'Time' and 'Place'

There's one leap of faith that I need to make, and it's very difficult. I'm going to meet real people, on purpose. I never did that before. And it has that same foolish feeling, the 'is this really necessary?' feeling that I described in the previous post.

I always met people passively, by chance - because I happened to attend a school or work at a job, where I couldn't help being surrounded by people.

When I dropped out of college, my dad didn't want me to get stuck living at home, in WV. I lived there very briefly, and we started fighting right away, and I got thrown out. So I came here to State College to live with my brother, who used to have an apartment here while he was going to Penn State. That was in 1997. That was how I got here.

That's also why I don't know anybody. This isn't my hometown. I never went to school here. The only people I meet are coworkers. I have a couple of relatives nearby, like Aunt Jean, but that's not the same as having a group of friends to hang out with.

There are several goals I need to accomplish.

1. Material support, short-term. If my car breaks down, I can ask someone to give me a ride to work. If I lose my job, I can ask around if anybody knows someone who's hiring. I can eat dinner at someone else's house if I run out of money and can't buy groceries. I can sleep at someone else's apartment if I get evicted. And I can just have friends to talk to and do fun things with. I don't have much of that kind of support right now. And I would offer the same kind of support in return.

2. Cooperation, long-term. There are many projects I have in mind, and they just get bigger and more complicated as time goes on. I can't do them all by myself anymore. I can't even IMAGINE doing all the work myself.

A few examples are: ELECTRONIC HARASSMENT SUPPORT GROUP. Working with other people who experience electronic harassment; giving and receiving moral support; reading books and web pages to reverse-engineer what types of attacks might be being used against us; testing various methods of blocking them out; observing our experiences day to day; locating other people who really can help, and telling people who really can understand. I don't just want a sit-around-and-talk group, but rather a plan of action to research, build, test, and observe things. And these have to be volunteers, people not getting paid, because I don't have any money to hire technical people like engineers who might already know the answers and be able to understand everything right away.

Another long-term project I have in mind is SELF-RELIANCE. This is a group of people who want to learn more and more about economic/physical self-reliance, including people who already know about it and will teach it to others. Hunting, farming, foraging, primitive survival skills, craftsmanship, holistic/alternative medicine. Anything that helps people rely less and less on the fiat money system, on government handouts, and on government-monopolized utilities like electricity, phones, water, sewage, medicine, the postal service, etc. Off-the-grid living. In a lot of ways this is similar to 'ecologically sustainable communities,' except that I put more emphasis on disconnecting from fiat money as an explicit goal of the community, more so than 'conserving environmental resources.'

3. Marriage and children. Oddly enough, this one is the scariest to me because it seems the most 'real.' I never dated anyone intentionally, with the goal of meeting a future husband. I always met people accidentally at school or at work, and almost always the other person approached me first. I was usually passive.

But I am 34 years old and I won't be able to have children much longer.

(I like to joke that 'I advocated having ten children before it became trendy.' I was convinced by Julian Simon that yes, it's not just a neutral thing, or a necessary evil, or something that 'uneducated' people will do, but instead it's actually a GOOD thing to have children. There used to be a stigma on having more than two children - but all of a sudden, the government and the media are trying to tell us the exact opposite of what they told us all those years. All of a sudden, they don't care anymore that too many humans will supposedly overpopulate the world and destroy the environment. Anyway, that's a rant.)

I want my children to have a father who lives with us. I don't want to depend on government handouts like welfare, food stamps, or WIC. I want to breastfeed my children, which will protect them against diseases and malnutrition, and help prevent obesity. But that means I'll have to stay home with them when they're young, and it means that my husband will have a traditional role of earning money for the family. It means that I won't be able to work outside the home for a few years, and I know it's expensive to support a family.

I want to avoid domestic violence and abuse. That was one of my biggest fears, one of the strongest reasons why I have been single for so long. I am afraid that I and my children will be financially dependent, and that my husband would become angry and abusive, fighting every day - even if there was no physical violence, it's still terrible to live with constant shouting and arguing. When you depend on someone financially, that person can resent you. The husband feels like a slave, earning money and not even getting to spend much time with the kids, and he wants to relax after work but then his wife tells him that he isn't doing enough chores around the house. How do you divide up that labor - the money-earning and the housework and the childrearing and everything else, without fighting and arguing and shouting every day? I was afraid of that, so I didn't get married.

I also haven't 'fallen in love' the way that people describe romantic love. I've had infatuations and crushes, I've had friendships, I've felt attracted to people, I've felt curious or fascinated, I've felt cameraderie and a sense of understanding - but all of those things can be short-term or temporary. They don't necessarily mean that two people can live together for several decades while raising children. That requires a lot of trust and getting to know someone.

This is the scariest project because I know already that if I start deliberately dating people, I will have to say 'No' a lot. I will need strict criteria about what I would say 'yes' to. I just don't like outright rejecting people and condemning them as utterly useless to me and kicking them out of my life for all eternity - instead I'd want to say something like 'You don't qualify as husband but you can still meet the criteria for friend/comrade/ally/community participant/etc.' What happens to people after you say 'no?' I've looked online - I've seen how many men are looking for women - I've been to chatrooms - I know that it's very easy to find dozens of short-term relationships or one-night encounters. How do I find someone who I can peacefully cooperate with and live with for several decades? How do I choose only one when there are lots of good people out there? How 'perfect' does the relationship have to be, and what can I compromise about? And, looking at it from the opposite direction, what do I do if I find somebody who I would really like to be with, but he wants me to change or do things differently, and if I won't, then he won't marry me? What things are negotiable - what am I willing to change or give up if I find a situation that fulfills more important criteria? What do I do when someone else rejects me?

What strategy, what approach, will I use? Well, I'm doing two things. 'Search unto others as you'd have others search unto you.' Maybe you sit there wishing someone would find you, somehow. You can find others. I'm going to READ other people's web pages, blogs, dating profiles, social networking pages, etc. I'm going to search for specific things. I'll notice things about them, and then say 'I will or won't do that in my own advertisement.' It's kind of like search engine optimization. How can I make sure that my 'target audience' is able to locate me easily? I'll see what other people did well or did badly in their own ads. And I will make tentative contacts with people I'm interested in. So then I'm going to WRITE my own ads also. Some will be online, and if I get courageous enough, some of them will be papers hung on billboards (probably not for dating/marriage, though, but for the other projects!). (***Ooops! Uncontrollable laughter when I re-read this post. I didn't mean 'billboards,' I meant 'bulletin boards!' Billboards are those gigantic signs along the highway.***) I'd like to have some business cards that I can keep in my pocket and hand to somebody quickly and easily (again, that's for the general community projects, I think, but I guess I could use them for dating too). I'll start getting in the habit of putting 'tags' on all my blogs and photographs so that other people can find them. I'll learn to make the ads more findable. (There might be a problem with my paranoia about people being unable to contact me by email or phone. As laughable as that paranoia might be, I REALLY DO believe it sometimes. I haven't quite settled on how to deal with that yet. It will be easier as I get more practice and can actually set up meetings to talk to real people in person.)

Then there's the hard part of deciding what to do with people who actually respond. I don't know how to choose a husband. Choosing people to cooperate as friends, supporters, and community participants is a little easier - it doesn't require as many harsh rejections. But choosing a husband will be very difficult.

This is all totally new to me. It happened partly because I'm getting older and there is a very real time limit on my ability to have children, and partly because I decided I can't fight against the recurring yearly disasters anymore without some outside help. Problems keep happening, and I can't stop them, and they are too big for me to fight against by myself. They make it impossible to enjoy life and they are wasting my time.

I called it 'Time' and 'Place' because that's something a voice said today. It means, people will know to look for me when I start posting a time and place for meetings. There will be a few meetings where I go someplace and sit by myself waiting for nobody while nothing happens, and I twiddle my thumbs, and read a book, and eventually I just go home. But after my ads start kicking in, as I get connections and appointments with real people, there might be a few meetings where one or two people actually show up and start talking about the projects. You go for a while with all talk and no action. But then, some people might have more energy, or more knowledge, and they'll encourage me and the others to do things, try things, and learn things. You find people who are more assertive, and they help push things to start happening.

It will happen a little at a time. This isn't easy for me - I've never done any projects this big before. The community projects seem a little less intimidating, less personal, less frightening. But the 'marriage project' I estimate to be a THIRTY YEAR AGREEMENT. Ask yourself, when's the last time you ever set up a thirty year agreement to do ANYTHING? It's a really big deal. I've never thought about things in terms of decades-long agreements. And a lot of other people haven't either. We usually just go along living day to day. Many of us just go to college because we were told that's what we were supposed to do - I know that's why I went to school - but after college, there really aren't any specific plans. It all just ends there. I dropped out of college, and had no idea what I would do with my life. Just survive. So anyway, this is very scary and very new for me. But it has to be done.

When the marriage ads are done, I'll link them to and from my blog, because my spouse has to know about everything I'm experiencing and has to accept that this is part of who I am. The 'community projects' ads will also link to my blog. I know it seems to be taking forever, but it's really hard for me to get stuff done, when I have trouble sleeping, and frequent illnesses, and 'bad brain days' where I just can't think or do anything useful, and financial problems, and what not.

Well, that's it. It starts now, just a little at a time.