Confidence without Douchebaggery

  The following is a recounting of something Jody witnessed, and may not have happened exactly as depicted, though that's totally okay, because this version's been sexified by Jody's awesome imagination.

 The Phidelts had Wing Night this past Sunday in Westdale.

 After gorging on the delightful parts of some hapless, mass-produced chickens, me and the younger guys chill for about ten minutes before they head off to another pub. 

   During that time, two lovely young ladies emerge from the restaurant, walk past the bunch of us, and get into a car to light a cigarette.  Long story short, one of our entourage - driven by courage, apathy, and a deeper fortitude located somewhere in his pants - walks over to the driver's side.  I have no idea what he says - I'd later find out he opened with "I'd like to see some ID" - but the girls seem to enjoy it and the rest of us are quite entertained.

  "I love the way he sauntered over there," I say aloud.  "It's such a balls-out approach."

  At that point, a brother - who I shall deem "The Moustache" until he gives me formal permission to reprint his name publicly - responds with a cool point. 

"The trick is not giving a shit if people think you're a douchebag". 

  Think about it.  How many "nice guys" worry about looking like anything but "nice guys" when it comes to impressing the ladies?  That's why nice guys fail so frequently and so hard when they try to be less "nice" at bars and at parties: they're aware that they're putting on an act.  They're too afraid of saying something wrong that will make them look like complete assholes to the women.  Their fears become their focus, and thus become their experience.  There's nothing as confidence sapping, as emasculating, as the feeling that you have to choose between being a dick and being the Pillsbury doughboy to succeed at dating, and life.

  The trick is to lose yourself in the part.  And also to eliminate the word "douchebag" from your self description.  All you're doing is just walking your confidence. 

  Much like Jack the Clawless Tabby did in 2006.

  Call it a biological Napoleon complex all you want, this cat is one mean pussy.  Never once did it occur to him that the bear cub could easily take him out with the slightest of swipes, or that he was about five times smaller. The cat had his turf to protect. 

   Jack the Clawless Tabby never dwelled on his shortcomings: instead, he pushed his natural strengths to the max and harnessed them behind a single goal: telling a wandering bear to get the fuck off his property.

 Issues of confidence are rampant in my daily existence, mostly in the assertion department. Assertiveness remains a challenge for me, especially in the presence of stronger, go-getter personalities who are way more cock and balls than I'll ever be.  They give me little room to maneuver: if you push, I'll either dig in my heels or I'll just walk away, start some lone wolf time. 

  Or, if you're really being direct, I'll push back a little more out of proportion to what's called for, but that's a last resort.  I don't much care for pissing matches with people, but if you're on my territory - my home, my office, my arena - I will do what's necessary to protect my sovereignty.

 And yet, in situations where I'm not forced to beat my chest, I'm damned good at the confidence game.  I've landed a couple of jobs where I only barely met the requirements, based mostly on the interview.  Aaron pointed this out a couple of times when I've had moments of doubt: he's one person who sees that strength, and he's one of the most confident guys I've ever met. 

  We have an archetype in Western culture of the disgruntled office clerk.  That person who occupies a lower station in a greater organization who is so much more capable than what he's getting, if only he had the guts to just speak up for himself.  Frequently, the place where he paralyzes himself is one concept, this all-too-familiar fear:

"I don't want to be an asshole."

  Nor is it just guys.  Alice remarked to me today, in a somewhat related discussion, her own qualms with self-assertion.  After showing her the story on Jack the Orange Tabby, she said this:

   I'm always afraid that I'll look like a bitch if I assert myself like that.

    Back to the Moustache for a moment.

    "You know," I say to him, back at the parking lot of the restaurant after Wing Night, "I've always struggled with issues of authenticity, especially when it comes to meeting girls, but you know..."

     I steal another look over at Mr. Ballsy, chatting up the two girls.

    "It's nothing new.  I've summoned that kind of confidence at job interviews, why not here?"

    The Moustache agrees.  "Real douchebags don't care what people think.  That confidence is attractive and they know it.  You can be a good confident person without being a dick."

    Plus, as much as pretty girls can't initially tell the difference between an asshole and a confident good guy at a bar, I'm willing to bet they enjoy the process of sorting them out.

    Simple concept, right?  And yet, so many people fret over it.

   Losing yourself in the role doesn't mean putting on a show.  It's the acquisition and continued accumulation of a genuine feeling, and then just running with it.  It's like summoning a comic book superpower and then swaggering around. 

  Easiest way to summon this power?  Do what Ben Affleck's character talks about in Boiler Room - which Michael is watching over at his place as I type this:

"Act as if". 

   Assume you're a superstar, then lose yourself in the part.  I do this a lot lately as part of my visualization for acting.  Since I started, not gonna lie, my swagger's gotten more attention from all the right places (and a few of the wrong ones).

   As that superstar, walk up to someone today and strike up a conversation like it was nothing.  Unless the other person has some malfunction in that moment, I promise it'll go smoothly.

  If anything, that other person should feel anxious talking to you.  Be polite, kind, say whatever comes to mind, thank them, shake their hands if the chat was meaningful, then make your way out. 

   As you leave, notice that feeling - high, energized, certain - and carry it with you as long as it lasts. 

  And remember it the next time you see that cute girl you've been dying to talk to.

  To the naturally confident, extroverted A-types, this seems so basic, but to guys like me, it's always a new revelation, like a monolith from 2001.  Some people need to have this literally beaten into our skulls with a proto-human femur bone to make sure we never forget.

  And yes, lately I've been following my own advice and doing this with women.  More on that in a later entry.  Back to the novel, in the meantime.

Unnameable Randoms - June 22nd, 2010

Karma Project Update

I've got the basis of my little project just about finished, and you should see the first posting on the Karma's Agent page on JQLA very shortly.  Separately, on Facebook, I've already gotten a handful of people to be the first collaborators on this project, although the widget idea may be kinda lame, so anyone who wants to participate, leave a comment.  That'll be the best thing for now.  Further updates as I learn more about this whole Blogspot system...

Oh, and why, given my LOST obsession, haven't I called this thing the KARMA Initiative?  For starters, that's been done to death both by indy rock bands in the UK and mysterious social networking sites.  And also...c'mon guys, I'm not that much of a cliché....

Ethnicity, Jodyist Sacrilege, and Power Relationships  

So, here's the thing.  You can't tell by my writing, but I'm not Caucasian.  I'm actually of Indo Trinidadian descent, and technically Trinidadian by birth.  But Mom and Dad moved us to Canada when I was a wee toddler, so out of all of my cousins, I've been in Canada the longest.  I've got Canadian seniority. 

A derogatory term that summarizes how many in my family viewed me was "coconut": brown on the outside, white on the inside.  It used to piss me off - to paraphase Carlton Banks, "being brown isn't what I'm trying to be, it's what I am" - but I think, after nearly three decades living in where I have, I'm ready to take pride in that statement, as politically incorrect as it may be in some circles.  I'm a skinny white Canadian nerd trapped in the increasingly svelt body of an Indo-Trinidadian. 

That's not to say Trinidad means nothing to me, but as I've said for years, my roots are secure, and my focus has always been on growing my branches.  And unlike Croatians or Serbians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Pakistanis, or most Africans, my nation of birth has done pretty well for itself overall in recent history, so there isn't that anxiety of "having to support the motherland" thing through one crisis or another that keeps many would-be Canadians hyphenated.

I'm not Trinidadian-Canadian, because I was never Trinidadian.  I'm Canadian.  Thank you kindly!

Matters of ethnicity have been coming up lately, though.  My ex was Anglo-Canadian, ethnically, and the idea that we were an "interracial" couple didn't really matter in the community where we grew up, not until we went to university where, suddenly, "race" was all we talked about in English class.  I almost wonder if the universities would do a better job of faciliating good relations between different peoples by simply not always reminding us of how different we actually are from each other.  But I digress.

It's been coming up because I've recently expressed that I have no interest in women of my own ethnicity or skin colour.  And as I noted, I already have a clear idea who the person will be.  Yet many in my family have offered - in a good manner, nothing pushy - their opinion that I should be free to explore, well, other brown girls. That's a problem, because the only woman of Indian descent that I've ever been seriously infatuated with isn't exactly playing in my league.  Sorry, brown ladies: as lovely as you might be,  I know myself, and I generally don't find women of my own race attractive.  It's just how I am. 

(And yes, notwithstanding the candidate selection process thing I mentioned before, odds are if you're an attractive ginger with blue eyes, you'll get my attention.  Or if you look exactly like Aishwarya.  And a special mention for Zoe Saldana, because, well....daaaamn......). 

Plus, women of my own skin colour tend to be Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, or that crazy brand of West Indian Christianity, all of which practically own your life.  In other words, if it works out, one of us is going to have to convert, and given that Jodyism is a fringe path with only one adherent and no proselythizing requirement - well, directly, anyway: I'll never go door knocking - it's gonna be me.  I will never abandon my spiritual freedom for a girl.  As Miyagi-san says in Karate Kid II, "never put passion above principle.  Even if you win, you lose."

There's also this old school idea that some of my relatives have that I'm supposed to be a dominant partner in my relationship. As they say in Ebonics, Jody don't play dat.  You give me a submissive partner who's going to do everything for me, you'd better believe I will exploit the crap out of that arrangement.  She'll be working a job, cooking dinner, cleaning my bathroom, fixing the dryer, giving me shoulder rubs,  and children.

Thing is, that's not a relationship, that's servitude, even if I'm benefitting, because I have a lazy streak in me that, make no mistake, will win out if I know someone else is always going to do it for me.

No, I want someone who'll do some of those things voluntarily, but who will also be sure to tell me to eff off when I'm becoming a demanding ponce. 

Again: equal and complementary powers.  That's what Jody's next, hopefully last, relationship is going to demonstrate in action.

Je dis, hey, qu'est ce qui se passe ici?

I've started advanced level French classes to keep me employed at my current posting.  It involves a bit of work on my own time, but I have no idea how intense it's going to be. So, unless I have something I really need to get off my chest in blog format and the words are just there, the flow of updates is going to be lighter than before.  My priorities for the next month will be the MS - I crossed 100,000 words on Saturday! - my fitness and exercise, baseball, French courses, and the Karma project, along with the one or two nights out that I'll be hanging with friends. 

Oh, and more Unnameable Randoms....those are easier than Aaron's Mom....et bien sur, pourquoi pas?

Have a nice day!

Avatars

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(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 9:1 Mood: Smartypants)

With Avatar coming out on DVD, I'm surprised to find that most people don't know about the word itself.

The avatar originated as a Hindu religious construct, thousands of years old. It means "descent", referring to the physical appearance of a deity in the flesh, having descended from heaven to Earth. It is essentially an interface, or representation, if you will, of an aspect of divinity in daily life, for the purpose of interaction between mortals and the gods.

In 2010, we - as in Western civilization - have appropriated the term to mean a representation of a real person in another medium, like wearing a diving suit while exploring the ocean. Mostly, we apply this to computers - i.e. your chosen MSN or Facebook profile pic is your "avatar" within that environment, and users interact with you via that representation - and, of course, in the film Avatar, which makes literal usage of it, creating bodies that act as the medium of interaction between the research scientists on Pandora and the Na'vi people.

Purists hate it when we Westerners appropriate terms from other cultures for our own usage, but I've always felt there's a creative aspect to appropriation, a synthesis of ideas to create a new way of seeing an old concept. And we all use "avatars" every day, although many of them are as much a show for our inner selves as they are for others in our daily experience of life.

Your personal avatar represents who you want to be as much as who you are now (or who you think you are). I suspect that out of the ten or so Hindu avatars that allegedly walked the Earth, their devotees were as much looking to create in themselves the qualities of the particular gods that were made manifest in the flesh. With Facebook in particular, profile avatars express complex feelings that words cannot, while ensuring that the outsiders know it's you who they're looking at.

Then, there's life itself, especially when you're a teenager...

Most teenage boys' hero worship involves hockey players and quarterbacks, or martial artists. Not so much me: mine were all fictional characters on TV.

In Grade 9, I had transferred out of French Immersion and was starting out with a new group of peers. Given that I wasn't terribly popular before, and that I didn't want to have the same level of bullying recur at the new place, I decided to reinvent myself. So, I chose this guy...



I never completely grew out of the noble, upstanding, fish-out-of-water and terribly polite Mountie, but Due South's Constable Benton Fraser served the purpose of reinventing myself as an overall "nice guy", someone who you could be friends with and who would be nice to other people. Someone with a sense of order, Canadian, decorum, a quiet, polite hero. The nice guyishness has stuck, though I find it somewhat disturbing that ultimately he's almost undone by a woman two seasons in...oh well.

I also had small periods of time when I used to see things through this eyes of this science fictional character... Of course, Babylon 5's Captain John J. Sheridan was far more badass than I ever could have been in high school (or even now), but the idea was to teach me to build up some backbone, become someone who would fight for principle, even if, for me, the weapons came in the form of words. Plus, he was "The One" of Three people who had a destiny to change the course of the galaxy. He brought different races together, commanded fleets, saved Earth from dictatorial rule, and created an Interstellar Alliance between them. And they made a line of plush teddy bears named after him, in at least one episode, anyway....

Of course, university changed a few things, and when I joined Phi Delta Theta in second year, I realized I had to start looking towards the type of future that I wanted to be, and the man I wanted to become. And when I became Chapter President, a time that coincided with the release of my all-time favourite movie trilogy, suddenly this figure appeared from the shadows to claim his rightful place as my new avatar...



Now, choosing Aragorn as my avatar wasn't merely my usual delusion of grandeur acting up. Rather, I wanted to feel that I was someone who was headed to great things, that I could serve the Greater Good, help others, the realization of the "destiny" that I had started to feel I had in high school. From him, I learned courage, character, healing others, love and dedication, and fellowship. This especially became true after my buddy and pledge brother Michael described me as "the heart, and the butt, of the Chapter" (the guys didn't let me get away with taking myself too seriously. They still don't. That's what lifelong friends are for.)

Today...well, I've come back to reality. I'm not going to be a Mountie, a Captain, or a King. I'm 29 years old with less than half a year to my thirties. I'm single and not completely loving it. And I'm still getting this writing career off the ground. And though I may still have some greater destiny in store for me, I'm not nearly as sure of anything anymore, except that life will be what it is whether or not I like it, and it's all in how I approach it. I'm in between the guy who is looking for it all, and the guy who has it all. As such, it's appropriate that my avatars waver between these two (I'm tempted to photoshop them into a hybrid)...

Ted Mosby is a romantic, a dreamer, an overthinker, and a creator of his own destiny. We already know his show, How I Met Your Mother, has a happy ending: what we want to see is, well, howit all went down.

The other guy, Richard Castle, is where I hope to be in a few years. A successful writer, artist, and badass. A father, and yet despite having been married (and divorced) twice, he still has the ability to fall in love, as the on-screen angst with Kate Beckett will attest. It's the success that appeals to me, one that I look forward to so much.

As I said, the avatar represents as much who you want to be as who you are right now. I'm pretty happy when I see my Facebook friends shuffle around their profile avatars: they capture us at our best, even if they don't always bear our faces, they show who we would like to be. They express how we're feeling, what we're looking for, so much more symbolically and powerfully than words.

Whichever avatar you choose, make sure it says something about the characteristics within you that are now rising to the surface like lava bubbles, or the abilities you feel you need to attain by summoning the power of your chosen figures.

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