The authority grab and the precision junkie

I've been thinking more about work language lately, and less about personal life. Here's a thought.

As I advance in my career I spend more time at conferences, it seems. And there are definite patterns of language at conferences. I'm not in the academic world, but I have a feeling that if I was, I would see this all the time, since it is frequently academics who do these.

1. Why didn't you mention [my thing]?

So, a presenter gives a talk at a conference. The presenter does a good job or a bad one, but let's say a good one. Clear, concise, interesting, novel presentation on something of importance (suppose it was on, development in west africa or something). Question period. Someone puts up their hand and the question is:

"This presentation was very good, I thank you for it. But I am amazed that in the entire presentation there was absolutely no mention of [whatever]. How you can talk about [your topic] without talking about [whatever] is beyond me. It seems to me that [whatever] is completely crucial to this discussion, and needs to be incorporated into all discussions of these matters."

The speaker, if polite, usually acknowledges the importance of [whatever] and moves on to the next question.

I think of this as a kind of authority grab. The questioner is asserting the importance of [whatever], and [whatever] is usually the issue or research topic of the questioner.

2. What you said is not precisely true.

Some people you work with are what you might call precision junkies. If you say that something happened at the beginning of 2009, they will say "well, it happened in March 2009, which is not exactly the beginning". If you say that there was a man-sized hole, they'll say "well, it would have to be a small man."

The precision junkie might be doing an authority grab, or they might be contrarian, but most of the ones I have met are literally junkies. They can't help themselves. And you can't do much about them.

Neither of these people/tactics are dangerous, so I wouldn't worry about them. Just knowing they're there and knowing their names will help them irritate you a little bit less.

Harm reduction and porn

Every so often, I feel like my mind is being attacked, by images and plans, scenarios in which I could cheat on my woman. If I have the privacy to do it, I scan websites that review escorts, I look up online escort services, I look at strip clubs as I walk past them, I look up massage parlors. I imagine, in great detail, how I would go about evading getting caught and arranging a sexual encounter in one of these places, with one of these strangers. Thinking about these scenarios causes me to zone out for hours, and it's very sexually exciting. This is what addiction felt like, and I think it's no different than a drug. I lose time, I waste energy, I can't focus on what's important. I get stuck in a fantasy world, I sit, undignified, at the computer, wasting hours.

Odysseus tied himself up to the mast of his ship so that he wouldn't run to the sirens. My method is a little bit more prosaic. When I feel these - for lack of a better word - attacks coming on, I masturbate, using porn, so that no matter how much I am tempted, I could not physically pull off cheating. I am not sure if this is necessary or if it is excessive, I realize it is cheating in a way (though not nearly as harmful as cheating with another person).

When my woman is away, I do this even more. I feel like I am beating my brain, or my body, at its own game. It is demanding that I destroy my relationship and my future for anonymous, meaningless sex. I am responding by wearing it out through the most meaningless form of sex available (masturbation).

I would prefer to not use porn at all, and to just be free of this little voice in my head, these addictive cravings and compulsions. I think a combination of distraction and willpower can ultimately work. I want to free myself. I have tasted freedom and it is so powerful, so good, I want it again. I have it now, partially.

I am describing a classic porn addiction. The problem is that the porn addiction is the lesser of evils. What I think I am trying to do is the opposite of the gateway drug idea. But am I fooling myself? Am I actually, instead, heading in the opposite direction?

The one thing I have going for me is that, unlike with drugs, you need to be in a certain physical state - as a man, anyway - to actually engage your sex addiction. You can smoke or snort at any time, but you can only have sex if you can get an erection, and if you have beaten yourself to submission, you can't get an erection. So that's what I do.

I repeat, it's not my first choice. But it's my harm reduction method, like the methadone they give to heroin addicts.

Another thing I zone out on: creeping Music and Voice on the internet. I'm not as bad as Zuckerberg at the end of the Social Network, but I am not that far off. Voice is getting more and more famous, so there's more and more to see of her on the web. Music isn't, but she loves every new social network tool, especially involving photography, so there's always chances to see her.  Why do I do this? I don't want anything with these women. So, what am I doing? What is this behaviour? It also steals my time and energy, turns me into a criminal sneaking around. Why do it?

Maybe I need to sneak around? Is that the real thrill? Not reliving the sexual memories (which I do), but the need to have secrets, the need to have a secret life? A psychoanalyst might have a field day with this one, a pseudonymous blogger - who loves superhero movies and comics and shows like Dexter that involve secret identities - wondering, stupidly, if he gets off on the thrill of having a secret life.

My goal is integration - to lead one life, all above board, all clean and open. Is that goal generating these counter-drives, these counter-urges for secrets and sneaking?

Her sexual personality

I have been thinking about why sex fascinates me so much, why I re-live sexual memories so often and so much. It is not just the visual. Sure, we males are visual creatures and I am strongly affected by even subtle sights of female beauty. But I think that what is amazing about intimate relationships, even rocky ones, even bad ones, is the chance to get to know her sexual personality.

I think about Music, for example. She had this mischievious energy. She liked to be coaxed, a little bit. Even when she was eager to make love, she would suggest it very gently, like a question. We'd be in bed in the morning, and she'd sit up, and ask: "Do you want to get up? Do you want to get down?" Leading question. Predictable outcome. Or she would be on her laptop, pretending to ignore me, while I came up behind her and started massaging her. She would purr, but keep her attention away from me as long as she could. She was adventurous with blowing me, too, always trying to see how far back she could take me, and then reporting it back to me proudly. "You were all the way back here," she would tell me after.

But when she was really hot, she would become much more serious, and much more submissive. She would still want me to take her, but she would be very quick to move to whatever position I moved her to, quick to do whatever I wanted her to, and vocally very responsive. When I miss making love to her, when I fantasize, I miss these things about her. As much as the way she looked, and smelled, and tasted, and felt, I miss these things about her personality, things that I only learned after we'd made love dozens of times.

Voice was different. She was always hungry. Our sex life was limited only by my endurance. If I was ready, she was ready. If anything, she was more flamboyantly submissive than Music. It was a wild, loud surrender, lots of screams, lots of "please take me".

Music and Voice were such intense experiences, and so different from Soulmate, when I was younger, or Princess, today. Soulmate was finding herself, back then; Princess is finding herself, now. I realized, Princess is the last woman I will be with, and neither of us know her sexual personality yet. Shakira sang about a she-wolf being in there, and I think there's a she-wolf inside Princess too. I've caught glimpses of her, but I am looking forward to when she comes out and we can spend a whole afternoon together.

Time to change up...

Four more months of real, grownup, married life later, and I am rethinking what I do with this blog. I started this when I was lonely and dating and looking for something, and now I've found it and the world is very different. Maybe I'm living a journey not too different from Neil Strauss, who went from The Game to Emergency - learning how to pick up women, then learning how to protect himself and his family in case of the world collapsing. Well I've been around the world and seen that it's collapsing. Collapse is nothing new to me. But other things are. Like, responsibility. Not being able to risk my life so casually. Thinking about saving money and resources.

But it occurs to me that these, like my previous concerns about pickup and loneliness, addiction and nostalgia, are also concerns people have. Along with my abiding interest in pop culture and novels. Not to mention that there is still just as much need for a sharp tongue now as ever, in my life.

So, perhaps there is still a place for this blog.

Having said that, my blogroll is hopelessly out of date, so I think I am going to change it up. Goodbye Suzette, I loved you. Bad Man, you emailed me back when I was close to rock bottom, and now you're gone from the web. Naked Loft Party, you guys left too. Tim Ferriss, I will continue to read everything you write (and thanks for 4HB, I am using your protocols to help recover from both back and ankle injuries), but you certainly don't need any of the trivial traffic I would send your way! I do seem to be following you in life though. I am just now getting into cooking - me and Princess are becoming expert chefs. So, of course, I'll be getting 4HC... although for now, Jamie Oliver's doing a pretty awesome job.

Married life, trust...

Welcome back - more for myself.

So much happens in a year and a half.

I have been married to the Princess, almost a year now. I have got a modest bestseller and am transitioning to becoming a full-time author, transitioning from the humanitarian work that would be taking me away from Princess and my future children. Voice is long gone. Now a very distant work-colleague, literally oceans away. Music is a distant memory. Soulmate, a best friend. Princess is my world now, and I would trade it for nothing on earth.

From trying late to learn the skills of pickup, I am now in a totally different world. I am now trying to be a good husband. From trying to learn how to get and keep a girl's attention, my mind is now focused on how to manage constant demands for my attention and balance them against work, friends. It is amazing how things change. A few years ago I would have looked at Princess and strategized how I could get her to talk to me. How I would make myself interesting enough.

Now my life is characterized by her complete trust of me. Her life has been characterized by betrayal after betrayal, from family to early mentors on. She met me disillusioned. Thinking she couldn't trust anyone, knowing that you can do very little in this world if you really can't trust anyone, wanting desperately to trust me. And now she does. For every little thing, for every answer, for a role model, she looks to me. Her annoyance with me is always when she thinks I am not paying enough attention to her.

And I have trust in her, too. The idea that she might cheat on me strikes me as preposterous. And her trust in me is what makes me not want to cheat.

I have fantasies though. She has a best friend, who's almost as hot as her in a totally different way. Tall, athletic, big blond curly hair, very submissive. I imagine what a threesome would be like. We could all live together, maybe. I imagine showering with the best friend while Princess is doing her work in the next room, we all lay down together at night, I come home to find them in bed together laughing. I could teach the best friend a lot, the way I've taught Princess.

But when my temptations and fantasies run away from me, I imagine how it would shatter her world and it's almost like a protection from my own selfishness. She trusts me. I fear screwing it up. But her trust in me makes me want to live up to it. I think maybe this is how people grow. We grow because others believe we are better than we are. She thinks of me as her little god, and now I have to earn that.

I could learn to like this whole sex thing

Toronto is record hot for this time of year. Princess stays with me to escape her non-air conditioned apartment. We're legit now: she's met the parents and the Soulmate and all that. We're still deciding whether we'll face her parents head on or escape from them.

Princess is a strange combination of shyness and awareness of the fact that she looks like a supermodel. When I tell her I like Christina Hendricks better than Zhang Ziyi, who she resembles, she turns to ice - she thinks I'm saying I like curvy girls better than her ectomorphic beauty. Not the case at all. But a strange kind of proof that whatever her insecurities (she also thinks she's flat chested) she's also well aware of what she does to men. To me.

She's a virgin, but as I take her clothes off and kiss and hold her, she has this worldliness and acts like none of this is any surprise to her. It takes a few times to learn her but I am a good student and I learn how to please her, and she turns me on like no one ever has. I never thought I'd say that since Music. I never thought I would find anyone to equal her, but Princess excites me more. Princess makes me feel more certain, more aligned, more true.

So, at 5am, for the second time in the night, we make love. She doesn't like fingers. She takes a long time to come from my tongue on her, and she does so in a very low key way - a quiet little shudder, not the rapid breathing and rhythmic moving and sometimes screaming I'd gotten used to - though as she gets past her shyness and realizes what turns me on, she's getting a little louder. I'm on top of her, and behind her, and then she's on top. I slide down: "What are you --" and she moans as I put my mouth on her, her above me on her hands and knees. She comes like that and I go back behind her and take her again. "Mmmm... that feels good."

I whisper in her ear the whole time, that I love her, how beautiful she is. She just moans. "I love you too," she whispers. She's a little obsessed with cleanliness and thinks her body is dirty. I explain to her that I'm not attracted to the way her soap smells, which is very nice, but to the way she smells. After I've gone down on her she won't kiss me. But now she's sweaty and hot and a beautiful mess. "Can I come, or do you want to do it longer?" "Just come," she says. I do. I take the condom off, wrap it in a tissue, and collapse next to her.

"I like this whole sex thing," she says, smiling.

"Well, if you ever want it, you know who to call."

"Thanks," she says, rolling her eyes.

I miss no one, I think of no one else, now. I can feel Voice's absence and it's a very good thing. I don't feel uncertain about myself. I don't walk on eggshells. I don't fear the future. I don't fear a future of never knowing if she's with me. I trust the Princess when I open my mail in her presence or get a call in her presence, when either of those things with Voice would lead to a fight with her interrogating me about who was calling and why. I trust the Princess when she gets texts or calls in my presence and don't wonder if they're another secret lover like me. The amount of energy that went into holding my sanity (barely) in that situation - I am only realizing how much energy it was now that I am slowly getting it back. I am going to marry this girl. I have never felt so ready or so sure. I already belong to her.

Secret relationship, secret breakup

I'm babysitting and watching 'Dreamgirls', falling in love with Beyonce again. Eddie Murphy's character is about to go on stage. His girlfriend, played by Anika Noni Rose, gives him a kiss for each year that's gone by with her as a mistress and him still married and promising to leave his wife. 8 kisses. I would have given 4.

An interrupted 4. A 4 with several periods, including one a year long, where I saw a lot of other women. But in those years, even when we weren't talking, we both knew that we loved each other. We both knew that we were friends.

So this time, when I tell her I've fallen for someone else, and she goes in for hostility and defamation, it's a surprise. It's painful. A surprise for her, since every time I left over the past four years, it was not real. And this time it is.

"I can't wrap my head around it," I tell Roommate. "We're supposed to be enemies now? After everything?"

He shrugs.

I'm the kind of guy that would want to be able to get a coffee with her, or a dinner, and hear about her latest relationship adventures. I don't put borders around relationships. I've suffered for my inability to do so, certainly with her, probably in general. But I can't do it any other way. So the realization that my dream of friendship isn't going to happen is slow, and painful.

And I miss her. I watch videos of her songs. I check her twitter site, which she's been using to send coded messages of hostility my way. She tells our friends to tell me she's over it and doesn't care, now she sees I'm really pathetic.

The scandal protects me. She can't defame too much without revealing her dirty secret - me. So we both have to suffer in silence while we pretend indifference.

She tells me to never email or call or contact her again. She recently bought me an elaborate gift from five different stores in the mall. She tells me she wasted money she didn't have on it in our last conversation.

I go to each store, return each gift (the DVDs, the electronics, the clothes...), get a receipt, create an itemized ledger for the full amount, get cash out of the bank machine, bundle the receipts and ledger into an envelope, and leave it for her with the last of her stuff that I had. Money you didn't have, I write. You have it now. Thanks for the tweets, I don't write. That would be to tell her that it affected me.

Four years of friendship, four more of love, and it really comes to this? Could I not have hoped for better? Or should I, as everyone warned me, have known all along that this was all it was ever going to come to, because this was all it was? My body can't believe it. But my body came to fear her rejection and her contempt and her lies more than it longed for her. I really did hope for better.

The door's open, just a crack...

She's my friend's girl. They're off and on. Off, right now. She's in town for a few days. She stays with me, it's only sensible. Roommate is not at home. When we hang out in public she leans against me subtly. She hugs me for really long when we greet.

I set her up on the couch. Turn the heat up. Go to my room. Close the door tightly. Then I open it again.

I put my head to the pillow. 45 minutes later she walks in and crawls into my bed. "I'm wide awake," she says. "Is this okay?" She snuggles up to me and strokes my head and pulls my hair. "Yeah," I say. Our heads touch, and we are kissing. She likes to do it on top, holding me down, moving at her own rhythm. I smile and try to stay focused. I'm thinking about someone else. Voice flashes into my mind. Voice crying when I tell her I'm leaving. For real this time. Not like the last three times. So many betrayals.

In the morning I take her to the airport. We talk about her rocky relationship with my friend like we hadn't been making love two hours before. Or maybe like we had, and it makes no difference. This one will always be a secret. It all felt inevitable. But now it's done and it feels wrong.

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.