Social Dominance | Scar Tissue

I’m currently in summer school. Recently, I volunteered my services as a helper for a “Governor’s Program” whereby high school seniors learn German in an intensive program on a university campus.

I am from a different university than this program, but it is right next door, and the teacher who runs it also happened to be the director of a study abroad trip to Germany I went on.

Aside from the benefit of maintaining, if not furthering my German, I get to know students from the university next door, which will facilitate partying next semester, and game any senior girl I fancy. I am mostly in this for the long-term and German; everything else is a bonus.

I am aware of the fact that compared to any of the guys in the program, I am more interesting due to my build, body language, travels, experiences, and language ability (I speak German better than everyone except the teachers and the native speakers, and a smattering of other languages). In theory, hypergamy would work in my favor in this case (as long as I don’t do anything stupid).

So far:

I went out last night to help out with “game night”. I met up with a friend I had made during another event and went to play pool. I told the guys who were playing that I had the next game and they complied. I played against the friend and lost, but immediately set up the next game as doubles and chose people at random. When I picked someone, I gave them no choice, they were going to play pool. And they did. Girls and guys were compliant with my orders. It helped that I played better pool than most of them.

One girl (not that attractive) came up to me and asked for a photo. Another girl (attractive) came up to me many times to try and communicate with me (her German still needs work). She would fail to remember a word and turn away. When I asked her a question about what happened her foot (she had a cast or something) she did a twirl as she came right back. It was cute actually, how she struggled with German to speak to me.

I saw a girl who was playing guitar and told her to come play by the pool table while I played pool. She resisted at first, saying that she couldn’t play very well, but I told her to come anyway and she did.

This is interesting to watch.

~Wald

When I went to the summer transition program (STP) for my university, I encountered the power of nicknames.

When I first arrived on day one, I was with my mother. Often she would go right to groups of random people and introduce us. As a captive audience to her socializing, at first I thought she was being ridiculous. But people seemed receptive to our introductions. After a few of her ‘introductions’, I had made a couple of ‘friends’ and was set up to go shooting with one of them on the up coming weekend. Not bad.

At first I rationalized the success of her introductions by thinking to myself “It’s introduction day. People don’t think I’m weird because she’s doing the introduction. Any friend I make is through the shared bond of a forced social interaction pushed by a parent.”

Upon further reflection, I realized that what she did made sense. The next day I followed her example. I went up to random groups of people, introduced myself, and got to know the people I met.

I would walk up and introduce myself, “Hi, my name is (blank)”, “What’s your name?” Then I would ask the first person what their major was, why they chose the Institute, and what ROTC they were. Then I would point to a different person, “You! What’s your name.” I took control of the social interactions I entered. For the first two weeks while I did this, I gave people nicknames. Some girl had the same name as my cousin, so I called her ‘Concordette’ a spin on the place she comes from. Another girl’s name was Harper. “I’m going to call you Harper Lee from now on.” One girl had a name I didn’t like because it sounded like a boy’s name, so I called her “Pandora”. “No! Not Pandora. Can’t you come up with anything else?” “Too late”, I smirked.

I gave almost everybody I introduced to myself nicknames, “Top Gun” wanted to be a fighter pilot, “Surf” looked like a surfer hippie, “Scissors” was some guy I borrowed scissors from. People started asking me what I had nicknamed them. “I’ll get back to you.”

I never really had a nickname. The only thing everybody knew was that I had an accent. When asked why I had an accent, I would tell whoever asked me that they, in fact had an accent, with a smile on my face.

I refused to accept any nickname that people would try to come up with for me. Most people accepted that I was “he who must not be nicknamed”. The one girl who did try to give me a nickname ended up with the nickname of “mouth sex”. She never tried to give me a nickname ever again. I maintained my frame the nickname giver, separate from those who could receive nicknames.

At the end of STP, a lot of people knew me. During the school year people would come up to me and say, “Hey man, remember me?” and I would have no idea who they were.

Some people who I got to know later, never personally met me, but heard about me from others.

In conclusion, to me this experience reveals that nicknames give you status above the people you give them too. If you have the status as giver of nicknames, you have status above everyone.

~Wald