1. Asking for help is OK and normal;
2. Saying “no” to that is also OK and normal.

Unfortunately, in my adult life, I’ve been finding out — often to my own detriment, and sometimes with irrevocable damage to relationships — that a lot of people seem to believe the exact opposite. They never ask for help (except perhaps to their close family, and even then they feel terrible about it), and become shocked — and offended, and/or hurt — when asked.

Apparently, when person A ask person B for help, person B has two choices: either feel terrible for not helping, or feel terrible with him/herself (and resent the other person) for not being strong enough to say “no”. There are no other possibilities, it seems. Helping is something terrible, which harms the helper immensely, but saying “no” also makes the would-be helper feel like a monster; therefore, the asker committed a hideous sin just by asking, as if he or she ignored an unspoken rule or protocol: “thou shalt not ask”.

Am I so weird for believing that there’s nothing wrong with either asking or refusing? That we’re all in this together, that there should be no forbidden subjects between friends or more, that if one can’t or doesn’t feel like he/she should help, it’s perfectly OK?

I’ve seen this phenomenon for more than a decade (hi, ex-wife), and even this week I’ve talked to several people who absolutely and completely disagree with me (asking is infinitely wrong and even abusive, because it “forces” the askee to either sacrifice him/herself or feel like a heartless monster, and so on). Is this widespread? Or just a part of Portuguese culture? Anyone from outside Portugal want to share their thoughts?

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Yesterday evening was my sister’s 20th birthday (and I will have to, shamefully, admit that I had forgotten, and just went there to have dinner and exchange cars with my father, as I had left my own there for repairs and was using his to go to work), so dinner was more “special” than usual, both in terms of food and in terms of being with my family.

Not good for my diet, but one should have a decent sense of priorities; I’ve always thought that being fanatically faithful to a diet in an important social occasion with the people you love makes you a self-centered, fun-spoiling jerk.

I don’t mean that, of course, if you, really, strictly can’t eat or drink something due to being under doctor’s orders, or, say, if you’re a vegetarian; however, in all other cases, if you don’t feel a loved one’s birthday is reason enough for you to go a bit “crazy”, it’s almost as if that person doesn’t mean anything to you at all. Quoting Ayn Rand (quick, run!), “love is the exception-making”.

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Well, the second day has begun. I’ve already exercised, and while my abs were hurting a bit and forced me to go easy on the sit-ups, on the other hand I didn’t lose my breath when doing a bit of Wii Fit jogging, unlike yesterday. I also unlocked a new aerobic boxing exercise, but that one’s for tomorrow. Oh, and Wii Fit said I lost about 0.5 kg since yesterday. I must be doing something right. However, while my target now is a BMI of 25 (the threshold between “normal” and “overweight”), what I have programmed in Wii Fit as a goal is 22, which is in fact what Wii Fit suggests as a target for every new player (male, at least).

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m experimenting with that weird concept of “breakfast” until next Sunday, to see if it makes me feel better, worse, or the same. I had a scrambled egg and some leftover salad from yesterday’s dinner, and, while everything tasted good, I still felt like I wasn’t “supposed” to be eating so early; I wasn’t hungry at all when I started eating, and right now I feel a bit “bloated” (even though it wasn’t a lot of food). We’ll see if I feel “more energetic” during the morning, or whether I’m less (or more) hungry at lunchtime.

Today is Father’s Day here in Portugal, so I’ll try to have dinner at my family’s place and spend some time with my father and the rest of the family.

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Not the worst of times, but certainly also not the best.

I was never good at making friends. You already know about my personality-crippling shyness, but that’s not the whole story. One other cause is my geekiness, and my unusual hobbies, passions and tastes. What do you do when everyone around you wants to talk about soccer, and you don’t find it interesting in the least? Pretend? (I actually considered going down that path for a while in my teens, but, fortunately, honesty and integrity won out.) In fact, it was not until I went online, first by connecting to bulletin board systems and later to the Internet itself, that I discovered that there were other people in the world – and sometimes even in my town – who liked some things I like. Friendships usually (but not always) grow from common interests, so you can guess that not having any of those with virtually everyone you meet throws a wrench in the whole thing.

Another problem – and this one is wholly my own fault – is that friendships, like any relationship, need to be nurtured, or they will wither down and eventually die. And here I have to admit another big fault of mine: both because of selfishness and because of my area of work – computers –, where things are done for a specific reason, I’ve almost never called people “just to say hi”. Such a thing is simply not logical to me, doesn’t make sense… and yet now I realize that that’s a big part of maintaining friendships. I usually only start a conversation when I want or need something from the other person; that’s the “selfishness” part I mentioned. And, naturally, nobody ever likes to have a “friend” who only calls when he wants something from them. A possibly mitigating circumstance is that, in a way, this is really a part of my personality: when I want or need something, I ask, and I expect to be asked when someone wants or needs something. In my mind, not talking to someone every day, or every week, or even every month, doesn’t make me less of a friend, and it doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t do everything in my power to help that friend of mine if he or she came to me with a problem… but, as I said, this is just my “weirdness”; relationships do need nurturing, and this is something I’ve recently tried to teach myself. It hasn’t been easy, but I hope to improve.

Yet another source of trouble is that I haven’t made any male friends in many years. Considering that most of them drifted apart from me – and it wasn’t my fault in every case; some people really do change for the worse with time, and there’s little or nothing you can do about that –, I guess I don’t really have any close friends of my own gender right now. This is not necessarily a big problem, on one hand; I do find women, even when there is no sexual interest, much more fascinating and interesting, so it’s natural that most of my friends these days are of the opposite sex. But it may also signify a problem, one I’ve noted and commented with (female) friends from time to time: that virtually all of my friendships have something to do with sexual attraction. It was just a couple of months ago that I was looking at my MSN Messenger contact list, and I could really divide most of it it into: ex-girlfriends, girls I’ve had sex with, girls I’d like to have sex with (or even something more), and, well, that part was it. (Of course, there’s also family, a couple of (former?) male friends, co-workers, former co-workers, and all that, but the other part of the contact list does make up the majority of it.)

In fact, only very recently did I have a couple of experiences that were virtually new to me: spending time with female friends without any attempts at sex (not that I’d have minded , but there really were no attempts, even verbal or indirect ones), and, most surprising of all… I enjoyed it. A lot. Yes, what is more than natural to most people was an almost new, and very pleasant, experience for me. Hope for me yet…

Goals:

To make new friends and nurture the friendships I have – though the latter part may not feel natural at first, it is the right thing to do. And to separate the concepts of “female friends” and “sex”. Friends are great, and sex is also great, but one doesn’t require the other for it to be great.

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I don’t think there’s much to write here; not because of lack of relevance, but because this is actually one of the most stable, and healthy, parts of my life.

It wasn’t always so, though.

My mother… I’d rather not speak much of her here. Suffice to say that these days I see her about once a year, that she made my childhood and teenage years almost a living hell, and that I have to thank her, in a way, for many sad and unpleasant lessons. One hint: if you think that a mother automatically loves her children, that it’s unavoidable, that she would never hate and envy them for their happiness, I’m sorry to say, but you’re living in a fairy tale world.

But that’s all in the past (though I won’t claim not to be affected by it to this day, and quite possibly to the day I die).

My father, though, is a great guy, and I’m proud of having him as a father. Again, that wasn’t always so; until the end of my teen years, it was as if he was a different person. Cold, distant, authoritarian, and never satisfied with anything I ever did (even though I was, in many ways, the son most people would love to have… at least at the time). Age, or life, changed him for the better, and, again, I wouldn’t exchange him for anyone else.

My brothers and sister are also great people, and I love them all. I like to think it’s reciprocated. The oldest of them (still two years younger than me, though) has also helped me a lot in the past, more than you can imagine, and I owe him a lot – and, yes, that also includes money, but it’s not limited to that.

As for the more distant family, except for my uncle and aunt, they’re mostly “far away”; most of them I don’t see at all, or see every couple of years or so. I can’t miss them, because they’re not close enough for me to miss. I’m not complaining here; it’s just the way things are.

Anyway, I don’t think I have real “family problems”. The ones close to me are supportive in every way, whenever I need them, and I love spending holidays with them, for instance. If there’s one problem here, is that I feel that I don’t reciprocate enough; that they do more for me than I do for them. I also don’t know if they know how much I appreciate all that they do.

Goals:

To let them know the above, of course. And to reciprocate all the help they’ve given me for years. Also, I should spend more time with them; this is, in a way, hard for me, because I hate feeling like a “parasite”, and whenever I’m with them they feed me and all that. I don’t have money to do things like invite them to lunch and pay for it, so I always feel that I’m “abusing” their generosity, even though, of course, they tell me that that’s nonsense. Still, having more money should allow me to not feel like a parasite anymore; besides, they’d love to see me without money problems.

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