Getting all Alpha on your ass!

Almost embarrassed to admit it, but I am checking out the recent little burst of PUA literature (is "literature" still the right word now, with most of the info being on websites, forums, and youtube?).

About how to be, or be a better, Alpha Male. I am a gamma male, or even an omega male. It is all surface stuff, what I have come across, newtonian and not quantum. ("If you have self doubts, really look inside and try to figure out why you have those self doubts" is as deep as anything has gotten).

I don't know from Alpha Male, they are an alien creature to me, even more alien than women. Maybe an inherent quality of Alpha Males is shallowness. I do not mean that derogatorily, for any Alpha Males out there. I just don't know.


I went to Elmwood this afternoon -- after getting up at 6:00, doing Gongyo and showering and having breakfast, but was still tired so I laid back in bed at 9:00 and woke up again just before noon, and it is an overcast Labor Day and even though 80ish it feels like the first day of Fall, so with all that even though it is only 2:30 today feels like a wasted day.

I am ashamed to say that sometimes I go to Starbucks instead of the local coffeeshops -- I love The Spot, but Cafe Aroma gives me an odd vibe and I have been disappointed with drinks I've had there (and I am pretty easy to please when it comes to food and drink). But Starbucks has an Orange Mocha coffee that is magnificent.

At Starbucks the barista doing the mixing asked me my order while I was still in line, and I told her a venti Orange Mocha. I also grabbed a canned Iced Coffee to try it later, and with a tiny tip ended up handing over seven dollars.

As I stepped over to the mix station a guy who had been waiting from the time I had walked in asked the mix barista how many espresso shots were in a venti -- "Two," she replied, "Same as the tall. I don't know why it isn't more when you're paying more."

As he took his drink and walked away, I made a couple lighthearted comments about it, like, "You're just trying to get us to buy two talls!" I am sure she didn't really hear me clearly over the whir of the mixers and the hiss of the espresso machine and trying to keep the orders in her head, but she made some replies I couldn't hear as she twisted back and forth with her spoons and metal cups.

To the side of me and a few steps back was another customer, a man my height or a bit shorter probably a few years older than me but with black curly hair under an expensive baseball cap, the kind of intellectual boomer whose buying power keeps The Elmwood Village afloat; I did think he had been ahead of me in line.

The barista capped the drink she had been making and slipped it onto the counter to me. "There you go," looking at me. I thanked her, took a sip -- then, "Is this an Orange Mocha?" It wasn't.

"Oh no!" she moaned. And to the other man, "That was yours..." He dropped his face into his hand lightly for a moment.

"You two look so much alike," she managed. Maybe that was true.

I told her, and turned to him too, "Thank you for the compliment."

"Yes, a compliment," he mumbled, fumbling for a social grace.

She had almost finished with my drink by then, and we traded cups. She dumped the one I has sipped from and started a new one for him.


I am thinking afterwards that this might be a little Alpha Male scene. At least for me. By the looks of him the other man was higher on the social scale and economic scale, dressed equivalent to me, but in better more expensive clothes. Even his stance -- arms crossed, torso slightly tilted, looking a little expectant and impatient -- signaled more power than I think I myself project. But -- I was the one who addressed him. And I was the man who actually conversed with the girl. I was the one who sidled in closer to the counter and to her, who addressed her and replied to her comments, tried to make a little conversation with her even though she was not my "type". And I was the one she saw up-front, the one she gave the cup to, even though he subtly projected more power and had been there waiting longer than I. And she ended up giving me his drink.

I won!