How do I start living life?

I am 20 years old and have been going to an engineering college in the Southeastern United States for the past two years.

I am a commuter student. This has severely hampered my ability to make friends or get to know people on campus because I can only really pop in there for the duration of my classes and then head back home (which is about 15 miles away). I have never been a fan of playing sports because I have never been any good at them.

I have been trying to look for a job around where I live...as an unskilled young person with essentially no previous experience and no real references to vouch for me.

Also, I am a virgin. I've never even kissed a girl before. I am not willing to hire a prostitute because from every account I have ever heard, that does not really change anything besides the size of one's wallet.

In recent months I've improved my appearance with vigorous exercises and changing to a more stylish wardrobe. I am by no stretch of the imagination "fat" like I used to be, though I still think I am most of the time. I am told that I fret too much about my appearance, or that I have the bodily self-image of an anorexic. I call BS on that. I am not anorexic. I don't skip meals.

The only times I really have any fun are once every couple of years when I visit siblings who live abroad and once every couple of months when my two best friends from high school come back here for a few days whenever they take breaks from their college classes. I've only ever been to a single party at my college and that felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for somebody like me. It led to nothing.

The only person I've lived with for the past ten years is my dad. And he's gone through a lot of personal shock and has just been working a home business where he doesn't really have any constant circle of friends or acquaintances around him either. I was separated from the rest of my family at an early age. I don't live in the dorms on my campus because of expense reasons.

I've spent basically my whole life watching others have more fun and get more real-world exposure than me. I feel like I am waiting to actually start living my life. I was under the impression that college was gong to be better than high school, but now I am actually wishing that I could go back to high school. At least then I had three or four people I could call my friends. When I see on Facebook that people I knew, or at least saw a few times, in high school moved into their colleges' dorms a couple of years ago and now have lots of good times to tell stories about...well I honestly want to snap their bloody necks because I have *zero* stories to tell about wild, crazy fun times I've had at college. All of *my* drinking is done alone in front of my computer playing games on Steam or with myself.

To boil things down, here is an average day in my life at the moment...
Wake up-----Work out------Commute-------Classes------Home----Get hammered and please myself-------sleep

I've tried to join a clubs on campus but none of them have panned to anything worth remembering because they either haven't been that interesting or they have been disbanded for various reasons. I am very hesitant to join any club on-campus that involves physical activity like HvZ, Nerf club, or some similar sport because I have a serious mental block about physical competition with others my own age due to my extreme ineptitude in the past with sports.

When I say I am no good at sports, I am not exaggerating. It's not a case of "oh he lags a little bit behind so he might need an extra push every now and then, but otherwise he is competent." It's more like if I am on your basketball team, you team *will* lose. You will lose so hard that your head will explode in a shower of gibs and every member of your family will spontaneously combust. At least that's the impression I got from middle school sports; I haven't tried playing any sports since then because no-one has forced me. I keep fit with stationary bikes, ellipticals, weights, treadmills, etc. The only kind of recreational physical activity I have enjoyed so far has been martial arts. I haven't had much practice at any of the styles, it's just that I prefer hitting people to hitting anything else.

How do I break all of this? I ask that no-one give me any religious answers.

Typical early life inertia.

It hits a large number of people.

Forget the clothes and physique for the time being (unless they really boost your self esteem).

Such activities are parasitic on your finite lifespan.

You just need to stop planning and anticipating things and just fall into doing things.

I'm not promoting recklessness at all but with a few obvious precautions pretend to forget that things can go wrong and just do them.

The act of walking is controlled falling if you stop to think about the process you break your stride.

Similarly if you overly plan your actions you will clog up your progress.

Gore Vidal called his autobiography Point To Point Navigation.

It's a very good way of looking at life.

Point yourself at the next thing you want to do and don't think too hard about the next stages in your journey until you have reached the first point you have aimed for.

If you are asked to speak or perform in public pretend to not care what people think.

If you are in a nightclub or a dance just move without too much self awareness.

Confidence is attractive and ignorance of limits (even faked ignorance of limits) is easily mistaken for confidence.

If you walk around with too much self awareness of your sexual history or lack of it and your perceived inability to make friends it will become a needlessly self fulfilling, self written prophecy.

Facebook should be called Fakebook it can be used as a networking tool but it can also be used as an excuse to plan things you will never do.

Do or do not, there is no if I wear this and look like that I might get somewhere with someone someday. 

You are only 20 years old, you have your youth now stagger and swagger and claim your crazy prizes.

McFlabbergasty said:

Also, I am a virgin. I've never even kissed a girl before. I am not willing to hire a prostitute because from every account I have ever heard, that does not really change anything besides the size of one's wallet.

Free Your Mind... And Your Ass Will Follow.

If your nose runs and your feet smell you are standing upside down.

Still not sure if serious.

Ask Jesus to the prom!

Borgnine will tell you the secret to life:

ERNEST BORGNINE - Secret to Old Age - YouTube

There's always a group of gamers and geeks near the entrance of my university's student center; they are usually playing Magic on the table or something on their laptops. I don't know for sure because I have been too afraid to say hello or even look at them directly. There's always like 15 or 20 of them and one of me. What am I going to say? I haven't gotten into Magic mainly because I haven't had anybody around to get into it *with*. What's the point of getting cards if you have nobody to play with? I've started up a Warhammer 40,000 model hobby (slowly but surely, that stuff is expensive) lately because at least one can paint the models in any color scheme and get a distinctive and cool look.

This has been going on for the whole two years that I have been attending classes there. I am never sure of what to say to them, or who to start with. I don't know any of their names, have not spoken to them, and to the best of my knowledge I do not and have not ever had classes with any of them. Which infuriates me to no end because they seem like the kind of people I could have been friends with by now. But I transferring to another university next semester (for unrelated reasons), so I think it might be too late for me already. I feel that way towards pretty much everything now.

I'm sure you can easily understand a game like Magic but why don't you pretend to be a little bit more green?

Ask if one of them can explain the basics to you and maybe the whole group will get involved. People tend to enjoy explaining their interests to other people.

Just stop being so self conscious matey.

The worst thing that can happen is they can say no in which case just join in with someone else's thing you wouldn't want to hang around rude cliquey people anyway.

Still need four thread reasoning.

And never wait to be invited to a party.

Turn up with some drinks and nibbles and say you are a friend of Trevor or Larry.

Nice thread! Tyrphanax has pretty much got this, all his advice is quite sound. Bingo is on a good track too, but, a little style never hurt anyone. But he is right, don't be too self conscious about it. Whatever you're wearing, wear it with confidence. Regardless of your gender, confidence is sexy as hell.

I relate in a lot of ways, and not so much in others. From teenager on through college I always had a good number of female friends and female attention. But I totally lacked confidence. So much so, that I didn't even realize that I had more female friends than a lot of guys did or that I had others that were interested in me. Even if a girl did show interest in me and made it a point to talk to me, I'd write it off as just being friendly and not allow myself to try to pursue anything for fear of awkward rejection. 

Flash forward to many years later and I reached kind of a low point in life where I didn't really care anymore. Apathy is generally not very attractive, but it cancelled out my self consciousness and during that time I discovered the whole "just take a plunge" thing, which in turn built up my confidence pretty well, which got me out of that funk in all sorts of ways.

Just go up and talk to people, that is what everyone else does. That group of nerds would probably be more than happy to have an new guy join the group. Just walk up to some guys playing magic and say, "You know, I've always thought that game looked really awesome, but sadly, none of my friends have ever been interested in it." That is probably a good enough conversation starter right there, if they don't engage you and just stay focused on their game, a simple "mind if I sit and watch?" will grant you permission to listen in on their conversations and decide your next infiltration method. They start talking about anything you know anything about, you can interject something.

With girls it is the same way, just find an excuse to start a conversation. If things go south, I do an out loud inner monologing thing (say something quirky humorous about how that didn't go over very well as if I am talking to myself, not her), it sometimes gets giggles, usually smiles, and from time to time completely turns things around, and at the very least makes me feel less awkward and kind of ends the exchange with a lighthearted tone. Just don't be afraid of rejection, not every girl you try to talk to is going to be interested in talking with you (most probably will, women like attention) and if they politely brush you off, it is no big deal. If you just let go and try, I think you'll find having enjoyable random conversations with girls isn't that hard.

Fear and self consciousness really hold a lot of guys back. 

Also, there is no greater social crime for one to commit than to be boring. It is absolutely unforgivable. Everything is interesting to someone, and nothing is interesting to everyone; so this isn't yet another thing to be self conscious about, just find things you are interested in and keep educating yourself about them (for goodness sakes, not just frivolous things, things that actually matter). When you fill your head with knowledge, you'll always have something exciting to talk about. If it is exciting to you, but not to the people you are talking to, then it probably isn't a girl/person/group you are going to click with anyway, so don't sweat it. 

CP3S said:

Nice threads!

Fixed.

Honestly, I'm really baffled by the four threads.  The first three were all posted at about the same time, so I originally wrote it off to a tech glitch.  Heck, I seem to remember Mr. _ender doing something similar with a Batman thread.  But then he comes back four hours later and posts the thread again.

*confused*