Church Retreats

Each year I attend a convention held by my church. I've done so since I was a baby. I only remember the locations from age five on. I've gone to sites outside the United States six times (to Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, and Spain). Here are the states I've been to and how many times:

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.

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.