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around], oh no, we wanted Brandi…ohhhhh…I guess I’ll have the buffalo wings.”
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    GLOSSARY
     
    WASTED HAPPY HOUR CHICK
     
    A species of HCI that goes straight from work to happy hour and is still there at midnight even though her colleagues are all gone. Wasted happy hour chicks seem like they should be easy prey, considering they’re often found dancing wildly by themselves in the corner. But I’m no longer fooled—there’s a reason she’s been left unpicked-up. And it’s usually the guy in Chicago that she’s sorta seeing.
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    As much energy as I expend chasing appealing women, I spend an equal amount of time avoiding HCIs. Most guys are quite adept at evading girls—which is not surprising given how so many of us seem naturally selected for the very purpose of repelling them. When a girl whom I’ve been trying to avoid calls me and I accidentally pick up, you would not believe the shit I come up with: “Oh, uh, hey Jill. Where am I? You know what’s funny? No one here knows the name of this bar. And there’s no sign. And none of the adjacent streets have signs either. But you should—” and then I hang up mid-sentence (which gives it a feel of authenticity), shut off my phone, and pretend the battery died.
    Women, of course, have a much more elegant method of avoiding male HCIs—they don’t bother talking to them in the first place, a devious tactic I call “preemptive avoidance.” When accosted, though, girls are skilled at shutting down unwanted advances. I’ve found that the less a girl wants to hook up with a guy she meets at a bar, the more outlandish an excuse she’ll give, and it will often be accompanied by blatant giggling and eye rolling from her nearby friends. And nothing inspires confidence in a guy like a giggling, eye-rolling girl telling you she has to leave because she’s got a placekicking tryout with the Giants in the morning.
    THE MINDSET
     
    The truest and most frustrating observation ever made about kicking game is that it’s all about confidence. Every guy has contemplated how much damage he could do if he could just go back ten years knowing what he knows now. But we’re stuck with what we’ve got. Luckily, the desire to hook up outweighs every other one of our primal instincts.
    My favorite television show is Lost. I’m obsessed with it. There’s just something about these flawed characters trapped on a mystical island that totally fascinates me. But there is one important, real-world lesson that I’ve learned from Lost. After all the survivors have been through—the crash, the smoke monster, the Others—they’ve never, ever given up hope on pulling ass. It’s like the first week they were concerned with getting rescued. The second week they were concerned with getting water. And by the third week they were concerned with getting head. Somehow, it always comes back to that.
    These pressures aren’t unique to us humans. I was recently reading about these insects called cicadas that lie dormant underground for seventeen years. After seventeen years, they come out, they mate, and then they die the next day. And I couldn’t help but wonder, how much would it suck to be the guy who doesn’t hook up that night?
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    GLOSSARY
     
    DUCK HUNT
     
    Named for the classic Nintendo game, a Duck Hunt is a bar or situation where girls are shooting guys down right away.
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    Perhaps the most trying situation I’ve encountered is going out on the prowl with friends who are in relationships. I think that the longer you’re in a relationship, the more you begin to forget what it was like to have ever been single, and how the game actually works. Whenever I’m in a bar with a couple who I’m friends with, they’ll inevitably say, “Hey Karo, check out that girl over there. She’s totally cute—you should just go talk to her.” Oh, is that all I have to do? Just go talk to her? Well, thanks for clearing that up, because I was just gonna whip my dick