The New Year is just around the corner and since I don�t want to move into 2006 hauling all this mental baggage, I thought I�d unload it all into this blog entry. That�s the main plan, that and to TRY AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!! *ahem* So anyway if you don�t already know me, most of my �baggage� involves females or more accurately, the lack thereof. I�m not saying that there aren�t any females in my life, because there are oh so many. The problem is none of them are interested in me romantically or sexually or any of that good stuff. I even went to so far as to consider continuing on merrily with my life as the perpetual celibate.

But then some things happen, despite my best efforts to simply ignore women and give up my pursuit of them, seemingly interesting opportunities seem to come up out of nowhere and I find myself back in the chase. The problem is I�m still just your average, frustrated and ultimately shy and quiet guy. Don�t get me wrong, during my long stretch of life as a bachelor, I�ve picked up a few things here and there, but for the most part the female of the species remains a complete and utter mystery to me.

This is not to say that I haven�t made any progress in my quest for female knowledge. Actually, I've gotten a little better at approaching females, striking up an interesting enough conversation and most importantly, being able to close with their phone number. For the better part of my bachelorhood my approach was a lot like this animated banner I once made for my diary:

The banner is of course a mild exaggeration created for the sake of humor. I've never actually gotten so drunk, stupid and/or rude enough to warrant a face slap, but I could have a decent conversation with someone I'm vibing with and in the end of the conversation not have the testicular fortitude (a.k.a. the balls) to close the deal and get those magical digits and that's where the banner is painfully accurate. It has of course been a while since I've created that banner, over a year probably. Since then I've gotten quite a bit more forward and confident when it comes to asking for a girl's number. Although there were times (dozens of times actually) when it may have seemed like it to me, asking and getting a girl's phone number is actually not rocket science.

It all goes down like this... If she's giving off that "friend" vibe, talking about her boyfriend who's acting like a jerk but she still happens to be with him and she's not giving you too much in the way of flirtation I'd say I have to catch up with my friends but I'd love to hang out sometime, can I have your number? And boom the digits magically appear. If she's more flirtatious I can be a little more outright and say "I'd love to take you out sometime, can I have your number?"

Somewhere along the way I've actually gotten pretty good at "number closing". I can even do it while I'm drunk, though I can't necessarily guarantee the integrity of the number punched into my phone during such an inebriated state. There was this one girl I really liked, personality, looks everything and I can tell she was kind of digging me too. I was pretty sauced though and by the time I had gotten around to actually landing her digits and by the time I had gotten around to actually calling her, past 2 days of course, according to the standards set by the single guy movie classic "The Swingers", I had gotten that "We're sorry, the number you have dialed is incorrect..." recording. At first I thought she may have stiffed me with a fake number, but then I re-checked my phone, there was 2 extra digits dialed into the saved number and I was like woah, I must have been pretty hammered at the time. Silly me.

The other problem with this is that now I have a whole bunch of numbers in my phone and little if any idea on how to leverage any of them into a date of the romantic sort. Don't get me wrong it's not like I haven't tried. Sometimes I'd call and get nothing but voicemail. Since I'd rather talk to a person in these matters, I never leave a voicemail at first. Most of the females I get numbers from have a cell phone so I know that if their phone is on I'm somewhere in their call history. If I have to leave a voice message I'll try to be as polite and as unassuming as possible. It will probably go something like this: "This is Derrick, I just wanted to say hi and see how you were doing. Here's my number in case you want to call me back.", then I cross my fingers and hope the girl is courteous enough to call me back.

Since I'm not the kind of guy that will blow up your phone with calls, voice messages and texts, I try to space my calls to once a week. I'll try to call sometime in the middle of the week to make a plan for the weekend and if she doesn't return my calls I'll try to give it the benefit of the doubt, I mean she did give me her actual number and not some fake one, so I use the "3 strike rule". If I can't arrange a date within 3 legitimate call attempts I simply move on to the next possibility. I try not to let those little speed bumps get in the way of my ultimate goal, which is to actually score a date.

Again, don't get me wrong, it's not like I haven't actually gone out with some of these girls, but most of the time it's in the context got just hanging out as friends. Here are a few things I�ve noticed:

• If the arrangement falls sometime during the day like meeting for lunch or coffee and there's very little touching or hand-holding involved, then it's very likely going to be a friends thing.



• If it's meeting at a local tavern for cheap beer and wings night in the middle of the week and there's very little touching or hand-holding involved, it's likely to be a friends thing.



• If it's a movie date and she invites her roommate to "tag along" again, no matter how cool hanging out seems to be, it's all likely to be just a friends thing.

It's not that I'm closed-minded to having female friends considering the amount of phone numbers that wind up on the friendship tip, but in the end I'm still just that single guy who hasn't had much luck scoring a real date with a growing list of phone numbers of girls who just want to be my friend. This is the basis of my celibacy theory that I went into detail a couple of entries ago.

There are quite a few other things I�ve learned by putting myself out on the line and trying to give myself the much needed jump start on the whole dating scene.

• If you see a girl with her cell phone surgically attached to her ear and practically answers every call to her phone and you manage to exchange numbers, but when you finally call she lets your call go to voicemail and doesn�t really return your call, then she�s probably not interested in you.



• You see a girl tapping away at the keypad like she�s doing the T9 text message adaptation of �War and Peace� but she doesn�t really respond to the text you sent her asking how she�s doing then she�s probably not into you.



• If she consistently chooses text you over actually conversing over the phone then she�s trying to bump you into the �safety zone�. Women like to talk, they especially like talking over the phone and they can talk to you for hours about absolutely nothing. If you can�t get her to talk over the phone and she does nothing but text you with you, she�s either a preteen/high school teenager, an adult acting like a teen, some T9 text messaging geek with free unlimited text plan but very little anytime minutes or as it is usually in my case, she�s not really interested in you.



• If she actually picks up the phone on the first ring and is excited to hear from you and invites you to �hang out� but when you are finally out, she winds up talking to you about all of her problems with her boyfriend and how much of a jealous asshole he is but he loves him anyway then she�s probably interested in you, but only as a friend to unload all her baggage upon.

So OK now I get it, for the most part chicks that are not high maintenance bitches after my cash money bling (like I have any) seem to think I�m a nice guy and they want nothing more from me than my friendship. Now isn�t that lovely? Sometimes they think I�m so nice that the want to �set me up� with one of their girlfriends. It�s a nice gesture and all, but it usually turns out that their girlfriends want to be my friend too. =p Then something wierd and out of the blue happens and I�ll have throw all my supposed theories out of the window.

I often question my degree of attractiveness to the opposite sex. Don't get me wrong, when I look in the mirror, I don't think of myself as an ugly guy. Although, I could probably stand to lose a good 20 to 30 lbs of body fat I've been carrying around with me lately, but I don't think it's so bad that I repulse women. For the most part it seems as if women don't really care either way whether I'm there or not. To be totally honest, lately I've been feeling like I'm invisible to women at least in terms of attraction. I'm pretty sure that my aura of confidence and self-esteem or apparent lack thereof is a huge factor in all of this and the fact that I have been so unsuccessful in the art of attracting women doesn't help matters much at all. Every once in a while however, a female comes along and for whatever reason she's somehow able to penetrate my shroud of invisibility and I'm just like woah, what the fuck?

One of those women just happened to cross my path. She was a strawberry blonde, I couldn't tell right off the bat if that was her natural hair color or not, the color seemed uniform from root to tip and it didn't seem highlighted so it seemed natural enough at first glance. Although I tried not to make it so obvious I was vibing her, eye contact was inevitable. Staring into her eyes was like drinking from a fountain of cool water after wandering days through hot desert. What really threw me off was that she was looking at me at least as much as I was looking at her and damn, her eyes were so fucking beautiful. From what I could catch they seemed to be grayish hazel blue. I wish I could have had a closer and longer look to confirm it though. Although she had a pink pea coat on, you can tell she had a nice body underneath.

I could have sworn I've seen her somewhere before, on the train on the way to work probably. Our first full eye-contact session happened right on my block. My cousin's car was parked on the street and she was in there waiting for me and my sister. We were going to do some after Christmas shopping and catch a flick because we all had the day off in observation of Christmas Day which fell on the Sunday before. So anyway, the strawberry blonde had pulled into the spot in front of my cousin's car and was just getting her stuff out of the rear hatch of her car. She closed the rear hatch of her car and turned to get her stuff and that's when our eyes first met, not in the full-on, undressing each other with our eyes kind of way, but in the shy, we're not trying to look at each other because it's impolite to stare but we just can't stop ourselves kind of way. It was kind of hot actually.

We transferred our focus away from each other momentarily to continue about our business and she began walking away. Part of me wanted to play it cool and just continue about my own business, but I had to go for a second look, just to see if it was a fluke or not. Usually I'm cute enough to get that first look, but very rarely am I ever given that second look by females. It's either they are playing hard to get, maybe to them I'm not worth that second look. I look up and our eyes met a second time and it was like wow. I felt like I should have said something, anything, but my game isn't all that smooth as of late (as usual) and my cousin and sister were all ready to go.

So maybe it was that proverbial two ships passing at sea kind of thing and I, like I've done so many times in the past was ready to dismiss it as such. That is until I saw her again this morning on the train station platform. I was standing on the platform a few minutes or so when the train rolled in and there she came running up the stairs to catch the train before it left the station. It didn't take long for us to recognize each other and make that eye contact again. I tried to distract myself away with my usual routine of reading the morning paper and catching up on current events, but I could think about was this unique coincidence.

She lives on my block and she takes the same train as I do and I could almost swear I've seen her at least one more time before. If I run into her again and if she keeps throwing the same vibe at me I'm going to have to make a move, either that or slap my own face and call myself a friggin' idiot the rest of my life. Actually I�m not quite sure on how to make my approach. I noticed she was wearing those the white ipod earbuds so I�m not sure if any game I shoot out will even reach her ears. And if I run into her again, I�m not even sure if I�m even going to get the same vibe like I did that first time and that�s not even considering the chance that I will probably never run into again ever.

Still, it�s nice to know that I can still get that vibe out of females, however few and far-between it occurs, when it does happen it�s a really nice feeling. So anyway, now that I�ve gotten that all out of my chest I can swing into the New Year, hopefully minus all this damn baggage.