Starter Marriage

The Detonator Plus

This weekend I was introduced to the concept of 'Starter marriage'. Even Arnie, an accomplished family therapist who most gracefully let me use his green bowling ball in exchange for mentioning his name on this blog, wasn't familiar with this phenomena.

'Starter marriage' : noun. A first marriage that lasts only a short time and that ends in a clean (i.e., no kids, no property, no acrimony) divorce.
'Starter marriage' plays on the term 'starter house', a the nice little place you move into because you're ready to buy a house, you can afford it, and it seems right for you, at least at the time. And whether or not you admit it to yourself, it's a place in which you don't intend to stay very long.

So why do people 'buy'? People have stated different reasons such as "I bought because it was time to buy, and I thought if I didn't, I would miss my chance". Other people have mentioned "I bought because there were other potential buyers, and I thought I was going to be priced out of the market".

My backdoor neighbors are definitely preparing for their 'starter marriage'. Their lovemaking was so loud this evening that I had to turn up the volume of my new stereo to levels I didn't know it was capable of to suppress their moaning and my envy. I hope they are not going to make a daily routine out of this because I'm sure Arnie would tell me that suppressing is not a good thing to do and a sure cause for future mental problems.

Note

Thanks, Pim. :) It's been great being able to work with you - the Tier 0 team is very lucky.

Received this note today from somebody who is leaving my team.

It's amazing how tiny notes or emails can lighten up your week. Disastrous dates, flat tires, speeding tickets, rainy weekends, missed appointments, dents in your car.. it doesn't matter. I have a smile on my face.

Brilliant Minds

Recruiter at Bay to Breakers

Google only hires the brightest minds. PhDs, Stanford Graduates, Harvard...you get the picture. And they hired me. But did they make a mistake? Did they do a poor job in checking my references?

Sometimes I do dumb things. Like this week.

When I'm seeing somebody who could potentially be a romantic partner, I don't want to visualize this person with somebody else. At least not when you're just starting to get to know this person. I'm sure this is probably true the other way around as well. So what do I do? Telling somebody I'm seeing that I have a blog. And of course she finds my blog and reads all about other dates I've had recently. Not that I have anything to hide or done something indecent but can you spell the word 'stupid' :)

Maybe I should stick to areas where I'm more competent: home and lifestyle! Last week I ordered a Niro surround system that uses a very interesting concept. It only has 2 speakers so no messy wires in your living room. I never cared to buy a stereo since I moved to the US but now that my stay in California seems to become more permanent, it would be nice to have the ability to play music at home when entertaining guests. Also, I want to play some new CDs I bought with cues from the rooftop bar that recently opened at the Standard Hotel in downtown LA. The Standard Hotel is a very very cool place. My next girl-friend doesn’t know this yet but for sure we're going to spend a weekend there. Less risky than resorts in Tahoe.

Can't wait to get my new system installed. In a future post I'll let you know if DJ Nasir's drum-and-bass can transform my apartment in a 'Standard' lounge as well.

Dirty Martini

4oz. Gin

1/2 oz. Dry Vermouth

1 tsp. Olive Juice

Shake with ice and strain into

martini glass and serve with olives.

Kaboom

KFOG Kaboom..

Saturday May 22nd - hands down the best Firework show in San Francisco: Kaboom. First I had a diner date at Delancy. Because of the big crowd at the BART station, I offered her a ride to a more quiet station. Kaboom: Did she just kiss me before she left the car?

Star Wars III

Love me if you dare..

Love me if you dare – I saw this French movie last year at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. It’s a story of two people so obviously in love with each other yet so wrong for each other. It explores the 'Love At First Sight' soul mate concept in a way that defies stereotypes. It is a compelling picture of the true destructive force that such an life long intense attraction can have. But it also explores the concept of the intense pain and sensitivity that comes from 'true love', and what that pain causes people to do. In addition, unlike many other movies, it shows the casualties of the soul mate concept - the other people hurt or left by the wayside.

So what has 'Love me if you dare' to do with 'Stars Wars III'?

Last night was the opening of 'Star Wars III'. I'd gone out already twice with my date for this screening and I like her a lot. She's attractive, down to earth and non-pretentious. She didn't crash my car although she beat me at a game of pool :)
She found her soul mate a long time ago and had a passionate, intense on/off relationship. Their last break-up appears to be final. But some of her feelings might never go away and she might never be willing to settle for less. Do I dare to love her? What if I am left by the wayside. Could my heart recuperate another time?

Just be Happy

Everybody happy?

Dates can be stressful, exhilarating and nerve wrecking. But they can also be very educational. Such as my lunch with my Swedish date this weekend.

She told me that pharmaceuticals are now being found in drinking water, according to a study conducted in England. The study found traces of painkillers, antibiotics, and antidepressants in both sewage waters and drinking water.

In another words, if you're drinking tap water you're getting a little bit of Prozac whether you like it or not. And since we now know that antidepressant drugs promote violent behavior, including suicides and homicides, there's justified alarm at the idea that we're going to medicate an entire country with trace amounts of antidepressant drugs in one grand experiment.

Short moments of Glory

The "OOOOOOOGL" team (the other "G" had a jump start)

My moment of Glory: Bay to Breakers 2005 – more than 70.000 participants and according to the official results, I had finished on place 172 with a time of 1:05:38 for the 12K (7.46 miles) race.

However, my moment of Glory was short lived; other team members had classifications that seemed unrealistically high as well so the realization settled in that the results were probably applicable to team runners only. And honestly, there were at least more than 1000 people in front of me when I crossed the finish line.

I still consider this result a victory though. A victory of mind over body. The last 2 miles my body was begging me to stop running and just walk the last 2 miles - my stomach felt weird, I was out of breath and my legs were hurting. Before starting the race, my head might have thought that I was still 18 but my body obviously didn't agree. And who was I doing this for anyway? But my mind ignored the alarm signals and I completed the race running. I made a statement: I don’t give up when things get tough. Which brings me back to the main thread of this blog, my dating adventures. But more about that another time.

Update: the initial results were off by a factor 10; I finished as number 1722.. :)

Offspring gender

Motorola MPX220

Humans have been doing crazy things to determine offspring gender for centuries. For example, in Austria, midwives buried the placenta under a nut tree - to 'ensure' that the next child would be male.

To see if running mileage might have a stronger effect than placental burial, Eddie Crawford of the University of Glasgow took a careful look at the effects of weekly mileage, training intensity, paternal age, occupation, and competitive performance on offspring gender in 139 male runners. The result: for runners who ran between 30 and 50 weekly miles, only 40 per cent of the offspring were gentlemen! According to Crawford, high-volume running tends to produce dips in testosterone, which in turn produces a decline in the output of boys.

So……I’m puzzled.

In preparation for Bay to Breakers I’ve been running quite a few miles which should have produced a testosterone dip. I have my talents but going through life as a Don Juan isn't one of them. However, recently so many women are interested in meeting me, that just using the first letter of their name on this blog would produce many duplicates. A tribute to my marketing skills? Future will tell if anything will come out of it but here's a sample of the candidates:

# 1: Classical musician. Just bought a condo.
# 2: She thinks I’m very charming.
# 3: Finished filming an indie movie called Valley Fog.
# 4: Looking for a date at the Rolling Stones concert in Boston.
# 5: Business woman. Only wants a physical relationship.
# 6: Goddess in Santa Cruz looking for a younger man; writes mysteries.
# 7: Met somebody from Amsterdam before; the way he deboned her fish made her raunchy.
# 8: From Sweden; likes strenuous exercises.
# 9: Almost divorced; not looking for a shack up right away.

Taking the best traits from all of them surely would result in the perfect woman. I'm still feeling lucky but it starts to become a little bit overwhelming. Maybe I should refocus my blog on the latest tech gadgets instead of my futile attempts to find dates; Motorola introduced a new smart phone with many new interesting features.

Personal ads for dummies

Baby, you can crash my car..

Lately, my life has been fairly full; I just got promoted to a management position, I'm running 4 miles every evening and to top it off, the municipal court in San Mateo even wants me to show up for jury duty. As all this leaves ample time to meet women, modern technology comes to the rescue: the online personal ad.

But in this engineer saturated part of California, for every woman looking for a partner there are at least 10 guys looking for the same. So what's the best strategy? Which ad gets you a decent response rate? My findings might shock you...

Ads talking to the fact how funny you are, financially stable, charming, foreign born and your willingness to make romantic walks on the beach on a second's notice, aren't really effective. Surprisingly, this is the ad that makes you feel happy that your gmail account has a 2 GB storage capacity:

Do you want to marry an easy going smart man, buy a house together in this ridiculous market and make or adopt a kid or two?

Before then you could make love to me every night, share hundreds of meals, walk miles and miles of trail, whine about your job, meet my family, be my date to a company Christmas party or two, overhaul my wardrobe, crash my car, and other things like that.

I'm charming and will accept your quirks, as you're mostly lovely. I think I can convince you of that in one date. Two, tops. Life's good now. It would be better with you.

And the scary part is that if one of the respondents really might become my sweetheart, I -really- would not even care that she'd wreck my car... But at least the response rate shows me that there's still hope for humanity: there are still women out there that have a good sense of humor.

3-iron

We are all empty houses. Waiting for somebody to open the lock and set us free..

The beloved one... that she may be, but not for our hero. Not anymore. After the closing night movie at the Castro theater in SF, our hero was all dressed up and ready to party. The beloved one had other plans though and wanted to go home as it was getting too late for her. No dictionary needed here. Four first dates in the last seven days but the woman I liked the most, is the only one who doesn't want to see me again. Why do we always want to have the things in life that we can't get..

3-Iron reminded me again why I love movies so much. Film is not the mother of all arts; it's the love baby from all the arts together - music, dance, poetry, photography, painting, literature.

I had a movie date with somebody from the East coast and we met on Friday to see 3-Iron. The movie lived up to my expectations although those were mainly based on the intriguing image on the film poster. My date had some interesting views on the lack of deep relationships in California. Although I always thought that this was something typical American, my date pointed out that flakiness is primarily a West-coast phenomena. Her take on this: because it's so much colder on the East-coast, people are spending more time inside which brings them closer together, literally and spiritually; life on the West-coast is easy and laid back which does not foster commitment. So what does this tell me about myself - why did I chose to live here in California?

So should our hero consider moving to Antarctica?

Film Fest 2005 - the beloved one

Night Club Suede - San Francisco

Her name means:

Joy (Greek)
Of dark complexion (Armenian)
A friend (Irish Gaelic)
Love (Cornish)
The beloved one (Italian)

It's amazing that working 8am until midnight for 5 consecutive days, hasn't worn me down yet. Maybe it's because of ..her..

I found a date for the closing night party of the Film Festival in San Francisco!! She's cute, smart, successful, drives a convertible, wants to buy a Ducati and would love to go to Amsterdam and Venice. She thinks that I'm an attractive, foreign and mysterious looking man.

Am I going to fall for the wrong woman again? It doesn't matter - how can I deny my heart. Here we go again :)

Film Fest 2005 - encore

She is beautiful. She wants to know if I started a line yet for the next movie which doesn't start until 90 minutes from now. She's back!!!

Everything falls into place as all of a sudden I know what to do - an offer that she won't be able to refuse: I have a pair of tickets for the Zoom film makers party and when she'll come out of the theater, I'll ask her to join me and she will gladly accept. The show is over and I'm ready to make my move when I realize that people are already leaving the theater through another door and she is running down the stairs in front of me. She is rushing out to her car, maybe to the restroom; it doesn't matter. I'm never going to see her again.

Ten minutes later I'm wandering on the first floor and.... there she is: first in line for the midnight movie. She still looks lovely. We finally exchange introductions. She's excited about the Zoom party but her sister is in town so she won't be able to make it. Dan calls me on the radio and my assistance is needed to handle a situation in theater 1.

I still don't have her phone number. So close and yet so far. Miyako is her name. And I will never see her again. Again.

Tomorrow I'll be working at the Aquarius theater in Palo Alto. The first screening starts at noon and the program guide describes the movie as a fascinating speculation on history, wish fulfilment and the eternal question "What if?".....