER, because I've had my epiphany and there is no shame in the game that I am running, but. . .I am a horrible judge of this, clearly!

And yes, krock, I know. Aspies flatmouth. I almost deleted this post several times because of aspies law.

Whoops, so I forgot the most important part of my epiphany: how I came to it in the first place! bitchygurl jogged my memory about that, and this is what I said to her in comments:

Oh derr, I forgot the key part of my epiphany! Which totally relates to this and is: I say I want to be pursued, but I have had a problem with every guy who's ever pursued me. I've been in painfully few relationships, gone on a pathetic number of dates in comparison, and mostly all with guys who pursued me. And I've shut down 98% of those dates/relationships. So I was discussing this tendency with mailekai one day, and I thought--"well, self, maybe you actually don't like being pursued. Have you ever thought about that?"



Or, perhaps I don't like the types of guys that want to pursue a girl like me. Or the type of guys who pursue girls, period. Maybe my whole only-child control issues stretch to the area of dating, as well.

So then I started thinking about it--created "Dana's Ideal Guy" and imagined two scenarios: one where he pursues me, in similar ways that I've been pursued in the past, and one where I think I'm all hot and sexy and awesome and pursue--or, in other words, control. Connnnntrrroooolllllll. And I was sort of surprised to realize that I even felt creeped out with Imaginary Ideal Man calling out to me on the street, or writing a solicitous email. I MUCH preferred the scenario where Imaginary Me said, "I like you. Come over here."

So then I was all, "well, what you need for that to happen is to start saying 'I like you. Come over here.'"

It was a little disappointing, initially, to sort of give up on that dream of being the crush object, but the more time I've had to live with it the more comfortable it seems.

I'm not saying this IS how you should feel, it's just the weird crazy thought process that happened to me.