First Milestone!!

Finally, a significant post! The danger with all of this blogging and what not is that, with this stuff, it's easy to spend a lot of time thinking about and researching these things instead of actually doing them. That is precisely one of the problems: social skills are skills. They are not social THEORIES...they are not social INFORMATION....they're social SKILLS. You don't get skills by thinking about them; you get them by actually doing them..practicing them.

Well, I just got off of the phone with one of the people I met at eHarmony. Yes, this was the first phone conversation I have EVER, in 24 years of life, had with a female (outside of my family, you know what I mean). Right now I'm trying to stem the somewhat negative feelings I get after trying/doing such things...there's a slight emotion of embarrassment, or something like that, going on, just from things not going perfectly.

BUT, they went pretty well! Like I said, to try is to succeed at this stage of the game. Before I called, I used what I knew about her from our e-mail chat to make a list of standby conversation topics. I won't post it, but it was 18 brief phrases, written up in Notepad, to remind me if I got stuck. I googled up stuff about how to have a good phone conversation, and it was a relief to find that my method had been suggested by numerous other people (making it not seem so weird!). This site had a humorous presentation, if you want to take a look: http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/hmw5.html

Anyway, I've digressed. I had planned for the conversation to last 15-30 minutes. It instead lasted a whopping 61 minutes, 51 seconds (remarkable, but she was probably doing 90% of the talking...questions from me). I wanted to end it earlier, but I knew I wanted to end on a high note (or at least, not on an awkward silence), and I couldn't seem to find one...dammit. Perhaps the saving grace here is that I was eventually able to end it (got another phone call and said I had to go) myself, rather than her ending it..definitely a good thing, she never gave up on me :) The only problems were (oh what the hell, I'll list them):

1. There were several awkward silences, especially after my list of topics ran out. I skimmed the blog entry on conversation topics, but didn't find anything very good. In retrospect, there was some good stuff there, but I didn't really think of it at the right time in the conversation.

2. Sometimes I would bring up a topic and then not have much to say about it myself (even music). I'd like to have some answers in mind for such things, or just be loose enough for good responses to actually come to mind.

3. Was definitely a bit inhibited, though definitely not as much as in the Stiff Mode post. Called a family member on the phone immediately afterwards and everything felt much looser...a lot different really. The good news is that, while I felt quite anxious for the first minute or so of the first call (and in fact had to force myself to actually just go ahead and dial), I calmed down quickly and felt little to no anxiety during the rest of the conversation. Cool!

4. Couldn't hear her well on her phone, dang it. Kept having to say "what's that?" Either that or just say "uh-uh," or "yeah," not knowing for sure what had just been said. Not good, but this is one isn't really my fault, huh?

5. A little too much of general stumbling about. That's okay though...after all, it was my first time!

Anyway. I'm VERY happy that I actually put my money where my mouth was and did SOMETHING. Just imagine....this is the first time I ever even tried something like this in my ENTIRE FREAKIN' LIFE! So, as far as I'm concerned, it's a great success. I would love it if I got some positive feedback in the way of this girl not bailin' on me, as far as the whole dating thing goes :) But regardless, I'm good to go. I'm about to set up the first platonic meeting with one of my craig's list friends...yep, that will be the first in-person meeting, and a blog entry on how it goes will be coming up Thursday evening.

This blog entry can't really do justice to the magnitude of this evening's event. A mere phone conversation, yet it's monumental to me - the first step toward turning my life around, not just thinking about doing it. Until next time, my friends.