Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, time for the anonymous mailbag. 

As always, you can email your questions, anonymity guaranteed to clay.travis@gmail.com, and I will publish them and forever preserve your anonymity. 

Here we go:

“I have a question for you. I’m not very close with my father, and I feel too embarrased to ask my roommates about this. So I turn to one of the best sportswriters on the internet. Makes total sense. I’ve also had enough captain to be considered Jack Sparrow. Last weekend I took this girl, who I’ve been texting a lot and talking to at work a lot, for dinner and drinks. Things went well, we talked and had a good time, were there for like 3 hours. Nothing happened between us or anything, but we continued talking the next day and since. Plan on hanging out more. Is it okay to just ask her if it was a date or would that be weird? i don’t know how to read people at all, and I’m desperate for help.

Sincerely,
An extremely drunk and confused 21 year old”

If a girl spent three hours alone with you, it was a date. But asking her if it’s a date is kind of weird. Because she’s immediately going to think, “Wait, does he want it to be a date or not?” And then she’ll have an awkward reply and you’ll screw things up because your response will be equally awkward. 

What you’re both trying to avoid here is showing too much interest in someone else in the event that they don’t have as much interest in you.  

I get so many questions from guys and girls about whether someone has a romantic interest in them. As if I can tell from a 200 word email. So I’m giving you the Clay Travis foolproof method to find out — rather than going in for the kiss first — kissing someone is a pretty universal sign of romantic interest, right? — try to hold her hand. If a girl will hold your hand, she’s 100% fine with you kissing her. But if she pulls her hand away from you then it’s much less of a rejection than going in for a kiss and she gives you the side head turn and you’re kissing hair. (This happened to me junior year of high school. Going in for a kiss and getting hair is pretty much the most humiliating move possible for a high school guy. How do you recover from a hair kiss? You can’t.)

That’s when I devised my hand holding move. The Clay Travis hand holding method is so legit they should teach it in high school.

Having been a boy in high school, deciding whether or not to try and kiss a girl for the first time is the teenage equivalent of a president deciding whether or not to commit troops to a foreign country. It’s a decision fraught with peril.

(Note: my handholding move may be real old school these days because all you kids now can send text messages and just wait for a reply, “Do you want to kiss next time we see each other?” And then you see those three dots in the reply and your heart is beating a billion times a minute. Hell, kids today might be sending naked photos to each other before they kiss for all I know. “This is my dick. You want to hook up?” So romantic.)

But even with all this modern technology based on the emails I get uncertainty about someone else’s romantic interest in you is still common. So the next time you are with this girl go on a walk somewhere and go with the hand hold move. It’s old school, but it still works.  

“I’m a senior at a prestigious High School, and am facing the largest dilemma in my life (well, for now). Somehow Prom season is upon us. (I don’t know how, but it is). I know the girl I WANT to ask to prom, but I don’t think she wants to go with me. Some background info: She’s not superbly hot, but has great features. She is well know for her behind the scenes activities,(sex, drugs, alcohol, normal high school things), we talk everyday in multiple classes, and talk about life. She is the one girl I think about everyday. (I sound like a creeper). I’m pretty sure she thinks we are friends. The problem is this, I have never asked a girl out before, nor am I up to her social rank, and I’m not attractive at all. She has told me she wants this college guy to ask her to prom, but I don’t think he will. I don’t want to ruin the friendship here, and I don’t want to embarrass myself. What’s the play here?”

Just ask her. 

What’s the worst thing that she can say? No, right? I don’t see how that impacts your friendship at all. She probably knows you like her already. Plus, you say you aren’t on the same social level as her, so what do you have to lose here? You can’t hook up with a hot girl if you don’t ask her out first. (Until you get to college and you’re both drunk on a dance floor while “Sweet Caroline,” or “Brown Eyed Girl,” plays, but that’s a couple of years in the future for you.)

Just walk up to her and say, “You’re not superbly hot, but you have great features and I know you can get beer. So do you want to go to prom together?”

She. Will. Melt.

I’m kidding about that, don’t say that.

Say, “I know you want to go to prom with (insert college guy here), but I’d really like to take you instead.”

If she says yes, and you want to know whether you should kiss her, refer to question one. Yep, it’s time for the Clay Travis hand holding move.

Oh, and no one gives a fuck whether your high school is prestigious or not. Either they’ll know it’s a good school or they won’t. Stop calling it prestigious. And you could go to the shittiest high school on earth and like a girl and not be sure whether she likes you or not.  

“Due to the way the windows in our office are, and the poor heating system, it is 81 degrees currently in my office. What is the threshold where I can leave?”

You’re past it. I’d leave. 

After my 2L year I worked in an all glass tower in downtown Nashville and in the afternoon it would get hot as hell in my office. I called the building maintenance and complained and the temperature guy showed up, stood in the doorway, took the temperature, said it was fine, and left. The rule in the office was that they measured the temperature in your doorway. Which made no sense because I was sitting by the glass wall. I wanted to make his smug ass come sit in my office chair until he died. 

I’d be sitting there baking, sweating my balls off, researching some bullshit legal issue and I would be simultaneously thinking, “I am such a pussy. How did old school lawyers like Andrew Jackson, whose law office was across the street from where I am now, work back in the day? They had quill and ink, wouldn’t they be sweating like crazy trying to write out contracts. They had to smudge up papers all the time, right? While at the same time also thinking, “I’m ready to quit this job. How do you expect me to type on a computer in this heat/”

Anyway, like I said, I’d leave if I were you.

I’m pretty sure an office being 81 degrees is a human rights issue.  

“I woke up one Saturday morning probably two or three years ago and begin checking all social media. In my facebook feed, one of my former high school classmates posted a picture of her adorable daughter in the bathroom with the caption “She Let Me Braid It!!” What she obviously doesn’t see in this sweet moment is that her husband just got out of the shower revealing a perfect angle of slightly seeing his junk and bare ass. I noticed immediately and took a screen shot knowing she would take it down eventually (which ended up being minutes later). After hysterically laughing by myself a few minutes, I sent the picture to a few high school buddies and we have dispersed to everyone we know and it always gets a laugh, ALWAYS. We still laugh about it years later and have all agreed that we will laugh about it 10, 20, 30 years from now. So my question is, what would you do if you were this woman’s husband? Would you be honestly upset or laugh it off? What would your wife have to do to get back in your good graces?

Attached is the screen shot and please blur out her name. I hope the husband isn’t an Anonymous mailbag reader. Enjoy.”

I’m not going to post this guy’s bare ass and side dick, but the fact that this wife didn’t even notice her naked husband in the background is just further proof of how sexually invisible husbands are to their wives. You’ve got a naked husband in the background of the picture and all this lady sees is her daughter’s hair braid. Welcome to marriage. 

As for if this happened to me, I’d think that picture was funny so long as I was having a good dick day when the picture was taken. 

Women don’t realize this, but the male penis changes sizes and shapes a billion times during the course of a day. Sometimes you’ve got great blood flow in your dick — a good dick day — and you’re totally fine with your dick being seen. (This is like the Justin Bieber naked photo. That’s the best his limp dick has ever looked. I honestly think this dick pic was staged to help promote his new album. That dick had make up on it. And the make up wasn’t lipstick.) Other times you’re in the middle of a bad dick day and you live in fear of anyone seeing your dick. When you use the urinal it’s like you’re trying to fuck the porcelain urinal wall. 

A good or bad dick day is just like a good or bad hair day for women.  

I know some guys who still give their dicks a couple of tugs before they get out of the shower and they walk in front of their significant others. Why let anyone see you in the middle of a bad dick day? 

I always think about this when I’m about get body scanned at the airport. Is this going to be a good dick pic or a bad dick pic? I feel like I owe it to the TSA to get some blood flow going. It’s the least I can do to thank them for keeping me from getting blown up.   

“Your comments in Friday’s (11.06) mailbag about Jimbo Fisher’s hairline resurgence got my rolling down this rabbit hole of thought:

Is there no possible scenario where a balding and/or bald man can avoid ridicule?

I’m a 28 year old married man who started losing hair at age 22. At 22, going bald was an all-consuming nightmare. Who wants to date the 22 year old bald guy where there are plenty of similarly situated men with a full head of hair to choose from? So I tried it all: propecia, Rogaine, shampoos. All that shit. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work long-term. Luckily, though, it delayed the inevitable long enough for me to land an attractive wife and have a respectable amount of hair for my wedding photos. I married a shorter woman who “says she doesn’t notice” (she’s lying) and will “love me when all my hair is gone” (hoping she’s not lying), so the stress of my early twenties has subsided, but it still sucks going bald.

The way I see it, the balding man has three options 1) ride it out as long as possible and then go with the Paul Finebaum look (hair on the sides, but smooth sailing up top), 2) no-guard shave it all the way, or 3) take out a second mortgage and pay for hair replacement surgery. A toupee/hair piece is just not an option in 2015. All of these options carry varying amounts of social stigma, but the one that confuses me the most is the guy that pays for hair replacement surgery and then gets “hair plug” jokes thrown at him nonstop, especially the professional athlete or actor whose likeness directly equates to marketability, and thus, more money. LeBron is the most recent example: first we jab at him for slowly moving the headband further and further up the forehead. LeBron is not that old and he has infinity dollars, so he makes the logical choice for him and pays for the hair replacement. Now he gets made fun of for having paid for the surgery. It’s a lose-lose. I can think of two other athletes who have made the same decision, Wes Welker and Wayne Rooney, and both faced similar public scrutiny. Wouldn’t 95+% of the people poking fun do the exact same thing as LeBron, Welker, and Rooney?

Since you have a full head of (allegedly) natural hair, you have no credibility to speak on this topic, so naturally you should provide your opinion, if for no other reason than to piss off everyone who might disagree with you. Is the only hair that is free from ridicule your natural hair? What would you do if you were going bald? What if you were a professional athlete worth hundreds of millions of dollars? How much less marketable would LeBron be with a bald head? Unrelated follow up: did LeBron go through with the hair replacement to avoid “trying to be like Michael Jordan” comments?”

One of my bald friends pointed out to me a few years ago that being bald is the only physical trait it’s possible to make fun of in America today. 

The example he used was how a fat lady at his office came up to him at a full lunch table and said, “Boy, every day you have less hair than the day before.” And then just laughed at him while everyone else laughed too. And he rightly pointed out that if he’d replied, “That’s interesting because every day you get fatter and fatter too,” then everyone would have immediately gotten silent, the woman might have started to cry, and he would have been a total asshole. 

YET SHE CAUSES HERSELF TO GET FATTER AND BALDNESS IS AN ENTIRELY UNCHOSEN AFFLICTION.

Once you think about it from this perspective, the plight of a bald man gets even funnier. See, I’m of the opinion that everything is fair game to be made fun of, but in this day of millennial pussies running around looking for microaggressions everywhere, the plight of the bald man is unique. He’s the last surviving person in America who it’s socially acceptable to make fun of for something he can’t control. 

I would totally get hair plugs unless I was a bad ass looking bald dude. (Note: bad ass looking bald dudes are rare as fuck, the unicorns of the male species.)

How popular was Michael Jordan, bald man unicorn? He made black dudes with perfectly good hair shave it all off to look like him. Think about that for a minute. Jordan was so popular that he made male pattern baldness, the least cool trait other than impotence that a man can have, so cool that people with hair copied him.  

“As someone who has outkicked the coverage, as well as having a couple of kids, you are the perfect person to ask about my dilemma. My wife is a very sexy lady. She’s also has had a couple of kids. At age 35 things are not in the same places as they were when she was in college, obviously. But she hits the gym, she’s fit, she has a very good body imo. I’ve been wanting her to wear more revealing swimsuits, but she’s conscientious about her stomach and the no-longer-perky breasts. But I am a man and nothing pleases me more than seeing my mostly naked wife out on the beach with me.

I’m athletic or was until the injuries started mounting. I put on over 40 lbs from my fighting weight in college. After another round of me petitioning her to wear a bikini next summer she said she would if I dropped all the weight I’d gained since marriage. I took the bet. All I had to do was lose the weight before June of next year. So within two months I lost all but the last eight pounds. I figure I’ll weather the holidays and drop the rest after the new year. She’s already admitted defeat and is shopping for the bikini.

Sounds like a happy story, right? Well, the snag is that she doesn’t want to go through with it. We vacation with my brother and his wife and another couple so this wouldn’t just be strangers that will see her. She’s a woman so all she sees are the flaws. I’m a man so… well, so I’m excited. But I don’t want her to be embarrassed and I especially don’t want her mad. So I’ve thought that I should let her bargain out of it. But I’m a Bama fan and I hear Nick Saban in my head telling me to Follow the Process and Make Her Ass Quit (Nick Saban is my fantasy sex counselor) so I’m torn. What should I do?”

“Nick Saban: Fantasy Sex Counselor” is the greatest show idea I’ve ever heard of. 

Tell me you’re not watching this. 

Also, is it wrong for me to assume that Nick Saban has analyzed every sexual position and only goes with the most efficient sex method possible? “Alright, you start with the missionary, do that for two minutes, sixteen seconds, alright then you go with the side rear entry, you should be able to move without pulling out, alright…”

Seriously, I would watch every minute of this show.  

Advice for everyone worried about bathing suits — you care so much more about what you look like in a bathing suit than anyone else does. 

And guys are relatively easy to please. If you have good boobs, emphasize them. If you have good legs, emphasize them. If you have a good ass, emphasize it. Whatever body part looks best on you, flaunt it. Guys will notice that more than your flaws.

If you have no good party parts, just walk up and down the beach making fun of bald guys.

Also, you’ve been with your wife for over ten years and still think she’s really hot, I’d emphasize that when it comes to her going back to a bikini.  

“I am about to turn 32 in December…I have been married now for 6 plus years and have a 2 year old daughter. The conversations in our house have turned less into what’s going on with me and my wife and more about what’s happening with our child, other family members that are having kids, our 2 dogs, etc. I assume that is fairly normal. We prioritize other things over ourselves.

So back to my initial point…I have a birthday coming up and my wife asks…”what do you want for your birthday?” My initial look clearly must have given away that I would enjoy some NSFW action which was followed by rolling of the eyes and sighing. Next I suggested a BJ coupon book that I read about in the mailbag and thought let’s give that a shot. Met with another disgruntled look.

Now that I have discovered I am the guy that has to beg his wife to have sex with him on his birthday…I need some direction on how to sail this ship. Did I show a lack of interest in her during some critical moment? Did I neglect a certain need post-pregnancy? Should I just pack up shop and start looking forward to having sex once every 6 months?

Thank you for your wisdom.”

Most wives don’t want to have sex as much as their husbands do. There are exceptions, but as a general rule this is true. Just about every married man would pick sex as his preferred birthday or Christmas gift, virtually no woman would.  

Your wife won’t ever want to have more sex than you do until she wants another kid.

I’m sorry.  

“Need some advice from a wise gay Muslim like yourself. I’m a football coach at a small school, another coach and myself went to Baton Rouge during our off week to watch Auburn at LSU. We stayed downtown and went out to see what the night life was like, it didn’t disappoint.

We are having a good time, drinking, talking to these Baton Rouge people trying to understand them and how they can drink so much. About 1:30am my buddy says he’s going back to the room, who the hell leaves the bars early when you’re in Baton Rouge for 1 night? This guy does bc he’s a shitty friend but that’s beside the point.

I’m not leaving til the bars close, I go upstairs where the music is great and everyone is dancing, I remember dancing with some blonde chick and she’s pretty into it, starts grabbing kissing etc. pulls me into a bathroom…yea not my choice in moves but alcohol…so I go with it. Get back to the room and apparently I had txt my buddy that I was about to F&@$ a girl in the bathroom.

To wrap up the story I get to the office Sunday and my buddy is telling all the coaches about our night out and the txt I sent him, during this time I get a Facebook friend request from a female in Baton Rouge, to my shock it’s the bathroom chick. Pass the picture around to the coaches and we realize she is in a relationship…with a girl. Now this could be one of those best friend things they think it’s funny to be in a relationship on Facebook (that’s my logic) then the convo goes deep, 1 coach has an elaborate story that this chick is a lesbian and she took advantage of me to have a child, says she’s going to show up pregnant or ask me for financial help. I say that’s crazy but I’m contacting you because who wouldn’t want a gay Muslims advice on what to do? Side Note: The Facebook request has yet to be confirmed, should I accept, ignore, or block?”

So you had sex with a girl in a Baton Rouge bathroom — who might possibly be a lesbian — and she Facebook friend requested you the next day and now you need advice? I mean, I think you have to accept. She knows who you are if she tracked you down on Facebook. And I’m not sure what the standard for Facebook friend request acceptance is, but I’m pretty confident that “banged in the bathroom,” is sufficient enough these days to be social media friends.

While I love your fellow coach’s idea that this is all part of the lesbian girl’s play to get pregnant, I think that’s really unlikely. Most likely is that this girl is just in a relationship with a good friend of hers and isn’t actually a lesbian. As evidence of the fact that she’s not a lesbian, I would submit that she banged you in the bathroom of a Baton Rouge bar. Most straight women wouldn’t do that, I have to believe the number of lesbians who would do it is even lower. Given that, you know, they don’t actually like men.

The bigger issue here is that you banged a total stranger — probably without using a condom — in the bathroom of a Baton Rouge bar. Some people are going to judge you for this. Not me. Given that this is the origination story of 70% of people born in Baton Rouge, I’d just say you’re well on your way to being an LSU fan.

By the way, the number of college coaches who read the anonymous mailbag is sky high. It’s funny to me to think about you assholes doing game prep for games I’m betting on, when you take a break to debate anonymous mailbag questions.

God bless all of you.

And happy Thanksgiving.

…

Remember, anonymity guaranteed for your mailbag questions. Send them to clay.travis@gmail.com