Is It Hot in Here or Is It Me?: RJ Ledesma's Imaginary Guide to Flirting, Body Language, and Pick-up Artists

By RJ Ledesma

Filipino humorist RJ Ledesma shares the five universal steps of flirting that women use to ensnare clueless men; he raises male literacy levels by educating men in the finer points of female body language; and reveals the secrets of professional pick-up artists that make women do things that they will regret in the morning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712729263

Book preview

IS IT HOT

IN HERE

OR IS IT

ME?

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Anvil Publishing

MANILA

IS IT HOT IN HERE OR IS IT ME?

RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to

Flirting, Body Language, and Pick-up Artists

Copyright to this digital edition © 2010 by RJ Ledesma

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be

reproduced in any form or by any means

without written permission from the copyright owner

and the publisher.

Published and exclusively distributed by

ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

7th Floor Quad Alpha Centrum Building

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

Trunk Lines: ([phone], 477-4755 to 57

Sales & Marketing: [e-mail]

Fax: [phone]

www.anvilpublishing.com

Book design by Arnold and Cynthia Arre

Cover photo by Juan Caguicla

Author’s caricatures by Arnold Arre

ISBN 9789712729263 (e-book)

Version 1.0.1

Table of Contents

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Foreword

For Want of Foreplay

Introduction & Acknowledgments

Playing with My Tools in a Parallel Universe

Prologue

You Smell Good Enough to Mate

Body Language

Say It With Your Legs

Fondle that Wineglass

What Lips are You Talking About?

Show Me Your Beak

Where Jackson Keeps his Five

Stages of Flirting

Torture by Numbers

You’ve Got the Look

Meet, Mate, and Meat

Sige, Lumapit Ka (OK, come near)

Would You Like to Jingle My Bells?

My Sign is Hazardous Materials

It’s a Raining, Aren’t They?

Small But Terrible

It’s My Turn, Ayt?

Amazing Graze

Touch Me in the Moaning

The Rhythm is Gonna Get You

Professional Pick-Up

The Magical Mystery Tour

Breaking All the Rules

M.A.C.K. Attack

Fatal Attraxion

52 Pick up

Smooth Operator

Talk It Off

Potty Mouth

About the Author

Foreword

For Want of Foreplay

Everyone knows RJ Ledesma needs no foreshadowing, forewarning, or foreplay, so I don’t really know what I’m doing here, having to usher him into a river like a St. John the Baptist.

After all, he’s a forthcoming sort; he comes (maybe also goes) forth into the same river where he never steps twice, rather daintily dips his toes into the water’s edge, then calls for a towel from his yaya.

We have to bear with his forebodings. It’s simply the way he indulges in forecasting what his foredoomed forefingers—counterpart extremities as these are—might try next. In brief, that may be his idea of foreclosing on an idea, especially when it has to do with seduction.

Did I say something about him never stepping into the same estero twice? With any liquid situations involving prospects of exchanging bodily fluids or the flush of gooey testosterone, RJ steps in, time and again, in fact plunges into both the shallows and depths of discovery.

Headlong and pell-mell does he plumb the inevitable: that familiar realization that he can only succumb to fashion statements, or his making them, by way of alluding to his imagined peers, from Boy George to David Beckham, the Jaworskis to James Yap.

He may have his own totemic takes on the vulnerability of cavemen upholding the potency of a high waistline or baggy pants, but when it comes to fertility studies, he harks back to wanton readings on professorial expertise.

From savvy insights on the inner DOM that apparently stems from intimate knowledge of his own inimitable persona, to sage advisories offered DITs or DOMs In Training, we have to hand it to this aristocrat of emotional effusions.

As tellingly does he share his foresight on a gamut of mating occasions, as when she will break your balls harder than Efren Bata Reyes, or the types of gazes that may foretell the possibility of a relationship, peaking with that intense two-to-three-second stare that has the power to dissolve underwear.

He forecasts the propitious moment when to fondle your wineglass, or to adjust our groins with pride—possibly with the same opposable thumbs he has held up to the light, or the light bulb in countless bathrooms.

From the body English of flirtatious conduct to a litany of professional pick-up lines, he will lead sundry students to screw-up after screw-up. Inherent is his joy, after all, in making us all drown in the same roiling eddies of that river of fancied passion, where only the brave and the bald can bob up and down to cleanse themselves of a "facial gayuma."

RJ Ledesma is his own one-man truth commission when it comes to conducting testosterone tests. Such is his credibility that we have no doubt that any league of extraordinary gentlemen will confirm his theory of relativity that applies to comfort zones—as pioneered by the likes of Willie Revillame, Jojo Alejar, Vic Sotto, and Dolphy (or Ramon Revilla.)

Their testimony should mitigate any speculation that this book’s author also happens to be obsessed with the imagined paradise of Piolo Pascual, let alone the germane supremacy of Kuya Germs.

In a pheromone-dictated parallel universe, we would do well to arm ourselves with all the knowledge on Biblical knowing found in these pages. Thus should our evenings, midnights, and wee hours turn into models of satiety, if not frustration. Either way, we can thank the author, and touch him in the moaning.

Alfred Krip A. Yuson

Palanca Awards Hall-of-Famer

Introduction & Acknowledgments

Playing with My Tools in a Parallel Universe

My weekly columns have always been the result of passionate procrastination.

The column percolates in my gray matter for most of the week—a period marked by furious scribbling of random thoughts on the back of a steno notebook while in the midst of business meetings and cramming in some late night research from my library which consists of such landmark texts as Men Fake Foreplay, The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray and M.A.C.K. Tactics: The Science of Seduction Meets the Art of Hostage Negotiation.

After cobbling enough chicken scratches that pass as notes, I try to sneak in a column during the weekend. And the operative word here (among many operative words that I use in this collection) is sneak.

Because in between playing with my baby daughter, performing my Ashtanga Yoga practice, buying my weekly produce at the open-air market, replying to various office-related emails, visiting our open house projects in Batangas, writing and editing articles for UNO magazine, shooting for a movie or television project, attending children’s birthday parties, hosting for a wedding reception or a corporate event, taking my wife out on a date, serving as a lay minister in church (seriously), and taking in a stolen out-of-town vacation with the family, I am probably able to sneak (there goes that word again) in about two solid hours of column writing work during the wee hours of Monday morning, when all that I have going for me is a surge of adrenaline, a tinge of willpower, and a pot-full of barako coffee.

And if the writing gods looked favorably upon me that week, I would have emailed my column to my Philippine Star lifestyle editor, Ninang Millet Mananquil and my desk editor, Scott Garceau, before the National Anthem starts playing on television. Once I click on send, my brain can finally go on shut-down mode and I can leave behind the struggle, the joy, and the insanity that is humor writing. Until the next weekend.

I have been a slave to my weekly column for the past five struggle-filled, joyous, and insanity-laden years ever since Tessa Mauricio-Arriola, the former lifestyle editor of the Manila Times, was deluded enough to offer me a column in the paper’s Sunday edition. I met Tessa when stand-up comedian Tim Tayag (I have an interview with Tim in this compilation entitled Potty Mouth) and myself were making the rounds of several publications, offering song numbers and lap dances to various editors with the hope that they would write about the late-night comedy show that we co-conceptualized, co-produced, co-starred, and were co-accused for, The Men’s Room on Studio 23. Apparently, my gyrations left Tessa so traumatized that it impaired her sound editorial judgment: When the Sunday Times magazine was being re-formatted, she was on the lookout for someone who was celebrity-ish. Someone who had a bit of public recall but was already lying out there in the fringes. Someone who was desperate enough to claw his way back into that pedestal of fame that he enjoyed in this youth and would do nothing short of exposing his chest hair and knickers on national television for the sake of ratings. Someone a bit more desperate than Jojo Alejar. You know, someone like that.

I accepted that weekly column, which I entitled Playing with my Tools (innuendo and I are the best of friends) with equal parts glee, terror, and hair loss. Along with the rusty pliers that I often mentioned in my first set of columns (which you can find in Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me, my first collection. That’s right, I want all your money), my writing had gone rusty as well. The last time that I had produced anything of creative merit was back in college when I snuck (I do a lot of sneaking around) into the National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City with all but two short stories (Beerhouse Eulogy and "Bangungot") to my name. Since that workshop, my creative writing output had been nada, unless you consider creatively written business reviews and a 10 pound graduate school thesis.

Aside from my creative inertia, there were a lot of reasonable reasons that should have prevented me from taking on this column. I was already slaving away as COO (Child of Owner) in our family managed real estate development business where I was hawking away plots of land in the metro-Tagaytay area. On top of that, I had just taken on a job as editor-in-chief of a men’s lifestyle magazine while still hosting and producing a weekly comedy show on the side. These responsibilities alone were enough to make free time, sleep, and a full head of hair mere figments of my imagination.

Nonetheless, I recall the introduction that was written by one of my creative writing professors, the great Dr. Cirilo Bautista, in his short story collection. Dr. Bautista compared the bane of creative writing to being that proverbial monkey clinging on to your back. And if you don’t take good care of that monkey, that little primate will go ape*&^% across the length of your spine (that description of the monkey’s business being mine and not the professor’s). Apparently, I have been lugging a big, feces-throwing ape on my back since I first read Green Eggs and Ham. So I had to be a tad more unreasonable.

Turning up unreasonableness a notch, Tessa asked me to write a relationship column. Given that my knowledge on relationships was probably as extensive as the former president’s knowledge on the ZTE-NBN deal, I needed to immerse myself in research. And this immersion did not include getting myself plastered in bars while testing out pick-up lines on women who were half my age and who wore clothes two sizes too small for them, God forbid (yes, God and my then-girlfriend-now-wife forbade it). Instead, this research entailed amassing an indecent number of relationship books that men should never admit to owning, much less to reading (especially when you have How To Make a Man Fall In Love With You proudly displayed on your shelf). But admittedly, there are some really great relationship books out there, such as my once oft-quoted Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, which has saved me from both writer’s block and the wrath of my then-girlfriend-now-wife’s rusty pliers many, many times.

And contrary to the implied violence that I often write about, there has been no physical abuse of body parts, whether erogenous or not, in the reproduction of my column. What has been thoroughly abused, however, was a hyperactive imagination fueled by years of too many comic books (But well-written comics books, I must say. Please check out the works of very good writers Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Warren Ellis, and Garth Ennis), movies by Monty Python crew, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Ben Stiller, and Steve Martin, and the writings of Dave Barry, David Sedaris, and our homegrown world dominatrix Jessica Zafra.

(After a year’s worth of playing with my tools, I submitted an essay entitled You Smell Good Enough to Mate—the first essay that appears in this compilation—and was lucky enough to be one of the winners of the Philippine Star’s 2006 Lifestyle Journalism awards. So with my rusty pliers in tow, I created Version 2.0 of my weekly column, "Pogi from a Parallel Universe," which has appeared every Wednesday in the M Section of the Philippine Star.)

And there you have the formula that I have used, abused, and have been investigated for in my columns: Pinoy pop culture, the anthropology of relationships, the eighties (yes, all of the eighties), shock value, noontime variety shows, self-deprecation, Sunday tsismis (gossip) shows, armchair psychology, local politics, digressions and non-sequiturs, along with a running cast composed of Dirty Old Men (DOMs), Dirty Old Men-in-Training (DITs), No Girlfriends Since Birth (NGSBs), Manny Pacquiao and his sparring mates, an imaginary Gary Lising, and, of course, my wife, my yaya (nanny) and my stubbornly loyal three female readers. Shake the ingredients thoroughly and stick them in the microwave. Step back and wait for a meltdown.

The columns that appear in this collection were written over the last half of the 2000s, which accounts for several things: First, many of the political and pop culture references were ripped (there goes the implied violence again) from the headlines of the period, so they may already sound outdated. In the event that somebody reads this book about 20 years from now (if books have not yet become extinct by then), it will probably be part of their required reading for Philippine history or Arts and Culture or Abnormal Psychology. Second, all of these essays were written when the most unpopular Philippine president ever led this country (led this country, yes, but as to where, I am still unsure of). As