Look, I know it’s been a while, and I know I didn’t call or write, and I’m sorry. Though it’s little consolation, I want you to know that I thought about you constantly. I only saw other people like half a dozen times, and frankly I didn’t enjoy it and missed you.

There were lots of reasons not to write the blog, virtually none of which I can describe in detail without continuing the extended metaphor much further than is approved by the FDA for human daily allowance of metaphor. However, I do realize that I won’t get out of this week’s blog post alive without hitting three more things:

1. Yes, I am 100% single.
2. INAD resumes in a week. Buckle up.
3. I swear I wrote an awkward thing for today, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where the hell I saved it. But I promised myself that I’d post about girls today, and post I shall. Here’s a brief little vignette that I jotted down on a business trip a while ago.

—

I leaned forward. She looked up at me.

“Let’s build a campfire right here between these benches,” I said to her. She shivered and giggled. “We’ll get some marshmallows and sticks and camp out. Are you in?”

She nodded and giggled again. “Once, when the power was out, I roasted a marshmallow with a candle! It took like an hour.”

She was another single serving friend from the airport, a cute and bubbly freckled blonde sophomore engineer at Lehigh who was trying to get to Allentown, departing gate F17. She wore purple but liked pink. I was on my way back from recruiting in Cleveland, departing to Richmond from gate F16. We were both trapped in Philadelphia for an hour and a half with nothing to do but pretend to ignore each other when we weren’t subtly flirting, not for keeps but just for the hell of it. It sure beats not quite making eye contact with anyone while hoping to get out of the stupid airport.

I’m not even going to pretend that this post was about how I talked to a random person, humanity was connected together, how happy we’d be if we understood strangers, and so forth. I mean, it originally was about that. How we should reach out as a country to our brother man and lift him up.

Seriously. Lets be honest with ourselves. If you have a floral skirt on and smile a lot, you’re a lot more interesting to me than my brother man.

Okay. You didn’t want to do any work today anyway. But rather than fire directly into Part 4 of an ongoing story or take a shot at transcribing any pent up awkward things of which I have several, let’s do a long-overdue Q&A mailbag. The rules: questions, comments, insults, and search keywords that someone used to find the website will be in bold. The silken lyrics of forgotten love songs, which may or may not be awkward, will be in regular type.

It is not is surprise to see that quirky yet relatable blogs like Awkward Things I Say To Girls ran away with Funniest Blog and Most Addicting Blog…
—Jon Baliles

The nice thing about Q&A blog posts is that I get to pick any Q I want, including ones that Alex Trebek would never allow. Especially ones that are not in the form of a question and talk about how awesome I am. Thanks to all of you who nominated and voted for me in the first Richmond Blog Awards. Your check and autographed picture should arrive in the mail shortly. In the meantime, I have begun to wear a name tag that says “Hello, I am the funniest, most addicting man in Richmond” whenever I go to a bar to hit on girls. It isn’t awkward at all.

Congratulations to all of the rest of the winners also. I’m proud to be a part of the diverse and maturing Richmond Blog scene.

If I’m in the friend zone, why does she flirt with me?
—Search term

She flirts with you because you’re a fun person to flirt with and she likes the attention, and maybe because you’re misreading the situation and she wants to go out with you. Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to post for a while. Those especially committed procrastinators who have any sort of maternal or paternal mentoring-type feelings stirring deep inside themselves, assuming they’re sure it isn’t morning sickness or indigestion, respectively, may want to click on over to the comments section of what has become one of the most popular posts on the site, pageview wise: Getting Out of the Friend Zone: The Easy Way.

Those of us who have commented there have become a close bunch, like an organized crime family who has also travelled cross-country in a van. But there are unanswered questions, such as “how” and “what if.” There are feelings oozing out of the confining rectilinearity of the “submit comment” box. For some reason, feelings seem to hit my readership right in its wheelhouse.

When’s the book version coming up?
—jesstagirl

When I get paid to write, you will get your book. In the meantime you get INAD chapters whenever I can anesthetize myself enough to perform the necessary autovivisection. For example, I wrote one of the more recent chapters after seeing The Notebook, which I don’t want to talk about for emotional reasons except to say, with a controlled expression and distant stare, that it reminded me of something. You also get some facts. Here they are:

• INAD is about 15,000 words so far in total, which I hear works out to be 60 pages.
• The entire story has five parts, of which I have completed three.
• I think there are 16 more chapters between the remaining two parts.
• Writing it out helps.

“Could you have another chance after you rejected a guy?”
—Search term

Almost all of my high-pressure adolescent girl-related moments were accompanied by the vivid sensation of falling. “Will you go to the Eighth Grade Dance with me?” I asked the tall, quiet, and smart girl that I happened to have a huge crush on when I had just turned 14. I couldn’t support my body, though, so even though an early growth spurt had kept me lanky, I found myself looking almost up into her eyes from a half slouch against the wall of the cafeteria next to the little school-supply store where you could buy pencils and notebook paper during lunch.

“No.” By the tenth grade, girls had started to append an apology to the ends of their rejections, but I guess eighth graders hadn’t learned that yet. I didn’t even feel that bad about it though. I just picked myself up off the wall and went on with my lunch, running through my backup options.

But I didn’t need them after all. “Hey Justin,” said the girl in sixth period science class. “Some people are going together to the dance in like a group. I mean, you can come with me to that if you want. Do you want to?”

I don’t mind if I do, I thought, and wondered idly how awesome I was to have convinced her to un-reject me. I did all the date things, like giving her a corsage that matched her dress and dancing with her a few times. But after the stiffest dances I’ve ever danced with any girl it was undesirably clear, like a Filipino Monkey transmission into my brain, that she had no interest in me after all and that my inclusion in the group, while not unappreciated by others (who danced with me multiple times), had more to do with the immutable set theory of dance-date monogamy than with the girl actually, like, liking me.

That wasn’t the first time that kind of thing happened to me, and I’m sure lots of guys have similar experiences. This makes us wary. But if I ask someone out, I did it because I was interested in them, and interest has a way of not fading as quickly as you’d want it to.

So, uh, the answer is “Yes.” Sorry. I guess that was a parable.

Are you awkward?
—Search term

Yes. Yes I am.

The first was called This Most Recent Unpleasantness. It was co-written by Ross, who runs the whole website and who I have to thank for getting me excited pushing me along occassionally. I can’t think of any better way to get you to go read it than to say that, at one point, I have an awkward conversation with a girl who is turning into a zombie.

I looked down at her legs. Her right shin was in her lap. “Yes, you’ll be fine. Let’s get you to a hospital. And then afterwards, dinner? Is that a thing? Because I’ve always . . .”

She interrupted me again, yelling “I am on fire!” She screamed in pain. “Kill me . . . ”

Obviously this girl just has a problem with listening. That’s okay, though. I mean, communication is something you can deal with in a relationship. “The thing is, I’ve been secretly in love with . . .”

That’s when she spat blood all over me. It was as I was staggering away that she suddenly stood up, broken leg or no, and started shambling towards me, groaning loudly.

The newest project is called Gifted & Talented. This one is also collaborative and first-person, but it’s expected to be a bit longer and is being cowritten by Ross along with Val and Susan, both of whom I am ultra excited to write a piece with. Best of all for me, I get to write in a very different voice than I typically use:

It’s fully morning and I’m fully sober when I walk into the apartment. I don’t even look at my prick roommate before I start busting his balls. Call it a habit.

“Hey, asshole, I ran into your sister at the race last night. I think her butt’s getting bigger now that she’s 17. I like it.”

Now, don’t you worry your pretty heads about ATISTG. I’m practically bursting to tell you what happened last weekend, as soon as a I get the chance to edit the loooooong e-mail I wrote to a friend about it yesterday. But I figure that if I’m going to give you something to do for hours when you don’t want to work, I’m going to need more variety and lots of help from my friends.

1. I have become polished and suave.
2. I ran out of old stories that could be written about. That’s it. The website has all my awkward stories.
3. I started another blog.
4. The Hot Copy Editor story is done. Nothing else happened.

In order: yeah right, as if, I don’t cheat, and we’re just getting started. So don’t worry. I feel rejuvenated and refreshed, blog-wise. Life-wise is a different story, but, then again, if everyone went around happy and unstressed all the time, who would be left to create and use the Internet?

One or two contextual points that I want to just get out of the way, here:

• Those of you who ever previously noticed the sidebar to the right may pick up on the sudden glaring omission in the Cast of Characters. I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m still processing and moving on and mourning a little.
• The Hot Copy Editor story was getting a little intense for me to write, I think. I’m glad I took a step back. But I’m totally ready for another shot.
• Thank you for clamoring for my return. I know I have appeared to have been turning a cold, callous ear on the cries of my adoring fans, but I thought about each and every one of you the entire time I was spending long hours working on real, actual work (or, let’s be honest, having fun and wasting time) instead of writing awkward memoirs.

So, buckle up. I’ve got a whole backlog of awkwardness, all kinds of (entirely non-personal and in no way to connected to any particular relationship, necessarily) dating thoughts, and it’s a long way from a Lake Michigan beach in 2002 to an apartment not far from a highway in Northeast Ohio in 2005. I’ve got some writing to do.

See, right there. That was a little awkward, right? That’s pretty much how I roll on a regular basis. But if I wasn’t so awkward, I wouldn’t be able to have this awesome website, now, would I? Nope.

So, to help you learn to be awkward like me, I’ve created these four helpful tips:

1. Lose any ability to tell how awkward you are being. Feel awkward about asking for the electronica section in a music store, but not awkward at all about telling a girl that you need more of her in your lifestyle. If you have literally no ability to predict in advance how awkward a situation is, you’ll be way more likely to have a ton of awkward conversations.

   It’s like if you were, say, colorblind, and your fear of making fashion mistakes plus your legitimate innate inability to judge colors properly causes you to get dark uncoordinated untrendy clothes all the time, if not fully outsourcing the clothes purchasing decision to a seriously un-hip (in terms of young men’s fashion, but in other ways surprisingly hip) mother. Personally I don’t know anybody who would be in danger of that specific problem requiring some friends to stage a literal intervention culminating in an actual shopping trip to, say, Express, which apparently does indeed sell men’s clothing.

   Anyway, it’s like that, although that example was 100% fabricated, naturally.

2. Be scared of mundane interactions. This is how you get people to laugh at you while you’re ordering a pizza. Maybe normal people are able to confidently handle the myriad complications and ways to optimize information flow during the pizza ordering conversation, but the awkward person will not hesitate to be terrified that they’re going to somehow offend, confuse, or make a mistake when ordering a pizza. The resulting “I, uh, need to make an order to pick up” is apparently awkwardly hilarious enough to cause multiple people to independently burst into laughter.

   I don’t see what’s funny, but then again, I apparently don’t know my own awkwardness.

3. Screw up the timing. Try this exercise: take any perfectly normal joke. It could be the next witty thing you think to say in response to something someone else says. Now, instead of saying it right away, give everyone the opportunity to drift into the next thought. Maybe if you’re talking to a waitress, let her take one step away before you call your witty thing after her, like you’re giving advice to a kid getting onto a schoolbus.

   “That’s why they call it a catfish!” you could say.

   Except since the comic timing is totally unambiguously disrupted, she kind of only has the ability to look back at you with a half-forced smile and think, oh gosh, not one of those. Ugh.

   And lastly . . .

4. Start a website about the awkward things you say to girls.

This trap used to be particularly easy for me to fall into because I was scared to ask girls out, yet I love being their best friends. I do like talking about emotions, after all. After much trial and error, I figured out how to prevent it, how to identify it, and how to deal with it once it’s taken root. So, as promised, in my attempt to provide something of value to my heterosexual male readers, all six of you, I would like to present my tried-and-true steps for getting out of the Friend Zone.

Important Note: Half of what I’m talking about (like, ever) is based on sitcoms and Jane Austen novels, and the other 45% is from an extremely anecdotal collection of personal experiences. The rest I’m making up. Which, seriously, is pretty much the same source distribution for your average published string theory paper². Even so, some of this stuff is common sense.

There are three keys to avoiding a Friend Zone outbreak before it starts.

1. Flirtation
2. Observation
3. Escalation

Feel free to come up with your own pneumonic. But, honestly, this is just your standard dating rules of engagement, folks. These are the basics. If you flirt, she responds, and you escalate (pay attention to pacing, though), you won’t have to worry about being in the friend zone for long. Contrariwise, if you’re getting obvious rejection signals during step #2, then you can move on with a friendship or move on with your life.

But, hey, we’re only human. Sometimes you’re too scared for step #1, don’t notice that she’s digging you in step #2, or some sort of boyfriend-type scenario is causing you problems in step #3. Before you know it, months have gone by, and you’re getting together with her to knit and chat about boys she likes that aren’t you.

How do you know you’re in the friend zone? Here are some ways to tell:

• You feel like you can’t be honest about how much you like her because it’ll destroy the friendship. But you will, one of these days.
• When she started dating her boyfriend, you just knew that she’d break up with him someday to be with you. That was six months ago.
• You’ve watched When Harry Met Sally. Multiple times. With her. And you think that’s how it’s going to work out in real life.
• You aren’t interested in dating other girls, because you want to be available when she finally decides to actually date you.

If those symptoms apply to you, you know the situation is serious. Now, for some people this is entirely acceptible. Maybe you’re willing to lavish the girl with attention indefinitely despite little expectation of an actual mutually exclusive two-way-street type relationship with a future. But if you’ve made an affirmative commitment to resolving the situation, here’s what you do.

Tell her how you feel. Part of your problem is established behavioral and thought patterns obstructing your ability to think objectively and critically. This has you mixed up in some kind of crazy cognitive dissonance where you’re constantly modulating the amount of affection to what you think are accceptible levels.

Which, sure, that’s fine and good when it’s your hot coworker and you’re just trying to keep your crush a secret so that things are acceptable for work, but it does not work well for a more intimate and open best friend-type relationship. You need honesty for that.

Keep in mind, too, that there’s never going to be a perfect time for this. You might have to be proactive. Call her up, ask if she wants to take a walk, stop her where the scenery is pretty and tell her how you feel. Or, whatever, write her love poetry and give it to her with some tropical fruit at the end of economics class. I will give you one guess as to which of those ways I have employed in the past. Here’s a hint: try to imagine which one is more awkward.

There are three possible outcomes of this:

1. Outright rejection. Good, you can move on with your life.
2. Outright acceptance. Maybe she just had no idea and she’s felt the same way about you. Fantastic, all your dreams have come true.
3. Something in between. Don’t fool yourself – if you got rejected, own it and deal with it. But if you aren’t sure, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Oh gosh, you’re saying, that’s so awful. You’ve ruined the friendship with your crazy expressions of affection. Maybe so. Personally, I’ve remained good friends with girls I’ve had crushes on, after even the most apocalyptically awful drunken e-mailed declarations of awkward love. Actually, if I can dig that one up, I’ll reprint it and tell the story.

Date Someone Else

I’m going to say this up front: if you sleazily make some girl a pawn in your hare-brained jealousy scheme, I will personally come to your house and make you listen to unbearably awkward stories until you can’t take it anymore and apologize for being an asshole.

That is not what I am suggesting.

What I am saying is this: try moving on. Seriously, try hard. This is for your own good. If you’ve been rejected or semi-rejected after you declared your affection, don’t spend time with her so much any more. Meet lots of other girls. Join a club. Take yoga at the gym. Go to concerts of bands that you like, and talk to the girls there. Whatever you need to do. Just, seriously, be sure to use the prevention steps above. You don’t need to be in the intersecting area of two Friend Zones. That’s like a Venn Diagram of doom.

Or, hey, maybe, I dunno, spend time with friends who are dudes.

My Work Is Done Here

No, seriously. That’s it. There are three ways this can play out:

1. You decide that the new girl that you have found is better anyway. This is kind of the optimal scenario, honestly. And since you followed the Tell Her How You Feel advice with the original friend zone girl (you did, right?) and she did not reciprocate, you have nothing to regret. You’re free to enjoy your newfound relationship.
2. She realizes that you’re who she really wanted after all, and that she misses having your in her life, so she throws herself at your feet. Why would this happen? Don’t ask me, I’m just lifting this from the plot of the second season of Friends. Anyway, now you have a painful decision to make, which I will leave to you. I will say this: don’t make a list with pros and cons of each girl, and then leave it where they can find it.
3. You realize that you can’t handle YOUR new life without her and break up with your own girlfriend, but yet she shows no signs of your lack of attention causing her to want to be in love with you. Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think this means it’s not going to work out between you two. I mean, it’s one thing for a girl to not be interested when you ask her out, but it’s quite another, more serious thing for her to not be interested in you when you are dating another girl.

So there you go. All it takes, really, is knowing your exits, just like a covert superhero operative behind enemy lines who is also on a blind date. If you follow these steps, you will either be dating the girl you want, dating someone else, or miserable and alone, like when you started. But, even if it is the latter, at least you’re out of the Friend Zone!

¹: This post is also gender- and preference-specific, because I don’t know for sure if this works for anything other than a guy getting a girl. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in other scenarios, though.

²: Don’t believe e.g. Schewe, Stein, and Castelvecchi or Distler, Grinstein, Porto, and Rothstein. String theory is witchcraft. At least I don’t have to wait for CERN to collide hadrons to test my dating theories.

I know I am being horribly rude. I’m sorry. I intentionally have tried to keep these advice-type posts as gender- or sexual-preference-neutral as I can. I do this not for politics, but for a more practical reason: I want as many people to laugh at what I’m writing as possible. (It sure isn’t so that my advice convinces people. Taking dating advice from me is like taking milking advice from a cow. It happens, but I’m not entirely familiar what’s going on down there, honestly.) So I apologize for singling out heterosexual girls today. Don’t worry, I’ll have something at least as air-quotes “helpful” to say to guys about hitting on girls next week. I don’t have much productive to say about girls hitting on girls, but guys hitting on guys reminded me of a story I need to tell on this website. I don’t know, do you think it fits the theme? Close enough. At any rate, it isn’t as though I personally need to be hit on. I don’t. I’m hoping that’s part of why I can pull this off.

My hypothesis is that guys and girls aren’t so different, really. I’m not trying to be the anti-Larry Summers over here. Well, maybe I kind of am. But when I think about what generally happens when I have asked a girl out, here is what I come up with:

1. I decide I am interested.
2. I kind of freak out a little bit because I’m scared to death.
3. I miss a golden opportunity for whatever I’m trying to accomplish.
4. I collect myself or someone encourages me.
5. If I haven’t already blown it, and most of the time I have, I muster all of my courage and do the thing I needed to do, whether it was asking a girl out, asking for a phone number, or kissing her.
6. If nothing goes wrong, a relationship is born, like e.g. right now. I am literally dating the best girl in the universe ever. Which is where you’re trying to get, unless the first few steps of the process are so incredibly entertaining to you that you enjoy them too much to give them up, in which case you don’t need this blog post and I’m sure that most of my writing is a sad, sorry little academically interesting but abstract study in what must seem to you to be abnormal psychology. Or, contrariwise, you hate relationships and never want to have them again, which, sure, we’ve all been there, and yeah this post doesn’t apply to you either at this time obviously.

I’m pretty sure I would notice if my penis came into play for any of those steps. I don’t think it did.

If you have your own little flirty hinty way of getting your interest across, you aren’t who I’m talking to. You are proactive in your own way. If it’s working out for you, congratulations, that’s all I’m talking about. But here’s what you need to know if it isn’t always working: things that are obvious to you aren’t necessarily obvious to other people. Best-friend-but-not-interested signals are sometimes indistinguishable from please-jump-my-bones signals. From both sexes. I can cite examples. But like I said, proactiveness comes in lots of forms.

Sometimes you have to make your own fairy tale. I know that many girls gaze romantically at their own feet, off of which they expect to be swept. I have heard with my own ears the logic that, well, no guy that I would be interested in would be incapable of approaching me. There are a number of ways for me to answer this one:

• One encounter doesn’t define a person or a relationship. Ask Elizabeth Bennet.
• Maybe the guy who is absolutely perfect for you has been walking around for years wasting his subtly sensitive yet roguishly carefree attitude, muscular physique, and disposable income on other girls, but since those girls aren’t you, everything was all wrong, until finally he sees you and is so smitten by a radiance unlike anything he’s seen before that he’s unable to say anything polite, proactive, or affectionate. Did Han Solo immediately impress or even hit on Princess Leia? No, she thought he was terribly rude at first, and he found her annoying yet hot. But what if Han Solo had never come back to help Luke destroy the Death Star, and was imprisoned in carbonite before Leia had the chance to stop being so cold and unfeeling, as though her heart was the ice world of Hoth? She’d be sitting at lunch with her single friends in New York eventually, talking about the man that could have been yours, but for want of proactivity and plain old bad luck, you let him slip away until finally, because he wanted exactly the same kind of family you want, he settled for some girl not nearly as good as you. And now someone else is married to your husband.
• So what if you have the romantic idea that the guy for you will be the one to be proactive. Guys have the romantic idea that you don’t poop. I doubt that shattering either of these dreams would ruin an otherwise great relationship too terribly.

I’m not entire convinced that the word “Romance” means what we seem to think it means. I don’t have enough data to say anything either way. So, take this step as a “sources have confirmed” type statement. At the same time, I know about the ultra mundane non-romantic-seeming little things that make me feel truly special in a relationship, the kind of stuff that is boring to talk about if you aren’t this girl or generally someone who knows how to write about it properly. None of those people work for Hollywood, unfortunately.

And most of all, good luck never failing. I have talked to several guys about this, so I think it’s not just me, and while I’m sure you might not be everyone’s type and so forth, girls who hit on guys get dates. I’m serious. How many guys are going to say no to a girl who asks them to go out on a date? Our extemporaneous rejection muscles are atrophied. It’s like shooting whales in a tea cup.

So, assume you’re single. Hold on. First, let me say that the following is a plausible yet hypothetical situation inspired by, like, my entire freaking website, including the posts that are nothing but a twinkle in my notepad file. This hasn’t happened to me. Yet. Keep this in mind.

Assume there is a guy or girl, depending, that you desperately want to talk to. Say, you’re, I dunno, in the laxative aisle at the drug store and this incredibly smoking-hot person is just achingly close to you in the worst way. Your two choices are obvious: do nothing, or say something. We will exclude any alleged choices that could involve eventual incarceration.

Let’s say you do nothing, which is probably, honestly, what most of us would do, most of the time. You’re going to maybe vascillate a bit and try to think of the perfect thing to say, but by then it’s too late. Immediately and for at least the next week you will feel bad and daydream about what you could say if you had another chance.

Alternately, assume you decide you don’t give a crap (ha!), walk right over to the other side of the laxative aisle, and say,

“Look, I’d like to be a lot more regular about calling you up on the phone. Don’t you think you could give me something that could help me with that?”

I mean, if it were me, that’s definitely what I would say, and you know it. Further assume, for the sake of argument, that the cute girl or hot guy, for, you know, whatever reason, responds with something less affectionate, like,

“Um, that was awkward. Like, that was a really weird thing to say.” Which, by the way, is probably close to the worst possible thing that, in reality, should happen to you in a hitting-on scenario. To like a 99% confidence level. I’m sure you folks have some stories.

Even so, that sucked. But here’s how often you think about that girl again: never, unless you decide to share the hilarious story with an incredulously cringing yet adoring public fanbase, the hordes of which you make up but a figment. Instead of a week of moping and daydreaming, now you have a lifetime of a hilarious story. Plus, and here’s the amazing part: you aren’t daydreaming about what you would say anymore, because, how could anything possibly be better than a joke about being regular? Seriously.

After enough awkward things have been said by me, I started to get a sense of which rejections were rejections and which weren’t. I started to learn for myself which ones I cared about, and which I wanted to push harder on. This sentence is mushy, so close your ears and hum if you hate mushiness: I realized that who I cared about was someone who wouldn’t reject me at all, and, well, she didn’t. Ha! Tricked you! The humming does nothing, you can still read anyway!

And, frankly, I realized that not only was it 100% un-scary and preferable in the stupid inspirational-poster way to fail than not to try, young man, but I honestly felt significantly better after being rejected than I did after missing an opportunity. It’s not even close. It’s just that only with talking to cute girls did I have an easy, low-downside, repeatable opportunity to test failure vs. failure to act.

I’m serious. Say more awkward things to girls, if you prefer them, or guys, if that’s your scene. Maybe you’ll learn a little life lesson of your own.

Geeks don’t sleep around. Geeks, through their higher IQ and therefore greater understanding of the tragedy of human condition, know that the dice only seem to have more sides on the other side of the table. Hence, they instinctively stay loyal to their lovers through thick and thin. Their social skills are also not well developed enough to support an affair, and frankly, geeks generally aren’t quite sure how they ended up with the lover they have attracted. When you date a geek, you know the geek will be yours until you are done.

Geeks are good at the things they try. When’s the last time you met a geek who didn’t have some secret skill just simmering below the surface of a simple-seeming life, honed in the wee hours of the night? It could be hacking, playing video games, or the ability to insert and remove those stupid computer power plug things from drives without cursing or breaking a finger. Let sex become their new favorite late-night hobby, and you know that a geek won’t quit until he or she has learned how to hack into your brainstem through specific genitalia interfacing in parallel with general dermal and oral bonding.

Geeks are not interested in status. Geeks became geeks because they chose to spend their time doing things that would not necessarily make them popular with everyone else in school, like sports and fashion. The ability to resist peer pressure is important to a geek. This means that a geek is more interested in their or your happiness than looking good to others, which will come in handy when either (a) you need attention, in any sort ranging from the nurturing to the lascivious, and also, because both of those things are not necessarily unorthagonal dimensions, any combination of the two, or (b) you need to be rescued because it is the climax of a teen 80’s movie. Or both.

Geeks haven’t formed bad habits. After years of serially dating lots of other women, many socially successful guys have become too confident to be intimate, think of women only for sex, and don’t have any intention of letting what in their minds is “just another girlfriend” enjoy the last spring roll. Let us not even pry into the diabolical, dark, twisted, and depraved mind of the girl who has serially dated many men. None of this is true of the geek, however. The lack of past romantic partners allows the geek to approach lovers with the zest of the neophyte. Geeks are not full of romantic confidence; however, once coaxed from their emotional holes like tame bunnies, they are eager to please and enjoy their newfound relationship.

Geeks can concentrate. Geeks can focus their energy on one task with the intensity of a hunting cheetah. Granted, the task they are focusing on may have more to do with hunting orcs with a +1 Sword of Piercing rather than hunting gazelles with claws, but the fact remains that a geek, once set upon a task and given Mountain Dew, becomes a tireless slave to their goal. Put a six-pack of Dew on the bedside table and a geek between the sheets, and you have found yourself one relentless lover. When’s the last time all night actually meant all night? When’s the last time you were with someone who, if they needed more of the night, knew how to get it?

Geeks have excellent finger dexterity. Geeks roll dice. Geeks play video games. Geeks flip pages in books. Geeks type a lot, and use characters like ~ and ^ and | that no one else has any use for. Geeks use calculators in postfix notation. As a result, a geek knows how to use his or her fingers to greatest possible effect. Whether you have a button that needs pushing or a joystick that needs joy, a geek is the person for the job.

Geeks have imagination. Once you have found your amazing lover, you wouldn’t want things to become boring. That is where geeks prove their real worth. Replayability is important to the value-conscious video-game playing geek, and this translates to relationships as well. Wouldn’t you want to date someone who has created a Quake 3 mod? Wouldn’t you want to date someone who has written steamy Everquest fan fiction involving elven incest? Wouldn’t you want to date someone who wished they were Morpheus rather than someone who wished they were Barry Bonds?

There are plenty of other reasons why geeks are the best lovers around, but don’t just take my word for it. Find the nearest sexy geek and coax that person into asking you out, even if you have to do so using instant messanger. Remember: the only non-sexy geek is a single geek.

Note: I wrote this for another website back when I still did that kind of thing, back in the heady, young days of 2004 when the only thing that wasn’t going unrequited for me was my singleness. Tons of girls wanted to requite that. Anyway, I need to mess with some spreadsheets right now, so this is what you get today. Happy Valentine’s Day plus two.

Work is work.

You might have even tried online dating, but subsequently found that the human brain is incredibly sophisticated in its ability to integrate the innumerable subtle behavioral variables by which each person is uniquely distinguished from each other person, giving live face-to-face contact a tremendous advantage over online encounters when it comes to evaluating and selecting potential dates. Or, you know, maybe you tried and all you met were losers.

Whatever the reason, if you’re a single adult professional for whom all of the typical, cliche dating vectors have proven to be unfruitful, you need some new ideas. Just as often as I feel like it, I’m going to blog about another way to meet someone that is promised to be:

1. Awkward, and
2. Only marginally less obvious than the most obvious ways to meet people

Sorry, I don’t do things ado-free around here, and I definitely don’t have original ideas. At ATISTG.com, every idea is stolen (seriously, it has been on my list for weeks though) and every story actually happened or your money back. Regardless, here we go with the first slightly awkward way to meet someone interesting to date:

Okay, this one’s cheating, and I’ll try my best to keep it un-mushy (too late?). But despite the fact that I’m going to restart at Way One for the gym thing, this way is definitely the number one way, like, in my heart. This is how I met the (literally) best girl ever.

Have I tried this before? Yes.

Oh geez, it’s mushy after all. I need to say something awkward, quick. Okay:

A quick FYI for guys:

I’m on dangerous ground here, because there is one thing that I am definitely not suggesting: if you are a guy, you can not go to a gym and stare at girls. They feel uglier than they normally would feel there and just generally don’t seem to like to be stared at. Plus, you are not as hot as you think you are at a gym, and you’re also a little more of an ass than normal, and not in the way that girls are alleged to like. It’s okay, this is biology, it’s just how it works, but it’s true. So I am definitely not saying you should find the hottest girl and go “help her with some weights” while you “show off your muscles.”

See, it’s true. Any girls that snuck into this paragraph are cringing. But, whatever, it serves them right. Get out of here, girls. You get your own paragraph.

A quick FYI for girls:

This is tangential, but it needs to be said: you are not uglier when you are sweaty at a gym. There is a biological reason for this too, but I don’t want to talk about it. It seems like the girls I talk to have never heard of this effect before. No, I’m not telling you why this is true, but it’s a pretty good subconscious reason for guys to think you’re hot when you’re gross and sweaty.

Okay, fine. I’ll give you a hint. Look, just think about other times in their lives that a guy would see a girl be sweaty.

Advice for everyone

Here’s what you do instead of being an ass or feeling ugly: take a class. Now, guys, you might not want to be the one guy in the yoga class, although I recommend it if you have enough balls because, instead of being creepy, you’re going to be too busy thinking about how sore your sorry cookie-dough un-yoga-prepared male body is going to be to even think of imagining talking to girls. Here’s the secret about yoga: it kicks your ass.

This advice goes for girls too, though. There’s spinning and kickboxing and weight training and all kinds of other things. Find something that fits your fitness level and be friendly to the people in the class. Over time you will build acquaintance relationships with them. This will do two things: (1) you will meet people who care about being in shape, and (2) you will have lots more motivation to be in shape yourself. Will you date them? Probably not. But this game is about meeting lots of the right kind of people. There is statistics involved. Any time you can branch out into a completely new peer group, you are giving yourself the chance to meet people to date.

Have I tried this before? Yes, kind of. I developed a delayed-action retro-crush about two years ago on a friend from high school who worked at a gym (delayed-action retro-crush = being attracted to someone who used to be attracted to you, because, say, they started working at a gym and got scary hot). I worked out 5 times a week and got into the best shape of my life. I think I never talked to her the whole time, except to say hi. But, whatever. I took some spinning classes and, you know, met lots of married suburban women with kids.