My Brilliant Game Plan
• Justin Jacob on the rules of attraction

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So I write to make this girl I've never met jealous

I am a writer. I write out of passion, out of a need to improve myself and to understand the world around me. I write because I think too much, and because I am a liar. (For what is a good storyteller if not a great liar?) I write to be funny and sarcastic. I write because I secretly want to be God, or at the very least Steven Spielberg. I write for the self-satisfaction I get from completing a thought, and for exploring new methods of execution. I write as an excuse to quip. I am a creator. I write and that is who I am.
Well, sort of.
So I write to make this girl I've never met jealous. My sole purpose for spending witching-hour after witching-hour in front my of computer is not to improve my technique or even to entertain, it is to piss off some chick who writes articles in Good Magazine. I want to write better than her, and have my articles published alongside her articles, an affront to all her hard work. My ultimate goal is to steal her thunder and there's nothing she can do about it. I want her to dislike me, without ever meeting me. I want her to hate my opinions and to ignore what I say. I want her to snort her derision with a mention of my name.

So, why would any person engage in such a quest of pure assholery, you may ask? It's simple: I like this girl. I know this to be true, because the black on white words that appear in medium-glossy wood pulp every 2 months, consume my thoughts for weeks on end. "Romantic fool" you’re thinking? How about "unlucky bastard" instead. Truth is, I’m more pissed off at this whole situation than anything else. To me, it’s a lose-lose situation for there are essentially three outcomes to my predicament:
1) The most obvious…my infatuation is just what the dictionary says, and is temporary. I grow up and get over it, hopefully upgrading my obsession to Victoria Secret models, if not the real thing.
2) In some Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks -ish quirk of fate I actually meet my one-to-be, find her to be adorably coquettish , and shift myself out of "longing for" into "wooing".
3) The opposites and extremes of both 1 and 2.

Clearly, my only option for sanity is to believe in, and strive for number 2. Naturally, I’ve devised a rather ingenious way to ensure my very own When Harry Met Sally old-person short.
A few months ago I was digging through a garbage bag full of childhood relics at my Mom's place and was caught up in that flight of fancy the hated-French would call a "reverie". As I sat on the floor of my old room, vacu-forming Lego blocks into my ass, I reminisced about my first romantic conquest. It was in 1st grade, and I was newly initiated into walking that vicious gauntlet of fear and humiliation known as "Attraction to the Opposite Sex". I can still clearly remember my first kiss, as it played post-birthday party amid a session of 1on1-kissing tag; I can still recall that strange feeling of victory. Girls were so easy to understand back then, they basically wanted the same thing you did: to check out what the hell's under the OTHER car's hood. All you had to do was just be, what in the grownup world is called, an Asshole. You know, doing the standard stuff like pulling of hair, stealing of toys, and kicking of knees. Oh how I miss those days, it used to be so straight forward. Basically if you kicked enough knees you were bound to put a notch on the board. Essentially, that's how I wound up exchanging pecks with Jennifer Scott on the living room floor.

Since then however, the game has increased in complexity due to that quadratic formula called ‘maturity‘. To this day I have never been half as suave as that slick 6-year old boldly suggesting a "1-on-1" game of kissing tag. That kind of skill has been rendered negligible by the sheer mounds of insecure horseshit that adolescence and early adulthood piles onto people.
Well, no longer I say! For me, its back to the basics. I think the asshole approach has some serious merit. Think about it, the major task that confronts us all is acquiring the attention of the subject of our desire. When you were six, the logic was simple, as this was easily accomplished by cutting off her pony tail. Even now I am hard pressed to invent a more effective method of making sure that someone takes note of you. Once you‘ve made her aware of your existence, all you have to do is get to know her something easily achieved through a dedicated campaign of irritation. There are invariably two outcomes to such a campaign:
1) The girl breaks down, and a friendship (or more) may result; and
2) She hates you for the rest of your grade school career, which in all honestly, is infinitely preferable to her not caring who you are.

So my plan is to transcend this gap of pre-adolescent/conflicted-adult predation, thereby becoming the hero of all Men without girlfriends. While I am sure that this approach has been utilised in the past, mostly to a high degree of failure, I plan on succeeding where other's have failed. The secret lies in differentiating the six-year old asshole from the 20-year old asshole. I suspect that all those guys who had similar plans didn’t make this distinction. A six-year old asshole is basically annoying, and in a tangible way inflicts their social ineptness on other people. A 20-year old asshole is far more suave. He’s an asshole in afterthought. He’s utterly polite and good natured, and its only when you’ve left his company do you find yourself thinking about some subtle comment. You question yourself as to what he meant, and if you are misunderstanding the situation. All of a sudden, he’s not just another nice guy, he’s interesting.

I will make this girl take note of me, and then, persist on making my very existence inescapable. She will read my articles, perhaps with a grin, perhaps with a silent "moron", but nonetheless she will be made aware. And if I’m clever enough then maybe...just maybe she'll think about me. She'll start to wonder if this guy really IS the asshole this article is designed to make him out to be. Or maybe a part of her will wonder if those uber-sexist phrases like "predation" and "notch on the board" are evidence of a subtle wit backed up with a brooding sardonic intelligence. Even as I write this I can’t help but direct a self-congratulatory "brilliant" to myself. Afterall, I am playing to win this time, and like Kunta Kinte, I'm goin back to my roots.

© Justin Jacob march 2003
jjacob3@uwo.ca

*This is the first article I've written, not that this fact should make
any difference. I'm merely stating it, like an excalmation point.

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