As of late, there has been a lot of comparison between me, in a sexually aroused state, and a cat. A kitten, more acutely, but for the purposes of this post (this eventual metaphor), we're gonna stick with cat. Those of you who know me well can imagine how turned on I would have to be before I found the kitten comparison anything but completely repugnant.

And that's what it is, or what the word "kitten", in this context has come to mean: me, in a state so worked up and in the moment that I suspend my cynicism for that kind of drivel, and really, my criticism of really anything at all. Me, getting beyond that state of endless thought, fast-moving analysis, the sarcasm, the defensiveness, the stress.

I'm sure, for most of you, such a state isn't terribly hard to imagine. Myself, I have one definite account of it in recent memory, and I'm dubious that there'd be more than that if I looked farther back in the records. But then, I have a tendency to forget, quickly, how something felt, and only remember the facts and figures, some of the conversations and the visuals (though almost always in a third-person, movie-camera angle.)

I really think my sex life would benefit incredibly from learning how to meditate, how to shut off the go-go-go of my head. I bought a Psychology Today magazine a few weeks ago, an issue on sex and attraction. It sits, crumpled, on the floor of my bathroom, open to a page that has one of the oversized quotations from the surrounding article: "When a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent." I feel like the further information that must be in the article would be illuminating, if not entirely surprising, and I feel like I should read it, but by the time I get around to actually picking it up, I'm generally done with whatever I was in there for in the first place.

I do think it's interesting how often science seems to be running to catch up with things that seem completely obvious to the new-age set, though.


So, I've found another comparison between my sexual self and a cat tonight, because heaven forbid I should witness some natural phenomenon and not find a way to make it about me. Riding my bike tonight, I come across a cat toying with some small, helpless prey. Hypocritically, I ride up to stop it. Unlike the two or three other cats I've done this to on my late-night excursions in the past few weeks, this one didn't seem at all perturbed by me. I rode the bike up until I was a foot and half away from it, then had to get off to deal with it at closer range. The mouse it was toying with must have been injured by the time I got there, it would have been easy enough for me to scoop it up and bring it somewhere safe, but not wanting to get bit, I put my hand between the cat's head and the rodent. I expected, finally, for this to spook the cat, but I found the cat's head pushing resistantly against my hand. At first I thought it was stubborn, then I realized that it just wanted my affection. I pet it at length to distract it and give the mouse a chance to escape, and I remembered I that I know this cat-- not just metaphorically, either. This is the same cat that's often on this stretch of road, often comes up to me and demands my attention. Every time I pass it, it comes to greet me, it's colleague.

So there it is. I didn't find a delicate way to put it, but it's obvious, non? Both of us cats, catching and toying with prey, injuring or killing it, and for no good reason. We're both well fed, well taken care-of. But it's in our nature, to chase and destroy. It's in our nature to make a life into a plaything.


"I've been a bad, bad girl.
I've been careless with a delicate man.
And it's a sad, sad world.
When a girl will break a boy, just because she can."


There's probably more on my mind-- more about how much today sucked, how many little conversations have backed up in my system and will die before they have a chance to get out, like so many seedling maples, growing in a gutter. About missing my muse, the man who, if nothing else, has given me the will to write again (Talk to me in person, world, if you want know where to send that giant thank-you note.) About things he's got me thinking and talking about-- what I really want out of life, why I won't let myself have them.

But I have to finish my English homework, and get this damn mix CD done, once and for all. For him, of course. I do this as a token and a labor of love, finding just the right combination of songs, just the right order so that it builds and falls appropriately. I bet the cat never did that for the mouse.

In the end, I guess, that's what separates us from the animals.


On with it.

On my walk tonight, I was thinking about too many people to even remember who they were now. Largely, people I've kissed. And one person I long to kiss again, with this sort of Mitch Albom-style pining. (IE, cross the plot "For One More Day"-- where the lead character gets to see his dead Mother again-- with a lesbian erotica. It made more sense in my head.)

I stepped into a smell that reminded me of her, but maybe only because I was already thinking of her. I found myself wanting so badly to think of a song that reminds me only of her, and of nobody else. When I couldn't think of one, I looked through my iPod. Nothing there was quite right, nothing there was quite worthy of her. But the ensuing melancholy, and the temperature of the air around me, and odd sadness that's permeated my alone time lately, that all begged for Arcade Fire's "Crown of Love." It's a song that does not remind me of her, or of myself, or maybe of anybody. It's a parting gift from Casey, one of the last songs I ever downloaded on his recommendation, but it doesn't remind me of him. I think, perhaps, it reminds me of a reality that lives in my fears.

"I carved your name
Across my eyelids
You pray for rain,
I pray for blindness."

As the full meaning of these lines crushes into my head for the first time, I want to fall to my knees and scream at the sky.

"If you still want me,
Please forgive me.
The crown of love
Is falling from me."


And now, I am relistening to the song to recapture the feeling, to get these words down. And now, I am paralyzed by it. By the sad, driving progression of the piano. By the inevitable, pained strains of the strings. By the desperation in the singer's voice.


There is something I want to say here, about how, even as I grow to love someone new more and more, I grow to believe in love less and less. The affection that grows between us now is just a testament to the fleeting and frail powers of affection in general. I'm certain reading that will be, at best, annoying to him: more likely, it will make him acutely remorseful of the consequences of his decisions, both the painfully obvious and the bizarrely ironic.


For some reason, I'm listening to "Danny Boy" now. Great song, came into loving it pretty late. Not a big fan of this particular singer. (Daniel O'Donnell)


He said if he was ever going to give in and kiss me, it would be while we were standing. He's great at that, and he knows he is-- paying attention to things people have said, and using them again, at another time, to their absolute delight. I told him that almost all of my first kisses with people have happened while laying down (he says it's because there's some arcane aspect of my beauty that comes out while I'm lounging-- that's not an exact quote, mind you, but I have to fit his sentiment to my own sense of rhetoric. Something about the slope of my side...I don't know quite what he's talking about, but then, neither does he.) The rare ones that haven't been laying down have been sitting-- at this point, I have to make a written list of everyone I've ever kissed just to make sure I know what I'm talking about. Twelve on the list that undeniably belong there, in that I didn't just kiss them, I had a whole, like, session of kissing them. Jill, Jeremey and Bobby also on the list, as people I only kissed once or twice (Jill) or whom I kissed during a game of Truth or Dare or Spin the Bottle (Jeremey and Bobby)-- I guess Serena and, to a lesser extent, Peter, would be added to that list, if you count those.

And Kris and I used to have a policy that I was allowed to kiss him as a friend-- IE, no tongue, brief and simple and completely platonic. When I say, "we had a policy", what I mean is that I realized that Kris had a tendency to kiss me like that, so I asked Zack if that was fine in such a way that implied he had no choice.

Only one person on that list who's name I can't write at all. One person who I've chosen not to mention in too much detail on here so far. One person whose name everyone knows should be on the list, but with whom my last kiss was a secret.

When I first wrote it down, I had the sneaking suspicion I was missing someone-- I was. Greg Goulding. Breadloaf, Vermont, maybe in 2000. The dew-covered hills that we were rolling all over as we skipped out one of the readings that wasn't optional, the library with the bust of Robert Frost and the fireplace, and reading poetry to each other on that couch.

Any good man can tell you, I'm a sucker for literature.

I was coming around to something-- oh yes, why I'm sad that I've never been kissed standing up. It's not just a positional thing, it's important to point out. It's about the build up to the moment. The will-they-or-won't-they. A terribly important aspect of my fantasy kiss is that I be the person who gets kissed, rather than the one doing the kissing. It's equally important that it happen at a moment where a significant amount of movement has to happen before landing-- IE, that I not already be in that position, that it's not just a matter of parting one's lips. There has to be that moment of anticipation. Whether the movement of someone's head towards mine would happen quickly and passionately-- think someone who's eyes are fixed on you crossing the room at a New York pace, then grabbing you up, and kissing you hard-- or would happen slowly-- think of someone looking deep in your eyes as they go to hold you, then they are looking from your eyes to your lips, then touching your face with their hand before tilting their head and leaning in as they pull you in gently with their hand on the back of your neck-- well, whatever. In theory, I'd take either, so long as there was that question in the air for just a moment beforehand, like the tiny, almost indiscernible trail of a firework that disappears altogether for just a moment before it explodes.

In practice, I'll take neither. I'm married. I mean, chicks of the world, you have your instructions. But this is, by no means, an invitation for the men in the audience. Unfortunately.

I am trying to count how many of my first kisses were started by me. Six, I know for sure. Emily, Mark and Jeff, I don't honestly remember anymore. (I'll leave comments open if any of the three of you are reading this, and would like to edify the audience. Anyone who's kissed me, actually, feel free to contribute. Remember, to access comments, you have to view this post by itself.) Greg, Ben, Sam and Katie, I'm pretty sure they kissed me first.

I feel like somewhere in that list, there's more I could write about. But I probably shouldn't. I'm re-reading some old posts, I may include some links in a tweet-- I really love this damn blog, I really want people-- other than me-- to read the archives. Wanting that wouldn't be the most shameful thing I've wanted, as of late.

On with it.

There's a post I want to write, that I've been saving up for too long now. Too many pieces, and how will they all fit together?

A post about a word that is my weakness. A word that makes and breaks things-- that I am dependent on. I once-- twice? A hundred times?-- told Sam that the reason he and I could never be together is that I didn't believe he'd ever be able to look into my eyes and use that word for me, and whenever, in the past, I've started to wonder how it might feel to be with someone like him, someone who intrigues and seduces me the way that he does, I remember that he'd never be able to say it. I also know that it's for the best, that he not have what it takes to use my weakness against me. As if, at the time, in that moment, he was not my weakness. But I guess I have more than one.

And no, it's not "love". Believe it or not, there's a word that makes me even crazier than "love".

A post about the way Emily's cousin came up to me yesterday, begging my forgiveness that she did not recognize me at first, and used that word, all three perfect syllables of it, twice, with modifiers like "absolutely", and, I don't know, something else. In return, I told her I recognized her, because she was the same as she'd ever been-- stunning. I didn't go into the fact that it wasn't just the physical that made it true-- her manner, her personality. The easy generosity with which she lavished complements upon me-- the complement, it turns out, that is maybe the only one I would ever need to hear. It's easy to see why she's Emily's favorite cousin, why our mutual friend never got over her. It makes me feel somehow more important as a person to have made any kind of impression on her in the two or three times we met previously, as well as through the things that Emily may have told her over the years.

But this isn't a post about Maggie, not really.


It's a post about something I said the other night, having one of those moments where suddenly, I realize, I feel far less self-worth than I'm even aware of. And I wanted to link to a post about one of the last times that happened, and if I find it, eventually, I will put that link here. (Well...I found one post that briefly made mention of it here. In that same search-- I searched for the word "possibility"-- I found this post which I find particularly interesting, too. I'm wondering if the post I was actually looking for-- which had the words I said to Sam, the lack of his appropriate reaction to them, and then Zack's reaction to them, later, and how perfect it was, despite everything we were going through-- was actually an e-mail to someone? If it was, I may post it, later.) I wanted to express how, it turns out, I still feel broken, defective. Even with all the progress it could be argued I have made. Because of all the progress it could be argued that I never will make.


It's a post about belief, as much as anything else. The belief I held, when I was young, that the first thing that happened when you got to heaven was they sat you down in a room with a big TV and a group of angels, and reviewed a full, decades-spanning video of your life. When I was young, this was the largest source of my Catholic shame-- this belief that I would be trapped in that room, seeing, with perfect remorse, all the times I ever touched myself, all the times I ever swore without immediately adding "I'm sorry, God."-- do you know how long I did that?

"Catholic girls start much too late."

That same belief of the afterlife, while it had been such a source of anxiety, was maybe the hardest thing to lose, when I lost my faith. Suddenly, I inherited the belief that everything that had ever happened to me was, all at once, gone. That, along with the shameful moments, I had lost my turn to see it all again, the friendships, the happiness. The moments of extreme perfection which are like shining islands in the sea of misery that they cause, acting as poor and precious justification to ruin everything you've come to depend on. Suddenly, all that was left of these things were my fleeting memories-- and anything I'd already lost a memory of, well, maybe someone else had one. But if not, if it was something that was just my own, well, was it even real anymore?

This was probably the seed of a rather unpopular idea I expressed in lit class a few weeks ago, that truth may be subjective. I know I'm not the first person to think that, but it's not something that I've really known anyone to agree with.


Belief in other things, too-- or the lack of belief in other things. Seeing my reflection, sometimes, I'm given ample evidence to believe that I am that thing I wish to believe I am. Other times, I see myself and think that it couldn't be farther from the truth. This informs my skepticism-- do beautiful women exist? Or are their simply women who know better than others how to pose, how to dress, how to apply makeup and hide their flaws. Myself? Well, I'm pretty enough from a certain angle, but I don't know quite how to strike it, and even in the company of people who give me ten times more confidence, in the moment, than I usually have-- when I leave, I can't help but wonder how much of the evening I spent with my neck craned in just that certain way that makes me, somehow, more appealing, more worthwhile.

Conversely, it's important to point out that I do believe in ugly women-- they are as real and as tangible as the earth beneath my feet. This isn't some hippy-dippy tribute to equality and the subjective nature of beauty. I believe that some women are truly ugly, but I question the possibility that any women are truly beautiful.


If there was anything to challenge that skepticism, it was the vision that was Emily, yesterday, on her wedding day. In her gown, with her hair just so-- seeing that, and holding my breath, and needing to stare: that must be what a real belief in beauty feels like. She was more beautiful than I'd ever seen her, but, beyond that, somehow more beautiful than anyone had ever been. How ridiculous that she should lack confidence that she would be.

There was a post I was going to write, the day before, about how, despite my changing tastes over the years, despite my changing moods, my changing lifestyles...despite the approval that I give for the hollywood standard of beauty, and the way that makes certain people think I am shallow, despite everything, the first person I ever kissed has never stopped being beautiful to me. Having seen her yesterday, the whole ode I had planned seems to be something of an understatement.

And Emily, with that same generous grace that seems to be a quality of a "Davis Girl" (as Floyd puts it), Emily always tells me I'm beautiful, too.

What would the world be without Davis Girls, huh?


There were other things to write-- about this CD I've listened to easily five times in the past forty hours or so. About whether or not I am converted, about individual lines that stand out. But, in reality, this wasn't a post about the one person who's been driving me to write so often, lately. And it wasn't a post that was asking to be pandered to by him or anybody else. This was a post about Emily being beautiful, Maggie being stunning, and me being weak. This was a post about the subjectiveness of truth, and the impossibility of perfection, and the things I believed when I was young. This was a post about the things that I don't believe now.

On with it.