The goal is to date successfully. The subgoal is to get one date. Despite meeting a lot of single women, flirting with them, and getting some phone numbers, none of them have been willing to actually go out, or they've made plans and then cancelled. The working theory is that I'm way less attractive than I think. So I'm debugging my appearance and behavior.

Clothes. My process was this: go online, read about fashion, put clothes on, stare at mirror. "According to this, none of my shirts actually fit!" Go to the store, try shirts on, "and none of these fit either!" Go to a tailor, spend $180 to get five shirts ruined (N.B. test a tailor before giving them a big chunk of your wardrobe). Go to a new tailor, and finally I now own a shirt that fits like it's supposed to.

I had tried improving my clothes before without effect, but I think the latest batch of changes bumped me up a level. I've also been testing out these high-status behaviors, so it's hard to isolate changes, but these are new in the last two months:

1. People walking on the street get out of my way (this led to a lot of "sidewalk dancing" for a while, because I was still expecting them to expect me to move).
2. Pretty girls have started conversations with me. That NEVER happened before.
3. In groups, men have been taking way more shots at me.

Social. I can now reliably initiate conversations with strangers. I did this by noticing that I was comfortable engaging with people, as long as they made the first move (i.e. they said something to me). So I started gradually lowering my standard for what qualified as a first move in my mind, e.g. if they asked me to save their place in a line, then I'd start a conversation when they got back. I'm at the point now where even passive things qualify, like "he's carrying a trombone case" or "she's wearing a cool shirt." And when someone walks across the room to stand near me, to not talk to them feels almost as awkward as ignoring something they said.

This is a useful skill in general, but it's really nice for flirting, because you don't have to rely on them or some external event to throw you together. There are some other benefits too, like having more control of the conversation. The most surprising thing I've noticed is how pleasant it always is: even when I'm hitting on girls that just aren't interested, they're friendly, and never offended. We talk for a while, I say goodbye, and we go our separate ways. What was I so worried about?

There's a lot more that I'm trying, but this comment is already too long. I am keeping a log of my changes that I'm sure will be completely useless to everyone except me, but I'm tracking it anyway. See you in August, hopefully I'll have some good news!