Metablog

I got a message from an OKCupid user today, one I hadn’t contacted. It’s nice to get something out of the blue like this:

Hello dear, how are you doing today, hope great, let me introduce myself, my name is merry william , 29 years female from chicago. I searched your profile, read it and I was amazed with the content of your words…

Doesn’t she sound intelligent?

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This post is extremely boring. You were warned.

This is the second night in two weeks that I didn’t sleep at all because of restlessness. I didn’t take my sleeping pills either time, but I’m still concerned. The first time, I was staying up programming, and felt progressively worse the closer it got to 7 AM. I decided I had to sleep, and skipped work. Last night, I was once again programming (though I spent a lot of that time reading the documentation on OpenGL and not actually writing code), but this time I didn’t feel quite as tired by the time 7 AM came rolling around. I think it’s because I had been getting consistently good sleep for several days, which wasn’t the case the first time. I took my meds around 6:30 AM so that my stimulant bupropion wouldn’t wear off and leave me ready to fall asleep standing up, and I’ve had plenty of caffeine today. I feel quite sleepy, and not extremely sharp, but otherwise fine.

I worry that the meds are making me sleep longer than I need, like 9 hours instead of 7.5, and so I’m actually getting ahead on sleep and so not able to fall asleep in any reasonable time-frame. After tonight (in which I plan to sleep 10 hours) I think I’ll try limiting myself to 7.5 for a while. And getting to bed at a more consistent time, of course. I’ve been pretty bad about that, but then it’s been a long time since I’ve had this much energy to control. I hope the anxiety wears off. Maybe it will with consistent sleep for a couple weeks. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had consistent sleep for two solid weeks.

Online dating has been frustrating for me. I’ve been on OKCupid since last August, ten months ago, and I’ve only gotten two dates out of it. I’ve sent out dozens of messages, and I’ve only gotten responses to maybe 20%. Some of the people with the most promising profiles turned out not to be interested. And I have received only four messages from people I didn’t contact first. So it hasn’t been completely bare, but don’t people typically have more activity than that? Even when I haven’t been doing anything on the site, I regularly log in so that they can see that I’m still active. I have some good, objective reasons to believe that my profile doesn’t have anything seriously wrong with it, though of course there’s always room for improvement.

I wonder if part of my problem is that people just tend to be really picky. I think that the people I’d be interested in would be especially picky. Maybe I’m underestimating how picky most other people are, and so my expectations for success are too high. (Short-term success, for me, would be ongoing conversations with other interesting users leading to around a date per month on average.) Do I need to be less picky to get there? Would I have a much better chance of finding a long-term partner if I were less picky about first dates?

And I’m pretty sure that part of my problem is that I find it hard to get a good idea about someone, to the point where I can actually feel attracted to them, online. On the two dates I’ve actually had, it just ended up feeling weird and flat. I imagine this is unavoidable. You just have to spend time with someone before those feelings can start, and e-mail conversation, especially through a dating site, is a slow, slow process. And then, how long do you need to try to make conversation before you ask someone on a date? Would I have better luck if I sent out first e-mails suggesting a date (along with the usual greeting and conversation starter), instead of e-mails just trying to get a conversation going?

It takes so much energy, and it’s discouraging when you feel like the women don’t have to put as much energy in. I’ve heard a lot of success stories, or at least “success-getting-dates” stories. I’m not one of them.

Hmm. I didn’t mean for my three posts a week to all be on weekends.

I found a medication combination that works a little better for me–I had tried Rozerem for my sleep, but it did really weird things to me. But after getting on Wellbutrin, I thought I might be ready to try Rozerem again, and lo and behold, it’s working for me now. One side effect of all these pills is an utter lack of appetite. I went from a BMI of 25.3 to one of 24.0 on the first SSRIs, and I’m probably going to go down even more on the Wellbutrin. And even when I do eat, the food doesn’t taste as good. But I can deal with that.

Some progress on my piano DDR thing. I’m thinking of calling it Play Play. I actually have the recording part and the scoring algorithm done. The holdup now is that I need a piano roll control so I can record and edit songs to play with it, and so I can display the song while you’re playing it. After I get that finished, (or maybe before,) I’ll try to add some stuff to automatically let you practice different sections of a song.

I am not an introvert. I just reclassified myself today. (Well, back in March when I wrote this, anyway.) I had always thought that being uncomfortable around people, and being socially pretty reclusive, meant that I was introverted. But after reading this WaPo article, (via Overcoming Bias,) I realized that those aren’t really the core traits of introversion as commonly conceived. Introversion, according to Mary Carpenter, means that “[you] don’t reveal [yourself] by working through problems out loud or by talking much about how [you] think or feel.” And that’s pretty much the opposite of me.

In fact, my non-introversion goes farther than that. Why, I’m positively extroverted, considering that I published a diary online for over a year (no longer available), and that I regularly reveal rather intimate things about myself to total strangers in the internet public, or to people IRL that I’m not especially close with.

I could be described as socially isolated or interpersonally hostile, but not introverted, not as a character trait. I do get introverted when I’m around strangers, but that doesn’t mean much. Social anxiety, maybe.

It’s been two months since my last post. The post before that was a few days earlier, and the post before that two months earlier. I kept a diary for maybe three or four years before I switched to this blog, and I noticed that I tended to have four or so months of pretty consistent posting followed by a few months with almost nothing. Cyclical. Well, I guess we’ll see if the cycle has reached its bloggy springtime again, or if I won’t feel up to posting for another long time.

Here’s what I’ve been up to: Continue reading »