Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for me to solve all your life’s problems with the anonymous mailbag.

As always, send your anonymous mailbag questions to clay.travis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

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Okay, here we go with the anonymous mailbag.

“So a couple weeks ago I had a date with this drop dead gorgeous woman (like one of the hottest women I’ve ever been out with.) We had been out once before, great chemistry, but this time things progressed and after an evening of a few drinks we ended up back at her house.

When it came time to unsheathe the sword, my soldier did not rise to the occasion and storm the castle….AT ALL….. like nada… nothing…. I was mortified.

My question is and I hope we are in the anonymous mailbag family trust tree here although I’m sure this has never happened to you, is this type of thing normal? I mean this golden blonde goddess was right there and… nothing. I don’t know if it was performance anxiety, beer, fatigue from work, being in my late 40s what? I don’t know what to do. Now the lady won’t talk to me…. blown opportunity. Well… poor choice of words. Any advice, wise one?”

First, your problem is a common one. That’s why Viagra, and all the generic Viagra competitors, are such gargantuan success stories, because many men need erection help so they consume their drugs.

My suggestion would be to consult with a doctor and see what he determines based on that consultation. It could be any of the factors you listed above — or none of them — or a combination of all of them. I don’t think you should be embarrassed to have that consultation with a doctor because, again, Viagra is the most profitable drug in the history of mankind, and if this didn’t happen to men all the time, the market wouldn’t be massive.

As for the woman, I think you may be misreading this. Your inability to perform may have embarrassed her as much as it embarrassed you. Sure, she could be ignoring you because she thinks you’re a loser, but she may also be ignoring you because she feels partly responsible for your failure to perform. Especially if you told her, “This has never happened before with anyone!”

“Well,” she might be thinking, “why did it suddenly happen with me then? He must not find me attractive enough.”

In other words, while you’re focusing on your own self-esteem issues, what if you impacted her self-esteem as well? That’s especially the case if she’s similar in age to you. Let’s say she’s in her late forties too. She may be worried that she’s not as attractive as she was in her twenties, and you just gave her evidence that might be true with your inability to perform.

Sure, you say she was hot, but I bet you defended yourself to her by saying that you never have erection problems. To you, that’s letting her know this is an isolated incident. But what if she blamed herself? So maybe you’re right and she’s ignoring you because she thinks you’re a loser, but what if it’s not about you, what if it’s about her instead? I think you have to consider that.

Good luck with the doctor’s consultation, and if you get a supplement, just know that your sexual performance is now drug aided, so you can’t brag about it. You’re the Sosa, McGuire and Bonds of sex. Any records you set are inadmissible to the sexual Guinness Book of Records. (By the way, why isn’t there a sexual Guinness Book of World Records? Are you telling me this thing wouldn’t kill? Should be a business no brainer.)

If I were you, I’d reach out to the woman and ask her back out. In doing so, make a joke at your own expense. If she still ignores you, so be it. At least after a doctor’s visit, you will have a back-up plan if this ever happens again.

But if she actually liked you, I’d bet she’d be open to a dinner date. If so, pop a pill and be ready to go the next time.

“Can you comment on what you’d do if you were in a state like Maryland, (which has not educated a single kid in any meaningful way since prior to March 2020) and is now having high profile Howard County, MD Public Schools floating the idea that they will not return to school until ‘at least’ January 2022. The lack of education in MD is destroying lives and much more. What would you do? Move to a state providing in-person education, keep fighting, mass civil disobedience? What? Parents are absolutely getting no where here and kids are suffering big time!”

If my kids weren’t attending school in person and I had the financial resources and work wherewithal to move to a place where my kids were going to be in school without hindering my job, I’d move in a heartbeat.

I don’t even see that as a difficult decision.

That’s even more the case if some schools are talking about not being open FOR ANOTHER YEAR. If true, that’s pure madness.

My hope is that, with the vaccine now rolling out, many states will inoculate all teachers in the next few months and end the teachers union argument that it’s unsafe to return to school once and for all.

The data has shown for months that kids aren’t primary spreaders of the disease and that teachers aren’t under any higher risk than your average profession. So once teachers are vaccinated, I don’t see any argument at all for why all schools wouldn’t be back open immediately. That’s why I’ve said that the first people vaccinated should be nursing home residents — because they are dying with COVID at much higher rates than the general population — and the next people vaccinated should be teachers.

If you vaccinate nursing home residents and people over the age of seventy, then the death rate from COVID effectively vanishes since that’s the vast, vast majority of all people dying with COVID.

My own kids have been in school for the entire fall semester, and they will go back to school next week for the spring semester. But as I wrote in the mailbag back in the summer, my wife was going to take the kids to Florida and put them in school there if our schools didn’t open back up here in Tennessee, and I think that would have been an easy decision for us to make.

It’s readily apparent that kids who aren’t in schools are being massively harmed by remote learning. And that the kids being the most harmed are the most disadvantaged already. They don’t have WiFi at home or computers or parents who can help them study. One of the unfortunate ironies is the people who claim to care the most about equality are ensuring that poor and disadvantaged kids are even more poor and disadvantaged relative to rich kids than they ever have been before in our lifetimes. Shutting down schools is a decision that is going to lead to the most profoundly unequal outcomes of the 21st century.

And what’s incredibly frustrating about this is the data has been clear since the spring that shutting down schools made no sense at all. In fact, it was based on misapplying the lessons from the 1918 flu. Shutting down schools helped then, but the 1918 flu was a pandemic that impacted everyone of all ages relatively equally.

COVID is almost exclusively a disease that impacts the old and the unhealthy.

Kids are actually under greater danger from the seasonal flu than they are from COVID, and the data is very clear that schools should have never shut down in the first place. The fact that many schools are still shut down today is pure madness.

“I’m a Division III baseball player at a school in Texas. As of now, we are on track to play our full schedule, which is great news! However, we’ve had to deal with a number of hypocritical and nonsensical policies implemented by our administration to get to this point.

Like most American colleges, my school has a mask mandate requiring us to wear masks even when we are outside—my roommates got written up for walking 100 feet from their car to our apartment on the edge of campus without a mask—which is obviously just ridiculous. Additionally, they have banned the use of neck gaiters on campus—claiming that they are wholly ineffective in preventing the spread of the virus—which is actually probably accurate from what I have read. So, what does the school require us to do in order to go through with our fall practices? They hand out neck gaiters to all of the student athletes on campus and tell us we must wear them the whole time during practice to prevent the spread of the virus.

Policies like this are laughable and make it difficult for anyone with any common sense to take what the administration says seriously. They really told us that gaiters didn’t work and then made us wear them to practice just days later! Because gaiters are more comfortable than masks to practice in, I did not complain this time around because the only thing that would have come of me complaining would have been a full blown mask mandate at practice too.

With that being said, how would you approach such situations as we head into our Spring baseball season? As of now, I believe we will have a mask mandate in our dugouts, no fans, and no eating in restaurants when traveling, along with who knows what else. I obviously want to play and do not want to do anything to ruin my Junior year after already missing most of last year due to the virus, but it is very hard for me to keep my mouth shut around such hypocritical nonsense.”

In situations like these, I think you have to take a step back and think about what matters the most to you.

I’m guessing that playing the baseball season matters the most to you.

If that’s true, I’d focus on trying to follow the rules to the best of my ability — even if they are nonsensical — to allow the season to be played.

I’d give the same advice to every college athlete who wants to play their sport — follow the rules, even if they don’t make sense to you. That’s not because I’m a sheep who follows unnecessary rules. It’s because you have to assess what you have the power to change and what you don’t.

Right now, I guarantee you there are tons of people on your campus that would love to shut down college athletics and are looking for every reason to do it. You’re gaining the result that matters the most to you by being able to play at all.

In my mind, you need to do everything possible to preserve that right.

I’ll give you an example from my own ten-year-old’s basketball league right now. They are playing, but only one parent is allowed in the gym to watch, the seats are socially distanced, and we’re all required to wear masks while we watch the games.

I know well over half of the parents on our team, and we’ll even socialize with them — maskless — at dinners or kid events in the neighborhood, birthdays and the like. Our kids have been playing together — and going to school together — for months. Given these scenarios, these protocols don’t make a great deal of sense to me.

My wife and my parents, for instance, would also like to come watch the basketball games. But I’ve followed the rules and only one parent has gone to watch the games so far.

Do the rules make sense?

Probably not.

But I want my ten-year-old to be able to play basketball this year, so I’m going to follow the rules to make it as likely as possible that he can complete his season.

One of the aphorisms I try to follow is perfect is often the enemy of good. If you have a good result, especially if it’s the final result you are seeking the most, then fighting for the perfect result can end up being self-defeating.

The final result I want is for the games to be played, so I’m going to do whatever I can to help the games be played.

Another recent example: I was at Universal Studios last week with my family. I would have been fine if everyone in the park wasn’t wearing masks outdoors. Heck, I would have preferred it. That’s because the data is clear: the odds of a virus spreading outdoors in warm weather is extremely low. That’s even more the case when everyone is immediately allowed to take their masks off as soon as they go indoors to eat in a restaurant.

Put simply, requiring masks outdoors, especially in warm weather, doesn’t make a ton of sense based on all the data.

But I wanted to take my kids to an amusement park, so I was willing to follow the rules required to be there. The park being open was a good result. I didn’t need it to be perfect.

I think, unfortunately, you’re in a similar position right now. Many of the rules surrounding baseball don’t make sense, but you’re getting to play baseball, which is a good result for you. But it’s not going to be a perfect result.

So I’d follow the rules as best you can, even if some of them are illogical.

“There is a girl that I have liked since high school (7+ years ago). I have asked her out twice before. One was like a week after she broke up with her ex (I know, stupid decision) and once a couple years later without knowing that she was currently in a relationship. The first time she turned me down because she felt she didn’t have time for a relationship, the second time she was in a relationship. So she hasn’t ever really said she isn’t interested. I enjoy having her as a friend as she is one of my closest friends. It’s been a few years since I’ve heard if she has been in a relationship. How do I find out if she is single or if she is interested in dating me?”

I mean, how hard can it be to determine if a girl is in a relationship? Given all of the social media platforms out there, this is one of the easiest things on the planet to uncover.

You need to up your cyberstalking game if you aren’t able to uncover this information.

Look at her Instagram photos. Are there any men in those photos? It’s the holidays. It should be easy to determine. Every girl shouts out her boyfriend during the holidays. And if she doesn’t do it, then she does it for his birthday. Scroll through her past photos. Girls with boyfriends love to let everyone know they have boyfriends. So if she’s not doing this, she’s probably single.

I give you credit for being willing to ask out your high school crush — many people are terrified to do this — but your analysis of the situation leaves a bit to be desired.

Which is why I think you need to be prepared for rejection a third time. Because when a girl says she “doesn’t have time for a relationship,” what she’s often saying is “I don’t have time for a relationship with you.” If she’d had a crush on your for seven years, I doubt she would have hit you with the time excuse. So I think her rejection of your advances was more crystal clear than you may realize.

At this point, she knows you are interested in her, so I don’t think it’s about the way you ask her out. In fact, rather than ask her out, I’d wait for an opportunity to bump into her in a social setting and have an opportunity to impress her then.

It has been seven years since high school. You’ve probably changed since then, hopefully for the better, but she may not realize this. If all else fails, women are attracted to success. If your high school crush isn’t impressed by what you’ve achieved, someone else will be.

Which is why I think all guys — and girls — should focus on finding success in your life. Success is sexy.

Good luck.

“I live in a 3 bedroom apartment with 2 other roommates and have done so for the past 3 years. The first 1.5 years we actually had four living in the apartment until one of the guys was married off. Since then, the group has wanted to add a 4th to the mix again to save money, but nobody has shown up at the doorstep. Originally when we all moved in, I promised the guys that if I ever left for an opportunity, I would find a replacement or cover my rent to not screw them over with me moving out. Within the past couple weeks, I was offered an opportunity to move across town into a situation that would massively benefit me.

So, in that time, I found a roommate to replace me. The roommates are claiming that we verbally agreed to wanting a 4th person and that the new guy is the 4th person. The leasing office won’t charge me for going off the lease when the new guy gets approved to be added on. The only thing is, the roommates I have been with won’t sign off on the new leasing contract to take me off because they want the 4th to save money and because I’m on the contract right now. They are saying I need to finish out the remaining 8 months of a 15 month lease. I feel like this situation is not normal nor in my favor after I did the work to find a replacement and it doesn’t seem like I have any leverage moving forward. What should be the best way to handle this to better my situation, if that’s even possible?”

At first glance, your roommates sound like total dicks here.

You found a replacement for yourself. If they want a fourth roommate, that should be their responsibility, not yours.

But upon closer examination, some of your claims don’t make a ton of sense. For instance, why do you need to move to take advantage of a new opportunity? Can’t you just drive to a new job from where you live now? Your rationale for why you need to move doesn’t make much sense to me and it might not make much sense to your roommates either.

It sounds like to me you just found a place you’d rather live and want to break your lease.

That becomes even more likely when you look at the prior evidence. You and your roommates were willing to let a prior roommate out of the lease to get married, which is eminently reasonable, so why are your roommates not allowing you to do the same? It sounds like there’s a detail here that you aren’t sharing.

Final thought: I believe the roommates’ better argument here is they signed a lease with you, not with the new guy. If I lived with two other guys, who I assume are your friends, I wouldn’t want one of my friends to move out and just find a random new guy to move in with me. What if they don’t like this guy? What if they just don’t want to live with a stranger?

Most roommates don’t want to live with strangers. I wouldn’t.

And you probably wouldn’t either.

You signed the lease and found one roommate already. If you found one, you can probably find another. That seems to be the bargain your roommates are requiring in order for you to be let out of your lease.

I don’t think your roommates are being fair or bending over backwards to help you, but I don’t think you are being very fair either because your rationale for why you need to move doesn’t seem very logical either.

Worst case scenario, you’ve got a little over a year left on the lease. That will pass quickly, I’d imagine. That doesn’t feel awful to me.

“Settle an argument amongst my buddies and I.

I side with you and your argument that in 2020, women are hotter than ever and can be hot for about as long as they want. Workout regimens, cosmetic surgery and procedures, hair and makeup fixes to mask aging. If a woman wants and has the means, she can be hot in 2020.

On the flip side, all one has to do is walk into a Wal-Mart and see that there is a faction of America that has basically given up on hygiene, doesn’t value fitness, and lets their ages show.

We are split down the middle that women in America are getting more attractive or less attractive?

And for the record, I’m sure this same argument applies to men, for the woke PC’ers out there.”

There is zero doubt that women — and men — of financial means have never been hotter than in the present day.

I mean, just go to a high end beach.

There have never been more hot moms in world history than in America right now.

Hell, sometimes you can barely tell the moms and the daughters apart on the beach. Are they friends, sisters separated by a few years, or a hot mom and her daughter?

But there’s an important caveat here: wealth is often the determining factor. The richer you are, the healthier and better looking you are likely to be. You have the time and money to go to the gym, you have the ability to eat healthy, you get enough rest to allow your body to recover and you have the financial resources, if necessary, for cosmetic surgery.

I’d say this also mirrors, by the way, the ability of athletes to extend their prime ages of competition. Look at athletes like Tom Brady, LeBron James, Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Drew Brees, all of these guys and girls are extending their careers past the point where most athletes have began precipitous declines.

Now many are using drug cocktails that are borderline illegal — I wouldn’t put it past them — but I also think they are taking better care of their bodies, training more efficiently and effectively and making better health decisions that’s allowing them to forestall the rapid decline of aging that we’ve seen in the past.

The result isn’t that the average person who isn’t taking care of themselves is in worse shape now than in the past, although they may well be more obese since obesity has increased substantially in the past several decades. I think the gap between those in great health and those in poor health has just widened. Not because the average person is getting worse, but just because the top person is getting much better.

That makes the gap look larger than it actually is. The people at the top are getting much hotter at a faster rate than the people at the bottom or the people in the middle.

I also think, by the way, that this same process applies in, for instance, wealth. We talk a ton about the income gap in this country, but the reality is that the super wealthy are creating that gap because of their extreme success, not because the average person is falling behind. In other words, the average American, prior to COVID, had never been doing better financially in the history of our country. But the wealth gap was also increasing. That’s because the most successful are growing their wealth faster than the average person in the country.

That is, everyone is improving. The top is just improving more rapidly.

We have to be careful and recognize that things can be getting better for the average people in the country, but that they can still feel like they are falling behind because of the extreme success of the outliers at the top. Because, honestly, that extreme success of the outliers, I believe, is also contributing to the uplift of everyone else. That’s because capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any financial system ever created in world history.

But to answer your question one more time, more succinctly, yes, people have never been hotter in world history than right now.

…

Thanks for reading the mailbag.

As always, send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.