Category: General Musings

When I was twelve, I told my family, “I’m never going to marry.”
They laughed and told me I was too young to know what I wanted.

When I was fifteen, I told my friends, “I’m never going to marry.”
They laughed and told me that it was just a matter of time.

When I was twenty-three, I told my colleagues, “I’m never going to marry.”
They laughed and told me that I just hadn’t found the right woman.

I’m twenty-nine and still not married. It’s not from lack of opportunity or interest in having a partner in crime – I simply think that most modern marriages are not treated with the respect they deserve by those in them; I think there are better paths to follow in cementing a relationship. Still, another tenant I tend to live my life by is, “Never…say never.” I don’t see myself getting married…but you never know what life is going to throw and I’m not the type to let others limit me – much less myself.

Which brings me to my main thought – I have difficulty pigeon-holing my relationships with people.

People like to categorize: Lover. Friend. Close Friend. Best Friend. Acquaintance. Work buddy. Fuck buddy. Boyfriend. Girlfriend. College pal. Companion. Colleague. Neighbor.

Sometimes categories are useful. Such as, “I’m going out with my friends tonight.” In a broad stroke, you’ve described the group of people you’re going to be spending your evening with. People have a general idea of what a friend is.

Where these categories are less useful is at that stage in a relationship where one party wants to define what is they ‘have’. There are multiple problems with defining a relationship based on a category:

1) You are letting society set limits on what your relationship is. Assuming a title comes with a lot of pre-defined baggage. Friends don’t have sex. You shouldn’t fall in love with your fuck buddy. Boyfriends and girlfriends should be exclusive.

2) You and your partner may have differing ideas of what a ‘lover’ or ‘girlfriend’ is. Categories are convenient but can be misleading. The better path, in my humble opinion, is to be as honest as possible when deciding what a relationship is going to be. If it comes down to setting boundaries on it, be explicit. Public displays of affection are fine. She wants to kiss other girls? Fine. Kiss other boys? Not without permission first. Calling me when I am out late to ensure I am alright? Shows you are caring. Calling another six times to check in on me? A bit…over-attentive for me. The key is to be clear about what you and your partner want and make sure the other person understands the important lines you are drawing.

Everyone lives by societal rules to some extent – unwritten definitions and rules make it possible for us to interact. But is there a need to blindly accept the dictates of others?

Love and hate are not so much opposites as alternating faces of the same coin. What is it about a person or concept that so drives you to hate it? Anything, anything, that drives you to put so much passion into hating something so fully must be a thing you love, and love with the same vicous passion. Does that person make you angry? Confused? Insane? Frustrated? Hatred is only fucking unfufilled. Hatred is obsession over something you can’t have. Hatred is a contest of wills. Hatred is passion denied.

I’ve continued to think on how best to handle writing about true life encounters. The issue I keep running up against is that my past relationships (even those that didn’t last more then a night or two) are all distinct in general, but specifics on encounters would be hard to get perfect. And if I am going to get creative with the details, then I am potentially defeating the purpose.

More recent adventures, for which the details can still be recalled with startling (and, at times, very distracting) clarity, I am hesitant to write about out of respect for my partners. Yes, this is a semi-anonymous blog, but I consider trust between my partner and I to be more then just important – it is integral. Changing names and details helps, but not enough to make me comfortable enough to write about it. Yet.

Of course, permission given, I can and will write. NE, a dear friend, has acquiesced so there may be some stories about her in the near future.

My relationship with the Hollywood kiss has progressed through three distinct stages: Development, Disappointment, and Enlightenment.

Development. I had just reached that point, somewhere in my mid-teen years, where my interest in on-screen romance went from bland ignorance to cautious curiosity. Boy meets girl. Girl gets into trouble. Boy saves girl. Girl rewards boy with kiss (ok, ok, nowadays it’s more – boy meets girl, boy gets girl into trouble, girl gets herself (and the boy) out of trouble, girl uses boy for some quick and dirty sex, and then turns out to be a psychotic murderer in the requisite plot-twist). I watched the on-screen kisses with a mixture of awe and nervousness. They were a lot to live up to. This was how kisses were done. Every kiss must be like that. Right?

Disappointment. Wrong – so wrong. From my late teens to early adulthood, kissing never even came close to what I had seen in the movies. It was either too fast, too slow, or too wet – too little or too much. Noses bumped. Teeth clanked. The first woman (I was sixteen, she was thirty) I ever kissed tasted like the butt-end of a used cigarette (she must have had a three-pack a day habit). It was like kissing an ash-tray. This was kissing? The only people who kissed like what I saw in the movies were the actors and actresses making them. Under the guidance of a director. With perfect lighting. And breath mints.

Enlightenment. I was twenty-two the first time it happened. I actually thought, ‘So this is it.’. It started tentative – a small bite, teeth grazing her lower lip. Her lips parting for me, her hands tightening along my sides, pulling me a bit closer. She tasted like vanilla and peppermint. We were moving in synch, her tongue brushing mine almost shyly as we found each other; the kiss deepened, became harder, more forceful, the natural progression as we wanted more and more and…a pause, a shuddering breath as we found ourselves practically clinging to each other.

So what is the moral of all this? Not all kisses are Hollywood kisses. I don’t even want them all to be. The thing about Hollywood kisses isn’t their caliber – some of the best kisses I’ve ever shared were sloppy and frenzied, or slow and so subtle they were almost imagined. Hollywood kisses are just those kisses where all the pieces seem to fall together. They surprise you. They have magic.

Class dismissed. Except for you – the pretty brunette in the back. I need you to stay after for some more practice. Because practice makes…well, in this case, broken hearts, Jerry Springer shows, and sometimes, just sometimes, the perfect kiss.

I’ve done my share of writing about sex. Abstract, concrete – poetic and prosaic. I’ve written erotic stories and third-person narratives.

But I’ve never written about an actual encounter.

The way a scene unfolds, how I feel during it, tastes of edges and curves – these details come out in the rest of my writing. True stories? Perhaps I have never considered them important stories to tell, to test against my writing talents (meagar as they are). Yet what is the point of this space if I am not going to share a few actual facts? Reality has bite.

What to write of? One of the many scenes between me and my close friend NE? Of hunted prey and frenzied capture?

There is a vending machine in the break area. It offers the normal assortment of fizzy beverages in cold 12oz cans for .65 cents. A larger, plastic-bottled, version is offered by a nearby vending machine; these cost 1.25.

I prefer the cans. Metallic tasting diet coke always wins.

But I digress.

The .65 vending machine is broked. Oh, it will take all of my coins – but about one in three won’t register in the machine’s small calculating electronic brain. I’ve lost a good two or three dollars in change over the last year to this machine.

And then, a few weeks ago, I figured it out: the coins that the machine ate sounded as if they weren’t going far enough in – they were making it just enough to fall into some kind of crack. But if I flicked the coin in with decent velocity, and at the right angle, the coin machine would always register it. This works very well for quarters and dimes. Nickels, on the other hand, are proving to be tricky.

Now each time I approach the vending machine, I know it’s secret. I accept its challenge. Just me against the vending machine.

I’ve been sleeping too much.

I wake up, and I want to stay in bed.

I get up, take a shower, and want to lay down on my large leather chair and close my eyes.

I get to work and I want to listen to classical music and forget where I am.

Too much sleep is a classic sign of depression. But I’m not depressed. I know this because I became intimately familar with depression in my adolesence. I never tested the bottom of that dark river – never felt true despair. In fact, there was a certain comfort in the melancholic embrace it had – it gave me permission to withdraw. But it was a temporary retreat, a false promise of solace that lead nowhere.

So why am I so…unmotiviated? I am still engaged in life – I do things. But I have no great challenge, no great reason.

Decent well-paying job? Check.
Nice, if small, house? Check.
Good friends? Check.

Maybe I just need a vacation.

Why do so many people, including me, find themselves putting up their personal thoughts, detailing life’s minutiae, expounding on the pros and cons of Kerry, euthanasia, and cunninglinus?

I can guess; some of it must derive from the human need to connect to others, to share. Some of it must be the writer in us finally being given space to exist. Some of it must be our desire to leave a written legacy, something that says we were here – we thought – we blogged. And some of it – perhaps a lot of it – is our attempt to get attention.

Me! Me! Over here! Helllo! Pay attention! Pay attentttttion!

Seriously, though – we all want to think we are unique, special – and we want recognition of this. And, well, yes – as individuals, we are quite different from each other. But being a human – one of billions, stretching back thousands of years – really, as a rule, we’re not likely to say something that hasn’t been said before.

So why do it?

There are quite a lot of people livejournalling, blogging, RnR Craiglist posting; but it’s not the number of people doing it that surprises me – it’s the fact that there are so many doing it well; that fact makes me pause. So many people who can write in such a fashion and about things that are so interesting that you want to read on. You want to unravel the serial adventures of their lives, you want to know what they think about tongue piercings, copyright law, and their mother’s broken car.

Therapy for the masses? Still debating this with myself. In the mean time though, I have to go read how that postal work’s affair with his mother-in-law is working out…

Ever stop to smell the roses?

This phrase, unfortunately, has lost a lot of the magic it once had; it has become a Hallmark card, the lesson learned by a forty-something construction worker after a 90 minute after-school special. This doesn’t make it any less true or important – but it has certainly lost some of its punch.

So I have a new idea.

If we liken roses to those things in life that we enjoy, those things which are good, then the concept embodied by it only takes the idea part of the way. What about the time spent away from the roses? The hard, sad, and indifferent times? Few of us have the luxury of cultivating rose gardens. Should we pull back from life when it becomes hard?

I was discussing this with my brother the other day- he’s going to be making some difficult choices in the near future. It is easy to avoid making choices; you can let life make them for you. But in allowing things to happen – you are no longer driving – you are a passenger. For me, it is important that I be an active participant in my life – all of it. It’s not just the roses that are precious, but the thorns that draw blood and remind of how fragile life is. It is the soil we tend and the act of nurturing it so that good things come.

It is about being in front when we do things. There is a distinction between doing things and experiencing them. An obvious example is the way we tune out when driving to and from work; it is automatic, a motion we are going through. Now imagine this state pervading your whole life, without you realizing it. This is the state most of us are in, until something, amazing wonderful or devastatingly bad, wakes us up.

I want to experience life, not just pass through it. I want to be an active participant in my life.