i am no wimpy scaredy cat.

you do me wrong now, my love is strong now…

at this moment in ‘history’ i feel like our society is dictated, in an unruly way, by fear. fear of rejection, fear of disappointment, fear of inadequacy, fear of unimportance, fear of vulnerability, fear of success. fear.

and i honestly believe that we are here, in this societal place, because of a lack of love. i know, so naive of me. but it’s true. a lack of love for ourselves, and for others.

when we perceive that  lack of love, it only causes us to hold on to our love, and keep it for ourselves, and therefore not give it away. to anyone. perpetuating a lack of love for each other. which leads to more fear that we won’t be love by another, allowing us to justify further our clinging to our own love.

and all fear stems the same way. from a lack of perceived love. so what do we do? hold onto our love out of fear that a) we’ll have nothing if we give it away, and b) worse, that someone may not actually want it.

and now a days this seems to manifest itself in strong, successful, single twenty/thirty somethings choosing to stay single or to focus on their career, or to play it cool for love and connection. all stemming from a fear that they will not be loved.

recently, i made a decision to identify fear in my own actions as soon as possible, and to own it, and address it head on. overcoming a fear, of any size or importance is empowering, and actually creates self love, which ‘fills up’ our love levels allowing us to feel more comfortable giving it away. to anyone. Read the rest of this entry »

crushing.

young hearts spark fire, all night. oh yea. oh yea.

i have a crush.

i don’t know him, really.

but, nonetheless, i hope to see him around.

crushes are weird. they are exciting, they give you hope, they add fun to everyday life. but having been single for so long now, and honestly, not having met many people in that so long that i would want to stop being single with, there is something scary about having a crush. like what if this goes somewhere? what would that mean? (spiral spiral spiral)

and i know it seems extreme that i’m even talking about this, especially because i don’t know said boy, but now is exactly WHEN i think about this stuff. because crushing, in and of itself, is fun. what is not fun is when something happens that is real enough to push that crush onto the 5 yrd line of the possibility zone. because then shit’s on the line. that is where something that is said or done could make or break it. ultimately, that is where rejection becomes factor. that is where a crush moves into a possibility of dating, or going on a date.

it’s kind of nice, actually having a new crush. but the thing is, i don’t know him. and when i think about getting to know him i get all weird and freaked about rejection. and this is all happening before ieven know him. because i meet so few boys that i crush on, the possible rejection that comes from a crush these days oddly holds a higher level of possible affectedness. meaning, that rejection holds more power than if i were meeting smart, handsome, funny boys all over the place every single day. it’s a numbers game. the less chances, the more value each chance acquires. therefore, just the thought of something making this crush move into the possibility zone is mildly paralyzing.

but, um, HELLO i am not going to let a chance at something good pass me by because of fear. that’s for sissy marys. but i am going to blab it all out here to get it out of me and move on.

because i don’t even know him.

but, neither does anyone i know. which is also nice for a change. avoiding the normal incest that comes with dating and my group of friends.

so i have a crush. and randomly thinking about this boy that i don’t know gives me hope that i’m not broken. i do know how to maybe be interested in someone in this city. cause it’s been a long time since that’s happened.

also, i love my neighborhood.

we used to dream, and now we worry about dying. i don’t wanna worry about dying… i just wanna worry about those sunshine [boys].

young hearts spark fire. japandroids.

when life shoves brown paint down your throat you can choose to paint a pile of poop… or a teddy bear. or you start with poop and turn it into a teddy bear.

either way, this has been a month for the record books. basically, my daily mantra has been: “the universe knows what it’s doing steph, trust it, give in to it, and let it play out. also, trust yourself, and your intuition to guide you as to how it will play out.”

this weekend, i dove head first back into writing on stephdub.com. with datenight demanding much of my attention, i had left stephdub to thrive off of one very controversial and comment gathering post. i felt inspired and in touch with stephdub the writer. so i wrote, and posted on a saturday evening. when i knew that no one would be around to read it.

sunday morning i went to log into my site analytics to see how many un-noone’s did read the post, and my page was giving me this crazy weird error. so i sent a nonchalant email with a screen shot inquiring about the error.

i leave, have a wonderful and craft packed sunday and come home to watch bored to death and reply to a comment on my post that came in the night before.

at which point i see a 403 error on stephdub.com. and then i see someone tweet about not being able to access stephdub.com.

so i text @gerardramos, try not to worry, and go to bed.

at 10:38am i receive this text: ***king hard drive’s crashed. they are working on getting the data and restoring.
i respond: oh nooooo, i’m sorry, is that as terrible as i think it is? (thinking, well if they are restoring the data, this is one hell of a nightmare that will blow over for me, but be a royal pain in the ass for g.)

at 1:51pm his response: it’s way worse than you think :(

at 2:58pm my blackberry buzzes with an email titled “complete failure.”

i open it to find, among a few others, these paragraphs:
Over the weekend the server was hit with an attack.  One by one, the services were brought down and eventually all data was corrupted.  When the backups ran over night, they were corrupted as well and both hard drives crashed to an un-recoverable state.

The company will not send me the drives because of security issues and they do not have data recovery services internally. They did what they could, but there is nothing left. 

apparently, this is a similar thing that happened to ma.gnolia a few months ago. the recovery process… well, what recovery process?

it’s time to scavenge what’s in google’s cache and dive back into getting stephdub back up and running. a.sap.

and as i read that email i was oddly calm. and said ok, universe… i trust you.

you see, october has handed me doozy after doozy. and i have thrown my hands up, embracing this crazy crooked path with all of the love and trust i have in me.

it started, actually, in september. g and i were spending a sunday afternoon, post brunch, chatting about dating, business, success and progress as i prepared for datenight radio. we reflected on how stephdub.com had been going strong for a year and a half, and how far it, well, i’d come.

when he convinced me that fateful day in May 2008, to make all of my writing public, and start stephdub.com i had just quit my job, moved across the country, and was sleeping on a couch in a dear friend’s bedroom. how was i going to start a site? well, thanks to a good friend all i had to do was register stephdub.com, play in photoshop one sunday afternoon drive down the coast to create a “logo,” and have him set up my wordpress account and host it on his server.

and there i was, a year and a half later, with a radio show, a content filled blog, and a paying job discussing that it was maybe time to ‘revamp’ stephdub.com. time to incorporate datenight and my podcasts with shades of perspective and my writing. but where to begin? i still only had a couple hundred dollars to actually spend on any sort of upgrading… in what area do i spend it?
an actual logo or printable image for stephdub/shades of perspective/datenight?
some sort of site design?

and even when i made that decision, who will do the work? see you all, my designer friends in SF. you’re too badass for me. i can’t afford you. and i respect friendships too much to ask for favors…and i know your work is worth way more than i have to spend.

either way life was good. the weekend after this was my birthday party, and g’s birthday party. i was excited to party hardy and then get back on the exciting track to success with datenight and stephdub.com.

and then it started. without going into too much detail, i had to make a very difficult decision. one that created a battle between my rational, pragmatic self and my intuition. i wrestled with what to do for a while, ultimately choosing intuition and signs i would love to have ignored and…

i quit my radio show. i am no longer a dj at pirate cat radio.

like i said, there were many factors that went into this decision, but it was the right one. since, however, it was such a challenging decision, i didn’t really tell anyone. i needed to sit with it. i needed to process it and own it.

and this past weekend, i started telling a few close friends.

i also threw myself back into writing. and started planning on continuing datenight, in simply podcast form.

and then this.

i lose stephdub.com.
it is a message, universe? well i hear it loud and clear: “step up, steph. keep pushing.”

so here i am thinking… i have a clean slate. and a little bit of money, and a long ass october almost behind me.
what do i do next? well, i decided to put it out there to you… the interwebs, the twitterverse…. my friends.
i see this as the perfect opportunity to rebrand stephdub. or, well, create a brand.

and i’m asking for your help.

with my refusal to risk affecting important friendships by asking any specific friends for help or favors i will put my request right here, for anyone to accept, or adjust, process or deny.

i would like to start fresh with stephdub.com and datenight: i have limited (and i mean limited) funding (like a few hundred dollars) and want to put it towards any or all of the following things:
new site desgin
wordpress theme
logo/s
image/branding (instead of logo)

so- do you have a little free time and want to gain good karma by just donating your badass talent to the stephdub fund? are you a college student, or intern (or know one) that needs a final project? do you have any designers hanging out in your back pocket ;)? are you unemployed, getting paid by the government and want to build your portfolio but you just need a project to do it with? do you love hearts and the color black and like to doodle/sketch while on break from your high paying clients?

if you think you are any of the above, or you know someone that would categorize themselves as any of the above i swear this will be easy and fun and gain you major props by the universe.
if not. that’s cool. cause i’ll totally figure this shit out.

but a very successful saleslady friend of mine always says, “if you don’t ask, the answer is always no.”

all my love,

<3 stephdub

i am, um maybe, um, not interested in you romantically?

and i don’t want ambivalence no more, i don’t want ambivalence no more, i don’t want ambivalence no more, no i don’t want ambivalence no more.

so i’ve got a ton to write about, but after a friend called me today stressing about an encounter that he had with a girl this weekend i knew i needed to start here.

girls are bad at rejecting boys. ok. that’s way to general of a statement. but after this weekend, i realize that letting someone know that you are not interested in them is much more difficult than boys give girls credit for.

i will say, now with more certainty than ever, that i am not good at letting a boy know that i am not interested. and most likely i did not realize that he WAS interested until i’ve inadvertently acted overly fun and friendly, cause that’s just who i am.

maybe it is my own fear of rejection- i can’t bring myself to inflict that on someone. maybe i’m a coward and preach honestly and ownership of feelings but don’t practice it. maybe i attract very confident boys that can’t imagine me not being into them. but i seem to get myself into the predicament of needing to let someone know i’m not interested, um, way too late. but being blatantly honest that i am not interested is ridiculously hard.

and i have two theories on why it is hard. they both apply to me, but the latter i think applies to hetero dating overall.

so, yea, i write a relationship blog, mostly about my single life. and my possible desperation, possible fear, probable longing and definite dreaming of meeting the one. and i’m now on the radio, soliciting dates from cute boys with beards and bikes to anyone that will listen. and that’s me. i’m single. though i despise to say it, some would call me flirty. i’m hopelessly romantic. gregariously extroverted. defective in my need for privacy. and impossibly picky.

i do believe that sometimes the most crucial personality aspect, impossibly picky, is often (apparently) buried deep deep under all the former stephisms. but. it. is. the. bedrock. of. who. i. am.

one of my employees said something to me that was so simple, yet so profoundly right i had to take a moment to process it. he said, “for someone so low maintenance, you sure are picky.”

well there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. stephdub to a tee.

so what’s this mean? it means that when my emotionally open, carefree, fun-loving, compassionate, easy to relate with, outgoing personality is paired with my propensity for meeting new people constantly, talking about my single hood, and DESIRE for a date- we have a recipe for disaster.

the girl that, if you don’t know her well, is ASKING for dates, but has a problem telling people that she is not interested in them.

and this is a problem because unfortunately we have this saying, and belief in our society that beggars can’t be choosers. therefore, if i am asking for a date- who am i to be picky enough to want to be attracted, physically and mentally my date? that is, apparently, too much to ask for. but as my amazing sales person girlfriend says, “if you don’t ask, the answer’s always no.” duh. so YEA. i am asking for my cake, and i SURE AS HELL am going to eat it too. AND just because i’m asking for it does NOT mean that i am desperate for it.

until then though, i do believe that i will have to become more comfortable letting people know i’m not interested. breaking hearts if you will (says my new and non forgiving group of friends who like to laugh at others’ hardships. ;)

there it is. i am open about my desire to meet the one, and all of my trials and tribulations in dating, thereby attracting many more (than maybe normally would) boys to try and hang out. and sometimes i see it from a mile away. and sometimes i am way too far into what i think is friendship and then i get wimpy and freak. i freak because i most likely care well enough for the person as a friend, just am not interested romantically.

but like my friend said today. he’d rather know. rejection is better than not knowing, not showing, or not going.

the OTHER thing that just doesn’t help my cause is that we live in a heteronormative society where masculine and manly roles are not only present but expected to be enacted. and in dating, these roles include being the initiator. it’s the norm for the guy to ask the girl out. it’s expected. and i will go as far to say that it’s expected for him to be aggressive in his pursuit. well, an aggressive guy is much more difficult to turn down than an non aggressive one. especially to someone that just wants to be nice and lovey and caring and not mean.

so, in the car today i was thinking about the fact that boys should just wait for girls to show them that they are interested. and i thought about the fact that i am often the initiator/have no problems tellings boys i like them.

until i realized that was the old me. that was the college aged stephdub. that was pre crazy schema creating relationship that created the “play it too cool” stephdub.

so i’ve talked myself into a contradictory circle. i have a problem telling boys that i’m not into, that i’m not into them. but i have a problem showing boys that i am into, that i am. ummm, can i get a whomp whomp?

and there’s a shadow in the sky, and it looks like rain, and shit is gonna fly once again, and I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but pathos has got me once again…

know your non-negotiables.

can we make out and pretend it’s all there? cause you know, i’ve been waiting for something that hasn’t come through but it might come along soon and until that, you will do.

recently i’ve been thinking a lot about the things i want and need in relationships (in general, not just romantic). and i am reminded of a single, yet overwhelmingly powerful, sentence that i heard last year around this time. it was almost year ago that i had a life changing week at the Smart Marriages Conference. that i was surrounded by others that feel as strongly about the same things that i do. and believe in my ability to make a difference in the world.

anyway. a very smart marriage therapist said quite simply, “you’ve got to know your non-negotiables in relationships.”

what does this mean? well i’ll start with the fact that they say that people with similar backgrounds and values are more likely to succeed in relationships. and, incase putting words to the  not so tangible concept of ‘values’ is hard for you i’ll define values: 1. a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life, 2. the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance orpreciousness of something.

values are the CORNERSTONE of relationships. yet, when do we really begin to talk values with someone? once we’ve been dating them for a while, or at least hung out a few times. this social norm seems to be contradictory to everything we know to be important to the success of a relationship. shouldn’t we be basing our desire to continue a relationship on the fact that our ’standards of what’s important in life’ are the same? not whether or not we locked eyes across the bar or grocery store. don’t get me wrong, attraction is important. very important. but why do we treat it MORE importantly then values? our principles in LIFE.

have you ever been asked to describe your values in life? i’m not talking about what you’re looking for in the perfect partner (cause that usually goes something like this- smart, attractive, good sense of humor, kind, successful, etc.). i mean, have you ever really said aloud your list of guiding principles of LIFE. most people haven’t, nonetheless even thought through them completely. only after you have consciously decided what you value in life can you really begin to understand what you want and need in a partner and relationship. (remember, i am NOT just talking romantic relationships.)

we all know that i’m big on accountability, and consciousness of one’s actions at all times. so i really wonder how it is that we blindly enter relationships based on attraction, or proximity, and leave the basic building blocks of importance out of our decision to move forward in a relationship. (so, i know i’m leaving out one of my favorite not so little things in life- connection, but i will argue that connection is created with a basic understanding of one’s OWN values…even if it is unconscious.)

i’m not saying that we leave out completely our values in dating. not at all. i’m just saying that it seems like we’ve got the order of how things should go all wrong. doesn’t it seem silly to create bonds and connection based on something other than values, with the possibility that eventually it may come out that our values are not aligned?

i know sometimes i go off idealistically of how we all could have the perfect romantic relationships, and acknowledge that it would absolutely be very awkward socially to discuss values within minutes of meeting someone. i get that. but, have you ever begun dating someone, and start to like them, to then find out that you have very differing views on something important to you. here’s an example. i have a friend that is very very very involved in and passionate about politics. her friends know this, and many parts of her life include political elements. so, she meets this guy through a friend of a friend of ours. and they totally hit it off. are very attracted to one another. they go down the normal path to begin dating. and then she finds out through a friend that he belongs to the ‘other’ political party. and she freaks. why? cause she likes him. and now there is no way they can possibly continue in her mind. and she’s disappointed.

where am i going with all this if i am NOT suggesting a mass social norm readjustment that includes awkwardly talking values at moment one?

right here: know your non-negotiables. it is that simple. ask yourself what you value. write down your guiding principles for life. out of those decide which of these you are not willing to give up or compromise in any, especially romantic, relationship.

do this BEFORE you start dating anyone. if you are currently dating or married to someone. do it now as a DISCUSSION with your partner. if you are single complete your list of nonnegotiables RIGHT THIS SECOND. before you even set eyes on another person. ever have the chance of meeting anyone new.

why is this so time sensitive? why am i urgently asking you to act? because if you don’t do this before you start a relationship the less likely you are to be adamant about deserving those things, or ‘wanting’ or ‘needing’ them in a relationship.

because connection and attraction are important things just like values. and the way society has evolved these things happen BEFORE any sort of value discussion. and when we get to know someone, and connect on other things the more we begin to believe that if we are not getting one of our values, or not aligned with our partner that it doesn’t matter. passion, and love and connection and love and caring screw with our heads. we end up making decisions in relationships (friendships and romantic) that are based on the fact that we care about the other person, not the fact that we need/want/deserve/value something. and in most positive friendships we often give to and care for our partner (friend or dating) as much or more than to ourselves- cause that is love at it’s most basic.

but that is where love will trick you. if you don’t know your list of values, of non-negotiables (the things you are not willing to give up in a relationship) BEFORE you enter a relationship… love will likely cloud your rationale and you’ll be confused as to what you really value because of the connection and care you have between you.

know.your.non-negotiables.before.you.enter.a.relationship. w r i t e  t h e m  d o w n.

it will save you heartache, resentment, self blame, sadness, disappointment, and lost connection.

i’ll take you to the movies
yell at you when you’re late
you can sigh when i shower for too long
hold up the bathroom so that you have to wait
invite people over for dinner
make up names for kids we could have had
and when we get drunk, we can get it together
go home too early, everyone will say we’re sad
i can’t believe it’s not love!