I’ve been reading some self-help books lately.  *blush*  A number of them are about how to live like a French woman.  *double blush*  And so many of them, surprise, surprise, are full of shit.

The funniest one was All You Need to be Impossibly French.  The title and back copy are highly misleading.  It’s really an opportunity for a British author to trash French women and make them out to be impossibly shallow.  It was really stunning, the disconnect between the marketing and the content of the book.

This book was slightly better, but this segment frustrates me:

Think of what you have that builds your sense of pleasure, calm, and self-esteem.  Join a club, secretly.  Or begin a new hobby that no one knows about but you.  Read a book, alone, and keep it private.  Find a new cafe that is your secret place.  Go to a matinee, but tell no one.

This is how I live my life.  Very secretly, discreetly, and all that.  French women do this and don’t sleep alone?  So what exactly am I doing wrong?

Any more of this and I’m going to go back to my original belief:  self-help is completely worthless.

Much worse.

On Sunday, after I’d spent much of my weekend feeling sorry for myself, I started reading this book.  Really no better way to make myself feel like an asshole for thinking MY life sucks.  Although it’s not doing much to make me feel better about humanity as a whole.

I’ve been trying to get out more, occasionally with other people but frequently alone.  It’s very easy to be a hermit in Seattle, if only because so many other people are too.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that, not only am I alone in being willing to be seen in public by myself, Seattlites are incredibly hostile to people out on their own.

Just last week, I went to see Billy Connolly, and, when my seat neighbor realized I was on my own, she sneered at me.

A month or so ago, at my opera club, I was talking to a couple I’d just met.  The woman asked if I’d come alone, I said yes, and she squealed “Oh!  Good for you!”

Then there was the bartender back in January who felt I had to defend my decision to go out drinking by myself.  Wait, why did I give him a tip?

In New York, it’s very common for people to go out alone.  I’m sure part of it is due to their cramped, uncomfortable living conditions.  Few people have the luxury of hiding at home, not if they live in a squalid basement studio in Washington Heights.  But some of it also has to be that New Yorkers actually talk to each other.  You won’t be treated like you’re invisible in New York the way you are here.

I suspect that much of what goes down in Seattle is a nasty feedback loop.  Seattlites don’t talk to each other and don’t make friends.  Consequently, many people are left largely friendless.  If they try to go out alone, they’re ignored or given shit for it, so they give up and stay at home.  And, since there are few people out alone, judgmental assholes aren’t forced to get over it.

I might just be paranoid, but it seems like some of the hostility (versus simply indifference) is due to the fact that I’m breaking the rules.  It seems like people here really feel the need to have someone, a friend, an acquaintance, a partner, to go out with, and something about a person forgoing that threatens them.

Are going crazy on this blog post.  And all the spammers are promoting .ru sites.  Is it because I mentioned Prokofiev?