Boy

One pet peeve of mine is women who refer to men as "boys." I hate when they do that. Like "I saw this boy the other day" or "I'm going out with a boy tonight." or "Are there any cute boys there?" My experience of women who call men boys is that they don't like men very much, and appear to have a problem with them (and with themselves). They'll deny it, of course, but in their daily lives, I think it's borne out.

I've seen it enough times to wonder if there's a correlation, even if this is utterly unscientific. The women I've seen use that term aren't able to form stable, lasting, healthy relationships, are perennially unhappy, are neurotic as hell, and are generally threatened by men -- it comes out in things they say and do. I think there's a perhaps half-conscious put-down inherent in calling men "boys," or seeing them as boys -- or, maybe there's a level of immaturity in these women themselves that makes them feel threatened by the term "man" and prefer the pert "boy" term, instead. A kind of projection of their own immaturity onto guys.

Grown women can be girly -- that's nice, sure. But grown women aren't girls; they're WOMEN. And, by the same turn, grown men aren't boys. Sure, a man can be boyish, and a man can be childish (just as a woman can be childish, too) -- I've known old people who are immature, crazily enough.

But give "boy" a rest, why don't you? Seriously, the ones I've seen use that term are emotional basket cases. It's just odd to me, because I've seen it used by a whole generation of women (or are they girls?) It's endemic in the generations after mine. Somewhere down the line, "man" was blackballed in the culture, and there's a generation of guys out there who feel compelled to apologize for being men -- maybe those are the "boys" those "girls" are wanting.

To me, it's just so off-putting. I immediately think badly of a woman who uses that term for guys. It's instinctive, but it's there, all the same. I respect a woman who is confident enough in herself to want a man, and not a boy, and who can see a man as a man, and appreciate him as one.

It's one thing for women to call themselves girls, or men to call themselves boys; they're allowed to. But when it crosses the aisle, it rankles. It just feels off for a guy to say "Are there any nice girls there?" It's an affectation, it's insulting, it's lame.

So, guys, if a woman sees you as a "boy," look out. That one's trouble, and it's not going to go well for you.

Self-Love

Someone said that you should never love somebody else more than you love yourself, and that sounded like wisdom to me, until I thought about it more. On one hand, sure, I get it: If you love somebody more than they love you, you're toast, because that person'll rake you over the coals, will take advantage of your love, and you'll be hurt, possibly badly. That above caveat is like the creed of a gunslinger -- the "kill or be killed" School of Love.

In my own case, I loved someone I couldn't possibly love more than she loved herself. And I really, really tried to make her happy, not realizing for years that you can't really make somebody happy; either they're happy with themselves (and happy with you) or they're not. But I made it work as best as I was able, and because of that asymmetrical relationship, I found myself getting progressively unhappier over time (magnified when kids were factored into the mix), without (at first) understanding why.

It took real soul-searching (so to speak) to realize that, yes, I had my own happiness to factor into the equation, that making her happy couldn't be my only mission in life without being a dead end, and me ending up a husk of humanity -- there had to be reciprocity in the mix, which simply wasn't there: she was happy to take all that I could give, and gave next to nothing in return. And when I'd try to bring that up, I'd catch heat for it, like it was somehow illegitimate of me to expect reciprocity in a relationship.

So, yeah, I understand that axiom above -- you can definitely get into trouble if you love someone more than you love yourself. But that's how I would view it: more of a caution sign than a road map, because if you start out with that in your head, you're going to miss out on a good or even great thing. It's like explaining a painting to someone instead of just looking at it with them; it's all head, no heart -- or the heart is protected behind concentric walls of emotional fortification in a labyrinthine construct: love gets lost in such a place.

You've got Cupid as an accountant on your shoulder, ensuring that, lovewise, you're always in the black. But red is the color of love, not black! To find love, true and worthy love, you have to risk going into the red, emotionally. You have to find somebody who appreciates you, makes you happy, makes you feel good, and be willing to love and appreciate them in return. Yes, you have to be cognizant of the nature of the person, so you don't end up with somebody who'll hurt you -- but you also have to be willing/able to understand how precious love is to be willing to risk it.

Love can't be safe; if you hold back, if you hold yourself in reserve, if emotional safety is your primary consideration, you're going to hobble what love you find, what love you can even feel. You'll end up with a person who might fit the checklist your brain has come up with for an acceptable love, but without the passion and romance and trust and joy that comes from a true and powerful love.

Just as there's a risk in being burned, so is there a positive feedback loop in reciprocity -- if you find someone who appreciates you-as-you, who loves you and makes you happy (and wants to make you happy), that's a treasure -- enjoy the ride.

But if you pause while basking in the glow and think "Huh. Am I loving this person too much? Should I hold myself in reserve, for fear of losing myself in this wonderfulness?" If you get cold feet, you're lost. There is a transcendent joy in losing oneself in love -- in my experience, the more neurotic a person is, the more self-obsessed they are, the less capable they are of feeling joy -- and joy is a key component of love. And, big shock: those folks have a perilous and fleeting relationship with love (and joy, for that matter), and are unhappy people because of it.

To bring an Epicurean slant to this, it's like having this glorious feast on the table before you, and you're fretting about eating too much, or how many calories are in the roast beast, or whether you should use the salad fork first, or whether that's gluten-free bread, and who'll be stuck doing the dishes later -- from my vantage point, there's a feast in front of you? Dig in! Enjoy! Feel the love! Savor it. Treasure it.

The "Are We There Yet?" School of Love spoils the whole trip. You're in love? Enjoy the ride, take in the scenery. Have fun. Don't fret the mileage, the road conditions, the traffic. Just enjoy. That's how a Romantic does it, anyway. Life can be a dirge or a dance. Which one's more fun, hmm?

Villains?

This kind of amused me. I love how Sauron tops the list!

Hmmm....

What is Kim Kardashian famous for, anyway? What sterling qualities might she bring to garner such undeserved celebrity?

There must be something about her, right? I don't know. Something behind it all?

And then, seeing her pix, finding something compelling about them, I thought "Wait, I know what it is! I bet she's a LIBRA."

Yep.

Time and again, when a celebrity might catch my eye, odds are good that she's a Libran. Librans are natural exhibitionists, incidentally. It's why, say, Kate Winslet can't seem to be in a movie without baring her assets, so to speak. And she's definitely not the only one. The astrological equivalent of wind chimes, beware the Libran.

Bahahah!

For one thing...

...I recognize that love has very real (and logical) evolutionary roots for us. It has survival value. A loveless soul (using "soul" purely rhetorically) is a forlorn apparition, unlikely to thrive or be able to function well in human society. The Bible says "We love because God first loved us." For a nonbeliever, I think, instead, "We love because our family first loved us." It's our first experience with it, and individuals who grow up in a loveless household, if they are that unfortunate, suffer for it. The ability to express and feel love is integral to healthy human function, and the roots of it have to be tied to our experience of love in our family (or the lack thereof). If we're loved, we are capable of loving, in return, and passing it along. All fairly obvious.

But when it gets into the realm of romantic love, and what that means, then the Devil's in the details. I don't know how a pragmatic soul feels love, because I'm simply not pragmatic. Maybe a pragmatist's view of love revolves around a kind of cost/benefit analysis of being with/without that person -- like "Zeke is around, Zeke likes to shovel the driveway in the winter, Zeke likes to cook for me -- ergo, I love Zeke, because my life is better with Zeke than without Zeke." Maybe a pragmatist views love in another way, like "Jade is really hot; she looks good on my arm, we look good together, when we're out, everybody checks us out. People can't believe how lucky I am to have Jade. Ergo, I love Jade."

Maybe? I don't know. To me, either of the above seem like dead ends for different reasons. Is love what you can do for the other person, or what you can get from the other person? Or are those merely beneficial side effects of it?

If you love someone, you want to make them happy. Their happiness makes you happier, too (and vice versa -- their pain hurts you). The challenge is when you love someone who might love what you do for them (and, hahah, to them), but maybe they don't love you -- that is, who you are.

To be true, love must be acceptance of the person for who they are. Not who they could be, or who you wish they were, who you thought they were, or what they can do for you. It has to simply be that person bringing you joy simply by being who they are, or you finding joy simply in that person's being.

Our society sort of sabotages that, I think, in the endless creation of wants and needs through lifestyle marketing -- happiness and contentment aren't encouraged; it's always about vaulting from "need" to "need." I think perhaps love has been both idealized and diminished in the popular culture. Romantic love, in particular, because it is not safe, it is often painful and hopeless and desperate, and it is not readily fungible. When marketing conveys the impression that X will make you lovable/desirable, it insinuates that you are not lovable to begin with.

If someone accepts and appreciates you as you are, then you're in a good position, where love is concerned. If you accept and appreciate them, in turn, then you're both better off. Otherwise, somebody's going off a cliff.

That's a Moray!

With February looming, the whole industry of Love(tm) in motion, I thought I'd blog about love for the whole month, since, despite being an atheist empiricist (or maybe because of it), I'm a romantic who believes in love, or at least I think I do. As a writer, I'm prone to thinking a lot about things, anyway, and what they mean, and exploring various sides of life and experiences, so it's a somewhat useful exercise.

If I had the Photoshop acumen to turn the moray below pink, I so would, but B2 is grousing about something at the moment, so I have to be hasty...

Abt. Always. Be....

I saw an Abt truck in my 'hood the other day, and maybe it's just me, but seeing these slogans on the truck, it made me wonder just what personal electronics Abt was providing...

Sontag

Well, the Bears blew their chance at going to the Superbowl, alas. Too bad, but so it goes.

I'm sleepy and wound up at the same time; need to wind down. Amazing how quickly January has already passed, really.

Hello, Dolly

Oh, my...

Sex Doll-As-Flotation Device

Definitely not what one wants for their 15 minutes of fame!

Silkily Spectral

I was watching "Watchmen," which I haven't watched for awhile, and I remembered that Silk Spectre I, played by Carla Gugino, is hot. She's rather yummy...

Kiss Off

I like the evolutionary explanations for kissing.

Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, gives an engaging overview of the possible evolutionary basis for two people mashing their mouths together -- a practice that is actually pretty odd, once you think about it. There's the way sexy red lipstick plays on our hunter-gatherer past, how swapping spit can help us develop immunity against disease and why it might have first developed as a way to literally sniff out genetically appropriate sexual partners.

As our ancestors began to walk upright, rather than males being attracted to the female's posterior, they began to focus on the breasts and the lips -- they call this "genital echoes."

Hey, I'm still drawn to a female's posterior. What can I say, I'm old-school!

Has kissing changed much over time? Do certain styles of kissing come into fashion?

Well, I love the French kissing story. It turns out that when people were traveling through Europe, there was this notion that women in France were more openly affectionate. There became this saying: "While in France, get the girls to kiss you." That sort of evolved to be: "Get a French kiss." But in France they don't call it that, they call it a "tongue kiss" or a "soul kiss," because it's supposed to feel like two souls merging.

"Soul kiss." That's amusing.

What happens physiologically when we kiss?
 
A lot. It depends on the kind of kiss, of course. If you're talking about a good kiss, our pulse quickens and our pupils dilate, which is probably part of the reason we close our eyes. There's also a rise in dopamine, which is responsible for the craving and longing, that can't-wait-to-be-with-you sensation. It's also stimulated by a lot of recreational drugs like cocaine; kissing sends us on a natural high. Dopamine spikes from really longing for something for a while and then getting it. When we've been dreaming about someone for a long time and then finally get it, dopamine is involved.

Serotonin causes obsessive feelings about someone. It's also the same neurotransmitter involved in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It sounds a lot like the symptoms of falling in love. Everyone loves to talk about sex, but kissing is probably the most intimate activity we can engage in.

I'm a good kisser. Just saying.

There's a strong gender divide in how we view kissing, isn't there?

Absolutely. There's a huge gender divide. In one large study of college-age students, strong patterns emerged: Women were constantly complaining about too much tongue and men were saying, "I really like wet kisses, lots of saliva!" The guys were usually eager to foray into sex without kissing and very few women were. Women paid a lot more attention to the teeth and breath of the person. Men tended to say they would consider starting a relation with someone just because they were a good kisser, and women were not that way. The act of kissing has a lot more significance for women than men. Men tend to report that kissing is a means to an end; women tend to try to figure out what the kiss means about their relationship, what it says about how their partner feels toward them.

Why might this be?

I started getting really frustrated by these findings, because I felt the results were very stereotypical. So I got together 80 of my own friends and acquaintances, and I was pretty shocked to see that they fell almost completely in the same pattern. When you start looking at reproductive strategies, it makes sense: A woman puts a lot more investment into the [sexual] decisions she makes, because she is fertile for a much shorter period of time each month, and a man can theoretically inseminate countless women throughout his life. Women are a lot more sensitive to smell and taste, which can tell a lot about a partner's health and reproductive capacity.

There's a great study looking at attraction and scent. It turns out that women are able to identify men who have a very different genetic code from their own, and they tend to be more attracted to them, because if they mate, their children would be healthier and stronger and more likely to survive because of the diversity in their genetics. Interestingly enough, women who are taking the birth control pill seem to have the opposite reaction. They're more attracted to men with genetic immunities similar to their own. It starts to make you wonder what all these hormones that we take are starting to do to our bodies and whether they're masking these signals that we've developed over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. I came across some pieces asking, "Is it possible that for some couples divorce is a result of the woman going off hormones and all of a sudden feeling less attracted to her partner?" It's certainly an important question to ask.

I don't know where I come down on this -- for me, it's never a means to an end. A good kiss is wonderful, but she can't have bad breath; that's just instantly off-putting for me. I don't particularly dwell on meaning, because if you're kissing at all, she's got to be digging you on some level, at least I'd like to think so. But I think a woman's health (and, heh) reproductive capacity does matter to me. Like if she looks sickly, she's going to not be appealing to me. The idea that birth control pills can twist a woman's attraction response is kind of freaky.

Quick, Dirty, Saucy

I'm making spaghetti tonight, one of my savory sauces, in this case, a marinara with a Southern Italian kick to it. Was just kind of tossing in various ingredients I had on hand, to good effect. I'd post what I did here, but do I really want one of my yummy pasta sauces getting out on the Internet, for just anybody to enjoy? I don't know....

The one thing I'm lamenting is the absence of any Italian bread on hand. I'll have to make do with that I have. But the sauce is good. I'd call this one my Quick and Dirty Sauce -- Spaghetti Che Calci Nel Culo.

Blast from the past....