2005-06-23 - 6:25 p.m.
I just found a review of a musical I was in over a decade ago and it reminded me of my amusing failure to get with a girl at a cast party for it. She was one of the �chorus line of busty women�. She sang a solo number that the reviewer probably found unnecessary but I still remember. My whole interaction with her could be taken as a misapplication of the philosophical bet of Pascal�s wager.
Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal figured that it was better to be religious than not. If you act religious and there is a God, you go to heaven. If there�s no God, you waste like 5% of your time going to church and doing religious stuff. If you aren�t religious and there�s no God, you don�t really gain or lose anything. But if you�re not religious and there is a God, you�re fucked. You go to hell. Being religious is thus the safe bet.
At this cast party, I was chatting up the girl, so to speak. Things seemed to be going well. I was pretty taken with her; I thought she was so pretty (although in retrospect she had an oddly pointy chin). At the rate I was going, it looked like I had a fair chance of going home with her. Then someone came by and asked if I wanted to smoke up and I excused myself for a minute to do so.
When I came back, I returned to flirting. Things seemed to be going well again, but a nagging fear crept into the back of my mind. What if I was not actually being charming? What if I was actually saying completely unintelligible nonsense and making a fool of myself? What if she were only smiling and nodding outwardly and was secretly disgusted with how stupid I was acting?
I realized that I was stoned and might be acting completely normal with only an internal paranoid fear that I was being an idiot. I assessed my strategy. I could either keep talking or leave. And I was either acting like a fool or I was being fine. Although I wasn�t yet conscious of what I was doing, my course of action seemed basically organized like Pascal�s wager, along a clear column and row grid.
If I kept talking and I was fine, I might get some action. So to speak. But if I kept talking and I was being an idiot, then I totally killed any chance I�d ever have with her in the future or with anyone she knew and told about my foolishness. If I backed off and I were fine, well, I�d lose out on potential nookie. But it was a good move if I stopped talking and I were acting like an idiot. So the safe bet was to back off. I excused myself and left.
Now, the only stoned-ness that was happening was the bizarre decision tree-making in my head. Outwardly, I was acting fine and had just talked myself out of a probably-fruitful pursuit. She of course had been good to go (so to speak) and I believe ended up going home with the guy who played nightclub MC Vic Voom. All I got out of the night was this funny story.
Did I learn a lesson from this? Well, eyes on the prize. First of all, don�t leave the person of your desires to go smoke pot. If you do find yourself stoned and flirting, don�t play weird second-guessing games in your head. Pascal�s wager is an interesting philosophical gamble, but should probably not be applied to guide your actions. Especially when it comes to romance. So to speak.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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