Jibbering Musings

The other day I took a flight to New York, due to the non-arrival of the fast bus, I didn't have much time after the rush hour slow bus to the airpor. So I didn't have time to do the important things, like shower, eat breakfast, buy books for the flight and check email. There wasn't much choice in the easy quick grab book sections that I'd not already read - either people aren't writing enough, or I'm flying too much and buying too many books, but I ended up picking up The Game by Neil Strauss. Geeks seem very popular in the media at the minute, we have The Big Bang Theory, The IT Crowd and of course all the reality shows like The Pick Up Artist, which I found 'cos it appears on Joost, which has characters from the book in. The Game is pretty much a book about the obsessiveness of the geek mind, and what goes wrong when the nerdy thought processes get re-routed into trying to pick up girls. Other than Neil Strauss himself, all the other major characters are from a very computer geek background - they all started in the early days of the internet. It turns out that geeks try and pick up women in much the same way as they code, learning simple routines by memory and cobbling them together into something larger. They also seem to suffer many the same problems as they do with programming projects - they get increasingly obsessed with the art and the process and lose the actual aim of it. So like with projects that never get complete because some developers try and perfect a pretty irrelevant routine that was working fine rather than actually complete the project. So the geeks go out and "number close" or even "kiss close" a girl, but never actually go out with a girl, or spend time with them - which to me is kind of not the point of being a pick up artist, but maybe I've missed the point. As a single shy "engineer" reading about the ideas and techniques has made me think about why not start try out the ideas from the pick up artist community, unfortunately there were two problems with this, one the work involved really seemed to be quite a lot, but much more importantly you have to do it without drinking and there really seems silly. So I think I'll stick with the traditional English fallback of getting really, really drunk, and hoping something happens - I mean it wouldn't be traditional if it didn't work sometimes right?