Archive for March, 2009

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The Best Advice

March 31st, 2009 by Manda | 5 Comments | Filed in Life

Last week, a few things in real life went a little bit astray, leaving me feeling stressed, nauseated, and sick. All I wanted to do was stay in bed forever and ever and not have to face the world. I had never felt like that before, and it scared me1. Even though I knew why I felt emotionally drained and unequipped to deal with life, it was still an awful, awful feeling, to not want to get up and get on with my daily life. All I wanted to do was hide in my bed and not leave my room, possibly forever.

Everyone has days like that, ones where the desire to stay in bed and avoid the world is greater than the desire to get up and proceed to deal with daily life. Only those days don’t occur to me very often, if at all, and I was freaked out that I was feeling this way. I had no idea what to do, or how worried I should be, or even if something was wrong with me. Filled with doubt and uncertainty, I decided that I should call my mother and ask her for advice, because I was terrified of what all of this meant, if it meant anything.

I explained my situation to my mom, and she gave me the best advice I could have gotten in that situation. She told me that I needed to get out of bed and face the world, because the longer I stayed in bed and shied away from everyone and everything, the bigger and scarier it would seem. I had to take steps to be strong, and get over whatever fear I had of facing the world and just march on with life. And even though I hoped she would tell me it was okay to stay in bed forever and ever, she was right. I couldn’t let things affect me to the point where it crippled the way I deal with my daily lifestyle. And the first step to doing that was getting out of bed.

It was really the best advice.

  1. Not to worry though, it was only a very brief phase and everything has since worked itself out. [↩]

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Don’t Click It

March 30th, 2009 by Manda | 3 Comments | Filed in Online

Way back in the day when I had a PC desktop, I broke my mouse. Well, the mouse itself wasn’t broken, but I could no longer left-click on anything since I had broken the clicker1. While keyboard shortcuts are useful, they can’t replace every function that is available with the click of a mouse, and so I had to go into the computer store and get a new mouse so I could happily click away at my computer.

Don’t Click It is a website that has an entirely click-free interface. It’s set up to explore the concept of having to click to get to a new page on a website, and instead of clicking on a link, you only need to hover your mouse over the link to be taken to the new link. There is some nifty stuff abut the history of clicking online, as well as site statistics2 about visitors that click on Don’t Click It.

If I had known that Don’t Click It had existed when my mouse died, then I could have browsed at least one website with my dead mouse clicker!

  1. I am sure there are more technical terms for my story of the broken mouse clicker, but I’ve no idea what they are! [↩]
  2. After a few minutes of surfing at Don’t Click It, a box appears asking you whether or not you miss the clicking interface [↩]

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Underlying Sexual Tension

March 29th, 2009 by Manda | 6 Comments | Filed in Friends, Question of the Week, Relationships

A guy and a girl can be just friends, but at one point or another, they will fall for each other… maybe temporarily, maybe at the wrong time, maybe too late, or maybe forever.
- Dave Matthews

The majority of my good friends are male, and while I have been only friends with almost all of them (as in, there has been no romantic history between us), some of my good male friends and I have experimented with being in a relationship, with varying results. While there were different reasons for each relationship not working out, I have remained on good terms with all of my exes, even if the initial transition from boyfriend/girlfriend to friends was a little rocky. Still, though, I feel that regardless of whether or not I have dated my good male friends, there’s a certain element of attraction between us. It doesn’t matter how small or overwhelming this sense of attraction is, but the fact remains that it is there.

After years of maintaining that boys and girls can be friends without any sexual tension becoming involved, my experiences in high school and college have slowly changed my mind. I think that if a guy and a girl are really good friends, there is some degree of underlying sexual tension between the two. That doesn’t mean that either have to act upon this tension, or that it will even make a difference in the friendship, but it is still there, no matter how much tension exists. In some cases, it might require a delicate balancing act between the two parties to take care that neither slip into the dangerous “more than friends” territory, especially if the other only views the person as a friend, or weeks and months and years might pass before one realizes that all along, they’ve loved the other as more than a friend for all this time.

Question of the Week: Do you think two people of the opposite sex can be friends without any attraction whatsoever?

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