Apologizing By Evidence

The analysis of this fight, and my subsequent apology, will tell you what you need to know about our twelve-year marriage, and why it thrives to this day.
The source of this scuffle was simple: I was due to leave for Connecticut in half an hour, and Gini and I were having a fight.
The problem was simple: Gini was asking when I was leaving. I, in turn, asked her why she was asking – because I could delay my leaving for an hour, if she had something sufficiently pressing and needed the car.
Gini, in turn, proceeded to ramble on for valuable minutes of the remaining time I had left – I still had to pack and shower – not actually telling me what she wanted, just a bunch of apologetic preamble that I told her I didn’t need.  I needed to know what I could do for her.  I cut her off once, twice, three times, asking her to get to the point and just tell me what she wanted me to actually do.  She did not.  Voices were raised, shouting began.
Then Gini got up quietly and left the room with that stricken “I am not dealing with this”  look on her face I, unfortunately, know so well.
Here’s what you need to understand. I’m right.  I still think I’m right.  I wanted to know one thing at a time when I had very little time before I left – something that I was willing to do to benefit her – and Gini was dorking around when I needed straightforwardness, not excuses.  She should have just said what was on her mind: namely, “I have a hair appointment, would you mind leaving an hour later so I don’t have to walk back a mile in the heat with newly-cut hair?”
But I was also ridiculously stressed about leaving for Connecticut.  I didn’t want to drive nine hours alone.  I was stressed to the gills because I’m an introvert, and the last three weekends have been all filled with people, and the next three weekends would be all filled with people, and every circuit in my body was – is – screaming for an afternoon alone to recharge.  I was nervous about visiting my Grammy, who is going downhill (as you’d expect from a 92-year-old) and I didn’t want to reenact the hellishness that was my maternal grandmother’s slump.
So I sat there, and after a few minutes of DON’T WANNA I found Gini and apologized.
I did not apologize because I felt like apologizing.  But looking at the available evidence – stressed Ferrett, rushed on time, stricken Gini – everything around me suggested that I was, in fact, being an asshole.  In fact, the only data point that didn’t suggest that I was being a jerk was the little voice inside shrieking, She’s wrong! You’re so right! – a voice I’ve learned, over the years, often leads me astray.
I was apologizing based on pure track history.  I know Gini well enough to know that nine days out of ten, when she gets that look on her face, I’ve crossed a line I shouldn’t have.  I know me well enough to know that when my energy supplies are worn to the marrow after a solid month of socializing, I act funny.  And we cuddled, and I figured out what she wanted, and I left later.  More importantly, I left for Connecticut with the feeling that we loved each other, not dashing out for three days apart after a nasty fight and having to patch it up on the road.
Sometimes, you need to look at yourself and go, “Okay, internally this feels completely correct… But viewed from the reactions of others and my situation, would a smart investigator conclude that I’m actually in the right here?”  Because every so often, you’re gonna  wind up in a situation where you’re in a bad headspace – stress, PMS, a little too wired on one drug, legal or not – and you’ve gotta be able to step outside to look at it objectively.
Cuddled up on the bed, Gini and I discussed this.  She laughed.  “You think I only apologize when I think I’m wrong?  Oh no, my love.  I do it too.”
This is why we’ve weathered twelve years.

How The Ferrett Fucks

A friend of mine hooked up with a crush of mine last weekend.  When I pressed for the inevitable details, I was told that she “fucks like a beast.”
I tried to think of how past lovers would describe me, if pressed.  I don’t think “beast” would be the term that came to mind. So I conjectured several potential descriptions:

• “Ferrett fucks like a cold shrimp.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a mattress sale.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a Denny’s restaurant at three-thirty in the morning, right after the bars have let out.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a borscht belt comedian working a hostile room after one too many glasses of Manischewitz.”
• “Ferrett fucks like… well, you know that pair of shoes that’s always hanging from the telephone line from the laces, the ones you always wonder how they got up there?  Ferrett fucks like they got up there.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a carnival, but not Ringling Brothers, like that little carnival with the beat-up ponies who comes along and sells you elephant ears with too much sugar on them.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a Ferrett.”

Suggestions welcome.

The View From A Thousand Different Points

Here is a flowchart, telling you how to pick up a woman.  It’s long, and visual, and probably pretty effective.
I can’t stop reading the fucking thing.
See, viewed from one perspective, the whole Pick-Up Artist thing is an eminently rational response to a common conundrum: I’d like to have sex with someone I find attractive.  How do I do that?  Well, let’s use science!  And so the breaking down of the stages of flirtation into small, easily-digestible chunks and methodologies is something that really is quite helpful for guys looking to know how to charm a girl – or at least a certain type of girl.
Viewed from another perspective, it’s absolutely goddamned creepy.  It’s mind-manipulation at its crudest, using hooks to push the animal centers of a certain type of woman to goad them into having sex with you.
Yet viewed from another perspective, I mean, shit, isn’t that kind of crude hooks what corporate America does all the goddamned time?  We’re flooded with advertising and political campaigns designed to do exactly what the Pick-Up Artists do – hell, Yahoo! has at least an article a week on “How Supermarkets Manipulate You.”  We’re in an age where scientists are paid to find our weakest points – they’re like a psychological karate-master, knowing that if they hit us in the back of the knees, we go down like this every time.
The reason we don’t find that every bit as creepy as the Pick-Up Artists are a) we rarely get a raw look inside the mind-process of a corporation in the same way that we get a look inside the brains of Mystery and company, b) “men wanting to have sex” is often seen as inherently a creepy thing for men to do, and “women consenting to have sex with men” is something that OMG WOMEN DON’T WANT ICKY SEXX THEY MUST BE MEZ-MO-RIZED, and c) the corporations that create that sort of mind-scanning really don’t want you to look too closely at it, so they tamp down that particular animal terror.
But somewhere inside the corporation are a bunch of modified Pick-Up Artists, looking at your buying and voting habits with just this kind of creeptastic eye, looking at you as though you were a Skinner box with buttons to punched.  Their goal: find those buttons.
Yet viewed from another perspective, is learning manipulation explicitly really bad?  I mean, shit, speaking as a guy who had to learn whatever charm he possesses naturally, I can tell you that when you have zero skills in the “get people to like you” department, the folks at the top of the high school social pyramid did things that seemed like magic.  I had to watch them and learn things that seemed elementary to you, like “Don’t wear a shirt full of chocolate milk stains” and “Don’t interrupt people to tell them how they’re wrong.”
Some people have the charm naturally.  But that charm is still a form of manipulation, whether they consciously honed it or not.  They may not overtly mean to charm you when they touch your shoulder, but somewhere deep within they’ve learned that the shoulder-touch gets better results, and they do it.  So why is it creepy when one person is naturally talented enough to do something by a set of naturalized instincts, and the other learns it through hard work?
Isn’t that just punishing the socially inept, telling them that if they don’t have it, they never should?  Shouldn’t we encourage the kind of charm that sways us, no matter where it comes from? Why is it kind of a creepster thing to say, “I totally live by Dale Carnegie’s ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People’?”
To me, it feels like a way of saying, “We had all this talent naturally, and you shouldn’t be able to get it if you didn’t acquire it.”  That barrier to entry is creepier, in its own way.
Yet then I go back to the flowchart, and I see some pretty creeptastic shit buried in there: “It’s on, bitches!” and “No matter what she says here [at this stage], you’ll have to accept her” and “If all three answers are sexual, she’s a tease… you’ll have to build a lot of rapport to get through her barriers.”  GUH.
And I realize that for all of my rationale that this could be a thing that could help the innocent asocial nerd become a person who can get by in “normal” society, this is also the kind of Lex Luthor shit that can turn a nerd into a guy who views other people as safes to be cracked.  You wind up with a bunch of super-nerds, charming on the outside, shitty on the inside – not pick-up artists but con artists.
Then I loop back to the corporations doing the same shit to us, and I know for a fact they don’t give a rat’s ass about me aside from the contents of my wallet.  Shouldn’t I be more concerned about their manipulations, which are constant and effective?  What about the lonely nerds who could benefit from this?  What about the creepy way that a lot of the negative reaction to all of this assumes, on one level, that women are so hostile to sex that any normal guy who gets a “hot” woman to sleep with them must be an evil mastermind?
It’s creepy.  It’s useful.  It’s institutionalized.   And so I keep looking at this goddamned flowchart over and over again, trying to fit all the pieces together, and they don’t quite mesh.

A Brief Note On Pool

I have a love of terrible dialogue, delivered convincingly.  This was something they used to do back in the 1950s and 1960s – take these long, comic-book speeches, florid with metaphor and full of emotions that nobody would actually say, and the actors would somehow sell it.
It’s a tricky thing to pull off.  You need both commitment and talent.  If you don’t speak these lines like your next breath depended on them, the phoniness of it bleeds through.  If you don’t have the talent to act it with the proper heart, well, you look callow and stupid.
But when you manage it, well… you get Obi-Wan Kenobi telling Luke that this is a hive of scum and villainy.  You get Charlton Heston screaming at apes. You get Kirk and Khan, uttering lines through the bits of scenery still wedged in their teeth.  You get Jack and Rose on the deck of the Titanic, and yes that movie is better than you give it credit for.
But really, I’m watching two masters work some of the turdiest dialogue ever written: Rod Serling, you did us all a favor with the Twilight Zone, but holy crap your speeches were wooden. The only reason you could get people to believe this stuff is that you realized that you needed good actors… and when you got them they managed to bring your leaden speeches to life.
I’m watching two masters of the craft, Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters, exchange rapid-fire dialogue in one of the best TZ episodes, “A Game Of Pool.”  And I’m thinking, nobody talks like this.  Then I’m thinking, but people should.

As You Wish, Crom

SCENE: I’m showing the original Conan the Barbarian to Gini for the first time.  Conan, about to face the fight of his life, puts his back to a rock and says:
CONAN: Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen – then to hell with you!
The soldiers charge in.  I pause the movie. 
ME: He doesn’t get killed by the soldiers at this time.
GINI: What?
ME: The soldiers don’t get him. I’m explaining to you because you look nervous.
GINI: What?  I’m not nervous. This is a terrible goddamn film.
ME: As you wish.
I unpause the film.  Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, and miracles ensue.

You May Have Noticed I'm Not Used To Being Quiet

Usually, I go in guns blazing.  That’s because I don’t have the time to be stealthy.
“Stealthy” in videogames means “you creep everywhere at half-pace, waiting for guards to walk by, hoping their broken goddamned AI doesn’t spot you out of the corner of one visual cone and call every guard in the world in upon you.” Plus, I have a goldfish’s sense of direction, so no matter how many maps you throw at me, I get lost.  So what inevitably happens is that I wind up getting lost, then trying to find my way back in slow-motion, hoping no guards see me or the trail of bodies I’ve left behind.
Or I could just kill the guards, then kill any other guards who come at me, and never have to worry about them again.  This seems like a better option.  Break out the bullets.
(Plus, for some reason, designers have decided that “crouch” means “stealth.”  I’ve seen sneaky people.  They walk a lot whenever possible, and usually the guy hunch-lumping his way along the sidewalk draws more attention.  Plus, I keep getting cramps in my thighs imagining crouch-walking for, like, an entire day, as videogame characters seem to do.)
Except for Deus Ex, I started stealthy and have stayed stealthy, and for no apparent reason am very much enjoying it this time.  I don’t know why.  I’ve learned that there are a lot more ways that “stealth” can go wrong, because one impatient move sets off the whole damn alarm system.  You have to check every corner, monitor every footstep, hack every terminal.  Which means a lot more reloads, because I walked across a hallway and OH FUCK HE NOTICED, HERE’S SEVEN GUARDS, MISE WELL RELOAD.
I am like five levels in on Deus Ex, and with a straight-up shooty approach I’m pretty sure I’d be halfway to winning the game.  Instead, I’m repeatedly trying to get the near-perfect level.
Still, I think I am at least getting the thrill of the stealth player, which is that I am a different kind of God.  With the guns-out method, I am the Avatar of Arnie – they turn into blood fountains the moment I lay my eyes upon them.  But there is no fear; hell, there’s no time for fear.  In fact, they all charge at me, so confident that they can destroy me, that their brains are rapidly-expanding chunks of desegregated neurons before the Is this really a wise idea? thought begins to trickle through their neural networks.
With the stealth, it’s a trick; they never know I’m here, but their world is falling apart around them.  The only time they see me is when they stumble across a body, or notice that the turrets are now working for me – and then there’s that delightful moment of them going, “Hey!  What’s happening?” and I feast on their panic before hello, boys, did you miss me?  I’m the early-Rambo mode, the man who hides in bizarre places and drops down, the Batman.
Of course, I’m still notably terrible at stealth because I treat the guards like Pokemon.  I’m supposed to avoid the ones who aren’t bothering me, but I hunt every one down and knock them out.  I can’t leave if there’s a man standing; they all have to be heaped in the corner, made senseless puppets.  In this sense, I become John Wayne Cleaver’s wet dream.
Still, it’s fascinating.  And has the benefit of making the videogame take a lot longer to finish. So I may have to try this approach again in the future.