I wrote this a long time ago, but never posted it. I just dug it out and figured I’d put it out there since I haven’t written anything new in a while (the crew is back in town and I’ve been going out a lot lately). Here it is, a meditation on the ‘art and science’ of successful dating as inspired by #1 Single episodes.

What happens to women (normally sometime in their 30s) that makes them regress to high school chicanery when it comes to dating? They follow all these ‘rules’ that they’ve either read in the floppityjillion dating books they buy or gleaned from their (normally single) friends as if successful dating was as systematic as baking a cheesecake. Spending money to compensate for confidence, hiring professionals to ‘master’ something as simple as making themselves happy and ending up even more stressed then before - this is what frustrated women seem to do.

At least that’s the way Lisa Loeb comes off in #1 Single, her (second?) reality show which chronicles her (scarily frantic) search for love. The show is not far-fetched. There’s the money grubbing and selfish friend who - as Elbow says - ‘throws advice like grenades at the table’. I want to know if these friends who’ve got it all figured out actually date, because they seem permanently single. And I don’t buy that ‘empowered to be alone’ malarky either.

With this fog of advice something as simple as dating, which should be an exercise in relying on your own instincts and reactions to that one person, becomes more complicated then a doctoral thesis.

We all date for ourselves and ourselves alone. We (should) know us better then anyone, with the circle widening with exes, friends, specialists, and books as to what advice to trust. No one else has been in the relationships we’ve been in but us. That’s why the key is to cultivate an ear for each of our own inner voices, the one telling us something may work or not.

If we listen to the ‘always’ and ‘never’ rules of dating - always go on two dates, never let the girl pay first - we’re institutionalizing a process that should be spontaneous and fun.

What’s the worst thing that happens? Two people go out and don’t hit it off? So what. It doesn’t make either of them a worse person, merely because a connection with this other person failed to be made. It is, most likely, a result of any number of things. Before you and that person met up tonight, last night, last week, each of you was living your own lives, full of your own issues with work, friends, family, money and life. The very moment you met was unique from any other moment you could’ve met. Maybe one of you is having a bad day, maybe you just found out some really great news thats making you feel more confident, maybe the restaurant you decide to eat is cooking something that smells like your exe’s favorite dish. There are a million things that contribute up to that exact first meeting, first date, first everything. Change any individual detail and you change the outcome of the whole relationship - the butterfly effect.

Amidst all this chaos it’s truly amazing when two people can actually hit it off. What makes a good relationship? Most say chemistry, but what is that? I would say it’s having qualities that complement each other. Maybe it’s doing something your last partner never did, or reminding you of an old HS relationship you have grown fond of with age. Again, all random and none of it controllable, no matter how many self help books you read.

Those connections and chemistry does not a relationship make. Relationships are born out of the collection of shared experience you have with another person. It becomes a relationship only when you’ve invested enough time and emotion that you can look back and have fond memories, ones you wish to repeat. Over time, with more shared experience, many of those random choatic bits fall into line with one another and you start to feel that ‘two people, one being’ sensation. Then you’ve got a relationship. Its ultimate success is then much more reliant on the people involved.

However up to that point (which, btw, usually takes months to acheive), you really can’t blame yourself or the other person if it goes wrong. The person you never call after three dates might have been the person you date for three years, if you hadn’t said that one thing that reminded them of their ex, or they hadn’t been driving the same car your drug dealer boyfriend drove in college.

As we get older we get more and more desparate to find ‘the perfect relationship’ and start looking for it in the first date. We go out with someone and watch them smile at a baby at the next table and think what they’d look like smiling at your own baby. This isn’t wrong, but it sure adds pressure. The kind of pressure that can lead to one of the random moments that throw everything awry.

Stay calm, stay cool. If this person doesn’t work out, there’s a million more that are just as anxious and secretly (or not so secretly) desperate as you to find a relationship.

Whatever you do, don’t change who you are to make someone like you. if it works, they’ll be falling for the wrong person and eventually you’ll hold it against them, or yourself. this includes taking advice from friends, books and specialists too literally. only you know you, only you’ve had your experiences, so you should listen to yourself as the final say on what to do and what it all means.

*ring*

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Sony!”

“Oh, um…Hi! How are you?”

“Oh good, good. You get your Blue Ray DVD player yet?”

“Well, I was thinking about it. Then I saw that another one of your formats was just shitcanned.”

“Oh, that wasn’t shitcanned. Unless by ’shitcanned’ you mean ‘made way more awesome and groundbreaking by the world’s technology pioneer’”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, now we sell movies on the Memory Stick Entertainment Packs. It’s never been done before, we broke new ground…again, lol”

“Um, isn’t that one step away from people converting videos to MPEG and uploading manually to the PSP, the way everyone already does it?”

“No, it’s totally different and awesome. Would you like to buy S.W.A.T. or XXX: State of the Union on MSEP?”

“Maybe later. I guess I saw this coming, this whole conversation sounds familiar… you did the same thing with MiniDisc in the 90s.”

“No, MiniDisc was totally awesome. Americans weren’t ready for that kind of technology…”

“Yeah, are you sure it doesn’t have anything to do with cost? I mean, it got to the point where you could buy a CD and a blank MD cheaper then the MD of that album. Was that part of your business model?”

“We don’t condone the unauthorized duplication of copyprotected media.”

“Oh, trust me, we all know how you feel about that. How are those lawsuits going anyway? Nothing like some privacy invasion to stir up good PR”

“That wasn’t our fault! It was all First 4 Internet! Plus, most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”

“Ok. I’ll assume that’s not a fictitious company. I don’t really understand what herpes are, but I know damn well I don’t want them. Remind me again when you last revolutionized technology? Ah yes! The Walkman. Wow, that turns 30 soon doesn’t it?”

“The Playstation 3 is set to take the world by storm in ways the walkmen could never dream of!”

“Oh? Looks like you better be right if you want to keep dinner on your plate.”

“It’s going to change the way we use electronics at home.”

“You seem pretty confident, are you going to start advertising soon?”

“Yes! Not only is Sony the world’s leading technology innovator, we work with some of the most cutting edge agencies in the world to produce revolutionary advertisments!”

“Revolutionary? Are you sure you don’t mean creepy, confusingly offensive, vaguely illegal, and racist?”

“Proof again! The world is not ready for Sony! We stand beyond the forefront of early adoption and remain a beacon for the next decade that will bring about…”

“Hey, Sony, I have another call. It’s LG, we’re going to meet Samsung for some sushi, Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Oh, what sushi place are you going to? Maybe I could…”

“Actually, it’s this whole thing where we’re going to buy iPods after, I didn’t really plan it, I’d feel weird just inviting, hey, listen, we’ll talk later OK?”

*click*

I have fond memories of magic eye books. My mom’s friends Jeanine and Michael (I think, he went by Parsival for awhile) used to have the books at their house. We’d go over their for solstices and equinoxes and I’d always look through the books. I was always the only one who could see the images, even though I managed to teach some of the adults how to look at them right (if you know someone who has trouble, frame one and have them focus on a reflection in the glass, it’s the soft-focus necessary to reveal the image).

Since then, I’ve been fascinated with the technique. The patterns are all similar, but not the same. I’ve got stacks of books (somewhere) that are magic eye ’stories’ &emdash; fantasy books with parts of the plot hidden in the magic eye puzzles. As the magic eye phenomenon grew, the patterns became more and more beautiful. Then it went away.

Today, over at Flash Insider, they featured flash-gear’s new custom magic eye creator. Color me excited.

I played with this for awhile, creating a few different illustrations. (Does the lack of precision in these flash drawing applications make anyone else feel like a little kid with markers again? In a good way I mean…) It worked! It was like the good old days, as that familiar ache of soft focus starts in the tops of my eyes, and then the picture is revealed. Being a designer, with a much bigger arsenal of visual articulation now then when I was 10, I decided to figure out the ‘how’ of these images. The result? I’m stumped…

I love figuring out how stuff works. Seeing some of the cool stuff on the web was one of the main reasons I became a developer, to be able to see things and instantly figure out how to do them, or how they were likely done. When I find something that is still so exotic, it excites me, reminds me of why I chose the profession I did.

So, how do these work? I tried to figure out differences in the edges of the 3D image by focusing on one line and then closing an eye (which stops the effect). Nothing. The fact that both eyes are involved is probably a hint, but I don’t know how that applies ultimately.

Maybe I don’t want to figure it out. It’d be a satisfaction to know the ‘how’ of magic eye, but then it just wouldn’t be so magic anymore. Maybe some things need to stay mysterious. After all, a feeling that was strong enough to influence a career must be worth preserving right?

I started to write this entry in the beginning of May, when I thought the site was finished. Between then and now, I’ve started working fulltime, had to move, started living the Rock Star Lifestyle, and various other this–and–that. Techinically speaking, I’ve been fighting with mod_rewrite (and my web host as a result). Turns out it was the age old mistake — path issues. Turns out ‘main.css’ and ‘/main.css’ are two very, very different things, even if there aren’t real folders.

But now it’s just about done. Done enough to warrant an official launch, that’s for sure. It’s your basic blog with articles, links, a bio, all that type stuff. It’ll grow over the next couple months with some content seeping into the ‘coming soon’ areas. I hope to write a bit every few days, when I’m not exhausted from work or out on the town with the Entourage (that’s not nearly as pretentious as it sounds if you know me).