Illustration by "Monstro-Draw"; click to see it on its original page.

My First Encounter With Grown-Up Heartbreak

My first girlfriend at Crazy Go Nuts University liked my standing there: I was a popular writer and cartoonist at Golden Words, the humour paper run by the engineers, I was in a band and I also had a cushy job as a DJ at the engineering pub that entitled me to a lot of free beer. All this would be very small change here in the grown-up world, but in the genteel simulated poverty of campus life, it’s pretty high-rolling.

Unfortunately, I was a lazy student. My excess attention to extracurriculars took their toll and I was put on “Dean’s Vacation” for a year. As a non-student in a very tightly-knit student community with little apparent hope of re-enrollment, my standing and job had vanished and the girlfriend started looking for greener pastures. I caught her with a friend of mine in flagrante delicto, after which I got dumped for “not being very boyfriend-like”, in her words. I would later find out that her nickname for me was “The Bank of Joey”.

That’s when I knew that I’d entered the world of grown-up heartbreak. Rather than getting dumped for not liking her favourite music, I was now getting dumped over social standing and money. Once again, this was small-scale gold-digging since we were mere students, but it was gold-digging just the same.

Since then, I’ve been aware of money and its power to add a little alpha to your maleness. In some parts of the single urban guy’s world, showing that you’ve got money is the human equivalent to strutting with your peacock feathers in full bloom or showing off the many colours of your baboon butt. You can see this at places that cater exclusively to the banker/broker/financier/douchebag crowd like the club This is London, where the cover charge for men back in 2000 was $20. Women could enter for free.

DABAgirls

You’re probably asking “What’s a DABAgirl?”. I would’ve asked the same had I not seen the New York Times on the Dating A Banker Anonymous blog, a sort of online support group for DABAgirls. If you live in a city with a sizable financial district – Accordion City, the financial capital of Canada, is one such place – you’ve probably encountered the intended demographic for the blog: young, skimpily-dressed, skinny, pretty by The Hills standards and often the “arm ornament” of a banker, broker or similar finance type.

According to the blog’s “About” page, the stresses on bankers has proven to be a very stressful time for bankers and brokers. As a result, the relationships with the women they date have suffered. Not only are they distracted by the financial meltdown, but the perquisites of dating a high-roller – the pricey cocktails and meals at expensive restaurants, the lavish gifts, the jet-set vacations – have evaporated with the belt-tightening that a lot of people, even the “suits”, have been doing.

“Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA),” says the text at the top of the blog’s main page, “is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists – and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships.” Now while my seven-year stint as an undergrad has taught me that when someone starts a sentence with “Speaking as a feminist”, there’s a good chance that what they are about to say is pure nonsense, I also believe that the line “free from the scrutiny of feminists” is an indicator that some idiocy is going to follow.

The intro concludes with: ”So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter and email your stories to dabagirls@gmail.com.”

The blog was started by these two:

They’re Laney Crowell and Megan Petrus. One’s a lawyer and one’s a fashion editor, and both dated banker/broker/financier types. Their relationships went south around the same time as the economy did and after commiserating came to the conclusion that it wasn’t them, it was the recession.

“We felt our relationships were being victimized by the economy and there was nothing we could do to stop it,” they wrote. “Not knowing what else to do, we did what enraged yet articulate people have done since the beginning of time. We started a blog.”

The blog entries have that horrifying-yet-captivating quality that car accidents have. Here’s an excerpt from one titled Ain’t Messin’ With No Broke Banker:

Overnight, he went from unavailable to downright clingy.  He wants to have dinner every night.  By dinner I mean staying in and cooking as Megu is no longer in the budget.  AND, FYI DABA girls – chopping vegetables along side your man in a hot New York sized kitchen is NOTHING like the sexy kitchen scene between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger in Nine and a Half Weeks.  Seriously.  It sucks.  Anyhow, he suggested I meet his parents over the holidays and he keeps commenting that half Asian babies are by far the cutest.  My take on his 180: having no steady source of income for the foreseeable future, he realized that his chances of securing another fashion industry type girl are pretty much zilch and so he is cleaving to me as the last vestige of his former high rolling lifestyle.

Thanks to the recession, I now have a completely devoted BF, which is exactly what I wanted.  So I should be happy, right?  Wrong.  I’m bored and can’t stop thinking about my perpetually unattainable Euro ex-boyfriend who is recession proof courtesy of an offshore trust account.  To be honest, I’m only with my BF because I just don’t have the heart to change my facebook status from “in a relationship” to “I ain’t saying I’m a gold digger, but I ain’t messin’ with no broke banker.”

In the entry Goodbye City Life!, the author writes about how her financier boyfriend asked her to make a list of all the expensive restaurants in New York that she wanted to try out. The reason: he wants to take her to them all before they move to a less stressful and more inexpensive life in the midwest, and she is having none of it:

It was like a bad episode of Green Acres.  Was I going to be plucked out of my beloved city?  I cast a mournful glance down at the Louis Vuittons encasing my feet.  Poor dears.  They wouldn’t last long in the suburbs.  Indeed the yard work and monotony of suburban life would wear down both of our soles.

The closest any of the entries gets to saying that money isn’t everything is through this snippet from an entry titled Relish the Recession, in which the author suggests to take on a Latin lover:

Next time you are stressing over some finance guy remember that he is just a math club nerd with cash and that there are some things money just can’t buy a woman, and a mind blowing orgasm is one of them.  So relax, as evidenced by the existence of this blog, none of your girlfriends are marrying rich banker types any time soon.  You are not going to be the last of your friends to marry well.  This recession just bought everyone an extra two years of the single life.  SAVOR IT.  Go, have a steamy affair with some Latin lover who spends his free time thinking up new bedroom positions instead of trading positions.  Relish that for the here and now you don’t have to be seen in public with a guy who wears black shiny shoes with jeans.  Carpe diem my loves.

It’s crap like this that makes me glad I never went into finance, in spite of some very tempting offers.

It Could All Be a Joke

There’s a good chance that this could all be fiction, in the same way that Belle de Jour, the name of both a blog and its author. She was purportedly of a high-class call girl in London and many people believe that her stories of soliciting were pure fiction and an exercise in creative writing. The author got a book deal out of it, and a television show loosely based on her blog has also been created.

(Less successful was Flatmate de Jour, a blog that was supposed to be a journal of a young woman who shared Belle de Jour’s apartment. It was a group effort of which I was part. I contributed only one entry, but I think it was pretty good – a one-liner that went: “Spaghetti puttanesca for dinner. Again.”)

Dating a Banker Anonymous could be pure fiction, written perhaps as a social experiment to see what kind of reaction its vapid characters would arouse. It might be a a way of landing a book deal. It could also be satire; you’d only have to exaggerate reality slightly to end up with the characters in the blog.

Unfortunately, the nightmare scenario is equally likely: that the entries in Dating a Banker Anonymous are true, even though embellished slightly. You meet lots of people who could’ve written those blog entries in big cities; New York certainly has no shortage of them.

Thanks to its exposure in the New York Times, the blog is already taking on comments from people who are calling out its authors on their shallowness. I doubt that’ll do any good. I think that if the DABAgirls from the blog entries are real, some of them may grow out of it, but that change will come about from some long journey of self-discovery and not from the finger-wagging of a blog commenter.

My advice: read the blog, enjoy the horror, and give those DABAgirls a wide berth.

A reader commented that since the Ginger Ninja and I started dating, I haven’t been posting too many blog entries under a category where I used to post a lot of stories: “Yeah…Girls…Geez”. He’s right, and I’ll see what I can do about it.

Here’s a comic that fits under the “Yeah…Girls…Geez”. We’ve all been here before, haven’t we?

Comic courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I used to get burned by my own “Nice Guy Syndrome” in situations like this until my mid/late twenties. That’s when I adopted the new doctrine I like to call “Just Evil Enough”, which I paired with the doctrine that my old roommate Paul and I developed, “Just Gay Enough (the motto: “We dress nicely, we cook, we don’t take it up the pipe”).

Learn the lesson from that old Star Trek episode where a transporter accident splits Captain Kirk into his “light” and “dark” side — his command and mackin’ skills came from his dark side. Embrace your dark side and own it, but don’t let it own you.

(An aside: a number of people who’ve seen this comic commented on the “boob grab” in the third panel. I said “The double boob grab followed by moving them as if they were an accordion doesn’t win you any points. But I gotta be me!” See? That’s just evil enough.)

One of the things I noticed at Tom and Michele’s housewarming party (which I covered in this entry and this entry) was that the people there, whether or not they realized it, seemed to be observing the Seven Minute Rule, pictured below:

Click the comic to see the full version on its original page.

As the comic excerpt above puts it:

…if you’re a girl with a boyfriend and you meet a guy at a party, you MUST make a reference to your boyfriend within the first seven minutes of conversation.

Girls with boyfriends are shameless abusers of the long-flirt. Since they already have someone to go home to, they don’t have to float from guy to guy searching for meat. Because of this, the guys they talk to mistakenly believe the girls are interested in them, ESPECIALLY when they talk for hours without mentioning their boyfriends.

The excerpt above comes from Tip Me Over, Pour Me Out, an autobiographical webcomic written by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and illustrated by Lisa Hanawalt. Being a rather relaxed kind of guy, I find neurosis highly amusing and Bob-Waksberg’s ability to tell a funny yarn makes it doubly so (he’s part of a comedy troupe called Olde English). Tip Me Over, Pour Me Out has been finding its stride in its most recent episodes; I’m going to be keeping an eye on this webcomic.

The ladies love the accordion. Would a 1960’s comic lie?

Comic courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

A scene from Worst Date Ever, Part 4, just before it all went to Hell. I’m the guy with the only unblurred face; in the front row are Crabs, The Waitress and me.

Old Blog Entries? Why?

One of the downsides of switching domains (from accordionguy.blogware.com to joeydevilla.com) and blogging tools is that all the links to my old blog entries have changed completely. I’ve received a number of emails from readers who’ve bookmarked old entries of mine only to find that when they visit those bookmarks, they hit the “can’t find it” page.

So, over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to point to some of my best entries over the past six or so years. If you’re a long-time reader, go enjoy them again! If you’re relatively new to this blog, I think you’ll be in for a treat.

The Best Christmas Present Ever and Worst Date Ever

The first set of stories I’ll point to is Worst Date Ever, which took place around the spring of 1999. It starts with a bout of loneliness and turns into a story complete with strong language, adult situations, a bar brawl, butterscotch schnapps, iambic pentameter and ABBA.

Start with The Best Christmas Present Ever, which features my friend Crabs, who figures prominently in the Worst Date Ever story. While it’s not likely to ever be turned into a Hallmark Cards Christmas Special on TV, I think it’s a pretty good story about the true meaning of Christmas, and the only Yuletide story featuring crab lice.

Then, you can hit the Worst Date Ever entries…

• Worst Date Ever, Part 1
• Worst Date Ever, Part 2
• Worst Date Ever, Part 3a
• Worst Date Ever, Part 3b
• Worst Date Ever, Part 4
• Worst Date Ever, Part 5
• Worst Date Ever, Denouement Part 1
• Worst Date Ever, Denouement Part 2

I hope this provides you with some entertaining weekend reading. Enjoy!

As sensational as the topic of cyberbullying is in light of the Kathy Sierra incident, I believe it’s still the exception rather than the rule. Here are the statistics on threats I have received:

Number of times I have received threats because of my accordion playing on the street: 6 since May 1, 1999, the day I first took the accordion out on the street.

Number of times I have received threats because of my blogging: 1 since November 10, 2001, the day of my first blog post. The threat (a vague one at that) is chronicled in the article At Last, My Blog Lands Me in Hot Water!.

Number of people who’ve taken joy in my misfortunes online: Only one that I’m aware of. She wrote in response to the article What happened to me and the new girl (or, “The girl who cried Webmaster”), one of my weirder moments. Go read the article if you’ve never done so before; I’ll write more about the online schadenfreude later.

Chart courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

In the late 1990s, a surprsingly large number of friends-of-friends who were women were involved in relationships with older married men (it was never clear to me how much thought they’d given to the long-term prospects for the relationship). I remember a Globe and Mail article from that time that talked about “The Man Glut”, a situation in which the author estimated that there was something in the order of 10,000 more single men in Accordion City than women. It’s probably no coincidence that I took up the accordion at around the same time.

When I lived in San Francisco around the end of 2000 and the first half of 2001, a number of people I knew complained of the lack of single women. There were a number of news reports that made the claim that the male-female ratio in Silicon Valley was even higher than in Anchorage, Alaska. As for the available men, women there had a saying about the nerds in the Valley: “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” I remember hearing about some very expensive “how to meet women” courses in the valley in which nerds paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars to workshop their dating and socializing techniques.

Returning in Toronto in 2001, I came back to the complaints about the lack of eligible single men. In one particular case, the expectations of a friend of a friend were impossibly high.

It turns out that my experiences were indicative of larger trends, as the map below showing the ratios of single men to women across the United States shows. The west coast has a higher ratio of single men, while the east coast has a higher ratio of the single women. You might say that the country looks like a middle school dance:

Click the map to see it at full size.

My proposed solution: a big barn dance in “flyover country”.

[found via Reddit]

Over at a blog named Awkward Things I Say to Girls, there’s an entry titled Why Geeks Make Good Lovers. The reasons provided by the author:

• Geeks don’t sleep around.
• Geeks are good at the things they try.
• Geeks are not interested in status.
• Geeks haven’t formed bad habits.
• Geeks can concentrate.
• Geeks have excellent finger dexterity.
• Geeks have imagination.

I’ll take issue with a couple of items in the list (for example, geeks do have bad habits. They’re just different from those that the popular kids have), but it’s an interesting article nonetheless. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Better still, go check out the rest of the blog, which the author describes as:

About the Blog

When the shattered remains of a once-promising conversation with the most recent cutest girl I’ve ever seen are strewn disasterously [sic] about the floor, I pick them up, scotch-tape them together the best that I can, and post them on this blog for your enjoyment.

Here’s a public service announcement for you gentlemen who are married, engaged, dating or “attached” in some way: this weekend is probably your last window of opportunity to book dinner reservations for Valentine’s Day, which is this Wednesday. Book as soon as possible and stay out of the doghouse. Don’t say I never do you any favours!

If you live in the Accordion City area, the Toronto Life Valentine’s Day Guide 2007 might have some ideas you might want to try.

Regular Expressions to the Rescue!

“Whenever I learn a new skill,” writes Randall Munroe, author and artist behind the incredibly nerdy webcomic xkcd, “I concoct elaborate scenarios where it lets me save the day.” In his latest comic, he illustrates this:

Click the comic to see it on its original page.

(Nerd alert: in order to get the joke in the comic, you need to know what regular expressions are. They’re strings of characters — called “strings” for short — that describe or match a given set of strings, according to rules. Think of them as being similar to the “search and replace” function in your favourite word processor, but on steroids.)

HTTP and Computational Complexity to the Rescue!

Back in 2003, I started dating a woman whom I thought was a webmaster and a computer science graduate. A reader of this blog recognized this woman by her description and email me a warning, saying that she wasn’t who she said she was — she was in fact a con artist and identity thief. She used enough jargon to seem convincing as a webmaster and programmer (not to just me, but a number of nerds), but I managed to catch her when she was unable to explain the difference between HTTP GET and HTTP POST and when I tricked her into lying that she proved that P = NP. The whole story is here in an old entry of mine, titled The Girl Who Cried Webmaster.

Radio Shack TRS-80 Nerds to the Rescue!

When writing about computer skills saving the day, I remembered that Radio Shack made a couple of superhero comics in which Superman got an assist from some young nerds equipped with the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, a staple of young nerds back in the early 1980s:

A little Googling landed me at X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut’s CosmoBlog, where he not only features the covers of these cheesy classics, he’s also giving away the comics!

One of the interesting side effects of writing funny if somewhat embarrassing dating stories is that people start coming to you for dating advice. If you Google for the phrase “master of dating”, the first page of results points to an Alex Payne blog entry which categorizes me as such. This has only increased since I got married; I assume that this is because people believe that as a married man, I have accomplished the dating mission. I would counter by saying that “it’s the journey that counts, not the destination“, but that’s not the point of this entry.

A number of women friends, acquaintances and blog readers whom I’ve never met but have sent me emails have told me that there seems to be some sort of guy shortage, and this leads to the inevitable question along the lines of “What are guys thinking?” or “Could you please tell me about the guy mindset?”

Explaining this feels like trying to explain colours to someone who’s been blind since birth. I usually end up falling back on my “Chihuahua Theory”, which goes like this:

Imagine that there’s a little chihuahua in your head that barks at everything.

While this is a glib, throwaway answer, most people upon hearing this suddenly change facial expression, as if they’re having a Eureka! moment. “Yes!” they say, “I understand!”

This theory amused the Ginger Ninja when I first explained it to her about a month into our dating; it’s why her first Christmas present to me was a plush chihuahua.

The piece of paper shown below was found in the cafeteria of an Arizona school. I’m strangely relieved to see that they haven’t changed…

Click the image to see the original photo.

Poor Rocheal. She’s in the same boat as “The Ugly One” from Teen Girl Squad.

In the International Herald-Tribune, there’s an article on the social situation in Beirut, where young women outnumber young men by a ratio of five to one. The sex ratio skew is the result of the dire employment situation in Lebanon: the educated and ambitious men to seek their fortunes abroad while the women stay home (apparently the guys who stay behind are the dolts, the shiftless and the local equivalent of Ned Flanders.)

The practical upshot of all this is that when the men come home, they return to “one of the world’s most aggressive cultures of female display”. Simply put, the entire place turns into Coyote Ugly.

Perhaps I’ve become a bit too comfortable in Logan International Airport’s Terminal C.

Terminal C is the terminal I use most often, after the ones in Toronto. Of the airlines that have regular Toronto-Boston routes, Air Canada is probably the best option, both price- and comfort-wise. They tend to use larger and more comfortable jets than the next-best option, American Eagle, and they use Terminal C, which has better restaurants and stores and more available power outlets than Terminal B. It’s also where the Logan branch of Legal Sea Foods, home of some very good “chowdah”, is located.

Yesterday afternoon, I took Brent Ashley to Legal for some chowder and calamari, to thank him for giving me a free pass to the Ajax Experience conference. The “Thai Style” calamari is pretty nice, with its spicy pineapple-and-peanut sauce, but let’s face it: it’s seriously deep-fried and greasily travels through your system like Mario Andretti down a straightaway. Needless to say, I felt nature’s rather urgent call while waiting at the gate and asked Brent to keep an eye on my stuff while I beelined for the bathroom.

I’ve used the bathroom at Terminal C dozens of times, so I navigated my way there on auto-pilot. I saw a set of open stalls, picked one and went about my business.

As I was finishing up, I noticed that the voices of the guys in the room were a little weird. That’s when I realized that I’d just taken a crap in the women’s room.

A plane must’ve just landed, because the bathroom got very full. I decided that right then would be a very bad time to emerge from the stall; better by far to wait for a lull. The last thing I needed was a room full of women who might be under the mistaken impression that I was some kind of Japanese toilet pervert who got his jollies listening to women using the bathroom.

I even briefly considered tossing my black blazer over my head in the hopes that it would hide my bearded face and perhaps even fool casual onlookers into thinking I was wearing some kind of chador. Hey, I’ve had stupider ideas.

A few minutes later, I got the lull I was waiting for. I opened the stall door and set a quick but not overly hurried path for the door and crossed the hall into the men’s washroom, where I washed my hands.

Note to self: Look before you poop.

(By the bye, the women’s washroom at Logan is just as poorly-maintained as the men’s.)

[via reddit] Here’s further proof that everything under the sun can be expressed mathematically: the Attractiveness/Relationship graph (it’s not as complex as it sounds). To those of you who are going to waste the next couple of hours classifying people they know along the graph, I apologize in advance.

A guy named “Ikes” has created some strange diagrams on his site. I used to live near a Hooters, and for a while, I worked across the street from one, and from casual observation would say that the diagram below is fairly accurate not just of the downtown Hooters, but most places in Accordion City’s club district:

It’s been ten months to the day since I married Wendy, which means that it’s time for me to post another sappy photo and take her out to dinner tonight. Happy tenth month-a-versary, sweetie!

The web statistics suggest that I’m getting a crop of new readers, partially because of the Love/Hate T-shirt entry, partially because of the entry featuring the Family Circus/Cthulhu mashups and partly because of RailsConf and some nice linkage from the Ruby community’s very own rock star, why the lucky stiff and his Ruby-related site, RedHanded.

Welcome, new readers! Go fetch your favourite beverage and feel free to cruise through the archives. There’s almost five years’ worth of stuff here, ranging from silly to serious. If you’re at a loss for a place to start, try this page, which features links to my favourite blog entries.

To narrow it down further, let me suggest the “Girl Trouble” entries of 2003, which are listed below. Enjoy!

Worst Date Ever

I’ll cut to the chase: the date ends with her screaming while curled up in the fetal position.

She was a pretty blonde waitress with an English accent who worked at the cafe I frequented. I had a crush on her from the first moment I laid eyes on her, and it turns out that she had a thing for me, too. Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing that went right. This multi-part story has got it all: adult situations, violence, ketamine, strong language and ABBA.

• Worst Date Ever, Chapter 1
• Worst Date Ever, Chapter 2
• Worst Date Ever, Chapter 3a
• Worst Date Ever, Chapter 3b
• Worst Date Ever, Chapter 4
• Worst Date Ever, Chapter 5
• Worst Date Ever, Denouement Part 1
• Worst Date Ever, Denouement Part 2
• Bring It On

The New Girl Story

This is the blog entry that got me nominated for a bloggie and landed me a chapter in the book Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs.

The short version: I gush about my new girlfriend in a blog entry,

someone reads that entry and sends me an email warning me that the

girlfriend is not whom she says she is. Creepiness ensues.

• The Girl Who Cried “Webmaster”

• No, I did NOT meet her online
• For the record

Last Night

In this entry covering a single night, I face romantic disappointment, thwart a pickpocket,

endure bad poetry, entertain a crowd, aid and abet underage drinking,

come between a small-town girl and two Gap ninjas, entertain another

crowd and get complimented on my hat.