Time Spent with Friends in May 2013

I decided to break down how much time I spend with various friends and acquaintances, so I kept a log during the month of May. What surprised me was how little time I spend one-on-one in person with anyone--or at least, how little time I did so in May. One friend barely shows up here, Al. I imagine he'd at least get a couple of hours one-on-one each month most months, but he was bedridden most of May, so we stuck to short phone conversations.

The chart shows time spent with friends in groups (for example, at parties--in fact, mostly at parties), on the phone, and one-on-one face-to-face. Time spent at organized activities I have to attend--namely work or church--are not counted. 

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).

Phone Calls for February 2013

I kept track of phone calls made to me and returned in February, which renders possibilities for all kinds of charts, some of them quite different from earlier charts regarding November 2012. 

Phone Calls by Gender

Phone Calls by Person

Phone Calls by Relationship

Estimated Time from First Contact to Phone Number

I'm not one to pick up phone numbers from women quickly or easily. Most of my contact with women is online, since I try to date largely within my church--and that is scattered, with women few and far between. So I thought I'd think about women I was interested in whose phone contact information I've gotten and how long it took (the y-axis represents the number of weeks, the x-axis represents the particular woman):

A lot of this delay is my own (note how, in the above, sometimes women ended up giving me the phone number without me asking), but often the women themselves delayed--I asked, but phone numbers weren't in the offing, at least not at the first request. In general, I think I've taken too much time to ask (if I'm interested, I should just move to phone and meeting as soon as possible), but interestingly, even exorbitantly long times of knowing someone have not always yielded a phone number right away.

Phonecalls for November 2012

I kept track of phone calls made to me and returned in November, which renders possibilities for all kinds of charts.

Phonecalls by Gender

Phonecalls by Person

Phonecalls by Relationship

Unfortunately, among the potential dates, the incoming calls came from one person, with whom a "just friends" clarity was eventually established. Apparently, in that regard, I'm not great at getting phone numbers to begin with, and I'm even less successful at getting callbacks or through calls.

Long Distance Calls for October 2011

More Cell Phone Usage 2011 and All Time

I thought it might be interesting to look at who I talk to on the cell phone, since I've several times looked at who gets called long distance. Here's the chart for 2011 as of the end of October:
Here's the chart for all time as of the end of October:
If I were to add in November, the numbers would skew even more in favor of the present configuration. Since then, however, I've used my cell phone hardly at all.

Cell Phone Usage 2011 and All Time

Since I first got it in 2008, I haven't often used my cell phone--it's mostly for travel and emergencies and the rare case where I am needing two phone lines at once. Hence, because the cell phone is usually off, most of my calls are outgoing rather than incoming. Here's the breakdown for 2011 through the first half of October:
Here's the breakdown for all time:
Clearly I did a lot more calling out in 2011 than in previous years.

Long Distance Calls for September 2011

Long Distance Calls for May and June

June Answering Machine Messages

Years ago, for a short while, I kept a list of people who called me and then broke it down by categories to examine the nature of the communication that went on in my life. I got a couple of coworkers to do it with me, and we were able to compare notes at the end of the month. Interestingly, most of us received calls primarily from a very small set of people (e.g., most calls came from one's boyfriend, etc.).

Then a few years later, I decided to conduct a similar experiment for a full year. Unfortunately, the results of that experiment were lost in a computer crash a year or so later. My experiment eventually came to an end when my friend Al decided to rig the results by called to leave a message every day. By the end of the year, not only was he the number 1 caller, but it was unlikely anyone would ever call me that many times again (indeed, now that I don't keep such a log, he doesn't call as often). As a humorous sidenote on December 31 that year, at a party, each person there called me and left a message, and of course Al called me from the party probably over twenty times. I think I had over thirty messages when I got home. They may be on a recording around here somewhere.

I didn't start a log this month. But I figured I wouldn't erase my answering machine messages, which in turn would allow me to easily document the results at the end of the month without the need for pen and paper. And now the results are in.

Interestingly, friends made up the bulk of the calls. I say interesting because years ago telemarketers likely would have been on an equal par with them. And sometimes I still feel that way. But the do-not-call list has probably doomed most such marketers and so they've given up, even among those of us who never signed up. (For a few years, I received even more robo calls than I ever had before--the result, probably, of a dwindling list of people not on the do-not-call list, which by now is likely so small it's simply not worth dialing the list.)

So here goes, the list by category:


Note: no messages from relatives. These days, I tend to do most of the calling to my parents rather than the other way around. The one business call was from an editor (!); boy, that makes me feel like a real writer. The friends consisted of three people, one of whom made up two-thirds of the calls. Among the telemarketers, I got the same calls twice over, so there were only three messages left at five different times: one was for a dental insurance, two for life insurance, and two for a credit card.

But I'm also intrigued by when these phone calls occur, and so I figured I'd plot them out:

Finally, there's this nifty scatter plot that details the times messages are most likely to arrive: