This seems like the perfect time for a ranting session, primarily because I had one out in L.A. and no one got to see it. After leaving the mall and getting back to the mansion, I sat down in front of a camera and went on a tear about the challenge for… well, it lasted a while because I was pissed.
I’m gonna try and narrow things down a bit so I’m not spewing venom for pages upon pages without giving a decent explanation of why I was so disgusted with it. And that’s truly how I felt—disgusted. The entire trip back to the mansion, I just felt dirty. While the other challenges had been slightly awkward, they were basically expanding my comfort zone. Getting phone numbers from random women… I hated it.
I think what disturbed me the most was that we were supposed to get their phone numbers. That was it, nothing more. Approaching a woman can be difficult for me, there’s no question about that, but we were just asking to write down a number in a little black book! BIG FUCKING DEAL!
If I’m going to make the effort to walk up to a woman and talk to her, I want to talk to her. Most of what they showed me doing was chatting with those two girls on the bench (during which time Bill came and “stole some of my mojo”… if I didn’t love the guy so much, I’d have been pissed at him, too…). While we were talking, I found out that they were drinking coffee. Turned out the blonde was drinking tea, at which point I cried out, “You lied to me!” The brunette then told me that her coffee was really nasty—she let me take a sip and I confirmed that it was really nasty.
I told them that I was from Minnesota, had just come to L.A. and didn’t know my way around. When I asked if they’d take me on a little tour, show me the sights, that sort of thing, they volunteered immediately. We’d be getting together that weekend—I was supposed to call the blonde on Monday night and the brunette on Tuesday (since she worked on Monday nights).
Thus, after a nice conversation, I had two phone numbers. We had fun talking, I got to know them better and I was feeling pretty good afterwards (much like I felt while having dinner with Mindi, but they cut out all the fun parts). However, I had only two numbers… I was doing the challenge wrong and losing because of it.
Perhaps the best example of my frustration was towards the end when I’d basically descended to following Bill around (like I said, I wanted to go home—I couldn’t bring myself to do it actively anymore). He walked up to some girl, got her phone number “to invite her to a party” and then walked away, exactly what he was required to do.
Next, I approached her, wrote down her name and phone number, then looked at what I’d just written and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a name spelled like that before.” Her eyes lit up and she told me it was a name her parents got out of the Bible. Had I been doing the challenge correctly, I would never have known about the Biblical implications, but more importantly, I wouldn’t have seen her eyes light up. To me, that’s a more impressive accomplishment than writing anything down on a slip of paper.
Thus, the reason I was pissed off about what we were doing and why I felt so dirty afterwards. We weren’t talking to these girls to get to know them or get together with them, for that matter—we were supposed to get their phone numbers, nothing more. Will I continue to feel nervous when approaching a strange woman if I want to talk to her? Yes. Did the challenge serve to help soothe that nervousness? No. It’s a fairly simple act to write down a name and number—it’s something else entirely when that name and number will let you drink her coffee.
