The Sci-fi Thing And Just Being Yourself

Some comments from yesterday’s post – Girl Game: When You’re Too Low Maintenance… Add a Touch of Klingon

Anonymous said…  Athol, honest question, why all the scifi? Is it personal preference, you think it get the message over more effectively that anything else or that the people you’re trying to reach are often geeks and would understand the idiom?

Looking Glass said…   Two thoughts on the sci-fi:

1) Athol’s a nerd, never forget that.

2) The point of Sci-Fi is abstraction, allowing for a discussion of the present from a foreign point of view. Which is a lot of what Athol’s work is.

Athol: The short answer is yes to everything. The longer answer is that I’m just being myself.

Yes I do like sci-fi. I’ve read and watched a ton of it and it’s just in my veins so to speak. Jennifer likes sci-fi too, so that’s a big win as well. There’s been plenty of times in my life where I’ve found myself talking to a very attractive woman and been quite drawn to her, and then she reveals some sort of basic confusion between Star Wars and Star Trek and my erection just ebbs away never to return. Seriously, Captain Picard does NOT become Darth Vader, does that really have to be explained to anyone? I must do something with my face as well when they unload their ignorance on me, as I’ve seen the look cross their face of, “Oh that was the wrong thing to say to this guy for some reason.”

So I draw from what I know. That’s how stuff ends up in posts. I have no idea how some of it turns up, it just does. I get that Jimmy Neutron brain blast thing happening sometimes.

Yes I do think some of it is better taught from the sci-fi angle. The main thing I do this with is the Captain and First Officer metaphor for a husband and wife dynamic. It is enormously difficult to explain any form of male leadership or dominance without getting immediately screamed at as some kind of wife beating bigot. Everyone immediately goes on the defensive and is concerned that the wife is going to be taken advantage of. Male dominance can so easily be reframed as female subjugation if you aren’t careful.

The Captain and First Officer role however is instantly understood by anyone familiar with Star Trek, and quickly understood by those that don’t with the follow up explanation of “it’s kinda like a pilot and a co-pilot in a commercial airliner”. The trick is both the Captain role and the First Officer role, are positive and strong/meaningful roles in a relationship. It’s also a little goofy to use Star Trek as a marriage advice source. As a result, no one gets defensive about listening to the concept. Women that would be extremely angry at the suggestion they deep down want a male lead relationship or being submissive, often immediately explode with a “OMG that’s exactly how I feel!!! I want to be a First Officer!!!”

For some women it’s a total mindfuck to realize they’ve gotten two decades into a marriage actively working hard to avoid getting what they really want from the relationship.

And yes, I’m trying to reach geeks. Let’s face it, the beautiful people of the world don’t need help getting laid, and there’s only a tiny minority of them. The rest of us can learn ways to improve ourselves and there’s a great mass of us. At the end of the day I’m trying to make a living at this too and it’s simple do-the-math-thinking.

But beyond all that, I really just don’t care too much what anyone thinks anymore. I’m very much out as a person these days. I’m out about my sexual interests. I’m out about my thoughts. I’m out about about being an atheist. I’m out about sci-fi. I’m out about what I eat for dinner some nights lol.

So there are lots of reasons someone could decide to dislike me, or not like something about me. But there are also a lot of reasons someone could decide to like me, or like something about me. So either way, there’s opportunity for a strong reaction one way or the other. The people that don’t like me leave a pissy comment and then move on. The people that don’t care either way move on too. But people that like me stick around and if they keep liking me they become fans, and fans buy books and tell their friends about the blog and book.

When people say “just be yourself”, what they really mean is “don’t nerf your personality into the ground trying to be someone that no one could actively dislike.” Because if you do that, you’re taking away everything about you that someone could like about you too.

When you are yourself, you tend to attract people to you that are also into the same things as you. If you love hiking, tell people you love hiking, ask women to go hiking with you, join a hiking club, actually hike somewhere. At some point someone will probably say, “Oh you should meet Tina, she likes hiking too”, and then you go game Tina. Don’t game someone into being your girlfriend and then discover she hates hiking. Then especially don’t complain that she’s Fitness Testing you about your hiking. Or maybe you just stop hiking altogether to keep the peace. See how that works?

Jennifer loves sci-fi too. When I first met her, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine piloted and we watched it together in a group in one of her friend’s dorm room. We don’t watch that much TV, but we’ve watched DS9, Voyager, Bablyon 5, BSG, and Stargate SG-1 together cozyed up on the sofa together. We’re hopeful about Terra Nova so far. So that’s something that’s worked for us. So when I texted her earlier today…

Athol: “Imzadi… do you think I use too many sci-fi references on the blog?”

Jennifer: “LMAO.”

See… you may not get that, but she gets it. She gets me. And that’s all that matters.

Though I do advise moderation in the geeky thing, it’s possible to go too far in that direction…

Plus I do give a crap about people and I think that shines through. I think that’s the difference between Nerd and Geek. A nerd will fix a computer, a geek will help people by fixing computers; a subtle but important difference.