searching doggedly

New York is a city full of dogs. More than any other urban center I’ve visited, it teems with canine companions. Mornings and weekends, the streets are lined with a vast array of sizes and breeds out for much-needed walks, their poop-scooping owners closely in tow.

Each time I see one of those dogs pass, I’m inevitably struck by the similarity between the dog and its owner. Head to any park in the city, and the old claim – that people look like their pets – is immediately and empirically observable as true.

Which, over the past few years, has been a cause of slight distress to me. Because, while my current travel schedule and living situation don’t easily accommodate a four-legged friend, I’d certainly love to pick up a pooch at some point in my not-too-distant future. And, frankly, I had no real idea what sort of dog would be my match. Obviously, such decisions beg the question of who does the adapting; do people start looking like their dogs, dogs like their people, or do both meet somewhere in between? Whatever the answer, it certainly seemed to me imperative to find a dog that might bring out the very best parts of myself.

So, this evening, while procrastinating on completing a major business document, I set out to wade through the furrier parts of the internet, searching for a breed from which I might one day draw a dog of my own. After several hours search (sadly, I’m not kidding about that time tally), I’ve settled upon the rather definitive answer: I am, apparently, a beagle person.

Beagles, it seems, are quick, clever, happy and curious, though fare rather poorly in obedience training, having an unusually strong sense of wanting to do things their own way. Small, slender and muscular, they need lots of exercise, bore easily if not mentally stimulated, and seem to have a knack for getting into trouble by following their nose.

Who knows. Next time I have work I’m trying to avoid, I might even set out to preemptively find some good potential beagle names.

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September 18, 2003

underwear

For whatever reason, we guys often form bizarre attachments to pieces of clothing, strong emotional connections that effectively prevent us from noticing their increasingly well-loved condition. Favorite t-shirts yellow at the armpits, favorite jeans fray at the hems and zipper, yet we can’t possibly imagine actually retiring them. And nowhere is our love more apparent than with underwear; given the choice, we’ll keep washing and wearing a trusty pair of boxers until it’s disintegrated to nothing more than a waistband and a few hanging threads.

As women rarely hold such forgiving opinions of overly scruffy clothing (and underwear in particular), it behooves any guy with an eye towards impressing the ladies to (at least occasionally) view the contents of his closet (or, at least, his underwear drawer) with a cool and dispassionate eye. This very morning, I did so myself, examining each pair of boxer-briefs, and I’m afraid the results were not good:

Total Pairs: 11*
Pairs in Good Condition: 2
Pairs in Acceptable Condition: 1
Pairs with Weirdly Ruffled Waistbands (ed. note: due to elastic losing it’s stretch after too many washings): 3
Pairs with Small Holes: 3
Pairs with Holes in Front Large Enough that the Proverbial Mouse Might Escape the Proverbial House: 2

As much as it pains me to say it, I think it’s time for a serious drawer cleanout and underwear shopping spree.

* This is nearing the bare acceptable minimum number of pairs. Guys mainly do the wash only after running out of clean underwear, re-wearing all the cleaner looking pairs inside out, and then sometimes even wearing bathing suits as underwear. Clearly, then, the more pairs owned, the less frequent the need to do the wash.

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August 17, 2003

the asshole spectrum

Whenever I hear a ‘nice guy’ bemoan the fact that women seem to constantly pass him over for jerks, I can’t help but think he might be overestimating his innocence. Nobody, after all, is a gentleman 100% of the time, just as nobody is 100% bastard. Instead, we men inevitably inhabit the spectrum between those two extremes.

Further, ‘nice guy’ lament to the contrary, women don’t actually prefer men on the asshole end of the spectrum; they don’t even prefer men at the fifty-fifty split. Instead, as careful observation of female friends will quickly reveal, most women look for guys at the 10% asshole, 90% marriage-material mix: someone charming, sweet and wonderful the vast majority of the time, yet with independence, backbone, a handful of unpredictability and a bit of edge.

So take that to heart boys. If booty’s your aim, be nice. But not too nice. Aim for 10% asshole. Or one-up what women say they want and head for the thing their behavior shows they like even better: the 80% nice guy / 20% asshole mix who they alone can tame into the ideal 90/10.

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August 4, 2003

free advice

If you happen to be going to a karaoke birthday party this evening in the East Village, there will inevitably be a group of guys attending who think it’s really ironic to perform “YMCA”. Which is a shame, because that same group could easily instead perform “Bohemian Rhapsody”, by far the best karaoke song ever, especially if someone is ready to nail the Freddie Mercury part.

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July 18, 2003

see: straw, camel’s back

It is always the very small things that destroy relationships, the minor grating details that compound slowly over time until, one day, you wake up with the sudden realization that you couldn’t possibly spend the rest of your life with the kind of degenerate who would habitually leave the toothpaste uncapped, allowing the tip of the tube to gum over with dried out paste.

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July 8, 2003

correction

My mother, indignant about my earlier posting regarding her shampoos and conditioners, helpfully pointed out the inaccuracy of the data I had presented; the thirty two bottles weren’t all hers, she explained, and they also weren’t all shampoo. Drawing on her background as a field-leading social science researcher, she conducted a more rigorous examination, allowing me to present this revised tally:

Along Side of Shower:
– 5 bottles of her shampoo
– 9 bottles of her conditioner
– 7 bottles of my father’s (or possibly my brother’s) shampoo
– 8 bottles of body wash
– 3 bottles of face wash
– 1 bottle of unidentifiable amber liquid

I stand corrected. Thanks, mom, for clearing that up.

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June 29, 2003

newman’s first law of booty magnetism

Apropos my last post, I’ve recently been honing a gender-differentiated theory on attractiveness and attraction. Though it’s still rough, I think I’m ready to share the basics:

Guys: At first glance, we boys talk a big game, rating women ruthlessly (“look at her calves; I can’t give her better than a seven”). But when it comes down to it, we don’t really value looks as much as our guy-banter implies. We do, however, have a minimum attractiveness threshold, a point below which, no matter how much we like the girl, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to see her naked. Though it’s strictly inviolable (consider the number of guys who, though feeling remarkably guilty about it, have a close female friend they’d marry if only she were slightly more attractive), it’s also probably much lower than girls would likely assume (rarely higer than a six, even for the most critical men). So long as she’s above the minimum cutoff, a cool girl the guy loves to spend time with trumps a hotter-but-boring one every time. In other words, while we guys have an inviolable minimum, above that line we weight personality more heavily than looks.

Girls: Ladies, however, have no fixed minimum. As Voltaire observed, give a charming guy ten minutes to talk away his ugly face and he could bed the Queen of France. (Hence the vast majority of women who have dated [or fallen in love with] men they initially found horribly unattractive – something we guys find inconceivable.) Conversely, however, women factor in attractiveness the whole way up; there is no point after which additional beauty doesn’t much matter. Which is to say, with most women, a totally rockin’ 7 would face stiff competition from a merely reasonably interesting 10.

The groups of friends on which I’ve tested the theory have nearly universally agreed, but I’d love to hear from readers who can help hone the details (or perhaps rebut my hopethesis altogether). If you’ve gleaned some sharable yet hard-earned insight from the battlefields of love,

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June 27, 2003

not ponytails or cottontails

Over dinner with my family, I suddenly remembered an episode of DuckTales where Scrooge explains the story behind his Lucky Dime – in short, that he earned it through the hard work of shining the shoes of the first customer of his first company, a nascent shoe shine business; and, that (more importantly) after realizing he’d never make enough money to swim through just by busting his ass at the shine chair, he made his motto “work smarter, not harder,” invented an elaborate contraption based on an old bicycle that could shine five pairs of shoes at a time, and then hired in an ever-increasing flotilla of young shoe shine machinists.

Frankly, I was shocked and thrilled by the recollection, as though “work smarter, not harder” has been my mantra for at least the past decade, I’d always assumed I picked it up from some business book. Instead, while (as Will Hunting eloquently described) the equivalent of an MIT undergrad degree can be had for five dollars of late fees at the public library, apparently the Harvard Business School equivalent runs at the cost of a DuckTales DVD rental. How exciting to finally have good advice to pass on to up-and-coming entrepreneurs!

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nerd happiness

I’ve yet to discover a guilty pleasure greater than staying up way into the night so absorbed by a novel that I can’t possibly put it down without finishing, greater than reading and weighing and rereading the final sentence, snapping the back cover closed, turning off my bedside lamp, and falling into a deep, contented sleep.

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June 25, 2003