Rusty's Blog

Want to?

Why don’t you? Most of us don’t really know why. Oh, we experience pain, and a lot of us think that such pain is ‘bad’ for us, or should prevent us from feeling ‘good.’ That doesn’t have to be the case.

Some of us are undere stresses that affect us emotionally. Holidays, Family members passing away, new house, finances, Work presure, family members doing ‘wrong,’ even falling in love. They all place one form of stress on our emotions, and as a society in the US, we don’t tend to teach pwople how to respond to those stresses.

What? You though I was going to tell you to imagine feeling good? Or suggest it first? We’ll get to that. Imagining ‘feeling good’ really is a great way to end up feeling good. However without figuring out how to address the rest of what’s going on in our lives, it’s a feeling that lasts till the world invades again.

Let’s start with the physical. Perhaps you remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc where Indie has been beaten up, and he hurts just about everywhere? It seams that no matter where Marion goes to touch him, he feels agonizing pain until she asks him where it doesn’t hurt. For most of us there is almost always a part of our body that doesn’t hurt. And some people have tricks they do to themselves to ignore pains and injuries. If you’re familiar with them, and they work for you, great. For the rest of us, the idea is to take a few moments, and feel a part of our body that is not in pain. Is it touching something that we think is sensouous? Can we feel the texture of something around that spot that makes us feel good?

Another element is to make sure we are treating any injury properly. If it deserves medical attention, has it gotten that attention? Also we tend to go through some low times as our bodies go off of any pain medication that we have been on. Part of that is the body wanting the pain medication back, and part of it is the body responding to the fact that it was injured and has been going through a lot of work in recovering.

Keeping in mind something that you really want to do in the future, or that you have loved to do in the past that recovery is going to let you do again, may help.

“May help?” you ask. OK as with visualizing yourself feeling good, or putting a broad smile on your face and looking in a mirror at yourself and saying “I Like You. You make me feel Great!” a few times, these suggestions are ideas you can consider, use, or even disregard On your own terms. This means that it’s entirely possible that you will go through this entire missive, and will never do anything that helps you feel better. Along with everything else, I am not a doctor. That’s why I suggest that if there is something medically wrong, that you will have to take it upon yourself to seak out help for that. And that applies both to physical ailments and mental and emotional ailments. I am not licensed to practice medicine, and an not a psyciatrist. I’m not even a Psychologist, though I am very interested in why people do the things they do.

We know pretty well that when people have experienced a significant loss in thier lives that they have to go through the entire mourning process. Oddly enough most of us think that celebration has no similar process. Really? Think about a couple of “celebration” events. A married young lady finds she’s pregnant. Most people would consider this an event worthy of celebration. Let’s presume that Lady and Hubby have been trying to have a baby, and all the family is in accord. What’s the first thing that happens? “No! I’m Pregnant? Am I ready? Are we ready financially?” Sond familiar? Denial and Doubt. How about someone winning the Lottery? Shock? Surprise? And so on. In short we go through a gamut of emotions for both positive and negative events in our lives.

And Just because they are scheduled does not mean that major holidays are out either. The fact that they are sceduled doesn’t change the fact that we experience sadness over people who are not going to make it, or places we are not going to get to.

There are so many traditions in the US, that I won’t say that “It is a tradition at most holidays..” but I will note that for many of us Food is an important part of many celebrations, as well as more than a few events like funerals and going away parties. That often gets hooked up with ‘feeling good’ and the result is that for many of us, there is an emotional component of eating, and when we don’t feel good, or we experience something that makes us sad, we go and eat to try to make ourselves feel better. Is it no wonder we tend to gain weight?

In other words, I’m not about to tell you to go eat something comforting to feel better. What I will say is that when you are under emotional stress due to loss or gain, you very likely need to find some place or way that you can go through the process of recovery. Go do that. If that involves being with someone and sharing the experience with them, then do that. Then come back and you can work on going from feeling OK, which is fine, to feeling Good. which is better.

At the extreams of peole who feel that the perhaps shouldn’t feel good are those people who feel ’sorry’ for other people who’s lives they have no impact on. The “How can you celebrate when there are people in _insert country here_ who are starving _or whatever sufferance they experience_?” Well, let’s be honest with ourselves. If I feel bad about that situation today, does it help them? How? On the other hand if I’m aware that there are people who are suffering in _wherever_ and I donate for some cause to help them, or pray for them, or whatever, should I still feel bad myself as a result?

In short, If you are in a situation where you need help, then you should seek it out and get that help.

OK, so by now you should be at the point where you may not feel ‘good’ but you feel OK. This may still include some fairly high stress from work, or family. That’s generally OK, as long as you are expecting the stress and working with it. Some people have a lot of trouble understanding this, but in every thing you do, there will be stress. The ‘Stress Free Lifestyle’ doesn’t really exist. You make thousands of decisions every hour, and some people every minute. Some of those decisions will be wrong, and hopefully you will have the opportunity to learn from them. Some of those decisions will have an impact far beyond what you are doing now, some of those impacts you will know about as you make the decision, others you won’t know about even after the fact. If you’re not OK with that level of stress, then perhaps you should be looking to do something different, but no matter what, you will have stress in your life.

Let’s go beyond that. Did you get some exercise today? I don’t mean did you take your dogs out to the dog walk and bring them in once they did their thing. I mean did you get some exercise in today? Go for a walk? Lift weights? What doesn’t really matter, what matters is going out and getting some blood flowing through your veins at a higher rate than ‘normal.’ Well? Did you? Perhaps now is a good time to get up and go for a walk. No worries on comming back to this, feel free to set a bookmark, or write down the URL for this page. Come on back when you have done some exercise. I’ll be here. If you are wondering, half an hour of walking, or the like, is all you should look at specifically doing today. Just go for a walk.

Feel better? Good that’s a start. Now you’ve probably spent the day binding muscles into knots. Do you have a tub, or a shower massage? Go make use of it. Run a warm or hot soaking bath, and relax for a bit. think about how good the warmth feels as it releases the tension in thos muscles. If you have access to a spa or hot tub, so much the better.

Feels pretty good doesn’t it. Heck even thinking about it probably has put a smile on your face. Just those two things, a half hour walk, and a relaxing soak in the tub, if done every day are likely to make any day about 10% better. And that can tip the scale from feeling OK to feeling Good.

Can’t go for a walk? That’s OK. walk over to the fridge, and pull out 2 20 oz pop or water bottles. Do some curls, hold your arms straight out while holding onto the bottles, press them, imagine they are a bar bell and do a full clean and jerk. Spend 20 or 30 minutes doing that, with 5 or 10 reps of each exercise you can think of, then put one bottle of watter back in the fridge, and sip down the other. Put the cap back on the bottle and go watch the news.

Ever wondered what you would do with a stress ball, but thought it was really stupid to pay $4 or $8 for one of those things at the sporting goods store? Take note of that 20 oz bottle in your hands. It fits your hand pretty well right? And with the lid on, you can squeze and release it OK right? And it’s not very heavy. Well, every time the news anchor says something you think is either really stupid, or really inappropriate, (I won’t tell you what network to watch, I know people who feel that way about newrly every anchor out there.) Squeeze the pop bottle. If you start breaking these, it might be a good idea to move up to a $4 stress ball, but it’s also likely that you’ll find another 20 oz bottle ready for use before tomorrow.

Now limit yourself to about half an hour of news, if that. I’m pretty sure that you will have worn the bottle out about then. So now it’s time to start visualizing and imagining, and feeling really Great.

I’m going to presume that you had a ‘normal’ childhood. Your folks didn’t drop $2500 on an Outward Bound experience for you when you were in 8th grade summer vacation. You may have gone to summer camp, but more likely didn’t. There was probably a ‘Reading Is Fundamental’ program at your local public library, but to be honest right now you don’t know where the closest library is, or what hours they are open. You probably spent Saturday morning with the box of cereal in front of the TV watching cartoons. Now if you are in your early 20’s, that may translate to you got home from school and curled up in front of Nickalodian, and told your friends about the Cartoon channel a few years later. Or perhaps you spent the last 3 years of HS watching the Family channel after school. I don’t know. We’ve gotten to the point however where most of us don’t associate having a good time with being outside. Playgrounds and parks? You mean the soccer field where all those kids were being hen pecked by their moms? Well, no I don’t. Oh, you mean that place where that woman got beat up and raped last year? Well, that’s sort of the place, if not the situation.

Entirely too many of us have no idea what a park is, or why we might want to go there. I happen to live in the ‘greater metro area of the Twin Cities.’ New York set asside a relatively large area of the city space as Central Park. That’s not quite what happened in the Twin Cities and surounding areas. It just happens that within the TC area, it’s almost impossible to go any significant distance in any direction without finding a place to go for a walk. We have walking and biking trails throughout the area and where we don’t have sidewalks, it’s because traffic is light enough that one can safely walk on the side of the road.

All that said, Most of us grew up in a climate of fear of strangers in public places. Or rather our parents had us come home right after school, and we didn’t get to go out and play sandlot baseball or neighborhood scale cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, etc. So for entirely too many of us, if it wasn’t part of an organized system, be it little league, boy scouts, girl scouts, or 4-H, Soccer, karate or the like, we ended up staying inside and watching the tube. Or experience of pleasure was all too often watching Wyle E Coyote run out of road when chasing the road runner.

Change that. Start by finding someone in your area who you can relate to, and can talk with. Say “Hey, I don’t really think there’s anything worth watching on TV tonight. Are you up for a walk down to the park and back?” If they are not, say “Ok, Thought I would ask, and was hoping for someone to walk with. Have a good evening.” If you would rather, check with your local city parks and recreation department. They may know of some organized events you can get involved with, if your more comfortable with that.

Strange as it may seem, Being involved with other people tends to be the simplest and fastest way to really feeling good about yourself, and about others. And that will leave you feeling good.

Now it’s possible, if unlikely, that there is someone reading this, saying ‘this is stupid.’ If you already feel good, or great regaring what you are doing, or where, that’s fine. Well, great actually. It’s not like this was written for you. But there are a lot of people these days who have no idea what ‘feeling good’ even feels like. Give yourself a chance. We are social animals. For some that means competitive, and ‘have to be Alpha.’ For others, it means that in order for us to have a healthy mental state, we have to spend some part of each day interacting with other humans. If you can do so in person, you will find that it operates on a whole lot more levels than reading blogs and stories online.

That said, if you have found some activity, online, in person, or on your own, that really makes you feel good, I want to know about it. Yes this can include anything from meditation, to fantastic sex. Leave a comment. I have enabled OpenID, and there are a lot of places that provide that authentication now. However I also accept people leaving comments annonymously. I do ask that you leave an e-mail address, but it’s not going to be posted, and I’m not going to check it before your comment is approved.  And yes, I do want to hear back from readers.

It’s not about sex, not about money. It’s about reality. First of all, I don’t care how beautiful you think a given woman is. Her beauty is not going to specifically help you, and may very well be a significant hinderance to you.

OK, First up, all women are first of all ‘People.’ Just like you are. Why is this important? Because now you can start considering how your behaviour may be affecting her.

We all worry about some factor of our appearance. Anything from ‘hat hair’ to our skin condition, to the color of our cars. We nearly all make some decision about what we wear today, on some personal concept of style. It may be flawed, guys on average tend to be more likely to be color blind and thus choose some combinations poorly, or ideal (rare indead) but it does say something about our view of ourselves. All women are doing some of the same things. In fact on average women are more concerned about their own appearance than guys are, but if you start with something that you probably do care about the appearance of, this will make more sense over all.

I’m going to presume that you have a bicycle, motorcycle or motor vehicle of some type. Whether you spend a lot of time on it’s appearance or not, you do notice the attention it gets. If someone seems to turn up their nose at your car, that probably means something to you. If someone seems to take no notice of your bike, then that means they don’t se themselves as someone who would be excited to go riding as well.

‘Normal’ levels of attention is something like a compliment about the color, or style. And an enthusiast may spend some time talking with you about the engine size, highway performance, who did the paint job and so on.

At the other end of the spectrum are the people you start to get concerned about. Perhaps all they can seem to talk about is the rims, or they are overly complementary about the paint job. Beyond that are the people who just sit and stare. You might even get concerned about the safety of the vehicle, because that person just doesn’t seem to be able to leave the subject alone.

That’s the end you might want to start thinking about, and deciding if you are emulating. First of all if a woman is in the group of people that is considered Beautiful by the public at large, she will appreciate the recognition, in moderation. Think about it. While more than 95% of the people on earth may not care about her one way or the other, the remaining 5% are probably all around her. It’s likely that she has heard nearly every pickup line known to man, and a few known only to women And one thing she knows is that people will try to compliment her in an effort to get indimate with her.

She doesn’t mind that people think she’s attractive, it’s the fact that altogether too many people think that the only thing she is happens to be ‘attractive.’ Being attractive is likely to bring a variety of benifits, but the constant attention eventually gets dull and boring. And after some period of time is even annoying. Yes she wants to know that you think she’s attractive, but that’s anything but the most important thing you can do. In most cases you being currious about what she is doing and why, will do more to improve your stature with her than having the sweetest car ro Bike, or having a Million in the bank, or being cut like Atlas.

Are there exceptions? Sure. There are women who won’t take a second look at a guy who doesn’t have a huge bulge in his pants when he is sitting back relaxed. There are women who won’t talk to a guy who doesn’t have a 6 figure job and an 11 figure checking account. And there are women who want nothing more than continuous complements from addoring fan boys.

If you want one of those women, you know what she’s looking for. Go get in that group. And good luck to you.

That is the exception. Women are not (usually) objects. They are not ‘things’ or ‘things to be possesed.’ (usually) The vast majorety of women are excited about something in their lives other than their appearance, and are far more interested in being recognized for that, than just about anything else in life. Women are ‘people’ And just like people everywhere, they are far more than they appear. If you don’t recognize and respond to that, she will treat you as nothing more than you appear to her as. Which is either annoying, or possibly dangerous. And in all likelyhood, isn’t very favorable to you.

Go, say Hello, introduce yourself, and ask what she likes about what she is doing. It’s likely to get you a lot further than any ‘pickup line’ you can come up with. Might you get ‘put down’ for the approach? Sure. So what. Now you knwo something more about her, and if all that is, happens to be that she’s not interested in you, That’s OK too. For that matter she may be more interested in what your response is than anything else. If it’s clear from her response that she’s not challenging you, (or you think it is) say ‘Well have fun with that.’ and move on. If it appears to be a challenge, and you feel up to it, go for it. If you spotted her doing knitting or needle point, and asked what she liked about what she was doing, and her response was something like “Stitching the names of those about to die. How do you spell your name?” an appropriate response might be ‘D-e-a-d–m-a-n–w-a-l-k-i-n-g, but I’m not planning on telling the guy operating the guilotine that the slot for the blade needs to be greased, until after I’ve been pardoned. Oh, and you’ve dropped a stitch there…’ <wink>. or ‘I’ve replaced all the gun powder with black pepper. I’ll escape while there sneezing.” and so on. If you include the ‘dropped a stitch’ line, then hopefully after she’s lightened up a bit, say “seriously, I don’t know the first thing about embroidery, (knitting, or whatever it is she is doing) but I do like to know ‘why’ people do things they find interesting. What makes this interesting to you?” In short you may not be someone who shares her specific interest, but you’re interested in her, in ways beyond her appearance.

If all a woman was interested in talking about with you was your car, and the conversation never got to other interesting subjects, you would loose interest before too long. Most women are pretty much the same way. Men and women all have diverse interests, and if we can share more than one interest, that makes each of us a bit more interesting.

And believe me, we all want interesting.

A couple of disclaimers. I happen to be oriented towards women, so there is a large portion of the human experience related to guys in relationships that I have little or no insight to give. There may be some carry over of thoughts on guys that may be of use to the gay community, but that is neither the community I am personally interested in, or the subject of this blog. I am also not a professional when it comes to studying people. I’m not going to quote studies, reports or anything along those lines to give evidence to my comments here. If you happen to study the topic as part of your profession and want to point out areas where I am so far wrng that it’s not funny, you have my blessing. It’s not like I’m going to loose any standing in the field of psychology or sociology. I recognize that I may state a lot of things that are wrong, and hope that people will politely correct me on those elements.

I am a guy. I’m not an expert on guys, but I tend to be somewhat thoughtful on a number of topics, and some people think that I explain topics that I find interesting very well. My primary interest is not in guys, but in talking to women (who are my primary interest) I’ve encountered a number of observations, statements and accusations that I think warent some commentary from me.

Guy’s generally want to do three things. First is survive. Second is get laid. Third is competition. Pretty much everything a guy does can be looked at as part of one of those three things. Work is doing something that you’re ‘good’ at in an effort to make it possible to survive. If you can have fun while doing that, great. And there are more than a few occupations that tend to get one laid, which works out well for guys doing that.

In general guys are not all that complex. In competition, we only rarely strive to be the best so that we get laid more often, it tends to be a secondary reward. Wining tends to increase our chances of survival. And we consider it play as well. In many competitions, the play aspect is more important than the ’survival’ aspect.

Some people think that the getting laid aspect is part of the surviving, or even the play/competing aspect. I won’t say that it doesn’t have a place, just that I don’t personally think that it is the critical aspect in general for guys.

A common misconception through the years is that ‘all guys think about is sex.’ I have three days in mind that clearly put that subject on ice. Fishing opener, Hunting opener, and Superbowl Sunday. Some people may say that the first two are part of ’survival’ but even they recognize that those guys who go out on those days to hunt and fish, are not doing so because the fish they bring in, or the deer meet (elk, moose, bear, etc.) is a critical and life sustaining part of their diet. Additionally both hunting and fishing have some interest in Trophies. That’s competition, not survival, and it’s about as far from getting laid as these things tend to get.

There are other events through the year that demonstrate that guys regularly put thoughts of sex further down their list of things to do than is often suggested. That said, it pretty much always is there, and under some circumstances can be brought up to the fore rather quickly.

Guys don’t tend to multi-task well. In the computer world there are two ways that programs can multi-task. The first is interrupt driven. Something interupts the processor in doing whatever it is doing, and takes over until something else interupts the processor. The second is scheduled, where each program is allocated a timeslot to do work within, and that’s ‘it.’ (As a note, implementation of the latter is often done using a clock that interupts the current process and tells the processor to go on to the next process or program.) The problem with Interupt driven multitasking is that you end up with tings left to get done that just don’t happen. The advantage of course is that responsiveness seems ‘better.’ Guy’s tend to be interupt driven when it comes to doing things, and capturing our attention. Some of us have gotten to the point where we can priorities those interupts, though even that is not always a very clean process.

Perhaps the most demeaning thing you can say in the presence of a guy is “All of the good guys are taken.” It’s just one of those statements that you can’t go right with amoung guys. No matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the guy sees himself as, if he’s single, you’ve just painted him with the ‘I will ignore you’ brush. He knows he’s already been judged and found lacking in your eyes. One joke I’ve read on the topic points out that single women think all the good ones are married, and married women ask ‘who got them” and the logical explanation is that there is no such thing as a ‘good’ guy.

The other serious flaw on the ‘All the good guys are taken.’ statement is that a guy hearing that statement wil all too often hear it as ‘I don’t expect to be treated well by a guy.’ And if you don’t expect to be treated well by a guy, then you must expect to be treated like dirt, so he will do just that. If you want to be treated well, you have to recognize that there are a lot of guys you haven’t met who very likely will treat you well, and you need to be more vocal about what you want and are looking for in a guy, especially when there are guys present.

Want to be treated like royalty? It’s basically a fairly simple 2 step process. When talking with a guy, ask him where he thinks the two of you will be in a year or two. Five or ten if you’ve been seeing each other for a while. This will set him up to be thinking of the two of you as a couple with some history. Then ask what sorts of things would work towards improving that relationship for the two of you. Be ready to think about what you see in him as someone you can see yourself loving a year or so down the line, and see what sorts things you can see up front in him that you know will get better with time. And part of that is going to be how much you love his generous nature to you. How you love how thoughtful he is towards you, etc. Along the way, letting him know what sorts of responses he can expect from that sort of treatment will make it significantly easier for him to figure out for himself.

While a guy may be looking at you only as a person to share the sack with tonight, he may also be looking at what you being a part of his life will mean for him and his future. Letting him know directly what you can do may be out of the question. However if you demonstrate to a guy an understanding of what he does and is, he is far more likely to see being with you as improving his survival state, and possibly increasing his opportunities to enjoy life.

Granted that does imply that you are looking for someone who offers what he is able to, and that you are looking for something more than a one night stand yourself. If you want a one night stand, make it clear up front that you’re after one thing only, and don’t confuse having a good time with him for thinking that perhaps you should change your mind. I’m not saying that he will think less of you or anything, just that you chose to be with him for a specific activity, and have let him know it. If you’re willing to entertain rethinking that later on, you have to let him know that something significant in your relationship with him has changed, and you like what you see so far.

There are a lot of guys out there who are not looking for a one night stand. Some because they are cynical, others because they see it as a matter of their faith. If you are spending nights clubbing, or the like, you probably won’t run into either. But on the off chance you do, recognize that spending time with him is going to be something other than sex, though it may be sexually charged. Personally I suspect that he will be releaving that charged state in private, but it’s probably not something he’s going to be willing to discuss.

Guy’s tend to ‘find’ women by appearance. So obviously appearance seems to be ‘importan’t in meeting guys right? Not really. In fact it can be one of the wost things you can do for your chances. It’s not a given, but most guys over the age of 20 have figured out that the ‘Hot Babe’ at the bar has more put-downs at her disposal than he has pickup lines. (And yes he does need to learn that the best ‘pickup line’ to use is ‘Hello, my name is [his name].’) If you go out of your way to show up as the perfect 10, most guys will look at you, and decide whether they want to go through the put downs or not. Since it’s neither ‘fun’ nor likely to improve his chances of ’survival,’ you know that most of the guys that will approach you are looking to get laid. They may be doing ot to show up their buddies, but at this point he doesn’t knwo enough about you to know if that’s likely to enhance his survival, and there’s always the chance that you are at the bar with your 250 lb linebacker boyfriend who will see if the guy who aproaches you works well as a tent peg, really discouraging him.

Most guys don’t know what sorts of signals women are sending to encourage him to approach her. Many will recognize that a signal has been sent, but not necessarily what the meaning is. And the vast majority have no idea what the sequence of steps from first sight to a passionate kiss are. For most both of these things are essentially a strange language that they don’t understand. It doesn’t seem to prevent them from getting along well enough with many women, but obviously it’s not a given that you will find such an experience enjoyable. Sorry.

Obviously this is rather short, and hardly encyclopedic. As much as the above is filled with generalizations, it should be viewed as just a small part of what makes a guy someone you may want to get to know. Every guy is different. If you don’t believe me, ask a dozen married women if their husband was swapped with some stranger, would they know the difference. Yes they would. And every woman is different. There are guys who seem to either ignore that, or appear to believe that it is wrong, but ask them which of any two women at the shopping mall, or wherever they may be, is of greater interest to them, and it is clear that he does think of each woman differently.

Hopefully this is of some help to someone. As I say, I love women in general, and are rather fond of a few, while lusting after several, some of which may be in the fond of group as well. I’ve come to the broad concern that I’m not sure who I may be ‘right’ for these days. I’ve pretty much gotten past the ‘they are all nuts’ phase, though that does still crop up from time to time. Whether I lust after a woman, are fond of her, or she’s in the ‘love em all’ group, I really wish the very best to all, including that you find someone who loves you as much as you love them.