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Surprise, New Year's Eve is way better in Brazil
Happy New Year, dear readers and twisted Kommentariat. I hope 2015 finds you well and deep in the winnings of your fantasy football championship. Or at least deep in some kind of [sexual imagery].
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the disappointing slate of Wild Card games this weekend. Until then, enjoy these people’s problems and my harebrained advice to them. And as always, if you have a question for next week’s Mailbag, email us.
Dear Captain,
Football first: I’m in a one-man keeper league and my options to keep are totally ass. Also, the way that this league works is that you give up your first round pick no matter who you keep, so where you picked the guy doesn’t matter.
That is … sub-optimal.
Anyway, my keeper from last year, for the third year in a row, was Adrian Peterson. In a related story, I finished in last. Looking at my roster, the only other keepers would be Dez Bryant or Cam Newton. Do any of those guys seem worth giving up what would be the first overall pick next year?
I could see Peterson and Dez both being first-rounders, but first overall? Even with your league-mates’ keepers taking some of the best names off the board, that’s a tough pill to swallow.
That said, Dez and AP will both be gone by the time you pick again at 24, so all you have to do is (a) figure out who you’d rather keep — personally, I’d take Dez — and (b) figure out whether that player is better than anyone who will be available with the first pick. I’m assuming that you have no knowledge of who’s being kept until after you make your decision, so you’ll have to go through every roster in the league and do some guesswork about who will be available.
If one of your opponents has, say, Aaron Rodgers and DeMarco Murray, or Jamaal Charles and Demaryius Thomas, then you can surmise that there will be viable options come the draft. It just depends on whether you think that option will be better than AP/Dez. (SPOILER: I don’t think anyone’s letting go of an obvious #1 overall pick.)
Advice: Remember how you said that when you turned 30 that you just wanted someone who was nice like a teacher or a nurse?
Yes. It’s a nice shortcut for weeding out bad apples if you’ve dated a lot of, say, PR reps and aspiring actresses. Not that there aren’t perfectly good people who are PR reps and actresses (and lawyers and financiers and whatnot), but the baseline of “Oh, this is a good human being” tends to be higher among those who choose more altruistic careers.
Well I did that!
Yay!
I found a wonderful former teacher studying to be a nurse
Dang! Checking off BOTH boxes! You’re an early frontrunner for KSK Mailbag Gold Star Reader of the Month.
who brightens every day that I’m around her. We’ve been together for nine months and we’ve started talking about moving in together. She said that she’d want to be engaged before she moved in with someone, even if the wedding weren’t planned right away. Now, I’d love to move in with her because I’d love to see her every day. But being engaged after 9 months seems a little rushed to me, even if it’s just a word and a ring and there’s no wedding in sight. I think I’d be more comfortable once we pass the year mark, but is it weird or wrong to think like this about getting engaged? I just want to do it when I’m comfortable, but I also realize that an arbitrary cutoff for when I’d feel comfortable seems kinda bullshit.
-Want That Sweet Apartment
First of all, this is a great problem to have: worrying about the appropriate order of cohabitation and engagement is common among thirty-ish professionals, and it’s a good sign that the two of you are addressing expectations for the relationship up front. It’s not like you’re a Republican looking at the Affordable Care Act: you two can find a middle ground that will ultimately satisfy both of you.
How you find that middle ground, of course, will hinge on communication, willingness to compromise, and perhaps patience. You’re perfectly justified in thinking that nine months into the relationship feels too early for engagement; similarly, she’s well within her rights to want a commitment before moving in with a man — I’ve seen too many grown women twist in the wind for years while their live-in boyfriends feel no urge to move forward with engagement or marriage.
In the meantime, I recommend a regular re-assessment of your feelings and an ongoing discussion with your girlfriend. Personally speaking, the revelation that I’d found the person I wanted to spend my life with didn’t immediately acclimate my brain to lifelong monogamy. Even as I rode the wave of “Yes! I found my future wife!” there was an undertow of “Aw man, my awesome single life is over,” which was a silly thing to happen in my brain after a year of happily dating the same person, but it happened nonetheless.
I can’t know if you feel the same way — or even a similar way — but it’s best to have all that sorted out before you move in with a woman OR get engaged to her, whichever comes first.
**********
Hey Captain,
Fantasy: I placed 3rd in my league thanks to your advice and Antonio Brown and no thanks to LeSean McCoy and Philip Rivers’ rapidly degrading health. So thank you.
You’re welcome! And also sorry for being so high on LeSean this year. I had no idea Chip Kelly would become a nigh-Belichickian Enemy of Fantasy Football.
Sex/Life: Kind of a long story so I apologize in advance. I’m 29 years old and still live at home due to never being able to get a well-paying job out of college combined with $60k in student loan debt.
Yeah, that’ll do it.
About a month ago I was able to weasel my way into a job (100% nepotism-assisted) that finally has my life on a decent track. I’ll be going from making $14/hour to close to $70k/year and now I can finally join the adult world. My plan is to live at home for maybe another year, pay off as much of my loan as I can, all the while saving everything else for an eventual apartment. Of course anything can change, but how does that sound?
That sounds like a reasonable plan towards a much better life.
My love/sex life is infinitely more sad than my living situation, so I’ll break it down in easy to read list format:
- I’ve had sex with only 2 girls in my entire life, one when I was 18 and another about 3 years ago (neither were long-term relationships, they only lasted 3-4 months each). In between those gaps I haven’t done so much as talk to a girl. The sex was infrequent and I’ll freely admit to being terrible at it with both of them.
- I’m literally the last single person out of my group of friends who are already in the engaged/married/house & kids phases of their lives, so I’m used to playing the role of 3rd/5th/7th/9th/11th wheel when we get together.
- This all boils down to my horrifically low self-esteem and fear of rejection. I’m only about 5’3″ so it’s tough to feel confident when you’re at a bar and look like a lost 12 year old. I’ve never been able to approach a girl in public but I’m at least a decent conversationalist when I need to be. Not unlike how I got my current job, those two girls I slept with were a result of pure dumb luck.
Not to go all inspirational-quote-a-day-calendar on you, but you make your own luck. It’s no coincidence that the people who work the hardest at a particular thing also happen to be the luckiest in that regard. Yes, luck can help out any ol’ Joe Schmuckatelli, but it definitely favors the person who creates more opportunities for himself.
Since this is a football/sex mailbag, think of “luck” with women like fumbles. Due to the unpredictable nature of a fumbled football, it really is a 50-50 chance whether a team or its opponent recovers the ball. Bad teams can have good fumble luck and vice versa, but do you think any team is just like, “Well, our luck will revert to the mean over a long enough arc”? No. They hustle and go after every loose ball.
Even more importantly, good defenses recognize that it’s not the percentage of fumbles recovered that matters, it’s the number of them. Would you rather have an aggressive, unlucky defense that recovers 40% of 25 forced fumbles over the course of a season, or a shitty but lucky one that recovers 70% of ten fumbles?
Sorry, I know you didn’t sign up for word problems and football metaphors, but the point is this: don’t settle for a stroke of good luck once every five years. Go out and make more of it.
The job lets me work from home a few days a week if I want to and they have an office in NYC (I live in NJ), so I’m thinking I can maybe move to the city when the time is right and then try my hand at online dating? I hate to say it but I think I’m too old for something like Tinder, but then again I have no idea. The lack of sexual experience is really a bummer for me right now and unfortunately I don’t see that changing anytime soon with me being almost 30 and living at home.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and have a happy new year!
- JK
So you’ve got a late start on adulthood, and you the sex gods dealt you a less than ideal hand with your stature. You’re certainly not in an advantageous position, but it’s also no reason to feel sorry for yourself. People who feel sorry for themselves don’t generate their own luck; confident people with joie de vivre do.
I have two good friends from the Marines who are short dudes (5-3 to 5-5) that have done well in life and love. One is relentlessly positive and outgoing; the other gets by on wit and withering sarcasm (he’d respond to short jokes with, “Oh? Is that about my height? Never heard anything like that before. Clever.” Then he’d roll his eyes and take a swig of beer with such disdain that you’d want to crawl into a hole and die). While they have different tacks to success, their power source is the same: confidence.
Confidence, as I’ve written before, is a combination of experience and lies. And if you lack the experience to give you that confidence, then you do what every person who appears confident has done: you fake the fuck out of it. Fake it ’til you make it. You tell yourself that you’re confident until you actually act confident, which makes you appear confident, which people interpret as confidence. Confidence is a con game, and the only other option is fear and regret about missed opportunities.
Once you move to New York, you will be no different than hundreds of thousands of other young-ish people paying off debt and looking for a mate in this metropolitan ratbox. Instead of fretting about your liabilities (height, lack of experience), focus on your assets:
- gainfully employed
- no clingy ex-girlfriends
- no history of STDs (I assume)
- nothing to lose
- totally jacked
p.s. If you’re not totally jacked, start going to the gym. You’ve got a good frame for squats and pull-ups.
**********
Dear KSK,
Two parter: 1. My fiancée doesn’t mind, but certainly doesn’t enjoy my gas – do I owe it to her to keep it in until the wedding? I assume after the wedding is free game right?
That depends on your fiancée. Some women think farts are hilarious — which, let’s be real, they totally are — but others don’t want the men they fuck to sound like a Kevin James movie. I think that’s fair.
So go ahead and fart away away after the wedding if you want, but you may want to lower your expectations for the honeymoon, as well.
2. She is already locked in to marry me – I’ve given her a bankroll to bet with my bookie (hates football but loves money) to try and increase her interest in watching the bowl games. Fair or foul?
- SWV
It’s your money, you can throw it away however you want. Personally, I have a hard time imagining anyone without direct ties to Iowa or Tennessee getting too excited about the Taxslayer Bowl without a significant wager on the game. Do what you gotta do.
**********
Hey Cap,
Fantasy: No championships here, but I made the playoffs with AP as my first round pick. I feel pretty okay about this.
Relationships: I’m currently reveling in Step #2 of the Post Breakup Plan.
For new readers unfamiliar with the Official Matt Ufford Post Breakup Plan:
- Cut off all contact with the ex. He or she is effectively dead. I repeat: NO CONTACT.
- Mourn the relationship. Drink and cry and be angry, but not for longer than a month.
- Pour your heartbreak into improving yourself as an individual: your job, volunteering, school, the gym, anything productive that makes you a better, more fully realized person.
There’s also the unofficial fourth step of “REVENGE, SWEET REVENGE,” but that comes from you dating someone smarter and better-looking.
While my ex and I were dating I applied to grad school in a different city. He then moved to that city for work. We didn’t do an official LDR, as that seemed unreasonable if I didn’t get into school. If I got in, we agreed to pick things back up where we left off.
After he moved, I visited and it was lovely. We stayed in close, affectionate contact during the 3 month separation. I got into school in October; he was ecstatic, I was ecstatic. We could date again! When I planned my trip to look for apartments a month ago, he insisted I stay with him for the duration.
That all seems very good and reasonable, and reads very much like the first page of a modern take on a Shakespearean tragedy.
He picks me up from the airport and then tells me “I met someone two weeks ago and I want to see where this attraction takes me.” So I’m stuck at his house for 10 days (getting a hotel at that point was prohibitively expensive. In retrospect I still should have done it). I look for an apartment, he backtracks and says he wants to work on things (we sleep together and act like everything’s fine for most of the week). Finally, he takes me to a party hosted by a female friend who made it abundantly clear she also is/was sleeping with him. He and I have a huge drunken blowout afterward because DUH.
That really is a spectacular vintage of breakup. I mean, I know it’s the source of immeasurable pain for you right now, but if I could bottle your breakup and sell it to the thirsty masses, it would fetch a hefty price. Not like a Pappy Van Winkle price, but, y’know, Blanton’s for sure. Rest easy knowing that you have Grade-A, quality heartbreak.
It took about a week for me to execute Step #1, as I was both jilted and heartbroken (been there) and he was actively pushing the “you’re my best friend” angle (have not been there).
What a fuckface.
After Christmas I unfollowed/blocked/what have you. So here we are. It’s the holidays, so drinking a ton is socially acceptable. I’ve lost about 10 pounds because I have no appetite when stressed, so I have a jump on Step #2. Because I’m moving, the days have been filled with my friends throwing farewell parties and generally making me feel loved and awesome, so my rational self can see past this breakup.
However, I’m leaving that support system in a few days to move 1500 miles away. I’ll be in school, I’m reasonably social, I bathe; making friends is theoretically easy. But I’m terrified I’ll end up talking to this guy again. My defenses are weak, I’m feeling incredibly vulnerable, and he very much wants to stay in contact. He’ll keep trying to contact me, I’ll finally respond, we’ll hang out, and we’ll sleep together with zero consequence for him and renewed devastation for me.
He was (I thought) a very thoughtful, sweet guy. He is not: he literally told me he’d never actually loved me, but dated me for so long because I am “perfect on paper and everyone thought you were great for me, so…” He’s obviously not who I thought he was, so beyond the hurt of being dumped, I’m doubting my own judgment and self-worth. I don’t want to confirm those doubts by letting this guy back into my life.
If you or the Kommentariat have any advice on how to stay strong once I move, I would appreciate it. Also, if you or the Kommentariat want to reaffirm that this dude is an absolute garbage person, that would be nice too.
Thanks Internet strangers!
Rest assured: he was an absolute garbage person to you. He may eventually grow and mature and become a good boyfriend/husband to a different woman down the road — which is totally unfair to you, of course — but for our intents and purposes, he is garbage. Don’t even in nibble at that “best friend” bait: best friends don’t royally fuck each other over like he did to you. Use his assholedom to move on; you may even one day realize that him being such an inconsiderate shit was the best thing for you to cut the cord.
Now, I obviously don’t know where it is you’re moving to, but most reasonably-sized places don’t have a ton of overlap between grad students and working professionals. You are, I’d wager, relatively safe from chance encounters with him.
That means any contact will come from him via text, because no one calls anyone any more. And giving him a straight-arm via text is easy: the first time he texts you, tell him, “I don’t want you in my life. Please don’t contact me for any reason.” That is firm, polite, and unequivocal in its meaning. If he follows up with anything else besides some version of “I’ll respect that, goodbye” then your response should be “FUCK OFF.” No dialogue, no questions answered, just him fucking off forever until his dick rots off.
What an asshole.