Well, besides the whole not really going for it thing - this is something I have known for a long time. I'm too good looking!

From The Sun Online:

And Selena is not alone. In a recent study, sociologist Diane Felmee found only a third of women said looks were the first thing that attracted them to a man. Most preferred a sense of humour or financial and career success.

Researchers at Newcastle University also believe ugly men exist as a way of repairing our gene pool. Women would rather date men with good genes, who can fight disease easily, than a classically beautiful man.

So, shit, I guess it's time to get that sock full of quarters out, to ask Josh to smash me in the face with it, to find some legal/illegal way of getting a BMW, and maybe to stock up on some Zicam in case she gets a tickle in her throat that ain't STD related.

I was out yesterday at Cecelia's with my bff Jer-Bear. He met a new girl through a friend of his, and I met her for the first time yesterday. Decent enough girl, seems down to earth, I guess. She brought up the age thing somehow, her being 23 and Jerry being 29. I'm not sure if it's really a hangup for her or not. Certainly dating a girl who is under 25 is a no-no in my rule book, for many good reasons but if I met a girl who I thought had potential I wouldn't say "Man, you're great and all but you just need a couple of more years." Hell no! She could very well ripen up by then and your appetite for her could be ruined! If I allowed what someone else thought to affect my decisions all the time, I would probably have had a lot less fun and far less experience in life.

He seems to like her, thinking she may have potential. She brought a cute little friend with her so she wouldn't be alone. The thing is I'm not a great wingman like Josh. I don't have the patience to talk bullshit and pretend like I have to put my best face forward. No, I don't have to do that. I like me. I like my cynical sense of humor. I like to make fun of things. I like all the bad jokes I come up with in the struggle to come through with a few good ones. If someone isn't down with me, it ain't worth wasting any time or energy worrying about them. They're irrelevant, and probably too square for my tastes anyway. Josh is a lot better at dealing with this. He can talk BS for hours and does so every night!

Birthday comes up in a few weeks, as someone reminded me during dinner. No, I am not celebrating. If Josh wants to celebrate he can. It comes on a Friday this year. The last year has been both good and bad, but I just want to move forward. I don't like celebrating, but a few years back I do recall getting a little striptease/lap dance from my girlfriend at the time, which was GREEEAAATT, and which I've come to find is not something a lot of girls like to do for their men. Let's just put it this way - I don't recall a single gift she ever got me, but I sure as hell do remember that night, the images being permanently burned into memory. This year...heh.....it ain't gonna be as nice.

Saw this link off of Drudge this morning, talking about how a bunch of jobs at Citibank are going to be cut or transferred to lower cost economies.



What is really interesting is what it says here:

"Meanwhile thousands of posts in New York City will be shifted to Buffalo in upstate New York near the Canadian border, although almost 60pc of the cuts will take place outside the US."

Oooh, you mean we get to take jobs from NYC? THOUSANDS? Really? I think it's fantastic. Wait for the local government to fuck it up.........

Hey, a new Category for me!

Well, I knew it was time to get back on the pills, as I now have my insurance and money to take care of myself. I went to the Doc and what did he tell me? Just go back to your counseling and get whatever you need there. Huh? I thought you were my Doctor! Why am I here paying you money to tell me to go elsewhere to get help?

I'm so frustrated.

What I do know is that for me, depression and getting blasted go hand in hand. I don't want to go backwards. I hate waking up, hands shaking, overwhelmed with anxiety. It's just brutal. It's distracting, heavily so, and debilitating.

I guess it's time to get rid of this Doc and find someone better.

Just some food for thought here. I heard some things on the radio the other night that were very scary/fascinating.

We have heard from people who are scaring the death out of us, telling us the end of the world is nigh unless we change our polluting ways, sermonizing in ways reminiscent of the Book of Revelation.

Chew on this - what if we were TRULY helpless?

• GRAIN OF SALT ALERT GRAIN OF SALT ALERT*

I listen to Coast to Coast AM fairly frequently. There was a guy on the other night called Ed Dames, a military man who claims to have been part of a clandestine CIA program dealing with Remote Viewing. With a lot of effort, these Remote Viewers claim to be able to do many fantastic things. Locating people, bombs, lost artifacts, and to some extent telling us about the natural world are among their alleged gifts (think of reasons why our gov't would want to have this kind of asset).

Anyhoo, this guy is a polarizing figure because of what he says, and believe me it ain't good. I'll cut to the chase - he said that very, very soon our Sun is going to go through a solar cycle of epic proportions, with the result being a barren earth, and the human race being cut by at least half, if not more, because of the poor food supply. Put as bluntly as he put it - we are dead in 50 years.

Now what do you make of it? Put aside the shaky foundation behind the claims for a moment (I am also skeptical of Remote Viewing) and imagine that this were true. How would it change the way you think about your fellow man? How would it affect your attitude towards life?

I was reminded of the dream I had where I had a vision of our sun going bonkers, bubbling and blowing up. I remember thinking, man what have we been doing here all this time? We make war, we fuck each other mercilessly, and what was it all for?

The point Dames made, and I agree, is that you have to squeeze every little bit of joy and happiness out of life. Even if the world doesn't end, this is still ultimately true. So why go about things being bitter, insufferable or down on life? You're wasting your fucking time.

Yeah, officially as of last night the depression came back with a fury. I thought I could handle life like a normal person would but apparently it's asking too much. Wow was it ever a struggle last night to even get to sleep. This morning wasn't much better. Not to be too emo but I'm really sad. I hope the good Lord hits me off with some comforting feelings today.

Damn it.

Yes, I really do believe that it is just a movie. It's not meaningless, as we can all take from a movie what we will, but in the end it is not any kind of political statement. Since my position has been called ignorant (e:paul,4918) I feel I have to explain myself.

I did actually take two film courses while attending UB. One dealt with music in the movies, and the various ways in which music can be used to evoke emotions or make what we see on the screen more powerful. The other was actually in the History department, and in the course we had to watch a movie during Tuesday's class. By Thursday's class we had to have a report on the movie and how we thought it followed along with the themes of the day. The Empire Strikes Back was the most memorable of the films, obviously dealing with Cold War themes.

So while I am no expert on film by any means, I do know something about how ideas like this are formulated in the heads of academics and film critics when they review a film. I also know the difference between a film which INTENDS to speak about certain political themes versus a film that people take and apply their own interpretation to, whether it makes any sense or not.

The material for the film is taken from a Frank Miller work which was done before Bush or Iraq even took place. Unless he was a very special person there is no possible way for the work to have intended to address those themes, and even if that was the intention it would have been done poorly, as there are a myriad of ways to interpret Bush in that context.

M. Faust of our own beloved Artvoice doesn't buy it either. In his review of the film he mentions that he talked to the film maker, Zack Snyder, about this very topic. Here's a cut from the review:

"I guess that's unavoidable," he sighed. "I'm not going to pretend to be like, 'What's that, Iraq? There's a war going on? What are you talking about?' That's a reality of the world. I tried to make a movie that looks at the nobility of conflict, that asks if there is such a thing. I didn't do it in relationship to what's happening now because I don't have that much foresight - I wish I had. The point is that there can be nobility in sacrifice. Does that give context to sacrifice that we've maybe lost in the muddle of our current situation, is there a way to get that back? And also the story is 2,500 years old. Does history have some bad habit of being a big circle? Yeah. But is that part of my design? I don't think so."

The film maker himself says he didn't make the movie with the current problems in mind, and that he couldn't have in the first place. That is enough to satisfy my own curiosity about the intention of the film, and to not believe anyone who attributes something to the film that was never intended.

Does that mean that the film has no meaning? No, no way, the story behind it is incredible. No less a man than Jack Valenti said that the most important part of a movie is telling a story. The movie studios are fortunate to have a reviewer like the dude at the NYT because that increases the buzz and adds a financial boost to the revenue the film brings in. Of course a movie studio wouldn't do anything to stop the debate. Like any other industry their goal is to make profit on films.

Think about Norbit for a moment, a film that the critics absolutely thought was terrible. It has actually ended up bringing in at least $80 million so far, not too bad for a shitty movie. The movie studios don't necessarily have the academics/critics in mind all the time because they are notoriously hard to please compared with normal people. All this review did was make a bunch of people rich by injecting his own bullshit into the theme of a movie, and I'm sure the guy will get a nice fruit basket on Monday for his effort. Whatever we take from it is fine, and we can learn many things from the Spartans, but let's not talk about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie being a central theme.

Sometimes people wonder about the bad things going on in the world. Why do people have to suffer? Why do people have to go through misery? Many philosophical and religious debates have spawned from this question, and it is a natural question people ask themselves at some point in their lives.

The answer I have come up with is that we suffer so that we are able to give special meaning to the good moments in life. Without that distinction, the special and rare moments become ordinary and we don't have as much of a connection to them.

I got a call tonight and found out that I'm single again. I've been fearing this moment for a week or so, not because I did anything wrong but because I've had this really strong, uncomfortable gut feeling. That was reinforced by the fact that she hasn't exactly been communicating with me for a few days. I hadn't stayed at her place for a few weeks.

When things like this happen people start questioning themselves, beating themselves up or thinking about their inadequacies. Lord knows I've got my share of faults.

Questions also arise in the mind about extracurricular activity. Is another guy involved? How would I handle such a betrayal? Lord knows it's happened to me before.

A clear mind reveals that the details, no matter how ugly they might be, don't matter so much because in the end my lot wouldn't change and I would still have to look to the future. She said it's because of the demands of her new job, plus the desire to spend more time with her friends.

If it's another dude, if it's the job, if she just wants more freedom in her life, I'm still on the street and I have to brush it off and move on. What else can you do?

Basically it wasn't going much further, and anyway I have never had the kind of strong attraction to her that I probably should have after dating her for a few months. I felt that this was going to happen at some point, yet still I feel deeply saddened at having failed at another relationship.

I do have to say that I was really happy to be with someone who had almost complete tolerance for my antics, which was very refreshing. I learned more about what I want in a woman. I learned that I still have more things in my life that are a lot more important than being with a girl who isn't absolutely head over heels about me.

It's not like it was a miserable situation. We got along quite well and enjoyed each other's company. It just wasn't right. She said the timing right now is so bad. I remember when we first met and I said to myself that it couldn't have come at a worse time. I was in the middle of fixing a bunch of things in my life and didn't need another complication. How's that for irony? I need to put the focus back on myself again. There's still a lot of work to do.

We learn the best through personal experience, and experience has taught me that getting through these situations makes the next great experience with a chick that much sweeter. I can be proud of myself and how I've handled the entire relationship. Maybe calling me normal would be a little bit of a stretch but I'm getting there.

I saw this on MySpace and I thought it was rather funny.....enjoy!

Peace, Love and Orgasms!

Your homie,
Jason



How to Make a Woman Happy

It's not difficult to make a woman happy. A man only needs to be:
1. a friend
2. a companion
3. a lover
4. a brother
5. a father
6. a master
7. a chef
8. an electrician
9. a carpenter
10. a plumber
11. a mechanic
12. a decorator
13. a stylist
14. a sexologist
15. a gynecologist
16. a psychologist
17. a pest exterminator
18. a psychiatrist
19. a healer
20. a good listener
21. an organizer
22. a good father
23. very clean
24. sympathetic
25. athletic
26. warm
27. attentive
28. gallant
29. intelligent
30. funny
31. creative
32. tender
33. strong
34. understanding
35. tolerant
36. prudent
37. ambitious
38. capable
39. courageous
40. determined
41. true
42. dependable
43. passionate
44. compassionate

WITHOUT FORGETTING TO:

45. give her compliments regularly
46. love shopping
47. be honest
48. be very rich
49. not stress her out
50. not look at other girls

AND AT THE SAME TIME, YOU MUST ALSO:

51. give her lots of attention, but expect little yourself
52. give her lots of time, especially time for herself
53. give her lots of space, never worrying about where she goes

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT:

54. Never to forget:

• birthdays
  
• anniversaries
  
• arrangements she makes

..



..



HOW TO MAKE A MAN HAPPY

1. Show up naked
2. Bring food

What if the thing I ordered for my GF doesn't come in when it is supposed to? Is it time for Plan B? (Dick in a box)

Finally, thanks to (e:Zobar) I was able to go to O's web site and see what they have to offer. The missus wants to get some grub from there for Valentine's Day. So I roll over to my HSBC Web Banking to ensure I have the funds.

Wait for it.....wait for it.... -32.07

Fuck. How am I supposed to get dinner with negative money? Not to mention this will become -65.07 once they inevitably fee my ass. Trip to TO with girlfriend, new monitor, V-Day gift, parking ticket fees, cell phone bill, and of course normal indulgences = running out of cash.

This is very depressing. I'm not going to sit here and complain about the Government being responsible for my financial status, which would of course be bullshit, as it always is. I just wish I would have planned the month a little better. I probably could have put off paying the parking tickets, which in retrospect would have been worth it because I would be able to get dinner AND be able to do my fucking laundry.

Now I have to figure it out. Do I take out a C-Note from my already negative bank account, and accrue yet another 33 dollar fee so I can do my laundry and have money for dinner tomorrow, plus whatever else I might do between now and the 15th? I don't see much of a choice. I can't go to the missus and say, sorry, you're going to have to pick up dinner. Even though I think gender roles are complete nonsense when it comes to relationships nowadays you still feel something is very wrong if you don't come through on V-Day.

At least I have $2 in my pocket, which will get me a Sparks.