Tuesday 9:46pm

My phone doesn’t show any missed alerts, which means she hasn’t called or texted me since getting off work. I am slightly annoyed, since I know she  has started revealing to people that we’re fucking. Except that we’re not fucking — despite the fact that she put my dick inside her this weekend, which I wouldn’t really call fucking, since I was mostly asleep at the time.

I consider the impact pornography has had on my sex life and general ability to relate to women, and decide I would be better off without it. The fact remains that she hasn’t called me tonight, and that chafes me ever so slightly. If she really liked me, she would have called, knowing my tendency to worry when I don’t have enough information to make an informed decision.

I’m eating frozen blueberries, because I’ve heard the antioxidants in blueberries prevent cancer, and I have a testicular ultrasound scheduled for this Friday at 4pm. I worry that my boss will think I’m not serious about my job if I take too much more time off work to get medical tests. I’m pretty sure that beating cancer would improve my lifetime earnings by close to $250,000. I’m also falling in love with my nurse practitioner. She’s a cancer survivor herself. That’s probably why she ordered the tests.

The girl who hasn’t called me doesn’t seem to be very emotionally aware. I’m mostly convinced she’s either sleeping with, or just emotionally manipulating, my best friend Bradley. On the other hand, that could be my excessive and irrational mistrust of all people. The evidence for that belief doesn’t seem to be overwhelming, but since I have trouble thinking of counter-evidence, I find it hard to dismiss out of hand. I decide that if the possibility exists, it would be more embarrassing to dismiss it and be caught unawares later, than to hold an irrational position forever and just feel cautious and hard-headed.

I can’t shake my obsessive thoughts about my nurse practitioner. She has breast implants, and I think surviving cancer is probably the only set of circumstances in which I would endorse a woman getting breast implants. I would love a big tumbler of Dewars on the rocks right now.

There’s probably not enough binge drinking in my life at this point for me to make the really hard decisions about what happens next, like do I go to grad school or just continue climbing the corporate ladder. The next most important question is, can I fuck that 31-year-old tart they just installed behind my desk without my current work girlfriend finding out? Her face is so basically perfect, I don’t even care that she has almost no tits. I have thought about fucking her in the stairwell a disturbing number of times, without a condom. I would definitely want to come inside her without a condom. I wonder if she would notice if I masturbated and came in her hair while she was on the phone. I think I’m going to start ordering two drinks at a time when I’m at all but the fanciest restaurants. Are my shoulders starting to seize up from my kettlebell class?

The thing about my co-worker (the 31-year-old, not the one I’m not fucking) is that she’s unlikely to get drunk near me unless it’s at work sponsored event. Could we fuck at one of those without anyone noticing? Probably not. It would be more ethical not to flirt heavily with other women I work with, but I think it’s almost inevitable. Our only stage upon which to play out romantic jealousy plots is work. This is extremely unprofessional behavior but it might not be able to be helped.

It’s now 10:01 (also the name of a very pretentious restaurant in my neighborhood), and no call or text from the coworker I’m not fucking. I can’t believe how thoroughly she’s dissing me. I wonder if a trip to the Llave del Infierno strip club and a handjob from a stripper would make me feel better about the situation. I could order two drinks at once.

Since I’ve been writing for about 15 minutes and produced about 800 words, I can surmise my writing speed is about 3,108 words per hour, which is really quite spectacular and should more than make up for the fact that I’m so inept at having real relationships. It’s probably the best idea to just go to bed now, so I can get enough sleep to encourage protein synthesis in my shoulders, lats, gluts, and quads. I’m supposed to go to a South-side lounge tomorrow with my friend Randy, and speak to a girl I find attractive, to get over my fear of approaching women. With the  anger I feel from being dissed tonight, I get the distinct impression that will be no problem. I should probably also meditate again before I get in bed, to cleanse myself of this negativity and re-center my mind in a happy and positive place that allows me to consider the very real possibility of a stable, monogamous long-term relationship with a woman who is three years my senior, has a much less valuable undergraduate degree than me, and yet somehow still makes 94% of what I make.

The Best Craigslist Ad Ever and Why Online Dating is Doomed

I recently wrote and posted the best craig’s list personals ad ever. How do I know it was the best ever? Well, because about 100 women told me so.

Here is a typical response:

“Wow I have to say I’m a little old for you (48) and probably not your type but you should get a response from every woman in (XX city)! Yours is definitely the most fun and funniest post I have ever seen on Craig’s List, usually, they are sick and disgusting but yours was amazing! You must have funny oozing out of every pore on your body . . . anyway just wanted to say I wish you luck and am sure you will have no trouble finding a great girl!”

This post is a great example of typical female psychology. If a guy is funny, and he posts a funny ad online, then he should get laid like a rug, and married, and kids, and wealthy. Everything will be OK as long as you are a really, really, funny and amazing guy.

Well, I am a really, really funny and amazing guy. And you know what? The world doesn’t work that way.

This is how the world works:

1. If a woman is looking for love online, either browsing personal ads or answering craig’s list personal ads, she is defective in one of the following ways: addict. overweight. ugly. angry. mean. single mom. deeply conflicted. low self-esteem. shitty job. no career. no ambition. wants kids. wants financial support. trying to cheat on husband. etc. etc. etc.
2. The really hot, quality girls are either married, or in “monogamous” relationships. The scare quotes around “monogamous” just mean that they might slip up and sleep with a friend or a random dude in a bar if the mood strikes. Nobody finds out or if they do, they’re forgiven.
3. The really hot, quality girls spend all their days in a corporate environment (since men and women are equal now) and then go home to their bore-friends who fuck them in pretty much the same way  all the time. (I know this because I’ve been one of those bore-friends).
4. The really hot, quality girls might go out on a ‘girls ‘night’ but then it’s all about drinking and dancing and looking hot and only occasionally, in a very rare instance, letting themselves get fucked. So-called ‘players’ or player wannabes will spend 90% of their effort trying to find or manufacture those instances when an otherwise ‘claimed’ woman will open her legs for just one night.
5. The really hot, quality girls are therefore SEQUESTERED away from any really hot, quality guys who may be single.
6. The really hot, quality girls who are SOMEHOW STILL SINGLE are therefore free to sigh, “where are all the GOOD guys?” Simple because they have constructed (or rather, allowed society to construct for them) a CLOISTER around their lives so they have ALMOST NO CHANCE of meeting a decent guy outside of an alcohol-soaked dance club where they won’t remember anything anyway.
7. The way for an awesome, funny, intelligent guy like me is NOT TO POST PERSONALS, but to go out to an alcohol-soaked dance club, insult women, insult men, and generally act like an arrogant douche-canoe until a girl is amused enough to let me drag her back to my car / apartment where I will proceed to pound her like a cheap steak, an event that will go down in her personal history as ‘the best night of passion of my life’ due to her filling in all the awkward gaps caused by alcoholic memory erasure with scenes from her favorite romance novel, but which will expose ABSOLUTELY NONE of my best qualities, and therefore lead to no number exchange, no further conversation, no personal expansion, no authentic encounter, no mutuality, no connection, and nothing, in other words, worth doing at all.

If you’re a hot, funny, attractive, intelligent single guy, and you don’t live in NYC, LA, SFO, or (maybe) Chicago, the best thing you can do is either A) move to one of the aforementioned places and join the rest of the human dating race, or B) slit your wrists right now.

Because the online thing doesn’t work.

Econ Courses Make Students Less Generous

On December 2 of 2011, Harvard Business Review “Daily Stat” published the following:

Econ Courses Make Students Less Generous

College economics courses have the effect of making non-econ majors less generous, at least toward nonprofits. Taking introductory microeconomics reduces a nonmajor’s likelihood of donating to specific nonprofits by 2 percentage points, and an intermediate course reduces the likelihood by 3.7 to 7.9 percentage points, according to Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose of the University of Washington. It’s unclear whether this is the result of exposure to economics concepts, exposure to econ faculty and students, or some other cause, the researchers say.

So why, pray tell, are a bunch of economists running our country, in an age where we need generosity more than ever?

Big Spending on War Has Little Effect on GDP

According to Military Spending and Economic Growth in South Asia: A Panel Data Analysis as reported by Harvard Business Review on November 30th, 2011:

A 1% increase in military spending increases real GDP by only 0.04%, according to a study of five South Asian countries by Albert Wijeweera and Matthew J. Webb of the Petroleum Institute in the United Arab Emirates. Their findings suggest that the substantial amount of public money currently directed toward military purposes in these countries has just a negligible impact on economic growth.

Well, duh.

That’s a reason why the United States should probably stop spending $660+ billion dollars on our military.

And that, by the way, is NOT counting the over $56 billion in the so-called “black budget”, which receives no Congressional oversight whatsoever.

War, what is it good for?

Love, Actually. . . Not

I’m back, bitches.

I just finished watching Love, Actually with Liam Neeson and a whole host of other Hollywood A-listers, and not only is this the perfect movie to watch on Christmas Eve, it’s also a pretentious load of Disneyfied fairtytale crap.

Love, Actually has nothing to do with actual love. It’s all about wish-fulfillment fantasizing about an idealized version of love that twistes our friendships, ruins our marriages and makes a mockery of our childhood crushes.

At the root of this movie is not a heartwarming tale of truth about how “love conquers all”. At the root of this movie is a glittering, cynical, hard-edged exploitation of human hope and vanity.

Let’s take a look at the stories involved, one by one. I’m only going to briefly thumbnail sketch the movie plot: a variety of characters’ stories intertwine in wholly contrived ways while they all, in their own way, pursue “true” love. That’s the summary. Here are the gory details.

Harry, the director of an ad agency, cheats on his wife Karen with his younger, sexier secretary Mia. Karen discovers this and has a two minute breakdown, and then goes on with life as usual, because she won’t end the marriage for the sake of the kids. This vignette underscores that who Karen really loves are her kids. This is a bleak, depressing, and wholly realistic commentary on the modern marriage, in which (if kids are present) they often become the focus of the relationship, above and beyond the breakdown of the original partners’ marriage, and in many cases the original couple will “stay together for the kids”, thinking this will be better for the kids (even if, in many cases, it’s actually worse). The difficulty here underscores the insanity of believing that a modern marriage has a better than 50% chance of working when the truth is, it doesn’t.

If you’re still questioning my conclusion here, answer this quick quiz. Which choice is better for a happy family?:

• Husband and wife unhappy and maybe cheating but stay together for the kids
• Husband and wife unhappy and maybe cheating but break up (divorce)

If you tried to avoid a third option, “Neither – Happy Marriage”, you’re welcome to try, and please send me a postcard letting me know how well that works out.

Peter marries Juliet, and gradually Juliet realizes that Peter’s best friend Mark is in love with her. But, despite this love, Mark has gone years without speaking to Peter or Juliet about his undying love. So, he decides to sneak over to the house one night, pretend to be a whole chorus of carolers (yeah, right) and show Juliet signs that say, basically, “I love you, but I’ve always been to chicken to tell you, so hopefully I’ll find another girl, but I really am committed to you forever, in my heart.” And Juliet responds by French kissing him. Oh, boy: the moral of the story? If you’re false with your best friend, it’s okay, because the gorgeous girl he just married who you want desperately will probably break you off a little piece for you anyway if you just tell her how you really feel. That way, everybody’s happy. Oh, but you still can’t be honest with your best friend, and you still can’t have your dream girl. Unless you, y’know, kill your best friend. That may be your best bet. She’d probably get turned on by that or something.

New UK Prime Minister David is attracted to office-girl Natalie. When the U.S. President visits and makes a pass at her during a state visit, David is horrified and has Natalie transferred into another department. Later, she admits to him she was momentarily intoxicated by the President’s power and couldn’t help herself, and she really does love him (David). David ends up kissing her backstage at her kid brother’s Christmas play and, of course, the happy couple is outed in front of all the world. The moral of this twisted story: First, use your power to hit on the women in your office. Second, use your power to remove them from your path when it gets too difficult. Third, use your power to chase them down again when they make a inept confession of love (?) to you in a Christmas card. And Fourth, sneak around with them at public functions, imagining nobody will find out. True love really does conquer all. BARF.

Jamie is a writer who got cheated on by his wife with his brother. Shattered, he retires to a French cottage to write, and, romantically, the owner provides him with a fetching Portugese housekeeper, Aurelia, who doesn’t speak a lick of English. Of course, the sparks fly despite the language barrier, and after a tearful goodbye in which the impotent Jamie fails to act even after Aurelia kisses him on the mouth, he mounts a months-long campaign to “win her back”, learning Portugese and traveling to Portugal, contacting her family without her knowledge and actually showing up at her workplace unannounced and uninvited to ask for her hand in marriage. Of course, the rest of her family are portrayed as ignorant 3rd-worlders who banter about a “bride price” as if this was some 15th century arrange marriage. We’ll ignore the blatant racism and elitism for a minute and focus on the fact that, of course, Aurelia has been learning English and “saving herself” for him, on the off chance that he would randomly show up, just like in a storybook romance (“my prince will come.”) — and, of course, he does. Hello, has anyone ever heard of this happening in real life, not in a Disney movie? I didn’t think so. So here’s the Real Life version of this story: inept, impotent Jamie doesn’t have the stones or the follow-through to learn Portugese and fly to Portugal, and so continues his days masturbating to Internet porn or, better yet, marrying some sexless woman who will never measure up to the Portugese minx he lost through inaction. And, of course, Aurelia goes back to Portugal, works as a waitress, and gets picked up by a hunky Italian one night, who proceeds to boff her brains out, giving her the best sex of her life, only to dump her two months later for a richer, prettier girl.

I could go on, but I’d rather not.

Let me instead elucidate the rules of modern relationships, in contradistinction to the propagandist tripe this movie has put out. Instead of letting your mind be polluted with this Hollywood garbage, tell yourself the following: I guarantee the following messages will get you better results.

1. You will never, ever get a second chance with a girl, so act now.
2. If you get married there is a better than 50% chance you will get divorced. Know this.
3. As a man, once you have kids with a women, the kids will become more important than you.
4. Go after the woman you want, not the woman you think you have a chance with.
5. Be honest with your male friends about which girls you love (or are crushing on). Be brutally honest. It’s way better than losing the friendship when you seduce her later and she cheats on him, and it’s way, way better than watching your best friend marry and fuck a girl you had a good chance with.
6. If you are in a relationship with a woman, whether marriage or just dating, there is a good chance she will cheat on you, either with your best friend, your brother, or someone of no consequence. This is not because she’s an evil person: this is because humans are not meant to be sexually monogamous.
7. You can be tightly devoted to your family, but if your blood relatives become your only social connection, you won’t get laid very much.
8. Real love isn’t learning languages, traveling across continents, and doing other outlandish and stupid things in an effort to prove to someone you love them very much. Real love is accepting someone for who they are, totally, and letting them be that person, encouraging them to be an ever more perfect actualization of their own highest self — even if that someone is a guy who needs to seduce every third woman he sees. Anything else is selfish and self-serving wish fulfillment.
9. Don’t date women you work with.
10. Especially don’t date women who work under you.

Gun Control: It’s the Economy, Stupid

I have to say, I like guns.

This topic is a little off base of what I usually write about here, so I’ll be brief, but I do think it’s important.

New York Representative Carolyn McCarthy recently dusted off old H.R. 1022, which you can track here via OpenCongress.

A summary of the bill follows:

A bill, also known as the Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2007, that greatly expands the list of prohibited weapons. The definition of a semiautomatic assault weapon is broadened in the bill, to include many guns that are currently legal. The text of this bill contains a long list of specific guns that would become illegal to possess, if it were enacted. Additionally, it would make the private transfer of any assault weapon illegal.

Now, a lot of bloggers are going nuts about this bill — “The Dems are trying to take away all our guns!” and “This is 10x worse than Clinton!” and “THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!”

But if they looked closely, they would notice that this bill is absolutely 100% D.O.A.

First of all, it has NO co-sponsors (nobody else is dumb enough to support it).

Second of all, it’s been referred back to Committee, where it will most likely die an inglorious death.

It’s probably just horse-trading.

Nobody is willing to sign on with her, because not only is anti-gun legislation largely ineffective from a policy standpoint, it’s also an absolute non-starter from a political standpoint.

Standing Armies vs Well-Organized Militia
Bills like this, and gun-control legislation in general, always comes back to the 2nd Amendment: Let’s review:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This is a Jeffersonian concept that is related to the idea that the free State would not be keeping standing armies. Since we do have a standing army (and an extremely expensive one at that), some anti-gun activists will say that there is no need for a well-regulated militia.

To which I reply: a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state, would be desperately needed in such times that the freedom of said State was under attack by aforementioned standing army.

To wit: Bush’s grab for control of the National Guard.
To wit: Corporations empowered to raise their own standing armies.
To wit: our ‘broken’ Armed Forces , over-stretched because of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and now possibly Iran), and their current inability to protect our own nation in the (admittedly unlikely) event of an attack on our own soil.

If this country continues it’s slide into corporate autocracy, I’m sure that pretty soon a whole lot of Democrats are going to wish they owned assault rifles, and a whole lot of Republicans are going to be glad they do.

Urban vs Rural
Others argue that gun control is really an issue between the soft-palmed sissy urbanites — locked in their glass condos for fear of the gritty urban gun battles taking place in the ‘bad’ parts of their city — and the rural gun owners, those rugged individualists who are either salt-of-the-earth hunters or crazy survivalists stockpiling bunkers of illegal assault weapons, depending who you ask.

I think it’s unquestionable that urbanites and others living in metropolitan areas have a much different relationship with firearms than rural people.

It’s easy, when you are in a city and hearing about people get shot weekly or even daily, to be logical and think “Well, the guns are the problem. We should just ban all the guns and then nobody would get shot.”

On the other hand, the rural people, who have grown up around guns and treat them with respect and understand their power, can’t get their heads around this. “Take away our guns? Yeah, when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers.”

Urbanites, of course, then decide that anyone who was so strongly in favor of gun ownership must be a bloodthirsty thug — since all the people they associate with gun use in the city are either thugs or other People of Low Moral Fiber.

But they’ve got it backwards, because when you go out into the country, “gun people” are often the nicest people around.

This is the disconnection between urban morality and rural morality: In dense urban areas, there are gang wars, drug deals, “reps” to protect, and guns will be made available as tools in these social constructs regardless of their legality, since they are part of American culture.

In rural areas, a different kind of morality holds sway — more traditional moral and family values, respect for nature and the environment, respect for individual liberties and the power of guns. The cultural love of guns holds true here, too, but here, the guns are used in an entirely different way.

These are broad characterizations and as such obviously gloss over subtlety and nuance, but I think are no less useful for all that.

So it should be easy to see why the argument so quickly gets out of hand between an urban anti-gun liberal and a conservative pro-gun rural: they’re arguing across cultures and moral systems. The issue of gun control is really incidental to their argument.

Here’s the reality: guns don’t kill people, PEOPLE with guns kill people. And the legal or restricted status of guns in urban areas will do absolutely diddly-squat to curb gun violence and violence in general.

You think criminals can’t get guns once they’re outlawed? If they want guns, they can get guns. If anything outlawing certain weapons makes them MORE likely to be available on the black market.

It’s the Economy, Stupid
I believe that the presence or absence of guns really has nothing to do with the rates and levels of inner-city violence.

People’s subjective feelings of happiness and hope, on the other hand, do.

When the economy is up, and unemployment is low, and real wages are rising (adjusted for inflation) and the poorest 10% of our population believes they have a chance to better their circumstances, crime will be low, because the perceived risks associated with criminal behavior will outweigh the perceived potential rewards that could probably more easily (and less riskily) be gained by legitimate employment or other opportunities.

When the economy is down, and unemployment is high, and real wages are stagnant or falling, and the poorest 10% of our population believes that they have been forgotten by the politicians and all sectors of the economy, then crime will rise, because the perceived rewards of criminal behavior will outweigh any other perceived rewards that an individual could gain by other means.

In closing, I believe all citizens of the United States should be able to purchase long arms, handguns, semiautomatic and automatic assault rifles, so long as they go through a mandatory gun safety and usage training course, and registered each and every weapon they owned as well as disclosed ammunition amounts.

I also believe that all gun-owning citizens should be required to take independently-verified marksmanship tests, the results of which would be tabulated and placed in a state database, so the state could evaluate the quality and amount of firepower that was available to it in the event of a “citizen’s militia” call-up.

Finally, I believe the Fed should butt out of state’s rights and the existing state militias (National Guard). In this respect I am all for strengthening state control and Governors at the expense of the Federal system.

And to conclude, a photo of the Israeli TAV-21 assault rifle, a gun I’d quite enjoy owning: