How To Entice Attractive People Into Your Bed.
Rule one: Don’t make your goal to entice attractive people into your bed.
It’s the paradox of fucking: if you really, really need to get people to sleep with you, that sheen of acrid flopsweat will repulse them. Your prospective bedmate will sense that underlying motive embedded in your every friendly gesture, that subliminal mutter of “I’monlydoingthisbecauseheyyouhavefungibleprivateparts”…
…and that’s great if you look like Brad Pitt humping Angelina Jolie with Steven Spielberg directing you. If you are possessed of such magnificent physical charms that people will go, “All right, I’ll plook you on sheer looks alone,” then sure, maybe being really eager to get people to sex you up is a working stratagem.
Most of us, however, are average. Which means we do not have that magnetic pull that draws people to our groins via lust-shackles alone. And for us, you know what works?
Friendship.
Fuck your “friend zone” talk. “Friend zone” is another way of saying, “If I can’t fuck you, what good are you to me?” And that shit is insulting. No, what you do is find people who you like, people who you can stay up until 3 in the morning talking about the craziest shit, people who love the same music and movies and books you do, people who laugh at your silliest jokes….
…and assuming they’re available, you let them know that hey, this is all great, and I’m attracted to you, too.
Be sure to let them know how little the attraction means. Too many idiots present the attraction as some sort of make-or-break situation, as if you don’t respond in kind and voluminously, I’m taking all of this friendship and going home. No, this attraction simply means that something could happen on top of an awesome friendship, or we could just continue being friends.
You know what? Three times out of four, they’ll go, “No, I’m good.” And that’s awesome. You know why?
Because you’re friends with an awesome person, you idiot.
But no, if you must require some tedious reason to keep non-fucking people in your life, consider this: this vivacious, lovely person you know now probably hasother friends much like him who, if you hang around long enough, you will get to meet. And he will introduce you to them – why not? you’re a good friend – and talk well of you, and if that attraction sparks again, then you may wind up dating someone even better.
Like calls to like. So, you know…. try liking.
It’s an advanced concept, this get-lots-of-sex-because-you-don’t-want-sex thing, and a lot can go wrong. You might, stupidly, confuse “attraction to body” with “attraction to person” and wind up ignoring all sorts of things you don’t like about a girl because she has a hot rack. You might, stupidly, think that “not wanting sex” means you never ever talk about sex ever ever, suppressing all desire, and then spring this hidden attraction upon her when she’s most vulnerable. You might, stupidly, hang around someone who knows he’s attractive and using you like an ATM of kindness to dispense all sorts of favors you wouldn’t do for someone less handsome, in which case you don’t have a real clear grasp of how this “friendship” thing works both ways. You might, stupidly, decide you’re so unlovable that you send out vibes of self-loathing that short-circuit any attempts to find friends, since you’re all but telling people how awful they must be for hanging around you.
But in general, if you go out of your way to like people – not bodies, but people – and work on finding a good social group filled with fun, you’ll not only have more dates, you’ll have a better life in general. Don’t concentrate on finding that one person who will fill every aspect of your life with soft, hot lovins; concentrate on finding many people, a wide net of folks to fill those non-date days with lunches and texts and happy nonromantic times, and the rest will usually come along.
Then there’s rule #2.
Oh wait. There isn’t.
Just focus on rule #1. It’s not about sex. It’s about the connection. And if you follow the connections, sex will come tagging along eventually.
The Official Blog-Policy On Children. The Official Cost Of Fame.
What would your life be like, Cat Valente once asked me, if you’d known at twenty-three what your blogging would do to you?
Would you choose it again?
We gazed at each other in silence, unable to imagine. We’d both thrust ourselves into the public eye at an early age. So much of our lives had been shaped by the concept of well, I’ve shared this much of my personal life, might as well share the rest.
We had exposed ourselves, becoming D-list celebrities. People knew things about us that we never knew. People hated us for reasons we could no longer control. People had seen some ugly opinions that, over the years, we’d come to walk back or even be ashamed of.
A life of privacy?
Who could imagine?
I had made a “funny” blog post that had hurt some transsexual friends of mine, and I felt just awful for propagating such puerile, hurtful shit. I really just wanted a break from my blog, to not even have the temptation to look at comments or see my friends’ list, and so late at night I “deleted” my LiveJournal. I’d return a few days later, but for now I just didn’t even want to think about it.
I awoke to thirty emails.
I awoke to two blog posts in LJ drama communities, discussing what a drama queen I was for exiting the Internet, people having Google-cached the original hurtful posts and having posted it in their own journals, huge debates on about seven or eight journals about whether people were right to be mean to me. The drama got worse, to the point where I had to reactivate my journal and then explain what happened, because God knows that walking away without explanation was proof that I was a drama queen. Then I explained why I’d left and where I was going, and people used that as evidence that I was a drama queen.
A week later, I was googling “theferrett” to try to find an old blog post of mine, and Google’s suggest field filled in “theferrett deleted his livejournal.”
That’s when I realized this was not the kind of life I could leave. Not if I wanted to keep writing.
About once a week, I wonder what would happen if I lost my job. All my friends tell me employers will Google you now, to see what kind of employee they’d get. And I don’t have any choice, at this stage. I’m poly, I’m kinky, I’m liberal, it’s all out there. I’ve got thousands of inbound links. If they don’t want some crazy dude with sex humor, well, I’m fucked.
Maybe the D-lister fame would help hook me up. I don’t know.
What I do know is that when I was twenty, in college, I wrote for the college newspaper, and I had a twenty-year-old dude’s sense of humor steeped in Howard Stern and George Carlin, a lot of semi-intellectual shock jockiness. And I wrote some ridiculously exposing things that made me campus-famous, and when I got a website six years later, I said, “Well, why not put those up there?” And my blog became an extension of twenty-six-year-old me, who was prone to oversharing because it got a laugh.
Twenty years later, I’m still dealing with the ramification of those decisions. My life has been bent, warped, around that. Some of it’s good. I get to do good. But I also have no choice. In a very real sense, I’m chained to a life decision I made before the Internet was even really born. I threw myself in before the ramifications could have been fully known.
Now, you can see all my worst moments with an hour’s worth of search engine time. You can find out about my one experience with a hooker, which is still this blog’s most popular essay. You can find out about the abortion my girlfriend got. You can find out about my most embarrassing blowjob. I had to take down my friends’ names, because they kept showing up on their employers’ Google searches, because this blog is not huge but goddamn it’s big enough.
I’m used to it. But let’s not pretend it’s not stressful. And let’s not pretend there aren’t days I would prefer not to be reminded of those, and oh! Here’s a comment from a stranger, telling me oh yeah, he knows all about that blowjob, isn’t that great?
This blog has been a little kid-heavy as of late. Me, writing about my kids and what I want for them as a parent. Rebecca, in the hospital for cancerous tumors.
But I don’t name children except on very rare occasions.
Yes, I named Rebecca, but I only did so after her father did (and Eric has an audience far larger than mine). And I did not give the names of either of my daughters in my “Dear Daughter” essay; in many ways I’m glad the picture the Good Men Project chose, inexplicably, to use in their reprint gave it the visual of some other guy’s kid.
I believe that in this world of the Internet, things that are archived have a way of coming back to bite you. And I think that as a parent, one of the best gifts you can give your kid is their own destiny – a few family photos shared here and there, sure, fine, but that funny essay on the time little Johnny spread poop all over the walls? No.
I’ve been chained by some bad choices, but they were at least my own bad choices, even if I often want to fly back in time and punch twenty-year-old Ferrett in the face for shaping my life in this one inextricable way. My kids? Other kids? Maybe they’ll choose to be Internet superstars, and if that’s the case I’ll throw a link or two to them. Maybe, like my younger daughter, they’ll see the exhaustion that comes from being a public persona and have a small Facebook account that they check every three weeks, and a dusty Tumblr.
Whichever it is. That’s their choice. Not mine.
And so I might blog, but never with identifying characteristics. Not by name, unless it’s so publicly known (or universally positive) that it’s going to not affect them.
I’ve lived a life warped by inconsequential fame, with occasional side trips into worldwide notice. I would not wish that upon someone who didn’t choose it. And children deserve as much innocence as they can get, dammit.
This Is Not Me. I Was Not Here.
I was out in the world this weekend, read by thousands of people, debated on the radio, dissected in blog posts.
I was huddled in a children’s hospital waiting room this weekend, praying for good news.
If you’re a blogger, you come to realize that you do not exist on the internet except in snapshots; you write a blog post, which may or may not be an accurate representation of what you felt because words are a poor man’s telepathy, and then it’s published. It’s out in the world now as an independent entity, this imperfect avatar of you, and people react to it.
I think every blogger with a mid-sized audience has made a post, then gone off to a dinner or a movie, and come back to find that your entry has taken on its own life. Sometimes it’s a cancerous discussion in the comments that needs to be cut down; sometimes it’s a misunderstanding that’s undercut your argument; sometimes it’s a misphrasing that makes you appear to be a racist or a misogynist (or, worse, a proper phrasing that reveals subtle racism or misogyny).
Regardless, the point is that your blog isn’t you. It’s a representation of who you are, yes, but words are fragile things even in the hands of masters. And people can have these vivid discussions of who “you” are without you even being present, and some of the most personally relevant moments of your life don’t exist in avatar-land until you commit them to the blog-world.
And this weekend, the schism was total. My “Dear Daughter” essay zoomed past over a million shares on Facebook, shared across multiple platforms. It was discussed on national radio. Television shows were emailing to ask if I’d appear on.
And I could not have cared. Rebecca, my dear goddaughter, was in deadly danger from a brain tumor. I was taking care of the Meyers’ other children while they tried to save their daughter’s life, coping with life-threatening cancer. My life was not on the Internet; it was rubbing Kat’s back, asking questions of doctors, organizing logistics. My world had contracted to one sick girl, and the family I loved…
…and the death of my youngest cousin…
…and my grandmother, dying on hospice…
…and my wife’s week-old grandniece, in the hospital, unable to digest food.
This week has been perhaps the most stressful of my life. And while I’ve been retreating into personal issues, blog-me has been exploding, flourishing, shaking hands and making inroads.
I could not have cared less.
It’s not that I’m ungrateful for the attention. I think “Dear Daughter” is an essay with a lot of things I believe in, and I’m glad someone is saying it. It’s an added bonus that it’s me, sort of. But that me is a very different person, and I’ve never felt that distinction more so while the meat-me is watching a sick child asking for popsicles, irritated every time I check my mail as I scroll past hundreds of responses to see how my Grammy is doing, to see if the flowers arrived for my cousin’s funerals, to see if Kat’s updated on Rebecca.
Usually, the halves of me are joined to some extent. I’ll go for a walk with the dog while blog-me piles up a few responses, and then return to discover that blog-me’s generated some amusement for real me. But this weekend? Real-me had no time. Blog-me was subsumed in driving frantically to New Jersey, orchestrating logistics, texting my father.
Blog-me’s back, because blog-me is how I unwind, and God how I need to unwind today. And it’s related, close enough that if you like blog-me you probably like real-me. (Though it’s not guaranteed. I have some friends who hate my blog, and some strangers who hate my blog who wound up liking real-me against their will.) But they have separate lives.
This weekend, blog-me was out on the largest publicity tour he’s ever had, touching thousands of people, advocating for sex-positivity, inciting debates on feminism, discussing parenting techniques. Real-me was taking care of my friends, completely ignorant to anything outside those bland blue walls.
I’d never felt that difference more keenly. And I don’t think you can understand it until you’ve lived it, that bizarre echo of you that people read and discuss and maybe even come to love but doesn’t truly exist.
These words. They’re close. A shadow, a representation, a sketch.
But not me. Nor is any blog. Nor is any piece of writing.
New Story! "Hollow As The World," At The Drabblecast!
The Drabblecast is a very well thought-of podcast, so when they commissioned me to write a story for Lovecraft week, I was all like, “Whoah, that’s an honor.” And so, over the next five weeks in the Clarion Echo, I wrote a story from start to finish – first called “Minecraft,” then “Stonehewn,” then “Run Deeper,” then (and finally) “Hollow as the World.” (If you paid your $5 to be a part of the Clarion Echo, you’ll see just how damned messy my process is.) The story was about a kid exploring an alternate world on his computer, and the costs thereof – not strict Lovecraft per se (that’d be “Riding Atlas,” which unfortunately I’d already sold), but definitely Dreamlands territory.
It took four drafts, and quicker than I’ve ever written a story with that many drafts before, but I finally got to where I was happy with it – and thankfully, Norm accepted it. And three days later, it’s up at the Drabblecast, with some stellar artwork to go with it, and one hell of a gritty narration.
Here’s your obligatory excerpt:
One of the reasons Joshua loved Lydia as much as he did was all the secret rituals they’d devised. Some days, the way Lydia sent Joshua into high titters with a raise of her pierced eyebrow was the only thing that kept Joshua from slitting his wrists.
And of the many traditions that bound them as friends, the most sacred was the second videogame bet.
You couldn’t have the second videogame bet without Lydia winning the first bet, of course. That bet was, “Would Lydia beat this latest game before Joshua did?” And she invariably beat it before Joshua, before everybody; Lydia mowed through the toughest levels without dying. Sometimes, she completed the game on release day, then sold it back to Gamestop for nearly full credit.
Joshua’s online buddies private messaged him, angling for the secret to Lydia’s talent. He never told them, though of course he did know. He’d asked her, once, after she’d finished Portal 3 a full three hours before anyone else. She’d squinted at him over candy-red glasses, deciding whether she could trust him. Then she’d shrugged.
“I think like a designer,” she said. “Every time I’m not sure what to do, I think: ‘If I’d designed this level, where would I want me to look next?’ It’s made the games… predictable. Most days, I only beat them to see the end credits.”
“Really? You watch the end credits?” It was a slowball pitch. She grinned, glad at the opportunity to razz him.
“I’d think end credits would bring you nothing but relief, Joshua. They prove games are designed by people. You do remember that, right?”
His groan was old, well-used. “Now, Lydia, it’s been years since I’ve been afraid — ”
“ — but you were afraid, weren’t you?” She leaned in, hazel eyes sparkling. Joshua fantasized, for the ten billionth time, about calling in his marker and kissing her.
“Yes, I was afraid,” he recited. “I thought the characters inside the videogame had lives when the machine was turned off, the television a window to another dimension, and I was afraid to play because they knew I was there. I was six when that happened, Lydia.”
“I was six, too,” she replied loftily. “Yet bizarrely, I never worried about that. Nor did I build a whole videogame-playing technique around proving myself wrong.”
“You just wait for the second bet.”
“That day,” she proclaimed, hiding her smile behind a sip of Red Bull, “Will never come….”
If you liked this, remember: a $5 donation to the Clarion Write-A-Thon will get you entry to see the four drafts, along with about 10k in writers’ commentary (and three other completed stories). This tale mutated quite a bit, as it was very tricky to get a handle on, so I think it’s worthwhile if you’re struggling to fix your own drafts.
Otherwise? Enjoy.