Fatigue game

Last week, Roissy posted on sick game, the idea of approaching girls when you’re under the weather. He also wrote on hangover game a few months back, which works according to the same logic – putting yourself in physical and mental discomfort makes you more attractive to the ladies, because you stop giving a damn about social conventions and just behave like a jerk. I’ve come across another variant on this theme – fatigue game.

Sleep deprivation is a real bitch. If you don’t get the requisite amount of shut-eye in a twenty-four hour period (eight hours for me, though your mileage may vary), your body wreaks its horrible revenge. Your head throbs with waves of pain. Your stomach churns with indigestion. Your muscles spasm (my right leg starts jittering uncontrollably, for instance). Your limbs ache and become sluggish in movement. Even worse is the mental damage. Your brain unfastens from its moorings, becoming disinterested in anything that doesn’t lead to a nice, warm place to curl up and nap. You start staring off into space. You become mean-minded in your body’s obsession with sleep. You become, in other words, an unrepentant asshole.

Due to more problems at Chateau Bardamu, I spent the better part of last week deprived of Z’s and was in the foulest of moods as a result. It’s near impossible to be mirthful or even content when your digestive tract is burning with acid and your cerebrum feels like its being massaged with live electrodes. After a couple of days in which I’d gotten a total of three hours of sleep, I had finished chowing down at a restaurant during my lunchbreak when I spotted a cute white chick sitting at a table near the exit. After tossing my trash and heading to leave, I opened her. During our conversation, I spoke less than I normally do, never smiled, maintained an upright, unshakable posture, and stared her in the eye almost the entire time, all while my brain was prodding me to close my eyes and drift off to Dreamland. And surprisingly, it worked, as her hair-flipping and laughing at my crummy jokes showed. After twenty minutes, I got up to go back to work, getting her number before I left.

Additionally, I managed to find this comment by lurker on the hangover game thread:

Hmm, this might also be related to “exhaustion game.”

In college, I had an extremely hard time going to sleep before 3 am or waking up before noon. True story, this is how I picked my major. English professors don’t do mornings, either.

Now, this would be all well and good if I didn’t have a work-study job on Sunday mornings (!) at 8am (!). What’s more, it wasn’t something I could blow off: I had to open the religious offices for service, and I was the only one around.

So my solution many times was to just not sleep—stay up all night, go to work, open it up, sit at the desk, wait for the shift to end (1pm), then go home to dorm and sleep. Not a bad plan?

Well, as we all know, you tend to act a bit loopy when tired. I’d open up the religious offices, and Sunday girls come strolling in, dressed in nice-but-sexy college-girls-but-good-girls dress.

Normally, I wouldn’t make eye contact, but being tired, I stared up and down without caring, my feet propped up, and even let out an errant whistle or comment in my tiredness.

My boldness paid off–whenever I did this, I got a girl to come over and chat with me, and sometimes hung out with her later in a decidedly Biblical fashion. My politeness when not tired, in contrast, got me little but girls ignoring me at my station.

If you want to try fatigue game, I have a few tips for survival while sleepless, culled from a lifetime of screwing with my Circadian rhythm:

• Imbibe some caffeine before you go in, as it will heighten your alertness without numbing the pain of exhaustion. I recommend an energy drink for that extra boot in the ass.
• On that same note, avoid alcohol and other depressants, as they’ll make you sleepier. Fatigue game probably works best during daylight hours.
• If you have leg jitters or some other noticeable spasm that develops when you’re tired, try to minimize them, as they’ll kill your otherwise aloof attitude.
• Don’t sit in overly comfortable chairs, as your body will sneak up on you and make you fall asleep if you stay put for too long. This happened to me one too many times during my college career.
• When you don’t sleep, your breath becomes exponentially worse for some reason, even if you don’t eat anything. I’m meticulous when it comes to dental health, but I’ve never managed to find a solution to this problem. Swish with mouthwash twice daily (which you should be doing anyway) and carry plenty of breath mints.
• There’s a point of no return (somewhere between thirty-six to forty-two hours, by my estimation) past which if you don’t get any sleep, you’ll become so zombified you can barely stand upright. Don’t bother approaching if you’re past this point.

Later that day, after getting off from work, I got home, jumped on the couch, and slept like an arsenic-poisoned kitty cat for five hours. Eating, sleeping, fucking – is it any shock that the most satisfying pleasures in life are the most primal?