Do Women Date Shorter Guys…?
Posted by cuinlalaland in Relationships on January 12th, 2010
I absolutely love the City-Data Forums! I get so many great topic ideas from just the relationships forum by itself I don’t know how I could ever run out of ideas for posts, no wonder most of my posts are related to relationships in some way 
swiss90 asked ‘Do women date shorter guys?’ and I’d have to say YES, and have sex with them, and marry them too! It’s no problem at all if your a shorter guy or a taller girl you can and will find someone special if you can just relax and maintain a good attitude!
How to Give Advice
Posted by cuinlalaland in Personal Growth, Relationships on January 5th, 2010
As a friend recently explained to me, it’s not the knowledge you share, it’s the way that you share it.
Most of us (especially those who participate in social media) love to spew our opinions give advice. Sometimes we hand it out for free, sometimes we get paid, sometimes it’s requested, and often it’s not. But we give it anyway 
As we approach 7 billion individual opinions globally (and that’s just the ones from those currently alive!) it really makes me feel great to know when my little voice helps someone out.
The question is when you find yourself in a position to offer advice how should you go about it for the greatest impact?
1. Consider your Audience
I’ll use this article as an example, which is advice about how to give advice My audience various widely from close friends to total strangers. As a result the advice I’m sharing has to be somewhat generalized, but I still want to give it a personal touch and of course want it to be as useful as possible to you in whatever situation you need to put this information to use.
The biggest advantage in this particular case is that if you’re reading this chances are you are either looking for this exact type of information, or you have a measure of respect for my thoughts. Either way you’re open to considering this advice even if you end up deciding you disagree. Which leads to…
2. Solicited vs. Unsolicited
By contrast to the agreeable conversation you and I are having through this article. There may be times in your life where you find yourself in a position to have to give advice to someone who may not want it, and certainly didn’t ask for it. When advice is unsolicited you can’t exactly go around beating people over the head with it no matter how right you might be. Use some tact and put your perceptive powers to use.
3. Personal or Professional
Are you offering your advice on a personal level or as a professional service? For me right now it’s a little bit of both, if you’re reading this article because you just searched “how to give advice” then you might consider this my professional opinion. But if you’re a regular reader of my blog it’s so much more personal than that. My advice is to offer professional quality advice with a personal touch no matter what the situation. If they don’t like what you’re saying you won’t change their mind by not being true to yourself, so you might as well just be yourself and have fun and let the chips fall where they may.
4. One-time or On-going
You love my articles and you’re going to keep coming back to read everything I need to tell you, right? So even if this is your FIRST visit you and we will see each other again and again, right? Offering on-going advice and opinion requires a relationship to be established and the more trust that is built over time the more effective (I believe) your advice will be because your audience will do their best to act upon that advice.
5. 1st Person vs. 3rd Person Experience
Sharing your own personal experiences is generally preferred but much of what we know we’ve learned from others and their experiences. When offering advice based on a 3rd party’s experience don’t pretend like it happened to you! You’ll miss important details and it will be obvious you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
6. Keep Your Expectations Reasonable
My last bit of advice on giving advice is not to take it too personally if your audience doesn’t act on your suggestions. Most of us need to have things repeated and backed up over and over again before we believe it, especially if it’s something that’s not easy to accept, something perhaps that we are in denial about and lying to ourselves. When offering advice to someone in that state just be patient and hope for the best.
Photo Courtesy of: hellojenuine
May I Swim Through Your Bubbles?
Posted by cuinlalaland in General, Relationships, Stories about Me on July 3rd, 2009
It’s Friday glorious Friday and time to let my hair down. [Well, it's not really Friday as I write this it's actually Thursday and my hair isn't long enough to let down...] but that doesn’t matter! The point is it’s Friday for YOU assuming you’re not reading this from the archives and…well, ah…OK never mind.
First, I’m going to give you a quick review for June, then a couple of rousing endorsements, and finish things off with a story…yes a story! So gather round the virtual campfire and break out the marshmallows, kids!
June 2009…Otherwise known as Baby Steps for cuinlalaland
The site went live on June 20 with the post Understanding Emotional Perception. Since then we’ve had 35 visits by 22 unique visitors from 3 countries (hey there!) Nearly 40% of visitors are returning so it seems I’ve had some success in fooling you into believing I’m offering some sort of value here, good…good
Not many of you have subscribed to receive updates by RSS or email so I encourage you to do that now, it will make keeping up with new posts a lot easier. Just click your preference here: RSS or updates by email. And of course if you’re on Twitter you can follow me, don’t forget to say hi and let me know you’re from the blog, I’d love to hear from you!
Shout-Outs
I want to thank Taylor Lord for his post Two and A Half Months Blogging, An Ongoing Journey For Success which I found inspirational and an ongoing motivation to never give up. I also want to thank Taylor for becoming my very first subscriber and twitter follower. Look forward to a long friendship, Taylor!
Havi Brooks is proving to be an interesting inspiration as well in fact you might notice some of her writing style rubbing off on me! I particularly recommend her Blogging Therapy series if you’re looking for some great reading on many aspects of why you should blog but why so many of us find it difficult.
I also want to thank Chris Guillebeau for his report 279 Days to Overnight Success. That gave me some great ideas for blog promotion and monetization as well as encouragement that success can be achieved in a relatively short time.
I think that about wraps it up for the announcements. And now for the main attraction…
May I Swim Through Your Bubbles?
The story of the week I discovered girls.
That’s right I said week! There was a very definite moment in my life when I realized I was starting to notice girls and enjoying the fact that I was pretty popular with them. It was the summer of 1989 and I was 11 years old and the week in question took place at a vacation resort on a lake in Canada. OK that’s not entirely accurate, I actually had a ‘girlfriend’ a couple of months before that…she’ll play into this story later…so I had ‘noticed’ girls before this, but that particular week is where it all came together, as you will soon see.
[Truth-O-Matic 0.2000b Gauge: 99% -- This is a running measurement of how much of my story has been fictionalized, dramatized, or otherwise mis-remembered, mis-categorizied, or whatever other mis-ized you'd like. All of this took place 20 years ago, so cut me some slack! The Gauge starts at 100% True and goes down with each umm...'lie', for lack of a better word.]
While I’m at it (mentioning the Truth-O-Matic) I might as well tell you that the title of this story is also falsified. First, it’s too grammatically correct, and second it wasn’t a question it was a statement that started the ball rolling.
Monday Morning…
“I’m Going to Swim Through Your Bubbles!” [read this out loud with your nose pitched for proper effect]
“What?” Destiny* asked.
“I’m going to swim through your bubbles!” I repeated, with a diving mask covering my eyes and nose that made my voice sound like I had a really bad cold.
Destiny paused briefly as if she either didn’t understand or was horribly embarrassed and then slid down the slide and splash! into the pool…and I, swam through her bubbles! (See? doesn’t that make perfect sense? The splash made bubbles and I liked swimming through them, what’s so weird about that? Nothing I tell you!)
*Names have been changed for the protection of the innocent my protection from being sued if any of these people ever figure out that I’m writing about them.
When I came up out of the water Destiny swam over and asked what I meant and I explained it to her just like I explained it to you above. She immediately started killing herself laughing and said that she thought she’d farted or something and was totally freaked out that I would want to swim through her fart bubbles. OK I admit, I had a brief fart-bubble-swimming fetish, but that’s a whole ‘nother story for another time. That wasn’t the case this time and once she knew that she immediately ran back up to the top of the slide so I could swim through more of her bubbles…wasn’t that sweet? 
A Friendship is Born
We spent the next hour or so playing in the pool before the lunch bell interrupted us and we had to quickly get dried and run to the dining room. At least we weren’t the only two people sitting here in our bathing suits with wet hair, that’s just the sort of resort it was. I don’t remember much happening after lunch… I think she went off to hang out with her other friends, not to worry, they’re in the story too a little later.
I should also mention that the week actually started on Sunday but that’s ‘arrival & settling in day‘ and nothing much happens on Sunday, and I didn’t meet Destiny until Monday so that’s why I started the week off there. Saturday is ‘saying your sad fairwells & leaving day‘. It’s amazing how close you can get to a few friends in just one week of hanging out together 24/7. But we’ll get to that later.
Cast Members
Since this is the end of the first day I’ll continue the story next time. But before I go I thought you might like to be introduced to the whole cast of characters.
Protagonist: Me
Female Lead: Destiny, the dear friend
Supporting Roles/The Girls:
Ebony, the cute but serious girl
Peach, the infatuated stalker girl
Dream Woman, the girlfriend
(Why do these names sound like a cheesy porn flick?)
Antagonist: Green Eye on the Straight Guy
And his Sidekick: Yeah, What HE Said!
There are a spattering of extras that should appear throughout the story if I remember everything right (watch the Truth-O-Matic Gauge). Incidently, considering these are all fake names I better update the Gauge:
[Truth-O-Matic 0.2000b Gauge: 68% 98% Sorry, it's in beta, still has a few bugs.]
To be continued…
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