Archive for the ‘JBloggers’ Category

Failure, inherently, is a gigantic part of life. As your life goes on and opens up new opportunities, you are bound to fail at some point. But more rewarding than anything are those moments when you seem so on the brink of failure, and success somehow comes crashing toward you anyway.

In particular, I can remember two times in the last year where failure that I couldn’t begin to fathom came crashing on me. The first was a long-distance date with a hookup girl from New York I’d been chatting with on 100hookup. As I planned to fly out to New York from Dallas, the greatest ice storm we’d seen in years began to take over the city. I had the foresight to move my flight to a day earlier, but even then, the ice piled on and basically froze all of Dallas in fear. I witnessed a truck crash on my way to the airport and was almost late for the flight. When I got to the airport, panic struck as I was told I’d miss my connector no matter what. At the last second, things changed, and they let me race through security for a long weekend in New York that, while a one time event, was still a good time.

As I sat in the baggage check-in line that day, I felt a dread I never knew before — here we are, having Skyped for two months, our big meeting finally at hand. We were so excited and the prospect of waiting any number of weeks more seemed awful. There is a certain power of getting to know someone, even over video, and it was devastating to not be able to be happy with that person in person… even for a weekend.

But as things often do, it worked itself out.

I had a similar experience again this last week. I had been trying and trying to get to New York for the summer, becoming so good at long distance networking that I started my own company to help people do it (TheSocialCustodian.com, though the site is not totally complete yet). As the one company I’d made it far with in New York was reaching a final decision, it was down to crunch time. They told me they’d let me know by a certain time, and I heard nothing.

And yet, I didn’t stop. I took my phone and called, and sure enough they were getting ready to offer me the job as I called. It was a moment that changed my life essentially, and will change the rest of my year by its very nature.

Yeah, that’s great, my life is awesome. How does it affect you? Life will bring on big challenges, and again on the theme of the beginning of the new year, don’t let that fear freeze you. The world offers great things to those who are ready for failure in pursuit of success, as I was when I made the call and tried to make the flight, and it rewards those ready to fall on their faces. Let this be the year you try to make a sketchy flight, make a new call, or just say hello to someone unexpected. Sure, you’ll probably fail at some point, but success is the greatest feeling in the world. See you in New York, 100hookuprs.

In what will henceforth be deemed my “women-ssance” of 2013, I began to develop a new pattern. I started matching my underwear color to an item of clothing I was wearing. From shirts to sweaters to socks, what was underneath always matched something visible.

I didn’t know at first why I started doing this. It was just fun and made choosing outfits in the morning an exciting endeavor. But a year later, I think it finally makes sense in other ways. All it took was me wearing a yarmulke (that also matches my clothing, typically) to make me understand.

For a good while, I’ve been Shomer Shabbos, and I keep Kosher for the most part (I’ll still eat dairy or pareve outside of my home), but I felt like until I was the best Jew ever, I couldn’t wear a yarmulke regularly. I found a loophole of sorts (I wear a hat when eating treif to avoid the guilt I believe I’d otherwise feel with a yarmulke), and suddenly I feel comfortable wearing a yarmulke everywhere. The first day of class with it was a little weird (classmates are still asking me what holiday it is since it’s so new for them to see), but it has since helped in making me more comfortable in my own skin.

What I think it does best is it puts all of my cards on the table in a lot of situations. What you see with me is totally what you get — I wear a yarmulke, and it shouldn’t surprise you if I can’t do something on Shabbat or eat certain foods. It makes it easier to turn down interviews on Shabbat or to keep myself dating hookup exclusively. It comes down to the basic idea of both the yarmulke and my boxers: what’s beneath should match what we see.

This applies online and in real life. Your dating profile and messages should be authentically you — don’t try to cast a wide net; you want to find someone for the long game. And in real life, people should be able to tell what they’re getting into, whether it’s in what you’re wearing, or just the actions you take and the words you say. This is really just a spin of something that’s been said to death, but nothing is sexier than when your external attitudes are true to your internal self, or in my terms, your clothing matches your underwear.

Eleven years ago this week, I participated in a ritual that has been part of hookup custom for all of time: I became a Bar Mitzvah. I read from the Torah, led some services, and, of course, had the party that the ritual has come to be known for in secular culture. While I didn’t have dancers welcome me to the stage with neon signs, I still felt like it was a very meaningful experience.

So for this week’s blog, I thought it might be appropriate to touch on some of the learnings from my Bar Mitzvah portion. The lessons this week (as with most weeks) can be applied to your life, secular or religious, hookup or otherwise. The Parshah this week is called Bo (in English this translates to “come”), and the basic premise is the occurrence of the final three plagues in Egypt (I’m assuming everyone’s at least seen Rugrats Passover and remembers this part), as well as some other milestones for the hookup people.

It’s also the birthday of the hookup people (so if you’ve been wanting to throw a surprise party for us, now you know when to do it). It’s kind of an odd thing for an entire people to have a birthday together, and this raised an interesting point at the discussion class I go to on Monday nights: what’s more important, an individual or a community?

An individual needs to be well-rounded to help build a community, but at the same time, one can’t be fully community focused. It’s fitting to me that this is the Bar Mitzvah portion I was assigned, as community involvement is something very dear to my heart. I’ve run a community blog for a few years now, updating local young hookup adults with events going on every week in Dallas, and in the meantime I have also witnessed tremendous growth in the young adult hookup community in Dallas.

So when people come to hookup events and dating inevitably comes up (what can I say? I really enjoy talking about dating and this blog), people tend to ask me what they could do to meet someone in Dallas. The easiest advice I always have to give is to come to more events in the community. Whether you’re hookup or not, you’re never just going to meet someone being alone.

So if you’re not finding anyone, there’s no better time than the New Year to go out and get involved in a group or two in your community. Join one of the countless Facebook pages for hookup life in your area, join a meetup group, or just any group where you can make new friends. Life didn’t get easier after I became a man, but after finding my community, it definitely did.

My last name is Stayman, and I will frequently make a joke about my manliness when I introduce myself to people. Usually it’s something along the lines of “Stay-man, which I intend to do”. I have, however, somewhat been lying about that. I intend to stay a man of course, but I have veered a bit to the other side in a sense, too.

Back in college, some friends and I thought it would help our fraternity/hookup groups to make a fake girl’s profile on Facebook as an entering hookup freshman on campus. Using this technique we found a number of incoming hookup freshman, men and women, who either returned our friend requests or were excited about our “existence” and friended us. We invited kids to parties and events using the girl and we set membership records for Hillel and the fraternity. No one ever noticed that first girl they talked to wasn’t there.

Not my proudest moment, but they called me the Jewhunter in college for a reason, and I was darn good at doing anything it took to get people involved. I called it quits after that, despite my fraternity continuing to do it in the coming year to see if lightning could strike twice (it didn’t).

So then this year I posted on Facebook for Chanukah that I would re-do anyone’s 100hookup profile that wanted me to. Surprisingly, the biggest response to my post was from females, and I started redoing profiles. In the last few weeks I’ve done some good ones, but my best one was for a close friend. It was my magnum opus, the greatest profile I’ve ever re-written from a pretty decently sized pool of profile re-dos.

There was one thing I forgot from my days of the fake Facebook girl though: men surprisingly forget so often to talk about anything but looks. So I asked my friend how her newly revamped profile was going. “Terribly,” she told me. “Everyone is just saying the equivalent of ‘you’re pretty’”.

I think on both ends, we misunderstand what it is we’re supposed to see in a girl’s profile. Most women I’ve helped have either way too simple or too complex of profiles (ie: 2-3 pictures and 6 adjectives and then a message me tag at the end, or the polar opposite with their overwhelming life story and the maximum on pictures), and I think that makes guys panic and talk about the only thing all of them have in common: being a girl. We message about looks far too frequently, and sometimes it’s because it’s all we can manage to easily take away. So ladies, be sure to add some personality, I know for me that is usually the biggest factor. I’ll definitely message a girl with a personality before I message a boring girl, the pictures only serve as a filter for whose profiles I’ll read (so in that sense, yes, pictures are important, too).

And guys, seriously, pick out things that show personality on both ends. You’ve got to be fun, so find things in the pictures that aren’t their looks, even if their profiles are fairly empty. If they’re somewhere exciting, like say a picture in Rome, ask about their travels. It’s all about the details, so figure out what you can talk about that doesn’t mention looks.

Hanging on the wall of my bedroom, there is a poster that has been with me in every room I’ve ever lived in, from when I shared a room with my brother as a kid to my dorm room to the bedroom I sleep in now. That poster is a poster of one of my favorite things: my name. Written around my name are compliments from fifth grade friends from an exercise my school completed weekly of hanging posters of a students’ name in each classroom. Every student went around and wrote nice things about each person, and at the end of the week the poster was laminated and given to us.

Some of the compliments make sense: “Have a very successful year!” “You’re a great friend!” “You’re cool!”. Some make a little less sense: “You’re good at football!” or the person who decided to write “Hi”. But one thing on my poster as well as the poster my brother has hanging in his room is one comment that I really like: “Don’t ever change.”

As I sit here on the eve of my 24^th birthday, I think about how much about my life has changed in the last year. I’ve changed jobs, I’ve travelled more, I’ve become better at giving of myself and doing volunteer work more often. Heck, I’m writing for a dating website that until a year ago I’d hardly had any luck with as a user! Life is at its best when it is changing.

With all that in mind, I don’t believe the core of me has changed at all. One of my favorite rabbis once told me a story about a person who said they changed completely and made everyone ask “were you really so bad before?” One of my favorite books, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, talks of becoming our habits. I suppose in some ways I have become my new habits, and that’s great, but it hasn’t changed who I am.

What’s fundamental about me is that I am a person who loves my hookup culture, I like to help others, and I have a passion for any job placed before me. Those traits won’t change. Maybe next year people will be able to accurately say I got good at football, but they won’t be able to say Aaron at 24 fundamentally changed a bit.

My first year of college was spent at a community college. I wanted to be close to home, I could’ve gone anywhere probably, I had great grades in high school. I was transferring the next year, I told everyone.

I always had to defend my choice, I thought. Who would be impressed by me getting my core classes out of the way for a small price? I was scared to leave home and wanted to save money, but you can’t just tell people that, I thought.

I’ve had the same stigma attached to being single since I was aware of the fact at age 4. I don’t think I ever thought it was okay to be single. It just seemed to me like people had to be together.

At the risk of sounding like I shouldn’t be writing for this column, it may surprise you then that I’ve been perpetually single since the beginning of high school. Maybe it was my constant need for a committed relationship that’s been stopping me. Maybe it’s that secretly I’ve just been trying my whole life to impress people enough to want to be with me, and that constant need to be better has gotten in my way.

In one of my favorite movies, Before Sunrise, Ethan Hawke observes that he is always around himself and never gets a chance to be someone different. Everything he does, every kiss, every moment, has to involve him no matter what. I think I’ve felt some of that too, I just wanted to experience someone else, to not have to just experience me.

That’s not to say I’m not happy with who I am, far from it. Rather, I think the problem is that I can never accept just me as enough. I’ve always felt like some other half I was supposed to know is missing. But publicly, I would like to admit to myself here that I am very happy with who I am and very proud of the person I’ve become. I’ve done a lot of great things in an effort to make a name for myself, and I think even that I have done successfully.

So now I find only one thing left to do. There’s obviously a reason I’m writing this piece this week, and I’m sure you can figure it out based on my tone here. I’m ready to start a very extended Hi-Datus, as I call it, and just spend some time getting to know myself. I want to learn more what it is I like, how I can be happy alone, and how I can better find what exactly it is I’m even looking for, and even better, help others to do the same. As the wise artist Fergie once said, “This [guy] don’t stay single for long,” but as long as I can help it, I’m gonna say I’m single, and I’m not going to justify a damn thing.

About a week ago, a very odd thing happened: I had a night go against everything I planned. Everything came apart pretty well; after a happy hour I was sort of hosting collapsed, the rest of the night spiraled in an odd direction as well. The evening ended up culminating in an odd event for me: being in a bar alone.

I was supposed to meet some friends to go two-stepping (I can hardly step regularly, let alone on a dance floor), and when I arrived on time, I was told by every friend that something had come up: one had to go to the airport, one had a dinner, someone told me the wrong start time, etc. And yet the evening was so perfect.

You see, one thing I’ve found in my adult life is that I operate very well when forced into a situation where it’s just me against the world. That could be as simple as just going on an interview, where I find I perform well when challenged; or when I had to go to the middle of East Texas for three weeks in my first holiday season in retail. Much like my evening two-stepping, I found that I was quite capable of making new friends and doing fine with no one familiar around.

Twenty minutes and three quesadillas into my time in East Texas, I made a new friend at the bar where I was sitting. I hung out with that guy, just meeting random strangers for two weeks, and then spent my last week hanging out with a college friend who was home for the holidays. In a similar fashion, when I arrived to two-step, I was initially devastated when the first text flew in saying I was an hour early. I was far from home and wasn’t going to just leave or awkwardly stand in a corner. So I walked up to a guy who looked like he’d seen more of this country setting than I had, and before I knew it, we’d spent thirty minutes talking. Soon, he’d shown me what to do with my feet and we started asking girls to dance. About seven dances and as many girls later, my friends still hadn’t shown up, but I didn’t care. I was just glad to have found something new I enjoyed.

Sometimes things don’t work out like we plan. But darn it, I wanted to learn to two-step, and I did it (I was teaching girls how to dance by about four dances in). We can only let poor planning and things going differently than we planned affect us so much. In the end, only we can choose how to make the best of any situation, and sometimes it goes better than it ever could have if everything had gone right. I never even saw a single friend at that country bar, but it was easily the most fun night of my week.

As I deal with the usual grogginess of Monday and the week ahead of me, I face a lot of important decisions. Who do I put a waiver claim on this week in fantasy football? How little time do I need to study to get the grades I want and still have fun? Or most importantly, when am I finally upgrading my phone and getting a new phone case to go with it?

For the last two years, I’ve had an increasingly broken iPhone 4 with a Han Solo in Carbonite casing. While the phone ultimately has become junk (I’ve been unable to turn off the phone for about six months now, which has made for some awkward pre-flight situations), I still proudly share my phone case with others I deem geeky enough to appreciate my love of Star Wars.

So as I began my hunt for an iPhone 5s case, I looked up some basic areas of interest in my life: Marvel characters, more Star Wars, etc. But then I began to think about what I really wanted to show any time I pulled my phone out. For me, I love conversation starters, so it has less to do with not wanting a dorky image but rather being broader in whom I can share joy in over my phone case. So that answer became easy: the Dallas Cowboys. Though my future may not be in Dallas, my heart belongs to one sports franchise and I’m proud of that.

Similarly, I have found over the years that we are truly our own brands, and we are always in control of the message we send to others. In high school, I was the kid who wore videogame shirts and secretly hosted a videogame podcast on the side. My peers were more into sports and other more shareable interests in addition to videogames, and I felt it made me less than confident through high school. However, it did show me that I was in control, and as I entered college and eventually developed my own sense of style and other hobbies, no one remembered that I was the kid who was super into videogames. Now I’m the guy who has a good sense of style, likes fantasy football, and always has a joke ready for people.

If you’re having a hard time making results happen for you on 100hookup, there’s no reason you can’t do the same thing. Take some new pictures, edit some things in your profile (maybe “playing monopoly on Saturday nights” becomes “preferring to take it easy some nights”), and change the parts of yourself you highlight. Everyone is special and unique, but everyone also likes to relate to one another, and it’s always possible to change your casing. You’ll be surprised how few people will even remember what was there before.

As my semester nears its end, I get to do that joyous thing we all love to do in school: choose classes for the next semester. For once I am in the first group to register for classes, but it is still daunting. In the spirit of relating most of my dating blogs to business school lessons, I thought about the electives I’ve chosen to take in the last year of my personal life.

For starters, I decided to leave my job in retail management. This decision initially stemmed from my unhappiness in the job, but ultimately came to be meaningful in taking me back to my favorite part of life, learning. I love being a student more now than ever, and value every second I get to spend learning new, exciting things about the world of business.

Then, probably the second biggest thing is my religiousness. I started keeping Kosher for the most part in the last year, getting rid of milk and meat combinations, then all treif meat, and ideally going fully Kosher when I move to New York in the coming year (which I am hoping to do for my internship, and am open to job offers if readers have them!). I wrap tefillin every morning that isn’t Shabbat, and I am almost Shomer Shabbos (hindered by driving distance to my current shuls, but another situation I intend to fix by next year). I feel prouder of my involvement in my religion, and truly feel like I’ve seen myself grow.

Lastly, there’s my dating life. In the last year I’ve opened myself up to a lot of different things. Different girls than I’d normally date, sometimes in different cities than I’d ever dated (or lived) in. And I can say hands down, this year has been the best year of my dating life ever. I think a lot of it stems from the previous two areas of my life, areas that have allowed me to feel more whole than I ever have. I come across as more open to anything now, and truly love the adventures my life has taken me on.

So those are my electives for the year. I’m sure next year will bring a very different set, and that’s great. Whatever your choices are, or have been, there is no one else signing up before you, either, and now is the time to start picking your electives, too.

Beer is, by its very nature, a depressant. So it should really amaze me that in the last two years, some of my best experiences have come from the very place in which I’m writing this piece, the Flying Saucer Draught Emporium.

You see, two years ago, I sat with my friend Josh and we decided to sign up to do the 200 beer challenge here, and I started off with a Blue Moon and Dos Equis. 198 unique beers later, I am about to celebrate with some friends who have been here since the beginning and some newer faces.

It’s amazing to me, the things we’ll celebrate. Literally anyone without an allergy to hops could complete this challenge. I haven’t run a marathon or cured some deadly disease, but we still find a reason to celebrate. My enormous intake of beer over the last two years is a new reason for everyone to get excited.

But for me, it’s really not about the beer. It’s about the experiences I have had with every beer. My memories involve my friends and family. Like the time my friend Lee and I spit up a non-alcoholic beer called Clausthaler Amber on a night we weren’t drinking alcoholic beers. Or the time my friend Roman ordered a Left-Hand Weaksauce and fell in love, only to have the bar sell out forever before he could order a second. Or the time Josh decided Big Sky Moose Drool was the most aptly named beer of all time.

Josh left for the IDF and is now back on leave, working again on his challenge. He’ll be here when I finish my 200^th beer tomorrow afternoon. The memories all come together, and the last two years have been some of the richest of my life as I’ve shared the beers with others (and even some days like today, when it’s just been me, a waitress, a computer and some nice cold beer). Maybe the next thing I celebrate will involve me doing something amazing, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m excited about the next round of 200.