Glass Slipper

I'm guessing the super-couple is a pretty staple thing in most high schools - that couple that seems so good together, and you know that they're going to get married, buy a house and have kids together. For me, it was Huey and Jamie. They would hang out a lot together after school and on weekends, I was told that they spent hours on the phone together, and while there was some drama every now and again, they were really stable. The first few years after we left high school, things sounded like they were going really well.

The wonders of Facebook mean that I get to find out whether they did have that happily ever after, and the answer is no. A post came up in my feed with her saying she is so happy to be with this other guy, and that's when I realised they had broken up. It was so shattering to me. This was Huey and Jamie of the "Huey & Jamie 4 eva". It seemed like nothing was going to break them apart. Hollywood lied to me. The girl gets the guy, but can she keep him for ever and ever? When he puts the glass slipper on her foot and tells her she's the one, does he really mean "the one.... for now"?

I'm a really neurotic person. The kind of person who worries about leaving the stove on, and if I did any ironing, I'd probably fret over the iron being on, too. One of the things that I constantly worry about is MrMan5.5's safety. Maybe he got hit by a car, mugged, or fell down into a hole with no phone reception, and nobody around to hear him. Then I get hit with this panicked feeling of what I'd do without him, and my brain just shuts down. Does not want to process. (I should probably see someone about this....)

In light of all the break-ups I see around me, and the fact that my co-workers fairly regularly complain about their wives, I can't help but wonder how long until MrMan5.5 sees the light and moves on. I was trying to help one of my friends get over his break-up, and said that sometimes people change, and they no longer have the feelings they had previously. He asked what the point was, if the person that you emotionally invest yourself in can just up and leave? I think maybe I waffled on about taking risks, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and that kind of rubbish, but I'm actually starting to think he has a point. I want to be the person that MrMan5.5 stays with for the rest of his life, but the person that he is now isn't the same person that he will be in 5 years.

Julian says that women get away with a lot, and that men are usually willing to put up with a lot of crap in order to have stable sex. I also know that it does become a problem for a lot of couples later in their marriage, as the wife usually loses the desire for sex. I have seen it in myself. I have a theory that sex was a kind of procrastination for me. When I was a uni student, I thought about it a lot, probably because I had a lot of spare time, and a lot of things that I wanted to put off doing. Contrast to now, where I feel like I have very little spare time, due to work, and the list of things I want/need to do during that spare time is fairly long. I'm usually thinking about work, what I want to eat (this actually takes up a huge amount of my mental capacity - I spend a lot of time thinking about food), exercise, Dota 2, what I plan to do during the rest of the week. There is very little room in my mind for sex these days, which has the unfortunate side-effect of me just not feeling like it.

Char says this is really bad, and that I need to work on it, which I am. I don't know how she does it, as she is also working full time, yet still has a healthy libido. I'm making a conscious effort to think about it more, but I assume that as life goes on, and you introduce kids, and more and more difficult work, it'll slowly die out. Is this why some couples find that their sex life dies after marriage? When I was at uni, I was so sure that I wasn't going to be one of those wives who gets into bed, turns the light off, and passes out, but now I'm not so sure.

A woman made a post on a forum asking why she wasn't able to attract men with a certain salary range, and one man who claimed to be in that salary range basically said that she was a bad investment as his assets would increase in value, and hers (looks) would decrease. If the only thing she was contributing was an attractive face and body, and the sex that goes with it, then it would only make sense to rent and not buy, as you can just trade in for a newer model every few years. Not that MrMan5.5 is in it for my body and face, but thinking about my assets (my wonderful wit and ability to check for danger in a first aid situation), those will also naturally dry up as I get older, too. I guess unlike the "brainless beauty" stereotype, I am also in a profession that is capable of making money well after I get saggy boobs, but to be honest, it's not particularly one I relish in, and so I don't know how long it's viable for me to chalk that up as an "asset".

Rationally, MrMan5.5 would be better renting than buying, yet he still proposed and we do intend to get married some day. I thought maybe he was just pot committed - he had invested so much in this relationship that it'd be a waste to just toss it out. Yet there are people who have been married for 20+ years who get divorced, so there is nothing to say that won't happen to me. It's just my risk averse nature that makes me want to avert the possibility of that happening as much as I can, and a part of it is saying, "Well, if you never get on the horse, you can't fall off." Which is a bit ridiculous, because if you never take that risk, and you are interested in finding someone to share your life with, then you'll never be able to truly commit to someone as you have one foot out the door ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do have a solution, and that's the baby trap, as I know MrMan5.5's sense of duty would mean that he would want to raise that child as best as he could, but I would be so sad if I knew that the only reason he stayed with me was because of our child(ren).

So I don't know, how can you ever know whether someone will really be with you happily ever after? I'm going through a phase at the moment where I am trying to improve myself to increase my value to MrMan5.5, but what if I'm dumping all of my stats in X when I should really be working on Y? I don't know what Future MrMan5.5 will want. I guess all I can really do is try my best, it'll hurt if I fail, but I did the best that I could. I think I'm also fortunate that when we have had problems in the past, he has been willing to at least try to work it out, so hopefully I won't just wake up to an empty bed and a note on the kitchen counter some day.

The Third Person Must Be a Stranger

Nate: A threesome?
Dan: Oh yeah. Just me, Olivia (his gf), Vanessa (his best friend), two girls, four boobs, one Dan Humphrey.
Nate: Aw.
Dan: How awesome am I?
Nate: How stupid can you be?
Dan: What?
Nate: Buddy. Okay, I know things. I've been to Europe. Chuck Bass is my best friend. Alright, the third person is supposed to be a stranger.
Dan: The fact that it was Vanessa is what made it so fun.
Nate: Okay, the problem is that during a threesome there's always a twosome and a onesome going on.
Dan: You know what? The onesome was not so bad.
Nate: Okay, you may have enjoyed the show. But let's face it Vanessa is very vocal. It couldn't have been easy for Olivia to hear all that.
Dan: You know what, Olivia was fine. We talked the next morning. And so was Vanessa. I mean I haven't really seen her much, but I'm sure she is. Why are you being such a buzzkill?
Nate: Because you're lucky to have both of them in your life.
- Gossip Girl: The Last Days of Disco Stick

I was reading some old blog posts, and came across the saga of "That Guy", which I feel is one of the biggest mistakes I have made so far in my life. TL;DR: Wanted sex  one day and Charmeleon was unavailable, suggested meeting up for sex with one of my guildmates from WoW. We did. Then we did again. Then he wanted to, but I wanted to study, so I said no, but he kept insisting. So I decided I didn't want to see him anymore, and he said:

(sic) Alright, lol? okay.. see you like to make your insignificant life soo out there. and bitch to the open, i think in my defense i should only reply to your blog so others can read, alright. 

for starters I’ve only ever read ur blog twice, coz i know you love to bitch about people and life after certain events like all myspace/blog kiddies (100% predictable of course) 

Now. i’ve never called you. so why lie to make this much more of an issue to dramatize ur pathetic low life? i only messaged you twice to ask why u blocked me so i really dont understand why you make such bullshit up… So yes, i do regret even knowing you. even having sex with you on the first meetings i ever met you, well for me the experience was very daunting. you wondered why i couldn’t climax, that’s because it was like having sex with the grand canyon. 

Alright. soo now that we’ve established your a self righteous bitch unable to face a problem and a delusional moron with 0 life experiences as so expressed from her 1 of (I’m sure many, in her boring ramblings of her depressing thoughts aka “blogs”  ) shit analogies , and a shit root and a slut lol.. i think i will finally decide to not even initiate ur pathetic existence in this world and will forever regret knowing you. 

my 2cents.

So... Very harsh, but not entirely undeserved. Maybe I gave the impression that it was an ongoing thing, like I had with Charmeleon, and I wasn't entirely clear that I didn't want to see him again - which is highly likely, given how much I hated being direct back then (and still do). Thinking back, I realised it was a really risky thing to do. Although "That Guy" wasn't a complete stranger (he was a friend of a friend of one of my cousins), getting into a car, and then sleeping with someone you've never met before probably isn't a good idea!

In retrospect, that was one of the moments I would like to redo if I went back in time. I don't think it has affected me very much, but it was cruel of me to do that to someone as if they had no feelings. Sometimes it makes me feel pretty sick that I could do that.

Someone at work asked why I didn't just ask one of my male friends at uni? For one, it's a heap safer in the sense that I will have had some time to scope out whether they're an axe murderer or not (although with some people, you can't tell...). The thought had crossed my mind, but I decided against it for a few reasons.

At the time, I still lived with my family, and I didn't really think they'd be happy with me bringing a stranger to our house. My mum doesn't even like it when we invite over people we know really well! We could have done what I did with AG, was just do it in his car, or at his house - or, and I feel really bad about this one, at the house he was house-sitting (I really hope he washed the sheets afterwards =/). However, I barely knew anyone who had their own car, much less someone who had moved out of home. The people who did fill those criteria were mostly people who were already in a relationship, so they were definitely off-limits.

There was also the problem of my lack of confidence. I didn't think anybody would say yes. I asked someone at work who I also happened to go to uni with, and  he said he would have said no. I'm not even looking anymore, but even that felt a bit crushing - I don't think I could have handled a real rejection.

Most importantly, I had a great fear of ruining a friendship. It's kinda like snoring - how can you really know whether you snore or not?  How can you know if you're good in bed or not? You can ask your partner, but they have a huge motivation to lie to you, which is why you hear women saying, "He wasn't very big anyway" after a relationship has ended, but who don't complain during the course of the relationship itself. Sometimes it's just a spiteful insult, but I think sometimes it's true. For all I know, I could be the grandest of all canyons, but I can never find out as I will have nothing to compare with (and if I couldn't work up the courage to ask someone I knew to have sex with me, I would definitely not have enough courage to ask someone I know to have sex with me and then sex with lots of other girls to compare).

When it's just a throwaway relationship that you haven't spent time building up, then there is no fear that the person you're sleeping with might not enjoy it, and so even if it is bad (from either person's point of view), you haven't really lost anything. However, if it is a friend, then there is the potential that the friendship will never be the same - especially if you are a coward like me and struggle to confront someone directly.

I've never been in a threesome, but for the reason above, I feel like I should stick closely to the Gossip Girl rule: The third person is supposed to be a stranger. We've talked about possibly asking people we know, and I think it was mostly decided that it would be weird. Nate's point from the quote, about it being a twosome and a onesome is another great one, as at the end of the day, we are going to cuddle together in bed and go to sleep, while whoever the other person is gets packed onto a train for a lonely trip home. Would anyone want to do that?

I guess ideally, to be fair, you'd have two couples, and one really strong bed, but then it's just partner swapping or in the worst case, you end up with a threesome and a onesome. Or a twosome and two onesomes. I wonder if that's how people get into cuckolding. Or bukakke.

The only other solution seems to be to pay someone to join you, but I'm really worried about diseases. I think they're meant to tell you whether they have something or not, but I don't know if you can ever really know for sure. Though the same is true for your friends. Do you all go and get tested together and open the results together? That seems like something that'd kill the mood pretty quickly. Plus, anyone can print out some paper and put it in an envelope. I've never actually been tested, do the results even come in an envelope? Maybe they just email it these days.

There must be an app for this kind of thing...

Dunbar

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. ... This number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. ... he proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. ... Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

To continue from my last post, the reason why I'm thinking about the value of friendships is because I am meeting a lot of new people through the various activities I am doing, and so I feel like I don't have the capacity to continue to maintain friendships, but I don't know of a good culling process. To be honest, my ideal would be to have a few friends that I see regularly (once a month or more), a large group of friends who I see sporadically (once a year or more, but less than once every few months), and to rarely see the rest of my friends (less than once a year).

I've mentioned this before, but I always wanted to have a best friend like in the movies, but I feel like in trying to maintain so many friendships, I am missing out on the chance to find that person and grow that friendship.

Another experiment from the Dan Ariely book. In this experiment, the participants could click on three different doors: red, blue, or green. Each click used up a click, of which they only had a hundred. Each door contributed a different amount of money, which the person got at the end. So in the first case, once the participants worked out which door had the highest payout, they just clicked that door until they ran out of clicks.

He changed the experiment so that if you clicked on a door, the other two doors would shrink each time you clicked it, and eventually disappear. But you could click on a shrunken door to grow it again (though at the expense of the other two doors shrinking a little). You would think that it wouldn't matter, same as last time, once they found out which door paid the most, they would keep clicking it. But that's not what happened in the experiment. He found that most of the participants would start clicking the shrinking doors to try and "save" them, even though they know that clicking them would pay less, and that their optimal strategy was to just spam the highest paying door.

In the next experiment, he added a "revive", where you could click a door that disappeared and it'd come back. So in this case, people shouldn't waste their clicks saving doors, as it only takes one click to bring it back. He did find that people were no longer saving the shrinking doors, but they were still "reviving" disappeared doors as soon as they disappeared, even though they weren't using them, and even though they could have revived them at any other time with no loss.

One of the things he wanted to illustrate with this experiment is the irrational nature of people to keep doors open, even at the expense of better things, and even when the doors aren't really closing. That was definitely the biggest lesson I learned in 440 - as we spent so much time trying to keep our options open, to avoid having to refactor later, that we never really committed to an implementation until far too late into the project.

So back to the culling thought.

On Friday, I went to a bar with some friends, including one who I consider a very good friend. A couple of drinks later, and I found myself pushing him into doing something that he wasn't very keen to do. Morning after, and much more sober, I suddenly got this horrible feeling in my gut that my actions the night before might have caused this friend to hate me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do about it, and in the end I decided to email him and apologise. Luckily, he forgave me, but that horrible feeling really stuck to me. I felt like I had just narrowly avoided falling off a cliff.

Is that how you decide who is a friend that you want to keep? You try and picture how you would feel if they absolutely hated you and never wanted to have anything to do with you ever again.

In regards to the friendship debt point, Gerald pointed out that debt is perceived, and you might feel like you did someone a favour and that they owe you, but they might just see it as a regular thing that isn't a big deal. So as these debts are never formally documented, there can be a skewed perception of who owes who what.

In the case of this hypothetical hate method, how much I am willing to invest in this friendship should be related to how horrible I would feel if that person hated me. I think this way you are only as invested as you feel you should be, and you have no resentment that you are putting in more or less than the other person. It could be a self-regulating method assuming if the other party starts pulling away as they feel like they are not getting as much out of the friendship, this will cause you to feel non-hypothetically terrible, and so you will put more effort into the relationship - if that feeling of terribleness is enough to motivate you. If you put in too much effort, you will not feel so terrible at the idea of losing them, and so you can relax a bit.

Market For Friends

A good friend helps you move. A great friend helps you move a body.

I disagree with this, I think a great friend doesn't make you an accessory to murder.

I've been reading Predictably Irrational, and it has made me think about the decisions I've made in my life. He talks about the differences between people's willingness to do something based on market norms, vs. social norms.

SO WE LIVE in two worlds : one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult... if you've ever offered a potential romantic partner the chance to cut to the chase, split the cost of the courting process, and simply go to bed, the odds are that you will have wrecked the romance forever.
Ariely, Dan (2013-04-04). The Irrational Bundle (Kindle Locations 1242-1247). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

In the book, he gives the example of a lawyer who may be perfectly fine doing pro-bono work (social norm), but say you were to offer them $30 to help you with something, they'll probably refuse as they don't think it's worth their time (market norm). Many people are  perfectly happy to help their friends out for free, because that's just what you do as friends.

It got me thinking, at what point do market norms come into play with regards to social interactions? I can think of a bunch of people off the top of my head who I will happily drive to the airport at 3 A.M. for free, but I feel like a part of that is due to the length of our friendship, and how likely I believe they will reciprocate. I can also think about a much larger group of people who I would refuse to drive to the airport at 3 A.M. for free, and once again, this is mostly due to how likely I believe they will do the same for me. However, I will gladly send them my chocolate chip cookie recipe, or tell them which restaurant that photo I posted on Facebook came from. Surely this is a market norm? I am basing how far I am willing to go for them on how likely I believe they will go for me. Maybe I'm completely cynical, and nobody else looks at their friendships this way, but I get the feeling that I am not alone in this view.

There are other factors. One of the biggest ones for me is past actions - I feel like I owe something to people who have done something nice for me in the past. The problem is, how do you deal with memory inflation/deflation? For instance, I remember being really upset one night, and I was just sitting by the train tracks. I felt so alone, like there was nobody who would want to help me. I don't know why, but I found myself dialing MrMan1's number, and I didn't want to tell him what was wrong, I just wanted him to talk to me. I think he ended up talking for about half an hour straight, and it made me feel much better. At the time, I felt a bit like I owed him my life, but now, I can't recall exactly how I was feeling - was I really going to jump onto the train tracks? I don't really know what my "debt" to MrMan1 is at.

On the flip side, there was a time when someone was saying some pretty bad things about me, and only one person defended me. When that person asks a favour of me, I usually think about that time, but it has been years since that has happened. Has my "debt" been paid back yet?

Maybe working at a bank has influenced me, but I have some friends who I feel are very far in "debt" to me. From my point of view, I have put in a lot more effort into the friendship, and I'm starting to wonder what I really get out of it. This is tied into my next post - also inspired by this book. The cost of keeping your options open. There is time that I put into friendships that I feel could be better spent on enhancing existing friendships, or making new ones.

To be continued....

Weighting for the Next Big Thing

Last month, after nearly 3 years, I finally hit my goal weight. Well, it was 55.1kg, which is close enough to 55 for me to say that it's a success. I started off really deluded about the entire thing, to the point where I thought I could lose 6kg in 2 months, but after 3 years, I think I have a more realistic view towards weight loss. To be honest, it was really disappointing. I wasn't expecting an invitation to the Quahog Beautiful People Club, or anything like that, but I just thought something would be different. Everything seems the same, and other than increased fitness, I haven't really noticed any amazing lifestyle changes that people always talk about when they manage to lose a lot of kilos. Maybe that's just a testament to the amazing friends that I have. Or maybe it's a sign that I should eat more KFC as it doesn't matter!

1. Friendship

They say that you can't make friends with salad, but during this entire thing, I found the opposite is true. There were so many people who wanted to give me nutritional advice, and I've actually become a lot closer to people at work by discussing how to improve a salad, or make healthy food taste good. I still don't have a good understanding of nutrition, which is why I'm on the Copy Daniels Diet (where I just eat what the two Daniels on my team eat), but at least I can now make a better judgement on what's good or bad to eat. I no longer think chips are a staple part of every meal!

2. Motivation

I've always thought if I were going to associate myself with an element (of the traditional spiritual kind), I'd pick water. I'm happy just to go along with the flow, and if something doesn't work out, then I'll just go a different route instead. It takes a lot of built up force for me to get angry at something and push out against it. I think it's a good trait to have when it comes to making friends, but a horrible trait to have when it comes to heading towards a vague and far away goal. I always felt like achieving it would happen eventually, it was only a matter of time.

That's probably why I didn't really get anywhere in the first year or so. I'd never tried it before, so I didn't really have a good idea of what a reasonable measurement was - except that I knew losing a heap of weight in a short period of time was bad. I fell off the wagon quite often, with the thought that I could just catch up later. I think my biggest problem was that I had no reason to do this other than the fact that I wanted to be skinnier. I was in a happy relationship (and still am), I didn't have a job that relied on my appearance, I didn't play any team sports. This was something that I was doing for myself, and I've never learned to drive myself with that motivation before. I did well at school because I didn't want to disappoint my parents. I practice gaming because I don't want to disappoint my teammates. I read Java stuff outside of work because I don't want to disappoint my co-workers. I'd never had to avoid disappointing myself because I can always convince myself that I'm OK, and that everything in my life is going fine.

The first big consistent drop (i.e. one where I didn't just put it back on after a few weeks), 69kg -> 64kg was after I joined the gym. That's where I met Peter, who helped design a fitness program for me. What made me keep at it was that I didn't want to disappoint him. I know, I know, I still haven't learned how to use myself as a motivational tool, but I do know that about myself, and my way around it is to find someone who I can use as a stand-in for my parents. Peter never said anything bad about me and my lack of fitness. Even as I was detailing my diet, I saw a brief look of horror on his face, but he never made me feel bad about my habits - just encouraged me to make better ones.

To motivate myself to keep going, I started to focus on the improvements I was making. I could now for the train and not be completely out of breath. How I could carry more and more groceries home from the supermarket. I also imagined conversations with Peter whenever I went out to buy lunch. Would he disapprove of this? I wasn't eating incredibly healthy food, but I was eating KFC a lot less.

The next big drop, 64->60 was after I started doing yoga. I found that as work was becoming more and more difficult, it was becoming harder and harder to convince myself to go to the gym. GP's recommendation of the 4-hour-body said that the best method is 30 minutes of intense activity four times a week. I planned to go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. What ended up happening was that I'd be too tired on Monday, so I'd move that to Tuesday. But then I'd also be too tired on Tuesday, so I'd move that to Thursday. I'd still be tired on Wednesday, so that got pushed to Sunday. And I was left having to go to the gym Thursday to Sunday, which was really optimistic of me, and I don't think I ever managed to do it.

Yoga classes made a difference because they had set times. I had to go Thursday and Saturday, otherwise I'd miss them completely. I found that made it a lot easier to stick to it, as I couldn't put it off. My gym days were still variable, but I knew I had to fit them around yoga, and I didn't want to do Thurs-Sun as I knew I needed a break, so I went earlier in the week. This might sound silly, but I also felt a lot more relaxed after starting yoga. The hour-long class was a great time to zone out and just let my brain process everything that happened in the week - nobody needed to talk to me, I didn't have anywhere else I needed to be.

At this point, I was in the ideal weight range, according to WiiFit, but only just. I figured I could stop at 60, but I wanted to be convincingly in the range, and WiiFit said my ideal weight was 56, so that was my new goal. It was much harder now though. I was fairly active at this point, and eating healthier, and I was worried that the only way to keep going would be to start doing the crazy stuff that you see on late-night TV.

I don't really know what I did to get from 60-57. The things that changed: I picked up pilates, I did some work-outs with Char, there was the Christmas break (maybe less work stress = more weight loss). From 57-55 though, I attribute entirely to the Copy Daniels Diet. It was really strange, I was 57 for a long time, and then one day I weighed myself and I was suddenly 55.1, after two weeks of copying what the two Daniels at work eat. Which is also strange in itself, as they're both trying to bulk up, so their meals are based around that. But the most important part of the Copy Daniels Diet was the fact that both of them would tell me off if I didn't eat something approved by them, and Grad Daniel is very harsh. Again, I just needed someone to avoid disappointing.

3. The Downside

Throughout the whole thing, I hit some pretty dark points. Sometimes I'd forget to eat lunch because I was too busy at work, and afterwards, I would congratulate myself for skipping a meal. It made me feel happy at the time, but in hindsight, I see that it's really bad behaviour.

I also started comparing myself to the people around me. On the train, walking on the street, at work, at the gym. To be honest, I'm really surprised that the obesity level in Australia is high, because I never see obese people anywhere! All I saw was people who were skinnier than me, and I kept feeling like even though I had hit a healthy weight range, it still wasn't good enough. My self-confidence took a huge dive, as did my feelings of self-worth. It's strange as I never noticed these people before - I was just another person in a sea of people, just like everyone else, except now I wasn't. All the differences had become incredibly obvious.

I've improved now. A couple of weeks ago, I went a little too extreme on the Copy Daniels Diet, and reduced my intake of sugar and carbs, as well as swapping from beef to chicken. It got to the point where I nearly fainted at work. I know the old me would have seen it as a good sign, that I was able to do it, but not faint. The new me sees it as a huge red flag, and I spent the past week eating foods full of carbs and fats. I'm back to 57kg now, but I don't feel like passing out - which is super important to me.

4. The Reactions

As I said earlier, I haven't noticed any changes. The Arnie twins told me to measure myself (waist, thighs, calves, biceps) to see whether there were any changes, and the numbers haven't changed very much. I do fit in some of my older clothes (including a shirt I bought when I was 14, which still fits me, showing that I haven't grown at all in the past 14 years! T_T), which were previously feeling a bit tight, but I don't think I've gone down a size.

I wouldn't say I lost a significant amount of weight, so I wasn't expecting people to be nicer to me - and most people are really nice to me anyway, so I wasn't really sure how being skinnier was going to change that. Nobody on my team said anything, but I figured they see me every day, so to them it was just a graduate change. Or they're being polite as it's rude to talk about other people's weight. However, a lot of the women in my old team were congratulating me. They kept asking me what my secret was, and when I told them it was diet and exercise, some of them got a bit annoyed as they thought I was holding out on them. I still haven't been invited to hang out with the "pretty girls", but I'm going to tell myself that it's because I have no interest in going out clubbing after work. 

Most importantly, I feel comfortable with how I am now. When people said I was fat in the past, I would think that they were mean, and work out what mean thing I could say to them in return. If someone said it now, I think I would try and have a more reasonable response. I'd tell them that I was trying to lose weight, and tell them about yoga, pilates and the gym (I also want to start aqua aerobics, hopefully next next Monday). I'd also thank them for their feedback. I don't want to sound all preachy, but here's what I learned from the whole experience.

1. Find people who will give you honest feedback.
2. If that feedback is something you don't like, don't reject it outright. But don't just accept it either. Analyse it.
• Is there something you can do about it? If not, why not?
• Do you want to do something about it?
3. Be patient, change takes time.

My new goal is 50kg, but it's not as important to me now as getting to 55 was. I'm not sure what my next big project is going to be, so I might be like water and flow along until I come across something.

Engagement LAN: The Aftermath

The weekend just gone was our Engagement LAN, which finally happened, years after the idea was initially suggested. I had an event imagined in my mind, but the real thing was not like I imagined. I feel like this is a dry run for the actual wedding, since we got to experience a lot of wedding-like hiccups, and had to deal with similar things that would have come up during a wedding. I was even joking with MrMan5.5 that I was going to be a Bridezilla since this was one of the few days that I could make all about me.

There were so many things that went wrong: we left the spare batteries at home - and also the BBQ equipment (although that didn't matter in the end, as there was a total fire ban that day); the day was due to be 40 degrees, and I think someone said it hit 44 at some point; we had a cockroach infestation in the building; all the tournaments were behind; the late RSVP; sound not working for the PS3 and XBox 360; multiplayer hadn't been unlocked for WarioWare; conversations were being recorded in the stream; losing at Dota 2 to MrMan5.5; someone not sitting in their allocated seating; fridge was broken and unable to cool the drinks before arrival; Magic draft taking up more people than planned; the university's confusing road layout.

I have a whole new outlook on RSVPs now. I was actually pretty terrified that nobody would show up when I found out that there were a couple of birthday parties that were on the same weekend that a large group of people who were invited to ELAN were also invited to. Many people were listed as "maybes" or hadn't responded at all, and chasing them up was a headache. I am going to be far more diligent about responding to invitations from now on - and actually following through on my response (i.e. if I say that I'm going to go, I will actually go, instead of bailing on the day).

Someone accepted the invitation 1 hour before the event was due to start. To be honest, I was so angry when that happened. I know it wasn't a real wedding, but who RSVPs to a wedding 1 hour before?! I had already set out the seat plan, but luckily someone said they didn't need a seat as they just planned to play games, so there was a spare seat close to that person's other friends.

Speaking of the seating plans, the reason why I wanted to do it was because I found out about all this drama between various people. There were all these people who secretly didn't like X, or had some UST between them, etc., it felt a bit like a Professor Layton puzzle, trying to keep people with their friends, but avoiding seating people who hate each other near each other. There were no big arguments, at least not that I was aware of, or not due to gaming, so I think the seating went OK - despite one person not sitting in their assigned seat. -_-

Tournament-wise, I knew the schedule was a bit ambitious, but I didn't think it'd be 5 hours behind ambitious. I feel bad for people who showed up because I asked them to play in a particular tournament for me, but the game didn't end up running because we were too busy with other things.

I think that's another thing that I really need to learn: to delegate tasks to others. I just wanted everyone to have fun, so I didn't want someone to feel like they were "working" at the event, but I think that some of the people who were there would have been happy to help out if they were asked. I guess it also didn't help that a large subset of my friends did not know anyone other than that small niche (or only knew a few others), i.e. my Wow friends, my work magic friends, my work LoL friends, my work grad friends, my 440 friends, my chess club friends, my CSSE uni friends, my anime club friends, my second floor friends. I didn't want anyone to feel left out, so I tried to make sure I spent time with all of them. Meshu was really great though, introducing himself to others, and making friends. Rangers as well.

I really felt like the entire event was a disaster, and I wanted to just run away from it all, but MrMan5.5 pulled me aside told me that people were enjoying themselves despite all of the problems. Definitely one of the reasons I'm marrying the guy.

Overall, the event wasn't what I expected, but in hindsight, and without all the sleep deprivation, I have to say it ended up being much better than I expected. I really wish there hadn't been cockroaches though, as they were the main reason I didn't get any sleep.

Edit: The event going so well is also a testament to how great the friends we have are.

Dario è Sempre in Ritardo

3 years of Italian in primary school, 4 years of Italian in high school and one semester of it at uni and the title is still my most remembered sentence (trans: Dario is always late).

You could probably have substituted Dario for Anna and still been correct. In primary school, we were learning about whales and the teacher said, "A blue whale's heart is about the size of Anna's family's car." I was astonished that the entire class new what kind of car my family had, and later my friend told me that it was because I was late for school every day, so when my mum dropped us off, someone would always point out that I was about to arrive and everyone would turn to look.

I was pretty much late for everything, until I showed up an hour late for a lunch with Sharon and MrMan5, and he said to me, "You know, once you get a job, this kind of stuff isn't going to be acceptable anymore." (I actually did have a job at this point, but I lived 5 minutes walk away - though I still managed to be late once or twice). From that moment on, I worked a lot harder on showing up on time.

However, judging from the last two parties I went to, showing up on time seems to be abnormal. We showed up half an hour late to a NYE party, and half the guests weren't even there, and the party didn't really "start" until around two and a half hours after the start time. The second party, I was an hour late due to a car usage clash, and when I arrived, I said, "Sorry for being so late", just as the host said, "Oh, you're early." I confirmed the start time with him and he said, "Oh, nah, that's in rectangular prism time™. I wasn't expecting anyone until X."

Is it now socially acceptable to be late? Is it the expectation that people shouldn't start arriving until an hour past the start time? I don't go to parties very often, but I am going to change that this year, and I don't really want to inconvenience the host.

Still, if this was the case, what is the point of the delayed start time? Why not just have the start time at the actual start time, and not an hour before you expect people to start showing up? I guess I'll show up a few more times to confirm that this delayed start is really a thing, since a sample size of 2 isn't really much to go on.

While I'm on the topic of party etiquette, I think parties should have a warning when there are going to be very young children present (newborns - old toddlers). I seem to have hit the age where this kind of thing is becoming more and more common. There is a phenomenon where the presence of young children just halts any intelligence conversation that is going on, and everything just devolves into baby talk and discussions on the stupid things that kids do. Even if you try to do something, you are constantly interrupted.

"So, did you still want to have dinner next Saturday?"
"Sure, let me just double check my- Oh, look, the baby opened its eyes! Everyone, look at how big her eyes are, she's just sooooooooo cute!"

If I ever become like this, please put me out of my misery. I don't know what a warning would do, actually, except maybe lower my expectations. Perhaps I am being too harsh. I keep being told that once I start having babies of my own, I will understand. Maybe I should use this time as preparation.