2003-05-02 - 4:11 p.m.

an email from a best friend

There was a saying a person on the net said to me:

A friend would bail you out of gaol; a best friend would be in there with you saying, "hey, that was fun!"

This is an email from my only known such best friend. It is self-explanatory.

Hi (myself), I tried to send an email to you yesterday about watching some S12 this weekend. Unfortunately it bounced back because I put vodafone.com.au and not vodafone.net.au ... D'oh!

Anyway the message was I am free to watch rugby tonight (Friday) at Glenbrook bowlo or OneWorld.

Tonight at 5.30 our time is Blues v Cats. Tomorrow at 3.30 our time is Highlanders v Waratahs.

I'm going out in Sydney on Saturday night to a German trivia night. You are welcome to come but I don't think you'd get much out of it, being in German and all.

Hey I read your diary ... yep, all of it. I'm kinda bludging at work at the moment cos my boss went into hospital to have an operation so I can pretty much do as I please at work :-) I think it's so amazing that you're so honest. I wouldn't have the guts to say half of that stuff you did even though I often feel the same way and have some of the same struggles.

I too have struggled with internet porn and I think heaps of other Christian guys our age have and just aren't courageous enough to say so. Sometimes I'm really strong and can say "No" to the temptation. Other times I'm lilly-livered and just give in. At the time it's kind of comforting when your love life sucks to get a bit of virtual love-life, eh? Well the feeling soon wears off and guilt kicks in. Recriminations ... "how stupid could I have been etc etc etc" but as the Scripture says about dogs and vomit ... Anyway a book I read which I have found helpful (although not a miracle cure -- I've resigned myself to tha fact that there aren't any) is "Every Young Man's Battle". If you want to read it let me know.

I live such a solitary existence and am not accountable to anyone. I live at home with my dad who's not there half the time anyway. He's with his ladyfriend 3 nights of the week. Basically since my mum died when I was 7 my dad started seeing someone again when I was about 8 or 9 which meant I spend pretty much every weekend from the age of 8 or 9 alone in the house -- something which has continued to this day. So I've learned to be self-sufficient. I can cook clean, iron etc plus do all the blokey handyman stuff too. You would think that would make me a good candidate for the girlz, but evidently not. Anyeay, I guess I'm a loner and just spend time alone cos that's what I'm used to. You mentioned in one of your diary entries about me being busy. Well that was true last year cos of College of Law. But now I'm just busy being alone. I would go out but no-one seems to want to spend any time with me.

Another thing about being alone and non-accountable. My dad couldn't turn on a computer to save his life so I was the only one at homw who used the net. In fact it was my account which I paid for with my own money. So there was no-one to check up on my internet porn usage ... which didn't help things. The only thing which would keep it in check was how busy I was with my studies. I was always dilligent enough to get the studies done. So when I finally finished studying I had this unlimited hours internet connection and heaps of free time ... recipe for internet porn disaster. At the same time my dad finally got an internet connection for work ... so I made the (difficult) decision to cancel my ISP account and just use the net (piggybacking off my dad's work account) for email. That's why my pnc email address is gone. I just use the free gmx one now. So far my strategy has been working fairly well as I don't have the guts to use someone else's internet account to surf for porn. I've been internet porn free for some months now which is a real achievement. So I'm sorry I can't do all the online chat stuff with you ... but I hope you understand why I pretty much only use the net for email now. I guess we'll just to talk in person :-) I'm kind of dreading the move to a college in Oxford with a free unlimited in-room megabroadband university speed internet connection. Anyway I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I too find my lovelife sucks. I am 24 years old and have never had a girlfriend. Not one. How cut up do you think that makes me feel? And then I see everyone at church our age either married or engaged or paired off and here I am still alone. Am I that unattractive? I know in our culture the initiative lies with the guy to ask a girl out so I must be partly to blame, but when I've "tested the waters" so to speak I haven't exactly received overwhelming responses. Whenever I talk to a girl there's no genuine interest in me as a person it's all just be polite and say hello cos it's the sociable thing to do.

It's just so hard to meet people. The only place to meet Christian girls is at church or in othe Christian groups like at uni. They all seem taken or not interested or too fickle or ...

There have been a couple of flickers though one of which was more substantial. Ther was one girl fantastic Christian girl who liked me and I liked her and we had stuff in common -- singing & classical music especially and so when the time came to ask her out we had a really long (3 hours or so) conversation about our lives and life directions and stuff and we "agreed" that we weren't reay to go down the whole courtship-engagement path. That was three years ago. I was 21 and she was 19 and we'd known each other for 3 years before then. I even liked her then (and she liked me) but I was uncomfortable with the whole going out thing then. I just wasn't ready for it because I was fully aware of where it could lead. It could mean that I ended up engaged at 19. I was still a little boy with all that uni to go. Anyway I still like her now and I think she still likes me cos just recently she's been SMSing me asking how I am and I went round to her new place for lunch the other week and caught up after 3 years' absence. I told her the news about me going to Oxford and she seemed really keen to know how long I'd be away etc. Anyway she lives locally so the 3 year "exile" was self-imposed. We sort of agreed not to see each otehr too much even though we live so close to one another cos we basically still liked each other and seeing each other so much when we'd agreed not to go out would just be really painful.

Since that little flicker there was one other flicker on the horizon but I snuffed out any possibility of it going any further. I met this incredible girl 16 months ago at the German Summer School in Hobart. She's from Sydney and we got on really well together ... but she wasn't a Christian. In other ways she was different from me too ... she was definitely from the LEFT of politics ... but that didn't worry me at all because I really enjoyed having deep philosophical conversations with her. But because she wasn't a Christian I was never really interested in her in the gf sense. I've never looked at her that way and I don't think she looks at me that way but I still like ebing with her and doing stuff together. She knows I'm a Christian so maybe that's influenced her thinking towards me too?

That's it apart from teh odd meaningless teenage crush. 24 and still without a girlfriend. I feel like God's dealt me a cruel blow. I'm at the point now where I feel ready within myself to get married and do the whole dating/ courting thing but now I've got this opportunity to go to Oxford. Now is the only opportunity I'll have to go, so it kind of sucks when there's the possibility of starting something up again with **** [name suppressed!]. But then again maybe it's all a figment of my imagination. I desperately want to get married and have kids and lead a "normal" life.

Well I haven't seriously thought about killing myself but I still feel like my life is crappy.

I wish we had the courage to tell each other all this stuff in person ... but it's so much easier to say the difficlut stuff in an email when we're not in the same room and leave the time together for talking about all the banal stuff in life like sport and politics. I guess I need more courage to be honest, eh?

Well I'll be seeing you soon no doubt. You are in my prayers, Fh.D.

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