(RT) #WTF: This is the CREEPIEST. Email. Ever. (guess who's back ... back again)

ohhhh my goodness gracious. So yesterday I posted an email exchange between me and this duderino that I apparently served once when I worked at this little kosher restaurant in Beverly Hills.

TOTALLY creeped me out ... like hardcore. Well, he responded - and it's not getting much better. UGHH!! 

Dude, it's Jen - one n. What was creepy? THE ENTIRE THING!!! THERE WAS NOTHING NOT CREEPY ABOUT THAT EXCHANGE!!!! 

I didn't reply back to his email, but an hour later he sent another ... 

Oh good god. I didn't reply. I have no words ... no ... words ... 

#creeper

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

The Matching Hypothesis: Half-baked Implications for Proverbial Ugly Ducklings and Nerdy Girls.

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

I’m pretty sure I angered H’Ttp-U’rl, baleful god of the internet, by warping his time and space with textual clusters so unnecessarily long and dense with syntactic buttfuckery and semi-fictional lexicon for the past few weeks, but...eh, here we go again.

There were a few topics floating around that I considered rambling on about, but given how pretty much all my posts have basically thus far been slipshod psychology lectures thinly veiled by boner jokes and one attempt to get you very drunk...well, not really gonna break the mold with this one.

I talked a lot in the ‘Geek Chic et Moi’ compendium about ‘Similarity’ and its statistical importance to the survival of a relationship - mostly in terms of attitudes (or in the case of my li’l nerds, interests as well) - but it actually goes a little deeper...or I guess shallower, really, than that. Lo, “The Matching Hypothesis”.

To reiterate: yes, birds of a feather seem to flock together in terms of intangibles like attitudes - but study after study after study since 1966 have noted a similar trend in the physical realm as well. Yeah, we all know and/or have seen a short, dog-faced 4 walking hand in hand with a statuesque 8 --- but by and large, self-perceived 7’s are subconsciously predisposed to shacking up with other 7’s, 5’s with 5’s, and *sigh* 10’s with 10’s (give or take a “point” in either direction). And in those major point disparities, there’s usually a good chance someone’s income is making up the difference. The good news - statistically, an immaculate personality can *also* help tip the scales; but unfortunately still not as much as hawtz will for chicas or “resources” will for dudes.

Evolutionarily and just like...generally, it makes sense: You date too far *up* - you’ll develop an actually justified jealousy and paranoia that your partner could (and may) easily do way way better than you that leads to stress and subsequent resentment; you date too far *down* - you may start to feel like you settled, begin harboring resentment as such, and then feel even shittier and stressed when no matter how often or strongly you demonstrate your love, you can’t get your boo to drop the annoying jealous, paranoid, ungrateful little shit act.

Excess stress kills both people and relationships. Evolutionarily that stress came from the thought that either *she* would secretly bone a dude with a bigger club and have you raise his offspring, or that *he’d* decide to shower a much hotter Neanderthal babe’s kids with his resources. It was literally an issue of genetic fitness and survival. Now it’s mostly just steady access to poon, comfort, and companionship that’s at stake.

This isn’t to say we don’t find ourselves consistently attracted to 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s no matter where we fall on the spectrum; I find Olivia Wilde and Yvonne Strahovski to be some of the most attractive women, like, *ever* - but distinguishing between “being attracted to” and “wanting a relationship with” is crucial. According to theory, despite the Destroyer-of-Worlds-class boner these women give me, some part of my brain just KNOWS they are not suitable mates because - shit, even suspending the fucking retardedness of the idea and imagining that one (or both :D) decided to call me theirs (for more than one torrid, amazing night) - I’d live in a state of perpetual crippling anxiety that they’d eventually realize the huge mistake they’d made; knowing this, my brain says “fuck *that* noise,” pre-emptively killing any motivation to even *want* to make that happen.

I mean, it’s a bad example since famous people have delusional (and often unattractive) fans constantly proposing to them from their azalea bushes right before the cops arrive, but the point is that in a non-celebrity scenario, when faced with someone we find stupefyingly attractive, our mind seems to do some quick and dirty math regarding the short AND long-term odds based on our self-perceived attractiveness, fostering or inhibiting the motivation to pursue accordingly.

On its own the hypothesis is pretty nifty, but a question I kept putting to my professors that none really had an answer for was thus: how does a *sudden, drastic shift* in one’s physical attractiveness affect their dating patterns?

Like, let’s say you have a “She’s All That”-esque scenario where dorky, largely ignored girl whose consequent self-perception puts her at a 4 suddenly shoots up to an 8 in the eyes of others. While I’m sure the newfound attention would *eventually* push her self-perception up to an 8ish, realistically there’s gotta be a transition period where she still feels drawn towards other 4’s who now - while finding her incredibly beautiful - won’t feel as viscerally drawn to her. At the same time, she’s receiving attention from the hypothetical Freddie Prinze Jr’s (just...go with it) but it registers as...I mean, almost *alien* to her; and despite her objectively thinking “yes, he is really fucking hot,” and *knows* she should want to date him, her ‘motivator’ hasn’t overcome the mental safeguard against doing so yet. It’s like some lonely, fucked state of quantifiable-attractiveness limbo.

It’s just something I was wondering because, hell, I feel like it happens more often in real life than one might think, and doesn’t even require the ugly-duckling/beautiful-swan transformation. I know plenty o’ young beautiful yet nerdy women who just kind of sat idly on the romantic sidelines until that weird time either late or post-high school when the guys suddenly realized “oh, shit, yeah we totally *do* like smart chicks now,” at which point those girls (much to their confusion) spontaneously found themselves super in demand, seemed sort of overwhelmed by the attention, and were kind of unsure how to react to it.

For many it was a turbulent transition; thrust as it were, fresh-faced and well behind the learning curve into the middle of a battle between the sexes that had been raging amongst their peers since long before they arrived, with hardened veterans - calloused by experience and versed in social nuance - already filling the ranks on both sides.  Some hit the ground running and performed admirably while learning - with curiosity, responsibility, and strength in equal measure; a few simply hid and removed themselves from the equation entirely; and others...lost both themselves and sight of who they were, abandoning caution and foresight, giving themselves over totally to the conflict and becoming an unrecognizable mess devoid of dignity in the process.

It’s a hell of a thing. It ain’t easy being nerdy.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

Weird Al Says: #WTF?!

The main paralyzing ingredient in Botox is also so poisonous that 500g of it can kill the ENTIRE world population.

This has been a moment of ... WTF?!

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

Geek Chic et Moi (Part II - THE DARK SIDE): DAS GEEKLUST! (Or) Sweeping Generalizations Based on Anecdotal Evidence!

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

Last week I did how I thusly do, gettin’ all pensive and theoretical and shit about Geek Chic, some potential sources of its appeal, and why for ein male übergeeken such as myself, the female geek’s existence is not only awesome, but potentially vital.

I mentioned before how the idea of a woman with a supermodel physique and JPL physicist’s brain (and Lego collection) cropped up in the media in the 90’s, making the quick hop from plausibility to full blown acceptance within the space of a few years. With the exception of a few cable networks that pride themselves on glorifying the rich and stupid as well as the asinine minutiae of their daily lives, beautiful women who are strong, smart, and even silly are prominently represented across all mediums of entertainment.

Ubiquitous as they may be, however, the novelty still has yet to wear off - for geeky women, this isn’t bad news; in fact, it literally means that the awesomeness with which male geeks in particular regard their female counterparts can *still* be likened to that of a pulse rifle that ejects donuts in lieu of spent shells with each shot and repeatedly tells you how good looking and socially competent you are.

But said awesomeness and novelty is not without consequence - in the face of something as masturbatorially epic as an ego-stroking genocidal donut gun, people who are as prone to obsession and worship as geeks are tend to promptly lose their shit, forgoing all reason and discount any peripheral information; in this example the mind is blown and just fixates on the concept of the fucking sweet weapon, not immediately processing the fact that it is in one of the seven scaly, gnarled hands of NonConsensualon, the Violator from the Nerd Rape VII system.

In a more...identifiable scenario, male geek encounters an attractive girl who does something that betrays her identity as a geek/nerd - uses a ten dollar word, alludes to a video game, implies graphic novel readership, or whatever - and from that point forward she could talk about her dissociative identity disorder, kleptomania, dangerously unstable temperament, or *all of them combined*, but since the aforementioned nerd-alert trigger temporarily overwhelmed the poor guy and rendered his train of thought into a broken “HOTGEEKBOOBSAWESOME” [HGBA] loop, it’s like raining punches on a Vicodin-addled person in a vibrating recliner - assuming they even register the blows, they may just think you’re contributing to the massage and give you a drooly smile. The seemingly hypnotic power that implying you’re a geek can have on the male populace and bending them to your nerdy will seems...well, IS kind of badass, but guys’ proneness to “blind geeklust” can *sometimes* have two repercussions that are kinda unfair for you. Geek ladies, you may be the victims of your own excellence:

1) “HE NEVER LOVED ME, HE ONLY LOVED MY GEEKINESS!!!”
We all know at least a few geeky dudes that excitedly jumped into relationships that they knew on some level would be bad for them or for which they were emotionally ill-equipped (in many cases with the girl expressly and honestly spelling out the potential pitfalls and personal issues upfront) later admitting that yeah, they knew what was up but had a lapse in judgment due to the big shiny *GEEK* in the pros column, figuring anything else was a reasonable price to pay. In light of the honesty and balls it may take a girl to be genuine and not conceal that kind of shit in the hopes that the guy will accept them for who they are, making the decision to shoulder the good and insufficiently-considered bad while blinded by geeklust is just very stupid of the guy and horribly unfair to the girl. On the flip side, sometimes it isn’t an issue of turning a blind eye to the caveats, but the formation of unwarranted expectations, such as when there is a failure to...

2) Define “Geek”
Everyone, except apparently the producers of the Big Bang Theory, seem to recognize that the term “Geek” is pretty amorphous and doesn’t really mean anything without context - most people these days won’t assume that because someone reads graphic novels, they must also play World of Warcraft or are virgins, or that someone really into sci-fi is automatically a Japanophile. Geeks can get pretty cranky when someone does stereotypically reason that “If Geek, then a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, etc.” Yet when faced with the nigh legendary hot female geek, some geeky guys will do just that --- in our defense, though, it’s not out of a desire to deride or be malicious, but out of geeklust induced excitement.

You say ‘nerd,’ his eyes glaze over as his mind slips into the HGBA cycle, and suddenly his unrealistic expectation (“earnest hope,” really) is that you *do* automatically love all things geek - or at least specifically all things geek that *he* loves. If so, you're now unfairly saddled with expectations you either can't or have no desire to live up to, regardless of your immediately elaborating on your particular geekdom that is objectively pretty fucking far removed from his own or not (remember, the HGBA cycle has disabled the processing of any further information you provide). In the geekverse, saying “we’re both geeks” is like saying “we’re both from Los Angeles,” and ensures about the same level of platonic or romantic compatibility. When male geeks deal with other male geeks, this seems obvious and they don’t just assume they’ll be best buds --- but when confronted with a hot female geek, logic goes out the window and that otherwise useless, very broad, loosely defined term can suddenly become his raison d'être for why you in fact *belong* together... Until he realizes much later that you don't actually share his undying passion for Yu-Gi-Oh! cards -- even though you never, ever said you did -- and withers from disappointment, I mean.

******
I’m guilty of having done #2 (heh), and know more than a few dudes who have done both and continue to do so. It’s not a common problem, though (I don’t think) - mostly just one for geeks of the highest order whose concepts of ‘like interests’ and ‘chemistry’ hover close enough to each other to be easily confused.

In an attempt to circumvent the problems of geeky regret or disillusionment, I myself engaged in a short, ill-fated excursion on OKCupid a while back. On one hand, it was awesome - on the other, it was *too* awesome and opened up an entirely different can of worms.

To be ensconced in a swath of bastardized behavioral economics and social psychology theories in Part III...

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

Weird Al Says: #WTF?!

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, could never call his own wife or mother because they were both deaf. 

This has been a moment of ... WTF?!