You asked the Universe for a modest amount of booty.
Butt you got a whole lot more than you bargained for…
“Oh, man, I couldn’t believe my good luck! Ladies fighting…over me?!? And not only that, the hot af, out-of-my-league one was winning??? Was this really happening, or was I just really, really drunk?”
Yes, this is exactly where I left you last time, with yet another cliff-hanger mystery…
…and this is the point in the story where I tell you to go back and do last week’s homework (aka take 3 minutes to read 3:45–The Perfect Time To Full On Panic At The Disco) if you haven’t already.
As usual, I’ll wait…
…
…
As it turned out, the correct answer was “both”.
At the end of the night, as I perambulated with the rest of the gang I had originally came with1If you were wondering how I ended up in a strange city dancing with strangers, the backstory is that I had joined my roommate, her boyfriend, my roomie’s female friend and her boyfriend, and my roomie’s female friend’s roomie for a Saturday night on the town in Greensboro, where one of them had recently moved. Since there were already two natural couples in the party, me and my roomie’s friend’s roomie was left to keep each other company for the night. Even though it shouldn’t have mattered, it seems that the fact that she was a lesbian contributed to her being as cold as ice towards me, despite my low expectations of having some platonic companionship for the night. Thus, I essentially found myself alone in the club. back to my roommate’s friend’s nearby apartment, I couldn’t help but feel like I was walking on clouds the whole way.
That really had happened! Both incidences had indeed actually had come to pass.
But, alas, when one is so drunk on wine and high on newly-found female affirmation, they are presented with a dilemma: do I drive the hour home under such influences? Or do I pass out in my clothes in my acquaintance’s abode, get 3 hours and 45 minutes2That’s a 3:45 Ass reference, folks. of sleep, and then drive directly to church at 7 am so I can fulfill my duties of setting up chairs for the worship services slightly hungover?
Pro-tip here, my friends: driving drunk is never the answer, and I had enough God-given sense to come to that conclusion as well.
As I drove to church the next morning, the hour ride gave me time to contemplate and ruminate over the previous evening’s events.
Was I filled with regret and remorse? Ah, hell no! Why would I want to take back such a euphoric life-changing experience? Nope, no regrets here, folks!
However, one thing gnawed at the back of my mind that I couldn’t ignore: why was I dancing with the average girl in the first place? Clearly there was a prime specimen next to her, shaking her tush in my general direction.
Yet…yet I distinctly remember thinking, “my best bet is to go for the average girl, a wager optimally balanced between having a modestly high chance of her accepting my advances, while the reward of being able to enjoy her modest level of beauty makes it worth the risk.”
In other words, going for the “personality friend” may have been close to a sure thing, but it wasn’t exactly a desirable outcome. On the other hand, the highest reward could be achieved by pursuing the attention of the “hot girl”, but my chances of success seemed too low to be worth the risk.
If you’re wondering why I would frame the problem in such terms, especially for someone who had had a few drinks, it should be noted that I had just finished a pair of PhD-level courses in quantum mechanics and thermodynamics about a month earlier, and so I couldn’t help but think of such choices in terms of “expectation values”.
Now, I won’t bore you with the granular details–you can read up on them here–but I will tell you the results of my off-the-cuff-and-inebriated dance floor calculations from that night. Using a superficial 1-to-10 attractiveness scale, I wanted to know where upon the scale I could expect to find the booty that would be grinding all up ons me, based on which of the three lasses I “chose” to pay attention to.
This value was found by multiplying the candidate’s perceived attractiveness by the estimated fractional chance3Note that this does not need to be normalized, i.e. the probabilities do not need to add up to 100% (or 1, actually), as my success with each of them was independent of the other, and there was no guarantee I would be successful with any of them. of success with that particular one. Ergo:
Hot girl (20% chance of success): 10 x 0.2 -> expected outcome: 2.
Friend with personality (90% chance of success): 3 x 0.9 -> expected outcome: 2.7.
Average girl (70% chance of success): 7 x 0.7 -> expected outcome: 4.9.
No choice (i.e. just wonder about the potential of the situation, but don’t take a ‘measurement’): (2 + 2.7 + 4.9)/3 -> expectation value: 3.2.
As you can see, making a move on the average girl was a well-calculated risk and a sound decision. But surprisingly, despite aiming not too high nor too low, I ended up with an outcome of 17!
Okay, so I shouldn’t have just added 7 + 10. Instead, it’s more appropriate to calculate the time-spent-with-each-girl-grinding-all-up-ons-me-weighted average, which, assuming 15 seconds and 135 seconds of booty-against-my-boys, respectively, comes out (7*15 + 10*135)/(15+135) = 1455/150 -> observed value: 9.7!
As you can tell, 9.7 is clearly much higher than 2, 2.7, 3.2 or even 4.9…so how were my calculations so far off???
It didn’t take long for me to realize where my error was hidden: in my estimated odds of success with each.
Not only did I not account for two very important factors–beer goggles and the lack of male competition–but I notably underestimated my chances of success with the hot girl.
Come to think of it, why did I assume that I didn’t have much of a chance with her? First off, I may be no Adonis, but I was the hottest guy in [that corner of] the room. In retrospect, it makes complete sense that she thought, as the hottest girl in [that corner of] the room, she would be entitled to the hottest guy, and hence the Hussy hostilities towards her average friend that I mentioned last time.
Secondly…well, there is no secondly. My physical appearance was pretty much all that she had to go on to make a judgment ass to whether or not I was bump-and-grind-worthy. So…if she clearly thought that I was so bump-and-grind-worthy that she would physically assault her supposed friend to get to me, that must mean…
Ok, so this definitively confirmed something I had suspected for quite some time. Do I have an inferiority complex? No, as I would have gone after the friend-with-personality. Do I have a superiority complex? That can’t be the case, otherwise I would have had made a bee-line towards the hot girl.
I went straight for the average one. Sh*t…I have a mediocrity complex (TM).
…
You have no idea how long I’ve waited to use that punchline, LOL. But I digress…
No, that’s not the worst of it, though. I could feel an even worse realization looming just over the horizon. True, it was a lack of sobriety that had led me to this eye-opening experience, but now, staring at the rising sun on my way to church and in the thrall of sobriety, a new level of enlightenment–some form of twisted nirvana, if you will–was coming over me.
What was really gnawing at me was: Why did I have such incredible unexpected luck last night? In theory, she should have taken one look at me and scoffed haughtily and ran off in indignation. I’ve felt that, much like the friend-with-presumed-personality, I’ve had to ride my own personality pretty much my whole life, attributing my lack of luck with the ladies to my average, non-Adonis physical appearance. And, alas, that is something that I can’t change too much.
But…wait just a tick. If my looks weren’t ruining romance for me–a new-found fact which was just unequivocally confirmed by my little dance-a-thon the night before–what else could possibly be sabotaging my love life (apart from dirty old bastards)…?
Oh. Oh, no.
No…no…no.
A twist in the plot unfolded just then as if my life had been written by M. Night Shyamalan himself: it wasn’t my physique that was the culprit here. It was something even more me: my big fat mouth and my “personality” had been screwing me over all along!
That was such a complete and utter shock to my sense of self that I almost drove off the road. It was pretty horrifying, actually. Here, what I thought were my best assets (no pun intended, seeing as how “ass” has been the theme lately), have turned out to be my own worst enemy all along–and I’m only finding out about this now at age 26!
On the flip side of this uncomfortable and worldview-shattering revelation though, was an incredibly shiny silver lining. It is true that one can only do so much with the looks ----- gave them–and so the good news is that this is not my problem!
Social skills, speech filters, being an intentional listen, working to be a kinder and more thoughtful soul…these things I could do something about. I had the power to actually change my love life luck, instead of just being a whiny shmoe who only pouts about what I crappy hand life has dealt him.
Indeed, what had been a night of mild hedonism for an innocent li’l church boy had somehow turned out to be perhaps the most life-changing moment of my life (yet whether or not that is the case, is a tale yet to be told here).
Or, in terms of my original title for this post (read like a newspaper headline):
Local Man’s Drunken Ass Gyrations Lead To Unexpected Self-Realizations
The headline from that night, if my life were captured in an Onion article
Content created on: 8/15 July 2022 (Fri/Fri)
Footnotes & References:
I honestly have never seen the Baby Got Back video until today. Thanks for the education as usual.