Bad Decisions / Rolling Mistakes

Bill Cammack — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:55:45 +0000

So, I’m talking to this fun and attractive young lady the other day while I’m hanging out with some friends. I’m not going to mention her name (not that I ever do, haha) because she actively hides from Social Media, but let’s say she’s “an accountant”.

So, off the bat, we don’t seem very similar as far as dating goes, but she’s a pleasant person and nice to look at, so I don’t mind chatting her up for a while…

At some point, the party moves to another location, at which point she was heading home and the rest of us were heading out to party some more. I was already WAAAAAAY over my time limit to determine whether I was gonna kick it with her or not, so I had decided that I wasn’t going to request contact information from her and if she wanted to get in touch with me, she knew to Google me or she knew we had mutual acquaintances and could find me through them.

Now that I’m writing this, I realize that this was actually a VERY important component of the bad decision I ended up making. I had gone over this scenario lots of times between when it happened and today and had neglected to rewind far enough back to the point where I had already written her off as far as tonight. That doesn’t mean my decision was any less poor, haha.. Just that I understand now why I went the route I did. :D

So… hmm… ok.. In thinking about the rewind some more, and considering my mindset about her by the time we left that party, I now realize how I got in the situation I got in. Before just now, I had been asking myself “How in the HELL did you end up walking with her AND some other guys instead of just HER?”

So when we were leaving place #1, I was going to be heading to place #2 and she was going to be heading to the subway to go home. This is where I made error #1 and told her I’d be right outside while I went to see if these other chicks wanted to come with.

Technically, that wasn’t an error, because I thought she was going home, which would have meant I would have been showing up at place #2 without entertainment in-hand, which is never a good idea. :D However, in being efficient about keeping my night going as far as entertainment, I wrote her off as past tense even though she was actually physically still right there where I was. I was seeing her as if she had already gotten on the subway, so I started interacting with her as if she were already gone. I was in some kind of “Nice to meet you, see you around the scene” endgame mode, when I should have been in a “This person that you’ve already had fun with is still here with you until she actually leaves” mode.

So the other chicks aren’t ready to leave yet, so I tell them where they’re going and then go upstairs to tell the accountant good-bye. She’s ready to leave on the spot, and if she had, I wouldn’t have thought about ANY of this stuff. :) She decides to walk to a subway station that’s in the same direction I’m heading to the next party, so we’re walking and talking…

However, due to blunder #1, my not leaving the place WITH her, we’ve now achieved two more people that are walking with us. Two guys. This is where oversight/error #2 comes in. Since I had already considered her as having left, it wasn’t a big deal that these guys were walking with us. One of them, I knew already, and the other, I was just meeting for the first time right there. The problem is that when you add other people into the mix, you can’t really talk about what you SHOULD be talking about with a gal. You talk about watered-down stuff or entirely different topics so as not to have your and her business “in the street”. I wasn’t worried about this, though, because she was already gone as far as I was concerned, and I was just escorting her to the subway.

The turning point in the situation was that she decided NOT to go to the subway and disappear from my life forever, but instead to continue on with the three of us to the party that we were going to. I was glad that she was going to keep hanging out with us, but I hadn’t considered what I was thinking of her in order to reverse it. In other words, I was still treating her like she was immediately leaving.

So my lack of paying attention to the present and instead focusing on an envisioned future (without her in it) led to this rolling mistake. I should have left the place with her. I should have walked with her by myself. If Woody had gone straight to the police, this would never have happened…

So error #3 was not recognizing the changeover and not mentally adjusting to the new situation… Error #4 was letting this guy I’ve never seen before control the conversation.

So now, I’m basically an innocent bystander to my own rap. Granted, it wasn’t much of a rap, because I wasn’t rapping TO her and, in fact had already written her off as soon as she had said she was going home. But what happened was that the new guy was talking to her about something, blah blah blah and then, somehow, he started talking about “picking up women”. I don’t know how this happened, because I didn’t care what he was saying, so I wasn’t listening in on his conversation with her. It just so happened to be loud enough for me to hear “picking up” or “picked up” or something like that.

I doubt their conversation had anything to do with me, because when women ask me what I do, I just say “I’m a video editor”. I can’t afford to say “I write a dating blog”, because that immediately puts women on guard for what I’m attempting to do to them. :D So, as far as I know, the accountant didn’t think I knew anything about dating at all.

In general, you don’t want to discuss picking up women….. AROUND WOMEN, unless they’re already in your inner circle. If these are your homegirls, and they know you do what you do… Yeah! Talk about picking up women all day. Also, you don’t want to talk about picking up women in front of women with guys who you don’t know what level they’re on as far as kickin’ it with chicks. This is a MAJOR BLUNDER and counts as #5 in this rolling mistake. If a guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s liable to make some sort of egregious error and subsequently drag YOU down with the sinking ship he just blasted a hole in. Also, if he DOES know what he’s doing, he could decide to intentionally sabotage your rap by saying the wrong thing(s) and jacking up her mood.

So, all of these errors led to the one I actually want to talk about… This guy says “blah blah blah picking up women”, and somehow now has incorporated me into their conversation. I replied something to him, to which he replies something to the effect of:

“That’s How You Picked *HER* Up?”

……………

So now, time slows down as all three people are looking at me. As soon as he said what he said, I had looked at her face, and her mind was suddenly kicking into gear, thinking about things she hadn’t thought of before. She looked like she had seen something shocking, snapped out of it in a few seconds and then looked in my direction, to hear what my response was going to be…

I guess time didn’t really slow down, but I was suddenly thinking at hyper-speed, running permutations and potential outcomes. On the one hand, I wanted to say nothing at all, silently pleading The 5th. The problem with a non-commital response is that it allows her to think anything and everything about the situation. You’re giving up control by not attempting to define the situation through words or actions. On top of that, it looks suspicious that you can’t answer a simple question.

Except.. It’s NOT a simple question, because answering a question about HOW I picked her up stipulates to my picking her up in the first place. I don’t “pick women up”. I hang out with them. If they happen to get lucky, good for them. ;) Therefore, at no point in time had I said anything to the accountant as far as dating her, messing with her or even liking the color or her eyes or how pleasant her personality is. This is why she had this “What’s he talking about, picked her up?” look on her face right after he said it. So, I don’t pick women up in the traditional “You come here often?”, “Did it hurt… When you fell out of Heaven?” sense, but at the same time, the fact that I was hanging out with her WAS the pickup.

So I wasn’t inclined to answer the question about HOW I picked her up, because I would have been admitting to her that I DID pick her up, which defeats the purpose of the style.

OTOH… I didn’t want to flat-out deny picking her up either. That would have given her the impression that I wasn’t interested. It also would have been completely disingenuous, because I had been hanging out with at least six other women at party #1 and I left with *her*. Clearly, by the fact of the circumstances we were currently in at the time of the conversation, I was in the process of some format of a pickup on her.

Tactically, denying the pickup was the way to go.. “Pick-up? I didn’t pick her up! We’re just walking down the street together in the middle of the night, even though we never laid eyes on each other before about an hour ago. A heh.. A heh heh *grin*”. I could have recovered from that easily, and it would have been a good excuse to pull her to the side later and explain how I really DID like her and WANTED to pick her up, except I denied it so as to keep our business ‘out the street’, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, while I was running scenarios and permutations in the seconds I had between his question and my inevitable answer, I failed to account for my past-tense view of her and decided that I was bored with the situation and was going to try something off the wall. Ladies, let this be a lesson to you hahaha.. If a guy does something completely odd, it might not be that he’s crazy, but that he just doesn’t care about the outcome and he’s experimenting. :)

So, without skipping too many beats, I start some BS explanation of “How I picked her up”. Error #6.. Following someone else’s lead when you’re kickin’ it with a chick. It was a HORRIBLE idea. It was completely ill-advised. I totally had no idea what was going to happen as I was explaining to a guy I had never met before the process that I used to pick up a girl that I had never met before who was standing right next to me and that I had never picked up in the first place (so far as she knew at the time). Fellaz… Do NOT try this at home! :D

Well.. It wasn’t worth it. Not to me. It was worth it as an experiment and to be able to tell y’all about it, but in real-time, I just felt kind of empty after I finished saying whatever I said, and I have no idea what I said, because I was just making it up on the fly and I was more paying attention to her reactions to what I was saying than whatever words I selected. Basically, I had burned whatever rap I had been working on to the ground and was going to have to bail altogether or start something completely new with her after my phony pickup confession.

Really, I felt pretty drained. I immediately started contemplating how this happened to me in the first place. Actually, some of my processing cycles before I spoke up were taken up by thoughts of “um… How the hell did this happen to me?” :D But I had to suppress that to decide what route I was going with the answer. As soon as I finished, I devoted all energies to assessing the situation, because it was a MAJOR blunder on my part. Now, through writing it out, I see how it happened.

And I supposed that concludes this story with Error #7. Instead of getting back in the game, I was just disgusted with myself and preoccupied with taking mental notes about the surrounding circumstances which led to my grand soliloquy about nothing of import. I basically grounded myself, which might have seemed to her that I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I hope I didn’t come off like that, but I’m pretty sure I did. Actually, I had put myself on punishment and was just disgusted and didn’t feel like working around the issue. I owed her more than that, but didn’t give it to her.

So, gentlemen… The moral of the story is to keep your eyes on the prize, control your situations and environments and make sure you retain the lead role when you’re rapping to a chick. If you’re gonna fumble, make sure you do it on your own terms… Not because you got lazy and let someone else kick the ball out of your hands while you were standing there watching it all go down.

I guess as a bonus, I’ll add in Error #8, which is the fact that since I knew there were plenty of women that I knew at the next party, I was totally unconcerned with fumbling ONE, and that contributed to my experimental nature. So, not only shouldn’t I have considered her past tense until she actually LEFT, but I should have maintained my level of concentration on her and attention to her until the situation played itself all the way out.

I think that’s what disgusted me the most about this situation. I got bored, I got lazy, I started slackin’… and then I GOT CAUGHT SLIPPIN’!!! :D

Ah well. C’est la vie. Easy come, Easy go! :D

~Bill

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Feed Error

Bill Cammack — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:34:24 +0000

My apologies for the feed error this morning. :)

I usually write all my posts myself, but my Lindz & Bill category is a collab with Lindsey Chen of http://lindseychen.com.

I thought it would be a good idea to post our latest article: “Top 10 Mistakes Guys Make When Trying To Get A Girl” password-protected, so that Lindsey could review it and approve it before actual release. I was wrong, haha that was NOT a good idea. :)

Since I don’t pay attention to feeds, I wasn’t aware of how quickly my posts were being sent to people’s feed readers. More than one person has informed me that I sent a password-protected post out to the readers. My fault. The only point was making sure that Lindz was cool with it before I released it, but I’ll find a different way to make that happen to avoid confusion in the future. :)

Thanks for reading and commenting and I’m sure you won’t be bothered with password-protected articles in the future, because now I know…

And knowing’s half the battle! ;)

Bill Cammack » error

Bad Decisions / Rolling Mistakes

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