no madanthony is an island...

When you are chronically single, like me - when you just seem to give off a force field that repels the opposite sex - you are never short of reminders of what a loser you are. Happy couples walking around at the store or sitting in the car next to you at the traffic light, romantic comedies on the TV at the gym where the loser actually gets the girl by doing things that would probably get him arrested in the real world, coworkers talking about their girlfriends/spouses/ect. It's always a reminder that there is just something about me that I'm doing wrong, that makes me unable to have something that everyone else seems to have no problem with.

And then there's the smaller, odder things. Like last week, I bought a bunch of stuff at an auction from a failed bank. In addition to some pc's, servers, toner cartridges, and check processing equipment that's going on eBay or to hamfests, I bought a couple pieces of corporate wall art - a bunch of large framed pictures. One of them - a large framed picture of a tree-lined path - would look perfect in my bedroom. I tried to hang it tonight, only to realize that hanging a several-foot-long painting by yourself is pretty much impossible.

Now, you might question if, if madanthony had someone else in his life, if he'd be hanging a picture that formerly graced the teller counter at a Timonium, MD bank branch in his bedroom. For that question, you might wonder if any sane woman would let her significant other drop $1100 on stuff from a failed bank. And you would probably have a point, but it's not the point of this post... the point of which is that, in life, there are big and small things where it would be nice to have another person to share your life and experiences with. And I don't have that. And I have yet to figure out what's wrong with me, what I'm doing wrong, what I need to do differently to get what I want.

What do I want? Well, this probably sounds stupid, and saying stupid things is probably part of the reason I'm single, but sometimes when I'm not doing much - usually when I'm driving home from work - I'll think about my cat, Nibbler. I'll picture her curled up on my lap, purring, her little furry head resting on my chest, and I'll find myself - no matter how bad my day was - involuntarily smiling. And that's what I want - a female that sits on my lap and purrs. No, seriously, what I wish I had in my life was someone that made me smile like that - someone who the very thought of spending time with made me happy. And I wish I was that someone for someone - the person who they wanted to be with when they weren't, the person who the very thought of put a smile on their face no matter how bad their day.

But clearly that's not meant to be. When I was fat, I tended to blame being fat on external things - it wasn't my fault that I was fat. Once I realized that it was, in fact, my fault that I was fat - that what I ate and not exercising were the reason I was fat - I was able to change those things and lose weight. But I haven't figured out what it is that I'm doing wrong that's causing me to be unlovable - if I need to spend more time at the gym, make more money, become more cultured, or what it is that I'm doing wrong now. When I was fat, it was because I deserved to be fat, because I did the things that fat people do. So I must be single because I deserve to be single, but there isn't the same obvious "eat fewer calories than you burn" equation for dating. Or at least not one that I've discovered.

And that's why there is a wall in my bedroom that still lacks a picture.