Deficient Skeleton Saturday: Everything's Gone Cantaloupe

Casting around for something to write about for TITOITS - man, that's an acronym I won't ever be using again - I found myself looking at the file in which I'd jotted down things I was planning to write about at some point, only none of them seemed like anything I wanted to write about now. I'm not sure why this led me to open the program I keep my BSoI entries in, but I did and realised that I've become tremendously good at starting things and not completing them. Looking over a couple of recent-ish ones and thinking that bits of them would be worth using, if only I could think of a worthwhile conclusion, led me to recall something that Ste Curran (I think) used to do on the Triforce where he would put post unused drafts up and comment on them and call it Bad Draft Saturday because he used to do it on Saturday, except I've just searched for an example and I can't find any so I may have imagined it. Anyway, this in turn led me to think of an exciting new feature which I've decided to call Deficient Skeleton Saturday, a title inspired by the thesaurus and my almost complete lack of imagination, where I stick an incomplete entry up and comment on it. Here's one from 11 December 2010 about girls and that.

So, yeah, in the pub the other night it was just me, a current workmate and an ex-workmate. Or, more relevantly, me and two women in their mid-to-late-20s who are quite close and see each other fairly regularly. Which leads to all sorts of potential for awkwardness; I am basically an interloper. And yet it wasn't. Awkward, that is. Or it wasn't for me, anyway; maybe they were both silently hoping I'd clear off so that they could resume whatever they usually talk about (I suggested that they would prefer to talk about clothes and boys at one point, which I think they took as the joke I intended it to be), but if they were they didn't show it.

I was wondering about this and I've concluded that this is another thing to add to the Life Skills Developed Through Internet Dating manual; I can now talk to women in pubs. It's almost as if it's a situation I'm now quite comfortable in; put me in any other social situation and I will struggle, all awkwardness and sticking my foot in my gob with depressing regularity, but sit me opposite a woman in a pub with a table and some drinks between us and I'm suddenly in my element, bringing out my good anecdotes, asking (hopefully) pertinent questions, offering to buy drinks and generally not seeming like a hopeless social inadequate. I've done it often enough that I have it down pat.

(Not that this situation was exactly the same as an internet date - there's always a slightly unpleasant extra layer of, well, I was going to call it 'meaning' but that might be making it sound much less base than it really is; when you meet someone you've been talking to from an internet dating site you are, basically, trying to decide if you fancy her and if she might fancy you. Which doesn't happen with people you've worked with for two years, because you know already whether you do or not.)

The problem is that I'm not sure if this is necessarily healthy.

Reason for deficiency: Probably because I couldn't work out in which ways it wasn't necessarily healthy, although I was absolutely sure that it wasn't necessarily healthy. Possibly it's because it suggests that by the time I gave up on internet dating (well, the last time I gave up on internet dating; it's happened at least three times now) I was going into these things on autopilot, and you're never going to impress anyone when you're on autopilot. Except that makes it seem that, with this new self-knowledge, it's time for another go at internet dating. It's alarming how easy it is to trick yourself into these things.

The Life Skills Developed Through Internet Dating Manual is a good idea though, and one I suspect someone else has probably picked up on. If I think of a couple more I'll have to turn it into some sort of series. Now, if I did internet dating again I'd be bound to come up with some new... NO STOP IT NO THE HORROR etc etc. Maybe Deficient Skeleton Saturday isn't such a good idea after all.