Bill & Frank’s audio podcast derived from the DatingGenius dating advice blog.

More Episodes: http://billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/

So, I’m minding my business the other day and all of these people are Twittering about the BET Awards that were going on right that minute. Stuff about how Soldier Boy (or however he misspelled it) should have been restricted to lip sync, because he can’t hit his notes, and how the censors missed cutting the audio when someone said “Dancin’ and ****”.

So, I decide to tune in to this disaster, and I see a very classy performance by Maxwell followed by some raunchy rap garbage that basically had every third word cut out by the censor, who, at that point was probably fearful of losing his/her job (and VERY rightfully so) to close out the show. Hopefully, the programming director got fired along with the censor for having NO TASTE WHATSOEVER… but that’s not the point.

I had the DVR running, so, as usual, I was Fast-Forwarding all of the commercials. However, there was one commercial that they kept running and eventually, I decided to back up and watch it. It was for this upcoming BET show called “Tiny & Toya”.

So, it’s not relevant *WHY* I decided to finally watch this commercial, hahaha but I did. So you see a couple of typical BET-looking chicks on the screen and then they start talking in sound bites…. Actually, someone uploaded the video to YouTube, so watch it for yourself:

For those of you that don’t want to bother watching it, here’s the transcript:

That’s Toya
She ain’t just Lil’ Wayne’s ex-wife
She’s MY friend
And that’s Tiny
You may know her as T.I.’s woman
MMMMHMMMMM
But she my girl (Yes, I know how to type and spell, but this is what they said.)
I’m not trippin’
I’m livin’ good, I got great kids, I got a great family, I’m great
For years, I’ve been stuck in this box
I felt like, I can’t have this without this man (Yeah, that’s actually true..)
I see myself breaking a cycle
Yeah, Baby!
a heh a heh heh
Tiny & Toya.. Series premieres June 30th

Now… Who do you think these women are, having either watched that video or read the transcript?… That’s right. Nobody. NO-BOD-DEEE.

We know why this is. BET caters to the lowest common denominator in the hopes to get views and eventually replace their infomercial programming with real shows.

The problem here is that the way they chose to present these ladies is that if they hadn’t hooked up with guys that turned out to be rappers, they wouldn’t be JACK in life. Too many of y’all represent yourselves in this fashion. Stop it. Make sure that you FLAUNT your accomplishments. Whomever you laid down with and maybe even had kids with doesn’t make for a brilliant resume for you.

It’s not like the sports playoffs. If you lose in the playoffs an then that team goes on to win the World Series or the Super Bowl, you get to say “I lost to the best team in the world”, and you might be able to get some credit for that… Maybe. OTOH, if your claim to fame is spreading your legs for a rapper like all the other groupies, that’s not prime. It’ll get other groupies that watch BET to watch your show and dream about parlaying their sexual activities into houses, cars and televison shows, but tell your agent to make sure you’re represented PROPERLY, not only in the shows you do, but in your promotional materials like commercials and posters.

So I’m watching this commercial, and I’m like “Oh… Great. Here. We. GO!!! :/” and then they decide to show part of the actual footage at the after-party for the end-with-crappy-rap Awards show.

A little more background information… The one called “Tiny”, I had never heard of her before, except that she was featured in this series about a rapper that got caught buying guns and got sent to jail. I had never heard of HIM before he got caught for the weapons charge. They showed him going home a few times in that series and showed the NICE-looking family life that they have together. Total props from me for their lifestyle. Seemed like a beautiful family situation. Oh… This show was *NOT* on BET. It was on MTV. Anyway…

I swear I watched every frame of Tiny’s man’s series and they didn’t ONCE mention her accomplishments. If I missed the mention, someone let me know where it is, and I’ll stand corrected. So I recognized her in the commercial as the chick that had kids for this rapper. *yawn*…

The episode keeps playing and at some point she mentions being a singer, so I’m like “OH, that’s interesting.” So then she goes on to say she used to be in a singing GROUP, so I’m like “That’s cute.” So then she says the group’s name is XSCAPE!!! :O

So now, I’m like “Wait a minute… I’ve actually HEARD OF Xscape back in the day!”…

If that wasn’t bad enough, the camera pans across some award, so I back it up and freeze the frame and it turns out that “Tiny” CO-WROTE “No Scrubs”, which won a Grammy Award in 2000 for “Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal” and “Best R&B Song” and remains one of the funniest, catchiest and most relevant R&B records for chicks to this very day:

*Notice the 7,320,780 views on this track!.. Props.

So, now that you know this, go back and watch that so-called commercial again. How come they wasted their 30 seconds talking about who Tiny laid down with? How come they didn’t mention that she’s a singer? How come they didn’t mention she’s an award-winning songwriter? How come they didn’t mention she had HER. OWN. MONEY. before she hooked up with a rapper?… Garbage.

Why is this relevant to YOU? Because fine chicks are less than a dime a dozen. They’re actually FREE. You have to pay to go to the movies, but you can get laid for free in this town. So… Instead of thinking you’re making yourself unique and desired by showing off how nice your ass is or how well you apply makeup or the hair you bought from the weave shop, you’re really better off by advertising and emphasizing your actual individual accomplishments. That way, maybe a guy will be IMPRESSED with you as a human being and think about something other than tappin’ that right quick and breaking north with no delay.

~Bill

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I will attempt to clarify, hahaha

Technology is changing. The way people relate to each other is changing. Back in the day, people used to send letters by Pony Express or on the train or on ships that would travel from America to Europe. Eventually, they were using telegraphs & telephones. Eventually portable phones. Eventually pagers, then text messaging and now smartphones. People used DOS, then Windows, then Mac OS. People programmed with ADA, C++, Visual Basic…..

Just because you composed incredible letters that you mailed to your loved one doesn’t mean you can kick that live, today over the phone. Just because you were a genius at database programming 15 years ago doesn’t mean you know A SINGLE THING about Twitter. Just because I was involved in live streaming three years ago doesn’t mean I know anything about it TODAY:

Jonny Goldstein & Bre Pettis – October, 2006

The way I’ve seen things happen… A LOT, in Social Media is that someone does ONE THING… *EVAR* IN LIFE, and from that point on, they’re declared relevant. Their opinions on totally unrelated things are heralded because they invented something ONCE, or they wrote ONE really popular blog post or book or they worked for ONE company that everyone was jocking at the time. After that, there’s no need to look at that person’s track record.. It’s like they made it into the hall of fame.

The difference with the hall of fame, like, in Baseball or Football is that you don’t ask hall-of-famers to coach teams AFTER they’re inducted. Why is that? Because the systems their teams used and that they individually excelled at… are OVER. There are new formations, new plays, new philosophies, there’s new equipment, players are faster and stronger… The ONLY way a hall-of-famer would be selected to coach a current team is if he had proven that he understands and mentally excels in the workings of the CURRENT environment.

The way I see it.. For those of us who care about such things, we have a new opportunity every single day to reestablish our relevance in our chosen fields of knowledge or expertise. Actually, I suppose there are two sorts of relevance. There’s the relevance in which you’re like a textbook… You’re still a relevant source of information about Pascal programming…. For whatever THAT’S worth….. Then there would be relevance to current concepts or technologies. What I’m saying is that the hall-of-famers DEFINITELY deserve all the props for their past achievements! No doubt. A lot of people act like relevance in one area is transferrable to relevance in another and tend to follow people as authorities on things that they really aren’t.

The reason I started out with part 1 of this article is that my “reaching back” situation helped me to recognize the lack of transferral of relevance over time. There are at least two reasons why it’s necessary for me to reestablish relevance with people I knew a long time ago, when we were kids.

1. Time has passed and they may not even remember ever having spent time with me.

2. “The Game” has changed immensely for all of us since we were kids. Whatever relevance I *HAD* in that environment isn’t applicable to our lives in their current formats.

This is why I ask(ed) the question “Are you still relevant?”. I don’t mean relevant to yourself or relevant to the people you interact with right now. The question is, how long do your props last? How long will people give you credit for whatever you did in the past? How long can you ride on past glory? How long will people still say “There goes whomever!” if you’re not striving to stay on top of new technologies, concepts and philosophies? Have you let yourself get out-of-date? If so, what’s your plan on rectifying that? Do you have one? Do you care?

On the flip side of that, what are the credentials of the people that you “follow” or consider to be authorities in their field? What are the credentials of the “experts” that you hire to work on your projects or help your company excel? The dating columns you read? What do the writers really know about people or relationships? Have you checked into any of this, or did you take someone else’s word that this person knows what they’re talking about and subsequently passed that potentially erroneous information on to your own friends and followers?

Are you accepting advice from people who were good at Atari 2600 games about XBOX games?… Are you accepting advice from guys that don’t know any women about women?… Are you asking gals that get played left and right what their advice is about men?… Are you relying on someone with NO RECORD WHATSOEVER of being a video producer or editor to complete your project professionally and on time?… Are you relying on someone with no record whatsoever of increasing a company’s ROI, efficiency or visibility to lead your company to Social Media glory?…..

Good Luck with that.

~ Bill Cammack

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I had an interesting experience happen two months ago back in May, which I talked about in “Who Are You?”. Basically, I sent a friends request on Facebook to someone I was friends with in Elementary School and she had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA who I was!

Now, of course, there are like a million people I’ve forgotten since Elementary, so her perception of me (or lack thereof, haha) isn’t a big deal. My perception of her happened to remain fresh because she’s an actress and shows up in films or on television every couple of years, so I pretty much couldn’t forget her if I tried!

However.. The situation made me consider what I’ve done… or perhaps how my mind works when it comes to my friends. My system retains what I’ll call positive, negative or neutral remembrances of people or they exit my mind entirely. All the time, I’ve run into friends that I haven’t seen for years, and we picked up our conversations and hangouts as if we had just seen each other yesterday. That’s because my system operates on a kind of suspended-animation basis.

In my mind, I don’t stop being friends with someone because we’re out of contact. I either have a generally good, bad, neutral or “zero” (forgotten) feeling about them when I run into them the next time, and then we take it from there. That’s partially what makes me who I am as a video editor. I can see footage and retain it in my mind and then make the video from memory instead of having to see it physically on the screen. I never “rough cut”. I’m always laying video and audio down exactly as I wanted it in my mind, checking it and then adjusting it.

So, after “Who Are You?”, I let it lay for a couple of months, and today, I went for another round of Elementary / JHS Facebook friend invites. The difference for me this time was that I’m no longer expecting people to remember me because I “remember” them. I’m not expecting anyone else to have retained ANY information about spending time with me years ago, even if I remember buying my FIRST album with them, or spending the night at their house, or cutting school with them or playing sports against them or getting into fights with them or liking the same music they do or scoring higher than them and everyone else in three entire classes on a math test.

It’s cool. It is what it is. They remember me or they don’t. They’ll accept the invite or they won’t.

The other aspect of this is that even if they DID remember “who I am”… That was then, and this is now. A whole lot of time has passed and a whole lot of stuff has happened that obviously make us different people today than we were in 6th and 7th grade. It’s clearly easier to kick-start friendships with people you knew from College and High School, because we were all more developed as characters/personalities by then, things aren’t so different now as when we were in school together and not as much time has passed.

So, even if I *HAD* props back in the day, that doesn’t mean that I still have them now and wouldn’t have to start all over (if I chose to attempt to do so) in relating to them as an absolute stranger.

It’s really very interesting, and I suppose there are a lot of people who wonder WHY someone would even care about reaching back to people he or she used to know years ago. I talked about that back in April 2008, in “Digital Internet Snobbery”. Basically, by staying on the cutting edge of Social Media, I realized a year ago that everyone that wasn’t as advanced as I was, I was like “Let them eat cake”.

It’s not that I *didn’t* care. It’s that I couldn’t. Social Media takes up all of your day, every day. Staying on the edge requires a lot of R&D and Trial & Error. There’s no time for MySpace when you’re advancing on Facebook. There’s no time for Ning when you’re advancing on your own blog. There’s no time for Joost when you’re watching Hulu. There’s no time for Jaiku when you’re advancing on Twitter……

So, my goal in reaching back is to let people know that I remember them from back in the day and extend that ping to them.. That recognition. They’ll appreciate it, not appreciate it, despise it or think nothing of it. Doesn’t matter one way or the other.

It mattered the first time, because that was my wake-up call as far as how my own system works. At this point, I’mma play it where it lays. I’ll reach out when I see someone I remember and that’s that. In the meantime, I’ll figure out what I’m going to do with my OTHER 1443 Facebook friends.

~ Bill Cammack

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Listen / Download => Street Game 03: Trust & Truth in Relationships [18:46]

Bill & Frank’s audio podcast derived from the DatingGenius dating advice blog.

More Episodes: http://billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/

Check out the Indy Mogul (indymogul.com) Season 03 Promo video!

Make sure you stick around for the end and watch the trailer for the upcoming test film, which will be released next Tuesday, July 14th!!!.. MUUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA

~Bill

Listen / Download => Street Game 02: Female Players vs Male Players (.mp3) [13:43]

Bill & Frank’s audio podcast derived from the DatingGenius dating advice blog.

More Episodes: http://billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/

Listen / Download => Street Game 01: Denial & Experience (.mp3) [7:32]

Bill & Frank’s audio podcast derived from the DatingGenius dating advice blog.

Please leave comments/questions/suggestions below in the comments section of this post. This is an evolving project, so your opinion might help us make a better show!

Part 01 of a multi-part episode…..

More Episodes: http://billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/

Those of you who are regular readers already know who “Frank” is, haha. He and I recorded an audio podcast this evening that I’ll be editing into episodes for release here in the DatingGenius blog under the show name & category “Street Game”.

The first few episodes are already recorded, but we’re going to be looking for feedback and reader questions, comments and perhaps call-in participation, depending on how the project goes, so stay tuned!

I’ve actually shunned the audio medium, opting to use either text or video. I now see certain advantages to using just audio, such as people being able to listen to the show on more players than they could see videos on and not needing to look at the show while it’s going on, so they can play it in the background while they have other windows open on their browsers or whatever.

Thanks to Frank for jumpin’ in on this experiment with me. For those of you interested in technical information, I used skype, and Frank was on his phone. I’m not sure what direction “Street Game” will go in, but that’s part of the fun. Right now, I’m thinking it’s going to be a daily show. It might be better weekly. We’ll find out.

Anyway… I know we had fireworks yesterday… Get ready for SOME MORE! hahahaha

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
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BillCammack.com

Ominous Weather Conditions over NYC…

This may be the right time to resume my videogaming career…..

~Bill

um… WOW! hahaha

This is all @Brett’s fault. Brett put up a reward for a picture of me when I wasn’t posing, and @Skyle figured she’d cash in!!! :O

Unfortunately, Selina didn’t know how hard it was going to be to get paid, so she had all these extra attempts and decided to make a montage out of them with Animoto! hahaha.. well…

I might have to use this as my show open from now on, hahaha

um.. Thanks, Selina… *waves*

Bill Cammack, Mike Hudack, Annie Tsai & Andres Palmiter

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

The reason I joined Twitter is the same reason I joined any Social Media site. There were people that I ALREADY KNEW that started using a new site, app or tool and I wanted to be involved in this new (and hopefully BETTER and INNOVATIVE) way to contact them or keep up with what they’re doing. What that did was give Twitter a particular flavor for me. It was the place where I went to receive up-to-the-minute information about people that I was keeping in contact with anyway via newsgroups or forums or email or their blogs or whatever.

The first thing I did was stop looking at the public timeline. Some people are fascinated with what random people have to say about random topics. I’m not one of those people. It’s very nice that someone in France saw a bird. I was interested in ‘hearing’ about who was trying to find a cab in Austin Texas to get from one SXSW party to another or that someone had a question or answer about videoblogging or editing or some other topic I was interested in. This is because I joined Twitter following certain people, meaning they were going there, so I wanted to be there too. Granted, it was about 50 people, but I already knew from prior experience with them what I was going to hear from them, and that’s what I was ‘buying’ into.

I remember standing on a line at nighttime, waiting to get into a party (which I normally don’t do, but this was extenuating circumstances), and I happened to be standing behind a few civilians (people not deeply involved in the internet) who started talking about what they had Twittered. One of the gals had announced that she went shopping. Another one had announced that they were going to be coming to this party that we were waiting for. I remember thinking “ah… THESE are public-timeline-people” and considering how all of us standing there use the same service but will never be in contact with each other, because they’re talking about NOTHING! Or, I should say, all the rest of THEM will never be in contact with ME. They’ll have their little pocket of people to communicate with and share stories about ice cream parlors and the mall. I remember being glad that everyone has their own set of people they Twitter with and having absolutely ZERO INTEREST in any of them becoming a follower of mine on Twitter.

Fast-Forward to July 2009 and all the civilians are running around trying to get more Twitter followers. Huh? They don’t care who you are. They don’t care what you do. They don’t care what you said… or IF you said anything at all. Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow. The clear focus is quantity over quality… like as if you get a prize for having a certain amount of Twitter followers.

I understand why this is, to a degree. For a lot of people, Twitter is their first opportunity at feeling what it’s like to be popular. The concept of one-to-many communication is fascinating and enticing. People can send a message from their phone on a bus somewhere and be heard all over the world, or at least by all of their followers at the same time, even if they’re all locals. You can tell a joke and 10 people might “lolol” at it. You can be the first one to break news about a bridge falling down or a plane landing in water. Normally, the only people who would hear you are people who you could physically tell, or people who read your blog after the time it takes you to post it and the time it takes them to check it and read it. All of a sudden, you get to feel like thousands of people care what YOU have to say. I see why people have become addicted to that feeling.

Personally, while I fully APPRECIATE the fact that randoms read my material, I’m most interested in what the people who know what I’m talking about and go through the same things I go through think and have to say about what I post. Right now, I have 2,586 Twitter followers and I’m following 895 people (which is STILL too many people to follow and actually read what everyone has to say). I know people with TENS OF THOUSANDS of followers who are also following that same number of people back! :O … Obviously, they’re using Twitter for a different purpose and experience than I am, but at those numbers, it’s clear that the vast majority of those people being “followed” are actually being IGNORED due to so many posts coming through on each refresh that most of them are flooded off the bottom of the stack before ever having a chance to be seen. Also, if someone COULD read thousands of posts a day, that would mean that they weren’t WORKING and were about to get FIRED from their jobs.

So this is what’s fascinating and annoying to me about the evolution of Twitter, or maybe it’s not evolution, but that the lunatics are now running the asylum. Every show you turn on, some civilian is talking about Twitter and trying to sound intelligent when they’re reading off of the teleprompter and don’t even know the proper inflection to put on words. They SHOULD be embarrassed, but they’re not, because they know that nobody else watching their report knows anything more than they do about the topic.

Twitter addresses are becoming like phone numbers to the civilians. They’re treating this like as if having 2,586 followers means that I have 2,586 people’s phone numbers or 2, 586 people’s ear when I want to talk about politics (which is never) or sell them something or have them all tune in to one of my live broadcasts. Not only is that completely untrue, but with all these people running around trying to get followers by adding everyone in creation, your list of followers is incredibly diluted by people seeking that virtually anonymous fame / acknowledgment. I think the funniest / most pathetic part of this is when people add you and then you delay checking their profiles for a few days, and by the time you do, they’ve already UNFOLLOWED YOU! This is completely ridiculous and shows you who only added you in the hopes you would add them back and inflate their fake popularity ranking of Twitter followers.

Is any of this a problem? No. I still follow the same core of people I’ve been following from 2007 to 2009. I’ve added people along the way whom I’ve found to be interesting online or that I’ve met IRL and shared good times with. I add some people because their bios look interesting or indicate that they might have something to say that I might want to hear or that they might have an answer to a question that *I* have, should they choose to follow me back. It’s just interesting, seeing people coming to the table these days with ZERO sense of community, looking to win a blue ribbon for having the most people follow them in the least amount of time or gaining people that they can peddle their wares to online. *yawn*

There are lots of interesting new people showing up as well, diving into Twitter head-first with valuable, RELEVANT information. Hopefully, they’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and find good groups of people to interact with efficiently & productively. I used to subscribe to the concept of “follow everyone that follows you”, but as I said, that became too many people to honestly follow, so I pared it down to ~700 and now it’s back up to ~900. I’ve been using apps to set up groups, which helps.. but I think I need another subdivision so I can sort people by RELEVANCE and attempt to get back to the essence of what I loved about Twitter when I first started using it.

~ Bill Cammack

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Episode Clip:

So, off the bat, we don’t seem very similar as far as dating goes, but she’s a pleasant person and nice to look at, so I don’t mind chatting her up for a while…

At some point, the party moves to another location, at which point she was heading home and the rest of us were heading out to party some more. I was already WAAAAAAY over my time limit to determine whether I was gonna kick it with her or not, so I had decided that I wasn’t going to request contact information from her and if she wanted to get in touch with me, she knew to Google me or she knew we had mutual acquaintances and could find me through them.

Now that I’m writing this, I realize that this was actually a VERY important component of the bad decision I ended up making. I had gone over this scenario lots of times between when it happened and today and had neglected to rewind far enough back to the point where I had already written her off as far as tonight. That doesn’t mean my decision was any less poor, haha.. Just that I understand now why I went the route I did.

So… hmm… ok.. In thinking about the rewind some more, and considering my mindset about her by the time we left that party, I now realize how I got in the situation I got in. Before just now, I had been asking myself “How in the HELL did you end up walking with her AND some other guys instead of just HER?”

So when we were leaving place #1, I was going to be heading to place #2 and she was going to be heading to the subway to go home. This is where I made error #1 and told her I’d be right outside while I went to see if these other chicks wanted to come with.

Technically, that wasn’t an error, because I thought she was going home, which would have meant I would have been showing up at place #2 without entertainment in-hand, which is never a good idea. However, in being efficient about keeping my night going as far as entertainment, I wrote her off as past tense even though she was actually physically still right there where I was. I was seeing her as if she had already gotten on the subway, so I started interacting with her as if she were already gone. I was in some kind of “Nice to meet you, see you around the scene” endgame mode, when I should have been in a “This person that you’ve already had fun with is still here with you until she actually leaves” mode.

So the other chicks aren’t ready to leave yet, so I tell them where they’re going and then go upstairs to tell the accountant good-bye. She’s ready to leave on the spot, and if she had, I wouldn’t have thought about ANY of this stuff. She decides to walk to a subway station that’s in the same direction I’m heading to the next party, so we’re walking and talking…

However, due to blunder #1, my not leaving the place WITH her, we’ve now achieved two more people that are walking with us. Two guys. This is where oversight/error #2 comes in. Since I had already considered her as having left, it wasn’t a big deal that these guys were walking with us. One of them, I knew already, and the other, I was just meeting for the first time right there. The problem is that when you add other people into the mix, you can’t really talk about what you SHOULD be talking about with a gal. You talk about watered-down stuff or entirely different topics so as not to have your and her business “in the street”. I wasn’t worried about this, though, because she was already gone as far as I was concerned, and I was just escorting her to the subway.

The turning point in the situation was that she decided NOT to go to the subway and disappear from my life forever, but instead to continue on with the three of us to the party that we were going to. I was glad that she was going to keep hanging out with us, but I hadn’t considered what I was thinking of her in order to reverse it. In other words, I was still treating her like she was immediately leaving.

So my lack of paying attention to the present and instead focusing on an envisioned future (without her in it) led to this rolling mistake. I should have left the place with her. I should have walked with her by myself. If Woody had gone straight to the police, this would never have happened…

So error #3 was not recognizing the changeover and not mentally adjusting to the new situation… Error #4 was letting this guy I’ve never seen before control the conversation.

So now, I’m basically an innocent bystander to my own rap. Granted, it wasn’t much of a rap, because I wasn’t rapping TO her and, in fact had already written her off as soon as she had said she was going home. But what happened was that the new guy was talking to her about something, blah blah blah and then, somehow, he started talking about “picking up women”. I don’t know how this happened, because I didn’t care what he was saying, so I wasn’t listening in on his conversation with her. It just so happened to be loud enough for me to hear “picking up” or “picked up” or something like that.

I doubt their conversation had anything to do with me, because when women ask me what I do, I just say “I’m a video editor”. I can’t afford to say “I write a dating blog”, because that immediately puts women on guard for what I’m attempting to do to them. So, as far as I know, the accountant didn’t think I knew anything about dating at all.

In general, you don’t want to discuss picking up women….. AROUND WOMEN, unless they’re already in your inner circle. If these are your homegirls, and they know you do what you do… Yeah! Talk about picking up women all day. Also, you don’t want to talk about picking up women in front of women with guys who you don’t know what level they’re on as far as kickin’ it with chicks. This is a MAJOR BLUNDER and counts as #5 in this rolling mistake. If a guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s liable to make some sort of egregious error and subsequently drag YOU down with the sinking ship he just blasted a hole in. Also, if he DOES know what he’s doing, he could decide to intentionally sabotage your rap by saying the wrong thing(s) and jacking up her mood.

So, all of these errors led to the one I actually want to talk about… This guy says “blah blah blah picking up women”, and somehow now has incorporated me into their conversation. I replied something to him, to which he replies something to the effect of:

“That’s How You Picked *HER* Up?”

……………

So now, time slows down as all three people are looking at me. As soon as he said what he said, I had looked at her face, and her mind was suddenly kicking into gear, thinking about things she hadn’t thought of before. She looked like she had seen something shocking, snapped out of it in a few seconds and then looked in my direction, to hear what my response was going to be…

I guess time didn’t really slow down, but I was suddenly thinking at hyper-speed, running permutations and potential outcomes. On the one hand, I wanted to say nothing at all, silently pleading The 5th. The problem with a non-commital response is that it allows her to think anything and everything about the situation. You’re giving up control by not attempting to define the situation through words or actions. On top of that, it looks suspicious that you can’t answer a simple question.

Except.. It’s NOT a simple question, because answering a question about HOW I picked her up stipulates to my picking her up in the first place. I don’t “pick women up”. I hang out with them. If they happen to get lucky, good for them. Therefore, at no point in time had I said anything to the accountant as far as dating her, messing with her or even liking the color or her eyes or how pleasant her personality is. This is why she had this “What’s he talking about, picked her up?” look on her face right after he said it. So, I don’t pick women up in the traditional “You come here often?”, “Did it hurt… When you fell out of Heaven?” sense, but at the same time, the fact that I was hanging out with her WAS the pickup.

So I wasn’t inclined to answer the question about HOW I picked her up, because I would have been admitting to her that I DID pick her up, which defeats the purpose of the style.

OTOH… I didn’t want to flat-out deny picking her up either. That would have given her the impression that I wasn’t interested. It also would have been completely disingenuous, because I had been hanging out with at least six other women at party #1 and I left with *her*. Clearly, by the fact of the circumstances we were currently in at the time of the conversation, I was in the process of some format of a pickup on her.

Tactically, denying the pickup was the way to go.. “Pick-up? I didn’t pick her up! We’re just walking down the street together in the middle of the night, even though we never laid eyes on each other before about an hour ago. A heh.. A heh heh *grin*”. I could have recovered from that easily, and it would have been a good excuse to pull her to the side later and explain how I really DID like her and WANTED to pick her up, except I denied it so as to keep our business ‘out the street’, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, while I was running scenarios and permutations in the seconds I had between his question and my inevitable answer, I failed to account for my past-tense view of her and decided that I was bored with the situation and was going to try something off the wall. Ladies, let this be a lesson to you hahaha.. If a guy does something completely odd, it might not be that he’s crazy, but that he just doesn’t care about the outcome and he’s experimenting.

So, without skipping too many beats, I start some BS explanation of “How I picked her up”. Error #6.. Following someone else’s lead when you’re kickin’ it with a chick. It was a HORRIBLE idea. It was completely ill-advised. I totally had no idea what was going to happen as I was explaining to a guy I had never met before the process that I used to pick up a girl that I had never met before who was standing right next to me and that I had never picked up in the first place (so far as she knew at the time). Fellaz… Do NOT try this at home!

Well.. It wasn’t worth it. Not to me. It was worth it as an experiment and to be able to tell y’all about it, but in real-time, I just felt kind of empty after I finished saying whatever I said, and I have no idea what I said, because I was just making it up on the fly and I was more paying attention to her reactions to what I was saying than whatever words I selected. Basically, I had burned whatever rap I had been working on to the ground and was going to have to bail altogether or start something completely new with her after my phony pickup confession.

Really, I felt pretty drained. I immediately started contemplating how this happened to me in the first place. Actually, some of my processing cycles before I spoke up were taken up by thoughts of “um… How the hell did this happen to me?” But I had to suppress that to decide what route I was going with the answer. As soon as I finished, I devoted all energies to assessing the situation, because it was a MAJOR blunder on my part. Now, through writing it out, I see how it happened.

And I supposed that concludes this story with Error #7. Instead of getting back in the game, I was just disgusted with myself and preoccupied with taking mental notes about the surrounding circumstances which led to my grand soliloquy about nothing of import. I basically grounded myself, which might have seemed to her that I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I hope I didn’t come off like that, but I’m pretty sure I did. Actually, I had put myself on punishment and was just disgusted and didn’t feel like working around the issue. I owed her more than that, but didn’t give it to her.

So, gentlemen… The moral of the story is to keep your eyes on the prize, control your situations and environments and make sure you retain the lead role when you’re rapping to a chick. If you’re gonna fumble, make sure you do it on your own terms… Not because you got lazy and let someone else kick the ball out of your hands while you were standing there watching it all go down.

I guess as a bonus, I’ll add in Error #8, which is the fact that since I knew there were plenty of women that I knew at the next party, I was totally unconcerned with fumbling ONE, and that contributed to my experimental nature. So, not only shouldn’t I have considered her past tense until she actually LEFT, but I should have maintained my level of concentration on her and attention to her until the situation played itself all the way out.

I think that’s what disgusted me the most about this situation. I got bored, I got lazy, I started slackin’… and then I GOT CAUGHT SLIPPIN’!!!

Ah well. C’est la vie. Easy come, Easy go!

~Bill

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Kunal & Bill

Bill & Jackie

This is the end
Beautiful Friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never, look into your eyes, again…

Can you picture what will be?
So limitless and free
Desperately in need
Of some… Stranger’s hand
In a… Desperate land…

Michael Jackson died today.
Thank You for everything.