Mr. Right, or Mr. Right Now?

I'm terrible at relationships. I'm just going to come right out and say that right from the get-go.

I fall for the wrong guys - the liars, the cheats, the emotionally-unavailable, the jerks - all the time. I fall hard, I fall fast, and inevitably, I end up broken, battered, sobbing and alone, leaving my poor friends to, once again, pick up the pieces and attempt to cheer me up.

Part of it is that, deep down inside, I want, more than anything else, to matter to someone. To be someone's first priority, to be the reason they get up in the morning (or log on, as the case may be), to have someone who is mine, just as I'm his. To have someone accept me as I really am, flaws and all. To have someone love me.

My RL history is just as dismal as my SL, so it leaves me wondering if the problem isn't actually me. Do I want something so outrageous that it's impossible? I don't think so. I see it going on all around me, all the time. But I can never find it for myself.

So what's the secret?

• Maybe it's confidence. I just find it hard to even fake a confidence when my past experience has been so dismal so many times. Confidence, for me, comes from seeing success, and then building on that. When there's nothing to build on (and lots to pull things down), it makes it hard to attempt this one.

• Maybe it's about relaxing and just having fun. If you're reading this, you know me well enough that this isn't something I do very well. I'm one of those 'carry the weight of the world' people, and more, I tend to over-think and overanalyze everything. Add in a healthy dose of skepticism and pessimism, I find problems before they occur, and tend to insulate myself as a self-protection mechanism. I've tried letting my guard down and relaxing before - all that's happened is I take one in the jaw that knocks me on my ass all the faster.

I've even tried faking these - you know, the old adage "fake it till you make it" - projecting an image of confidence, of being perky and bubbly and carefree. The problem for me, is that these masks never become reality, and eventually people get a look at what's behind the mask. They see the shadows lurking in the depths, and if that alone isn't enough to scare them off, then they see the early "act" as a deception, and nobody wants to be with someone who lies to them about who they are.

• Maybe it's about taking things as they are, not as I want them to be. I'll be the first to admit that I read into things. Reading between the lines, pulling out intentions and meanings is what I do - hell, they've spent the past 2 years training me to do it even better. But when it comes to relationships, I have a habit of pulling out more than is really there, and drawing the wrong conclusions. Cue defence mechanisms once again.

So what do I do now? Obviously my current strategies and attempts aren't working. I'm stuck in a limbo between two extremes - the mindless casual sex, and the "friend zone". The guys I do meet either want one or the other, but never anything more. The guys I want don't want me, and the guys that want me either want a just another conquest or just a friend. The former generally see nothing but the pretty pixels, and the flirtatious public demeanour of DJ Becka (I tend to let a lot more of my wild side show when I'm on the air), the latter are generally guys that I've gotten to know, that I've opened up to more, and they decide that they like having me as a friend, but don't want anything more than that. Hell, I get asked for advice on women, and guys complain to me about how they can never find the right girl - sometimes I just want to shout "HELLO!!! Girl here! One you know you like already!" - but they just never want to take that step to give a friend a try as a girlfriend.

A friend said I should learn to accept the whole "no strings attached" idea. To just have fun, and not always be looking for something more. As much as I'd love to be able to do that, I know it's just not who I am, or what I want. Sure, I could try to fake it, but as I just said, that never works for long.


Maybe nothing will come of this, but I wanted to get it off my chest. Someday, I might tell you more of the backstory, then again, I might not. Advice is welcome, even if I may not follow it.

I lost the battle, but I won the war

So, for those of you who know me, you know I do about 4 things in SL: I shop, I hang out with friends (or more accurately, I stand somewhere and talk to them in IM while they're off somewhere else), I DJ - more to come on that later - and I race stock cars. Racing is the subject of this post.

Now, when I first started racing, it wasn't because I had a great love for motorsports. In fact, to say I couldn't stand them would be more accurate. BUT, one of my best friends had his own racing team, and so if I wanted to spend time with him, I was going to be spending time at the track, and I'd much rather DO than WATCH, so, after some consideration, I hopped into a car. Now, no one will say I was some instant wunderkid. I was no natural. I practiced and practiced and practiced, and, for a long time, I sucked... but I was persistent, I had a great teacher who believed in me, and eventually I started getting better.

Fast forward to more recently... two racing associations later, and a rather unpleasant departure from the aforementioned racing team (which was my own fault)... and some success, including a Spectator Stock championship in the first season at KRP... but still, nobody really took me seriously as a racer, I was mid-pack in most of the major series that I ran in, I might make the occasional feature race, but really, I wasn't setting the scoreboard on fire or anything like that.

Then came the new EuroStocks at Racers Island. Now, I had run most of the previous season in their old stock cars, without much success, recognition, or anything... but these new cars were a totally different beast. They suited my driving style perfectly. I won my first pole the first week out. I won my first race at that track the following week. More pole positions, more victories, more fastest laps followed. Add in the banhammering of the one person who probably would have kicked my ass, a few other conveniently-timed missed races by a few key competitors, and we arrive at today. Race 14 of 15.

Going in, I had a 44 point lead. The most points any one racer could gain would be 28, provided they qualified terribly, won both heats, the feature, and got fastest overall lap of the day - an improbable occurrance to say the least. A pole, fastest lap and a feature win yields 27 points, which COULD happen. Either way, I was going to have to have a pretty disastrous day to get toppled (although I had one last week, so I was pretty determined not to repeat). Even finishing dead last, I would have gotten SOME points.

In the end, the story was written by the end of the first heat of qualifying. I won another pole. There was no way I could lose enough points, even coming last in the feature, to be at risk.

So why aren't I jumping up and down with glee? Well, because while I may have won the war, its only because I bombed the shit out of the competition early. The latter half of the season has been pretty dismal, and tonight was no different. I came in with a bang, but I'm ending on a whimper.

I started on the pole, I led the first 10 laps. Then, something ridiculous and out of my control (or at least, out of my ability to figure out how to fix, yet) took me from the lead to 5th. Not so bad, I was still within striking distance, and I'd come back from worse deficits. But instead of shaking it off and going for it, I fell apart. My race went to pieces. If the season had been riding on today's race, I would be off the podium, out of contention, mediocre once more.

So maybe right now I don't really feel like I DESERVE a championship. Some will argue that I earned it, that I did well enough early on to allow myself to relax a bit coming down the backstretch. But the truth is, I got lucky, end of story. People had to miss races for other things, or got taken out by psychotic drivers.

So yes, next Sunday, my name will go down in the books as the Champion of the 2009-2010 Winter EuroStock Season. But right now I don't feel like a winner. Maybe that makes me obsessive and perfectionistic, but that's part of who I am. At least it should shut some of the critics up.

Why I'm here

I'm one of those people that has to talk things out. I don't necessarily need answers, I just need to express what I'm feeling, even if nobody is really paying attention. Getting things off my chest helps.

So, I figured I'd get myself a blog.

I'll toss up some fun things I'm up to, events I'm taking part in, news, random writings and musings, and whatever else the mood may move me to talk about. Feel free to follow along, make some comments, or just enjoy the read.