the past few days

Well, I seem to have slipped a little in my progress. I have been saying hi, making EC's, and have been making friendly convo with strangers, but I have not made an approach in a week. I don't want to lose this little bit of momentum I have going, so I've been making myself go out despite the fact that I have froze the last two times I've gone out.

I have made some convos with HB's over the past few days but they have been superficial and I don't think I can count them as approaches. I keep thinking back to my last club sarge, which went badly. I have been obsessing about my bar game and I have completely forgotten my day game, which was actually coming along fine. Hence, I've lost some momentum. Today I did not approach when I went out to the gym although there were a couple of opportunities.

There are a couple of things that have been messing with my game:

• The people that I have been using as wings have been letting me down. I was supposed to go out with one and he cancelled out. The other one would rather sit at home and be lame than sarge with me.

• I have been stressed about work, and I have been doing a lot of personal projects around the house that I told myself I'd get to - these things are taking a lot more of my time than I have planned, but they are also important to me.

• My ex contacted me, it always throws me off when she calls and I have to remind myself that I don't care about her anymore. On Thursday I took all the little gifts and letters she has written me over the years and put them into a box, and put them away - which in itself is a good thing, but in the process I read some of the letters and it brought me down a lot more than I thought it would. These artifacts of our relationship have been put away now, and this will not happen again, though.

On Thursday night, I rewarded myself for doing well on a project at work I had been spending a lot of time on, and solo sarged at the bars. It was actually a good night to solo sarge at the bars as there were a fair amount of people out, but the bars were not so crowded that it was intimidating. I sat down at a bar in Wicker Park, there was a girl sitting about two seats away who I might have approached. She was just sitting down to read a book or something. Then, I'm not sure if this actually happened or not - but I *think* she actually scooted down one seat so that she was farther away from me. I may have imagined that this happened, but it nevertheless threw me. Then a guy sat down between us. I sat there for an hour, watched tv, made idle chit chat with the guy next to me and left. Then I went home.

Last night my wing I was going to go out with decided he'd rather sit home and play video games online. This kind of brought me down, and I started getting down on myself that I don't have a wide enough social circle yet that I'd have someone else to go out with that night. I sat at home - but then something snapped in me and I got dressed. I forced myself to go out because I wasn't getting anything productive done at home, and going out alone beats the hell out of sitting at home and feeling sorry for myself.

I wound up arriving at this bar at midnight. There were approachable women there, but I froze, so I had a drink and tried to calm myself down before doing anything. I struck up a conversation with this guy sitting next to me, just to be social. He actually turned out to be a cool guy, he was there alone too, a guy out having a drink on his own on a Friday night. He seemed to be more comfortable at the bar since he was friends with the dj and the bartender. Anyways, we talked about a lot of stuff - he was an artist, gave me his card and told me he'd send me an invite to this party he was having in a couple of weeks to celebrate his art show. So, that was at least one positive thing that came out of the experience. This guy took off but I stayed an hour more and had another drink. I was going to approach, but chickened out at the last minute and went home. Overall, a failure, although it was a generally pleasant night out. That bar is actually turning out to be a favorite of mine, there's always nice people there to talk to.

This is where I currently stand. No action for the past few days. I have done some good things related to getting my life together and inner game - I've taken care of a lot of personal projects I'd been meaning to get to, and have been working hard on the job. In terms of my sarging, though, I have to get myself together, I don't want to slip back to where I was mentally at the start of boot camp.