Why I have problems with relationships and women in general

The point of this blog is a bit of catharsis on my part. As I have more or less stated in my little "About me" thing in the right column, I have Attention Deficit Disorder. It is very real and it is very disabling, if not treated properly. I've only treated it on an as-needed basis going through school, and also seeing councilors when I considered taking my life. One thing I have noticed, though, is how extreme my moods and emotional states can be (are those synonymous? If so, I apologize for the redundancy). I can be high as a kite in the morning, and by noon, be depressed enough to plot my suicide. I've had many suicide fantasies and I often wonder if I'm actually partially insane.

One area where I am affected is how I interact with women. I bring this up because it's the area that depresses me the most.

Since middle school, I've longed for some girl or other, and I've always been too afraid to make an effort to talk to the girl in question. The first crush was sometime in middle school. Nothing came of it and I eventually just got over the failure of overcoming my own insecurities.

The next crush I had was in high school, and this girl was much more significant in that she actually noticed me and flirted with me. This girl was actually someone I noticed in church; my mom and I sat near the front and right half of the church because we liked the right entrance. This girl sang in the choir, and when I first noticed her looking my way, smiling, and giggling with the girl to her side, I would look behind me, and point to my chest to see if she was flirting with me. And indeed, she was, and I flirted back. My purpose in going to church was just because mom made me, but now it was to see this girl. Unfortunately, having your mom there with you doesn't really raise your confidence, and when the guy passing out those weekly newsletter things when you leave remembers you from T-ball days and from being a friend of his son, it's damn near impossible to get that nerve. Once I almost sat next to this girl in the pew, but my mom somehow got between us and I never got a chance to say hi. Eventually the girl gave up on me and stopped flirting. That left a cold, empty feeling in me.

The first girl I ever spoke to was Kendall Nathan in high school. I thought she was kind of dorky, but she was definitely cute and I actually somehow got the gumption to show interest in her. That means, I communicated my interest by way of speaking. She never told me flat out that she wasn't interested, but she never went along with my interest, either. I don't mean to make a villain of her, but I don't know how else to phrase this: she basically led me on until I became creepy. Naturally, we never hooked up.

There was an interesting episode in high school when some girl by the name of Sarah S. was sort of stalking me. Me being the weird kid who was afraid of girls, I was extremely flattered by this and felt like I could walk on clouds. It started when there was a discarded world map on our front lawn. It was a thick, cardboard poster that hangs by a string on a hook, like the elaborate picture frames families keep on the wall above the staircase. Anyways, my brother notices it, comes back to me and tells me I need to see it. Upon closer inspection, written in marker is a phrase like "Mike--I give you the WORLD, Love, Sarah S." and a little heart around Chicago with the words "My heart is here for you". Over the next couple weeks or so, I got a baby's crib mattress and then a coffee table, both of which had equally sentimental things written on them. I called multiple Sarahs from my school, trying to figure out who this was. The only one I didn't investigate was this girl Sarah Stolarski, who was a year under me. I was a little too scared to talk to her because I had no network connections to her (none of my friends knew her or her friends). So nothing came of that.

I managed to finish high school with not one date, girlfriend, or attended school dance. I still remember my dad encouraging me to go to the senior prom. I can only wonder how he felt when the dance came and went and I went along my introverted life as usual. Oh, and I'm sure my lack of experience and isolation were key to my multiple suicide attempts in high school.

College wasn't so hot, either. There was another girl I flirted with in between classes, but I turned her off quick when I tried to talk to her a second time. The gist of it was I had some morning class at, I think 9am, and she had a class in the same room at 10am. I eventually said hi, had a nice first chat with her, and went on my way. I don't know how I screwed it up, but I did. I think I somehow revealed that I had the dating/relationship experience of a school boy in an all-boys school. There was some other girl with whom I managed to have a nice conversation, but so much nothing came of it that I considered not even mentioning it. But I mentioned it for the sake of completeness.

After two years, I transferred to the University of Illinois at Chicago and moved into the city, with my landlord being an old friend of my dad's. He insisted an apartment just off campus would be better than sharing a dorm because he said I needed to be alone. Now, I understand many people would've opted for their own room than sharing one with a dorm mate in college, but the experience is a good one all the same, and I was denied it. The big problem with UIC is that the only way to make friends is if you stay in the dorms. The music dept. had its own network, but unless you were a lame clone, you had no hope. I mean, half the guys in the choir discussed girly movies and TV shows (I mean, what guy likes Meg Ryan movies and "Grey's Anatomy"?). Anyways, I remember one girl who was super-cute, and I spooked her because I was so ridiculously awkward when I said "Um...I think you're cute....and, um.....I like you....". Trust me, I managed to make that suave and sophisticated pick-up line sound embarrassingly awkward. Another girl played along and accepted my compliments and conversation for three or four days, only to confess that she already had a boyfriend and was leading me on. She did this because she was indulging in the compliments. She said thanks for them, but it only made me feel like shit, and then I hated her for leading me on and even for thanking me.

By the way, the more I heard girls say, "You'll find a girl some day, and you're going to make her feel special!", the more I resented girls as a whole and thought dark, disturbing fantasies about them. Some of my favorites involved honey and fire ants.

While I was in the union, I had some money, so I thought I'd look into escorts. I was doing this because I was a virgin and this ate at my confidence like you wouldn't believe. This whole lack-of-experience thing was like quicksand: I never had much experience dating girls because I didn't know how to talk to them, and I needed experience to know how to talk to them. And the older I got, the harder it was to acquire experience, and the knowledge of this and the fact that I was a virgin at a comparatively late stage in life depressed me more and more. This is the antithesis of confidence, supposedly the sexiest thing about a man. When I was 24, I briefly had a job in some dentist office building in the Chicago loop, which was some 21 floors high. I took my lunches in the engineer's workshop, which was basically on the roof, but under a glass ceiling/wall cage thing. The access to the roof was easy, and I was the only one there. So, there I was, 24 years old, a virgin with no girlfriend or dating experience, and trapped in a job that kept me away from my passion of music. Had I stayed there a day or so longer, I probably wouldn't be here to write this.

But someone convinced me to post an ad on Craigslist under the relationship section. The gist of it was that I was a virgin at my age, in spite of my being a decent, likable person with legitimate interests and something resembling a career path. I only received four replies, three of which were from girls who were absolutely incredulous that a 24 year old man could still be a virgin. Is it really possible to reach your twenties and somehow not automatically have sexual experience? Yup, and I was living proof.

The fourth reply was from a girl named Lori, and three days after I lost my virginity, I was knocked off of a ladder at my job and shattered my elbow something fierce. I went into shock and my right arm looked really weird: a bone was protruding against my skin in the forearm area and there was a big area of mush where my elbow should have been. But, this is another story. The point is, this girl visited me in the hospital and helped me get by as I recuperated, so this girl also became my first girlfriend. To this day, we're still friends. We didn't last because we knew from day one that we wouldn't marry or anything. Everything that rises must converge, and eventually our age difference and lifestyles just didn't make it feasible anymore.

The most recent girl for whom I've completely fallen is one Autumn Rhodes (I have a thing for unusual names, too). She spent part of her childhood in southern Ireland and she plays something like five different instruments in Irish bands, but mostly she plays the flute. She lived out in a farm area just outside of South Bend and after talking to her via instant messaging programs like AIM, we decided to meet and make a day at a county fair in her area. So I took the South Shore train to South Bend and she picked me up. We made a day of petting animals like lambs, sheep, pigs, and I think there was a llama or two. We also had our signatures analyzed, which was kind of neat. I still have the results somewhere. After the fair, we went to a park area where she played her flute for me and I played my guitar for her. It was a very nice day. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay overnight and the train had a schedule, so we had to end the day earlier than we would have liked.

A couple months later, Celtic Fest comes to Chicago and we rendezvous in Grant Park. I also meet her parents and her roommate in San Francisco (she had been going to school there). That was a nice day, too. She was showing me the world of Irish music and we were seeing performances by famous Irish musicians and bands. It was a great day.

Now, I fell for her online person, and I really enjoyed Autumn in person. I really fell in love with this girl. Part of why I like her so much is because she loves stupid internet phenomena like lolcats, ILoveBacon.com, goofy lists on Cracked.com, plush toys modeled after viruses and diseases, goatse.kcs (or whatever the site is) and images based on it, Talk Like A Pirate Day, the NOM NOM site, and anything silly and sex related. We can both laugh at really tasteless jokes, we both have geeky interests, and we both love good music. I also like how we differ in the musical sense, too: I like a lot of classical, jazz, and more common, popular music such as the many metal, alternative, and rock bands I mentioned in my first blog post here. She's pretty much into traditional Irish music, but I love what I've heard so far. I love exploring the traditional music of a country. Heck, when I took music composition in college, I listened to a lot of traditional Japanese music because I was fascinated with it and I wanted to try and write something in that style, which I did.

I had fallen in love with Autumn, and I made those feelings known to her. Perhaps that was my mistake, because I started to scare her a little bit. Just a little, though. I mentioned that I'd love to marry her someday. Now, she didn't return that sentiment, but she didn't say she was against the idea, either. When I offered to drive way out to see her band play, or to fly out to New York or San Francisco to see her in either city, she never encouraged the idea by providing details and helping to sort out logistics (like, what motels are in the area, what time she would go on here and there, whether or not she could pick me up from an airport, etc.).

Eventually, I sent her a detailed message asking her bluntly if she loved me back, and that it was okay if she didn't. She replied and said she valued our friendship, felt a bit scared about my wanting to marry her, and said that she feels I may only love an idealized version of her and that I didn't know her well enough to say such things. This confused me a little bit, seeing as I knew about her physical conditions, her sexual preferences about men, intimate stories, when she went to Ireland and for how long, how she was received in Indiana when she came back, and so on. She knew similar details about me, including where I grew up, who my family are, my physical conditions, my sexual preferences about women, how I broke my arm in the union, how I joined the union and left, and so on.

To this day, I've only had the one girlfriend. I think I prevent other girls from becoming girlfriends because I get overly excited and I think I fall too much in love too fast. It's hard to moderate, though, because once those hormones come in, it's hard to behave rationally. I just try my best to not be a dangerous creep. I think if I can somehow get a handle on this whole A.D.D. thing, I might be able to manage myself better in the dating department. I don't know, though. I feel like a child who just doesn't have the capacity to grow up or something. It's really hard to like myself when I have such a hard time adapting to the world around me like this, but I'm still here and I'm trying to do something about it. Maybe it's stupid of me to share my personal life here, but I don't care. I've always been one to lay out my cards on the table early on. If I do that and people still stick around me, then I know they like me for who I am. I also believe in being honest with your emotions. If I'm depressed, then I am depressed. Simple as that. I'm not going to bullshit myself and eventually give birth to a second personality (I simply can't afford the psychiatry bills).

Imbalance in the food delivery business

It's no secret that working in the food service industry is less than glamorous. To put it bluntly, it pretty much sucks. Servers (otherwise known as waiters and waitresses) receive a pay rate far below the minimum wage based on the idea they receive the bulk of their income in tips. For example, even in a major city like Chicago, a server may only receive a pay rate of $3.00 an hour, give or take a dollar or so an hour. The case is similar for bartenders. I would imagine the case is similar for other service people.

Delivery drivers, however, only have a partially similar case to servers. Both bring hot food from a kitchen in front of customers who chose to not cook their own food. Both rely on the generosity of the general public to produce sizable tips for any significant income. Both receive the bulk of their pay in cash. And for the most part, neither one receives health benefits, stock options, or time for sick leave.

There are differences, and they are significant. While both the servers and the delivery drivers bring hot food from the kitchen to the customers, the server remains in the restaurant and only walks a distance measured in feet. In contrast, the driver drives a car, burns gas (I don't need to point out how significant that is), fights traffic, and often is forced to park illegally and risk getting parking tickets. Also, there is an almost universal standard that patrons who dine in restaurants--whether they be the cheap 24 hour diners or establishments rated well by Zagat's--are expected to pay a tip that is at least 15% of their bill, or 20% if they're generous or can't do the math. For all their effort and risks, drivers typically earn at most $5 in tips for each order, no matter how much it may cost. I should also add that many delivery customers pay a handful of change or nothing at all, even though they may live in a highrise condominium overlooking a lake. Finally, while servers are paid an hourly rate, delivery drivers are only paid per delivery. Which means, if somehow a delivery driver doesn't receive any orders for delivery, that delivery driver doesn't get paid at all. Even though that driver invests his/her time waiting at the restaurant.

My last delivery job was working for Fornello Trattoria on Irving Park Rd. and Sheridan, which is four blocks directly north of Wrigley Field by way of Sheffield (which turns into Sheridan). Each delivery order has an extra two dollars tacked on, which goes to the delivery driver. In other words, each driver receives two dollars--plus tips--for each delivery. Some delivery customers use free delivery coupons, so the driver doesn't even receive a delivery charge for those orders. At the end of a driver's work week, a driver then receives a lump sum of money which is $10 per day, for gas. For example, if a driver works for four days, he/she gets an extra $40 at the end of his/her week. This would have been adequate even in the days of $2/gallon of gas, but not so much for $3/gallon. At $4/gallon, this is pitiful. On average, if I made 10 deliveries a night (and I seldom made more than that, often made less), I might make $40 or so that night.

Essentially, I only earned enough money to drink and drown my financial sorrows. Just to clarify, though, I'm not a big drinker. So I would only spend about $10 a night on beer, if that.

My current delivery job is here at Purgatory Pizza and it's twin (or whatever you call it--both places share the same owners and kitchen), Risque Cafe. I earn $3 per delivery, plus an extra $2 for some reason, making it a total of $5 per delivery, plus tips. This would actually sound pretty good, if I actually got as many deliveries per shift as I did at Fornello. In a given week, I might get a whopping four deliveries. Four, per week. Compare that to ten, per day, at the old place. And at other places, I've heard of delivery drivers making between fifteen and twenty deliveries a shift. If I received that many deliveries, I might even be able to afford to live in the city again!

Unfortunately, the owners refuse to drop off delivery menus in the lobbies of high-rise buildings and apartment mailboxes. Apparently, there's a law against this, although it's never enforced. Fornello spread menus like this all the time, and they've been in business for a good fifteen years or more. Oh, we have a poster on the roof that's in plain view of the el train riders. But who remembers the ads they see while riding the el? What's more, people who ride the el typically don't live very close to the restaurant, which means if they did order from us, they'd be too far away to make it matter. [Note: Fornello has no delivery radius, so many deliveries would take upwards 45 minutes, just to get to the customer's residence. This means fewer deliveries in a shift, less money for the driver, and more gas being burned.]

If you're reading this, and you order food for delivery, I'd like you to consider my proposed tipping standard for delivery:

-Like servers in a restaurant, each driver should receive at least 15% in tips for the order.

-If the weather is really crappy, or there's a nearby event in progress (like a gay pride parade, street festival, ball game, or apocalypse), the driver should receive at least 20% for each order.

-If the driver gets mugged, a parking ticket, carjacked, or has his/her car towed, you should go above and beyond and either offer an incredibly generous tip or something unusually good. I'll leave this to your imagination, and it can include sharing part of your dinner with the driver, a shot of whiskey (or whisky, or bourbon), or a sexual favor, just to get the creative juices flowing.

I hope you find this post informative and I hope it makes you think about how service people get screwed in our society. Who knows? If you think hard enough, you might find someone else who has it bad in some aspect of the service industry.

Look at me! I made a blog!

Wow, this is exciting! I'm experiencing a sensation of awe!

My real name is Mike and I started this blog for a number of reasons:

-I'm done with college and I want to explore a possible career in writing, but I didn't take the necessary internships while I was a student and so I hope this will eventually look good to potential employers.

-I like to think and observe the world around me and it's nice to have a place to read my thoughts. That said, I wonder if we're one step closer to manufacturing the human consciousness by way of blogs revealing our subconsciousness?

-It gives me power, and soon I will rule the world.

-I'm bored and it gives me something to do while I look for work.

I suppose I should explain who I am as well. I'm twenty-seven years old and I finished college just a few months ago. I would have finished sooner had my dad backed off when he insisted I join the IUOE (union of HVAC-related engineers). I absolutely hated it, and when I was knocked off of a ladder and had my arm shattered, I sort of took that as my cue to leave for good. There's no injury like irreparable damage, eh? And to give you an idea of what kind of guy my dad is, even as I was recuperating with my broken arm in the hospital, he visited me frequently to not only stop me from injecting pain killers in my IV, but also to tell me why the union is so great.

Why am I against the union? Actually, I admire unions; it's just that I'm a musician. I've studied music since I was six or eight. I mean, I went from studying Wagner, Debussy, and Stravinsky to sitting in a dank basement with a tattooed brute regaling me with tales of him starting bar fights and going to prison while drinking sink water coffee. I even majored in music when I went to college (U. of Illinois at Chicago).

You probably guessed that, as a musician, I play an instrument. I started playing piano when I was eight and, at thirteen, I picked up the guitar. I basically learned tablature and practiced out of magazines until I went to a family function and saw my cousins play along to Dream Theater's "Metropolis Pt. 1" verbatim. I was inspired to take serious lessons after that, and my teacher schooled me in the ways of classical guitar. As a result, I keep the nails on my right hand long and filed; the pinky nail on that hand and the nails on my left are all kept short. I eventually took jazz lessons for a while, too. While recuperating with my arm in a sling, I decided to take acting lessons because, well, you don't need a functioning right arm as much for acting as you do for music.

If I'm talking about my being a musician, I should probably name the bands I like. I think it's safe to say there's probably only four people on this planet with the same tastes as me. I've loved Billy Joel for as long as I can remember, but through my brother Matt, I got into Def Leppard, Guns n' Roses, Metallica, Van Halen, Anthrax, Megadeth, King Diamond, Mercyful Fate, and Judas Priest. Later, I got myself into Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Dream Theater, Garbage, Alice in Chains, and Eric Clapton. Oh, and through my classical studies, I got into Mozart, J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Fernando Sor, Isaac Albeniz, Nikita Koshkin, and I forget who else. Gotta give props to Berlioz, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg, though. In college, I got into Oingo Boingo, David Bowie, The Cure, Depeche Mode, King Crimson, Spock's Beard, Porcupine Tree, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, surf music, Iggy and the Stooges, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Talking Heads, Squeeze, Crowded House, Split Enz, Sonata Arctica, Nightwish (up to when they fired Tarja, the bastards), and probably a few other bands. Jazz rocks my world, too. I especially like the bebop era because that's when musicians bled, sweat, and cried to create art for the moment. Oh yeah, and Muse rocks my socks, too, although they do a good job of inspiring me to consider giving up music altogether.

I highly think Oingo Boingo is WAY underrated, though! I mean, c'mon, Danny Elfman's old band? Do you think all their songs sounded like "Weird Science"? Some of their stuff is the most touching, humanistic music I've ever heard, and some of it is some of the most insidious, wicked sounding stuff I've heard (and I've heard King Diamond).

Maybe my writing style seems somewhat formal. Even so, I do like silliness. I love cats because they have pointy ears, pointy noses, they're covered in fur, they have four feet and no hands, and they're perpetually confused. Also, when a dog barks, it just wants to get someone's attention and make noise. When a cat meows, it's actually trying to enunciate a word laden with emotional subtext. That just makes them all the more hilarious. Oh, and they're mature enough to be low maintenance. I also like silly internet crap like Talk Like a Pirate Day. If and when I ever get married, it'll be on that day (assuming I can somehow convince a girl to be my bride).

As far as religion goes, I was baptized Roman Catholic, but I'm basically an agnostic. When I went to church for the last year or so that I went, I only did so to flirt with the girl in the choir. Sadly, attending mass with my mom made it difficult to go up and say hi.

Politically, I'm left of center. My views of democrats and republicans are sort of like this: both sides actually think of the same things. It's just when democrats say "We should take military action against Al-Quaeda", they're doing so over beers in a bar and adding "We should just nuke the whole Middle East! We did that to Japan, and now they love us!" in their drunken states. Republicans, it seems, think the same way when they're sober and addressing rooms of reporters. When democrats are sober, they realize that glib plans for retaliation should be thought over carefully while other, less war-inspired options, are considered. Well, this is how the sides compare and contrast in terms of dealing with terrorists in the Middle East, anyway.

You might have guessed that I'm a bit of a dork who likes comic books, horror movies, video games, foreign and indie films, and using proper grammar and spelling. I can't help it. I mean, accuracy prevents confusion and degradation of our language. Also, I seem to have a knack for spelling well (I did win a spelling bee in the third grade. Came in third the following two years, though). This also means I'm socially inept: I didn't go on any dates or dances in high school and I only lost my virginity after placing an ad in Craigslist going for broke. Thankfully, the one legitimate reply to that ad is still a close and dear friend to this day.

Finally, I should point out that I have A.D.D. I don't include the "H" because, while I was hyper enough as a kid to power a city block in Las Vegas, I've become quite docile in high school and I hadn't gotten any more energetic since then. This post is mostly stream of consciousness, if you couldn't tell already. I still don't really know why I'm doing this, but all too often I tell myself "why should I do this?" to only later look back and say "I should've done something". So, here I am, probably a decade or so too late.