Get a Life

Do you all remember the 1990 television series “Get a Life”? It stared Chris Elliot, who played a 30 year old paper boy (who still lived with his parents). For the rest of this post I would like you to keep this image in mind.

This morning I went to coffee with Geek-Boy who is finally willing to talk about his relationship with Shannon. It is a complete shock to me but they are still dating. Shannon is also dating Nose Guy. Now I would rather die a lonely old maid than date either one of them, but that is just me. In fact, I would consider dating them to be a form of self-torture. However, now that the competition is on to win Shannon's heart between Geek-Boy and Nose guy, GB has started working out. To be honest, GB is not bad looking just really weird. From a distance a woman would think he is tall, dark and handsome. The Competition: Nose guy has a very muscled body, actually it is really silly, and he can’t lower his arms to his sides because his muscles get in the way. Let me mention this again, I think he looks ridiculous but I guess some people like muscle bound short men.

Okay the point is GB is exercising a lot, and has lost weight. Now in the GB spirit he has not bought new jeans and his old jeans are too big. He is holding them up with a belt and the waist is gathering awkwardly. Of course being the wonderfully observant and polite person that I am, I complimented GB on his apparent weight loss. He graciously accepted the compliment and proceeded to complain about maintaining weight loss when he spent the majority of the day behind a desk. He joked that he should quit engineering (note I am not an engineer) and become a paper boy. I died! I just could not get the image of Chris Elliot out of my head. Really GB, Get a Life!

Class Time

It is class time. I am currently without a class. I have taken ballet, salsa, Spanish and sailing classes since moving to the DC area. Yes, I am a class junkie. However, I am now in need of a class. I would like to take Country Western Swing classes, but I have not located a class that interests me. I would also like to take piano lessons but I need to purchase a piano first, and I am low on expendable funds at the moment, so no piano. I guess it is really a toss up between Spanish classes (again), painting and Hip-Hop. Spanish classes because I feel bad that I am not bilingual in this multicultural city. Painting because I don’t know how, and I have always wanted to learn. I look at painting like most people look at mathematics; It is hard, and beyond the ability of normal people to do (the painting not the math). I am also scared of trying to paint and failing miserably. I guess that it is going to be painting. I try to embrace things I am afraid of, and failure at painting seems to be one of them. However, Hip-Hop sounds like fun and it involves exercise which I always need. Any suggestions for my next class? No glass blowing I am way to afraid of it to embrace!

Knights in Shinning Armor

Today I am willing to write a blog about the few men that I work with who are great. This weekend I had two friends in town which was a logistics nightmare. It started with the arrival; which was kindly coordinated by the psychologist and the lawyer to be within an hour of one another. However the psychologist was flying into Dulles and the lawyer was flying into BWI. To increase the level of difficulty of this problem I have a roadster, with NO back seat, not even a pretend backseat. However two men here rushed to my aide. Hugh and I did a car swap for most of the weekend. Albeit he was able to drive my super cool car and I had his Hondo Civic, but we all fit in his car. The Bavarian supplied airport transportation and who says there are no more knights in shinning armor?

Thinking too hard

While I was reading one of my favorite bloggers recently I was amused to learn how many times a day she claimed to think about sex. Initially, I thought; “Yeah right, she is just being entertaining. Women do not think about sex all that often.” However it occurred to me that I think about sex that often in a work day. So being the queen of the geeks I started analyzing my sexually thoughts.

How often do I think about sex?

What time of day are most of my sexual thoughts?

I noticed that most of my s. thoughts were a result of a visual trigger. In fact, the ones that occur at work are almost always triggered by the 2% of the men around here that are hot. Shocking I know, but in my building of 250 people there are 5 hot men. These men are “thought worthy”. Fortunately for me I get to see at least one of them a day, and sometimes even more often. Hold on, I need to take a few calming breaths. Okay back to being a geek. Let’s assume I am an average female, and that the frequency and stimuli of my s. thoughts are normal. Now let’s also assume that a man thinks about sex A LOT more than a woman does. I am not going to put an upper bound on how much more frequent but a lower bound of at least double. Assuming that these thoughts are result of visual stimuli, the real question is who are the men looking at? This is strictly a numbers game, if only 2% of women are “thought worthy” and the work force here is comprised of 95% men, then the available stimuli is only .1%. (Did I do the math right? Math is hard.) Does that mean in my building there is at most one woman that is thought worthy? So perhaps if I was to stake out Pixie’s office or Ms. Chung’s I would notice all 250 men in the building eventually walk by. Perhaps men do not seek out visual stimuli. Or just perhaps I am thinking about this way too hard.

General happenings at work

The ten-years-old intern is leaving this week.  Well he is not 10 but he looks
like he is 10, he actually just turned 16.  He is an amazing 16 years old.  
I remember when I was 16 I had a really hard time thinking about anything
but boys (not much has changed).  I was not responsible and I did not know
what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  I definitely did not think
I would be doing this. The ten yrs old knows exactly what he wants to do
with the rest of his life, to the point he is doing an internship.  He
is very motivated, intelligent and extremely mature for his age.   
However I had a really fun time as a teen-ager, and most of my fun
involved being totally irresponsible.  I can’t shake the feeling that
he is missing something by not be irresponsible and carefree.
At the very least he might be missing some key socialization with other teenagers.
Hum I wonder if the F and Gs around here knew what they wanted to do with the
rest of their lives at 16.  Hey I might be on to something, I think I am going
to take a survey (and post the results if they are amusing).

On the killing time side; I just took a gender test online and
it said I was 89% male!  Not the 60/40 split or even 70/30, I am 89% male.
For the record I am female.  I don’t think I am an urban legend that was born
male and my parents really wanting a girl, so they performed a surgery at birth. 
I have all the appropriate female body parts too.  
I immediately emailed Ellen with the news and she said
(and I quote) “The career forces you, you don't have a choice. It's a matter
of survival.”  

The sad thing is I totally agree with her, it is the career that forces you to be a more stereotypical male. It is bad enough that I can’t wear skirts but now my attitude and thought process is male too! Geez.

Pure Gold

Eureka I have found it! It is the first to do list for the F and Gs. Now I know that this is a list for single men, but most of the men around here are single. And it is not the actual list that they need it is the reasoning behind the list. Well, they need the list too. I am going to forward the article to all the F and Gs around here that need it and might actually take the advice to heart. Note I will not be sending it to Geek-Boy (who lives with his parents), even though he needs it more than the others. I will post the thankful replies as they come in, hum I wonder who is going to ignore my sage advice.

Red Neck Woman

I recently heard a country music song called Redneck Woman by Gretchen Wilson; here is a sample of the lyrics,

Well, I ain't never been the Barbie doll type
No, I can't swig that sweet Champagne, I'd rather drink beer all night
In a tavern or in a honky tonk or on a four-wheel drive tailgate
I've got posters on my wall of Skynyrd, Kid and Strait
Some people look down on me, but I don't give a rip
I'll stand barefooted in my own front yard with a baby on my hip
'cause I'm a redneck woman
I ain't no high class broad
I'm just a product of my raising
I say, 'hey ya'll' and 'yee-haw'
And I keep my Christmas lights on
On my front porch all year long
And I know all the words to every Charlie Daniels song
So here's to all my sisters out there keeping it country
Let me get a big 'hell yeah' from the redneck girls like me, hell yeah
Victoria's Secret, well their stuff's real nice
But I can buy the same damn thing on a Wal-Mart shelf half price
And still look sexy, just as sexy as those models on TV
I don't need no designer tag to make my man want me
Well, you might think I'm trashy, a little too hardcore
But in my neck of the woods I'm just the girl next door

I am in a red neck woman kind of mood. I am sick of working with the F & Gs, and I am sick of being an intellectual (which according to Courtney I am). I am also getting a little overwhelmed by all the posturing by people in the DC area. Saturday night as I was waiting for Jean-Marc at Tryst, and I was casually flirted with by a relatively attractive man. However this guy made the obnoxious point of letting me know that he was a foreign journalist recently returned from Afghanistan, which is cool but not the in your face kind of cool that he was flaunting. I mean really this is DC, we all have cool jobs. In fact according to USA today

I have the most prestigious job out there, and frankly I am sick of it! I am going red neck, without the baby on the hip! Are there any places in DC this newly self appointed red neck can hang out?

You are so not funny!

Oh the freaks and geeks around here are so funny! Last week the email system crashed. The motherboard to our local server crashed, and we were without email and such for most of the week. The tech support could not fix the problem so we connected through the main facility server instead of our local server. I know a lot to boring details; however I was very busy last week and kindly asked my BAW to connect me to the server. Now he did connect me, but he totally fcuked it up too! He intentionally misspelled my name and I have been sending out emails with my name misspelled on them for a week. I know reading this you might think it is funny, and yeah it is kind of funny. I guess that is why M. is my BAW and not a freak or a geek.

Dinner and Dancing

Initially I signed up for Salsa dance lessons with Hugh, a very nice and almost normal co-worker. I imagine he did not want it to seem like a “date” so he inquired about asking other co-workers to join us. Now here in the land of freaks and geeks there are very few people that I am willing to spend extra time with, but I am one that never fails at a task and assigned the task of recruiting additional people, I did. I recruited the Bavarian and Night Man to join us, and they are relatively normal. However the men around here are not as sensitive to the nuisances of the freaks and geeks as I am and word got out. We now have 5 freaks and geeks going to Salsa class, with more on the way. On the surface this does not seem all that bad, right? Wrong! The reason I do not do things with the F and Gs is that it is never just Salsa, white water rafting or happy hours, it is so much more. Today after Salsa last night, they all want to practice with me. Hop-hop does not even ask if I will he just demands that I practice with him and eat dinner before or after too. Nose-guy is the same, insisting I help him practice. I already have practice sessions with Hugh, the Bavarian and Night man scheduled. Diplomatically I am attempting to have us all practice together, and then I am not giving any one of them special treatment. So far the diplomatic approach is failing. On the bright side if there are any women out there interested in taking Salsa dance lessons but don't because there were no male partners in the class, that is changing in the DC area, and a few of the possible attendees are great guys (a.k.a. Jean-Marc).

Where are all the women?

I have heard a crazy statistic since coming to the DC area, apparently the number of available single women out number the number of single available men 3 to 1. I was unable to confirm this statistic, but for the moment let’s assume it might be true. Note: This is statistic does not hold at my workplace, mainly because the sheer number of men out number the women, 25 to 1, regardless if you are single or not. So here is my dilemma, I have very few female friends in the DC area. In fact I have two, Courtney who is leaving the country for the next month and Jeanne who works and travels more than I do. I do have many male co-workers and a few male friends, but I would like more female friends. I recently read an article where the author stated

“Men benefit more from cross-sex friendship than women

There are proven--and apparent--distinct differences between female friendship and male friendship. Women spend the majority of their time together discussing their thoughts and feelings, while men tend to be far more group-oriented. Males gather to play sports or travel or talk stock quotes; rarely do they share feelings or personal reflections. This may explain why they seem to get far more out of cross-sex friendship than their female counterparts.

In Sapadin's study, men rated cross-sex friendships as being much higher in overall quality, enjoyment and nurturance than their same-sex friendships. What they reported liking most was talking and relating to women--something they can't do with their buddies. Meanwhile, women rated their same-sex friendships higher on all these counts. They expect more emotional rewards from friendship than men do, explains Sapadin, so they're easily disappointed when they don't receive them. "Women confide in women," notes blieszner. "Men confide in women."”

Unfortunately I have found this to be true. Where are all these fabulous single women in the DC area? Or should I count myself lucky that I am surrounded by so many men?