Not Sinking the Ship

(a.k.a. Viewing the Entrepreneurial)

Heather once told me “all I wanted to ever be was something special.” Well, all I ever wanted to be was someone doing something meaningful. Powerful to an extent, but meaningful.

I finally found a job that allows me to do that. It’s chasing the entrepreneurial dream, and it’s one of the most interesting experiences of my life. It kinda sucks to know that every decision I push for could be the End of Company — but it also makes me follow my gut feelings and dreams. It means that I need to push it harder, faster, better than ever before. And while I talk about my successes with glowing eyes… I also know that some of them were selfish, bad choices which I only realized in retrospect.

For example, I made my boss spend $120 on business cards. In the scheme of things, $120 isn’t bad — but in the larger version, $120 is pretty high, considering that we can’t even buy a $700 sound system that we’ll use in the future. This makes things perpetually harder for us, as there isn’t a good solution for this –

I’m supposed to have a refined eye for the conservative, the necessary. Without it, I’m leading the company into a trail of fire from which there is no return. The Abyss calls.  Well, maybe not an abyss per se.

But either way, I need to NOT SINK THE BUSINESS. As that’d be totally not hot, as Paris Hilton would say.

It’s all for now.

I’m a Sex Fiend.

This is by far the hardest post I’ve had to write in a long time. This is my proverbial outing: I am a man, and I am a sex fiend. I wouldn’t say that I’m a nymphomaniac — I don’t NEED sex. But I crave sex, and have been ashamed of it for longer than I can remember.
I came to this revelation a few days ago, and I’ve been trying to figure out what it really means. Masturbating three times a day if given the chance, indulging in fantasties of mind control, mature women, and soft domination.

And the shame… I’d look away from a story after I had release. Avert my eyes from pornography because I was “guilty” of wanting it. In my mind I was guilty of being immoral — since I had grew up with the belief that men are sexual predators, and that as a man, I will force my “unwanted needs” on unsuspecting women.

Over the years, this programming has manifested itself in an interesting way. It has convinced me that I need to be effiminate because women won’t be offended with that mentality. That heroes from movies such as The Princess Bride were the models that I was supposed to follow. And that I needed to be moral in all ways.

A few years ago, I realized that I projected that “morality” onto females. That if I wanted a girl, that I’d be taking advantage of her. And so my repression grew, and my shame increased accordingly.

To come out of that shell, I needed to admit to myself that I am a sexual creature. And I needed to admit that I crave females. I would stare at ladies and pretend that my ogling them wasn’t sexual, but rather done out of boredom.

I am a sexual man. I can and will not tolerate people telling me that I am immoral for who I am. Because repressing myself has ripped my insides out, and changing into the new person that I wish to be has cost me most of my friends.

But it’s who I need to be. The old must die, the new must reign. I don’t know if I can be that new person completely, and I don’t know who I will end up being. But I will integrate myself into being. The new must reign.

I Won’t Be Afraid of Fear…

I can’t say that I’ve had a lot of dreams. I’ve had the occasional bout struggling with the illusion of grandeur; everyone has. But I do remain hopeful at the future, believing that there can and will be a better future for me at some point along the road.

I think I found the right road. It’s a path which can make me a lot of money, and help people at the same time. AND help myself. It’s a trifecta. There’re two obvious pitfalls, though.

The first is that I need to learn coding for websites. From the bottom up. I’ve not coded…. ever. And I need to learn HTML 1.0, javascript, java, and perhaps CSS. And then most likely PHP. And I’ll be doing this on my own dime, on my own time.

The second is that I need to trust that I’ll get paid. I very well might not, and might be compensated unfairly. In essence, I’m trusting that my boss will be “cool” and give me adequate, if not above-adequate, compensation for my time and effort.

My parents believe that I’ll be left lackluster — that with this process that I’ll fall in with my brother, lacking a job and left searching. And yet I can see that my boss has great things planned — if he can just reach the tipping point and make things fall in his favor.

Risk and courage lie in the same boat. To pursue what you believe will work out in your favor, risking it all is necessary. I just wish that I wasn’t so damn pressured about it.

I’m reminded of Cobain — at the very height of his recording career, he wrote the worst and greatest B-Side I’ve ever heard — Moist Vagina. The lyrics are simplistic; “she had a moist vagina, I particularly enjoy the circumference. From the sucking walls of her anus… I prefer her to any other.” the music itself is incredibly muddled, sloppily delivered. But the song carries weight as it shows that pressure to perform carries weight, and that not everybody can carry it. But if you can, if you can stick through it, you may be more than you believe you are.

So who am I?

Apologies, Apologies.

Have you ever met someone who apologized incessantly? A guy or a girl who was unable to stop apologizing. I used to be one of those people.

The reason why I continued to apologize was that I needed acceptance and validation. I needed the validation to know that my ideas were alright, and I needed to be continually built up to know that what I was doing, who I was, was acceptable to people.

So, why did I stop supplicating? It’s because I realized that continual apologizing wasn’t hot. Since I completely lacked confidence, people became turned off to being the source to either my “good vibe” or “bad vibe.” And in most circumstances, people would get really pissed off with that person, incredibly quickly.

I realized that I usually apologized after comments that I perceived people would take badly, and that usually those comments were actually my real desires. In actuality, I was I apologizing on two fronts: first, I was apologizing for what I wanted, and second, I was apologizing for external events that I did nothing wrong in. (This is since the first tendency of mine would be to apologize after EVERYTHING.)

So, how did I do it? Very, very consciously. It’s like pleasure addiction, in that both are actually removed the same way. To quote coyoteugly, “Your subconscious will soon realize whose boss. Now, why did I ask you to keep a pen and piece of paper? Here’s why: The first few weeks WILL be difficult, and unless you’re Mr. Self-torture you’ll fall down a few times. This is normal. But: any time you do slip up and [apologize unnecessarily], you must record the time and date of your [apology] right after it occurred. So simply write it on the sheet of paper. The next time it happens, do the same thing – under the previous entry. By doing this you can keep track of your progress. If you really want to get laid, and unless you’re a total goof, you should find that as time goes on, the entries become less and less frequent. Continue your everyday life as normal. Sometimes all you’ll be able to think of is giving in. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO RESIST THE TEMPTATION.”

(Yes, this process works for both pleasure addiction and being an apologizing, humble fool. It was also taken from Coyoteugly’s post archived at ASFGold)

Resist the temptation to fall back into your apologizing ways, and move forwards, always.

Attached are two posts by SnowPatrol, which gave me Ah-HA! moments. They are on Acceptance and Social Value (i.e., The Difference Between You and Them).

Reproduced with permission: SnowPatrol – Acceptance and Social Value

“Guys Just Need To Be Natural…”

Alright, this post is for the ladies.

I was riding the subway today and some girls were talking about men. You know the chat — “I wish that guys would just be themselves, that they’d be natural around me.” The whole “genuine” chat.

So I’m just going to generalize for a bit here, based on my own thoughts and experiences. I’m sorry for any offense this might cause, but it’s for the best. Really.

1. Guys are horny. We like sex as much as girls do, but the difference is that we’re not worried about being labeled as “sluts” as girls are. Sure, guys are sluts, but we don’t really worry about the title, because our friends think it’s healthy and good  to get laid. So when we try for sex, it’s as a mutually-pleasing expedition into the female form, and not because we think “it’d seem cool if I banged her.” There’s always more to it.

2. Guys don’t appreciate shittests. You’ve heard it before, and it’s worth reiterating: don’t ask cosmo questions. Don’t try to trap us with our words. It’s not appreciated, and just because you’re looking for a flaw doesn’t mean that there’s one there. I had a girl ask me what I thought my relationship with her should be like from my perspective.  I told her that I’d like an emotionally and sexually fufilling relationship. She then became incredibly offended that I didn’t “take her feelings into account” when I told her what I thought my relationship with her should be.

Classic shittest. Don’t do it, because if you do it enough, I WILL WALK AWAY.

3. I don’t think before I speak. I don’t think most guys do. Sure, we’re naturally semi-sauve, but breaking our balls over every misspeech is not a way to creating a good relationship. So, if you’re a girl and you begin using microspeech criticism, you’re making the relationship a whole lot worse. As Judd Apatow wrote, such criticism creates an “unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond. Except that it’s without the pithy dialogue, and instead of 22 minutes, it lasts forever.”

4. Believe that your guy’s doing the best he can. Girls, if you don’t, you can walk, but most guys I know do their damnedest to make things work well. And even if he’s 20 minutes late to the show, don’t you think that it shows that he cares enough to listen to you yelling at him just so that he can see you, you most likely have a keeper.

Guys, if you have other things you  think should be on this list, feel free to add in the comments.