oats_son
12hr ago
What razor do you use? And what is the process for shaving that you use to cut yourself the least?
I used to shave every 2 or 3 days in high school. I didn't use any shaving cream, I just got in a hot shower and then either shaved afterwards, splashing hot water on my face, or shaved while I was in the shower. These days, I just use hair clippers to clip my face. It works okay, but I should do it more often. But I think I should probably start getting close shaves again.
oats_son
2d ago
I don't know if I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm not looking to date right now because I still have not moved out yet. I got a job and paid off all my debts, but I have not moved out yet. That said, more practice making friends quickly will be helpful, so I will be re-joining the gym soon, both for that and also to lift weights diligently because I gave up learning languages and find that I have a ton of extra time. Also I'm going to be trying both the social connection strategy and the dating app strategy at the same time, because they complement each other.
I don't know if I like the advice to start martial arts. I took Tae Kwon Do from 10 years old to 16 years old. When I was a kid, Tae Kwon Do was simple fun, and you got McDonald's afterwards. But starting at about 15, my brother and I were the only adult males in the class; all the other postpubescent males had quit in the years previous. Whenever we sparred, it was him and me; I discovered the first incidence of male rage in these sparring matches. If I took a direct blow to my (padded) head, or experienced some other minor ass-kicking, I found that I was so angry afterwards that I could not speak, otherwise I would reveal the tears that had involuntarily welled up in my throat. This was how it was in most tournaments. I do not like this feeling. I felt the same feeling playing baseball in my senior year, when I was 18; I never even played catch with anyone before, so it was a sharp learning curve, and I don't think I did poorly in those circumstances, but I failed a lot and continued to misplay for the admittedly pretty bad baseball team, and every time I was the source of a bad inning, I would get very mad. I remember more than one game, we would all get in a circle and take a knee, and my face was involuntarily contorting itself in sheer rage. No tears that time, though.
I dunno. Maybe I'm mature enough to handle it now. I don't get mad at Tarkov or DayZ like I might have, and those fill me with adrenaline. But I do get mad and start shaking due to nerves if I break up my dogs fighting and one of them bites my arm in the chaos, though it doesn't help that I consider their continued fighting to be an unresolved serious issue creating tension in my life.
oats_son
2d ago
I have been doing some more thinking, and I think the "no sex before marriage" thing was predicated on a lot of things: that people got married really early on, that parents could much more closely watch their kids to ensure nothing bad happened, and that they could not easily get divorced. I think evangelical Christianity misses some of the nuances, and unfortunately, male evolutionary psychology also doesn't appreciate that people tend to have more sexual relationships now, on average.
There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.
Yeah, that probably describes me. Thanks for writing this, helps me feel more normal. I've been thinking about sex a lot more lately now that getting married seems possible for me, but I do still want it to only happen with someone I'm fairly serious with. I just don't know how long I should wait once the relationship starts, or how long the particular woman will tolerate.
oats_son
2d ago
Wow, this is good advice! I saw some notifications and thought "damn, the AAQC must have brought more attention to this embarrassing thread", but thanks for the input.
I have had friend groups composed of "losers" with no cross-sex appeal, and I also saw possible friendships locally and watched them go by because they were with "losers". I get along with losers, but if I'm going to be friends with losers, they may as well be the most maximally entertaining to me, and I already have maximally entertaining losers (they're not really losers, they just can't really help me) in my online friend groups.
oats_son
4d ago
I agree with your point. I think using my father to make it was not very effective, though.
oats_son
5d ago
My experiences do not call into question the statement's validity. As @RenOS pointed out, my dad was not really a traditionalist, or at least, not a traditionalist of any tradition I know about. He started a family and kept cutting off any of his own social connections he had made. He didn't go to church. He had us go to the state park with a bunch of milk jugs to fill up drinking water from the spigots there. One year, he got obsessed with nitrogen and fertilizers and chemistry and had us all piss into milk jugs and buckets. I remember, once, the fellow Tae Kwon Do pupils were in the same car as me swinging by my house, perhaps to drop me off after a tournament, and wondered about the dark yellow liquid jugs lined up by the clothes line. They wondered "is that lemonade?". I don't remember what I responded with. Dad was immersed in something other than a conservative culture. Dad still is immersed in something other than a conservative culture. He browses extremist websites every day. He set up an office in the barn with a window AC unit for his elderly grandparents because the actual house is apparently not finished enough to live in (or, since his computer, his bed, and his TV are in the house, maybe he just doesn't want to be bothered by them?). He has spent years doing minor work on the house, and it still isn't finished. The toilet broke, so he set up a "bio-toilet" that doesn't need to be cleaned or piped anywhere or anything expensive like that. He doesn't pay for trash pickup, he just burns what he can and sets non-burnables aside in its own large dumpster. There are bullet casings all over the ground.
I think I'd describe him as "extremely anti-social with paranoid narcissistic tendencies" before I'd describe him as a traditionalist.
Great advice. I also don't want to screw around with straight razors, both because I'm a wuss, and also because it sounds like a big fuckin' waste of time learning how to sharpen it and shit. But the irritation was something I also struggled with. If you put on cologne or something, it would sting like hell. I think I have a boar bristle brush, too... Thanks.
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