Lessons from My Brothers: 90%

Recently, a group of friends and I congregated at one of their places, where we entertained ourselves by having a few drinks and asking each other questions from The Book of Questions as well as its sluttier and predictably more fun sibling, The Book of Questions: Love & Sex.

Sample questions from the books:

• Out of all the people you know, whose death would you find most disturbing?
• Would you rather date someone with an average face and an amazing body, or someone with an amazing face and an average body?
• Have you ever had sexual feelings toward a family member? Whom?

One of the first questions we asked led to one of the more interesting moments of the night for me. How would you rate yourself -- in looks, intelligence, and personality -- against the rest of the world? We decided to go SAT style, by percentiles. Thus a 50 in looks means you believe you are in the top half of all people of your gender in the entire world in terms of physical appearance, and better looking than any of those trolls in the bottom half.

My bro Mark, always an outspoken one, went first. He thought about his looks for a second, then replied: 90.

Ninety. As in the 90th percentile of looks. The equivalent of a 1940 on the SAT's (or a 1300 on the Critical Reading and Math sections, for those of us who applied to college in an era not defined by High School Musical). Looks are to Mark what academic achievement is to RPI and Georgia Tech.

This is my bro, Mark:

Now I love Mark like a brother, but he is not better-looking than 90% of all men in the world.

So of course I started laughing at him. And that's when he hit me with some knowledge.

When it comes to something as abstract as looks, it doesn't matter what you are as much as what you think you are. If you're the type who goes out to bars and tries to pick up women, you're not going to succeed if you think you're an ugly old bastard.

Essentially, Mark directly answered the essence of what the question was trying to get. A 90 doesn't mean he thinks he's better looking than 90% of all men. A 90 just means, if Mark sees a smolderingly hot girl at a bar -- assuming he's single, which we sometimes need to remind him he is not -- he's very likely going to talk to her (and you can believe, after a few drinks, he becomes a 99 and then will definitely talk to her).

And then is it any wonder why I have so many pictures of Mark's ugly ass with women around whom he has no business being?


But that's what 90% means. So next time you look at yourself in the mirror, don't be afraid to smile. Point. Give yourself a little wink. And play on, playa.

(Just to close the gap, I believe Mark also went intelligence - 75, personality - 95. Those, too, are highly questionable results to me.)