by SG’s Team Agony feat. Rin

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.

Q: My girlfriend just broke up with me recently after four years of dating and almost a year of being engaged. I never thought this would happen but she just up and left for reasons she would never tell me.

With all that behind me, my real question is what to do now? I have tried going out to meet people but with no luck. I have tried online sites but they seem just as bad as going out for meeting new people. I do have a few friends around but just find myself so lonely all the time. I work from home which doesn’t really help. It’s a good job working on computers and I make great money, but it doesn’t help me meet people at all. I just don’t know what to do with myself and find myself fighting loneliness all the time.

A: Regrouping after the breakup of a long-term relationship can be very difficult. The first thing to address is your loneliness. You’ve mentioned you work from home and make a good income. If you don’t already have one, you should purchase a laptop and take as much of your work outside the house as possible. Even if it’s just for an hour or two a day, hanging out in a coffee shop and working will give you a nice dose of people. Choose a pleasant coffee shop, even if it’s out of your way. Maybe it’s in the neighborhood you want to live in, or maybe it just has a great atmosphere.

When you’re lonely, it’s important to reach out to your friends. They care about you and want to see you happy –– try to make two or three friend outings every week. Good friends are the backbone of getting through a breakup.

Because you work at home and are in a low place right now, you should consider adding some physical activity to your weekly routine. Exercise releases all sorts of beneficial chemicals in our brains, like serotonin and endorphins. Cultivating a feeling of wellbeing will definitely help with your loneliness and put you in a good place for when you do meet someone new. Joining a gym would be the easiest step, but you could also try yoga, team sports, or just go running in your own neighborhood. Lifting weights at home would also do the trick, though it doesn’t have the added potential social benefits.

Since you just got out of a relationship, give yourself some time to recuperate before you stress about meeting someone new. Make new goals — find things you can achieve on your own. Spend time figuring out what makes you happy, then do it! In a long-term relationship we can lose ourselves and it can be really empowering, when single, to find out what we want to do and just do it without worrying about the repercussions.

Maybe she was against you getting tattoos; maybe she didn’t like it when you went out with your friends and came home late; maybe she hated it when you played your favorite album on repeat for three hours straight. Now is your time to do whatever the fuck you want without needing the approval of another person. Discover the good parts of being single. It sounds contradictory, but it’s true! Sometimes being single is fun.

Hope those suggestions are helpful to you!

Rin

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

by Blogbot

Every week we ask the ladies and gentlemen of the social web to show us their finest ink in celebration of Tattoo Tuesday.

Our favorite submission from Twitter and Tumblr each wins a free 3 month membership to SuicideGirls.com.

Check this week’s winners below.

From Twitter:

@OneZero wins with a rather unique Zombie Skunk. Full marks for originality and execution (nom, nom!).

From Tumblr:

lazulibutterfly wins her “stay” and “true” wrist pieces. We can’t fault that mantra.

If you haven’t won this week, don’t forget that you can enter each week until you do, so good luck next Tuesday, and happy inking!

A few things to remember:

• You have to be 18 to qualify.
• The tattoo has to be yours…that means permanently etched on your body.
• On Twitter we search for your entries by looking up the hashtag #TattooTuesday, so make sure you include it in your tweet!

Check out the Tattoo Tuesday winners of weeks past!

by Steven-Elliot Altman (SG Member: Steven_Altman)

Our Fiction Friday serialized novel, The Killswitch Review, is a futuristic murder mystery with killer sociopolitical commentary (and some of the best sex scenes we’ve ever read!). Written by bestselling sci-fi author Steven-Elliot Altman (with Diane DeKelb-Rittenhouse), it offers a terrifying postmodern vision in the tradition of Blade Runner and Brave New World…

By the year 2156, stem cell therapy has triumphed over aging and disease, extending the human lifespan indefinitely. But only for those who have achieved Conscientious Citizen Status. To combat overpopulation, the U.S. has sealed its borders, instituted compulsory contraception and a strict one child per couple policy for those who are permitted to breed, and made technology-assisted suicide readily available. But in a world where the old can remain vital forever, America’s youth have little hope of prosperity.

Jason Haggerty is an investigator for Black Buttons Inc, the government agency responsible for dispensing personal handheld Kevorkian devices, which afford the only legal form of suicide. An armed “Killswitch” monitors and records a citizen’s final moments — up to the point where they press a button and peacefully die. Post-press review agents — “button collectors” — are dispatched to review and judge these final recordings to rule out foul play.

When three teens stage an illegal public suicide, Haggerty suspects their deaths may have been murders. Now his race is on to uncover proof and prevent a nationwide epidemic of copycat suicides. Trouble is, for the first time in history, an entire generation might just decide they’re better off dead.

(Catch up with the previous installments of Killswitch – see parts ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, and SIX – then continue reading after the jump…)

[..]

by Daniel Robert Epstein

Man I love this job! After three long years of wooing I finally got a chance to talk with the legendary comedian Al Franken. After many successful years as a standup comedian and Saturday Night Live writer, Franken has released a number of hysterical and popular books such as Why Not Me? and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. When Franken released Lies and the Lying Liars in 2004, esteemed filmmakers Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus followed and him and documented the experience. Now it’s all been put together in the film Al Franken: God Spoke.

Read our exclusive interview with Al Franken on SuicideGirls.com.

by Blogbot

Artist / SG Member Name: Eric daStone / lagrangian_point

Mission Statement: I don’t have a mission statement as such, I just like to paint. However, when I first started to paint seriously I tried to paint things that you don’t normally see. This was quite literal back then, painting skeletons, muscles etc, on figures while trying to maintain a life and soul to the figures.

More recently, I have become fascinated with quantum and particle physics — that matter is in fact energy and vice versa — and that everything is virtually made of nothing. I try and paint this reality, although I don’t think I have come close to succeeding yet. Ultimately I try and paint interesting, soulful images.

[..]

by Blogbot

We asked our Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter friends if they preferred pie or cupcakes. Over 9,500 responses later, and the results are in…

[..]

by Daniel Robert Epstein

Who ever thought that Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio would get into a bidding war over the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft? That’’s something even Nostradamus wouldn’t have predicted, but it happened. Said bidding war was over the rights to Max Brooks’’ wild new zombie book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which tips its hat to Studs Terkel’’s The Great War — but rather than featuring interviews with people involved in World War Z, the book investigates nearly every aspect of what would happen if there were a real zombie infestation in today’’s world. Brooks is definitely an expert on all things zombie, having written the bestselling Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead.

Read our exclusive interview with Max Brooks on SuicideGirls.com.