You Are Your You

Seriously. You are you. And one day. You will die. You will be bones and rotting flesh. Maggots will be copulating in your intestines. While you’re still alive, still kicking, still lickin’ the chicken, please don’t give too much of a damn about other people.

Please don’t worry if you’re going to make that girl uncomfortable. She’s uncomfortable all the time. She bleeds from her crotch! That, and guys way grosser and way more boring than you hit on her all the time. It’s like if you had someone stomp on your balls everyday, then one day someone stomps on your face instead. It’s still uncomfortable, but your balls will be happy. Yep, just like that.

Please don’t be too conciliatory. Don’t start your emails or your conversations with “I don’t want to make you feel awkward, but…” -or- “It’s ok if you say no, but…” These are lies! You do want to make her feel awkward, it’s not OK if she says no, you just want to be eating your pussy and fucking it too! Besides, these things will just make her feel even worse about being a jerk to you. If you actually wanted to make her feel better about dropping you like the wet towel you are, you’d give her an easy out by being a jerk to her. But you don’t want to make her feel better, you want to make yourself feel better about making her feel awkward. Boooo.

And please don’t try to make yourself look too good. Don’t talk about how smart you are, how funny you are. Be smart. Be funny. She’s not a moron, she’ll figure out if you’re a loser. I guess there’s the possibility that she’s a completely self-involved bitch, but in that case that ship is set to sail where it wants to. Seriously though, you don’t have to prove your worth to anybody other than Thor. Don’t fuck with Thor.

Ting-a-Ling

As humans, as animals, we become conditioned to respond to positive signifiers. Pretty face, nice boobs, you like what you see. Your logic becomes very simple. Get booooobs. Get faaaace. WAAANTTT FAAACE. NEEED FAAAAACEEEE. BYYYOOOOBBBS. Do whatever you can do get them. Do it do it do it.

This sort of thinking makes you really stupid. You are Pavlov’s dog, throwing knee-jerk ereactions at sexsitive boobulus:

Want X, need to get X, need to do Y, ow!
Want X, need to get X, need to do Y, ow!
…

You will never learn! Need to step outside the context. Need to free your mind, see yourself as you really are. You need some principles.

First Principle: Be a Selfish Bastard

Let your first one be: don’t care too much about her. She’d probably get bored with a guy who cares too much about her, anyway. Or she’ll use you up and leave you. Really, there’s no way this can go well.

Selfishness is not wrong! I love selfish people. Selfless people are so fucking boring. While Ghandi sat around starving to death, some pioneers in silicon valley were CHANGING THE WORLD FOR THE AWESOME.

With selfish people, I don’t have to worry about them so goddamn much. Selflessness requires that everyone becomes their brother’s keeper, because their brother’s keeper is too damn busy being his brother’s keeper.

And you don’t want to be this girl’s keeper, you want to be this girl’s throbbing ROD OF POWER.

(a caveat – it’s actually fine to be selfless if you actually are, but make sure you think your shit through and are ACTUALLY being selfless and not just some disgusting murky mix of selfless and selfish – good luck with that shit)

Ugh.

Ugh

I asked this girl on a “date.” Just like that. I thought it was simple enough. Two young sexy smart motherfuckers go out, have some food, get to know each other. What happens happens, right?

Wrong.

She asked her friends like “what does he mean? What is dating to an American boy?” and they went off like “oh, he wants to marry you – this is serious – blah blah blah blah BLAH.” Seriously, what the fuck?

So she sent me an email back like “no, I don’t want to go on a date, but I’ll go out to lunch with you, and you alone. And we’ll talk about us. And we’ll be cute together.” What? Isn’t that a date? TWf is a date then? What?

Hot Wet Relatio

To be honest, I don’t know where I really stand on the whole issue of “relationships.”

On the one hand, I really don’t like the idea of being in a “relationship.” If I like someone then I will stay with them. If I don’t, then I won’t. Simple as that, right?

On the other hand, the word does have staying power. If I have a short bout of hateful hate for my lovah it can keep me in place until I pull my head out of my ass and realize that I was just depressed/annoyed at something else/whateverthefuck.

On the other hand, should I let myself be manipulated by words this way? Isn’t this my whole deal? The force I am constantly striving against in my battle for self-actualization? Shouldn’t I be able to control myself, keep myself from doing retarded shit which will make me unhappy in the not-too-distant future, without belief in ill-defined abstract concepts?

On the other hand, isn’t losing control what being with someone is all about? Don’t we want to find someone who we can just “be ourselves” (ugh, sorry for that) with, be silly and stupid with, just like let it all loose? Feel what we’re feeling? Be who we are!?!

Ugh. If you don’t say you’re in a relationship then you have nothing societal on which to base your interactions. Everything has to be new, fresh, whatever. That’s obviously way more fun, but also way more stress-inducing. If you do say you’re in a relationship then you run the risk of things become stale, role-based, charicatured.

(as a short aside, I am obviously writing this from my white, middle-class, American, extraordinarily neurotic perspective, so if you don’t have these problems or don’t find them interesting, bugger off)

Durrr Date

And what the hell is a date? How do you know if you’re on a date? I mean, obviously if her hand is on your thigh and she is doing little fingernail circles on your penis tent, it’s a date. But there’s this huuuuge gray area.

See, back in the day shit was black and white. If you asked a girl out, that was it. You were basically asserting that you want to bone this girl and probably that you’d like to marry her. Men and women didn’t just “go out for fun” like they do now. There was no ambiguity about it. If she said yes, she was basically consenting to be yours and yours alone for a long, lone time (at least, this is my reading of history – it’s probably horribly wrong – whatever!)

Nowadays, women are “empowered” and are “people” and so it’s perfectly reasonable for a guy and a girl to go out, have a nice, platonic lunch, talk about the weather, Obama, and – oh I don’t know – Darfur. Completely unsexy topics, obviously not going anywhere. Then, when it’s done, they go back to being lonely white people. Everyone’s happy!

This means that we need to develop a new set of symbols. Just “date” is not enough. Unfortunately, this is where the specter of complexity rears its ugly head. Who decides the symbols? How do I know what it means if the girl I’m out to lunch with smiles at me? People smile at each other, right? What if I misinterpret her friendly gestures as sexual advances? Sure, nothing catastrophic will happen if I make a move, but maybe she’ll feel more withdrawn from me, not wanting to stoke the raging inferno of my libido. Are women able to treat such things gracefully? I guess I have not had experience with this, so I do not know.

What I do know is that girls have made advances on me when they were very much unwanted and that made the situation very awkward. I was not able to deal with it. I suck.

Then again, maybe women have more practice with this sort of thing, since many of them are constantly being fawned over, made passes at. Man, men disgust me. Speaking of disgust,

Liberal Douchebags

To top it all off, there’s this whole class of people who get a big kick out of being progressive liberal freespirited jerks. They keep things open and unnamed and stupid so that they can feel superior about their, uh, two-persons-together-item. They make all conversation related to them awkward – “Jim and his, uh, woman-friend-item are coming to dinner tonight.” They love it when people make mistakes – “no, actually, we’re not dating, we just happen to be with each other right now.” Then, when one of them sleeps with someone else, they uh…stop being a two-person-together-thing. Durrr.

Even if these people don’t exist, they do exist, and I hate them.

Love

I’m definitely going to write a lot more about “love” at some point, but I don’t think that I could write this post without talking a little bit about how the meaning of the word has changed/how it frustrates me/etc.

I honestly don’t understand how/when people use the word love these days. My best guess is that each culture has their own conception of love (e.g. I have it on good authority that in Nigerian culture the strongest thing you can say to a person is “you please me”) and that in the semiotic holocaust that is post-modern white-people-culture all of these traditions have kind of blurred/fractured to the point that no one has any idea what’s going on.

Our pop songs and sloppy romantic comedies have trashed the word like I trashed your momma’s vaginal opening – leaving it an empty husk cast of meaningless superficial interactions. Our emo ballads have equated it with a sort of release from self-loathing. The presentation of gender relationships in hip-hop and sex-obsessed culture has either just removed it from the equation entirely, or rendered it into a signifier of lust and bodily attraction.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not making judgments here – I’m not talking about love the Platonic Ideal or making the claim that any of the above culture forces are changing love the “thing” (if it is a thing). I am talking about love the social symbol. Love as a symbol has power only with respect to some notion of the purity of the culture in which it is embedded. Since love is a two-person act, it is subject to the ridiculously sophisticated and subtle dynamics of common knowledge and therefore a lack of certainty w/r/t its definition causes substantial social confusion. And it just so happens that all these cultures have significantly damaged the “purity” of the culture in which they’re embedded. I mean, sure, some insulated Southern Baptist hick can probably still truly and honestly say “I love you, Charlene,” but what about the rest of us? We can’t even speak the words without sounding like a total Leonardo DiCaprio wannabe. Ugh.

Man am I confused about all of this. So confused that, I shit you not, I have actually turned to one of my ex-girlfriends and said:

“I feel a very strong positive emotion towards you right now.”

Symbols are dead, long live Ugh.

She’s a little quirky. Her shoelaces are pink and black and she does her hair in this super-strange way. She’s kind of quiet, but when she gets drunk she really gets going. She’s got good taste in music, but likes inexplicably shitty music, too. She probably does art of some kind. She’s on your mind, yeah, yeah, she’s on your mind.

But that’s where she’s been for the last few months. Rather than, say, on your dong.

You talk to her at parties, you see her around. Your conversation is always just interesting enough to get you both engaged, but your raging half-erectoid cock keeps you teetering on the edge of mental retardation, weak enough in the knees that you can never find the balls to ask the whore out. That stupid bitch, why won’t she just ask you out? Why is it always the men who ask out the women? Why why why?

You get really drunk at some party and go home, get more pissed, then send her a long rambling email about how you’ve always thought she was so special and interesting and no one else is like her.

The next morning you wake up, check your inbox expectantly, no reply! You begin to worry. Your already booze-bile-churning stomach clenches tighter than Bush’s deathgrip on Cheney’s 2-inch loveROD, you begin writing some back-breakingly apologetic/explanatory missive, and you realize that you have entered…

THE FESTER LOVE zoonenenenene…

Yes, you’re in fester love, and there’s nowhere to go but down.

“All you need is fester love.”
-The Beatles

You’ve done it to yourself, you know. When you first met, you already knew how awesome this girl was. It was apparent. I mean, she’s not the hottest girl in the world, but she has the sort of ineffable disinterested quality which sends your brain into all sorts of fantasy-delusion-dreams. You knew you loved her once you saw her. Then, when you went back to your boy’s place after the party to get a nightcrap, you just couldn’t stop going on and on and on about her.

So what did you do wrong?

Well, nothing and everything. In one sense, no one does anything wrong. The idea that you could do something wrong implicitly rests on the belief that there may be something wrong with you. Which there isn’t. We’re all beautiful starflowers.

A better and more productive question to ask is what did you understand incorrectly?

Misunderstanding #1

You probably thought something along the lines of “oh, this girl is so awesome, everyone must know, everyone must see it, I bet she has guys lining up to take her out.”

WRONG.

This girl is weird and does not fit into the traditional roles which actual men (men with real big dicks and swaggers who ask women out like they were a bug chaser and women were pure anthropomorphized Super-AIDS) drop their knickers over. She probably doesn’t even have big tits. Believe me, they will not ask this girl out. They cannot be seen with this girl. Even if they are into her, this girl does not fit into their bizarre self-aggrandizing masculine fantasies.

Which means that the set of her potential suitors is pathetic shmucks like you who can’t get their act together enough to go after a good thing. You’re in competition with losers! You win!

Misunderstanding #2

You probably think that you’re below her, that she’s some beautiful sex alien and you’re Alien.

WRONG.

First of all, this girl’s probably got some issues. Not a certainty here, but if she is attractive and smart and has some how avoided the trauma which comes along with those traits, then yes she is above you, and god help me if she isn’t above us all.

Second of all, this girl probably isn’t a sex goddess.

Third of all, you’re probably not as shit as you think you are. If you’re attracted to a girl like this then you are either some soddy emo douche-hipster-douch (in which case, yes, she is above you), or you’re actually a nice, introspective, interesting guy who could actually make her feel good about herself without being a dick. You might even be shittier than her (aren’t we all shittier than women?), but if you care about that then you are buying into the debilitating and idiotic lie that relative worth matters. ABSOLUTE WORTH MATTERS.

Stop feeling so down on yourself. Since when do love and romance have anything to do with value? They’re about connection, and the sooner you learn that anyone can become connected to anyone, the better off you’ll be and the closer you will be to viewing your sex trophy as a *gasp* human being.

Misunderstanding #3

I don’t know if this is so much a misunderstanding as a generally bad idea, but you’re probably harboring some bizarre idealized vision of what it would be like if you two went out to lunch, if you two kissed, if you two got naked and licked whip cream out of each other’s assholes.

Probably, in actuality, your first date (if it ever happens) will be as awkward as all first dates. You won’t know what the other person thinks, you won’t be able to find the right things to say, and it’ll go wonderfully anyway.

Life is how it is – getting trapped in fantasy feels good for a little while, but it also gets old real quick and it is just one more thing enlarging that hollow spot just below the heart which that eternally misunderstood organ will one day slide into with a satisfying “thump,” never to be seen again.

Down With Fester Love

Don’t let your love fester. It will never, never end well. If you’ve already been through this experience (and god knows I have) then you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, then you’re probably milking some pathetic Arthurian fantasy that I’m not talking about you – no! – I couldn’t be! – she’s the one, after all. She’s got all you could ever want and more. She’s fucking Johnny Depp plus Tits.

So ask her out. DO IT NOW. Before your festering fester love festers faster.

A Secret Trick

One time, I became really obsessed with this girl who teased me a lot. She would say things like “oh, don’t you want to tie me up, Bizzie?” but never follow through. She would get drunk and sit on my lap in little skimpy outfits and shit. I’d sit in her room and we’d talk and talk. “You’re the only one I can talk to, Bizzie.” But nothing ever came of it, obviously. I let it fester. I always though “oh, maybe she’ll make the first move.” “Oh, maybe the time isn’t right.” “Oh, she’s probably not attracted to me.”

Then, one day, one of my friends suggested that I put her on my “permanent ban list” – a list of women i will never engage sexually. This seemed like a fix. I would stop obsessing about her – sitting in topology class with a massive erection imagining her in a web of black latex and leather straps. I did it! She was on the list! Fuck her!

Within a week, I was wrist deep in her sopping 20-year old twat.

So, the point of this blog is to present a personal perspective on dating, sex, and relationships in a world that grows ever more confusing for the male gender. Feminism has crippled us – deprived us of our male role models, confused our gender roles, broken all traditional tools for male/female interaction. SO! We must rise above, we must forge new ones.

New Traditions

So, despite being 22, I am pretty inexperienced at dating – asking girls out, going on dates, etc. In University the primary method by which we find our partners is through the new tradition of getting wasted at a party, finding someone to hook up with. After that, we suffer through a long period of ambiguity caused by the fact that we can never know if we really like the person, are just going along with it because we hooked up with them, or whatever-the-fuck. Seriously!

But today, just before writing this post, I asked a girl out on a date. I bit the bullet.

Before asking her out, I spilled water on my sampler (durr), sprang up onto the bed to check whether my window was leaking, smoked a few cigarettes. I was pretty fucking nervous, to tell you the truth.

Anyway, I want to go through how I constructed my approach so that it might be helpful for you guys out there who are nerdy like me, self-conscious and self-doubting like me.

Assume She’s on Your Team

I usually shy away from attempts to force my emotional state, attempts to convince myself of something that isn’t true. But when it comes to dating – when it comes to the irrational – you just have to take your medicine, cause yourself some emotional trauma, and create a fantasy.

Create the fantasy that she already likes you. Believe it. If you don’t believe it, you lose. Whatever you can do, whatever convoluted logic you can conjure to believe that she likes you, just tell yourself that she does. Assume she’s on your team. If you can actually convince yourself that this is the case, your battle against your silly pathetic emotions is half-over.

The Other Half of the EQN.

The other half of your personal re-programming has to do with your facing the situation objectively. This is super hard to do because you probably attach an inordinate amount of importance to this encounter. Life is long – you will meet other girls, you will be able to deal with rejection (if it happens, which if you’re paying attention, you must assume it won’t). Whatever pedestal you put this girl on, whatever fantasies of her great perfect ideal nature you harbour, you must also accept the fact that the world has 6 billion people in it. Even if she’s one in a million, there are 1000 people just like her in china.

So face the situation objectively and realize that the pertinent variables are already outside of your control. Either she likes you, or she doesn’t. If she does, she’ll accept. If she doesn’t, short of being some sort of fast-talking man-god (which you probably aren’t if you are reading this blog) there is basically not a damned thing you can do to convince her to go out with you.

There are two states the world can be in. Each has a decided outcome. This means that your decision to call this girl and ask her out will at most resolve the situation.

Contrary Beliefs

So there’s an issue here, right? A fundamental inconsistency in my strategy.

On the one hand, I’m telling you to assume she likes you. This will give you the motivation you need because you are doing a purely good thing. You are resolving a situation in a positive way.

But on the other hand, I’m telling you to face the situation objectively – maybe she doesn’t like you.

If you are this age and you can’t think inconsistent thoughts for short periods of time, may Thor have mercy on your soul.

Fear of Resolution

It’s strange that I fear resolution. In some ways it’s like that fucking Shroedinger’s cat bullshit. If you don’t open the box you never know the kitty is dead. And you tell yourself “oh, not this time – maybe next time – maybe the next box.”

Here’s the thing – every single box will be the same. Every single girl you meet will either like you enough to go out with you, or she won’t. This shit is more constant than pi. You might run into situations where a girl flings herself at you – great! But the chances of that happening in a big city like Tokyo, NYC, or Boston are pretty much slim to none. I guess if you’re some sort of super stud then you’ll have some free pussy every once in a while but you are not, because you are reading this blog.

So don’t fear resolution. It’s easy to say, hard to do. “Don’t fear spiders.” Ok, how?

I’ll Tell You How

This is one of my most important insights about personal decision making in life, so listen carefully.

Whenever you make a big decision, you are not just making a decision for that moment. You are making a decision, in essence, about all future decisions you are going to make.

If you don’t do it this time, what’s going to change before next time? Maybe – maybe – if you have a plan then it is a good idea not to do it this time. Spare yourself the possible negative emotions which come from rejection, become a stronger better person, maybe have some slutty man-sex with some walking vag from the club, and get ready to actually start riding the ride.

But the time will come when you can’t see a way for things to change. You don’t have a plan to get better. At this point, in effect, you are making the last decision you will ever make. If you don’t call her, don’t ask her out, you’re fucked. You’re never going to ask anyone out. If you do call her, you are the man. You’re the champion. You are the all-singing all-dancing lord of the cosmos, breaking the laws of gravity and quantum mechanics. Even if you fail (which we’re assuming you won’t) you will ask other girls out in the future. After all, you did it last time!

If you actually believe this, then your only option is to ask her out. And you have to believe this.

(this insight extends much further into your life, of course. Be it quitting smoking, quitting your stupid lame-ass job and being homeless for a while, whatever. If there’s a big decision to be made and you don’t make it, and you don’t see how things will change, you will never make it)

Constructing Your Script

One big pissah is that these days it’s not clear how to ask someone out, show them you like them, but not sound creepy.

If you say something “I really like you a lot, you’re so sweet and interesting and intelligent blah blah blah, wanna go out?” you might be poisoning the well. She might be like “oh, I thought I liked him, but he’s creepy.” You do not want to be creepy.

But if you say something like “do you want to go get dinner sometime?” you sound like you could be a friend.

See, this is where the anthropomorphized form of feminism [1] bends you over the barrel, rips off your balls, and throws them in her prize-sack. Back in the day, when men and women barely spoke, if you asked a girl to dinner your question was completely unambiguous. You might as well have said “wanna go fuck in the closet next to the water cooler?” But these days, hey! Women are people too. They can be friends. Friends go out to dinner, riiiight?

So one trick is to make sure you use the words “go out with me.” Don’t say “do you want to go out to lunch?” Say “do you want to go out with me this weekend?” This removes any ambiguity about your position. Now she knows that you want to put your dong in her twang.

A friend of mine pointed out that it’s also important to show that you’re a little nervous. If you say something like “you make me feel comfortable” – well – no great hot passionate lusty sex has ever come from “comfort.” And that’s all I have to say about that.

Mememememe

So what happened in my case?

She accepted! It was a tiny bit ambiguous whether we’re actually going to go out, but she said she wanted to go to lunch with me. Eat it, bitches!

That ambiguity was due to the fact that she did not accept but was merely confusing, weird, and Japanese. Oh well!

—

[1] As a side note – I don’t want to mischaracterize feminism or make it seem like I think it has had a bad effect on society. I think that it has had a large number of extremely good effects on society. I think it makes male/female relationships (when they do happen) much more open, honest, and effective. I think that it makes women happier (sometimes). But I do think that the influence on feminist theory has had a strong destabilizing effect with respect to how we approach relationships and dating. That’s why this blog is called “A Boy in a Girl’s World.”