I am a judgmental man with strong opinions and very few solutions; the human equivalent of a check engine light: quick to alarm, short on details, and of no real use in a crisis. It’s not that I don’t want to help, but my broad sense of superiority is undercut by my narrow range of expertise. This has no effect on my confidence, or willingness to give advice on any subject, but the end result often borders on negligence. There are three categorical exceptions: Lifting stuff, Night Hammocking, and Adult Romance.

What qualifies me to give romantic advice? Nothing, and everything. I’ve been happily married for a decade, but I mostly lucked into that. When was single I did okay, but I suspect that was passable good looks propping up unsound game theory. On the surface my romantic expertise seems another empty boast, until you consider my profession; I am a personal trainer. Ninety percent of my job is identifying correctable patterns and repairing flawed decision making; that is the whole of human behaviour and I have been cheating the world by not sharing my findings in a public fashion. That changes today.

Sam The Turtle’s Complete Guide To Romance

Sort yourself out first

If you go fishing with an unstrung line, in a boat with a hole in it, it doesn’t matter if the fish are biting, you are unlikely to catch any and drowning is a real possibility. Now you might argue “ What if I bail furiously the whole time and jab at the fish with my rod? If I find the right spot on the lake it might work”. It might, but you also might want to consider that an empty line is the least of your deficiencies. Continue reading →

This morning two gutter creeps stacked my garbage cans, climbed my back gate, and stole my bike in broad daylight. I was ten feet away in the kitchen, and had the blinds not been down I would have seen it happen. Instead I found out ten minutes later when my wife noticed an absent bike and an open gate. I was left to stalk shoe-less and seething up and down my street until a construction worker, who’d witnessed it go down, shouted a description of the creeps. Lank greasy hair, one had a blue and white shirt, the other no shirt at all, both late twenties to early thirties. Generic Centretown skids.

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I may be developing some misanthropic tendencies. Outside the window of my workplace there is a giant Ottawa sign, only it’s missing a “T”. OT_AWA. If you stand between the T and A you can extend your arms and become the missing T. I was against it immediately and time and repetition have only hardened my heart. It’s like I’m being waterboarded by a lazy sight gag. I spend my day glaring out the window, wishing sunburns and sandal blisters at this ceaseless caravan of Letter People.

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I can’t tell if I’m having a midlife crisis. I am not acting out, but I find myself needlessly confessing my age at the start of conversations; my name is A.J. and I am forty one years old. I don’t know if it’s a nervous tic, or a means to extract qualified praise for my appearance, but I present my age as if I expect to be challenged on the point and persuaded otherwise. I think about the fact that I’m forty one more than I think about sex, and when I think about sex I think about the fact that I am forty one.

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