Unless he is Jesus and the fish is an orphan…

But on the iPod touch it figures stuff out from something else (I assume your location in your address book card), which is good.

http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=228807.0

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431793

cl

Mine weekend was also the same. I really liked this pic of cat.

Blessings Matt Haller

Look, places like Squiz are a different kettle of fish

Yeah, I know that.

What I mean is that even if freebies are run with a semblance of some sort of structure (people who focus on testing, etc) then it doesn’t have to be that way. As in, I’m agreeing with you.

It’s a case of too many chiefs, not enough indians - or actually in this case too many indians doing what ever they want and no chiefs to be seen…

Here’s how it works, guys. If a woman (a) looks busy, or (b) looks away when she sees you looking at her, that’s a subtle signal that she doesn’t want to talk to (a) anyone, or (b) you. Most other women get that, and wouldn’t pester her (especially if she’s a stranger). Some men don’t pick this up as a cue, and then go barrelling in where they’re both uninvited and unwanted, and expect - demand - her attention. And quite often, because they lack the social skills to have picked up that she didn’t want to engage with them, these guys are the ones who are dateless, lonely, and desperate (because they’ve had a string of failed pickups, because they lack social skills, and they lack the ability to get to know people in a less intrusive and gauche way, because they lack social skills).

I wish I could bold that bit. It is the lack of social skills on the part of the male that leads to an encounter which pisses both participants off. The woman didn’t want to engage in the first place. Suddenly she’s presented with a situation which is a distraction from what she was previously engaged in doing (not good), has started out badly (lack of recognition on the part of the male that she did not want to engage, whch is an immediate indicator of the male lacking social skills) and promises to get more awkward (see: lack of social skills on the part of the man).

Given such a situation, the response of “I have a boyfriend” is a very valid out. It’s a show-stopper line, without having the emotional loading of a statement like, “Dude, piss off. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. I have no interest in you as a human being. If you died tomorrow, I wouldn’t care. I don’t want to know you exist”, which, even though she’s annoyed, she does not want to have on her conscience as having been something she has said to another person, even a stranger.

Whatever the man’s initial intentions, there are two very probable reactions to the “I have a boyfriend” statement - guy will get pissed at her (for several potential reasons), utter a variant of ‘fuck you’ and exit immediately; or guy will stutter out a, “Um… look, I wasn’t actually trying to pick you up…” and, embarrassed, leave immediately. (Less probable reactions might be something like, “Uh - look, I just wanted to let you know you have a bit of toilet paper stuck to your shoe,” which, if true, could lead to a shared laugh and genuine engagement.) But, back to the more probables - the end result of both probables is the same, and it is the woman’s desired end result. The encounter will have ended. Woman rolls eyes, settles feathers, feels relieved encounter has ended without her having to be overtly cruel, and gets back to whatever she was doing.

Man, on the other hand, is left a mess. Whatever his initial motives in beginning the encounter, he now feels rejected, flustered, upset. Again, because he lacks social skills, he can’t ‘parse’ the encounter and work out why it went wrong. He just knows he feels bad. His encounter with the woman has left him feeling bad. Attributing blame is a normal reaction - it makes sense of the encounter, which lessens the upset feelings. So, it must be her fault. The self-created knowledge that “she’d do this to any guy” lessens the feelings of rejection, and is such a comforting belief, because it puts the man in with a group of (imaginary) other men whom she has (in the narrative he is creating) rejected, and misery really does love company, even if it exists only in his own mind. And, sometimes, to keep his ego healed up, the man will continue to heap blame on, and attribute failure to, a woman or women who he has dealt with… leading to such oft-repeated statements as “(she needs to) learn how to turn down a man gently with grace and charm” (translated: “She has neither grace nor charm”) or, “she looked at me LIKE I WAS A RAPIST!!” (translated: “She hysterically overreacted”), or, the classic - “What a bitch!” (You don’t need a translation for that one, right?)

Dear oh dear, I’m writing an epic. Essentially, if you are someone who has had many encounters like this, stop blaming random people. (And that goes if you are male or female, or the random people are male or female.) This is a self-created problem, and it’s only hurting you. No-one is under any obligation to be tender towards your hurt feelings. Get thee to a psychotherapist. At best, you lack social skills for some reason, and a psychotherapist should be able to help you learn those behavioural skills. You could be on the way to a vastly improved life, where you can appropriately interact and genuinely engage people. At worst you lack empathy, which, though I am not qualified to fully understand, I would imagine will mean a lot more work, but, if you genuinely work on it with a qualified (and good) professional, maybe you can get to a stage where you can develop and maintain satisfying relationships.

Honest, I’ll try to be quick about the next couple of points.

Blaming “the Anglosphere” and “western civilisation” for “women’s inbred fear of men” is just daft, and again, it’s blame shifting. It is only a very recent change in the human history that any woman would be directly dealing with a male stranger in a social setting. Even two hundred years ago, women had to be ‘introduced’ before they could even (appropriately) acknowledge a man, and in the case of unmarried men and unmarried women, there should always have been chaperones. In villages and tribal societies, the men deal with male strangers. Our instincts process change a lot slower than our intellect. In this change of the last couple of hundred years, I would postulate that (generally) women have (generally) some measure of reserve toward unknown men in social settings because women’s instinct is still operating a couple of millenia ago. (Please note the ‘generally’, I am very much aware of the oversimplification of that last statement.)

But it is ‘reserve’ - it is not ‘fear’. I think the ‘fear’ that is shown is a mix of surprise at the unexpected engagement; anger which is not socially encouraged to be shown directly; and a genuine fear, but which is fear of not handling the encounter correctly, not a physical fear of being raped (while in a populous airport). Social embarrassment is a very real fear for everyone, and in a completely unexpected social engagement, people don’t have the chance to process (or ‘practise in thier heads’) the likely outputs of the engagement. Instead, in this scenario (suddenly having to deal with a stranger at an airport), the person has to immediately deal with it, and the immediate reaction, on being pulled away from what she was engaged in, is a moment of complete confusion, which can lead to a flash of panic because she has not had the chance to process the encounter beforehand and so, for a second, can’t think how to deal with it and this intimates the possibility of social embarrassment. That’s the ‘fear’ that’s really being shown, I think.

Now I just said that it is only recently that women would be directly dealing with a male stranger in a social setting. However, women have dealt with male strangers in a commercial setting for millenia, and with complete comfort. That is because of the implicit agreement between both men and women engaged in commercial dealings that during the commercial dealing, the gender of both is irrelevant, suborned to their roles of buyer and seller. (I’m talking about the buying and selling of bread and meat in the marketplace, where both genders accept that both have a place there, not about office politics, that’s a whole other kettle of fish.) Which is why Lee’s ‘let’s have a drink’ approach to his bank teller was just unacceptable. He was directly and aggressively noticing her gender at a time when it should have been completely subsumed by her role as seller (bank teller) and his role as buyer (client of the bank) She would not have been psychologically prepared to deal with a come-on. Taken so off-balance, dealing with the encounter would have been quite difficult, especially given the dictum that one cannot be rude to a customer. It is, frankly, a rotten thing to do to anyone, to put them in such a position.

I’ll shut up now Off soapbox! Great blog, though!