Free yourself from addiction and win

After hearing from several independent and hard-core smokers of success quitting using Allen Carr's "Easyway" I got the book, read it, and passed it on - to Soulmate and the Princess, and a few others.

I woke up with Princess yesterday morning, watched her put on makeup. "Oh no," she says, "I have the smoky eye look." She's a jeans kinda girl, not the tights and boots that are spinning my head about since the weather got cold. But she has this waterfall of brown hair and she pulls her knees up on the chair when she talks to you. She sounds a little whiny when she talks but in a cute way, like Hayley McFarland (the Tim Roth character's daughter in Lie to Me). Too young for me. Not, evidently.

Watching her react to the easyway got me thinking a lot about addictions. Consider this. If you add up everyone who's addicted to smoking, porn, drinking, coke, heroin, eating, gambling, sex, coffee... you would get almost everybody. My own addiction experiences are porn and, now that porn is clearing up, I am realizing how much of a coffee problem I have. Having these compulsions you can't control has a few effects, all of which Allen Carr talks about in his Easy Way to Stop Smoking book. It makes you a fugitive. You doubt your strength. You hide from yourself and others. You are perpetually ashamed.

The shame thing is especially interesting if you're trying to have success with women. I mentioned this in a previous blog. Confidence is attractive. So is health. Nothing saps these things like addictions do. I can feel it happening in me already. If you can face a woman with absolutely nothing to hide, you can give off an impression of total congruence and sincerity. If on the other hand, you have these drives you can't control and are ashamed of, that is going to show up somehow in your body language, somewhere, and it will undermine everything else that you are trying to do when you want to attract someone. What's more, the freedom you have and the strength that you have is itself attractive. It is something that almost everyone wants. It's a little bit intimidating, actually, to people who have everyday addictions (especially to things like smoking or coffee) or hidden ones (like to porn or gambling or hard drugs).

Today's my second day off of coffee and hoo-wee have I got a headache. I walk through the PATH underground mall on my way to work and it feels like every Tim Horton's, Starbucks, and Second Cup is singing to me... "Come, Verbal. Comfort is here."

But I walk on, and take my comfort from the original pickup song. Long before there was a pua community there was "Bust a Move" by Young MC: "On the beach you're strollin', real high rollin' everything you have is yours and not stolen. A girl walks up with something to prove..."

When you're free of addiction, everything you have is yours and not stolen.

God is in the rain

Tonight I'm feeling a little like V for Vendetta and Evey rolled into one. I'm torturing myself... by re-reading and typing out all the letters that Soulmate wrote to me, like 20 years ago. The beauty in those letters, the beauty in us, and actually the wisdom too, is something I lost when I cheated on her and never regained. Isn't that strange? I was never stronger or more balanced, better able to love or be loved, than I was when I was 17. That can't be true and yet it feels and looks that way from here.

The memories are so intense, the encounter with this little girl's soul and my own, that it breaks my heart. And it is helping me somehow. There is a place that is way beyond game and way beyond rejection, a place of love and connection and people reaching out for one another and being true to themselves and each other and strong enough to face what comes and putting the other before the self. And I touch that place when I read those letters, I lived in that place, even though I was also in the school musical and the track team and lived a full-on high school suburban drama too. Now the rest of my life is so much more real and I have seen so much more suffering and tried to do so much in the world, but that wisdom and love feels like it's eluded me for so long. Why?

It all makes me want to reach out to my Soulmate but she's not the same person that wrote these letters any more than I'm the same person who got them and wrote back. And wisdom isn't in trying to relive those times. I'm blogging now instead of trying to write to someone or call someone because I am trying to do as V told Evey, don't run away from it. I have to go back to the letters now.

Microexpressions

I just watched the first season of Lie to Me and quickly went and got the Microexpressions training tool from Paul Ekman's website. The show's amazing not just for Tim Roth's acting (or the fine work of the other actors, including Kelli Williams who is totally hot in this soothing calming way like a fine blanket of falling snow) but also for the science, which is fascinating. And fascinating even though I'm not sure I buy it. But I took the test and did the training and now I feel subjectively like I am seeing more in people's faces than I used to.

For those who don't know, Lie to Me and Paul Ekman's research are based on the idea that people's faces don't lie. It's similar to what Suzette Elgin (see her blog to the right, ozarque) says about tone of voice. People can't lie very well, if you know what to look for. There's a movie out (I've seen the posters on the TTC called "the invention of lying") in which one person can lie.

So I'm at a party the other night with this little beauty who's telling me that she thinks she's hideous and everyone thinks she's angry all the time. I tell her about Ekman and microexpressions. She says, so I can't lie to you? I say, no. What do you see? I'm angry, right?

"I don't see anger, and I definitely don't see hideous."

But what I do see, and this is the truth, is these intense expressions of sadness.

"I get sad, sometimes."

"That's what I see."

She starts to tell me more, and the party interrupts now and then. We leave off, and pick up again, a little later, when we're both a little more sober.

I'm intrigued by her, this muslim princess. She's a feminist and an activist and deathly afraid of her family and community, she feels guilty about all kinds of things that happen in her country, things her people do to other people. She's jumpy. It's fear and sadness, and I want to earn her trust. Is this part of her strategy with guys? To make us feel like we want to protect her? We play the games we play, conscious or not. What's hers? Does she want me to see the sadness and fear? Even when she laughs, it's like she feels like she's stealing it, like she's not supposed to.

A few days later I see her again. We're talking about her life and her plans. I'm deep into giving her advice, maybe to make things safer for myself, or maybe I am trying to attract her now. I don't trust my intentions. She's too young for me, I tell myself. But I am close enough to smell her hair now and I think about what it would be like spread on my bed. That's one feeling, and it's there. But so is my desire to make that sadness go away, to replace that fear with confidence, to tell her that trauma can be overcome through connection and understanding (connection with me maybe, I think to myself, and let the thought go).

"I'm going to go for a smoke," she says, "my lungs have breathed clean air for too long".

Flakes

Just another night alone, playing David Usher on the computer and feeling things.

I thought I'd try out going to the club alone on the weekend. I discovered a few things. One, I went out too early (10:30) and the club I ended up in was empty (the first line I got into was guest list only, leading me to think I should get on the guest list first). I chatted up a gorgeous little bartender, saying I was waiting for friends. The plus side of the bar being empty meant that I had lots of time with her, since she had no one else to wait on. But when the time my friends were supposed to show up arrived, I had to go. I got her number, but as I suspected, she didn't pick up when I called.

Charming someone when they're in front of you is one thing: leaving an impression to the point where she'll pick up when you call is another.

There's another girl I like that I've known for years. She works at an Italian restaurant on College st that I stumbled on by chance and whenever I go there to see her we flirt like crazy. Then I call her and she doesn't return my call. Rinse and repeat. I just can't seem to hook her.

Whether it is just statistical probablility (most numbers will flake) or something I am doing wrong, the solution is probably to get more numbers. If that's the case, I should go to the club later, on the guest list, and actually with friends.

I'm also a bit devastated about what happened at work today. Even when you have a job you love, some people have to get fired. Having to fire someone is not fun. It was pretty much the first time I've done it. I understand now what it's like to be too ashamed to look someone in the eye, to retreat behind third-person language; I understand how people can become bad people. If I had to fire people all the time, I'd either feel like I was a bad person or I'd have to start feeling like they were bad people. Either way, I'd be carrying around something that I'm carrying around now that I don't like. There wasn't really any bad verbal behavior, from me or my fellow firers, nor even from the fired. But the situation was bad: nothing could make it good.

How to kick your internet porn addiction

I used to use internet porn once or twice a day. For about a month I have been cold turkey. This, after wanting to kick this addiction for years and not being able to. Having done it, I feel immensely better. I am also a better lover, even in the strictest physical sense (reading Pornified could have told me that I would be). In the hope that others can have the same feeling, here are my suggestions.

1. Forget feminism. Forget Andrea Dworkin. You're not using porn because you love objectifying women or seek dominance. You are using porn because it makes you feel sexual pleasure, and because you like to look at beautiful women, and because you like to fantasize about having sex with beautiful women. The trouble with trying to kick your porn habit through understanding that porn is sexist is that the effect is to make you feel bad and ashamed. Feeling bad and ashamed, you will turn to something that makes you feel better and gives you pleasure and doesn't make you feel bad and ashamed. That is to say, you will shut your door, mute your speakers, and fire up the porn sites. (On the other hand, it was watching "The Price of Pleasure", definitely a feminist film about porn, that started me thinking about trying to kick this habit in the first place).

2. Forget religion. Forget religious injunctions to avoid temptation. You're not using porn because you hate spirituality or ethics or trying to grapple with the big questions. You're using porn because of the power of its images and the pleasure it makes you feel. Like feminism, the trouble with trying to use religion to resist is that you will feel like a failure when it turns out to not be strong enough. You will then doubt your religion and feel even worse about that. That will make you turn to something to make you feel better, and you're back into the porn.

The feeling you are waiting for - and you'll know it when it happens, and you should know that it will happen - is that you just won't feel compelled to do it any more. My third girlfriend was a cutter. She cut herself. She bit her knuckles. She would feel suicidal and cut herself so she wouldn't have to kill herself, is how she explained it to me. That was 15 years ago. If you ask her about it now, she can't remember the feelings. All she knows is she doesn't have to do it any more. People who have compulsions just stop having them. There are ways to speed this up, and ways to slow it down: the point for you is to know that they can stop and, in your case, they will stop.

3. Try a distraction. Norman Doidge's book "The Brain that Changes Itself" has a chapter about porn addiction. He advises his clients to distract themselves with something else they want to do for 15 minutes when they feel the compulsion coming on. If you can distract yourself for that long, you'll get into a different groove. There are lots of things you like to do besides look at porn. When you consider that you can only look at porn when you have privacy and a computer, you realize that that kind of time is a rare gift. Try using it for something else - look something up you haven't looked up, pick up a musical instrument, do some push ups or chin ups, or, hell, write a blog entry or journal entry.

There is more to porn than just the images. Porn is a fantasy world. In that fantasy world you can be with beautiful women without any fear of rejection. They are prizes, you are a consumer. The trouble with the fantasy is this: the deeper you get into the fantasy world, the farther you get from the reality of it. They really are inverse. In reality you will be with beautiful women to the extent that you are attractive and to the extent that you aren't devastated by rejection. That means looks, success, confidence, verbal and emotional and social and physical and, yes, sexual skills. And even when you've got those, you are going to get rejected soooo much more often than not that you have to approach so much that you realize that rejection is not such a big deal.

The time and more importantly the energy that goes into porn use and fantasy is lost for self-improvement. It really is lost. If you were reading literature or watching movies or watching television, playing golf or even drinking beer with the guys, you would not be losing time the same way. Each of these things either gives you something you can connect with another human being on or gives you an actual connection, and nothing helps you connect like connections. Which takes us to our next suggestion.

4. Improve yourself. When you find yourself reaching for the porn, try some kind of self-improvement activity as a distraction: exercise or use a skill. What's good about that you can get better at things. The reward of getting better at something is qualitatively different from the pleasure kick that porn (or most drugs) give. You're trying to retrain your brain to seek that feeling instead of the empty pleasure feeling. It really is a better feeling.

5. Pick up. This was actually a key point for me. The minute I started to think of my love life in terms of skills I could get better at, I had already won a major battle against porn addiction. I could go for the empty pleasure, or I could go for the real thing. And the real thing is both different and better. But to go for the real thing means getting clothes that fit me, working out so my body is nice to look at, becoming a good conversationalist and a good listener and reader of people, and practicing talking to girls at all times, the more scared I feel the more important it is to do. There is a reason they call it "game": because if it's just a game, then it is not you that is on the line and it is not you that is getting rejected. It was your play that didn't work: you're going to lose more plays than you win in this game, but the wins are very rewarding and your porn use is keeping you out of the game and keeping you from getting better at it.

6. Don't be ashamed to be sexual. This takes us back to the point about forgetting feminism and religion. Both of these systems of thought can leave you feeling bad for being a male who is sexually attracted to females. But you are male and females are sexually attracted to you too (or could be, if you worked on yourself). If you approach a girl with shame in your heart, it will show in your body and it will make you unattractive. Shame is as repulsive as confidence is attractive. And that might be the biggest reason to leave porn behind. I am miles more confident now that I am not using porn than I was when I was using it. There is no confidence like feeling like you have absolutely nothing to hide. Anyone with a compulsion feels like a fugitive about to get caught, and that feeling reinforces the compulsion. You can be a free man, a prize that any woman would have fun talking to and take great pleasure from spending a night with. You can spend the next 20 minutes using porn, or you can spend it taking the next little step towards becoming that man.

The most effective distraction for me has actually been to look at men (I'm not gay - if I was bisexual or sexually attracted to men this would probably not be effective... I don't know if all these principles apply to queer or bi males). Looking at music videos with super hot women in them can generate the same kind of longing and inadequacy that long-term porn use leaves me with. But if I look at men who women like, I can learn something - body language, posture, verbal skill. I once told a friend who was nervous on dates that he should stop thinking about how he was doing and start thinking about whether he liked the girl in front of him. But kudos to him, he was out in the world and making things happen. For the porn user, the advise is the opposite: stop looking at what you want sexually and start putting energy into becoming desirable. The results will please you, and quite possibly please a real woman too.

Wedding envy

September is wedding season, and I went to one last night. A true bollywood-style extravaganza. The bride and groom were right out of bollywood. He's a kid I've known since he was pre-verbal. She's a stunning out-of-towner. Smart fellow, this one: sometimes you gotta go far afield for talent. It was a family deal: I suited up and went with my parents and hung out with the childhood peer group that never fails to make me feel small and weak, because they remember me when I was, and they see nothing but those parts of me I want to discard when they look at me now. I face this group three or four times a year, not more, most of them during wedding season. I have bad memories with both generations - my parents friends and their children who are my age. I'm now watching most of those children raise their own children, and I think that they're doing a little better than our parents did, although they've probably had a bit of an easier time of it.

There's an elaborate ritual where the bride enters the reception hall (resplendent as befitted) at the back of a little parade, at the front of which are drummers and in the middle of which are all the female members of the family. As I said, the bride looked like Kajol with a little extra meat on the bones (in all the right places). My heart was full of envy. I realized when I got home that it wasn't that I wanted the bride. I was watching her glide along with this beaming restrained smile but all I really saw was Music. The groom looked handsome and every bit her match, and was having great fun besides. But I didn't want to be him, I just wanted to be that happy in love.

Am I seeing what I want to see, seeing whatever will make me most envious? I think I might be. Some of these peers of mine envy me for my own successes. They hear about my jaunts or work adventures on the grapevine (my parents to their parents to them) and, probably, wish they had my freedom and my luck. I envy them their domestic lives. Not that I even necessarily think they're happy lives: and indeed these parties are occasions for such binge drinking by both generations that it's always made me a little uncomfortable. Not just social drinking, but drinking because something's missing. But happy or not they are lives, and I don't have one yet; they are where they're supposed to be, and I'm not; they have succeeded in a way that I've failed.

Nostalgia's a funny thing. A couple of years ago I went on a couple of dates with one of these girls, a sensitive one who I ran into by chance at one of my own haunts. We both felt a little spark I think, rediscovering each other as adults. I backed off before anything could happen, knowing I wasn't over Music and not wanting to take this jewel of a girl to bed when my own feelings were ambivalent (I ended up doing exactly that with Painter, and probably the Gymnast too, but they were tougher and had a better idea about what they were getting into. This girl doesn't know me and, worse, has a mistaken sense of how well she knows me because she's known me since we were children). She was at the wedding, and we spent the whole night together. Almost like our third date. She awkwardly raised the fact that she had a boyfriend, and I smiled. It was sincere, and there was an element of relief, certainly of happiness for her. But envy too, wondering what I missed out on. In these moments I think I need to trust the old versions of myself more.

The Verbal of two years back probably made the right decisions. Second-guessing him now isn't fair. Sure, old versions of me made a few unambiguous mistakes. Regrets about those can protect me from repeats: I think that's what regret is for (and no, I don't believe in having no regrets). But if the situation was ambiguous and my own feelings ambivalent, and they still are, then I was right then and wrong now.

Or was I? Or am I?

This is what a happy wedding can do to a single guy.

Can we beat the (somewhat sleazy) language of sales?

I am feeling smacked around by sales language today.

It seems that from when I was a boy reading X-Men and New Mutants comics (the latter an underappreciated gem about adolescents who feel like misfits) and saw Charles Atlas's "dynamic tension" ads and wished I was bigger and stronger, I (we) have been preyed upon by people who make us feel bad in order to sell us stuff.

Have you seen Annie Leonard's "Story of Stuff"? As I immerse myself in marketing and sales literature and try to learn more about social media (dammit technorati, why can't I claim my blog?) I feel myself in the loop Annie describes. You work, you come home, you watch TV, you feel bad, you buy stuff, you work...

That is not at all a description of my life. And yet. There's no escape from some of it in this part of the world. And I am particularly vulnerable to it right now, because I am trying to find a girlfriend and trying to think about that in terms of skills - overcoming anxiety, dressing better, improving my body language - rather than outcomes. Just like the boy who was reading comics and found ads that promised to make his muscles big, I am now a man who is scouring the internet for answers about how to find a girlfriend, and am finding, instead, ads that promise to TAKE YOUR GAME TO THE NEXT LEVEL! I bought three books ("The Game" by Strauss, "The Mystery Method" by Mystery, and "Natural Game" by Gambler) but I didn't buy any of the e-books or products or CDs, because that whole side of industry has always struck me as kind of sketchy (even as a kid, I never quite sent out for the Charles Atlas books. Not that I had money to). I came close. Probably closer than I've ever come, last week when I met with the so-called PUA who was going to relieve me of over a thousand bucks to learn stuff there was no evidence that he knew, let alone that he could convey.

A few years back I taught a journalism class and introduced the students to a book called Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams. McWilliams's conclusion is that spam exists because it works - even if the success rate is tiny, there are enough suckers out there to buy the products that keep these organisms alive in the ecosystem. I'm saying this, I suppose, as a sucker. Not that I click on spam, but I do buy into some of the self-help and pickup stuff more than I probably should. Probably because my inadequacies are there to be preyed on. I suppose the spammers and sellers and pickup gurus who sell these things would argue that the "sucker" part of me is the best part, the part that's ready to "commit" and "take things to the next level", and the part of me that walks away from these bad deals and is suspicious of everything from Charles Atlas to nutritional supplements to repurposed publicly available content is the curmudgeonly part that wants to be trapped and settle for the mediocre.

But I don't want to settle for the mediocre. I just think that squeezing outsourced workers on one side and lonely suckers on the other has an ethical cost associated, even if some of what is offered makes sense (for example in pickup, the 3-second rule, doing many approaches, building comfort first, showing intent...). I suppose I have been hooked by the free software/open source/Richard Stallman view of the world in which information wants to be free. Repurposing information that's free and making someone pay for it seems to me... wrong. Doing work that contributes something is not wrong. Getting compensated for it is not wrong. Is that some kind of internalized 9-to-5 work-ethic limitation? I don't think so. If it is, I think I'd rather keep it, along with my moral framework, rather than trying to unhinge it all.

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A deal unclosed

I signed up for a pickup bootcamp here in Toronto, and walked away from it before starting. As much as I wasn't convinced by the person running the camp, I don't want to run him down so I am not going to name him or link his site.

For people without the background, the idea of a pickup bootcamp is that an experienced pickup artist will take you into clubs, show you how to approach, make you practice approaches and attempts to get girls' numbers and try to seduce girls, and give you feedback on how to improve your game. I thought it was time for me to try talking to girls in clubs, and that maybe some support and feedback from someone with lots of experience would be useful in doing so. I ended up feeling like the particular coach was the wrong choice, and I will explain why.

If you are a pickup artist coach trying to make a living from doing bootcamps, let me offer some free advice. I walked away because I wasn't convinced, and if he couldn't convince me, I didn't see him being able to convince a girl, and if he couldn't convince a girl, I didn't think he could teach me how to do so.

First off, the positive. Why did I sign up with him? Well, I did a search for Toronto pickup artists, and his site was high on the rankings. The $3000 bootcamps offered by Love Systems and Stylelife don't strike me as good value for money - I think they would be interesting, and good, but hard to justify paying that much money for them. This person charges less than half that, and is local, so I thought that it would be good to get the benefits of a bootcamp - to see an instructor demonstrate skills in the field, to have someone provide thoughtful feedback on what I'm doing wrong and what I can improve. The testimonies, reviews, and essays on his site all seemed plausible, though I didn't find them totally convincing (bad reviews can always be removed, after all, and good reviews composed from whole cloth). So I walked in a bit skeptical.

The first red flag came when I emailed him to ask about the upcoming bootcamp and got a message back pressuring me to sign up and provide a deposit. I have had bad experiences before with pressure sales. The false pressure was that there was competition for my "spot" in the bootcamp and if I didn't sign up soon my spot would be given away. I waited for the expiration date to pass, just to see what would happen, and got another pressure note (as expected, I didn't lose my "spot"). So, I said I would bring the full amount to the bootcamp.

The second red flag - minor, but he called me to say he would be late to meet me on the night.

The third red flag - something I learned from my lavalife experiences: when I got to the hotel lobby, he didn't look like his photos. He was with a woman, he introduced as his girlfriend, and I saw no chemistry between them at all, no connection at all actually. And, what do you know, I was the only one taking the bootcamp. The other person, who was coming from Washington (which I didn't believe) had to cancel for some reason.

Fourth - he looked me up and down and said "based on how you're dressed, we're not going to go to a club tonight". Now I wasn't in a tux, but I have gone to clubs dressed just as I was, and done fine. He'd had no intention of going to a club tonight - the look up and down and the "based on how you are dressed" was to bring my confidence down relative to his. A neg, I guess, but a poorly executed one because not accompanied by signs of interest or warmth towards me.

Fifth - his own style, and his girlfriend's, were nothing to write home about. Black slacks, black shirt open over a black t-shirt, black pants, not particularly well fitted. He himself isn't very fit and didn't present particularly well. Greasy hair, possibly implanted. Nor did she. Not seductive, in short.

Sixth - a million little signs of dishonesty and manipulating the situation. We were going to have dinner (which, I suppose I was going to pay for). We went to the bar for drinks (which I presumed I would have to pay for). Given the amount of money, being unwilling to incur small expenses isn't a "demonstration of high value".

Seven - the sales pitch itself. Perhaps I have read too much. But I knew all the tricks he was using. After asking my profession, he suggested to me that I was too intellectual and that caused me problems with women (which I don't think is my problem). His "cold reads" were way off. He said I had shielded and nervous body language and my face wasn't expressive. All true in that moment: I was distrustful of him and the situation (spidey-sense firing like crazy) and didn't want to give him more information than I was giving, and as I became more convinced that I was going to walk, my body language conveyed that - cold, unresponsive. He tried to challenge me: "Are you committed to this?" When that didn't work (I said, "hmm... maybe not."), he tried a kind of hypnosis, "Imagine having choice and dominance and power..." which, because I don't actually feel like I like choice or power and don't particularly want dominance, didn't play. Then he tried negative: "You might miss your soulmate..." and confidence: "I don't care about the money, and I could demonstrate any time, but you have to convince me that you are committed." All of these were pressure sales tactics, and I was feeling the buyer's remorse before the sale was even complete. It felt like when those cults try to recruit you (the latter day saints have a church on my block and ask me about Jesus regularly), or the time-share hotel salesmen try to sell you (I have a vivid childhood memory of when an American salesmen was trying to get them to buy timeshares in the Caribbean, clumsily, that has provided great protection against snake oil salesmen since).

In the language of pickup, he lacked social proof, he lacked authentic demonstration of high value, and his body language betrayed a dishonesty that prevented me from feeling comfort or believing that he could deliver. I told him I wasn't ready to commit. But it wasn't really that I'm not ready, nor that I'm completely satisified with my life as it is. It was actually that I didn't think that he could help me.

When I told him I was going to walk, he took it gracefully, which I was grateful for. On the subway ride home, I chatted up a girl, thought about Lex from the Naked Loft Party's statement that "there is no such thing as rejection" and how it's not about dominance and power but about finding people who want to take that journey with you as far as they want to.

Now back to my unsolicited advice for pickup coaches: you've gotta be what guys want to be. Selling hard and preying on insecurities as this fellow tried to do might work, since most of the guys who come to you come with insecurities. But it's not cool to do that. What these guys need is friends, as much as anything, and you'll help them more if you can make them feel like you care about them even a little.

Conversely, boys, if you're looking for help picking up, remember you're in the position of power when you're looking for a coach. Try to remember that, and remember that they fancy themselves as having many tactics in their toolkit for making people feel certain ways. You earned that money, and you're foregoing other things for this bootcamp (or workshop or whatever), on the scale of years of membership at a gym, a vacation, a small car, a term of college, a home renovation, a half a year of therapy. And these things might help you a lot more. Just make the decision sober, is all I'm saying.

An extended metaphor

I've been steadily replacing old clothes with new ones, getting a tailor to adjust some of the clothes that I do have, and working on posture - basically standing up straight, where I normally slouch - as well as intensifying my gym routines (trying crossfit workouts with a friend who is a personal trainer).

I had a conversation with another friend who just broke up an 8-year relationship. We were talking about the types of women we attract. Longer conversations work in our favour, superficial impressions don't. I believe the pickup slogan is if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always have gotten. If that were true, I wouldn't be changing my behaviour. Because there's a world of difference between doing what you've always done when you're in school - which can end up pretty well - and doing what you've always done when you're a young professional who's never talked to strange women in bars or anywhere else. In school, there are constant contacts with lots of girls who can get to know you and your value organically. Not the case any more. I was trying to think about what I liked and wanted, what I wished I could have, but I had this moment when I realized that my life would be shaped not by what I want but by what I attract.

My personal trainer friend hectored me the other day, he said that I am handsome, successful, kind, even confident - why wasn't I with someone? Or was I? I alluded to the Voice situation and he said I should get out of it and look seriously for something real. I took it to heart, though my feelings for Voice are not so easily dismissed, but I am trying to take a long and more permanent route to it, or so I like to think.

The extended metaphor (which I can thank one of Voice's relatives, who said he'd never consider setting me up because he always sees me "with the fishing rod" and is sure I can "fish for myself") is of fishing. Let's say you want to catch, not a fish to eat, but a rare fish that you want for your one and only fish in your aquarium. There's trying to build the most glorious aquarium possible and ensure your "catch" will be happy (that's trying to be a good person, a good partner, deal with your own issues and insecurities, be positive, be ethical, and get your professional, physical, and financial life in order). Then there's the matter of the fishing rod (pickup skills), the bait (working out, improving your voice and stance and fashion), and discernment (trying to match, as much as possible, what you are catching with what you are seeking). But there's also the pools you're fishing in, which might be the most important question of all (although so might taking the wrong bait to the right pool, or any other number of mismatches that could happen).

One concern I have, having organically met women all my life, made friends of them, and having had some of these friends become lovers, now that I'm not organically meeting very many women, is that going "fishing" on public transit, in malls, or bars, is going to lead to a whole lot of catches that aren't what I want. Maybe these are the wrong pools. I know my first, year-long foray into Lavalife during which I sent out several hundred messages that led to about a dozen dates, five of which led to multiple dates, two of which led to nights together, none of which led to multiple nights together (hopefully more on these adventures later), felt like the wrong pool. But maybe I had the wrong bait. Or maybe the wrong fishing rod. Or maybe I'm not as good in bed as I think I am, having gotten wrong feedback from the women I have been with, even though I never seemed to be able to get to that point with this kind of dating. I do know that I didn't leave these girls wanting more, and so I didn't get the chance to think about whether I wanted them. Neither of which are feelings I'm used to. What I'm used to is comfort, and love, and romance, and depth, and the lavalife months felt like scraps from that table.

It all feels so uncertain sometimes. In the movie Hitch, Will Smith tells one of his clients who is trying to refuse a pair of shoes on the grounds that they don't fit "him", Hitch says: '"You' is a very fluid concept right now. You bought the shoes. You look great in the shoes." On a deep level I know what kind of person I want to be. But on a superficial level, because I want to catch the right person, I am open to being fluid about virtually everything - how I stand, what I wear, my verbal behaviour, the kind of confidence I project. But will changing all these things help me towards my goals, or divert me from them?

Set aside the pride for a day

Last night I wrote a message from a place of loneliness. An hour after I wrote it I was surrounded by friends and by love. I had a little party at my place, 5 boys and 2 girls, drinking tea until 2am, talking about family dysfunctionalities, leavened with a little gossip. We adjourned at 2am and met again at 11am for breakfast. Our waitress was gorgeous (I failed to retrieve a phone number).

My friend Guitar has me watching Keys to the VIP on the Comedy Network (I think the link will only work in Canada). Everyone involved is a little younger than me but there's lots to learn. He is egging me on to pick ups as we are walking around, or on the subway... I am feeling a little "social robot" about it. Like this morning. I was with four good friends, one of whom is a stunning beauty, but I dissipated a lot of energy trying to figure out how to get the waitress's number. Maybe if I do it more it'll be second nature and I will be able to be in the moment and also "pull" when the opportunity arises. But I am not sure I want to live life as a constant series of opportunities to pick up, or to practice picking up.

Still, I think I have a ways to go on this journey before I can either assimilate it and make it a part of me or discard it. Some plans for the next step are in the works... and I'll report on it here.

Lifestyle design...

Something's wrong tonight. I'm at home alone and it feels like everyone I know is somewhere with someone. It's probably a night for working, or walking, or something, one of those cool fall nights with a nice breeze (Toronto summer, we hardly knew you).

One thing I decided about being alone, when I decided to break up with Music, one way I comforted myself, was to say that I would do all the things I wouldn't be able to do if I had had a family. If that kind of happiness was not on, then I could be productive, take risks, put in the time to try to make a contribution.

Finding Tim Ferriss's blog via the TED.com site was therefore a boon. So, welcome to the list of blogs I follow, Tim.

cry for the potential...

How to summarize it? A rollercoaster that ends in a train wreck? Maybe not that bad.

My job involves traveling to the worst places on earth, war zones. There's some risk. Less than you would think, definitely less than my parents think, but some. Enough that when I go I give Roommate and Soulmate each a half of one of the passwords to my computer. Enough that when I go I make sure I've said everything I want to say.

Last year, before I went on mission, I had a conversation with Soulmate. I told her that through everything with Music, through everything with Voice, there was always a part of me that never got over her. She said she understood, but that wasn't the place she was in. When I was away, I thought of Music, and although I missed her intensely, I realized I didn't really want her in my life. When I came back, I saw Voice, and told her I did want her in my life, no matter what. And a little after that, we were in bed again.

This summer I went away again. I moved my stuff out of Voice's place. Management was coming back for a week and living with her. She was going to break up with him, she said, and would do it in person. I said okay, but if she didn't, we were not going to be together any more. Something she could no doubt take as an empty promise. I've been weak before.

One day, in a little villa where the foreigners live, I sent a text message halfway across the world, telling Voice I was thinking of her. She said, texts are not a good idea. She was sharing the phone with her real boyfriend.

It hit me then. I would never get what I wanted from her. It would always be like this. Secret. I would always wonder who else she was sleeping with. I would never be her man, for real.

When I got back, sure enough, she hadn't broken up with him, and when I followed through on what I said, she was shocked. She hadn't really believed me. We saw each other for lunch a few times, and then she went across the world to visit with him for a while.

These months without her, on mission and with her gone, have been clean. Lower highs, higher lows. Like an addict in recovery. Lucid. I make decisions, take actions, do things without everything making reference to her. Without fear of her disapproval or anger. This is how I want to live.

She came back. She's broken up with Management, she says. I don't believe her. It's not public. I don't want to go back to her. I saw her today, in a group of friends. We're all together, we're all friends, we're talking about projects and things we will be working on this year. The work that brought us together. And keeps us apart. Or maybe it's our choices that do that.

I miss her. But more than that I realize I miss things that I never had. Being able to hold her hand in public. Bring her home to meet my mom. Travel somewhere with her. Not too much to ask, I don't think. But things that I could spend my life waiting for. The memory of that, of these various indignities over these months, now years, may be enough to protect me from going back to her for another round. There's no reason I should live as a fugitive any more. But can we actually forge a friendship?

When you get what you wish for...

It's been two months, and the world has changed.

I let the thing with the Gymnast fade. It's now been pretty much a year since I have heard from Music.

But my world is upside down because Voice is back in the picture. Her boyfriend, Management, moved to a different continent. Her orbiter, Auto, still lurks in the background, but she had an explicit breakup conversation with him. She moved to her own place, and I've been spending my nights there.

It's been a rocky road. One night she spent at Auto's house, and began to half-move in there before turning back from that. She still thinks about his car when she needs to get something done, getting angry at me for denying her the convenience. "If this is not something you're doing for your life, if this is something you think I'm making you do", I say, "then you shouldn't do it."

The first two weeks the sex was like making up for all the years we missed, but for the past four days we've been fighting. When she fights, she makes no provision for my dignity or her own. She yells, she walks away, she hangs up on me, she swears. I don't want to be abused. But it's too simple to say I should leave. Because she escalates fights so much, I don't want to say what's on my mind. But if I don't say what's on my mind, then we're not really in a relationship any more. I wanted her in my life and here she is. Still halfway though. I still have to hide it from my friends and loved ones. I am still a secret, which I hate.

I have traded loneliness for drama. This is love, but I want to be treated better. I deserve better.

Here we like to get things over...

That's a line from a song I like. "Here we like to get things over / life, love, anything at all."

I actually was riding the subway last night (before the chunk of my city that I live in went dark - and cold!) and peeked at a fellow's book, it was called "Getting Things Done", and I liked the idea.

I guess I am thinking tonight about how I am not over Voice, and I'm not over Music, and I might not quite be over Soulmate either. Do you get over or do you move on? I've been with four women since, Painter and the Gymnast being the most notable (and two others who I'll get to describing here). And it's probably helped. But nothing's gone away. Do I stop and think and try to deal, or do I keep moving?

I don't know why I'm feeling this so intensely tonight. Maybe because I know where Voice is, we're on good terms and working together, and I decided not to be there. Maybe because I left the city because of the blackout and can't contact anybody else anyway.

Given the title of the blog, last night I went to a public speaking workshop by one of the best speakers I know. I was suspicious that the workshop wouldn't be any good because the guy is a natural. Sure enough, I was right. He said that if you believe in what you're saying and have something to say, it'll come naturally. I don't think that's true, not quite. Nor is it entirely false. The times I have been lost it's not been because I have nothing to say, but because I have nothing to say to whoever's in front of me. You need to say something useful to the person, and for that you have to know something about her. There are times when she gives you nothing, asks you no questions, doesn't care about anything you might conceivably have to say. In those situations, you'll be stumped. Probably, don't speak.

But otherwise, practice is good and learning or figuring something out about the person and what you might have to offer them wouldn't be bad either.

A mostly freed mind

The author of the book about online dating "Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You", writes at one point that he has only felt free, or sated, of sexual desire for a few moments in his life. I am going through one such moment. Not that I'm getting all that much - in fact, I haven't gotten any in 2009. But there seem to be other things that matter more, these days. I've been working hard, really hard, at something that is sure to fail. I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to change a horrifically lopsided situation. And people I love, Voice included, are in it with me. Well, I suppose it makes more sense to say I am in it with her. She's on stage in front of thousands of people screaming her lungs out. I struggle my way through the crowd to get to the front so that she can see my face. "I think it will boost her morale," I tell Guitar.

"What would you do right now, if you were me?" she asks me on the phone. Our phone time is down to about 5 minutes a day, she calls from work and we talk until she or I get a media phone call.

"I'd like to think," I say, "that I'd do exactly what you were doing, if I had the strength."

"I don't know what to focus on - oh, wait, that was a complement," she says.

"It was."

"Your complements are always so indirect."

I haven't spent a moment alone with her in almost a month.

The Gymnast is making her way into my life now. I saw her once since I came home from the US, just for an hour. I was distracted, wanted to get home to work. She wanted to cuddle. We cuddled for a while and I began to protest that I had to leave. She kept contriving conversation topics and not releasing me from the cuddling. It was cute. But I left. I'll see her tonight, but tonight, too, I'd rather be working. So I'll go to her place late, I suppose, maybe spend the night with her.

From the time Music left my life until now I have not felt so focused or strong. I haven't felt like I could take it or leave it the way I feel now. And if I could keep this feeling forever I would. I think when I met Music I was much closer to this mental state than I was after I lost her. Loneliness and neediness are not sexy. And maybe it is true what they say, that it is better to want what you have than to get what you want. What I want to do in the world is so much more powerful than what I want from women or sexual life right now, and I feel a lot more balanced as a consequence. And perhaps it doesn't need saying, but my attractiveness hasn't suffered at all. The only problem this feels like something that happened to me, not something that I did or changed. Maybe if I can remember this feeling well enough I can call on it when I need it.