Susie’s Thoughts

I haven’t written anything about or to the victims of the tsunami. That is because there is nothing I can say. The picture above is from my favourite place on the earth. Every time I need to spend a quite moment by myself I go here. I put up the picture to remind us that life is precious and fragile. Since there is nothing I can say to those suffering right now I would just want to invite you to this place to spend a quite minute with me honouring the memory of all the victims in the world.

A year is ending and a new one is beginning. That always reminds me of endings and beginnings, so I’m going to leave you to celebrate the New Year with the words from one of the people I admire:

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

Helen Keller

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Sometimes life is fragile as thin ice over water. Handle with care!

This picture is a little bit like the one I’m using for my new painting.

A dating site is a little bit like a pub or a night club. Finnish people drink a lot when they go out, so if you want to hook up you have to do that in the beginning of the evening. There is no fun in a guy you have to carry home and who falls asleep immediately when his head hits the pillow. In a way it’s both sad and funny when you see the desperation in the eyes of men when they realize that the club is about to close and they haven’t yet been able to find someone to take home with them. I used to be a taxi driver, and there were those guys that when they hadn’t had any luck in the club, they just had to try if they could get lucky with the cab driver.

It’s something very unsexy with desperation. I don’t like to play hard to get, I don’t like that kind of games at all, but desperation is a completely different thing. I think you’re desperate when anything goes and you will settle with whomever you can get your hands on. It isn’t that I rate men as worthy of my attention or unworthy. I just think there are men that I’m not that compatible with and other men that I get along with well. I think we all get better off to try to have relationships with those we are compatible with. We all deserve to have someone in our lives that values us. I know it’s impossible to completely understand another human being, but if I don’t understand anything about the man and what makes him tick, then I think he’s better off without me in his life. And I’m too old to put all my time and efforts into trying to understand someone that I just don’t get along with.

I’ve been surfing some ads but immediately got some problems… what criteria should I use to search with? I don’t have any preferences when it comes to looks, education or location. I know it would be easier with a guy closer to me, but Finnish guys on international dating sites don’t want to date Finnish women. I guess the same thing goes with me, if I wanted a Finnish guy I would probably just put an ad up on a Finnish site. This is a small country, you know… and women live longer than men…
Instead of trying the search I decided to randomly browse the profiles of guys that were online. When I mingle at a bar I usually just brows through the guys until my eyes catch someone… I thought of trying the same here. The problem is that I have to choose based on a guy’s nickname, age and location only. The first guy to catch my attention was a guy that called himself doggydaddy. I recently got a puppy so I thought it could be nice with another dog lover. Hmm, good looking guy, seems nice, he says he’s got a professional job and cleans up well!?!?
The next guy wrote he’s whole profile in CAPS. I’m enough of a geek to consider caps shouting and I shout enough myself, don’t need another shouter in this family.

After reading these ads I have only one thing to say: “Guys, if you want my attention… WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF… that’s the purpose of these sites…”

Christmas is over and New Years Eve ahead. In a way I’m looking forward to the New Year even though I’m old enough to know that sometimes the next year isn’t any different from the year that has passed. During last years Christmas the poet told me he wouldn’t come back to my country and I was still smitten by him the whole year. I hope I will be taken by someone closer to me during the year 2005.

I have registered to a lot of free dating sites just to check them out and review them. I usually tell guys that size doesn’t matter, but when it comes to dating sites that’s not true. It doesn’t matter if the site is nice and has a lot of nice features if there aren’t any members. One site though gave me 20 responses in less than 12 hours, but none of them really clicked. I guess I should do a search myself and email the guys that I find interesting. A lot of sites offering dating tips say that guys want to be the ones taking the initiative and do the chase… I’m old enough to go for what I want instead of just waiting to be picked. Hmm, I’m still single so maybe my approach isn’t the right one!

I found a site selling an eBook about how to start and keep a conversation going. They offered different books for women and men, but when I looked at the example chapters and the table of contents the advice seemed to be the same for both sexes. The advice was to talk about the weather, favourite movies, books, dream vacations and dream birthday parties. In Finland you could use a whole evening to talk about the weather if you want to, but then again… every time I see someone I don’t know very well they tend to talk about the weather. Especially older people do this so I don’t know if that would be what I would want to talk about on a date or while chatting on Yahoo.

I guess talking about movies, books and vacations is nice, but spending a night listening to someone telling the complete plot in a book I would never read, or describing every bar they visited on their last vacation, everything from the drinks they ordered to describing the color and state of the bathroom floor and ceiling after they had too many drinks and passed out, is a little bit too much even for a former punk rocker like me.

So, if I decide to search some ads and write something to the guys I find interesting, what do you suggest I should write about? I guess the “What are you wearing?” approach doesn’t work on guys since it hasn’t worked on me!

I wish everyone a really good and peaceful Christmas!

I have been surfing the Internet to get some info on how to date online. First I have to tell you that I’m from Finland and we don’t date. We go out and meet people, we hang out and we even have sex, but we don’t talk about dating. There aren’t really any rules or guides we could read and follow to know how to act during a date… we hang out with people and if we like someone we seem to hang out with that person more often than with others, eventually we start having sex and if we find ourselves having sex with only one person more than once we start talking about a relationship.

OR then it happens as with the man I thought was the love of my life… I met him at work, we started to talk and the attraction was so strong that we were an item a week later. It was an instant attraction that lasted for 5 years and turned out to be a complete disaster. Now when I’m instantly attracted to someone I try to walk the other way. I have succeeded quite well with that for the past ten years. That’s why I have been single. I felt an instant attraction to the poet I’ve been talking about and tried to walk away. His poems always got to me though; let’s see what happens this time.
I found a lot of sites offering dating advice and some of them even asked for some money for me to be able to read them. I was wondering who would ever pay to read advice like that! There is so much information for free on the Net so I really can’t understand why someone would pay for the same thing. The poet use to say that nothing worth having comes easy… maybe we have to pay for the information to really appreciate it… the problem is: How to tell if the advice really works if we can’t try it before we buy it? Do we even need that kind of advice to be successful daters? Isn’t it enough to use common sense and be ourselves? Can you be really successful in a relationship if you try to be something you aren’t? On the other hand, I have been single for 10 years, maybe I should buy a guide to be NOT single and become happy.

What do you think, should I buy a book or a guide to become successful in relationships or should I just be the woman I am and hope someone who appreciates me will come along and notice me?

I have now registered to all the sites in my last post. FriendSearch turned out to not be completely free. I have to pay to be able to receive and send messages. Houb.net has chat rooms, forums and I’m able to create my own blog. At JumpDates I had so answer a lot of questions about myself and they had an instant messages system and Java chat. BookofMatches has also a chat and I had to answer a lot of questions.

I have yet to explore all the features at these sites, but so far I think they look good.