Nationalities

Because my ancestors are relatively recent immigrants to this country, I still know just how much I am the various nationalities that make up me. I am as follows: 

Women in My Life as an Adult

Until about a week ago, I'd never had an official girlfriend--that is, a girl I was seeing exclusively who was also seeing me exclusively, with an eye toward marriage (sometimes I've had an eye on a gal and spent time with her and not had anyone else in my life, but when we finally got to "the talk," I've always learned she just saw me as a friend; likewise, there have been a few times when I had more than one gal in my life, which led to my own inability to be decisive, and I ended up losing out on all the women, usually in quick succession--something that almost happened to me again this past spring). Anyway, I was talking the other day with a rather consistent phone companion over the first half of 2013, and she noted that I probably always had some gal who was a friend who I spent time with to kill the loneliness. I said sometimes, but I didn't think that had been the case with me most of my adult life. Hence, I decided to do a graph to see. Below are women I averaged probably at least an hour with on the phone or in person each week during a particular span of time (these are estimates; it's likely I've undercounted time spent with a few women along the way and they're not showing up, just as I've likely overcounted time spent with a few of these women):

Pretty much, I've only had such "relationships" since graduating from college. Of those, the longest was a strictly platonic friendship--I had no romantic intentions and the woman knew this. Right around age thirty--the end of my time in Texas and the start of my time here--I had quite a few women in my life; unfortunately, none of them ended up quite suiting me. Since then, I've tried to stick to mostly spending that much time with women only when I had some real intentions toward them. It's not that I wouldn't have a platonic friendship again that involved as much time as that (or those--since most of the gals in Texas were women who I dated who turned into platonic friends) in the late 1990s; it's just that I've been more focused on trying to find someone I'd actually want to settle down with. Unfortunately, I lost out on the few women I'd gone for since about 2003, sometimes because I was unwilling to commit but most of the time because the woman didn't like me in that mysterious way. Quite a few women I've had a strong interest in don't show up here because I could only manage to get smaller snatches of time from them. Since 2010 I'd been fairly blessed by women's presence (though I keep expecting a return to a more consistently quiet and depressing time, as that has seemed more typical of my adult life).

Interest in and Success with "Ideal" Women

I'm defining "ideal" here in a most basic way: never married, no kids, of my faith, within my preferred age range (eight years younger to four years older). I'm then adding in the degree to which, with those basic concrete variables, I was actually interested. I am doing this because I occasionally spend time with women who don't meet this criteria, and I want to get into my head just how slim the chances of a woman who meets such standards showing return interest is likely to be.

Here, over the past thirteen years, are the number of women who never responded to messages, who responded a few times before dropping correspondence or explicitly rejecting me, who have stayed in correspondence but whom I have never asked out because of my own lack of interest, who rejected me after the first date, and who accepted more than one date. Also denoted are the degree to which I was myself interested in or attracted to these women. I'm basing most this off a singles site devoted to my faith, a site on which I contact every person so that I don't have to feel like I'm trying to pick anyone up, which tends to make me self-conscious, and on a few people/dates I actually recall.

Looks like the chances of getting a date are about 20 percent, which isn't as bad as I thought. However, only one gal of high interest to me (only two total) who meets this criteria has accepted more than one date in the past thirteen years (and none of mid interest; unfortunately, I only got two dates with that other high-interest girl). When considering that the pool of church women from which I'm drawing is about fifty (and finding women outside that pool is difficult), a 4 to 6 percent total for more than one date doesn't actually bode very well. And that's why I opened myself up to dating a mother, and I'm glad that I did.

Another Month of Dinners

Here are the dinners (main courses, not including side dishes, like salad) I had from April 16 to May 15. This survey is perhaps a more typical month dinner survey I did, since I could eat breaded items all this month--hence, more tortillas are incorporated.

Enchiladas were more frequent this period because, as noted above, I couldn't use leaven for a week or more, so they took the place of a couple of other dishes I usually eat. What surprised me was that I ate out five times during this period, three times at restaurants; I don't think of myself as eating out the often--but friends wanted to get together.

Classmates Who Died

Four people from my high school have died since our graduation that I know of. I went to a small high school, so there were only about thirty or so in each class (my graduating class had thirty-five). One of those who died was one of my best friends, from about age ten through a little after age thirty. Unfortunately, we had a falling out about that time, and the friendship never recovered. A couple of years after our friendship came to an end, my friend's body started to shut down through the auspices of some odd disease, such that the past decade has been one of great pain, a pain I could only read about third-hand through a blog that at the end of April came to an conclusion.

Here is a chart of the way people from my high school have died:

All of the deaths are unique, as I guess in some way all deaths are. The first to go was someone else in my own class; he died within a year, in a motorbike accident. Tragic as it was, somehow, it didn't seem surprising; he had always had something of a wild streak in him. I don't remember the order of the second and third, but suffice it to say that marriage did them both in: one had a wife who left him and his response was to hang himself; the other had a husband who killed her. They were each a couple of years ahead of my own class in high school.

Forty-two seems a young age to die, let alone nineteen or one's twenties. But I suspect that as I grow older now, the deaths will begin to mount up, more and more of them by disease.