Snowy Thoughts on a Snowy Day

I’m looking outside and watching as the snow on the tree branches outside my window steadily accumulates. So I’m reading the news reports and this will be like the single biggest day of snowfall since 1944? Damn. Will David Miller call in the army? The only thing scarier than global warming is global cooing. Guess I’m stuck here in Waterloo for another day. Venturing outside is scary. Guess I’ll blog.

So a little over a week ago my residence had a snack night in the lounge downstairs – cupcakes, celery, stuff like that. James and I were downstairs, but nobody showed up, except for one really attractive girl that walked in and asked us if we should help ourselves. Slim dark brunette, stylish, seductive smile. James made a great wisecrack – ”that’s a lot of food for the three of us”. Great line, well executed.

Well we all got talking... unfortunately mostly about boring school stuff, but it’s at least an icebreaker. Made a few jokes. Turns out she is in anthropology, so I asked her if she believed in cultural relativism and how I thought it was nonsense... probably too much heavy heady egghead intellectual stuff for a social night though. I did note though that she was subconsciously playing with her hair and had a particular smile and a glint in her eye.

Steadily more people started streaming in. A couple of girls from our volleyball team showed up, and somehow I got detracted from my conversation with Katie and I’m engaged with the brown girls and chastising her for not showing up to our games. Then I told the brown girl the story of how me and three girls held a free agent team to 3 sets (true story), and that if she’d showed up we’d have won. I was implicitly showing higher value – gaining the favour of other women, talking sports... Amazing because this all came naturally, rather than the cold, manipulative, and calculating way I go about most of my interactions where it’s all about what-do-I-want-from-this-person-and-how-do-I-get-it.

I notice at this point that Katie’s talking to another girl, and was wondering if she had caught any of that. At one point out of the corner of my eye I see her look at me with a sort of grin. I should have rolled off and resumed our chat. But at that point I was engaged in a conversation with my roommate, and too late – she happened to walk out with her roommates before I had a chance to say bye. Ever since then I’ve been looking for excuses to bump into her again.

Well wouldn’t you know it, yesterday I’m doing my laundry downstairs and none other than Katie walks in. I don’t believe it. 150 people in my building, any one could have walked through that door... and it’s Katie. Not once, but twice – the second time as I was exiting. Now admittedly I felt a bit self-conscious about conversation while flipping my undergarments inside out, so that led to an awkward silent stalemate. So all I could muster was a "Hey", and the second time a very coy, Cary Grant-like “Well, hello again”, to which she giggled. She still looked good – must spend a lot of time on her hair and stuff, even indoors. Probably high-maintenance though, and probably boring, shallow, superficial... as most super-attractive girls are.

The more I think about it though, it’s not so much her that I’m attracted to, but what she represents – a boost in social value that would be accrued from scoring a hot girl – and a hot white girl at that. It’s like sitting at a restaurant and everyone looking at us, and me going, Look bitches, that's right, I scored her! Russell Peters did a joke about a brown guy sitting next to a white girl at one of his performances – “He's living the brown American dream!” - 01:30.

I don’t know about you guys, but the first thing that pops into my mind when I see a couple is either he’s done well for himself or he could do better. When we see a relatively mediocre-looking guy with a hot girl, we assume the guy has status. Or serious game. It’s like when we see an old fat guy with some gold-digging Eastern European Svetlana in a fur coat, we assume he has money. Like, how did Jay-Z bag Beyonce? That is one ugly fucker. It’s a cold, manipulative way of thinking – the ‘l’ word doesn’t even factor in my vocabulary; after 4 yrs of advanced math I’ve become too sharply analytical for that; everything’s an algorithm, a logical process, an induction or deduction. But I think it’s something we all privately agree upon but don’t like to acknowledge. Girls usually react with jealousy, guys respond with respect; either way it’s a boost in status and it’s a good feeling.

I wonder what the equivalent would be for a girl in my age range – 19, 20, 21? So long as the guy is reasonably well-dressed and well-groomed and meets a minimum non-hideous threshold, looks aren’t really an issue. Actually I think good-looking guys exude a certain confidence accrued from the attention they get from girls, and it’s not so much the looks but the confidence that attracts the girls, which in turns gives the guy further confidence and attracts more girls – a self-perpetuating cycle.

But there’s no social cachet to being a brown guy, given the tech-support/terrorist rep we have. It’s a handicap, though maybe not as much as being an Asian guy – the small-dick thing is hard to get over, and IMO Mongoloid features are great on women but don’t look good on men. However, I think my discipline of study gives me serious leverage: ”You say he’s in Actuarial Science? So he’ll make, like, $50,000, when he graduates? Score!” That would be appealing to a broke-ass anthropology major. Not to mention Actuarial Science sounds very esoteric and hard, and it’s something only very few non-Chinese people can hack. Here’s a hint for all you ActSci guys: NEVER say you’re in math, given all the negative connotations that brings. Just say Actuarial Science. I even ran this by a random at a club once and she agreed.

Also – and I don’t care how conceited this sounds – I think I’m better than a lot of these brown guys (Ismailis excepted) – more refined, more well-spoken, more earning potential, don’t smell... especially when I measure myself against a lot of these Sri Lankan Tamil poser thugs from Scarborough that I grew up with. I divide brown guys into two camps: ones that can get (non-trash) white girls and Chinese and Korean girls, and ones who can't. And if he looks like a guy that can venture out, then he is worthy of further respect, because that requires a certain social grace and tactful refinedness inherent in adopting white middle-class Canadian norms. Relative to white guys, I’m not all that, but to brown girls I would be more appealing than the rest of the severely shrunken pool they must choose from given all the ostracism they’ll face from family for venturing out for better prospects (i.e. white guys). I always see them eyefucking me on campus. (BTW James – that Venn diagram from Banana Boys about the races vis-à-vis relationships? You gotta scan that and put that up!)

But I’m ambivalent towards brown girls. I recall meeting a Punjabi girl in a party full of Germans two summers back, and Brock Campbell later telling me that she thought I was cool and everything and that I should hit that. But for whatever reason (I think moving down to Connecticut) I never did. I’m not sure what exactly accounts for my ambivalence towards brown girls. I mean I think I will eventually settle down with one, and hopefully by my late 20s I’ll get over my identity issues. And my egotistical narcissism! But I think it’s part of a growth/maturation process.

I seriously thought about LTRs with Asian girls for a bit... then I saw a brown-Asian mix on Facebook once and man she was weird-looking! It’s like she got the worst features of either race – dark skin, hairy, a huge Roman nose, slanted eyes... Imagine a Filipino with a brown nose – I wouldn’t want kids like that. Better to find a fair-skinned brown girl (oxymoron?) with big round eyes and sharp Caucasian features... like Shalini. Unfortunately they’re pretty rare in the Tamil community.

But I must admit that there’s a certain appeal to the Asian female – exotic oriental fetishization aside. There was one time when I was seated next to my cute China doll friend Jackie on a bench outside between Dana Porter Library and Arts Lecture Hall. Perfect fall evening. We’d just come back from a Manulife Financial info session, so she was rocking the business casual and looking sexy. Now a brown guy with an Asian girl is a rare sight on campus, and I think every third person coming out the library was looking our way. Especially the brown guys, who glances seemed to indicate respect. The Asian guys and brown girls were shooting daggers. Still, the attention was great.

Actually I think the most stylish girls on campus are the foreign Chinese girls - and I don't mean the ones in Beijing bubble jackets that go down past the knees, but the ones that actually take care of their appearance. The white girls here are kind of plain and homely, Katie aside, and I used to wonder why. Then you talk to them and you find out they’re from Strathroy, Goderich, Elmira, Tillsonburg – places I’d never heard of. Also, I don’t think there are any Club Monacos or La Senzas in these places, so I can understand. But you look at where K-W is, and there’s the GTA to the east, and a bunch of hick towns scattered the west, and farms in between. And a lot of these agrarians come here. The rich princess types go to Queen’s.

But I actually dig the FOB look so long as they don’t go over too overboard. I like the Uggs and the TNA bags and the super-straight hair and the bangs. The FOB look used to be very outlandish, but it seems that FOB styles have mellowed out over the last two years, more in accordance with North American styles, and I like the more muted look. I dunno – maybe I’m just a product of my environment, I’ve been in UW math too long, and 90% of the good-looking girls I see fit that mold, so I’ve conditioned to it. I’m sure if I went to York or UTSC I’d be more into the Hong Kong TABs. No doubt, I think a brown guy dating an Asian girl would be an upgrade in status. In the end though, it’s still a minority with another minority, and doesn’t really give you an in to the mainstream. It’s why black guys chase after (mediocre fat) white girls, and why Asian girls have a stated preference for white guys (though the former I can understand, given the alternative).

Also, I’m scanning my contacts list now and I have two numbers of some dude named Mike on my phone... I know I spent most of last night talking to this guy at the party. But my liquor content was up which means my gaydar was down. I don’t recall much after the 1:00 mark - that blue stuff the Russian kid spiked in my shot did me over... OMG James – did I pick up a guy?! More on that later.