fuck church. i've done that. dead end. you'll only encounter nice people who are paranoid in a nice way. stay away from those dickheads. they're the worst and will make you much more misearble. you'll put too much emphasis on their suppose niceness.

maybe all the cool nice people are hiding unlike you. i think that's the case and are fearful of the assholes like you.

I didn't know this. Well, yeah. I can imagine. Especially depending on where you live, how conservative it is, how the average citizen defines insider and outsider, that sort of thing.

(By the way, everytime I hear a foreign accent in my whitebread area, I get excited. I want to know about another culture, "what it's like over there," stuff like that. And if I happen to know a phrase or two in that language, watch out. But the vast majority of the times this has happened, the other person doesn't give a fuck about my interest. I guess they want to be a part of here, not there.)

ah yeah, i see. being an immigrant definitely has its stresses. i'm one too. takes some time to adjust.

if your upbringing makes you paranoid and negative you might be tuning to the frequency of the paranoid and negative in your new place. what in bulgaria was "normal" here is more "criminal." makes sense?

it takes time to get absorbed into a culture. the humanities are a good way to "get" a culture-- art, music, literature, history... but i'd also try some kind of therapy. not sure if it's available to you, but that might be a way to tweak your attitudes/behaviors to something more fitting to your new social environment, if that makes sense.

and maybe do some theatre.

This suggestion wasn't necessarily directed at church, tho it does sound like a church visit would be outside the norm.......what about a farmers market? We have one here the first two Saturdays of each month. It started small and has grown and grown. It opens at 6AM and people are all over the place, young and old, kool and not so kool......buying fresh produce and learning how to grow their own.

Just like church, it's not about becoming a person with a garden or who eats healthier, it's about putting yourself in an awkward position and seeing what results :)

oh yeah, normal elsewhere is fucked up in canada, i've been living here since i was pretty young but was brought up very differently than most, i think being from two places is a big part of who i am good and bad. i get on well with foreigners most of the time, jamaica has no connection to my background but jamaicans always understand things i say that freak canadian people out, i think maybe there's something about having a different frame of reference that has a bigger effect than being from any specific cultures.

i've been in therapy before for ocd, i do think having that disorder is a barrier to forming good relationships but shouldn't it scare off assholes too lol?

riiiight. i get it now.

i have a similar situation in that most of the people i get along with here-- i mean get along well enough to form friendships-- are foreigners. with gringos it's harder-- not impossible, but there is more of a cultural chasm to bridge. it's not so much about cultural referents ("where were you on 9/11"), but implicit values and behaviors. this makes me a "minority" of a kind. i was born in latin america, but US hispanics are farther away from me culturally than a european, for example-- usa hispanics are more americanized. but not just any european-- things will run more smoothly for me with "continentals" than with british people, for example.

now with gringos proper i've generally gotten along better with catholics and jews than with protestants. why? no fucking idea. it just happens. it's not like i ask for people's backgrounds, but the connection happens. maybe it's having shared values/attitudes/perspectives/traditions (e.g., forgiving "sins", or a love of argument, or a history of guilt). maybe it's that they are also minorities/outsiders of sorts here vs the wasp ethos. this is a statistical thing, not an absolute that applies to every individual, you understand-- just general trends that i don't seek but somehow find me.

now, i'm still a fucking weirdo in my own home country, and therefore a triple weirdo here, which makes me highly lynchable, so to build a friendly network of fellow eccentrics is quite a big fucking task, and often full of disappointments and frustrations, like the myth of sisyphus, but still worth pursuing, one annoying test person at a time, ha ha ha.

with some effort and patience, you'll find your own tribe, but it never hurts to get a bit of help. i had a really good shrink for years, and what i learned from the fucker was priceless-- it helped, of course, that he was a weirdo himself, and had spent some years in latin america, and while he was very much an american he had jewish/european/new york roots, and loved books too, so we could understand each other, and argue like crazy and have fun doing that, until i finally got better.

Tea places*.

*the kind that don't have wifi

What aboot hobbies? Maybe you want to learn something and there's a community for it?

Look, I've spawned a bandwidth clogging image-only posting clone ;)

maybe you should take up an American accent. works for me. :confused:

then again, although I meet new and interesting people, and the folks at work treat me well, I seriously have no time for any friends beyond that of my son and my wife.

I leave the house at 5:45am and I'm not back until 7:45pm, so the thought of anything more than dinner, making tomorrows lunch, a few Star Trek episodes and some sleep is beyond me.

there's been plenty of cool people on the trains, and few downtown, but I reckon until I move out of the god-cursed bush, I'm fucked for "friends".

synopsis: change the accent.

by-the-by: would you be interested in me ripping an old cassette tape I found? it's dancehall reggae from a public access radio station in Dallas, from 1993. I plan to put it to digital, for my own listening loving, but thought you might find it interesting as well....bred'rin.

what is it like singers from dallas or something? that sounds pretty hot

i thought about this thread some more and i now think the best answer is death

^^^ yeah, all the cool people are already in Valhalla.

the tape is from a public radio broadcast of circa '93 dancehall artists from Jamdown. I just happened to live in Dallass at the time that I recorded it.

truthfully, I have almost just as large of a (dancehall) reggae collection, and could likely make a superior mix, but them again, so might you. I've just been listening to old tapes lately, and remembered how much I lived for this weekly broadcast (to the point of recording it).

of course, all of this involves time that I won't likely have for another month, but once I have a chance to upload it, I'll toss you a link.

maybe once all of that is said and done, I might also be able to take the time to make a mix of my own, from my own collection, and send you a link to that too, if you like. nobody else really likes dancehall, like I do, and maybe you too, friend.

syg is a place to meet nice people.

You have given out too much Reputation in the last 24 hours, try again later.

The library's a nice place to meet nice people.

people who talk to themselves and smell like weewee.

people in libraries smell worse than that!!! i had a librarian to ask me if i wanted to go to new york city with him and his buttboy that smelt like straight up ass. dude, was a child molester.

humans in libraries know if you come there to socialize which makes it even more awkward. freakest most boring figurines ever. church is a whole lot easy going. at least you might get some horny eye from some hottie.

the christscum in this town believe witches are real and satan is literally in their head telling them bad thoughts.

one time this asshole with his wife started preaching to me on the street. my effeminate voice moved him to tell me that he'd exorcized people and the demons came out of them in a voice belonging to the opposite gender of the body of the person they lived in. i told him "if you're god was real i'd kill him." he swung a punch at me but stopped and froze it just before making contact. i couldnt stop laughing.

these christofacist bumpkins would have me hung if they got their way so fuck them all.

FUCK EM

burn their churches and all the obese acoustic guitar players will roast alive while they're screaming "PRAISE BE!" the fucking scunges