ask and ye shall receive

i never learned to ask for things nicely as a child. probably because if you asked nicely you were ignored. probably because nobody actually heard you, you being either drowned out by the general volume or by the volume in the head of the person you asked.

so now, i'm trying to learn to ask nicely for things. sweetly. as when alan alda's wife praisingly talked him out of installing a new toilet by telling him how smart he was.

i've had some practice with this this weekend.

first, i had to ask a guy (again) if he was in an exclusive relationship with someone else. before i met up with him, i have to know. he just said he was divorced "want to see the papers?" but didn't reply on that. so i had to nicely ask again. he wrote back "i would never do that." then he said to call him. then he wrote a few minutes later saying "did you get my message?"

ok, wierd.

so the question is - i asked. but why is the answer so hard to get? it's either YES or NO. not LET'S DISCUSS MORE.

i also had to ask another guy, very nicely, how i should handle the fact that he wasn't responding to my communications to him, yet seems to want to be in my life. are actions really speaking louder than words here? it's hard to say.

so i ask, how should i handle this? should i call you? again?

these aren't big things, but it's good practice.

i never used to ask anything. or for anything.

this can be very dangerous, much like driving headlong into a tree.

now, many concussions later, i'm learning to ask the hard questions. but first, you have to learn to ask the easy ones...