mengwong

I once fell in love with a girl because she was so darned curious.

Sure, she was smart: she could take two ideas, cross 'em, and come up with a third.

And she was pretty.

But most of all what turned me on was the way she would go look up things she didn't know.

In my day, they called that "research skills."

Nowadays they just call it "Google".

One of the unwritten rules of geek culture is this: never ask a human something that you could look up yourself. Geeks hate being interrupted. As a matter of etiquette, they avoid interrupting others except when absolutely necessary. Asynchronous media FTW!

A bunch of geeks hang out on an IRC channel I know. Between posting BoingBoing URLs and complaining about the mysteries of the opposite sex, bursts of highbrow chatter would sometimes occur.

One of the guys on the channel tended to slow things down. If someone used a word he didn't know, he'd plaintively ask, "what does ______ mean?" He'd expect it to be explained to him.

It eventually got too much for the others. One of them snapped and said, quite directly, "dude, is your google broken? wtf."

This girl that I was madly in love with, OTOH, would just go off quietly and look things up and come back, instantly educated by Wikipedia. She was delighted when I showed her the Googlepedia plugin.

Remember the scene in the Matrix where Neo needs to learn to fly a helicopter, fast? And Tank just downloads it into his brain? Learning new things fast is a superhero trait.

She was like that. She was like that about everything. She had an amazing appetite for ideas. So sexy.

Especially in today's world where knowing things is so darned useful, and learning things so darned easy, a lack of curiosity bespeaks a certain abjectness of spirit. I can think of only three reasons which might get in the way of someone going off to learn all about something that they're interested in.

A fear of appearing ignorant. Someone once mentioned that the difference between jocks and geeks is that geeks embrace curiosity whereas jocks defensively disdain it.

A lack of confidence in one's intellectual competence. If, over the years, you've acquired the conviction that your intuition or your reasoning is reliably faulty, you'll give up trying. I blame science education for this. The impulse behind scientific enquiry is to identify and explore every counterintuitive fact that nature presents. The impulse is admirable. But in school, it can appear inadvertently mean: "As with most materials, water expands when heated, and contracts when cooled," goes the physics teacher. "So if you took a beaker of water at 100C, and cooled it to 50C, it would become denser, right? And it would keep doing that through 40C and 30C and 20C, right? But guess what! At 4C it expands! And when it freezes, it expands even more! Ice floats! Gotcha!" A confident geek would say, "oh, that's interesting; I wonder why." But most people, after enough of those gotchas, get the message that the world is baffling and their intuition is no good.

Laziness. Some people just haven't got the capacity: they might lack the bandwidth, or the CPU, through no fault of their own. Okay, so maybe "laziness" is the wrong word. Maybe they didn't get enough iodine growing up. But maybe they just lack the motivation, because they've never experienced the pleasure of finding things out, as Feynman might say. Maybe they have better things to do. But if watching TV is the better thing, maybe "laziness" is the right word after all.

Curiosity is so important. Suppose your 4 month old baby got sick on a Friday evening, while you were out of town. What would you rather hear from your spouse:
- "the doctor's office is closed, I'll call them first thing Monday", or
- "I may not be a doctor, but I'm going to go online, do some research, and try to diagnose this"?

Curiosity killed the cat, but we aren't cats, eh?

Yesterday, over beer and wine at Boat Quay, a young lady and I compared notes about past relationships.

One of her favourite memories come from the bathroom; she was brushing her teeth and washing her face, and her young man was in there with her, showering, and it was all very domestic. She watched him in the mirror.

Usually the mirror is a single-user environment. When you look into the mirror and see yourself together with somebody else ... isn't that romantic? It's very special to talk to someone in the mirror. If you think about it, very few people fall into that category.

There is a photograph from 1995, never digitized, that captures that sentiment for me.

Anyway, I told the young lady: if I ever propose, I will say: "I want to share my mirrors with you for the rest of my life."

She said if somebody proposed to her like that, she would cry.

I am a big ball of cheesey goodness.

The newbies start with the high-school relationship, the immature relationship, the Hollywood fantasy, the dopamine crush.

Grown-ups have the adult romance, the mature relationship, the marriage-with-kids, the vasopressin commitment.

One easy litmus test to tell the difference:

Do the couple insist on sitting together at the dinner party?

Or do they follow Miss Manners's guidance, which is that couples should never be seated together; they should be fully capable of acting as independent social individuals for the duration of the party. And then they go home together.

Dependence, Independence, Interdependence.

Adults go into Phase III knowing their BATNA well: Phase II.

If you never have Phase II, if you've never been happily single, it's harder to be happily attached.

Wow. After reading this blogsite, I now have tremendous sympathy for twentysomething women.

http://www.baggagereclaim.co.uk/drama-seekers-its-time-to-get-off-the-relationship-crack/

Personally, my feelings about relationships oscillate between the following positions:

A. Alex, Helen, Kabir's Mom, etc say that I'm just what sensible women want: I'm a dad, not a cad. All I have to do is put myself out there.

B. Women claim to want nice guys, but in reality, it's complicated: until they get over their own issues, they'll just keep enacting relationships that validate their insecurities. Solution: she must be thirty to play, or, alternatively, the well-adjusted product of an extraordinary upbringing ... in which case she's already in a serious relationship, not with you!

C. William Gibson was right all along. See The Belonging Kind, a few stories down in Burning Chrome.

I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and go with door A. The others don't go anywhere.

Even On Becoming A Woman says that it's normal for girls to go through a homosexual phase: it is a routine part of adolescent development to develop a mad crush on an older woman, then a girl your age, then an older man, then a boy your age; this was recognized in the 50s and 60s.

During the culture wars of the 70s and 80s we forgot this, and the gay movement has so thoroughly hegemonized this discourse that any assertion of "oh, it's just a phase, you'll grow out of it" is demonized. In a sad little expression of humankind's worst tendencies those who once campaigned for equality now find themselves interrogating: "which side are you on? Gay or straight?"

With sexual orientation so politicized, the New York Times deserves a big hand for daring to say: women are bisexual in a way that men are not.

It's like that joke that goes: "What are men's magazines full of? Pictures of beautiful women. What are women's magazines full of? Pictures of beautiful women."

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

How quirkyalone are you?

Your score was 109. Very quirkyalone:

Relatives may give you quizzical looks, and so may friends, but you know in your heart of hearts that you are following your inner voice. Though you may not be romancing a single person, you are romancing the world. Celebrate your freedom on National Quirkyalone Day, February 14th!

I was talking to my hairdresser Courtney today about dating.

"I'm an engineer," I said, "so this is going to sound a little geeky."

"Go on," said Courtney. She had a comb in her left hand and a pair of scissors in her right, and they went snack, snack, snack behind my ears.

"It seems to me that there are a lot of lonely people out there. And being lonely, they're not very happy."

"Sure." Snip, snip, snip.

"Now, let's say your loneliness puts you at, say, minus five."

"Okay."

"So you go out, and you date, and you find a guy who is honestly not that great – he is, say, a minus three. But it's better than being alone. So you settle for the minus three. And compared to minus five, minus three is an improvement, and it feels good at first because you just went up two points."

"Uh huh." She put down the scissors, picked up the clipper. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

"But he's just a minus three. After a while, the two-point boost wears off, and you're like, damn, I'm still negative, I'm still unhappy, even with this guy."

"Right."

"But at that point, what can you do? If you break up with him, you go back to minus five. Frying pan into the fire."

"That makes sense."

"So it's pretty obvious, right? If you find yourself at minus five, the last thing you should do is date. Dating when you're lonely is like buying groceries when you're hungry." I had switched unconsciously into professor mode: I was now lecturing. To my hairdresser.

"You need to get yourself up to at least zero, so you're not unhappy when you're alone. You gotta cure the loneliness. Of course, the funny thing is that once you've cured the loneliness, you don't really need a guy any more."

"Yeah," Courtney agreed. She moved around and started working on my bangs. I closed my eyes and continued.

"But that opens up a whole new world: you can cut out all the minuses, the guys whose job is basically just to keep you company. You can start looking for the pluses. Guys who have something to offer. Guys with whom you can pro-actively synergize."

Okay, I didn't actually say that last line, but I thought it. May the good Lord have mercy on my soul.

"Maybe you'd always thought those guys were out of your league. And maybe there's a kernel of truth there. Why would a good guy want to date crazy unhappy lonely girls? They have a radar for that kind of thing. They don't want girls with too much baggage. It's like at the airport, you know? The signs that say BAGGAGE LIMITED TO ONE CARRY-ON AND ONE PERSONAL ITEM."

"Yeah, heh."

"It's kind of the opposite of résumés. When you see gaps in a résumé, it's a red flag. You want to see an uninterrupted string of jobs. But if she's had an uninterrupted string of boyfriends, going all the way back to when she was fourteen, it looks like she's never been single. That's a red flag. Maybe it means she doesn't know how to stand on her own two feet. If you're constantly in a relationship with someone, when do you find the time to thine own self be true?"

"Hmm," Courtney admitted.

"But anyway. Once you're not in the minuses any more, the good guys can can see you've gotten over your issues. You're not desperate. You can take it or leave it. You can have a win-win relationship, rather than two lonely people being lonely together. If you're going to get into a long-term relationship you want to start from a position of strength, not weakness. Wouldn't you rather be a +5 dating another +5 than a –5 dating a –3?"

Done with my bangs, Courtney moved back. I opened my eyes to find her looking at me in the mirror, head cocked to one side. Her lips were pursed in thought.

"It's hard, though," I said. "Bootstrapping from minus five to zero isn't easy. Getting your act together, getting over your issues, figuring out your boundaries, really becoming a person. It's hard work, and it takes time. I don't know. What do you think?"

"You're probably right. That's an interesting way to look at it. Is it okay in the front, or do you want me to shorten it?"

"A little bit shorter, I think. I don't like it touching my skin."

"Okay." She picked up the scissors again.

"Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how much of this is true, but I guess I could go blog about it and see what people think."

"Yeah, you could blog about it. Let me know how it goes!"

"Thanks! I will!"

Please bring to mind Ye Olde Three-Dimensional Diagramme. The axes are:

History

Positive Example: Brad and Dina have known each other since age 13. They grew up together. They have a lot of history. They share the same values, the same references. When Dina says, "hey, that guy reminds me of that Chem teacher we had in high school" Brad knows exactly what she means.

Negative Example: Meng is from Southeast Asia, did a CS degree in Philadelphia and an MBA in Singapore, speaks English and Perl, adores Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is a dot-com entrepreneur. The six-foot blonde model waitress is from Belarus, went to university in Minsk, speaks Russian and French, looks exactly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is a waitress.

Definition: shared values, shared background, shared social class, shared media, shared religion, shared language.

Chemistry

Positive Example: Angelina Jolie meets Billy Bob Thornton. They proceed to have wild happy sex (until the inevitable breakup).

Negative Example: You meet a random girl on the Internet. You go out on a date. It goes terribly. At the end, she tells you she doesn't want to see you again because, well, you just weren't clicking.

Definition: Attraction, simpatico, love at first sight. Maybe he just smells good. Her genes want his genes. Her body wants his body. Her subconscious mind, her intuition, tells her that he's the one.

Synergy

Positive Example: My mom meets my dad. They start a hospital together. He does the doctoring, she does the managing. Over the next three decades they earn several million dollars.

Negative Example: Anna Nicole Smith, 26, marries J. Howard Marshall, 89. A year later, he dies.

Definition: What the two of you can do together that you can't do alone.

How do you rate?

The strength of a relationship can be measured by this simple formula:

Relationship = Chemistry * History * Synergy

Imagine a plane that connects the points. The volume under the plane represents your relationship.

If you score strongly on all three axes, marry.

If you don't, keep on dating.

Isn't it weird how characters in movies never need to go to the bathroom?

This struck my twelve-year-old self as very strange: so you're showing me what's happening in the life of this guy, and it's riveting, but how come over a period of three days he never needs to pee?

Oh! They don't show everything! Going to the bathroom has no dramatic significance, so there's no need to show it. The audience may assume that it happens anyway. But it's just not worth mentioning. It happens offstage.

Most twelve year olds never even think about this, because at age twelve most people are already accomplished storytellers. Unfortunately, at twelve I was a plodding literalist. Dork. Nerd. Geek.

This is an important lesson because a lot of what we learn about romance comes from fiction. From Hollywood.

In the archetypal bodice-ripping chick-flick, there's oodles of romance. The movie is bursting with passion. If the male and female leads have Chemistry, movie reviewers gush, and audience go to see it again and again.

But you know what? Sometimes you get Chemistry for free -- if you should be so lucky to meet someone from your tribe. But sometimes you have to lay the groundwork. This is why people are sometimes friends for ten years before they discover a romantic interest in each other. To build a future, first you have to build a past.

Building a past is essential for Passion, but it's like going to the bathroom. It's not nearly interesting enough to show, so it happens offstage.

Unfortunately, years of programming have conditioned audiences to expect Instant Chemistry with anyone they meet; and when real life doesn't measure up to expectations, disappointment results.

It's the same kind of disappointment that feminists decry: the disappointment men feel when their wives don't look like supermodels.

If you're seeing Instant Chemistry and Unbounded Passion onscreen, then one of two things is happening.

One, you're not really watching a Relationship unfold: you're watching a Mutual Infatuation. In this case, both parties are falling in love with a delusion.

Two, you are watching a real Relationship unfold, but you're only seeing the high points; the hard work is happening offstage.

I think that when I showed up on my Segway, wearing a yukata, standing seven inches taller than I usually do, the Girl From Minsk began to expect a movie romance: the kind where both parties have instant sympatico, understand each other perfectly, and never even really need to talk.

I could go along with that; I have all the tools. But, as Neil Strauss warns, you risk your integrity every time you play The Game.

In Neil Strauss's The Game, nubile lasses who work as hostesses, waitresses, and bartenders are called "Hired Guns".

I like to think Hired Guns are off limits. They're hired because they're pretty; they work for tips; they're paid to be nice. They probably get hit on all the time and they probably hate it.

I like to think there's a special hell reserved for guys who hit on hired guns.

They sure do look good in black, though, don't they? In those form-fitting, skin-tight, low-cut, spaghetti-strap tank tops. That's how the Lisa Project started. (Yes, I'm going to the special hell.)

Now here's a question for you. Are checkout girls hired guns? Cutie Melissa was a checkout girl.

I've decided she's off limits, by the way. LiveJournal has spoken. So we're going to be Just Friends; I'm not aiming for MTJF. And I'm okay with that. I like her. She's one in ten million. Her favourite books are dystopian sci fi, she speaks Mandarin and Japanese, she runs her school newspaper, and she's happy. "I'd rather take a chance and be human. If I offend, I offend." She's like me, but a new release that's ten times better. I told her she's super cool.

I do want her to come over for dinner. But just to hang out. No more. She's too young. I'm too old. Sigh.

So, instead, I went out Sunday morning to the Farmer's Market and found a six foot Russian blonde.



She was working the vegan piroshki stall. Hired Gun. Off limits. Damn.

Reframe.

I walked home, did some laundry, waited until the market closed. Hopped on the Segway, rode back to market. The vendors were taking their stalls down. She was there. She wasn't a hired gun any more.

I gave her a ride on the Segway.

She gave me her number.

And now we've got a chocolate date in Santa Cruz!

You know what I like most about her? Sure, she's tall, blonde, and beautiful. But looks aren't everything. What I really like about her is her upbeat nature and her really positive, happy smile. That's cool.

In the last few decades, we've thrown all the dating rules out the window. We thought we would be liberated; instead, we now have a Tower of Babel. Throwing out the rules is like writing on unlined paper: it works fine if your hand is well trained, but if you're a beginner, some structure is a good thing.

In "What's a Modern Girl to Do?", Maureen Dowd mentions a few specimens of Women's Prescriptive Literature. They are very, very out of print, and very, very hard to find. One of her favourites, On Becoming A Woman, is also one of my favourites. I own several copies. I like to give them out.

The authors Mary McGee Williams and Irene Kane, writing in the 1950s, are Ladies with a capital L. They are cut from the same cloth as Judith Martin and Cheryl Mendelson. What do they have in common? They speak with conviction: with the experience afforded only by direct observation of every alternative. They know what's best because they've seen what's worse.

Good Advice

When people are perplexed, they turn to advice columnists. When advice columnists are perplexed, they turn to people like Mary McGee Williams and Irene Kane. Miss Abigail once quoted several pages directly:

"A boy likes a girl who ...
listens ...
meets his eye ...
walks with a spring, not a swagger ...
has a bell in her voice ...
isn't self-conscious about her figure, and doesn't advertise it ...
acts herself, instead of aping movie stars ...
has read a book ...

... this is all really good advice. Isn't it? It never goes bad.

Another piece of advice they give is this -- and this is what I really want to talk about:

In order to avert the possibility of becoming an old maid, a girl will rush toward going steady. Ironically, it's no guarantee of anything -- except, perhaps, a prematurely broken heart.

[...] You're too young to know your own mind, you never should have gone steady in the first place.

[...] This is a lesson that can hurt, but it's a good lesson, if you learn it. You pick up your chin, go out on dates with a dozen other boys, and determine not to tie yourself down again until you're smart enough and sure enough to know where the relationship is going.

[...] Sure, it's tougher to play the field, to have to try and prove you're adorable every single week so that some independent (by which we mean not-going-steady) boy will notice you, but in the end you'll get to know a lot of boys, and the more varied kinds of people you know, the more your own personality will develop, the more fascinating a person you'll become.

[...] After two people have dated enough others so they're sure they like each other best, after they're old enough to think in terms of marriage, once they're sure that going steady is not a crutch, we're all for it. // So is Dr Henry Bowman, who made a ten-year study of divorce, and concluded by saying divorce wasn't due so much to marriage failure as to courtship failure. If the divorcing couple had had a satisfactory courtship, "they would have discovered they did not have the common interests, common ideals, common religion, common background which tend to assure marriage success . . . the more alike two people are, the easier it is."

How To Date

What are these little old ladies saying? They're telling you: you need to date more and go steady less. This is dating in the sense of "thank you for a very lovely evening", where you go for a movie and a milkshake. It's the 1950s. Think American Graffiti. Condoms do not go. There is no Pill. The external consequences of sex (disease, babies, and shotgun weddings) are well matched to the emotional consequences of sex (love and one-itis), and to our evolutionary psychology.

The model they advocate is this: you meet a guy, he asks you out, you accept, you go out, you talk, you flirt, you laugh, you get to know each other. Along the way, you get to know yourself. If you like him, you see him again. If you don't, you politely refuse his entreaties.

If you do see him again, it doesn't mean anything, no matter how many times you see him, until he asks you to go steady. Until he asks you to go steady, you can date his best friend too and that's okay.

In fact, some people say that until you're engaged, you remain in play. Those are the people who say that "going steady" should end when you graduate high school. Grown-ups recognize only three stages: single, engaged, and married. Think of the phone system: engaged means busy signal. Not engaged? When he dials your number, your telephone rings until you pick up.

How Not To Date

When I was growing up, just about everyone I knew went steady after three dates, maybe two. The ones who dated around -- who only did what "On Becoming A Woman" recommended -- were called "players" if they were male and either "teases" or "sluts" if they were female. Actually, that's not true. They did more than date around. They slept around, too. Maybe that's why. But then, I didn't know anyone who just dated, and didn't go all the way. But they didn't sleep around; they were serially monogamous.

If relationships are like magnetism -- if they can be described by an inverse power law -- then over time the exponent has strengthened. Free-floating individuals snap together into boyfriend and girlfriend much more quickly than they used to, and are much harder to decouple. They date less and go steady more.

Why?

I suppose easy college sex has something to do with it -- when it's a lot easier for you to do it, it's a lot easier for others to assume you do it. You're away from home, there's beer in the fridge, and you don't even have to leave the dorm to buy a rubber. So everybody simply assumes that if you two are seen together, you're doing it. And if everybody's going to assume it anyway, you might as well do it. But oops, once you start doing it, you can't see anybody else; and you can't stop, without calling the whole relationship off, and causing a lot of heartbreak.

Parental divorce might have something to do with it. My generation, who went to college in the 1990s, saw their parents' marriages fail at a rate unprecedented in history. Maybe they feared that dating a lot meant "easy come, easy go". If your parents' breakup traumatized you as a child, you're going to hold on to whatever relationship you've got a lot harder than maybe you should. And so you avoid even skirting the subject of breaking up. It hurts, and it's easy to put off. Falling out of love is a lot harder than falling in love. While the whole world is bursting with ideas for getting into a relationship, it has very little to say about getting out of one.

The big difference between your mom breaking up with your dad, and you breaking up with your boyfriend, is that you and your boyfriend don't have kids. The consequences are vastly different. I know, emotions are running strong, but objectively speaking, until you're engaged -- until you're married -- until you have babies -- it's really not the end of the world.

Wait a minute. How did we get around to talking about breakups? It's the kind of subject that sneaks up on you, isn't it? Let's run the tape again.

Bob and Alice

Bob and Alice go on three milkshake dates. They have a good time, they become friends, they hang out. Then Bob stops asking Alice out for movies; again, obeying McGee Williams and Kane, Bob wants to try dating some other women. Alice sees him walking into a movie theater with Carol. Alice bursts into tears.

What's going on? Where did these expectations come from?

Alice calls Bob and accuses him of seeing someone on the side. "If you're going to break up with me, do it to my face!" Bob, perplexed, protests "But we were never really seeing each other!" Alice, with fresh emotional scars from watching her father walk out on her mother, snaps back, "that's the lousiest thing I ever heard. You men are all the same." Make room for one more at the next Lesbian/Bi-curious Social; we've got a newbie!

There used to be a time when the rules were clear: until you both agree you're going steady, you're not. Nowadays, relationships are such a touchy subject, and there's so little guidance, that it's easier to just cross the threshold worldlessly by sleeping together. How the rituals have changed! Yesterday she slipped on his jacket and wore it with pride. Today he slips off the condom and throws it in the trash.

Congratulations, you're boyfriend and girlfriend now. Don't forget to wash your hands.

Maybe we should go back to the good old days.

You've studied linguistics, you've heard about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, you've read Metaphors We Live By. Language creates the worlds we live in. Half of learning any subject is learning its jargon, its names for things.

What's one-itis?

One-itis is a term from the Fast Seduction community.

Infatuation plus justification.

The fixation on a single romantic object, and the conviction that "he's the only one for me." Half the blame belongs to low self-esteem. Half the blame belongs to Hollywood.

Learn the word, and the cure has already begun.

"Date" is one of those annoying words like "cleave" -- they are their own antonym. This only adds to the confusion. You can "date" exclusively, and you can "date" non-exclusively. "Bob is dating Alice" could mean they have been sharing the mortage and sleeping together for a decade. Or it could mean Bob asks Alice out for a movie once in three weeks, and he never knows if she'll say yes or no.

What does "date" mean to you?

If there is honour among thieves, surely there must be honour among AFCs. (Average Frustrated Chumps)

After fourteen million years of primate evolution, the Guy Code stands roughly as follows:
1. In a public bath, other guys don't exist. Especially their schlongs. Don't look at other guys' schlongs. Don't get caught looking.
2. Don't hit on somebody else's girlfriend.
3. Red cars go faster.

It's really just the Golden Rule in a form cavemen can understand: if you want big hairy Laughs-Like-A-Hyena to stay away from your current bedmate, then you don't go sniffing around Laughs-Like-A-Hyena's wife, Deaf-As-A-Tree-Stump-But-Hot-Damn-Will-You-Look-At-Those-Legs. Tit for tat. It's all right there in Axelrod 1984, Evolution of Cooperation.

The rule goes hand in hand with the Five-Sentence Rule For Girls. If a girl has a boyfriend/husband/fiancé, she is guaranteed to bring him into the conversation by the fifth sentence, no matter what contortions may be necessary. Think of it as a verbal wedding ring. How many times have you had a conversation like this:
-- The colour contrast in this Mondrian is really quite remarkable, don't you think?
-- Sure, whatever, I guess.
-- Do you see that tiny patch of red in the top left corner? Why, I do believe it is exactly the same shade as my 2005 Porsche Carrera GT.
-- You drive a Porsche? Wow, that's so interesting. What a coincidence! Because, you see, my boyfriend also knows how to drive a car.

If she fails to bring up her Significant Other by the fifth sentence, either:
1. she doesn't have an SO,
2. she has an SO, but she's not happy with him, or
3. she has never heard of the Five-Sentence Rule, in which case she becomes a source of frustration for guys who think they're getting somewhere and then some random guy shows up from nowhere and takes her away, argh.

I bring this up because Cutie Melissa, who true to my intuition is turning out to be exactly as intelligent, happy, outgoing, and successful as I'd hoped, finally dropped the B-bomb tonight. She's way past the five-sentence mark, so we're looking at scenarios #2 and #3.

The question now is: do we obey the Golden Rule (if they're taken, keep moving), or do we say screw the Golden Rule, all's fair in love and war, boyfriends are simply worth bonus points? Maybe the book we should be reading is not the Evolution of Cooperation but the Evolution of Desire.

Maybe it's okay if you're not friends with the boyfriend.

Maybe I'm thinking too much about this. Maybe girls like to be chased. Maybe girls like to be fought over. Maybe girls like to be won. It's embarrassingly primitive, but hey, apparently it's now fashionable to be an übersexual.

What Would Bono Do?

Bono would Get The Girl.

In this regular section, we follow Meng's attempts to find love. In this season, he learns to talk to girls; trades his AFC nature for PUA; becomes totally horrified at himself; and eventually gives it all up and declares celibacy.

After TagCamp, Ingy and Casey swung by Meng's place for a beer. The three Perl rockstars stopped at Whole Foods to get some food for Sunday's impromptu Socialtext geekfest. (They got a lot of sausage for the grill. Does that make it a sausagefest?)

And guess who was at Whole Foods: Cutie Melissa! Meng lent her Anansi Boys a few weeks ago. Today, while showing our three adventurers some vegan highlights, she may have felt a little cornered. She claimed she lost his card and couldn't get in touch with him; she tactfully asked for another. Did she really lose it? Did she throw it away? The Greek chorus says: she isn't interested, she wants our protagonist to just go away, she is just being polite.

Earlier, The Lisa Project called and asked Meng why he was having so much trouble finding a girl. Lisa, like every other girl who's gotten to know Meng, thinks he's a great catch. He must be doing something wrong, though, because girls who don't already know Meng, well, they never get far enough to reach that conclusion. Which takes us back to The Game. Nice guys finish last. But the Greek Chorus has been wrong before.

Ingy may have frightened Melissa a little, first when he explained that he was changing his name to Ingy Dot Net, and second when he kino'ed her butt tattoo.