Manversation

Well, I’ve done this a little out of order, it would seem. I’ve already posted on a few other topics before writing my intro post. There were a couple reasons for this:

1).    I thought it might be kind of monotonous to have four days straight of intro posts about us.
2).    I wrote the content for my other posts first.

Anyway, as you’ve no doubt surmised from my previous posts, I like travel, cooking, working with my hands and doing creative things in general. I think of myself as a Renaissance man or jack-of-all-trades kind of person. I was very heavily into art as a child and drew and painted pretty much whenever I got a chance up through about high school. Since discovering music in my junior year of high school, I’ve sang in choirs and played classical guitar and other musical instruments on and off for about 12 years including a 2 year stint as a music major where I played upright bass in the university orchestra and jazz bands. I’m fluent in Spanish and that’s what my undergraduate degree is in.

Somewhere in there, I dabbled a little bit with computers, I think around junior high. I wrote some role playing game type programs in basic on the old Apple IIe but unfortunately didn’t stick with it so my bio isn’t going to read like so many others on the web that state something like: “…then went on to learn Linux, C++, html, JavaScript, built a circuit board in my garage, started a web-hosting service, and am now making boatloads of money writing this blog.” Nope, sadly, that’s not me; I lost interest after tinkering with good old basic on the Apple IIe for about six months and I rely on Nate for the heavy lifting when it comes to the design and programming on this blog.

Like many (most?) other people with a non-professional degree, I work in a field totally unrelated to my major. I think my job is really about as good as it’s going to get for an office job – my bosses are quite reasonable, my coworkers are generally pretty good people and the pay and benes aren’t bad at all - I get five weeks paid vacation per year and in less than two more years that will go up to six. However, like a lot of other people who are “knowledge workers,” or office drones, I don’t feel like this career is my calling and I can’t see myself staying here until it’s time to retire.

However, after dabbling in many different things as listed above, I have found what I believe to be my true calling in life. About three years ago I bought a house (big mistake, more on that later- perhaps much more and many posts), and was looking around for furniture and getting pretty annoyed with the flimsy crap that was available in my price range. I remembered having read or heard about some woodworking classes at my local community college and decided to go learn how to make my own coffee table. Now, three years later, what began as a one-semester plan to make a table has turned into six semesters (and counting) of studying woodworking and furniture design. I’m in the process of building a workshop in my garage and my goals for 2009 include opening an online store to sell some of my smaller projects such as boxes and turned items like peppermills, and getting into an art show to exhibit some of my larger work like coffee tables.

I’ve been perpetually single with the occasional random fling for the last few years. During that time the longest relationship I had lasted a little over two months. I think both my threshold for putting up with female craziness and my inherent drive to get sex are lower than that of the average man. You know the guy who lives for nothing but to chase the ladies and spends every spare moment (and dollar, probably) thinking about his next hook up, trying to get numbers, buying girls drinks etc? Well, that sort of thing has always seemed like a waste of money and energy to me and I’m pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. I like having a girlfriend but I think I’m just too lazy to go through some of the customary and necessary gyrations to get one.

I guess I do need to make more of an effort in that department, though it has grown increasingly difficult to generate quality leads as more and more of my friends get married. This has the twofold effect of; 1). Reducing my pool of available wingmen for heading out to the bars and clubs, and; 2). Reducing the amount of single girls in my social circles that I could easily meet or that people could set me up with (married couples don’t tend to hang out with very many single women). Though as I write this, I’m still feeling pretty good about the girl I met last weekend, and if that doesn’t pan out, there’s always online dating again. So, I’m sure that with my long list of other interesting topics I’d like to cover, you will be hearing about some of my observations about wading through the modern dating scene.