I want to feel rich

When Wendy and I sold our condo and bought a house we got to see a lot of staging.  In Toronto over the past 20 years staging has gone from a thing a few people do to being the standard.  I have complaints about how staging works and what things it promotes (classism!  rabble rabble) but the tricky thing about staging is that it isn't easily defined and it gradually slides from completely reasonable to icky without a clear dividing line.

I will admit at the outset that we staged our condo to sell it, so while I will complain about staging and its effects, I couldn't turn it down personally.  I know that the staging process made me money, so despite how destructive it is, I wasn't willing to toss away tens of thousands of dollars on principle... especially when our real estate agent included staging for free.

At the beginning you just have cleanup.  You want to sell your house?  Clear that old junk off the porch, mop the floor, pick up the laundry.  I can't see any reason to complain about that.  You want someone looking through the place to be able to see what they are getting and feel comfortable.  The trouble is you keep on doing things that seem reasonable and eventually your place has been repainted neutral white, is filled with expensive furniture, decorated with fancy art, and completely unusable because all of your tools and gear have vanished.  It is sterile, boring... and looks like the place a rich person might live.  The kind of person who has taste in fine art, pays other people to do the work for them, and thinks garish colours are SO last year.

That is the part of the process that grinds my gears.  The stagers tried to tell us that we had to repaint everything so that the prospective buyers could see themselves living in our space, but I think that is nonsense.  We weren't trying to let them see themselves... we were trying to trick their brains into thinking of our condo as a rich person's residence.

The buyer wants to be rich, and they love the vision of themselves as a rich person, so we designed our place to facilitate that dream.  We put up ugly, shapeless modern art because that is how people in our economic bracket think a rich person's home looks.  I am sure that if you are selling a higher end home the staging process changes; you want to make the house look like a person that has twice that much money lives there.  The ideal staging makes the person who is looking to buy that place feel like it is better than the price would suggest, but not too much better, or it triggers cognitive dissonance.

Wastefulness bothers me.  I hate that we had beautiful colourful walls and we had to paint them all white.  I hate that we had to install laminate flooring because that is what is expected at this price point, even if plenty of buyers aren't particularly interested in laminate floors.  So much of staging is doing work that will immediately be undone just to shove money one direction or another.  I like doing things to improve a building - I hate doing them solely as a trick.

The trouble is we are all trapped in a destructive cycle of game theory.  We are playing prisoner's dilemma, except that we only play it with any given opponent once, so everybody defects all of the time.  Nobody has an incentive to cooperate, and the real estate people have every incentive to get people to spend more to raise the selling price because they are paid a percentage.

Even though I can see how this ends up screwing everybody over (except the real estate agents....) I don't see a good way out of it.  People are emotional and foolish and as long as they desperately want to increase their social status and houses are expensive then staging and other trickery will take place.  People want to be rich and powerful and a person's home displays that status clearly.  While these things hold, we are going to continue to try to make our homes look like an Important Person lives there, and we are going to continue to waste our collective resources to achieve that.

Humans are kind

Next up in my reading series is HumanKind.  This book is about humans natural tendencies towards kindness and helpfulness, and how these tendencies can be overwritten or pushed aside by modern life.

By modern life I mean all life since the invention of agriculture.

Our examples of hunter gatherer societies are fairly small in number but they consistently paint a portrait of cooperation, lack of hierarchies, and group decision making.  This makes a lot of sense when you think about the way such groups would live.  When you move around following herds or harvesting by season there is little to own.  You don't stay on any particular patch of land, and owning it makes little sense.  You can't have more possessions than you can carry, so hoarding wealth is nearly impossible.  Having a standing military is an expense you cannot afford because they can't accomplish anything useful.  This is the sort of environment that humans are mostly adapted to.  The few thousand years since agriculture developed have changed a lot, but that isn't enough time for evolution to have a big effect.

Once you have agriculture the rules all change.  Land ownership becomes crucial.  Hoarding wealth is suddenly feasible.  Increases in food production allow for specialization and pave the way for standing militaries and their accompanying rigid hierarchies.  All of this leads to war and violence.  However, turning highly cooperative nomadic humans into bloodthirsty pillagers requires a lot of change in our outlook, and it turns out the key to that is making us believe that humans are naturally bad, and thus in need of constant control.  We also need to be convinced that other people are evil, and thus it is acceptable to murder them and take their stuff.

This is the key to being a dictator over a huge group of people.  In order to impose your rules you have to make people fear each other so they will surrender their liberties for safety.  There are many versions of this - religions telling people that other people are inherently wicked, for example.  However, there are modern day equivalents like most economics that holds dear the idea of humans as machines that try to maximize their personal power and position.

The book addresses a lot of the ways we try to convince each other of humankind's wickedness.  For example, the bystander effect, in which the death of Kitty Genovese is often cited.  The story that is often told is that Kitty was attacked in an alley, and 38 people witnessed the attack.  They did nothing, and the attacker returned repeatedly until finally Kitty died.  The true story is that the police interviewed 38 people, most of whom were asleep or heard yelling in an alley and thought it was just a drunk person.  Two of them called the police (who arrived too late to help) and one found Kitty and held her while she died.  It is a tragedy, and certainly shows that some individuals are wicked and violent, but it does not teach us that human bystanders are callous brutes.

Similarly the Stanford prison experiment and the famous experiment where volunteers administered shocks that they were meant to think were fatal are often used as examples of humans being basically bad.  The book talks about both cases, and shows how flawed the conclusions are.

Humans are marvellously adapted to cooperate and learn from one another.  These are the things that set us apart from all other species.  The great majority of us struggle to harm others at all.  However, we can be indoctrinated, tricked, and pushed into hatred and violence, and we often are.  We should not imagine that this is inevitable though, because it is not.  The last century shows us that we can get better.  We can reduce war, we can try to help others, and we can break down barriers.  

We aren't perfect, and never will be, but we are slowly fumbling our way towards something better.

HumanKind is an excellent book that will teach you about the ways that we are tricked into hatred, how hierarchies and possessions create conflict and division, and how people use this story of inherent wickedness of humankind to justify atrocities.  Being better is difficult, but this book provides clues as to how we can go about doing that.

Facts don't care about your feelings

I just finished reading the book Factfulness.  It is a book that constantly repeats things I have been yelling about for years to anyone who will listen, so it should be no surprise that I loved it.  The book leads off with 12 questions about the world, mostly relating to human wellbeing and trends.  All questions have 3 answers, A, B, C and the average person gets 2 correct.

You read that right.  Guessing at random would give you 4 correct, but the average person is significantly worse than random guessing.  The author of the book talks about how in all his years administering these questions to huge numbers of people one person ever got 11 correct, and nobody got 12.

I got 11 correct, and I definitely should have got 12, but I rushed through.  That isn't because I am smarter than everyone else, but because the author of the book was trying to make a point, showing how badly humans do on specific sorts of knowledge, and that is a specific sort of knowledge I focus on.

The idea behind the book is that we are terrible at interpreting certain sorts of data and the information we are exposed to predisposes us to come to incorrect conclusions.  The book clarifies a lot of important facts that we usually get wrong, and provides techniques for preventing yourself from reaching those incorrect conclusions in future.  It is a combination of science, sociology, and psychology.  Through reading it we learn about what scientific research and facts tell us about the human world, why we get it wrong, and how we can make our brains be better at this sort of thing.

The key takeaway is that a lot of things are getting better.  For example, I have gotten into a few heated discussions about pollution where people tried to convince me that pollution is getting worse everywhere.  I brought up air quality in Toronto, and these people stated that it is getting worse every year.  I pointed out that we can falsify this both anecdotally and scientifically - just think about the smog pouring out of car tailpipes in decades past, and look at car tailpipes today.  Or, you know, you can just look up the numbers and see that air quality in Toronto has been constantly improving ever since we were able to measure it.

Lots of things are like this.  People see disasters on the news or charities begging for help with images of catastrophe and fail to realize that while individual problems exist, the global trend for nearly all measures of human well being is constantly improving.  We miss the forest for the trees.

Of course that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels!  Both the author and I are convinced that we should do more for environmental causes and assisting those less fortunate in the world, but we should do that while being aware of the successes we have had.  "We have a lot more to do" can go along with "Many things are improving rapidly" without contradiction.

Everyone should read this book.  If all you get from it is a new understanding of global trends it will be worth it, but you can get so much more.  It can give you tools to be a better activist, a better environmentalist, and a better thinker.

Throwing stuff away

There is a voice in my head that is desperately worried about wasting stuff.  It is the thing that causes me to always eat whatever food in the fridge is the oldest because I cannot stand the idea of tossing food out.  It is that same voice that gets me to use shoes until they have multiple huge holes in them and my feet start sliding out.  It also triggers when I see other people doing things that waste resources, even if the things they are doing are otherwise pretty neat.

For example, I recently have been watching some youtube videos about people making wacky inventions with their own equipment.  They use 3D printers, plasma cutters, and all kinds of high end tools to produce things like bullet powered baseball bats, automatic pool cues, and supersonic pitching machines.

It is neat to see a slow motion shot of a baseball moving at Mach 1.35 ripping through nine baseball gloves while hardly slowing down.

It bothers me to see all those gloves thrown out though.

It isn't a matter of cost at all.  I know the people making supersonic baseball cannons aren't worried about the couple hundred dollars they spent on baseball gloves.  It isn't much money in their budget, and it isn't my money, but I still *hate* watching all that perfectly good material be tossed away.  Bits of plastic, hunks of metal, and all the other detritus of construction pile up when these videos are made and it all just gets sent to a landfill.

These creators are doing neat things, entertaining people, and even educating them to some extent.  That part is all good.  No matter how much I recognize that though, I can't quite ignore the cost of what they are doing.

Making youtube videos about home construction projects is a miniscule part of the waste our society creates though.  It is just that it is easy to see the waste there when it is captured on a video.

By far worse than these creative types are extremely rich people.  If you have a big house, you are creating a lot of waste.  If you have five big houses, you are creating dramatically more waste, and doing so for far less return.  Four of those houses are sitting empty, and all the energy you use to maintain them and all the materials used to create them are wasted.  When I hear about rich people working in one city and then flying home to another far away place constantly it makes me frustrated and bitter.  Not at the money, because it isn't my money, but just at the ridiculous use of resources.

This sort of feeling is why when my vaccuum broke and I could no longer repair it myself I hunted down someone who fixes up old vaccuums and gave my vaccuum to him.  I did not do this for the money, certainly, since no money changed hands, but simply because I wanted the parts of my vaccuum to be used for something if possible.  Some of it is going to be junk, but I can't avoid that, so I tried to make sure as much of it as possible got used.

I wear shirts until they are big holes in them.  I don't do this because I am cheap, but rather because I cannot stomach creating more pointless waste when I have no need to do so.  The shirt still works, so I shall not toss it.  I don't mind spending money.  I do hate wasting resources.

When a cost is something that is solely borne by me, that makes decisions easy.  If the only cost of a thing is money, then I can make a simple decision of whether or not to acquire that thing.  The hard part is that the resources to create things are shared across all people, and the cost of throwing them away is much more difficult to calculate.

Boooooring

Yesterday we held Back to the Lounge, my annual university gamer reunion.  Sadly it was virtual instead of in person, but it was still good to get to see some people I hadn't seen in awhile and take some sweet, sweet dollars from others due to their incompetence at barbu.

It sure made me feel boring though.

When someone says "So, what's new?" I used to be able to talk about things I was doing, or at least something in the news I found interesting.  Now I have nothing.

There are two reasons for this - first, everyone is boring now because nobody goes anywhere, meets anyone, or does anything.  If you aren't boring now, odds are good you are a jackass who is taking big risks for no reason.

The second reason is my hiatus from social media.  In the fall I ditched my facebook feed and I don't look at it anymore.  That has been good in a way, because a lot of that feed was full of stress inducing outrage that was useless to me.  It was largely stuff I couldn't do anything about, and focusing and worrying about things you can't change is not useful.  However, I also don't have much to say about anything.  If people want to talk about the impact on world trade of a boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal, I don't have anything to contribute.  I didn't know that was happening until days after.

Having been away from social media for many months now I think that leaving it behind was a good decision.  It isn't without cost, because there were definitely things worth reading on there.  Some of those worthwhile things were just amusing, and some were informative and useful.  An awful lot were just time wasting nonsense though, and in sum I think being away from it is a positive change.

However, I am not sure that combining this with a pandemic is a good idea.  It has left me feeling isolated.  I am not sure that solving feelings of isolation by binging on Facebook is actually a good plan, but definitely my timing could have been better.  

I can't be sure what the optimal, rational course is.  It will be many months yet before we are all vaccinated and life can truly go back to normal.  Until then my ability to generate interesting ideas and stories will be limited.  I can fill the gap with stuff from the news or social media in order to have things to say, but I don't know how much value saying those things has.  Humans use small talk as a crucial part of social interaction, so being stuck for things to say isn't great.  Should I see "Did you see the latest outrageous or unlikely thing on the internet?" as a important piece of having relationships with people, or just a pointless waste of time, filling the air?

Viscerally I don't have the urge to go back on Facebook.  No matter how much I poke at it from various angles, I simply don't have the emotional drive to get back on that wagon.  Even if it does leave me boring as anything, I think my course is charted, and I just have to wait until we finally get covid-19 on the ropes to become a person with interesting things to say again.

A successful bid

One of the best predictors of how long a relationship will last is the way the people in it respond to bids for attention.  These bids are usually small things like pointing out a funny thing to a partner, asking a question, or a request for assistance.  Most of the time all we need to do to respond positively is acknowlege the bid, pay attention to it, and respond in some reasonable fashion.  You don't have to respond to every bid of course, but if you consistently ignore them to stare at your phone, shrug and move on, or otherwise lack engagement, your relationship is likely to either end or be miserable.

I put a large emphasis on responding to bids from people.  My romantic relationships get a lot of attention here for sure, but it also applies to child rearing and friendships too.  I think I may actually respond to bids so much that it is unhealthy for me, though I presume that the people I respond to like it.  

The way this plays out is that I am doing something on my computer with my headphones on, absorbed, and either Wendy or Pinkie Pie talks to me.  I can't tell what they are saying (because headphones), so I stop what I am doing, say "Wait, I can't hear you", take the headphones off, put them down, turn around to face them, and say "Okay, go ahead".  This is a positive way to respond to a bid.  I set aside what I am doing, make it clear that I prioritize their feelings and communication, and make sure I am prepared to engage in whatever it is they have for me.

Sometimes that is a good thing.  Maybe it is time to make dinner and I was being reminded, or maybe there is something interesting we can talk about.  Unfortunately a lot of the time it is something totally trivial that I do not care about at all.  It might be Pinkie Pie wanting me to look at the cat that she made in The Sims, or Wendy saying "Oh, never mind, I see it now."  In both cases it is frustrating because I tore myself out of my flow to respond to the bid, and now I have to get myself back into it.  Often what I *want* to say is "Not now, busy" but I don't.  It is important to not respond in that way, and everyone makes it clear that how I respond to these things is crucial for them.

I want to be a good partner and a good parent.  I want to be there and responsive when the people in my family ask for my time and attention.  I just don't know how to cope with some interruptions being necessary and worthwhile, and some being for things I absolutely do not care about at all.

The pandemic turns this from an occasional frustration to a serious struggle.  What I need is the ability to focus on things without being dragged out of my zone.  Unfortunately we have a tiny space and everyone is on top of me all day every day.  I am the one responsible for the vast majority of chores and work, so Wendy and Pinkie Pie need to constantly talk to me about groceries or dinner or cleaning or appointments etc.

If I could just go to work for a few hours and do things without anyone else around it would be wonderful.  I get a bit of that late at night after other people are asleep, but then I need to tiptoe around so as to not wake them up, so it doesn't quite do the thing I am hoping for.

I really like the idea of all of us interacting casually, being open to little conversations about nothing important.  I want to be receptive to people talking to me, even when it isn't something momentous.  I like the idea of talking with them about random stuff that popped into my brain too.  I just desperately need that separation at times, that ability to sink deep into a headspace without being interrupted.

The struggle goes the other way too, no doubt about that.  Pinkie Pie spends all day in her room, and she won't take care of any basic life functions without constant harassment, so I constantly have to be knocking on her door and barging in when she ignores the knock.  I am sure this is difficult for her too, but because she is always behind a closed door and won't respond to messages I literally cannot wait for a good moment to communicate with her - I have no way of knowing what time would be good.

Wendy works in our living room, so she has the same sorts of struggles.  I can't easily tell when she is engaged with her work or not, so if I need her attention I have to either wait, which might take hours, or just interrupt her.  Working at home is difficult for her even if I am leaving her alone, especially with difficult work where she needs to be in flow to do it properly, and me needing input on stuff ratchets up the challenge.

Having only a kitchen (where I am on my computer, usually), and a living room (where Wendy is on her computer, usually) as our living spaces is driving us a bit batty.  What I would give for an office space with a door I could close!  The ability to go and do something for a couple hours with a door between me and casual interruptions would be a wondrous thing.  

But, you know, money.

I don't have good answers here.  I would like to respond to bids less, but I can't know which ones are the ones I want to filter out until I have already responded to them.  I could put up a little flag that says 'go away' on it, but that doesn't actually work that well in practice.  It is weird and uncomfortable to not chat about little things to someone who is *right there* in a way that wouldn't be weird or uncomfortable if they were in an office ten meters away.  You just walk to the office if you have a thing worth saying, or don't bother if your thing isn't worth saying.  A 'go away' flag simply doesn't create the same social environment.

I am so profoundly ready for the pandemic to be over so people can get out of my space and I can drill down deep into something, knowing that I have hours of time where I can focus and nothing shall distract me.  Trivial or important, all distractions break my creativity and flow.

Welcoming to some

I have been following and commenting more on the World Boardgaming Championships Facebook page.  There is a large and contested set of posts there surrounding women feeling safe and included in WBC.

One thing I have seen in several posts is the idea that WBC is completely welcoming to everyone regardless of gender, race, culture, appearance, or anything else.  In fact it has been pitched as the most welcoming place in the entire world.  (Naturally it was pitched this way by men who think that we don't need to do anything to change women's experiences at the con.)

Of course we also, in the same thread, see women talking about all the challenges, insults, and rude or abusive behaviour they have witnessed on many occasions.  How do we square these two points of view?

I have a story that may help illustrate.

Years ago I was invited to an puzzle solving event.  After the event, all the attendees went to a nice bar to get dinner and drinks.  At the time I was living well below the poverty line, and I was regularly skipping events solely because of the cost of bus fare.  Everyone else at the party was ordering whatever they liked off the menu and chatting about their homes, their cars, and the vacations they had planned.

I didn't have a house, or a car, and vacations were a dream.  If I had ordered dinner at the bar I would have burned through 3 months of entertainment budget in a single meal.

Many people in that group might well have felt uncomfortable in many areas of their lives.  After all, they are a group of puzzle nerds.  I am sure to all of them, this was an incredibly welcoming environment.  I am also confident they thought they were being welcoming to me.

But it is fucking hard to sit and listen to people talk about their financial misfortunes when they are bemoaning how they have to put off buying a cottage, and you have to feel guilty about not tipping the waitress because you can't afford a single drink.

I can tell you without any doubt, people can be extremely comfortable, *think* they are being entirely welcoming, and make someone feel desperately out of place.  I left the bar eventually, and didn't get back together with that group.  I don't blame them, or think they did anything wrong.  They didn't know how it made me feel.  I didn't complain.  But I wasn't going to go back.

When I first attended WBC I felt wonderful.  It was incredibly welcoming to me, and I felt right at home.  But I am not every person.  My experience is not universal.  Just because WBC is extremely welcoming to straight white guys who are good at games does *not* mean it is welcoming to all.  Some people at WBC, notably women, have the same experience I had at the bar, but at the con instead.

If you are a white guy who loves to dress in nerdy Tshirts, cargo shorts, and a backpack of board games, WBC is fantastic place.  The rest of the world may give you looks and shut you out, but this place is perfect.  It is easy for you to fit in, and you are completely accepted.  I can easily see how you remember all the places in the world where you weren't accepted, and conclude that WBC is simply accepting of everyone!

But that isn't reality.  WBC is super accepting of you, for sure.  But that experience is not universal, much as you presumably want it to be.

So if your experience of WBC is one of comfort and acceptance, great.  I am happy for you!  But when you conclude that everyone else must have had the same experience, you are insisting that your experience is the only valid one, and you will accept nothing else.  You are refusing to be the accepting person in turn.

If you remember other places in your life where you got side eyed looks, and people talked as though you weren't there, or assumed you were clueless without knowing anything about you, you know that isn't fun.  It doesn't make you want to go back there.  Women are telling us all that this is how they often feel at WBC.  The men at WBC have a responsibility to try to give them the accepting, easy, comfortable experience we have.  The first step is listening to what they say, and *believing* it, even if it strikes us as quite different than our own experience.

I am not saying WBC is the worst.  I love it!  I think the people running it have good policies in place, and work hard to make it great for everyone.  I think a lot of the people attending do the same.  But we have room to improve, and the stories women are telling us make that crystal clear.

Covid and privilege

One thing that the covid crisis has shone a light on is privilege of many sorts.  The death toll goes across all demographics, but the trend is clear - those with less privilege are dying far more often.  Poor people, people of colour, homeless people, these are the ones dying far more often than white rich folks.  As I understand it this is one of the few situations where men don't have extra benefits - they are dying more of covid than women are.

When we talk about the crisis we should think carefully about what privilege we have that impacts it.  I see many people talking about how others ought to behave, and those statements are usually coloured by the speaker's position in life.  Those living with partners strongly object to people seeing anybody outside their home and can't imagine why anyone would.  Certainly there are risks to doing so, but if you are partnered and have somebody around to meet your needs for sex, cuddling, hugging, and whatever else you should be cautious to judge those who don't.

It is easy to talk about never leaving your house when you have somebody at home with you, but telling someone that they should simply never have human contact for months or even a year is a harsh thing when they live alone.  We know that telling teenagers that abstinence is the only way is a failure of strategy, and the same applies here.

That doesn't mean we should all be going to orgies, obviously.  It does mean that we have to accept that human contact is necessary for manypeople, and if you find that easy to get, you should hesitate to judge those who don't.

The same sort of thing applies with wealth.  If you have children and you live in a house with a yard this pandemic is drastically easier than if you are trying to cope with them in a 2 bedroom apartment.  Telling someone that they have to sit in the same physical space as their kids for months or a year is a completely different thing when you can retreat to a study, send them to the yard, or go exercise in the garage.  When you literally can't get more than 4 meters from them, the situation is not the same.

We don't tax people by charging everybody 20k in taxes and just accepting that this crushes the poor and barely tickles the rich.  We charge a percentage, asking those who have more to contribute more.  Something of the same philosophy needs to be considered with the crisis.  Nobody has a pass to going to parties with random people, but people in challenging circumstances should have more flexibility in how they cope than those who have it easier.

There are all kinds of ways we should apply this.  If you are a knowledge worker with highly desirable skills, you need to accept that someone with precarious employment is going to need to return to work sooner.  Surely there are many other kinds of examples, but the general key is to keep in mind that people's circumstances can be wildly different from your own, and that just because you don't find a rule a problem doesn't mean that it is workable for everyone.

I support strong precautions against covid, and I think we should definitely deal with it by implementing universal basic income.  I don't think we should reopen the economy quickly.  I do think though that we should all be careful how we judge others behaviour when they clearly have far less privilege than we do.  Nobody needs parties or conventions, but we do need security and contact, for starters, and we all should put a lot of effort into removing risk, while accepting that someone else may not have the resources to give as much as we do.

Fancy boots

When I buy clothes I don't buy fancy things.  I buy something solid, sturdy, but cheap.  I always thought it absurd to pay a lot of money for clothes, because why spend cash just to put on a display?  Being dressed up and being around people who are wearing expensive things makes me feel out of place, so I would rather avoid situations where that is required.

A few years ago Wendy bought boots.  It was quite odd, because she brought me with her and got my opinion on the colour and fit, but then asked me to hang out outside the store while she paid for them.  I wasn't sure why, until she explained that she wanted to buy them before I looked at the price and had a heart attack over it.  Blundstones are excellent boots, she told me, but the $250 price tag would have made me weep.

I wouldn't try to talk her out of buying such a thing, but I definitely would have choked and sputtered when I first saw the tag, that much is certain.  Spending more than $70 on boots?  Madness!

But recently my inlaws told me they wanted to buy me boots for Christmas.  My old boots were perfectly fine still, as they only had a couple of 5cm holes in them, but other people have different standards than me, I guess.  I know they would prefer I buy something of high quality and damn the expense, so I went out and dropped a giant pile of money on boots.  It made me twitch a little, slapping down my credit card, but I did it.

For the first time ever I am wearing fashionable boots in winter.  Aside from dress shoes for work and formal events I have never actually worn footwear that I would consider stylish, but now it is happening on a daily basis.

Perhaps these things aren't stylish where you are, or maybe they aren't practical, but in Toronto in the winter these boots are where it is at.  You need a little bit of insulation for the 0 degree weather, and you need them to be waterproof for the slush, but you don't need gigantic boots that go up to the knee either, we don't have enough snow for that.  These boots are exactly it, good looking, trendy, and completely practical.

I have even gotten reactions to them from other people.  Those reactions have all been "Dude, you paid real money for clothes?  What has happened to the Sky I know that wears all cheap stuff all the time?"

It is bizarre to be walking down the street knowing that some people would look at the stuff I am wearing and think that I am the sort of person that buys things because they are a symbol.  It is like I am some sort of different person entirely.  Who is this man?

There is a Sam Vimes theory of boots that says that you need to buy expensive boots because they will cost four times as much but last ten times as long as the cheap ones.  So far Wendy's boots have stood up extremely well, so the theory is working for the moment.  Perhaps I have been foolish all these years, buying cheap stuff that only lasted me five years and these new boots will last me twenty years and be worth every penny.

Perhaps not.

In any case I am going to wear them until they are a pile of leather scraps, because I certainly don't want to buy a second quality pair of boots in my lifetime.  One should do!

A conflict of trains of thought

I am watching.

When I am on the streetcar here in Toronto I can't help but watch people board to see if they paid their fare.  Mostly they do, but there are a significant number who simply walk past the pad and don't tap a card.

Some are under 13 and are free anyway.

Some have already paid on another leg of their route and don't need to pay again.

Some are just refusing to pay and cheating the system.

It bothers me to see this, but I can't look away.  I haven't ever done anything about it, because obviously I can't distinguish between the people who are transferring from another route and those who are refusing to pay, but it irks me and I can't help but leaping to conclusions. 

Doubly frustrating is that I halfways agree with those who are skipping out on paying.  Public transit costing money is stupid.  We waste huge amounts of money just collecting that money.  Installing card readers, taking payments, having people standing around to explain how to pay, all of these things aren't free.  We should just tax more and make all public transit free!  Why did we start wasting so much time and effort collecting tiny fees for this anyway?  We don't do so for roads!

I know why.  The poor can't be allowed to just get things for free!  Roads are for those with more wealth, public transit is for the poor, and giving the poor a free ride is anathema.  Rich people already have it easy, might as well keep on with that. 

We have bus fares because of classism, pure and simple.

(If you have been around here a while, you will note that "Because classism, obviously!" is my answer to most things.)

I do think that while we are all generally paying for transit you should pay for transit.  Dumping costs onto other people is a shitty thing to do, especially if paying those costs isn't a serious burden for you.  But I can't help but hope that the new system is a step on the slow road to getting rid of paying for public transit altogether.

I will definitely continue hoping and advocating for free public transit.  Yes, it will cost me in taxes, and yes, I will happily pay those taxes to avoid the waste that comes with collecting tiny fees.  But in the meanwhile I will keep watching to see who pays and who doesn't.  Not because I should, but because I can't stop.

The necessity of an end in sight

I read recently that rich people give less as a percentage of their income towards charity than poor people do.  We often hear stories of rich people giving huge sums or performing massive acts of philanthrophy, but in aggregate they are a lot more interested in yachts than in helping the poor. 

I think I know why.

The key reason is that people want to know that there is a clear end to their generosity.  It is easy for me to devote a day to helping a friend move, because I know they aren't going to demand I show up every day.  It is not a problem if someone in the same economic situation as me asks to borrow $20  for something, because I will not be expected to give them $20 every day.  My generosity has a clear end to it, so it is easy to be generous.  I believe that I have a moral imperative to help people with lifting things, or with sums that are relatively small for either of us.

Whereas if I look at a homeless person and think that I have a moral imperative to help them, where does it end?  Should I spend a day trying to help them build a home of boards and tarps?  Give them $20?  The next day they are still so much worse off than me that I should keep on helping, and I shouldn't stop at $20, I should give them $2000.  But why stop at $2000?  I would still have money in the bank, and they would still need it far more than me.  If I admit that there is a moral imperative to step in and assist, I don't see an end.

If I was a billionaire, that would be true of nearly everyone I pass by.  I should be giving them all $10,000 apiece.  They need it more than me.  But even after I do, they still need it.  The moral imperative doesn't have an obvious stopping point until I have given away 99.99% of my wealth, and maybe not even then.  I can't accept that... so I refuse to believe that I have a moral imperative to help, and I do nothing.

I am not saying this is the right way to behave.  It isn't.  But I do think it is the way people do behave.

People are far more generous when they can see a defined contribution that will have a significant outcome, and which doesn't force them to admit that they should be giving more and more without pause.  That sort of thing happens a lot among people in similar situations, and is extremely hard to achieve with massive wealth disparities. 

This is, to my mind, another good argument for policies that reduce wealth inequality.  I know it would be hard to manage, but a wealth tax aimed at eliminating wealth accumulation beyond, say, 100 years of work for the median wage earner, would be fine with me.  In Canada that would be something like 5 million dollars.  Now we don't have to take away every dollar over 5 million, of course.  But if we had a wealth tax starting on all amounts over 5 million, and it climbed substantially over 10 million, and went up to 20% yearly on all amounts over 25 million, that would really help with our problems.

When there are people that are absurdly wealthy, they will always look at the poor and see endless need, a need they cannot meet.  Some will do something, but most will do nothing.  Tax the hell out of their wealth and use it to help the poor, and they will definitely be doing something, albeit without their input or approval.

What we need is a system where everyone has their basic needs met, so that moral imperative doesn't feel so overwhelming.  We also need a system where nobody has the wealth to lift an entire city out of poverty because them simply having that wealth creates all kinds of extra problems.  I am sure we would find that in a world where people are all a lot closer together in terms of what they have, they would be far more generous in helping those that need a helping hand up at the moment.

Flappy flappy

Today I booked two airline trips.  One to visit family at Christmas, the other to play board games for nine days after Christmas.  Both of these are going to be good and happy times, though admittedly the second one has me more pumped.

I always feel a strong sense of guilt and shame around flying.  It is, environmentally speaking, not a thing I can easily justify.  I know that there are many things I do right in terms of environmental impact, but when I fly twice a year it is hard to think much of my convictions.  There are many things we can do to reduce the impact of our activies, like running our electric grid off of nuclear power and using electric vehicles.

Flying though?  That is going to be a mess for a damn long time as I don't know of anything that can effectively replace fossil fuels for that purpose, and public ground transit to get where I am going would be hideous.  My options just aren't there.

One of my great struggles with this sort of thing is when I have to examine tradeoffs.  Awhile ago I wanted to travel to Ottawa, and the train was going to be $350.  I could fly for far less than that, and I could borrow a car and travel for less than a quarter of the price.  Taking a vehicle for a trip that had a good mass transit option frustrated the hell out of me, but I couldn't justify paying hundreds of dollars to be more environmentally friendly.  It didn't help that the train normally costs $110, but I had only left 3 weeks ahead to book it, and they decided it was time to squeeze me.

This time it was different - direct flights, which are the least bad, were going to run me $700+.  However, I could take a series of flights through multiple airports and get the price down to $400.  It costs more fuel, takes more time, and saves me a couple hundred dollars, so I went for it.

Often, I think, when I fuss about flying people assume it is worries about crashing (not at all), or the cost (not really the thing).  I don't want to crash, and I will hunt for the best deal, but really I take the risk and pay the price without much fuss.  The pollution though, that is the thing that haunts me.

That, and the worry about missing my flight.  I don't worry about dying in a fiery crash, no, I worry about being the person who feels like an idiot because his plane left just minutes before he arrived.

My priorities may need work.

Angry Man

Yesterday the subway here in Toronto had some issues.  Someone decided to run on the tracks for awhile, and the transit employees had to chase them down and drag them out.  This happens from time to time, and it makes a real mess when it does.

I got caught halfway through my trip by the shutdown.  They got everyone off the train, and the announcer told us what was going on in a *extremely* annoyed tone.  We sat on the platform as train after train showed up at the station and disgorged its passengers so they could all wait for the idiot to get taken off the tracks.

Everyone was annoyed, but one man in particular was furious.  He was screaming at the announcements, ranting at the trains, and even kicked the train a couple of times.  The people all gave him a wide berth.  I wasn't sure if I should interfere - he wasn't hurting anyone, but sure was making people nervous.

I am torn on what to do in these situations.  Stepping in might help calm it down, but it might also cause an explosion.  It is a lot safer for me to try that than it is for most people - even if somebody is upset, they are unlikely to take a swing at me.  A combination of calm words, authoritative presence, and just being a large man see to that.  Privilege at work.

Finally I realized why the man was so enraged - he thought the trains were going north, without passengers, for no reason.  If they had been doing this I could understand his rage, but it makes no sense.  Why would the transit system kick everyone off and then run the trains anyhow?

I walked up to him and explained what was going on.  The trains were going out of the station north, using the crossover 100 meters away to switch tracks, then turning south again.  When he realized that the transit system wasn't actually just trolling him he calmed down a lot, and asked me how I knew this, and wondered if I worked for transit.

I knew it because it is bloody obvious if you think for five seconds.

However, I calmly lied to him and told him I had seen this exact thing before, and the transit operators told me how it works.  It turns out my years of sales experience have left me with the ability to lie effectively and easily.  I don't do so, except when some jackass forces my hand, but I am still good at it.

Finally the angry man wound down and wandered away.  Shortly afterwards the trains started up again and off we went.

I wish I knew when to step in when situations like this arise.  When it is just somebody drunk or high who is yelling foolishness I ignore it, but when actual violence erupts, even if it is just man on train violence that deals no real damage, I feel compelled to act.  I always end up sitting there, carefully not looking at the person being obnoxious, trying to figure out when it is time to carefully move between the angry person and other people, and when it is time to tell them to calm down, just hoping it won't come to me having to use force of any kind.

So tricky to know if I get that balance right, and especially so when Pinkie Pie is around because I want to set just the right example for her, but I also really do not want her to get involved.

Everybody knows

Everyone knows Rambo movies are a collection of shirtless Stallone shots where Rambo uses a machine gun to mow down endless waves of soldiers.  Also he probably kills a lot of people with knives and explosives too, just to keep it from getting monotonous.  This is certainly what I thought, though I have never actually seen a Rambo movie.  You don't have to see it when all the images are so constantly embedded in popular culture.  I know Rambo without knowing it.

Except apparently I don't know Rambo.

I watched a review for the newest Rambo installation and found out that the original Rambo has only a single death in it, and it was from a fall.  Rambo was largely responsible because he threw a rock that caused the fall, but it isn't at all clear he intended to cause a death.  The movie had violence, but it was a lot more of a character piece and not an orgy of carnage like I had assumed.

It turns out that things that everyone knows are apparently just things I assumed from soaking up cultural references.  Of course I was completely correct in my evaluation of all the other Rambo movies - here are there death counts.

Rambo 1 - 1
Rambo 2 - 115
Rambo 3 - 175
Rambo 4 - 254

These movies sure take a turn for the death right around Rambo 2!

But it makes me wonder what other cultural icons I know nothing about.  Is Nightmare on Elm Street actually a poignant look at regret over missing out on raising a child?  Is Rocky about a man who just wants to start a career as an actuary but boxes in his spare time to keep in shape?

What else do I know for sure, that everyone knows, but which just ain't true?

Awake once more

Pinkie Pie's return to school has been going well so far.  It isn't perfect and full of rainbows and unicorns, but it is working.  That is good enough, and after a year of struggling with homeschooling I will take what I can get.

It is an improvement in her life, no doubt, because staying home with me wasn't ideal.  I have the knowledge to teach her the things she needs but our dynamic was a mess and she wasn't learning all she needed to.  She is still having challenges though, and probably will continue to do so.

But for me, her return to school is a tremendous relief.  Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a year - I got back to designing games.  It wasn't much, but I spent time creating new cards for FMB, altering and balancing others, and printing them out.  A lot of my time ends up being about simple, concrete things like cutting up paper with scissors and putting those slips of paper into card backs so they can be easily used.

I felt something inside me that hasn't been there in a long time.  A powerful desire to build, to create, to continuously improve.  I have been a long time now just coasting, trying to get by.  I have been self medicating by watching too much Youtube and letting images of other people's game experiences be my way of spending time.  That isn't so bad as self medicating goes, but it isn't the joyous flow that I can get from creating my own things.  Youtube marathons will never get me in that zone where time vanishes and I wake up having made something new and wonderful for myself.

This makes me want even more to do whatever it takes to get the school experience to work for Pinkie Pie.  It will be good for her in the long run even if it is a struggle at times, and her being out there will give me the mental space to do things that bring me joy.  It will likely cost me on the sleep front because when I am playing or designing games intensely I find it hard to get the thoughts to stop, to convince my brain to finally shut down.

Given a choice though between the numbness of scrolling videos and the gritty eyed tiredness that comes with creation and flow, I will take the latter every damn time.

I might not be able to do it

I find encouragement a puzzling thing.  I recognize what I am 'supposed' to say in situations where people are feeling unsure of themselves, but I don't like doing the standard thing of saying "I am sure you will succeed!" in response.

There is a post by TheFerrett recently that echoes some of my sentiments.  He struggles with people telling him "you got this!" when he expresses doubt or worry about his ability to succeed.  For him, that response is terrifying because he suddenly feels like they assume he will succeed, which means that if he does fail they will see him as an irredeemable loser.  Telling him that you are sure he will overcome just adds to the pressure he is already feeling because he knows that he might not prevail.

What TheFerrett wants them to say is "I will love you even if you fail."  He wants reassurance that his life isn't over if he doesn't manage to get it done.

I don't feel that way.  I find people saying "I know you will succeed!" unpleasant, but not for the same reasons.  I end up being irritated because they are lying to me, or they are refusing to accept my evaluation of the situation.  Most of the time they know that I might fail but they are claiming to feel certain of my success anyway.  I don't want to be lied to.  I don't want to be patronized.  If instead they actually believe it is impossible for me to fail, then they are simply dismissing my assessment of the situation and telling me my doubts are unfounded.  I don't want to be gaslit either.

I know people aren't setting out with lying to me as a goal.  Nor do they plan on belittling me.  Their intent is to make me feel happier and more confident.  Unfortunately intent isn't magic, and those words make things worse for me, not better.

There is another sort of response that I get at times, which is for the listener to leap in and desperately try to solve the problem themselves.  I don't like this because their solution usually involves doing everything their way instead of my way.  Sometimes they have good input but usually I have thought and researched my strategy extensively and it is much better informed than they plan they suggest after a couple seconds of consideration.  I am not looking for rescue.  An offer of "Can I help somehow?" is appreciated, but "Here, this is how you must go about solving your problem." is not.

So what response do I want then?

TheFerrett wants people to tell him that he will still be loved even if he fails.  This isn't such a bad approach with me, because honest encouragement is a fine thing.  But saying "Don't worry, if you fail, I will still love you." isn't exactly the thing I am wanting either.

I am looking for "Oh, that sounds difficult.  What is your strategy to deal with this?"  If I am describing a struggle I am having and my doubts that it will go the way I want it to, I generally just like to have somebody to talk to about it.  Verbalizing my thoughts and plans can lead to greater understanding and refinement of those plans, and an extra brain occasionally comes up with angles I hadn't seen.  Going back and forth with "Okay, so if you are doing X, you must have already figured out how to cope with Y, right?" helps me with my ideas. 

This sort of discussion helps emotionally because I feel better when I have talked out my plans, and can sometimes help logistically by finding flaws in them.

When someone says to me "I don't know if I will succeed at X." my response is to say something like "You are capable of this.  But you might fail anyway.  I will care for you whether or not you fail.  The world is big and history is long, so if you fail, there will be more chances to succeed."  I like this sort of thing because it is encouraging, true, and accepts their doubts and worries as real.  It also correctly positions the consequences of failure as a setback, not a cataclysm.

Is it just me?

In my experience dating various people while being polyamorous I have found meeting metamours to be a challenge.  (Metamours being people who are dating someone I am dating.)  In the early going there were a couple of times that I definitely felt intimidated by a metamour, but only prior to actually meeting them.  The millionaire pilot who was also taller than me was a stand out example of this - I never actually met him, but I felt that insecurity, no doubt about it.

But every time I have met someone I always ended up feeling a sense of comfort and relief upon realizing that this isn't some superhero, just a person.  Someone who has strong points and weaknesses, stuff that is pretty and stuff that is not.  No need to be worried!

When people have met me in this situation though there has been a consistent reaction including some combination of insecurity, jealousy, and fear.  I have been mulling it over the past little while and I just don't know if this sort of thing is universal, mostly just among straight / bi guys, or if it is particular to me.

In theory people don't need to treat this like a competition.  I have lots of friends of widely varying looks, skills, attitudes, and personalities.  There is no need for a friend of mine to be worried about me meeting a new better friend and leaving them behind!  Romantic or sexual relationships could be just the same... but they don't generally seem to be.  I blame culture, mostly, and our instinctive reactions that treat attraction like it exists in a environment of scarcity rather than abundance.

I don't have the experience to judge if this sort of thing pans out the same way amongst women or nonbinary people.  That isn't my life!  My guess is that it is worse among men, in large part because of the way online dating works these days, with women bombarded with offers and men desperately seeking any response at all.  I don't have data to back that hunch though.

I also can't tell how much of it is me, or even what parts of me might be contributing to other people's struggles.  It is easy to see how you could describe me in ways that would contribute to insecurity - "Hey, I am dating a new guy, he is a tall, musclebound weightlifter who studied math in university and designs his own games.  Also he has the sex drive and self confidence normally associated with mythological deities!"  That is a recipe for creating insecurity, and while it does not paint a really accurate picture, it is close enough to the truth to be a problem.

A significant part of it is the emphasis that men place on height and strength, I think.  It doesn't even have to be conscious to be there, a deep primal worry that if you get in a fight with this person, they will crush you.  Tell people that this is a silly thing to worry about all you want, it won't stop them thinking about it.  Thing is, I know that size matters in the creation of insecurity and jealousy, but I don't know how much it actually affects the final outcome.  Do people just find something to be insecure about, no matter how innocuous the person they are considering?

My guess is that insecurity, worry, and jealousy before meeting or at an early meeting is worse among men than among non men, and I further guess that it is worst among straight men.  Also me being big probably makes that even more so in my specific case.  But there isn't anything I can do about it, really.  I already don't have any intention of stealing anybody from anybody, but that rational assessment has jack to do with how people end up feeling.  I wish I didn't create such feelings in other people, but there is no way to achieve that.

A lot may just come down to feeling like you are enough.  If you feel that, truly believe it, you have little to fear.  Even if a person decides they aren't going to be around you any more, there are other people.  Life goes on.

If you don't think you are enough, then you are probably doomed to be insecure no matter what sort of people are involved, and there is no way I can make you feel like you are enough.

I don't want to be different - I am fine with the way I am.  I do wish though that I didn't create these unpleasant waves in the world around me just by existing. 

The true enemy revealed

I have many enemies.  Pants.  Shoes.  Ninjas dressed in yellow.  But one of my greatest foes is doors.

There are a few acceptable reasons to have a door.  My fridge door, for example, keeps my food cold.  My oven door keeps me from roasting to death.  My balcony door keeps me from freezing in winter.  These are annoying doors, but their utility outweighs their intrinsic evil.

But my home is *full* of doors with no redeeming value.  Recently I struck a blow against the tyranny of doors and took off the two cupboard doors that have most annoyed me in the past.  Now my kitchen is far superior.

It is glorious.  Beautiful, functional, clean, neat.  Now when someone is using the counter and I want a glass, I don't have to caution them about danger, wait for them to move back, open the door, reach around it, and fumble to get the right glass.  Instead I just reach in and get it, smooth as anything.

You know how often I bash my head on no door at all?  NEVER.  You know how often I bash my head on the old cupboard doors?  SOMETIMES.  Never >  sometimes, when it comes to head/door bashery.

I can just look in and see everything.  No opening one door, realizing the thing I want is behind the other door, and then opening that.  Instead of a piece of furniture whose primary function was to impede my vision and movement, I have empty space, nothing at all, and both my vision and movement run wild and free.

People will no doubt claim that you need bathroom doors.  FAUGH I say.  Bathroom doors just cause mirrors to get foggy and block access to the towels that are hanging on the wall behind the door.  People have bodies under their clothes.  They poop on a regular basis.  We don't need a door to pretend that we aren't naked under it all, or to perpetuate the fiction that we go to the bathroom just to play Candy Crush on our phones.

But when a door is taken off, the resulting free door, loosed from its bondage, must be dealt with.  The solution I have come up with is to store doors behind my curtains in my bedroom, up against the floor to ceiling window.  If you are across the street from my condo you would clearly see a door up against the window, and you might wonder why.  The answer is that it doesn't bother me there.  Those curtails are always closed, it does not block my sight.  I don't want to go through the window and fall to my death, so my movement is free.  Also, I am extremely unlikely to bash my head on it.

While I would rather simply smash the doors, rend them to pieces, watch tiny shards fly past my head as I deliver the deathblow with an axe, this is not to be.  If I end up selling this place someday the new buyers will insist on their being doors.  They will be convinced that plates must be kept hidden, washing machines must be disguised, and food needs to be sequestered away.  We can't have visitors thinking that we clean our clothes, or eat!  What a social disaster that would be!

So the doors will stay until such time as I must reattach them to coddle the foolishness of others.  I despise doors, but not enough to lose money over them.  I am not *that* far gone.

Burnout

The Fyre Festival is an example of legendary incompetence turning into spectacular failure.  It was a festival pitched as a luxury music experience in a remote, tropical location that was superbly marketed, but which completely failed in execution.  People who were promised villas on the beach got leaky tents, chefs serving sushi were replaced with cheese sandwiches, and all the bands pulled out and the festival collapsed after everyone had already arrived.

I just watched a documentary on Netflix called Fyre about the festival, cataloging its initial meteoric rise and subsequent implosion.  It was clear that this wasn't a series of unfortunate accidents, but rather calculated fraud layered on top of idiotic optimism and mismanagement.  I liked the show a lot, and I recommend it if you want to watch evil fools fail.

The thing about the documentary that I found most fascinating though is the way they marketed the festival.  They got social media influencers to post about it and make it a meme, and sold out all of their heinously expensive tickets in no time at all.  I know that social media influencers are a thing... but the idea of following them, much less buying shit they are shilling, boggles my mind.

Why would I care what any of those people say?  Aren't they just mostly spending their days composing photos to make you think their lives are better than yours, and then trying to sell you shit that in theory will give you the life they are pretending to have?

I think I have a weird relationship to my phone compared to most people.  Health professionals insist that you need to leave your phone away from your bed so your notifications don't keep you awake all night.  I can't fathom this.  Why the fuck would you have your phone near your bed?  If anything gives me notifications I uninstall it!  Stop bothering me!

I can look at an instagram model and appreciate the curves, or marvel at the gigantic biceps.  But following them to get more pictures?  Nonsensical, is what that is.  It isn't that I am claiming some perfect rationalism that makes me immune to sales pitches (though I am about as resistant as people get), rather I honestly can't fathom what it is that goes on in people's brains when they follow social media personalities so fervently.

Following celebrities?  I am barely interested in following people I actually know, and I curate my facebook feed to maximize 'people who link thoughtful and clever articles'.

But apparently just knowing how to get followers on instagram is a career option, so apparently it is me who is the freak.  Nobody is paying me gazillions of dollars or offering free stuff just for a mention on my blog, so by the logic of capitalism I am doing this *wrong*.

I guess I should start posting pictures of my fancy life, spending time oiling my arms and learning to use filters to put up muscle shots, and telling people they can have it all.

Or not.  Because the prospect of doing that regularly makes my skin crawl.

One track mind

A couple days ago I went to a sex club.  I won't actually be talking about the sex though, because the non sex stuff was actually more interesting.  It revealed some things about my brain, and made me wonder if other people are like me in this way.  I don't actually know!

Part of the evening was an icebreaker event to get people comfortable and mixing it up.  This is a great feature for me because while the idea of sexing up a bunch of hot randoms at a club sounds fun, I know a lot of women get approached way too much in these situations and I don't want to be *that guy* who makes things shitty for them.  Having a structured way to get familiar with people is ideal for me.

The first icebreaker was sock wrestling.  Two people get a sock each, put on that sock, and then wrestle.  The winner is the one who gets the other person's sock off first.  Of course being a sex club the crowd ranged from people wearing something to people wearing nothing, so the potential for sexyness was high.  I, of course, was naked, because fuck clothes.

The organizer started it up, and she challenged us, asking who would wrestle her.  A woman about the same size stepped in and they fought.  The organizer won convincingly, through a combination of raw athleticism, aggressiveness, and practice.  Then she asked for more people to wrestle, and naturally I waved my hand about.  Pick me, pick me!  Ooh, ooh, pick me!

She picked me.

I was the tallest and strongest one there by a fair margin, so I wanted to be the first into the ring.  If someone was going to fight me, I wanted them to know what they were getting into.  A woman immediately stepped forward to fight me.  She was pretty average in size, but she gave me a 'IMMA CRUSH YOU FOOL' look that made me optimistic that this would be a good fight.  Also she was super hot, both because she was conventionally attractive, but additionally because her aesthetic was exactly my style.

But her attractiveness and nudity had no effect on me.  Normally in this sort of situation I would be wound right up, incredibly sensitive to any touch.  I would be acutely aware of exactly how we touched, and every nerve would be trembling, waiting to fire.  Not this time.  The only thing in my brain was the desire to compete, to fight, to strive for victory.  The organizer said go, and we rushed each other without hesitation.

It became instantly clear that my opponent was fast, strong, and flexible.  Also she wasn't holding back in the slightest, and neither was I.  Normally if you ask me 'hey, did you touch a boob in that situation?' I can tell you *exactly* how much I touched a boob.  The fucking memory is seared into my brain.  In this case I have no idea.  We were wrestling for a little while so I probably touched lots of things, but I couldn't tell you what they were at all - my brain was entirely occupied with winning.  That what we were doing might be sexy didn't exist; it was eclipsed by the struggle.

She was faster and more agile than me, but I had a large reach, mass, and strength advantage, and I ripped her sock off without allowing her to get to mine.  She kipped up easily, demonstrating that agility, and I shook her hand and said "Good fight."  Afterwards we talked about it, and she seemed really happy that she had a real challenge, as that was why she immediately volunteered to fight me.  We were both pleased that it was tough and close - losing wouldn't have bothered me, but I wanted a challenge, and I wanted an opponent who was able to take my best efforts, and I got that.

*Then* I got horny, and unbridled desire set in.  Other people wrestled, but only had limited attention to pay.  Hot is great and all, but combine that with physical competence and a "I will fight you, no matter how big you are!" attitude?  Ker Pow.

But there was more icebreaking to come.

Twister is a thing children do at parties.  Also a really solid icebreaker for mostly naked adults.  During round 1 I got bumped out fairly quickly, as you tend to when there are 10 people on a twister board.  On the final round though I managed to hang in there until it was just me and the organizer left, and she made it her mission to get me out.  You can do this in twister by just hanging out on your end of the board and trying to win via physical supremacy... or you can get in right on top of the other person and make it interesting.  Also sexy.

I am not particularly good at twister.  My flexibility is suspect, though my reach does help.  But I am bloody determined, and I managed to stay in despite the fire in my muscles ramping higher and higher.  My opponent decided to make things more difficult for me by distracting me, so she ground herself against my leg and rubbed her breasts on me.

I noted the grinding and touching, and thought that she was doing a good job, getting the crowd into it, and making sure the people were entertained.  But it had no effect on me.  I was going to WIN.  I even thought "Well, I will remember this fondly later, once the match is over."  My legs were twitching with strain and I could feel that I was not going to be able to continue - it was becoming too much. 

Finally things came to an end.  She was underneath me, both of us all tied up like pretzels, when she just lifted her body up, hoisting me off the ground a little, and my hands lost contact.  Game over dude!  Whether or not she was cheating by the official rules of Twister I don't know, but I was happy to accept the end of the game either way.  I told her I was glad to lose because I was about to die and stumbled off.  I spent the next hour struggling to walk because my leg muscles were too beat, so I am glad it didn't go longer.

Now in retrospect that was hot as fuck.  But at the time?  Ice cold.  No reaction.  I think for some people that would be expected but I am the horniest man alive - that old silly stereotype of men thinking about sex every 5 minutes makes me go "Hah, amateurs."  But when competition is in the offing, that totally shuts down and the only thing I think about is striving for victory.

It isn't the winning that I aim for though.  It is attempting to win.  Pushing myself as hard as I can go.  Running to the edge of my capabilities.  Win or lose, the key is to play with all you have.  That is where the greatest joy is found.

Winning is nice and all, don't get me wrong.  It just isn't the key to capturing my brain like intense competition is.

I suspect most people are happy being partly in each world.  Sexy games can be fun because you are both playing a game and flirting, doing each in part.  But I don't do halfways like that.  If I am competing, that is the only thing I am doing.  If I am having sex, that is the only thing I am doing.  Straddling the line between those worlds is not a thing I do.

This has a lot to do with my divided mind.  Director can multitask to some extent - usually trying to accomplish something while worrying about other things.  Passion though?  He does only one thing.  Nothing else even exists.  While I was wrestling and twisting I was totally Passion.  Doing exactly one thing with all my focus.

Maybe if I ever go back to work I will skip sales and go straight to organizing sexy events.  Getting paid to play naked twister seems like a pretty sweet gig to me.