Day 11:

Missions on this day were about selling yourself. It had me write down my job or hobbies or interest, and the one that best defines me, and basically reword it into a powerful, interesting one-liner in order to sell yourself. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you can use this powerfully crafter line to give a strong impression. As someone becoming a physician, and someone who likes to exaggerate, I decided on: “Yes, I’m a doctor; I heal the sick and dying” Cute right?

The field work was a lot like day 10. More or less just more practice opening sets. Open 2 sets, with a root, FTC, disqualification (since that was the day 10 objective), and then the add-on of walking a step away after your opener is resolved, and then returning to ask about group dynamic. (ie “ok thanks for the help guys….by the way, do you all know each other from work?) Though Strauss doesn’t discuss why we’re doing this at this time, I suspect it is to give the impression that you are actually leaving after you question as you said you were, and then “spontaneously” thinking of a reason to rejoin the conversation.

I didn’t do this day at the time. I wish I could say it was because of time constraints alone, but it wasn’t. This assignment gave me fear not only because of the assignment, but because of the context I first attempted to employ it. I thought I’d go about it on New Year’s Ever, but I was with a very…lame group of people. They were not interested in meeting others. So it gave me a great deal of AA to leave the people I was with to talk with strangers. I did though, and ended up just talking to one 6-. I asked her, “do you have any idea what these people are celebrating?” Slight laugh. “Yea, I guess it’s someone’s birthday,” I continued. This girl was by herself and not having a good time. It was mostly an accident I ended up talking to her. “Well, how does this whole group know each other?” I asked. “Eh.. actually I only know one other person here..” At this point, the anxiety and the awkward and her pessimism all collided and I just ejected. The approach isn’t as bad for me as the compulsion I have to eject when it gets weird instead of just saying something to work through it. I do not count this set in the field work. Just continuing my trend of including successes and failures.

After New Years my life began to get extremely busy for the month. Don’t think I’m trying to get away with something. I know very well that in order to get something out of this challenge I have to actually go through with each day, and so I am certainly not avoiding this. But in the interest of not stagnating, I moved to day 12. In one of my 2 or 3 day 12 posts there will be fieldwork that meets the day 11 requirements. so fear not.

But in the interest of catching you up on my life, I will introduce this: The differential diagnosis. In medicine, when trying to determine a diagnosis for a patient, you begin to use clues from their history and physical exam and then labs and procedures to determine the most likely choices. This becomes your differential. I keep a differential of my women as well, and I classify each as active (currently seeing), inactive (for whatever reason), or pending (on hold until I am ready to bring them in). i do this because i thrive on classification, and bc i don't want to lose track of one of them. there is an element of timing important in this process.

Here is my differential, with names changed (obviously)

  1. Macy- active (girl with the shit-tests and that took me forever to actually bang her)

  2. Tracy- pending (someone working at hospital)

  3. Mindy- inactive (one night stand, unlikely to reignite)

  4. Jane- pending (long-time chemistry, this is the one I dropped in favor of Mindy in my interlude entry)

  5. Lana- active (fuck buddy with the very kinky sex)

  6. Veronica- pending (worked with her at another hospital)

This isn't up to date real time, but i dont want to ruin the surprise for coming days. My life is pretty much on hold through all of January due to my crazy schedule, but after that I hope to return to the Challenge en force. Day 12 is ready and, in my opinion it is one of the most important yet. And it will be a very entertaining read for you all too, likely moreso than this one... this was like the middle installment of a trilogy..necessary, but still not so great.