With Michael Jackson’s death last week, I wanted to do a tribute to him, but I didn’t want to just do fawning praise, and I wanted it to fit in with the theme of this blog, which is decontruction of social and sexual dynamics. I think celebrities are great test cases for learning to evaluate psychology because so much of their life is transparent and well-publicized, making them easy to study. Many short-sighted intellectuals disdain pop culture, but I love it, especially gossip magazines and celebrity biographies because they provide great practice for armchair psychologists like myself. And no celebrity is more psychologically fascinating or rich for analysis as Michael Jackson.

So I posted two videos that I thought gave great insights into his psychology with very little comment. I wanted to see if people who read this blog could see many of the themes I discussed being illustrated in the videos. Sometimes I don’t want to just spell things out for people, I want to challenge them to see read between the lines. It was how Iceberg Slim worked in his writing, and something I feel I don’t do enough of. The first video I posted from Michael Jackson this week was Stranger in Moscow.  I love this one for the message in the lyrics, particularly what they say about fame, wealth, culture, race and the different forms of isolation that can arise both because of and in spite of all those factors. But the lyrics to the song become especially poignant the more you understand his psychology and personal history.

Michael Jackson’s life story is a fascinating case study for psychology and human nature.

Joe Jackson was a steel mill operator and failed musician. He worked full-time at a steel mill factory, and in the 50s formed a music group with his brother Luther called The Falcons, where he played guitar. They failed to get a record deal and Joe was forced to go back to working at the steel mill.

While he went to work, the three older brothers would sneak into his belongings and play with his guitar. This is something that would never happen today as kids are rarely left unstimulated long enough to get bored enough to experiment with something like a guitar. Today those three older brothers would be watching BET and sneaking peeks at Internet porn while their dad was at work. The only time they’d probably come close to playing a guitar would be the controller of a Guitar Hero game. But I digress…

Anyway, Tito would play with Joe’s guitar behind his back, while his brothers Jackie and Jermaine sang and danced. One day Tito broke a string, which caused Joe to discover they were playing with his stuff. Being Joe Jackson, he promptly threatened to beat Tito (or actually did beat his ass, depending on who you ass), then changed his mind and asked him to play the guitar for him to see what he could do. As Tito played and the other brothers sang and danced, Joe realized they were actually pretty good and decided to channel his aspirations to be a musician into his children. That’s right, Tito, the butt of endless jokes, was actually the talent in the Jacksons responsible for launching the pop dynasty.

The three brothers formed The Jackson Brothers with some hometown friends, and eventually two younger brothers joined, Marlon and Michael. Michael around the age of 6 or 7 had displayed an uncanny singing and dancing ability and ended up replacing Jermaine, a talented soul singer in his own right, as the lead singer. How uncanny? See for yourself:

An important thing to realize was the type of music and performing the group was doing before joining Motown. Motown’s big innovation was taking a gritty, dirty, sexy and lowdown sound like black soul rhythm and blues (the rhythm and blues that was the precursor of rock and roll, not the genre of music we call rhythm and blues today) and sanitizing and whitewashing it to make it palatable to mainstream America. When you see the clip above, one thing that strikes you is that it’s not the type of music and dancing you normally picture when you picture the Jackson Five. It’s funkier and sassier. Sexier. Less bubblegum and kid-friendly. Very adult. Michael Jackson’s dancing in the vein of Jackie Wilson and James Brown, in a very adult, freewheeling swaggering and strutting sexual fashion. And keep in mind he’s 6 or 7 years old in this clip. And watch him dance again. This is very sexy and adult dancing, especially for the 60s. It’s actually very inappropriate for his age, but the problem was that he was so damned talented you’re willing to overlook it. If you have to choose between being denied seeing such talent and doing what’s right for the kid, most people selfishly choose seeing the talent. And that would be a recurring theme for the boy in his life ahead.

Now keep in mind, this boy is 6 or 7 years old and can dance with an incredible sexual swagger. This is the kind of dancing that could make a grown woman moist to watch. Yet another often overlooked aspect of the Jackson family is that they were very devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, especially the mother, and Michael grew up very much a true believer. This created a very profound conflict in him, as he was incredibly sexualized from a tender young age, and encouraged to increasingly play up his sexuality in his suggestive dancing and singing, yet on the other hand he was very indoctrinated with a belief system of repressive religious social attitudes. He was so deeply involved in the Witnesses that he was going door to door professing the faith as a youth. Yes, he was one of those door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Many psychologists theorize that this is where many of Michael’s dysfunctions arose from: the mental and emotional conflict from trying to resolve the freewheeling and inherently sexual lifestyle that he was exposed to and encouraged to chase with the intensely repressive and morally rigorous Jehovah’s Witness religious belief system he was indoctrinated into from birth.

But it gets worse. The boys got their start performing gigs in the circuit of strip clubs, burlesque houses and adult black dance clubs called the chitlin circuit. At one point they even had a residency in a strip club, where they performed in between stripteases and during down time. Anyone with a kid knows their minds are like sponges, and you can only imagine the type of vulgarity he was exposed to and forced to process. Yet while he wasn’t being immersed in that life, he was being immersed in his mother’s devout faith. At the same time, it’s probably very likely that much of the sexualized titillation he saw in the performances highly influenced his own showmanship as well.

When he wasn’t performing and being involved in religious activities, he was forced to practice, practice, practice at a feverish pace. If he wasn’t performing or involved with religion, he was in practice being overseen by his dad. His father was like a drill sergeant and Michael never had a childhood. The act of interacting with other kids in a peer group is very important to properly socializing a human being. Socialization through peer groups is something we often take for granted, so we never realize the severity of damage it can do to one’s psyche and social skills to be deprived of it:

Developmental psychologists Vygotsky, Piaget, and Sullivan have all argued that peer relationships provide a unique context for cognitive, social, and emotional development, with equality, reciprocity, cooperation, and intimacy maturing and enhancing children’s reasoning abilities and concern for others. Modern research echoes these sentiments, showing that social and emotional gains are indeed provided by peer interaction.

When Michael was 10 years old, they got a recording contract with Steeltown records. He had been singing and performing for over 3 years at this point:

Journalist, J. Randy Taraborrelli said of the groups two singles released through Steeltown Records, “Both were mediocre numbers that don’t really hint at Michael Jackson’s potential as a vocalist, but the boys were thrilled with them just the same. After all, these were their first records”. The Jackson family gathered around a radio to hear the song broadcast for the first time. Michael Jackson—who was 10 years old at the time—said of the period, “[the family] all laughed and hugged one another. We felt we had arrived”. “Big Boy” did not appear on any Billboard charts of the period but sold in excess of 10,000 copies…

The Jackson 5 would release a second and final single through Steeltown Records—”We Don’t Have To Be Over 21 (to Fall in Love)”. The two singles were to be supported by an eleven track studio album but it was never released. On July 26, 1968, the group signed a new contract with Motown Records. However, as the groups Steeltown contract had not yet expired, the new contract could not be fully executed until March 11, 1969. Motown Records tried to get the group out of their Steeltown contract, ultimately with a financial settlement.

By the time he was ready for the national stage at Motown, he was now 11 years old and a seasoned performer.

In his autobiography, Moonwalk, Michael Jackson has described his childhood as “mostly work.” The Jackson brothers were rehearsed and managed by their overly-strict father, whose insistence on perfect performances … in school work as well as in rehearsals and talent shows … frequently ended in physical and/or verbal violence. Michael was eleven-years-old when the group signed with Motown in 1969 (although the Motown press corps published his age as nine, explaining that he would be much cuter and more appealing to the public if he were two years younger. They called it “public relations.”)

Apparently Michael was very disturbed at this lie. We’re used to adult performers lying about their age all the time, but it’s important to remember that he was 11 years old and very devout in his faith, meaning he took much of it literally, including the ban on lying. Yet he was being asked to lie about his age in interviews and press conferences. To get him to do this, the adults around him explained to him the lying was okay so long as you’re doing it to further his career. Young Michael accepted this answer as satisfactory and went along with it. But that message, that the truth is flexible and lying is acceptable when done to further your career is said to have stuck with him throughout his life. Now his sense of right and wrong and his relationship to honesty were warped.

As grueling as his work schedule and the demands of his father were before the big time, they only got worse after fame:

He gives a rare glimpse of his youth in his statement that in the summer of 1970, the Jackson 5 performed in 45 cities, with 50 more cities being added later in the year. Forty-five cities within a ninety-day period meant that he and his brothers were performing concerts [on average] every second day during that summer. Travel to and from the concerts accounted for a portion of the non-performing day. And this does NOT account for recording sessions, picture sessions, interviews, or the interminable rehearsals Joseph Jackson insisted upon. It also does not account for the fact that, unlike many lead singers of the time, Michael was present at EACH of these recording sessions. He recorded with his brothers and his is the beautiful, clear treble in the backgrounds of all of the Jackson 5 early hits. Later, he would return to the recording studio while his brothers played basketball or tinkered with cars to lay in the lead tracks and round off the recordings.

Michael Jackson describes his relationship with his father, Joseph, as “turbulent”, understating rather than sensationalizing that relationship. But, much later, during a televised interview, he replied to his interrogator’s questions regarding this relationship with the words, [I was] “frightened … very frightened. There were times when he would come to see me, I would get sick. I would start to regurgitate.” When asked if such occasions occurred “as a child … or as an adult,” he responded with one word … “both.” He was 35 years old at the time of the interview.

Then it got even worse than that. On the road, they had a lot of groupies. The older boys were better socialized than Michael because they had more of a life before fame, including more years of formal schooling and peer group socialization. They had a healthier relationship to sex and girls than Michael did, especially the older brothers, who were approaching 18 at the time and had the raging hormones that come with that age. Since the brothers shared a room, they would have sex with the groupies in the same room as Michael. Michael would hide underneath the sheets and pretend to be asleep as the brothers banged out their groupies. This apparently traumatized him greatly. To make matters worse, Joe Jackson didn’t want to be left out of the sexual rewards. Joe would present himself as a “gatekeeper” to the boys, and groupies would often have to provide him sexual favors before they were able to get a crack at the boys.

Then young, extremely religious Michael would have to go home to his devout, beloved mother and lie to her face about everything that happened. Lie about the sex that his brothers had as well as the sex his dad had. The pressure and guilt of such secrets and the burden of having to lie to his mother, who he adored, combined with the grueling schedule and the psychological terrorism waged by his father wore greatly on Michael’s psyche and is the reason many mental health experts theorize his psyche fractured and became frozen at that age, 11 years old.

The seeds for all his adult problems were sown in his youth, and you can see it in what I’ve described: His issues with sexuality, both being obsessed with it from constant exposure and sexualization, but not being able to get a healthy relationship with it due to his extreme youth, his repressive religious values and his lack of peer group socialization. Not to mention that sex was something he was trained to be secretive and dishonest about. Adult sexuality became something that terrified him for all the reasons described.

As for his obsession with being around children, it was never proven that he molested those boys, so as far as I’m concerned they will remain allegations and not facts. But his obsession with children I think comes from two factors. First, he never got that peer group socialization that he so desperately needed, and since his psyche was frozen at age 11, he chose a peer group of that age. Second, his whole life consisted of being used, abused and let down by adults. Second, adults were either selfishly using him for short term benefits without any thoughts of the long term detriments, like his father, Berry Gordy or the Motown publicity machine, or they were letting him down like his mother, who failed to protect him from his father’s abuse and stayed with him, implicitly cosigning his behavior. So he probably was very distrustful of adults and wary of them. “I haven’t been betrayed or deceived by children,” Jackson once said. “Adults have let me down.” And because he was so horribly tyrannized and abused by his own dad, this caused him to be excessively gentle and nurturing to children when he became an adult.

I think it was Bill Murray who said (I paraphrase) that with fame, it’s not about whether you get screwed up or become an asshole, but how much of a screwed-up asshole you become. His point was that when fame hits you, nothing can prepare you from it and at some point you get screwed up. If fame does that to healthy adults, imagine what international superstardom did to an 11-year old with the dysfunctional background I just described?

When Michael Jackson was acquitted of molestation charges in 2005, a great piece appeared in Slate celebrating his acquittal and explaining the reasons it was likely he didn’t do it, and I suggest if you guys click one link in this whole piece you make it this one. I’d also suggest watching VH-1 to see if they ever air a special called “Michael Jackson’s Secret Childhood” again. Both touch on a lot of what I mentioned here and more.

Many say that the child abuse trials were the final emotional blow to him, something he perceived as his last and greatest betrayal, and that he sank into a depression that he never fully recovered from, because now not only were his relationships to adults ruined, he now had to be distrustful of kids. He was never safe from feeling used and isolated. Which is why I posted the song “Stranger in Moscow,” as it’s incredibly exposing of his personal psychology:

“Stranger in Moscow” is the fifth and final single from Michael Jackson’s album HIStory. The song was released worldwide in November 1996 but was not released in the US until August 1997. The track was written by Jackson in 1993, at the height of the highly publicized child abuse accusations made against him, while on tour in Moscow. In the ballad, Jackson sings of a fall from grace that has left him lonely, isolated, paranoid and on the verge of insanity.

See if the meaning and emotional impact you derive from the song has changed at all after reading this piece. Below is a version of the video with the lyrics printed on the screen for you to read as you listen:

Next: Dissection of MJ’s “Liberian Girl” video.

As everyone will be putting up the same Michael Jackson videos from the Thriller and Bad albums to pay tribute to the man, I figured I’d put up some of his more obscure ones. Last one was “Stranger in Moscow.” This time it’s a video for “Liberian Girl,” from the Bad album. This song was only released as a single in Europe, meaning the video as far as I know never got played in America. Or if it did, it was rare.

But the real great thing about this video is that it features a Who’s Who of all the major 80s players. See how many 80s celebs you can spot and name:

I’ve been killing flies with my bare hands my whole life. I have always kept quiet and never bragged about this fact, not because of any humility but because I was totally unaware of what an awesome feat this was. But apparently it is. Little did I know that I have been all this time a veritable Superman, with the reflexes of a cheetah and the bravado of an alpha ape. And I have Obama to thank for this discovery.

See, Obama killed a fly during an interview recently. I saw the headline reported in an oddly prominent fashion all through last week, which I found off given how there seemed to be more important Obama-related things to focus on like his wishy-washy responses to North Korea threatening to launch a nuclear missile in the direction of his hometown of Hawaii and the fallout from the Iranian elections. But no, despite all that, the media reassures us Obama is a badass tough guy because…he can kill a fly.

Seriously. It’s no news that the media will jump on any attempt to furiously fellate Obama, but this is ridiculous. Observe these grown men gushing.

It was a Dirty Harry ‘Make my day’ moment.

Then the next guy even praises him for having such great weather and rainbows at his speeches, as if Obama was somehow responsible for the weather. Oh wait, liberals think he’s God so maybe they actually do think he controls the weather for his speeches.

CNN chimed in:

When it’s appropriate he carries the big stick.

Mind you the reporter is saying this during the very same week he won’t respond to the Iranian situation and is responding weakly to North Korea. But no, fly killing is the measure of carrying a big stick. Truly the reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt.

Here is a roundup of the rest of the media:

You just have to appreciate the concentration and the precision. There’s just a few things going on in the world, but it’s as if everything was just stopped and at a standstill for the President to lower the boom….apparently he wanted to shore up his credentials as being a tough guy!

I’m 95% sure Meredith Viera left a wet spot in her chair. I’m 100% sure her male co-anchor left a bigger one.

If it was Bush who did this I’m sure they’d accuse him of human rights abuses, want him to stand trial before a tribunal and even accuse him of racism and hate crimes if it turned out to be an African horsefly.

Some more great stuff in the media:

The media reports on scientists’ findings regarding how impossible it is for mere mortals to kill flies.

Swatting a fly with your bare hand is no easy feat either, as Caltech scientists Michael Dickinson and Gwyneth Card recently determined.

The researchers used high resolution, high speed digital imaging of fruit flies faced with a looming swatter. In the instant before a fly can usually zip to safety, its tiny brain calculates the location of the impending threat, comes up with an escape plan, and places its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way in the opposite direction. All of this action takes place within about 100 milliseconds after the fly first spots the swatter.

“This illustrates how rapidly the fly’s brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response,” Dickinson explained.

Fleet-footed flies even tweak the escape technique, depending on the direction of the threat. Keep in mind that these insects possess a nearly 360-degree field of view, so they can see behind themselves. If a swatter comes in at a 50 degree angle, a fly can move its middle legs forward and lean back, raising and extending its legs to push off backward.

If the swatter comes from the back, no problem. The fly simply moves its middle legs a tiny bit backwards and leans its whole body in the opposite direction just before it jumps.

“We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat,” Dickinson said. “When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly’s body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting. Our experiments showed that the fly somehow ‘knows’ whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture. This means that the fly must integrate visual information from its eyes, which tell it where the threat is approaching from, with mechanosensory information from its legs, which tells it how to move to reach the proper preflight pose.”

So what is the optimal way to swat a fly?

“It is best not to swat at the fly’s starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter,” he advised.

Staying a step ahead of one’s opponents isn’t a bad skill for a leader. President Obama is also clearly a hands on, take charge person.

Seriously, you could compile all these clips and excerpts without changing a single word and you would have the script for a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch. You wouldn’t have to exaggerate a thing.

And I’m sure longtime readers remember how I discussed the obsession he and the media have with comparing him to Abraham Lincoln? Well, guess who else also had a run in a with a fly according to Associated Press?

President Obama launched his campaign from Abraham Lincoln’s hometown, used his Bible to be sworn in and quotes Lincoln at the drop of a stovepipe hat.

Now it seems the two share something else: an encounter with a fly.

Daniel Weinberg, the owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, has a photograph of Lincoln with a house fly on him.

Weinberg doesn’t know if the fly survived the encounter or if it suffered the same fate as the one that had the audacity to land on Obama during a television interview Tuesday and found itself on the business end of a presidential hand.

Remember, there is no liberal or pro-Obama bias in the media. None.

In parting though, allow me to share some Obama jokes from Rush Limbaugh:

How does Obama differ from God?

• God does not think he’s Obama.
• Liberals love Obama.
• God asks for only 10% of your money.
• God gives you freedom to live your life as you choose.
• God’s plan to save us is actually written down for people to read.

This is a question I get so often in emails, I decided to just make it a blog post.

Women expect men to be emotion readers, not mind readers. However, since a woman’s mind is so much more ruled by emotion than a man’s mind, reading her emotions gives you the most insight into her mindset and logic as well. Reading her emotions is basically the same as reading her mind.  That is why I always tell guys that the best way to change a woman’s mind is to change her mood and her logic will change accordingly. To change a man’s mind on the other hand, you must attack and change his logic, and his emotions will react accordingly.

The reason men can’t read women’s minds the way women expect them to is twofold:

1. Men treat women like men and try to gauge their mindset by reading the linear logic of the interaction and basing their conclusions on that, because that’s how they correctly analyze interactions with other men.  So even when they are using linear logical analysis flawlessly, it doesn’t help because they are approaching the job with the wrong tools.
2. Even if men did focus on trying to read and analyze the emotional progression of the interaction rather than the logic, they are much worse at this than women are and will miss most of the emotional “tells” anyway. So even when they are approaching it with the right tools, they do a worse job using those tools than a woman would because they aren’t as well equipped for using those tools.

Now since women can read other people’s emotions so well, they expect men to be able to do the same, therefore when a man is unable to do so they get frustrated and feel he’s being insensitive or not trying hard enough.  And since men analyze the logic and expect their opponent to argue linearly from a logical standpoint, they get frustrated when women seem to just not make sense and are unable to just say what they mean and do what they say.

Women are better at reading emotional states than men for two reasons.  First, as the physically weaker sex, they need to compensate for this physical weakness by being better in other areas, like reading and manipulating emotions.  Remember, for most of human history women didn’t have the legal and societal protections they have now.  They were subject to the whims and physical brutalities of the men they encountered.  By being good at assessing the emotions of men, they could tell when emotional states in the men they encountered were escalating and a hostile situation was developing.  And by being good at manipulating emotion they had a weapon they could wield against men that made up for what weapons they lacked physically.

Second, as the ones most expected to nurture children, they had to be better at reading the emotional, nonverbal needs of the children.  The natural division of labor for most of human history made this the woman’s job while the man focused mostly on security to the family in the form of fighting off threats and providing resources.

Women who were not superior to men in emotional intelligence had their genes weeded out of existence because they not only lacked the physical tools to protect themselves from men but also the emotional tools to assess and defuse threats from men.  And in addition, these women of low emotional intelligence would be worse at properly nurturing their children and reading their moods correctly in order to properly attend to their needs.  So the women alive today descended from women of superior emotional intelligence, and as a result also have inherited this superior emotional intelligence.

And thanks to our society’s current cultural marxism where everyone is assumed to share the same strengths and weaknesses, we are less likely than ever to consider that some people are just naturally built for some things and some people naturally aren’t.  Therefore women expect men to read emotions as well as they do, and men expect women to use logic the way they do, and most relationship headaches originate from this disconnect.

Chris Rock touches on this dynamic in the clip below, when you reach about 2:18.

Men, don’t argue–you cannot win. You cannot beat a woman in an argument–it’s impossible. You will not win. Because men, we are handicapped when it comes to arguing, because we have a need to make sense. Women aren’t going to let a little thing like sense screw-up their argument.

As a man, you have two options. (1) Adapt and train yourself in emotional intelligence so that you can communicate better on her level, thereby learning to read her emotional state, recognize when it’s changing and intensifying and nip the argument in the bud before it even starts, or (2) teach your woman to understand that you are not as good an an emotion reader as she is and to communicate better on your level by being more forthright with you about what’s bothering her in a calm fashion. If she insists on escalating into argument anyway, just playfully deflect, dismissively ignore, or just leave. Whatever you do, don’t waste time arguing logically. It just doesn’t work.

In the last installment, I discussed how I met a beautiful half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican girl at a nightclub back in 1997.  I pull a bold move and call her over while she’s dancing with another guy, and to my surprise it actually works.

She comes over, and I play it cool.  Long story short, we exchange numbers.

I call her later in the week and we arrange to meet.  I pick her up in Brooklyn, where she rents a room.  In her room she has a cheesy calendar of muscular half-naked, waxed black men of dubious heterosexuality.  Kind of like a bunch of Shemar Moores on steroids.  That already makes a terrible first impression.

The plan is to go back to my place and watch some movies and eat some snacks.  As we get in the car, she’s asking me a bunch of questions.  It’s like 20 questions, she has a ton of them, but none are particularly insightful.

“How tall are you?”  “How much do you weigh?” “Are you mixed with anything?” “Are you part Chinese?” “Are you sure?” “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” “Do you like big girls?” [Wait what?] “Are you really Haitian?”

This last question she keeps coming back to.  In the 80s and a good part of the 90s, many people had very little exposure to Haitians.  And the few Haitians they often did have exposure to were a very specific subset, the poor immigrants and refugees settled in the urban centers or the ones they saw on TV when they were showing clips of starving folk.  So I’d often meet people who claimed I didn’t look Haitian, even though there are tons of people in Haiti who look just like me.  They’d expect me to look like one of the refugees or impoverished people they saw on newsreels or like one of the taxi drivers they encountered in Brooklyn.  It’s similar to how people who’ve never met many Ethiopians expects them all to look like extras from the “We Are the World” music video, when in reality many of them are quite cosmopolitan, healthy and good-looking.  Nowadays with a lot more Haitians everywhere from all walks of life, this doesn’t happen to me anymore, but back then it would be an annoying recurring conversation.  But this girl takes it to a whole other level.

“So you’re half-white?”

“No, full Haitian.”

“Chinese grandparent?”

“No, full Haitian.”

“You sure?”

“What do you mean am I sure? I think I would know.”

“Is your dad Puerto Rican?”

“What part of full Haitian don’t you get?”

“No, I mean was he maybe Haitian nationality but racially Puerto Rican?”

“Listen….Mom? Haitian.  Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Haitian.”

“You seem really touchy about your race.  What’s up with that?”

“I’m not touchy about it.  You’re the one who keeps harping on it.  I’m touchy about answering the same question over and over again.”

“Okay, okay, fine.”

“So what movie did you bring to watch?”

” ‘Money Talks’ with Chris Tucker and Charlie Sheen.”

“Oh.  Really?”  That sounds like a really bad movie, I think to myself.  “Do you own anything else?”

“No, this is my favorite movie.  My favorite! It’s so funny.  Sooooooooo funny.  You’ll love it, I promise.  We have to see this one, pleeeeeeaaaasse?”

I think about it and realize that it might actually turn out to work in my favor if it’s a shitty movie.  If the movie is too good, we’ll both get engrossed in it, I’ll actually want to see it through to the end and I won’t focus on the primary mission at hand, which was sex (let’s keep it real here).  No, the more I think about it, a shitty movie is the best thing that could happen.  We’ll get distrated, stop paying attention, end up talking throughout it, making out, etc, etc.  This’ll be a great night.

We get to my apartment and enter my room.  I pop the tape into the VCR.  We sit on the bed to watch the movie.  We get about 5 minutes into the movie.

“HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAAHAHAHAA!!!  Oh my God, did you see that?!”  She hasn’t stopped laughing since the credits started rolling.

“Uh, yeah.  I did.”

“Why aren’t you laughing?”

“It was funny, but come on, it wasn’t that funny.”

“Are you for real?”

“Are you? Come on, let’s just get back to the movie.  Stop worrying about me laughing.”

Now I won’t lie, “Money Talks” is not a terrible movie.  It isn’t particularly great either.  It’s adequate, a little bit above sitcom level comedy. Nothing groundbreaking or memorable, not the kind of movie I’d watch a second time, but the kind of movie I could slightly enjoy if I was watching it with someone else.  Anyone else.

She won’t stop cracking up for the whole movie.  I mean cracking up to the point where she’s convulsing with laughter.  She’s not only riveted to every utterance in the movie, she laughs uproariously at the dumbest parts.  Some of the lines she cracks up at the hardest I’m pretty sure aren’t even jokes.  I’m too annoyed with her antics to enjoy the movie, especially as she keeps asking me nonstop “Isn’t this the funniest?”

I realize there is no sex to be had during the watching of this movie.  It’s just not going to happen.  She’s not coming up for air between uproarious belly laughs and interrogations about why I’m not laughing harder, and on top of that I’m losing my motivation to even make any moves on her.  “Haven’t you seen this already?” I ask, hoping she’ll take a hint.

“Oh…heh…HAHAHA…I’ve seen it so many times….HA!…I lost count!”

“And it still cracks you up this much?”  [I'm normally not this snippy on dates, but this whole ordeal wore down my patience pretty quickly]

“Oh ‘Money Talks’ never gets old!”

Apparently not. I resign myself to the fact that I am not going to make any sex happen while this movie is on.  No way, no how.  But the minute it ends, though, it’s on.

So the ordeal is over.  It’s late, I’m going to have to wait until the movie’s over to make this happen.  As the movie wraps up and she wipes the tears of laughter from her eyes, we make small talk.

Then it happens.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“What’s what?”

“That.“  She points.

“You mean….my computer?”

“Yeah!  Can I see it?”

“Um….okay.  You want to look at my computer….now?  As in right now?”

“Yeah, yeah, let me see it.  What do you use it for?”

“You’ve never used one?”

“No.  Not really, my uncle had one and I used one when I was a kid…”

“Oh okay, let me show you.”  I turn on the computer and log onto the Internet.

She gets serious.  “Uh…what are you doing?”

“I’m getting on the Internet.”

“What’s that!?!”

“It’s…it’s like this big network where you can talk to anyone anywhere in the world in real-time, and your only limitation is how fast you can type.”

Her eyes widen.  “Really?” She in sincere awe at the concept.  Even in 1997 the Internet was still a pretty well-known concept so it boggles my mind someone could be totally ignorant of it, but I figure if it’s that impressive to her maybe it could help my cause.  I decide to really impress her by showing her a chatroom.

“Look at this: you can even go into something called a chatroom where a bunch of people talk to each other at once, similar to the old party lines they used to have back in the day.”  I sit her in my desk chair and stand over her shoulder behind her as I log into one.

As the words and messages in the chatroom fill the screen she starts to get visibly nervous.  “What are you doing!!!!!!??!?!” she shrieks.

“What?  What?!”

“Can they see me?!“  She launches herself from the desk chair into my bed and hides behind a comforter while looking at the computer from a distance, anxiously.

I totally lose it at this point. “Are you fucking kidding me?!  You’re joking right?”

“Are you sure they can’t see me?”

To make things worse, my roommate Grip, who hears the commotion, comes upstairs and into my room, just in time to see her cowering in bed behind a comforter, staring nervously at the computer screen.

“What happened?” he asks.

She answers “He turned on that thing and opened up a room.”

He turns to me with a look on his face of part disgust, part disbelief, part amusement and part “I am never going to let you hear the end of this one, motherfucker.”  Out of embarrassment, I make a last ditch effort to show that my date really isn’t as dumb as  she seems (even though she totally is) and I say “She’s just playing.  Isn’t that right? Always joking.”  I take her and and gently attempt to lead her back to to the computer.

She lets out a scream like “AIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!  No!” and starts pulling back, like a tug of war, with me trying to pull her to the computer and her trying to pull away, with Grip just surveying it all, not knowing whether to laugh at me now or mercifully wait until later.

And it was at this moment I make an astounding personal breakthrough, one that every man must learn at some point but many never do: sometimes, no matter how hot she is, sometimes the chance of getting sex just isn’t worth it.  Grip leaves my room, thinking of the thousand and one ways he’ll give me grief over this for the coming year.  Meanwhile, I turn off the computer and the two of us settle in on the bed.  She’s got that come hither look, like it’s finally time to make that move.  And I say those magic words.

“Time to go.”  She had a look of disbelief.

She leaves me about 50 messages after that date, each one increasingly angrier and erratic as time keeps passing and I don’t call back.  Sometimes I still wonder where she is.  She was truly one of a kind.

First things first, click here to follow me on Twitter.  When I get enough people signed up I plan to do something fun and interactive with it.  But I won’t discuss it in any further detail until I have enough followers.

One night in 1997 I went out with the fellas to a hip-hop party being DJ-ed by old school legend DJ Red Alert at a spot called Downtime in Manhattan.  Nice spot, the music was great, the place was packed with just-dirty-enough chicks, my game was on fire, it had all the makings of a good night.

For anyone who doesn’t know much about New York, what you need to know is we’re renowned for our pizza, bagels, cheesecake and thirsty, thirsty thirsty ass dudes.  I mean Sahara thirst.  Just got out of jail, locked up in solitary most of the time with no lotion and a mouth too dry to even spit on your hand type of thirst.  As a result cockblocking is out of control here, especially in the dog-eat-dog world of hip-hop parties.  If you immerse yourself in enough of these spots, not only do you have to have your cockblock defenses up all the time, you have to refine your own cockblock game just to remain competitive.  Luckily I had just returned to NYC from living in Buffalo for a few years, one of the few places on the East Coast with thirstier guys than NYC, so I was well ahead of the local game in my defensive and offensive cockblocking skills.  It’s like doing combat in the Marines for a few years then coming back to your small town and joining the local police force.  Buffalo is like CB Special Forces for real.

I’m dancing with some girl and this guy keeps hovering around us.  He’s sticking to the periphery, hoping I don’t notice him.  If I was a rookie I probably wouldn’t have, but as a graduate of Buffalo nightclub game I’m endowed with 360-degree cockblock vision so dude was on my radar right away, but I didn’t pay it much mind at first.  The girl and I are dancing close, facing each other, and the pest keeps trying to stay out of my sight while catching her eye.  He’s winking, licking her lips, doing all this slick shit.  This annoys the hell out of me, especially after three songs or so.  She doesn’t smile back or do much to acknowledge him because she’s busy talking to me.  She’s basically ignoring him.

I finally ask, “Yo, who is that dude?  Do you know him?” 

She responds, “Oh, he’s a guy danced with for a song earlier who won’t leave me alone.  I’ve been blowing him off all night.”

Dag, that’s thirsty.  Worse, a bum like this isn’t just hurting himself, he’s contributing to blowing the girl’s ego out of control, which hurts everyone, most importantly me.  He then positions himself real close to us the side with his back to us like he’s not paying us any mind.  (Remember, he still thinks I’m not on to him)  I notice his hand behind his back facing outward, moving closer to hers.  Now I’m in a pickle: if I call him out over some girl I just met, I get into a dispute over a girl I don’t even care about and just boost her ego even more.  Women love when guys fight over them.  Even though the dispute would really be over his disrespect of me and would have nothing to do with her, that’s not how it would register in her brain.  But at the same time the longer I let him stand there doing slick shit, the worse I look.  The place is too crowded to just move elsewhere easily.  I refuse to leave the girl alone for him to swoop back in just out of principle at this point.  I didn’t care about hooking up with her at this point, I just wanted to make sure he didn’t (because I can be petty sometimes, sue me).  When you are willing to crash and burn in the process of ruining another guy’s chances, this is known as the Kamikaze Cockblock.

I let my hand brush against his.  He obviously thought it was hers and he took it (I have small hands for the record (not that that implies anything of course (no, really, it doesn’t))).  Then this bitch-ass actually starts writing letters in my hand.  This is the kind of desperation move thirsty guys do that just blows my mind, because not only is it horrendous but even if on the off chance it works, how can you respect yourself after?  Even if you win you’re a loser.  At life.  So I tell her, “This nigga’s seriously writing letters in my palm right now.  He thinks it’s you.  Watch this.”  And I start writing back, but looking straight ahead with a poker face.  She starts cracking up, which just makes him think she’s loving what he’d doing to “her.”  I see him start smiling too.  She and I are just cracking on the guy for about five minutes like our own personal in-joke.

When I think I’ve let the guy dig a big enough hole for himself, I squeeze his hand firmly.  He looks back, surprised.  I slowly wink at him with a totally creepy deadpan expression, still holding his hand.  The dude’s jaw drops and the girl bursts out laughing right there.  The guy just bolts. 

Fun fact: the average NY guy has become ten times as thirsty in the 10 years since this story took place. Especially in hip-hop clubs.  A desert nomad couldn’t top the stories of NYC thirst I’ve heard in recent years.  It really is no wonder a girl can be a strong 6 at best here and still walk around like she just finished booking the cover of Vogue and Maxim on the same day. 

Later on I’m at the bar, its near the end of the night and I’m pretty drunk.  On the dance floor is a couple dancing, and I notice the girl seems to be looking at me.  She’s really attractive, with a slightly exotic look I’d discover later was a Puerto-Rican/Irish mix.  I don’t pay it much mind, but each time I glance it that direction I can swear she’s looking at me.  Her expression is blank, not flirty.  She’s pretty far away, and the club is pretty crowded so she really could be looking at someone else or just staring in my general direction.  It’s so far away I can’t even be sure she can see me clearly.

I think, “What do I have to lose?  Let’s see what happens.”  I put on my best Blue Steel face, lean back against the bar, cock my head back, raise my hand to my hip and do that “come hither” thing with my fingers at her.  She just keeps staring in my direction blankly.  Did that even register?  Can she even see me from that far? I try it again, extra cocky this time.  Nothing.  She’s still dancing with the guy.

Oh well, it was worth a shot.  I turn to the bartender and order a beer.  Takes less than a minute.  I turn back around and inches from my face is the same girl.

Her, half-defiantly, “You called me over?”

Holy shit, that actually worked?!?!  I can’t believe it myself, but no way am I letting her know that.  Even though in the years following I will disavow cockblocking in general as a dating concept, at the moment I’m particularly proud of this one.  I play it off like this is my everday norm.

Me: “You know I did.”

Her: “Do I know you?”

Me: “You will.”

Little do I know I have just met the hands-down dumbest girl I will ever date.

Will be continued…

For an archive of previous installments in the series click here.

Procrastinate on Things You Enjoy

Pick something you are really looking forward to and get much joy from.  Now delay experiencing it.  Or miss it altogether.  Miss your favorite show.  Don’t even tape it.  That new blockbuster movie you were planning to spend the night outside waiting for to open?  See it three weeks after it comes out.  Procrastinate on the things you eagerly look forward to and do some chores you’ve been avoiding instead.  Leave that dessert you’ve been craving on your desk  and don’t eat it until the end of the day.  American Idol results tonight?  Live?  Go home and go to sleep instead.  Feel like taking a break to check email or Facebook or Twitter for the umpteenth time?  Finish your work project first and take the break in about five hours.

The point here is training yourself to forego immediate gratification when you have to.  The reason many of us don’t do the things we need to do to get long-term benefits for our lives is that our lives our filled with too many instances of succumbing to short-term gratification.  These short-term gratifications are distractions from more important lasting goals.

Here’s a great article by David Brooks on Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Experiment:

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

Brooks then goes on to discuss how these findings on the correlation between self-control and future success could positively influence policymaking. He also notes the following:

Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That’s probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don’t work. Sheer willpower doesn’t seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn’t stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis,” is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off — and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.

This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren’t so largely ignored by educators and policymakers.

The New Yorker goes more in-depth into Mischel’s research.

The scientists are hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They’re also conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they search for the hereditary characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

If Mischel and his team succeed, they will have outlined the neural circuitry of self-control. For decades, psychologists have focussed on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

This will be a fascinating investigation to track. If Mischel is right, raw intelligence isn’t so much the primary cause of future success but rather one of a series of causes of future success, a series that begins with capacity for self-control and capacity for delay of gratification. Rather than focusing on intelligence and whether it is mostly hereditary or can be changed, it may be more beneficial to study self-control and whether that is mostly hereditary or can be changed. It sounds like a subtle distinction, but it’s actually quite the paradigm shift.

I think learning to delay gratification is an important trait that it is never too late to develop.

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”…

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

I would suggest examining your own capacity for delay of gratification and creating challenges for yourself. Can you have a bowl of your favorite candy in front of you and only eat a couple and leave the rest of the bowl sitting there? Or do you have to pick at them until they’re finished? If the season finale or most important episode of your favorite show is on your DVR, do you have to watch it the same night it aired or can you leave it sitting there all week long until you’ve accomplished the more pressing matters in your life and are ready to finally get around to watching it? If challenged, could you force yourself to not DVR-record it at all, knowing it won’t be repeated and you’ll likely have to wait around for the box set to view said episode? It’s good to practice gratification delaying exercises and seeing how they make you feel. 

Read Iceberg Slim’s Pimp book to read how he mastered women by excruciating bouts of practicing delay of sexual gratification.

An encouraging finding:

The early appearance of the ability to delay suggests that it has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined. Mischel resists such an easy conclusion. “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.” For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. “When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.” In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.

But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Also:

Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”

Start with small things you look forward to and practice putting those off or missing them altogether. Then challenge yourself to practice with bigger and bigger things.

But like the article quotes above say, the best way to achieve the gratification delay and build patience is by not thinking of the gratification and distracting yourself from dwelling on what you’re missing by focusing on something else. Here’s what you should focus on: Periodically make an ongoing list of long-term goals and short-term tasks you need to accomplish. Order them from 1 to 4, with 1 being “important and immediate,” 2 being “important but not immediate,” 3 being “unimportant and immediate” and 4 being “unimportant and not immediate.” The things in 3 and 4 more often than not are usually the things you need to procrastinate on but tend not to. Tasks and goals in 1 and 2 are usually things you should be doing immediately but tend to procrastinate. So as you learn to delay gratification and practice patience, usually with items falling in the 3 and 4 categories, use the new free time to distract yourself from what you’re missing by focusing on category 1 and 2 tasks instead. Eventually eliminate all the 1s from your list and strive to keep the list of 2s as small as possible and keep them from becoming 1s. And even then keep practicing patience and delaying gratification, because new temptation is always around the corner.