Overwhelming Odds

With midterms blissfully over, I was officially on spring break as of 4pm yesterday. I mean, I've still got a lot of work to do, but I don't have to go anywhere at any specific time, which is nice.

I went home yesterday, padded around for about an hour, got some Chinese takeout, and then as soon as my head hit the pillow I was dead to the world. I woke up to a phonecall from George to go downtown with him and a small contingent of boys on the prowl. I drove. Spent most of the night swigging Red Bull. Otherwise, again, I would have been comatose. One of the guys actually picked up a woman at a bar... But I still maintain that her age was questionable. Not that she was jailbait. Quite the contrary, actually.

I'm not a frequenter of downtown as it is. MAYBE I'll go downtown once a week if I'm not too exhausted. This time was interesting in that, as far as I could see, the number of guys out last night outnumbered the women at least 3:1. I think the ladies could sense it, too. They stayed in groups and kept moving. Linger in one spot for too long and the jungle predators will attempt to pick off the weakest (drunkest) in the group. The mataphor is far more appropriate than I can adequately describe: I really felt like an impartial observer for a National Geographic documentary on TLC.

I'm shocked I had as much fun as I did, though. It's been a VERY long time since I've gone downtown with a group of guys who have the same collective thought: "Chicks, dude. CHICKS." I mean, usually when I go downtown, I go to relax and have a laugh. This was different. This was primal. THE HUNT. Well, it was as primal as it could be with text messages and iPhones.

After the night was over, I fully expected to collapse and sleep for 17 hours. Not so much. I was still awake until the sun came up. It must have been the Red Bull. So I spent a little time reflecting on girls and boys, guys and gals, men and women, ladies and gentleman, chicks and douchebags. It may have been that 3:1 ratio which put me in such a discouraged mindset, but damn. Is dating really a viable possibility for me anymore?

Finding a girl you like is easy enough, but history has taught me that simply caring for someone is insufficient to maintain something meaningful. There has to be more. Ok, ok, ok. Granted, I'm not going to meet the woman of my dreams downtown so I ought not let last night skew my perspective. HOWEVER, it does bring up the question "Where the hell DO guys like me meet women?"

It actually reminds me of something that one of my professors, Dr. Hammond, said to me once. He said that as we go through college and then grad school, moving through Masters degrees and PhDs, post-docs, yadda yadda... What occurs is that we're slowly but surely adding "more teeth to our cognitive gear-works" and that as we keep moving, it gets progressively harder and harder to find someone else that our gears can mesh with. I mean, the metaphor is ridiculously funny.

Q: "Tony, why are you still single?"
A: "I've got too many teeth on my gears."
...

It's ridiculously funny, but it's spot-on. Let's review. I'm an Air Force brat who has moved more often than a mafia target. My undergrad degrees were in Computer Science and Philosophy. My grad education is Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, I've got an insatiable interest in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience, and I'm shopping around for Robotics PhD programs. I enjoy riding my motorcycle, going to the shooting range, screwing with my computers, and watching movies that I haven't seen in over a decade (which, I just realized, are mostly solo activities). I'll listen to a single song on REPEAT for hours on end. And while I admire the style and class of others, I have very little of my own as I wear the standard uniform of jeans and a black leather jacket almost every day.

So I submit to the void of the internet: where is the woman whose gears mesh with mine? I sincerely doubt she's at Buddah Bar, Loft, or Barcode. Buddies of mine I've discussed this with think that the key is to simply find a girl who is as intelligent and beautiful as possible, and the other details can be worked out later. To be perfectly honest, I know lots of ladies who are both very smart AND very pretty, but I hypothesize a relationship and I just don't see it working out(for sometimes very obvious reasons).

I'm on the verge of throwing in the towel and accepting the fact that my cat is the only woman in my life who loves and understands me. ;)