Muffin Monday: Let’s Make a Date
I know so many young adult men who are single and I keep wondering why. Before you start whistling the kettle that my pot is calling black, I’m not going to yenta any of these friends unless they ask for it. As president of the “single and happy about it” club I fully respect those loud and proud in their relationship status…but I know not all of them are happy about it. Yet despite being able to say they want something more, they don’t seem to know how to go about doing it. Guys don’t think it’s just you either. It’s 2013 and plenty of ladies can be the ones to initiate a date—and we know it. So ladies get to share in the horror of the asking too and it’s no less terrifying to be a girl in that situation I promise you.
The process of initiating a first date can be intimidating. Does the mere thought of asking a girl out give you sweaty palms and heart palpitations? Are you struggling with just the right, witty first line to impress her? Are you reading every body signal and analyzing if her thanks for picking up the pencil she dropped is a sign that she’s ready to have babies with you? Well STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW.
It’s not that complicated. Trust me. You aren’t going to find some magical pick up line that makes her love you forever and ever and ever…. Sure there are those amazing stories from romantic comedies that make the story of “how I met your mother” seem legend…. But they aren’t real and they aren’t realistic either. I promise you that no girl (I can’t speak on behalf of guys but I imagine this hold true with them) will think any less of this opening line:
“Hi, I’m ____. I’ve seen you around work/the building/wherever and wanted to finally introduce myself.”
Now what? Now you let her introduce herself. If she doesn’t walk away, you move on to the second part of the process.
“It’s nice to meet you her name. I was wondering if you were available at all for coffee or maybe even dinner sometime?”
That’s it. That’s all it will take if the object of your affection, hereto known as the OoA, is at all interested in going out with you. You don’t need to offer any sort of compliment—you can but it’s not needed and things like “you have the most beautiful eyes” can sound cheesy depending on the girl or the delivery. I promise you, you don’t need it. Save the compliments for the date if it’s received. That’s when you want to use them. Trust me you aren’t going to change her mind for a date by telling her she looks pretty; the mere fact that you are asking her out pretty much set the expectation that you find her attractive. Now there are some girls who will love a huge romantic gesture, this is true, but to others it can scare them off. If you keep it simple, stupid, you don’t run into any risk of seeming too…well too anything. Too interested, too apathetic, too boring. Simple is good. Save the complexity for the date.
Which brings me to the most crucial part of the asking out: setting the date. Don’t leave it up in the air. Be prepared with a date, a place and a time. Offer these up but be flexible for her schedule or dietary preferences. “I know a great place for coffee. How about Tuesday at 6?” and then let her respond and beyond all be flexible if she suggests some-when or somewhere else. Unless it’s a local skinhead bar. Then run away.
But Olivia what about if they say no? How do I handle that kind of rejection? *Sigh* Okay I’m going to try to explain this without going past a second page.
“We make time for the things that are important to us.”
There’s so much truth in such a simple little statement like that. Right now my life priorities are still: Family, Work, Health, Passions and Friends…followed by everything else. Notice what’s not on there? Funny business aka romantic interludes. The fact that I’m not willing to make time is a good indicator of how serious I am about it—and that’s not at all. So guys and gals, if the object of your affections can’t be tied down to a time and a place…well then this person just isn’t that invested and you shouldn’t waste too much time on it either. But don’t take it personally and don’t think it means there’s something wrong with you. Just let it be. Make a second attempt to connect if she doesn’t respond to your initial text or phone call about the date–she may have accepted tenuously but just has been too busy to follow up. That being said if she just can’t commit to it on a third try just let it go because as the book title says “He/She’s just not that into you” and it probably has absolutely nothing to do with you. The worst thing is to send a barrage of messages, to get too personal, to get rambly…. Do NOT send a message about your past relationships or how eager you are. Just be simple, flexible and reserved. When you throw too much emotion at someone whose middle name you don’t even know…they’re gonna bolt. You might ask out 100 people and get 1 positive response back and that’s okay because I’m telling you that of those 99 rejections, 99% of them have nothing to do with you. One might. Maybe she saw you picking your nose or getting into a parking lot fight, I don’t know, I’m just playing the odds here.
I mean I’m not dismissing offers for any reason to do with the date-asker-outer. It has nothing to do with appearances, personality or any aspect of their physical presence. I just can’t even fathom making the time to emotionally invest in something that intense and I have so many things to juggle…I can’t have the responsibility of handling someone else’s emotions on that level. Your OoA (Object of Affection) might have too much on their plate for romance. Or you might a gross slob. Look in the mirror and get real and we’ll talk about what to do if you ARE in fact kind of a slob on another day.
In the meantime here’s a surefire way to get some dates into your day honey-muffin. Bwahahaha segue? CHECK!
Honey Date Muffins
An Olivia Original Read more
One fad diet I distinctly remember from being a kid growing up in the 80s was the cabbage soup diet. You know, 7 days of a stinky, flatulence inducing bland soup promising to help you drop 10 pounds! Miracle of miracles. Except it didn’t work because people go bored, people got gassy and people were basically just filling up on nutritionally empty soups loaded with fiber. I don’t remember if my mom ever tried this diet because we ate cabbage soup as a Ukrainian/Russian Jewish thing and our cabbage soups were far from boring and bland.
I’m going to be 25 this June. I’m still single with no prospects and no dependents. I’m renting a room in an overpriced Bay Area apartment. My mom and stepdad are within “I’m crying on the phone because there’s a spider in my bathtub” range. My mother was 25 years old when she had me. My mother was married; my mother owned a house and she lived further than 45 minutes away from her parents. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of me gets overwhelmed when I think about how far behind I feel in relation to this. When I was half my age I would have told you I planned to be having my first child by now too. At 20 I would have told you I should be getting married at least around now with plans to have a child in two years or so. Now standing here at the precipice of being halfway through my twenties I feel like marriage, kids, the picket fence…they are years away—if ever.
Despite the fact that the only thing I know I can plan is for life to upset my plans, I still have all these guidelines for the love and marriage thing. The underlying strategy to these guidelines follows that old idiom “only fools rush in.” Marriage would follow years of dating—children should be held off until the marriage is at least two years tested. A home should only be bought in a neighborhood that’s been thoroughly vetted for these theoretical children’s future education from K through 12. Definitely can’t have a kid until I’m ready to simultaneously start saving for their college fund! All these well intentioned plans that are meant to keep me safe and secure and probably will ensure I never do any of the above.
I’m physically at the right stage. I’ve got a real job with real future prospects. I’m just too damn selfish, too damn scared and well I would ideally like to have a life partner to raise a child with so I’m not really equipped but still…I could do it on my own. Is there an opposite phrase for “Only Fools Rush In” something like “and even bigger fools need to be pulled in kicking and screaming?” I know plenty of people who do…well the opposite of what I think should be done and they do it quite well.
No I’m not currently the victim of an alien abduction. I don’t actually mean to blame this epidemic of culinary ignorance on moms; certainly not with mother’s day approaching. I once had a professor who blamed our overweight, convenience food culture on women’s lib. This wasn’t a soapbox about forcing women back into the role of housewife mind you. He was just trying to grab our attention and demonstrate how a shift in family structure created the opportunity for the fast food market, also known as the fat food market, to gain a stronghold. Prior to the 40’s, women stayed at home and family meals were a daily job. Food was made from scratch, at home, and generally was more nutritious as a result. It wasn’t a matter of grabbing a box of processed junk from the drive thru window while juggling teleconference calls. Don’t go rushing off thinking your shrink is right and that all your problems are rooted with dear old mom. There’s no reason Dad can’t stay at home instead and make those meals for the kidlets. Sadly in today’s world having either parent out of the workforce just isn’t really a possibility even when/if a parent wants to.
The first step was to eliminate the “Crispy Rice” of a certain name brand cereal well all grew up snapping along with. Instead of using fried bits of white rice, high in fat and low in nutrition, I went for 
Question from reading facebook last night: Are we, that great high school essay “we” meaning “society”, getting smarter or just louder about politics?
Sometimes I really wonder if this magical interwebs is making us better voters or just louder whiners. No one on either side of the aisle denies that our political system currently is a mess. We’ve got a gaggle of elected officials who don’t seem to be worth a damn and they are running us into the ground. You might disagree about which side they are on but republicans and democrats all in general seem to be pretty dissatisfied with something. United we stand…in our disgust. But why? I mean we elect these officials—the power is theoretically in our hands. Why is this happening?
There’s another phrase that I think of on the topic of politics. Lesser known and often misattributed (thanks facebook) to President Lincoln: “Every country has the government it deserves.” Lincoln didn’t say that—in fact it came from a French lawyer by the name of Joseph de Maistre—who supported monarchy over democracy by the way. Still the quote often times seems valid. Ultimately we seem to be getting what we ask for. How many of our politicians have actually read the constitution? Great question. Here’s another one: how many voters have actually read the constitution?
Even so I always refrained from using racial slurs or references to homosexuality as part of my salty repertoire. For my generation avoiding some of the more notorious and long-standing racial slurs has been taught from birth. We know better than to use Huck Finn language, the terms our grandparents will still use to our horror, but I was always frustrated by the acceptance of terms like “Gay” and “Fag” as a young child. I would lecture my peers, practically handing out S.P.E.W. badges in my more righteous moments, and even refused to associate with kids who didn’t understand why it was wrong.
I’m not about to stop cursing anytime soon. I find it too cathartic. Maybe I’ll have an epiphany about that sometime in the future. I can’t make any promises. I also am not going to stop thinking that shallow, lazy and willfully ignorant people are annoying. I simply cannot abide useless people. I will stop using the word retard in a manner that implies someone born with an intellectual disability is useless. There are those born disadvantaged and those who simply choose not to use the healthy brains they were given. When so many in the handicapped community work to overcome the obstacles they were given, not only was I being insulting but I was being inaccurate in using “retard” to describe someone who chooses to be lazy. The only thing I hate more than being an insensitive jerk is being a wrong, insensitive jerk. I was wrong to lower those with born mental disadvantages to be on the same level as creeps and lazy assholes. When I saw it from that perspective, I was appalled at myself.
What if I told you that it is possible for you to lose anywhere from 3.5 to 7 pounds in a year without changing a single meal in your typical week and without adding exercise to your daily routine? If I told you that you can eat just as many pounds of beef in a year and lose weight simply by changing how that beef is farmed? Do I have your attention now? It’s a common misconception that beef is bad for you. Beef is not bad for you. Beef is in fact quite good for you. It’s the kind of beef you eat that matters. I posted last week a little bit about the corn industry and why I have serious issues with factory farmed beef. Today I just wanted to share some interesting facts with you about the quality of corn raised beef versus grass fed beef through the simple lens of weight loss. Just looking at our waistbands (ignoring ecology, biology and economic factors) the case for grass fed beef is far from lean.
Commercial beef has on average 8.5 grams of fat per 3 oz serving, commercial chicken has 2.5g when you average the white and dark meat. How many grams of fat, on average, do you think grass feed beef has per 3 oz serving:
On average ¼ of Americans consume at least one fast food/meal out in a week. Various reports show that of those meals the average fast food consumer will eat 4 hamburgers in a week. Doing that math it breaks down to 3.5 pounds you could lose in a year without changing the content of your diet—just by changing the quality of the beef you are eating and again that’s assuming your burger is a simple ¼lb patty. Are you eating half pound burger? Now that’s 7 pounds in a year. That’s ignoring any other beef products you may be consuming.
This doesn’t pertain to all of you, or even most of you, directly but I think you all need to be made aware of this so you can understand women and stop this behavior when you see it. Now I will make small talk when I’m in a good mood with my cashier or the cab driver. I know that it breaks up the monotony of the day in the service industry to have someone friendly engage you for even a few minutes. I’ve been there. I had my high school stint as a worker bee at Mervyn’s. But if there is a woman you are ringing up, or helping, or in a car with who is clearly having a bad day–leave her the frak alone. Seriously. Don’t make it your job to cheer her up because if she’s anything like me she really, really doesn’t want you to. In fact having a strange male approach me when I’m in that mood doesn’t help me feel better–it puts me on edge.
Let’s start by eliminating the idea that your only option for protein replacement is going to be tofu. I love tofu. It’s delicious when prepared correctly but it’s also soy based and just like corn, we have way too much soy in our diets. Where corn fills the gap for producing cheap sugars, soy stands in many of your pre-packaged products because it is the cheapest form of complete protein to grow. It’s cheaper even than the “beef” produced by the corn chomping factory farmed cows Ronald McDonald loves to use. If you breakdown what goes into the modern American diet…it’s 50% corn and soy. That’s nuts! Again from an economic and agriculture standpoint, the high level of soyfarming we do is horrible. It’s bad for the environment. One place that loves to factory farm soy is Brazil—in land that used to be rainforest. There’s also the not so awesome fact that most soy is GMO. I don’t have a problem with GMO foods themselves; so far there hasn’t been anything to indicate that GM soy is inherently dangerous. Remember I’ve got a biotech degree. That being said, the way it’s been manipulated is so that the soy can withstand large quantities of herbicide to kill of weeds. This means your factory farm can spray much higher levels of chemicals on your food—run off in the water and the seeping of those chemicals into the soy? Not so good. All the corn is GM too but depending on the modification we’re discussing I have less of a problem with it. That’s a post for another day. Back to the main point: more chemicals sprayed on my food is not something I’m eager to embrace.
Then I thought about it some more and realized that if you consider insects “people too” you basically have to desist from eating anything manufactured. In fact even growing a backyard garden and employing some organic tricks for pest control would mean impacting and killing the insect population should be disallowed. At what point do you draw the line? In a normal day any plant processing your vegan agave nectar is going to kill a thousand insects simply as a side effect of running the plant. Bugs get in the gears; bugs get in the food; bugs get everywhere and they get filtered out. So I can’t really get on board with the anti-honey vegans. The issue of animal-cruelty hypocrisy has been pretty prescient lately when PETA was exposed for “putting down” up to 
I accept that in the natural order of things some animals eat other animals—and that I am one of those predators. That doesn’t limit my desire to see these animals raised humanely and slaughtered as painlessly as possible. I think of this way: torture is often seen as something worse than death. Keeping someone in a state of constant pain and agony until they desire to no longer exist is horrible and overall we tend to object to torture more vehemently than even death itself. I accept this because, as with the honey issue, finding a way to eliminate any negative effect of our human need to eat on other living creatures is impossible. I’m not convinced that honey farming, especially the small scale local level, is particularly harmful to the mental state of the insects. I do buy locally sourced honey and not just because I try to be a locavore, but because eating local honey has been demonstrated to help with allergies—local pollens and all that.
‘So it is,’ they answered, ‘But we call it lembas or way bread, and it is more strengthening than any food made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.’
