I Don't Care About Your Band

Also published at Blogger Critics Network.

Julie Klausner has Double-D-sized breasts.

I have yet to meet Julie or her breasts, but when I discovered this awesome fact, the whole thing made sense. Trouble was, her mammarial revelation didn't come until the second half of her book, so I had to start over.

This, then, is why I read "I Don't Care About Your Band"* two and one-thirds times. Breasts give a man perspective, a couple of reference nipples from which to view the rest of the woman. Until that point I was amused but lost. Once Julie's chest found sharp focus, I had to re-read everything up until the breast-size epiphany; then I had to finish it off (the book, pervs); then I had to re-read all the dirty bits.

The picture in my mind is of a sex-obsessed redhaired girl with big tits, blindfold, in lingerie, groping around a room in a desperate quest for a penis. She's a Jewish Princess at a piñata party, smashing her way into the pants of any man who shows even the vaguest interest. As an idea for a role-play sex game, that sounds like fun, but as a metaphor for finding someone, it's a disaster. Which is a great word for Miss Klausner's dating life in New York, although by her own admission, it's a selective history.

My question is: How did she miss with those puppies? I constantly referred back to her picture on the cover, wondering how the hell this vixen failed so well so often. Maybe if she'd walked around Manhattan topless, her love life would have been different.

Which of course is the point of the book. Who wants to read about dating suxxess? It's infinitely more fun for we readers to get smug at dating horror. Even hotties don't get laid.

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Something That Might Interest You

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Because we dating and relationship bloggers are a cool bunch, I want to start something new.

I will be sending this copy of Julie Klausner's book to another blogger for review. That blogger will read it and post his or her thoughts, and then send the book on to another blogger for their review, and so on. Everyone who reviews will link back to all previous reviews, thereby forming a kind of extended multi-review.

Should we call this the Blogger Book Review Network or something more snappy?

I am looking for input; if you're interested in participating, whether a better system exists, whatever you think.

Edit: Snaf will be receiving the book to review. She seemed the best fit, being both single and a New Yorker like Miss Klausner. Next week I have another item to check out.




*I Don't Care About Your Band. What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, and other Guys I've Dated by Julie Klausner. ISBN 978-1-592-40561-9

Published by Gotham Books, a divvy of Penguin. They sent it to me, free.


Klausner links [site] [tumblr]

Edited for overuse. Words, that is.

Friday Fluffer - Curling at the Winter Olympics

Summer Olympics have Beach Volleyball.

Winter Olympics have Women's Curling.

Enough said except to emphasize how hot the Canadian Women's Curling Team is. Pictured is Cheryl Bernard, resident of Calgary and the uberMilf of Curling.

I imagine Curling Training Camp consists of touching up one's Frenched Nails, shopping for body-hugging yoga pants and chardonnay lunch with salad.

If you think this is criticism, you're wrong.



Pic from here [link]

What I wanted to write was how I spent an hour and a half and two glasses of cabernet mesmerized by the entire sexy-mumsy nature of curling. Why is this spectacle of ripe women on their knees on ice not more widely lauded? But I didn't want to appear trivial.

From the Wikipedia entry on Cheryl:
Recently, Bernard was nicknamed "The Curlgar" by American sportswriter Bill Simmons.[link]
Good enough for me.

First Impressions Count

Dress for success. Put on a big smile. Shoulders back, chest out, look confident. It's the recipe we use when meeting someone for the first time because we know that first impressions count.

It's not just in business or social circumstances in which the first encounter sets the tone for all that follows. First sexual encounters make a big difference too, oftentimes leading to someone choosing to accompany you down the rose-petal-and-poon-strewn path or relegating you back to the meals-for-one-and-masturbation path.

Men need to know this, that women will judge your sexual performance from the get-go - so when you get the nod, make certain to be the best you can. My advice is to make one really important assumption: consider your new lady a slut. No matter that you think she might be repressed or prudish or inexperienced, lose those thoughts. Babes mask their freak extremely well.

You have to bring your A-Game for the season opener. Much, much better to go balls-out for everything you can get for the very simple reason is that she's much happier if you find her limit before you find yours. And the best way to find the filth in yourself is to imagine that she's gagging for you to take charge. So take charge, and know that she's having at least as good a time as you.

Let me be clear that I'm not advocating anything without mutual consent. Of course. And because this is only the first heat in (hopefully) a long championship season there are boundaries. Anal penetration probably isn't on the menu, but you never know. Ask first. Sometimes intention is as good as the act. Role-play is too complicated for now, although maybe not. Endurance is important, but to avoid this problem, do your level best to get her off. A quivering girlgasm or twenty will go a long way to cementing that good first impression.

What I'm trying to say, men, is to let go of whatever presumptions you might have about her, and bring whatever fun you've ever imagined sharing. Temper that with ensuring she comes first (literally and figuratively) and honouring common-sense boundaries, and do your best.





Pic (not originally) from here [link]

Edited for a less clichéd illustration, which led to one less relevant.

Assumptions

One fuck does not a relationship make. It's a rookie mistake, making the leap from penis/vagina hijinks to something more.

Not that jumping that particular gap isn't promoted by a kind of hypnotism that unfortunately sways us all every day. Billboards. Blogs. Checkout magazine racks. All the reputable authorities. Hell, it's right there in front of me! If I make my lover cum in a new way, she'll be mine forever!

{This did not actually appear on a Cosmo cover, but I think they should at least think about hiring me.}

The feeding ground of assumption is lush and well irrigated. Yes we got naked. Yes we had borderline illegal sex. Yes I think you're great. No we're not in relationship.





Pic from some dopey MySpace place to which I refuse to link.

Edited because no-one knows Cosmopolitan from their elbow, but Cosmo is the repository of everything hip sexwise. Maybe.

Memories of Lovers Past

Some people have the happy knack of remaining friends with past loves. I think this mostly applies to men, but that's only for lack of pertinent women-data in my life.

It is possible that women react more negatively emotionally to break-ups because they attach more, earlier. (See the Ten Date Rule/oxytocin phenomenon.) Heat surrounding relationship termination works against friendly post-breakup contact.

On the other hand it might be because men don't give what they consider minor breakups emotional fuel. Until we (men) are significantly meshed, changing relationship status from 'lover' to 'friend' is as consequential as changing gears. Either that or we mask whatever we are feeling.

Generalizations and guesses, all. My own circumstance is a combination of:

~ bad breakup technique (the fadeout, the walkout)

~ breakup sloth (delayed, forgotten, deliberately avoided breakups)

~ relationship misjudgment (I didn't realize I was in one)

~ good breakups (with bad after-relationship service)







Pic from here [link]

Edited for incorrect use of 'mitigate'. Many, many demerit points.

Ten Date Rule Part One. [link]
Ten Date Rule Part Two [link]
Ten Date Rule Overview (later) [link]

Friday Fluffer - The Mangagement Ring

A step forward in human affairs, this. We're late to the party, but another wall to male equality fell with the coming of age of the mangagement ring. [link][link][link]

The mangagement ring is exactly what you think; it's a ring worn by men showing their status as pre-married. The days of the man alone spending six months of his salary on an engagment ring are over. Now the woman should reciprocate, and the bigger the bling the better thanks ladies.



Pic from here [link]

Edited because I couldn't spell 'mangagement.' Duh.

Everywhere

It's a given that whatever you're looking for is right there in front of you. You just can't see it.

That sucks. What use is a universe that supplies the answers to our questions but not the understanding to know?

But wait: If the universe supplies the answers and did so all along, what's the weakest link here? That would be the way we look at things, wouldn't it?


I want to make special mention of a couple of links, to my right, as I speak.

One is Relationshipdisaster, which isn't as bad as you'd imagine.

The other is Lesbian Love, which is the bestest site ever if you are keen on dating another lady, and you're a lady. You know what I mean.





Pic from here [link]

Easy, Like Sunday Morning.

Finding new ways to weed out possible Mrs Wombats has become a sort of hobby of mine. Dating websites all do this more-or-less the same way, with written profiles and canned questions. I dislike dating websites.

To my mind shoe-horning the individual into these boxes cannot meaningfully tell us that much about them. Most people find writing about themselves difficult. That part of their profile then becomes an exercise in satisfying the minimum word-count, with commensurate usefulness. Asking me whether I'm black or white or hispanic is meaningless, in my opinion. My star-sign? Yeah, whatever.

So I have tried to create a series of questions that ask about stuff that I think will tell me something about the other person, in relation to me. Make sense? Maybe not. Here's an example, which you might care to answer.

What does your ideal Sunday morning look like? And if it's different, what do you actually do?






Pic from here [link]

Decisions, decisions.

Here is a quote from an email the FAA sent me yesterday*:

70 percent of aircraft accidents are the result of poor decision making. Despite our efforts, we have not been able to improve this statistic. Flight instructors have been reluctant to adopt reality based training, simply because they have not had training or feel that there is no place or time for this training in their primary pilot program.

This pertains to dating as well.

70 percent of failed relationships are the result of poor decision making. Despite our efforts, we have not been able to improve this statistic. Singletons have been reluctant to adopt really basic principles, simply because they all think they're experts, and that there's no place or time for training in their primary desire; to find The One.

If you could see me now, I'm standing up with my hand in the air. Poor Decision-Making should be my nickname. I am guilty of some rip-roaring, ocean-going, Titanic-style bad decisions.

Maybe the FAA should go into the relationship advice business.








*The Federal Aviation Authority is the United States' federal government's bureaucracy that oversees all things airborne.

Pic from here [link]

Edited for clarity.

Dater, Know Thyself

Expectation is destructive in dating for two reasons:

1. It tends to crowd us into a corner, looking for certain outcomes.

2. It focuses attention in the wrong place viz: on the other person.

Knowing yourself isn't easy. We are bombarded by fear-mongers (aka advertisers, tv, magazines etc) whose job it is to make us feel inadequate. Buy their product though, and your life will blossom.

Written like that, the idea is preposterous, and yet it must work, otherwise you wouldn't covet that Beemer. Or that Burberry coat. Or that girl who drinks DiSaronno.

Knowing yourself isn't about acquiescing to your ego either. I might harbour desires towards Giada De Laurentiis, but that's pure ego. A of all, she's a superstar and I'm a peon; B of all, the chances of us actually being compatible in real life are vanishingly small. It's my ego talking, telling me that I have a shot at the impossible.

Trouble is that our egos like long-shots. Disregarding odds, statistics, probabilities, facts and truths is what our egos do, with self-evident results. We focus on the lottery winner, rather than the hundreds of millions of losers. We say to ourselves "What if it works?" when starting a high-risk business. Or we ogle impossible partners (like Giada) and wonder why no-one else measures up. That's why I say unrealistic expectation is destructive, and its main driving force is ego.

Dragging ourselves back to ourselves is an exercise in killing our ego for a while, and getting real, man, as hippies used to say.






Photo from here [link]

Friday Fluffer - Be My Valentine

Sunday is Valentine's Day, some bogus made-up celebration designed to make men anxious.

For those of you with nipples and an interest in low-energy technology, this might be a pleasing VD surprise - the LED Pasty.

Talk about green lights. [link]








Or if you are looking for something less outré, this might be more valuable. [link]

Man Hunter

Occasionally I take a little adult beverage at a local sports bar. With all those screens and the hard surfaces everywhere, an hour or so is about all I can stomach. But it's bright and shiny and happy, and there are a few guys I know with whom to share some male fellowship.

Last Monday saw me breasting the bar for a couple. After a long working weekend I felt the need for a happy hour snort. I'm such a lightweight thesedays, two is about my limit.

What caught my eye was the woman who arrived at the front door with me. She was a forty-something brunette, stylishly dressed in black skirt, knee-boots and what I believe were fishnets. Thinking nothing of it, I joined the lads at the bar to read my newspaper.

After a few minutes a couple of guys to my right noticed the dame. She was sitting at a table away from the bar. Apparently they had previously made her acquaintance, so she joined them. Their intercourse followed a familiar path. They bought her a glass of pinot grigio. They were overly felicitous, hanging on her every word. They both told her of their sad recent and pending divorces. It's the kind of conversation for which bars were invented.

One of the guys left, and the other started a move. It struck me at the time that he thought he thought of this first, but I'm convinced he was wrong. A woman alone at a sports bar at happy hour on a Monday isn't there for basketball. She's there for a different kind of sport; catch and release, maybe, or catch and keep, depending.

How smart though? If you're a woman looking for a man, go where the men are, where the hunting's reliably rich. She might have been a sweet southern belle, but that outfit was the social equivalent of dating camo.






Painting from here [link]

Widows

A barrier exists between prospective suitors and the widow.

How does the single man approach the bereaved? Is there a magic key to unlock the heart of a priorly taken woman?

How to kill the (dead) elephant in the room?

Clearly I have no clue.



Pic from here [link]

Strong Silent Type

Here's an observed relationship vignette I can't shake:

A friend invited me to a friend's party on a Saturday evening. It wasn't a big deal - ten or twelve people, some couples, some singles, some drinks and some free-form food.

The hostess's husband was out when we arrived, with his brother and a buddy. Riding off-road motorcycles was their recreation of choice.

About two hours after the last guest arrived, the husband and company turned up. He parked his giant truck and trailer in the driveway, walked in, grabbed beers for him and his posse, and sat down to watch sports on the idiot-box. Not only did he not greet his wife with more than a grunt, he made no effort to introduce himself to her guests, nor did he make any move to participate in the party.

I am picturing this large muddy man, beer in paw, staring mindlessly at his television while the socializing proceeded around him.

There's no knowing how the marriage worked. But from the subtle hints the wife exuded it is fair to characterize her attitude as 'exasperated'. At one point she fell in love with a strong silent man and married him. Now there is just silence.





Photo of Uma [link]

The China Syndrome

All we singletons (and not a few marrieds) lament the lack of the perfect partner in our lives. We look here and there, under that rock, on top of that mountain, at the end of that street, and still no-one makes the grade.

A solution exists if you believe that finding right person is a matter of fishing a sufficiently large dating pool - China. China now has "37 million more men then women, and there are as {many} as 120 boys born for 100 girls." [link]

Okay, this is a solution for only the ladies. Men: I'm working on it.

Let's allow that to settle for a few seconds. China has spare men equivalent to the entire population of Canada plus the population of Greater Sydney, Orrstraya. That's a heck of a lot of horny marriageable guys, my female friends. Imagine yourself arriving in a Chinese city, being mobbed with potential suitors. It would be like an entire Walmart Supercenter coming to your place begging you to buy something. Anything. The most subtle sign of interest would be greeted with sighs of appreciation, bouquets, love notes and flattering invitations. Speak, and they stand and applaud. Go on a date and they make you a hero of the revolution.

I sense a new trend in tourism starting right here.





Illustration found here [link]

Friday Fluffer - Robotic Love

Wombat's Second Maxim should be:

Never underestimate the capacity of men to find new ways to stick their dicks in things.

If you thought the Pocket Pussy was bad enough - as I do - meet Roxxxy. Roxxxy is a programmable sex bot. She was developed by....

....you know what? This is so stupid, I can't continue. Decide for yourself. I'm not often embarrassed by my fellow man, but this is beyond pathetic. [link] Safe for work.




Pic from here [link]

I think she made a pass at me.

Slightly old-fashioned, the expression 'making a pass' at an object of desire deserves greater currency. I like it. A comeback is in order.

Making a pass is subtle and discrete, a couple of characteristics missing from the hookup culture.

Compare and contrast;

So, friend-with-benes, do you wanna have sex?

with;

{whispered in her ear} Your legs look gorgeous in that skirt. Let's explore this further in my hotel room.

The point about a pass is that, while it is discrete, intent is never in doubt. The message is clear to both parties - at least in theory.

Those skilled in making passes make certain the belusted knows what the passer is thinking. Trouble is that there are so many amateurs out there making a hash of it. The worst of these is the Passive-Aggressive Pass, in which a pass is made backhandedly or at a distance. Underconfident men or women afraid of rejection make this kind of non-pass. They cobble together a series of hints, or beg. Begging and hinting do not constitute a pass. The accomplished passer puts himself or herself right out there. They are saying I want you without reservation.

Also, proximity is critical in pass culture. You should be close enough to smell each other.

THE RULES OF THE PASS:

A pass must be made face to face, or mouth to ear.

A pass must be clear to both parties.

A pass ideally results in sex within the day.

A pass correctly executed is always accepted as a compliment.

A pass rejected must be so honoured, but does not prevent further attempts.

A pass, once completed, resets, meaning it's a one-shot event. There are no pass credits.







Thanks to 30ty for the inspiration.[link]

Photo from here [link]

Edited for specificity. And speeeling.

Love is Criminal

This book was my weekend entertainment. It forced me to consider the advantages of being a crook, especially a crook who counterfeits C-notes.

There is a downside to contravening Federal US statutes, which includes being pursued by the Secret Service. Did you know that the Secret Service was originally charged with finding and bringing counterfeiters to justice? Only when Mr Roosevelt succeeded Mr McKinley did the Secret Service begin to protect US Presidents from nutters who would kill them.

The upside of counterfeiting is the women. The story of Art Williams[link] is all about women, how they fell in love with him, how they bore his children, how his mother went insane, and how they all helped him in his criminal life. This isn't some fictional tale detached from reality; the truth is that women found this guy attractive to the point where they'd ditch their families for him, break the law for him, and lie to the Secret Service for him.

I wonder: How bad does a Bad Boy have to be before women say no? Is there any point beyond which every woman holds up her hand and says Whoa buddy, this is going too far? (Sex crimes aside, of course.)

There is no conclusion to be drawn, other than love (or its blue-collar cousin, attraction) can conquer even the penal code. But the pervasive attraction of the Bad Boy leads me to believe there's some evolutionary advantage to taking on authority. Either that or bricks of $100 notes to be used for shopping expeditions are impossible to resist.




The Art of Making Money by Jason Kersten. ISBN 978-1-592-40446-9

Jason Kersten's homepage [link]

Set-Up Date

It's not even spring here in the northern hemisphere and the sweet smell of reproduction's in the air. Okay, not reproduction but certainly introduction.

Hello Wombat!
Anthea & Tony, here.
We met you a few times at {restaurant} and {tiki bar}. As a matter of fact the last time we saw you, we had lost a bet and owed you a drink! During that encounter, we thought you might want to meet a girl friend of our's who was moving to the area.
After months of searching for a home and garnering employment, she's ready to make new friends.Would you be interested in meeting for lunch at {restaurant} as we'd like to introduce you to her.
A & T*

Right, we have here the classic set-up. Andrea and Tony are a lively couple who spent time with me on four or so occasions. I like them. They know me about as well as they can. So what kind of woman is their friend? What do they think their friend will see in me? And what do they think I will see in their friend? All unanswerable questions, resolved only by meeting.

If I follow my own advice on this, I should:

a) have no expectation,

b) be myself, which is to say, absolutely refrain from trying to impress, and

c) remember to look in the mirror.**






*Although the timing looks suspicious given yesterday's post, I assure you this email arrived last night. It's for real.

**Note. One or more of these might be contradictory and/or impossible.

Pic from here [link]