| 29 jan 2002 randomness. so when i went to 18 mighty mountain warriors last thursday, i noticed this person sitting on the left side that looked really familiar. i realized that she looked like min jung, this online journalist who is semi-famous and stuff. but, of course, i wasn't sure, so i didn't do anything. but yesterday i e-mailed her and asked if she went to the thursday show, and bingo! it was her! ha ha. and then today, scarf girl blogs that it turns out that her friend daniel is good friends with one of mine, amy. in fact, both he and amy are planning on moving out here. waw! anyways... small fucking world out there. this month is going to put a huge drain on my savings. first, i have my first 4-digit credit card bill in a long time. i usually spend a decent amount of money at the beginning of the year. i don't know why, but it's a recurring trend. i guess during the holidays and for a short time afterwards, i am more lax about spending money on myself. and then, i have my iMac. and on top of that, i'm putting $5K in my roth IRA for 2001 and 2002. shit. i hate the way money flows so quickly out of my savings account. ok. i guess it's time for a history lesson here. some random girl named betsie e-mailed me last night asking how i got my girlfriends when i'm such an obvious wallflower. and seeing as how i don't have anything else to talk about today, i might as well delve a bit into my past. so the whole thing with kristie started when we lived in the same freshman dorm, gavilan. she was by far the most beautiful girl i had ever seen, so i just fixated on her after some initial fascinations with the other girls in my dorm passed. there was this distinct memory early on when jack, jay, ky, and i were having pizza in downtown palo alto, and we were talking about girls that we had seen and thought were hot. i mentioned kristie's name, and to my dismay, i got a unanimous "no fucking way!" from the guys who had seen her. in their words, she was "untouchable." well, the gist is, e-mail helped me a lot. we started writing each other, and that, coupled with hanging out at parties (especially the halloween party, where kristie was escaping this upper class stalker fratboy by hanging out with me and ken who were dj-ing the party), brought us closer. we were both really quirky and just plain weird sometimes, so i think that made our bond even stronger. but e-mail was the key. we were able to tell each other rather difficult and emotional stories that would have been tough to handle in face-to-face conversations. so there you go. kristie was the coup of my life, and because of that, i wonder how it is that i have any good karma left for the rest of my existence. there was another girl, grace, who was a brief fling the summer of 94. we actually had a history back in dallas, because back when cooties existed and the war between boys and girls was waged, we dudes chased a bunch of girls into a room at some chinese activities center. and grace scratched the fuck out of my hand. and then, later on, we met again at some chinese summer camp. she hooked up with my roommate patrick. i always thought she was pretty hot, too. she was kind of famous in the dallas chinese community for being pretty and tall and a good violinist. but anyways, i found out her e-mail address from a mutual friend, and i just blitzed her randomly one day, and said, "hey! you're the girl who scratched up my hand!" and when both of us went home for the summer, we watched _reality bites_ one night. and that was the start of a summer where we must have watched like 50 movies together. the story goes that she liked me right after that first movie, and she wanted to hook up long before i took the plunge and gave her that first kiss. in fact, we had sort of a "talk" over e-mail when she confessed her feelings to me. that very night must have been stressful for her, because we met up, and i was kind of nonchalant about it. but of course, i wanted to hook up, too, (well, because she was HOT), and we had this sexual tension thing going on where i could hug her from behind and out cheeks would kiss. let's see... k2. yup. you can probably guess that e-mail had something to do with it as well. but this one kind of makes me blush because i just randomly e-mailed her after seeing her perform in some asian american frosh skit. she was kind of cold and bitchy-looking. and it really turned me on. i don't know. i think that deep down i like nice girls (i mean, who doesn't?) but even deeper down i have a strange thing about trying to go for challenging girls, too. but what you don't know is that i e-mailed her ANONYMOUSLY. remember anon.penet.fi? the service that got closed down where you could anonymously e-mail people? yup. i e-mailed her basically one line... something to the gist of "i wonder if you're approachable." and luckily for me, she didn't think i was a psycho or anything, so she replied back, and, when i responded, i dropped just enough hints about for her to figure out who i was. and then i was all in the clear. we e-mailed for about a month maybe? until we finally met up at the footsteps of meyer library, where i proceeded to teach her how to smoke cigarettes. i am amazed at my relationship with k2, because our four years together was basically started by a whimsical e-mail that i fired off just because i came back from taiko practice all tired and wanted to do something crazy. well, that's enough history for now. but i guess you can see that i'm sort of a wuss. yes, i've gone out with some amazing women, but it has just as much as their willingness to respond to my e-mail prods as my ability to draw them in. my girlfriends all share a common attribute, and that's the fact that all of them like to write and share pieces of themselves over a medium such as e-mail. it's an expressive quality that i adore, and i'd like to think that anybody i go out with in the future is also a good writer. because frankly, while conversations are the best primary way to communicate, being able to put your words into a text format and come across eloquently and interestingly is a trait that i both respect and crave. i love digitally loquacious girls. and while this has translated to my fascination with online journalists, i still think that people who write good e-mails are much more preferable than those who write good blogs or IM messages. but anyways, it's all about how to make that first contact and make a good first impression. when it comes to something personal yet distanced like e-mail, i think i'm pretty good at it. and once i establish a good rapport with someone, i don't have any insecurities about being able to draw them in and close the deal. but that first step is a fucking doozy. the problem for me is making that first step when it has to be out there in the open. i still am not convinced that just walking up to a girl and making smalltalk is a viable thing, because it just seems so sketch sometimes. i mean, doesn't the girl know that you're making a move? isn't it fucking obvious? i hate the clubbing scene where it seems that any advance is based on the pretense of nookie cravings. it cheapens the whole deal. so that's why i balk at it, and that's why i prefer more innocuous and low-key approaches. as much as it can hurt, i still prefer to be friends first. and i wonder if that'll be my undoing from now on because something in my head is nagging me that it's time to evolve from my old ways of operating. i'm just not sure if i'll be able to change. change is a bitch sometimes. my theory is that the older people get, the less willing they are to take a chance (ugh, i hate that term because it always reminds me of the abba song and the subsequent erasure cover) on random contacts. what's more, i think that people are also less willing to make new friends... i mean, i can understand... if you have a great circle of friends always, why bother taking the time and starting over with someone new? that's a lot of work! and to me, that is not a good sign. because i have always thrived in my past on people who were open to starting things based on something as silly as a 3-line e-mail. hm. yeah. bad news. i know *i* certainly still have that willingness, but i just think that most people our age and above are either not as trusting, or they just don't have the time to deal with it. it sucks. comments! |