2016 is coming to a close, and I have decided to create an ultimatum. I have decided to give SoHo in Tampa just one more chance before the year ends. Just one more. That will be this Thursday, the 29th. If things don't go well, if I don't genuinely feel like I'm having fun or having a good time, if I feel like shit when I'm there or when I come home, then that will be the end of it - I will not be present in the SoHo nightlife in 2017. Hell, this could mean that during Gasparilla I could just go out of town for that weekend, even considering going to Miami - a place I vowed never to go back to - for their salsa congress.
Ever since I moved to Tampa, SoHo was the place I primarily hung out at. It's the place where PUA bootcamp instructors would take their students if there ever was a PUA bootcamp in Tampa. I've gone out, I had fun, but I struggled way more than I felt I should have. Still, I wanted to move to the SoHo area since I started hanging out there, and this past year I finally got to - only to no longer want to hang out in SoHo and go elsewhere. This mainly happened after falling out of the Good Looking Loser program, having an overall bad experience on the Miami 5-day bootcamp that I had a lot of hope for, and just dropping pickup altogether. I keep thinking maybe dropping pickup was a mistake and I should have stuck with it, but the truth is I wasn't doing myself good when I was in it; I wasn't being authentic with myself and at the end of the day I wasn't doing much better. Lot had changed as well in SoHo with the removal of authentic Latin nights at the clubs and changes to karaoke nights this past year.
The truth is I no longer have to go out to SoHo; there are better venues elsewhere in Tampa and even in Orlando. I still justify going to SoHo however because now I'm within walking distance, but it's like this past year especially I never liked going out and dealing with moron douchebags and stuckup bitchy women.
Thursday I'm going all out. I have that day off from work, I have the next day off from work. I have no excuse not to go all out. This will be a day when I really will use a full dosage of Phenibut, which I have not used yet save one small dose a couple weeks ago. This time I'll use the full benefit of the Phenibut, to help me get through the pain periods, the anxiety, and things that make me feel awful whenever I go out to these venues. All I gotta say is if Phenibut does little to nothing to help me out, help me make the night as awesome as I'd like it to be, then nothing will. Absolutely nothing will. Not in my current state, nothing. I would have to undergo a DRASTIC change in order for things to change. That means developing a beneficial social circle among other things.
So will Thursday night be the last night in SoHo? I will write all about it, what happened, whether the phenibut helped or not, etc.
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Using Phenibut
Aaron Sleazy posted a recent blog entry about Nootropics, and one of the most common that kept getting mentioned was phenibut. You can read the article here:
http://blog.aaronsleazy.com/index.php/2016/12/04/open-discussion-nootropics/
Ever since I started going out, I never took any anti-anxiety supplements or drugs or whatever. All I did was drink, and I usually only drink beer when I go out; never hard liquor except on occasion. When I do drink, I usually cut it off at 2-4 because it gets too expensive and I feel groggy when I drink too much alcohol. Plus I have a high tolerance for alcohol. In other words, it does little to nothing to help with whatever anxiety I have in place.
So this is where a drug like phenibut comes in. I ordered 200 g of it from LiftMode and am looking forward to trying it out and see how it effects me. I don't know how much I need to take in order for it to have any effect on me, but hopefully it will suppress at least most of the anxiety I feel when I go out to a venue where there's a lot of hot women or when I'm dancing with a hot girl I could potentially make out with. Right now, it's so out of control that it's just crippling, and nothing I can do on my own right now is really helping. Hopefully something like this helps. I even had friends tell me about their experiences with it and it sounds like a big secret of many guys when they go out.
I'll update everyone when I get it and try it out the first time. Hopefully it will push me to a successful night.
Saturday, November 26, 2016
On Rejection
I keep meaning to write in this blog, but I keep putting it off because of the time and focus commitment. I'm thinking I should go back to video blogs, which were much easier to make because all I had to do was ramble in front of a camera for however long. Just need to free up a lot of the storage on my phone.
Rejection is a subject that has risen to the top of the lists this year especially, and has been the key challenge I have faced especially when it comes to meeting and dating women. This hasn't just been the case with pickup, but this has been the case across the board.
To put it bluntly, I don't deal with rejection very well - at least not with women. I don't think I ever handled it well. Even as a kid, I hated the idea of going over to a friends' house and knocking on the door to ask if so-and-so is there, fearing that said friend wasn't there or couldn't come out to play, etc. and have the door slammed on my face or feel embarrassed for some reason. I even feared going up to the counter at a store to ask for something as simple as a refill on a drink (this was back when most places you had to ask for a refill at the counter and only a handful had the self-serve fountain drinks). Maybe it was because I was told no one time harshly or because I was afraid of people who worked somewhere because I was a little kid, or whatever. I remember having to get my mom, dad or sister to come up to the counter with me whenever I wanted something.
Now obviously I don't have these sort of anxiety issues today, but with women it's still a major issue. I think it's an issue for this reason - women reject guys, and guys who put themselves out there risk the chance of getting shot down hard. When I was in elementary and middle school, I never asked any girl out. I really wasn't in any position to date anyways, but I thought the ridicule would have been too great if I got shot down and I wouldn't have been able to live with the embarrassment. What I would do was obsess over one girl every year, thinking it would be nice to go out with that girl but not doing so - not because of the fear of rejection but because of what ridicule I would face if I did get involved. News travels fast, and I wasn't exactly the most popular kid in school. In high school, things did get a tad bit better, but it was still more of the same obsessing over one girl a year. In fact, this whole obsessing over one girl a year didn't stop until just five years ago, when I started learning pickup. I learned how bad oneitis is, and I will give pickup credit for helping me rid myself of that. However, I think one of the reasons why I had the oneitis in the first place was because I thought the girl was the best match at the time and yet I still didn't want to screw things up.
Pickup didn't make my fear of rejection go away. It may have subdued it a little. It may have allowed me to take more risks. But the truth of the matter is it in some ways made things worse. See when it comes to rejection, pickup companies are not clear on what they want to teach men and many times just outright contradict their own advice. I would say just about all of them have no problems giving a long ass speech about how guys should not fear rejection but should embrace it, take it on, just get as many rejections as possible because that's how you learn not to care, etc. However, once that speech is over, then they'll get into tactics, strategies, gimmicks, etc. on what body language you should convey, what you should be doing while you're out, what you should say to a girl when you approach her, how you should go about asking for the number, etc. and the more mainstream pickup groups will even go as far as telling you that you can switch on attraction triggers with any girl and if you don't then you executed step 2-B wrong or some bullshit like that. I know it's all to sell overpriced ebooks and videos and even more overpriced bootcamps, because if you just tell guys to be themselves and stop looking to women for approval and screen girls out, they wouldn't be in business. This idea of "ploughing through" has never worked. Sure, maybe a girl might not be agreeable at first, but if she flat out doesn't like you, there really isn't any super technique you can do to change that. It's better to be your real self instead of putting on a front as a means to avoid rejection and get what I call fake success. I mean, if you're an accountant for example, and you have to make up some story about how you are a professional assassin because some pickup guru told you to say that because she would think you're boring otherwise, isn't that not only being inauthentic but downright missing the point? It also made meeting women into a spectator sport.
I think I need to stop at this for now. There's so much more I want to say on it, but I'm running a marathon tomorrow. If I survive, I will speak more of this later.
Rejection is a subject that has risen to the top of the lists this year especially, and has been the key challenge I have faced especially when it comes to meeting and dating women. This hasn't just been the case with pickup, but this has been the case across the board.
To put it bluntly, I don't deal with rejection very well - at least not with women. I don't think I ever handled it well. Even as a kid, I hated the idea of going over to a friends' house and knocking on the door to ask if so-and-so is there, fearing that said friend wasn't there or couldn't come out to play, etc. and have the door slammed on my face or feel embarrassed for some reason. I even feared going up to the counter at a store to ask for something as simple as a refill on a drink (this was back when most places you had to ask for a refill at the counter and only a handful had the self-serve fountain drinks). Maybe it was because I was told no one time harshly or because I was afraid of people who worked somewhere because I was a little kid, or whatever. I remember having to get my mom, dad or sister to come up to the counter with me whenever I wanted something.
Now obviously I don't have these sort of anxiety issues today, but with women it's still a major issue. I think it's an issue for this reason - women reject guys, and guys who put themselves out there risk the chance of getting shot down hard. When I was in elementary and middle school, I never asked any girl out. I really wasn't in any position to date anyways, but I thought the ridicule would have been too great if I got shot down and I wouldn't have been able to live with the embarrassment. What I would do was obsess over one girl every year, thinking it would be nice to go out with that girl but not doing so - not because of the fear of rejection but because of what ridicule I would face if I did get involved. News travels fast, and I wasn't exactly the most popular kid in school. In high school, things did get a tad bit better, but it was still more of the same obsessing over one girl a year. In fact, this whole obsessing over one girl a year didn't stop until just five years ago, when I started learning pickup. I learned how bad oneitis is, and I will give pickup credit for helping me rid myself of that. However, I think one of the reasons why I had the oneitis in the first place was because I thought the girl was the best match at the time and yet I still didn't want to screw things up.
Pickup didn't make my fear of rejection go away. It may have subdued it a little. It may have allowed me to take more risks. But the truth of the matter is it in some ways made things worse. See when it comes to rejection, pickup companies are not clear on what they want to teach men and many times just outright contradict their own advice. I would say just about all of them have no problems giving a long ass speech about how guys should not fear rejection but should embrace it, take it on, just get as many rejections as possible because that's how you learn not to care, etc. However, once that speech is over, then they'll get into tactics, strategies, gimmicks, etc. on what body language you should convey, what you should be doing while you're out, what you should say to a girl when you approach her, how you should go about asking for the number, etc. and the more mainstream pickup groups will even go as far as telling you that you can switch on attraction triggers with any girl and if you don't then you executed step 2-B wrong or some bullshit like that. I know it's all to sell overpriced ebooks and videos and even more overpriced bootcamps, because if you just tell guys to be themselves and stop looking to women for approval and screen girls out, they wouldn't be in business. This idea of "ploughing through" has never worked. Sure, maybe a girl might not be agreeable at first, but if she flat out doesn't like you, there really isn't any super technique you can do to change that. It's better to be your real self instead of putting on a front as a means to avoid rejection and get what I call fake success. I mean, if you're an accountant for example, and you have to make up some story about how you are a professional assassin because some pickup guru told you to say that because she would think you're boring otherwise, isn't that not only being inauthentic but downright missing the point? It also made meeting women into a spectator sport.
I think I need to stop at this for now. There's so much more I want to say on it, but I'm running a marathon tomorrow. If I survive, I will speak more of this later.
Thursday, November 24, 2016
What I have accomplished in 2016
2016 is a year that I feel overall has been a huge struggle, much like 2004, 2008 and 2011. The problem is I never focus on the good things that happen in these years, and in this past year and those three years I mentioned, I have accomplished quite a bit. Now I will take some time to discuss what I have accomplished this year:
1) I moved to South Tampa, something I was trying to do for the last 4 years or so.
2) I became more active and was more focused on exercise this year than in years past.
3) I finally got the chance to visit St. Augustine
4) I finally got to take a trip up to the mountains of North Carolina after not being able to do so in the past due to financial reasons
5) I got to visit New York again, this time on my own terms
6) I helped Donald Trump get elected president, making it the first time in 20 years that the person I wanted to win the presidential election actually won.
7) I became a concealed carry gun owner
8) I picked up fencing again, this time in the form of historical european martial arts
9) I didn't struggle financially nearly as much as I have in years past
10) I got promoted to supervisor at work
11) I signed up for my first marathon, which I will be running this weekend
So why do I think 2016 has been a huge struggle? As I have written before, it's because of the social aspect. I went into the year thinking it was going to finally be the year where I get over my problem with meeting/attracting/dating women by starting off the year pretty strong and thinking I was going to springboard myself after the week-long RSD bootcamp in Miami this past February. What happened was the exact opposite. What happened instead was that I gave up pickup altogether, I stopped going out to the venues I was practicing pickup except on rare occasion, and when I did go I did little to no approaching of women. I felt like instead of getting better I got worse, and I felt like I lost any source of motivation that I had as well as any form of parachute. To make matters worse it I have a roommate who won't shut up about things like "sarging" and obsesses over pickup, even though he's just mocking it. I get extremely irritated when he asks me if I went out sarging or some stupid shit like that.
So with that said, will I finally climb out of this rut? Hopefully now that I'm focused on it, things can turn for the better. After all, I'm pinpointing what my biggest issues are, and the biggest one I have is I don't handle rejection well at all.
I will write more about this later, but I just wanted to share these thoughts, and I want to blog more often.
Monday, October 24, 2016
2016 - A Rough Year
2016 has been one of the roughest years for me. It was a year where in the beginning thought that things were going to be awesome in how I finally got to move to the SoHo/Hyde Park area of Tampa (even if it meant crashing on my friend's couch for much of the year), how I was going to go on the Model Season Bootcamp with RSD, how the year was off to a really good start based on what happened over New Year's, etc. I thought when it came to dating and pickup and sex, there was no way I could fail and I was going to have one of the best years ever in that regard - I was going to pull girls left and right and I was going to be more engaged. What really happened though was the exact opposite. Around April, circumstances caused me to quit pickup for good after finding out that what I was doing was a huge waste of time, it was counterproductive, and I was just working too hard on trying to hook up with some girl. That led me to do other things such as focus on workouts, read all the time at Starbucks, and drive all the way to Orlando every weekend to go to a dance social.
Things also changed at the venues. They all but did away with karaoke, and latin nights are all but non-existent.
But alas, the year is not over yet. So what I've decided to do now that I'm moving to a new apartment in Hyde Park with my own bed and everything, I decided to go out four nights a week and just be there. I won't approach any women unless I feel like I absolutely should; in other words there won't be any forced approaches like there were in the past. The thing I can't control is how a girl reacts to me. I can't control what a girl thinks of me. What I CAN control however is something like how long I plan to stay out, and that is one of the biggest weak areas I deal with Afterall, 5-7 hours of doing almost nothing and being exposed in a loud, uncomfortable environment IS very difficult and I know it's going to take getting used to. I know it's going to take a lot of practice. I know at first I'm not going to want to do it. I know that I'm going to want to leave at the first sign of trouble, the first sign of boredom, the first sign I feel like I need to read or eat/drink something, etc. What I fail to realize however is that by leaving, I'm missing out. I'm sure I missed many chances at banging a girl by simply leaving too early or just not showing up at all.
This is what I'm going to do for at least a month. Going to go one month at 3-4 days per week. Let's see what happens in a month. If things don't change, I'll go for two months. Whatever happens, I cannot fail myself.
Things also changed at the venues. They all but did away with karaoke, and latin nights are all but non-existent.
But alas, the year is not over yet. So what I've decided to do now that I'm moving to a new apartment in Hyde Park with my own bed and everything, I decided to go out four nights a week and just be there. I won't approach any women unless I feel like I absolutely should; in other words there won't be any forced approaches like there were in the past. The thing I can't control is how a girl reacts to me. I can't control what a girl thinks of me. What I CAN control however is something like how long I plan to stay out, and that is one of the biggest weak areas I deal with Afterall, 5-7 hours of doing almost nothing and being exposed in a loud, uncomfortable environment IS very difficult and I know it's going to take getting used to. I know it's going to take a lot of practice. I know at first I'm not going to want to do it. I know that I'm going to want to leave at the first sign of trouble, the first sign of boredom, the first sign I feel like I need to read or eat/drink something, etc. What I fail to realize however is that by leaving, I'm missing out. I'm sure I missed many chances at banging a girl by simply leaving too early or just not showing up at all.
This is what I'm going to do for at least a month. Going to go one month at 3-4 days per week. Let's see what happens in a month. If things don't change, I'll go for two months. Whatever happens, I cannot fail myself.
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Pickup Is Not The Solution To The Problem; Pickup IS The Problem
I can literally write a whole novel about pickup, why I think it's a sham for many reasons, etc. For now I will only focus on a couple issues.
First of all, if you go into pickup being afraid of rejection and/or not handling rejection very well, chances are your fear is not going to go away and may even get worse. Sure, you might drop some of the insecurities you had such as looking good enough, not driving a hot sports car, etc. but now you have other insecurities - particularly performance anxiety. You now learn all these things about how women think and feel, what gets them turned on, etc. and now you feel the need to run this perfect, 'smooth' game if you want to get the girl. Furthermore, pickup companies can be complete and total hypocrites when it comes to the subject of rejection. They'll do these long videos and seminars on how you should just go out and get rejected all night long and how it's perfectly okay and everything, and it's actually a good thing because of the exposure you're getting, etc.. Okay, great. However, once that conversation is over, they then do a complete 180 and talk about tricks and tactics of what to say, how to dress, what body language you should be conveying, how you should always be in state, etc. Even on bootcamps, they'll chew out their students for getting rejected by a girl. Talk about double jeopardy! Just a hunch, but you say that you should just go out and embrace rejection and be okay with it and do it often, etc. etc. but now you're implying that it's a bad thing that needs to be avoided or at least minimized. They'll even draw in suckers by giving marketing spiels like how you're getting turned down often or not getting the best results because you haven't been listening to their advice and now you should pay $500 for their new online video series to help you do so. It's clever marketing, but it is unethical in the sense that it's manipulating guys in need. Guys who get caught up on things like text game or amplifying attraction or using the best canned openers/routines are learning anything but being okay with rejection.
The second thing I want to talk about is comparing yourself to other guys. If you had a problem comparing yourself to other guys before learning pickup, you're going to have a greater problem after. Many pickup companies make seducing women or even just trying to find a girlfriend out to be this great competitive sport, and this is even evidenced by shows like Keys To The VIP and The Pickup Artist. By learning pickup, you tend to think you learned all the secrets you wish you knew back in high school when you had a crush on the hottest girl in class and you couldn't even get close to her because you weren't even part of the in crowd. You think when you go out to a bar or club that you have a leg up because you discovered some crazy secrets on the Internet that most guys don't know about. When that turns out to not be the case, you beat yourself up. Where guys really try to compete against each other is out on the bootcamp, which in itself is not a good thing. You go out to these bars and clubs with these hot women you're instructed to approach, and you may befriend and wing with some of the guys on the bootcamp, but at the end of the day it's all going to come down to how you perform versus the other guys. Some pickup companies, especially from the old school pickup, will even make claims that every time a girl rejects you, it's because you messed something up in the interaction and that you should have control 100% of the time of what the girl thinks about you if you just run perfect game. When you don't, then you tend to beat yourself up. Is this a really good place to come from? For me personally, I've gone as far as avoiding going out for this very reason.
I can go on, but I'll leave it at this for now. I'm glad I'm moving past the pickup community because it is destructive.
First of all, if you go into pickup being afraid of rejection and/or not handling rejection very well, chances are your fear is not going to go away and may even get worse. Sure, you might drop some of the insecurities you had such as looking good enough, not driving a hot sports car, etc. but now you have other insecurities - particularly performance anxiety. You now learn all these things about how women think and feel, what gets them turned on, etc. and now you feel the need to run this perfect, 'smooth' game if you want to get the girl. Furthermore, pickup companies can be complete and total hypocrites when it comes to the subject of rejection. They'll do these long videos and seminars on how you should just go out and get rejected all night long and how it's perfectly okay and everything, and it's actually a good thing because of the exposure you're getting, etc.. Okay, great. However, once that conversation is over, they then do a complete 180 and talk about tricks and tactics of what to say, how to dress, what body language you should be conveying, how you should always be in state, etc. Even on bootcamps, they'll chew out their students for getting rejected by a girl. Talk about double jeopardy! Just a hunch, but you say that you should just go out and embrace rejection and be okay with it and do it often, etc. etc. but now you're implying that it's a bad thing that needs to be avoided or at least minimized. They'll even draw in suckers by giving marketing spiels like how you're getting turned down often or not getting the best results because you haven't been listening to their advice and now you should pay $500 for their new online video series to help you do so. It's clever marketing, but it is unethical in the sense that it's manipulating guys in need. Guys who get caught up on things like text game or amplifying attraction or using the best canned openers/routines are learning anything but being okay with rejection.
The second thing I want to talk about is comparing yourself to other guys. If you had a problem comparing yourself to other guys before learning pickup, you're going to have a greater problem after. Many pickup companies make seducing women or even just trying to find a girlfriend out to be this great competitive sport, and this is even evidenced by shows like Keys To The VIP and The Pickup Artist. By learning pickup, you tend to think you learned all the secrets you wish you knew back in high school when you had a crush on the hottest girl in class and you couldn't even get close to her because you weren't even part of the in crowd. You think when you go out to a bar or club that you have a leg up because you discovered some crazy secrets on the Internet that most guys don't know about. When that turns out to not be the case, you beat yourself up. Where guys really try to compete against each other is out on the bootcamp, which in itself is not a good thing. You go out to these bars and clubs with these hot women you're instructed to approach, and you may befriend and wing with some of the guys on the bootcamp, but at the end of the day it's all going to come down to how you perform versus the other guys. Some pickup companies, especially from the old school pickup, will even make claims that every time a girl rejects you, it's because you messed something up in the interaction and that you should have control 100% of the time of what the girl thinks about you if you just run perfect game. When you don't, then you tend to beat yourself up. Is this a really good place to come from? For me personally, I've gone as far as avoiding going out for this very reason.
I can go on, but I'll leave it at this for now. I'm glad I'm moving past the pickup community because it is destructive.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Update on StyleLife - The Demise Continues
Back in April, I wrote an article about the Demise of StyleLife, detailing how their site declined at a much more rapid pace than I expected. Just wanted to give a quick update on that:
StyleLife did a complete makeover of their site. They changed the layout and made it much more flashy and attractive. While it looks like they're no longer offering live programs, they got plenty of good new material that isn't recycled whatsoever...right? Well, as flashy and new their website looks, the webstats showing the number of page views over the past year don't look so good:
They went from 30,000 views back in April (the month I said the site was pretty much dead) to just 8,000 views in August. What's even more shocking is according to digitalsitestats.com, StyleLife went from bringing in daily average income of $23 at the beginning of the year to just $7.
Furthermore, as dismal as the news was back in April, I predicted that the StyleLife Public Forum, despite its lack of activity, would stay up. Well looks like I was WRONG about that. As soon as the new site layout went up, they completely deleted the public forum.
On the website itself, they only have access to a handful of shoddy recycled articles. They deleted most of their old articles and kept only a few. If you want full access to the material however, you can pay their $85/month fee or $250/quarter fee to just read more bullshit. I'll pass.
So once again, things don't just still look bad for Stylelife but they look worse.
StyleLife did a complete makeover of their site. They changed the layout and made it much more flashy and attractive. While it looks like they're no longer offering live programs, they got plenty of good new material that isn't recycled whatsoever...right? Well, as flashy and new their website looks, the webstats showing the number of page views over the past year don't look so good:
They went from 30,000 views back in April (the month I said the site was pretty much dead) to just 8,000 views in August. What's even more shocking is according to digitalsitestats.com, StyleLife went from bringing in daily average income of $23 at the beginning of the year to just $7.
Furthermore, as dismal as the news was back in April, I predicted that the StyleLife Public Forum, despite its lack of activity, would stay up. Well looks like I was WRONG about that. As soon as the new site layout went up, they completely deleted the public forum.
On the website itself, they only have access to a handful of shoddy recycled articles. They deleted most of their old articles and kept only a few. If you want full access to the material however, you can pay their $85/month fee or $250/quarter fee to just read more bullshit. I'll pass.
So once again, things don't just still look bad for Stylelife but they look worse.
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