Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Love
What’s in a word?
It’s Smart Bitches Day today. For your SBD, I’d like you to consider the English language’s second-most mercurial word (next to fuck), love. (more…)
First love, forever love
Everyone knows Jewish men make the best lovers, but have you ever wondered why?
Listen to the hand
On average, an American man will fall in love with 8.6 women before he meets the one who will love him back*. We don’t know the comparable statistic for women, since the male sociologist conducting the study fell in love with his statistician, who spurned his advances and left the collaboration before they could wrap up the work. Oh, well.
Today’s Smart Bitches Day post has a couple of inspirations. First, Deloney got me thinking about my time in college volunteering at Napa State Mental Hospital, where every last patient suffered from unrequited love (at least, those who weren’t able to slip the watch of the psych techs and duck out into the shrubbery for a bit of “mush therapy”).
The second inspiration came last night, when Karen and I were watching a bit of Four Weddings and a Funeral. You’ll remember that Hugh Grant has a thing for Andie McDowell, and that a month before her marriage to some git in a kilt he stammers out in oh-so-cute fashion “I love you,” which she counters with, “Oh, that is so romantic.” And you’ll remember how, at the wedding, Grant’s ex-wife confesses that she still loves him. Hmm. All of this unrequited love. (more…)
The things we do for love
How far will we go for love?
I think some guys are willing to work a lot harder for it than others. In particular, if you look like this
(that was for you, bam) you’re likely to expend far less time and effort snagging this
than if you look like this
.Before you howl, “But Rick Moranis is cuuuute!” let me say: I’m one hell of a lot cuter than Rick Moranis, and I’ve had two, count ’em two women in my life (no, I’m not counting my mom), and it hasn’t been for lack of trying.
Matter of fact, I got pretty good at trying.
I’ve already written ad nauseum about my courtship with Karen. Nuff said already. Thinking about today’s theme, it occurred to me that I haven’t told you much about my first girlfriend, GFv1.0*.
GFv1.0 never put me through much grief, not in our courtship phase. No, she let her parents do it for her. They liked having me over for dinner for a game I liked to call, “Torment the Howlie.” Or was it, Torment the Gwailo? Can’t remember what slang we used for whitey in those days. Anyway, GF’s mom would feed me yummy stuff like fish stomach. Grinning madly, she’d say, “SO? How do you like?” Then GF’s dad would make me drink Chinese tea that smelled like tobacco and kept me up for days.
I realize now they were being nice, accepting me into the fold. GFv1.0 has since told me that they actually really liked me. But at the time, I saw it all as an awful test.
Black mushroom: that’s the one I failed.
GFv1.0 couldn’t understand why I didn’t like black mushroom. It upset her. It was worse than, say, hating chocolate. Oh, how we fought over black mushroom. Nowadays, of course, I crave the stuff.
Would you believe that for love of GFv1.0, I once watched a chick flick from the first row of the movie theater and then raved about it afterwards? Well, of course I did. I’ll bet lots of high school guys do that, especially those of us who hung out at the Rick Moranis end of the gene pool.
We saw The Turning Point, with Shirley MacLaine (*shiver*), Anne Bancroft, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. But I didn’t care that I was watching a chick flick and getting a whopping case of neck strain. Why? I’ll tell you why.
We’d had dinner at a nearby pizza parlor, and then we decided to fit in some necking time before the movie. This was mighty early in the relationship; open-mouth kissing resembled Mr. and Ms. Pac Man trying to eat each other’s faces. It was a messy affair, with much gnashing of teeth and bruising of lips, because, you know, they just don’t teach this stuff in school.
At one point, she reached over and patted the lump in my crotch and said, “What is that thing?”
That’s how I managed to get through The Turning Point with a grin plastered all over my face. Granted, there were Levis in the way, but she’d actually touched it.
Something just occurred to me. Given the fact that Mikhail Baryshnikov spends most of that movie in tights, I don’t think GFv1.0 would have asked me that question after the movie.
D.
*Who shall remain nameless. There’s a distant chance she may visit the blog one day. If so, my only chance of survival will be the fact that I haven’t spread her name to hell and back.
SF love triangles
Smart Bitch Sarah wrote a cool post on love triangles today. I encourage you all to read about the misadventures of Aragorn/Arwen/Eowyn, Archie/Veronica/Jughead, and a bunch of others.
I can’t let a good joke drop, not when it has much more cherry mileage. Here, then, are a few additional triangles for your discussion, from a world closer to home.
Captain Kirk/Mr. Spock/Nurse Chapel
Sure, Christine digs the Vulcan cervical neck pinch, but ol’ J. Tiberius has that power thing going for him. How frustrating it must have been for Christine to watch Kirk cavort with one snatch-o’-the-week after another; I’ll bet she and Yeoman Rand used to have whopping grand bitch sessions over a couple pints of Romulan ale, ending in declarations of, “MEN! What do we need them for, anyway? Come on, Christine, it may not be a Vulcan pinch, but I have fingers, too, and I know how to use them.”
But Kirk’s cavortings were all for cover. The Federation’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy doesn’t cover Starship Captains — or first officers — openly out of the transporter. What was it Spock said to Kirk on the point of death? “You are, and always have been, my special friend.”
Deckard/Rachael/Pris (Blade Runner)
I know what you’re thinking: he’s artificially manufacturing a triangle which did not exist in the movie — for comic effect! But you’re wrong. When Deckard (Harrison Ford) meets up with Pris (Daryl Hannah), the sparks fly right from the get-go. So she beats the crap out of him. So what? Is it so wrong for a woman to be assertive? She’s a replicant. She was programmed to be assertive. Do you get it, yet? Kicking Deckard in the nads is the only way she has of showing her love.
The only reason she keeps on clobbering him is that Deckard is too dense to figure things out. Remember when she jumps him and rides him piggy-back? I’ll bet you thought she wanted to break his neck between her creamy thighs. But, actually, all she wanted was for him to turn around. Stupid human.
As for Rachael: egads, how boring. I’ll bet she cries after sex. I’ll bet she cries during sex.
Luke/Han Solo/Princess Leia Organa
I know Leia and Luke are twin siblings, but anyone who has seen Joe Dirt can tell you this just heightens the sexual tension. Twincest is hot these days. So toss that objection right out the X-wing window, ‘kay?
It makes more sense to worry about the Luke/Han Solo dynamic, particularly given the fact that Chewbacca is willing to couple with anything that growls. (Wookies as a rule are orally obsessed; they don’t call him Chewie for nothing. Watch those incisors!) But let’s assume for the sake of argument that carnal hijinks aboard the Millennium Falcon were of the sort manly men get up to when there are no available vaginas. You know, the same sort of thing T. E. Lawrence got up to with those swarthy Arabian boys.
After all, we’re talking love triangles here, not circle jerks.
That said, I’d have to side with Han-Leia, just as Lucas did. In 1977, Harrison Ford was a hottie, and Leia would qualify for that adjective, too, if only she’d unleash her hair from those sadistic buns. Luke had all the sex appeal of a human Jar Jar Binks. And besides, his true attentions were elsewhere.
I can see it now, a la Joe Dirt:
“Luke, I am your father.”
“Say it again!”
“I’m your father.”
“Say it!”
“I’m your father. I’m your father.”
Oh, yeah.
D.
Checking out the fruit
This is it, our 21st anniversary. After today, you won’t have to listen to another maudlin rant for, oh, another 360 days or so.
Where we left it: quite ignoring The Rules*, I’d chosen something threatening for our first date — dinner at my apartment the following Saturday night.
I felt pretty good about this date. Karen, I found out much later, was far more cautious. “I still needed to check out the fruit,” she said. I didn’t need to check. First date, courting, the sex thing, meet-her-parents, meet-MY-parents: technicalities. This relationship was inevitable.
That Saturday, I blew off studying and spent the whole day washing clothes, grocery shopping, and cooking. My place northwest of the Berkeley campus put me within three blocks of a bakery, three grocery stores, a produce market, a wine shop, a cheese shop, and a fish market. Only the best for this meal.
The menu: salad, sourdough bread, seafood divan, a Dutcher Creek Fume Blanc 1978, and chocolate mousse for dessert. I didn’t finish cooking until 8:30. My roommates were in and out; Roger came by to haze Karen mercilessly. Having just had his heart ripped out by a feminist (who, in retrospect, was a far nicer person than Roger), he had to make sure I wasn’t falling into the same trap. Karen, I’m sure, will recall that I took part in this hazing ritual (which involved the infamous fish joke) but she’s just plain WRONG. Roger did it. Roger.
A bit later that evening, my other roommate Russ came by to snag two helpings of chocolate mousse and do the dishes. Russ was always doing the dishes whether he’d dirtied them or not, because he figured Roger and I were too ignorant to use hot soap and water. And, you know, it bothered him.
Eventually, they all left us alone, and Karen and I spent the rest of the evening up in my room not having sex. We talked until 2AM. Actually, I think I talked until 2AM. I violated one of the most important Guy Rules, violated it the way an Atkins failure violates a Krispy Kreme.
Don’t tell her jack about yourself, because whatever she imagines about you is far superior to the Truth.
If I failed to reveal all my secrets that night, I made up for it in our many late-night talks in the coming weeks. Who knows; maybe it was the right thing to do. She was checking out the fruit, after all, and I’d given her plenty to squeeze and sniff.
I walked her home. At the door, we kissed a few times, and I said, “Well, I think we’re pretty compatible. What do you think?” She agreed.
In the boy-meets-girl story, you don’t expect smooth sailing. You’d be damned bored if Adam Sandler didn’t lose Drew Barrymore at least once before the end of the movie. You mean Karen didn’t have cold feet, not even once? You mean neither of you went running back to your ex for one last fling, to the horror of the other, followed by a tearful reunion and the confession, I never realized until now how much you meant to me? Nope. Sorry. This relationship was like going down a slide on waxpaper.
Three nights later, I was trying to figure out how to invite myself over to Karen’s apartment (for some reason, I’d lost the nerve to just drop in like I used to) when Karen showed up with Kira. They hijacked me. Karen, it transpired, still wanted to check the fruit, and Kira was along as an independent grocery inspector. I grabbed my books, intending to study later (har-har), and the three of us took a lunatic trip through Co-Op. Not long after, Karen and I ended up in her room.
She put Ravel’s Bolero on the stereo and we both thought of Allegro non troppo before we thought of Blake Edward’s 10. One thing led to another, although it didn’t lead to much more than — hey kids! Remember this word? Necking. And, once again, we spent a hell of a long time talking.
Two weeks of talkin’ and neckin’ later, we finally got around to checking out each other’s fruit for realsies. Karen asked me afterwards, “So. Feeling the thrill of conquest?”
“I thought it was all pretty mutual –”
“Conquest on both sides?”
“I think it was all decided two weeks ago,” I said. “That’s when the ‘conquest’ was, if there ever was one.” And she agreed.
Hey, we were a couple of over-educated science geeks who thought we could control everything with our brains. To some extent we were right. We had some stressful months ahead of us — Berkeley College of Chemistry was never what you’d call easy, and the elephant in the room was the question, Where will Doug be nine months from now? I hadn’t been accepted to med school yet (hadn’t even interviewed), and Karen still had a year left at Berkeley. But Fate gave us a cakewalk. Stanford accepted me into their medical school. One year later, they accepted Karen into their graduate program in Chemical Physics. In our year apart, we were never more than 60 miles away from one another; that’s a long distance relationship even we could manage.
Yeah, Fate gave us a cakewalk, at least until She decided to take a fat crap on Karen’s head in late ’83. Our first seven years of marriage were pretty rough, thanks to Karen’s multiple sclerosis. But the fact we’ve made it to 21 years ought to tell you something.
I love you, Karen. Glad you liked the fruit.
D.
*The as-yet-unpublished Guy Rules. More on this some other day.
Smorgasbord
My friend Stan, bless his heart, wanted to find me a girlfriend. Guess he’d finally gotten fed up with my two-year-long depression following my breakup with GF v1.0. A week or two before winter break, he hosted a dinner party and invited me, Karen, Suzie, and their roommate Kira.
At this point in history, Karen had broken up with BF v1.0, landing her in fresh rebound territory. Stan figured this put her off limits, which left Suzie and Kira, but Kira could serve High Tea on my head (she’s that tall), so that left Suzie.
We played monopoly and poker after dinner. I glistened like a coked-up Robin Williams and Karen was a whip-crack herself, witty and intelligent. Suzie was Suzie (cute and bubbly) and Kira was funny as hell, but Karen had most of my interest. In my anemic language of the time — what I told Stan, and soon after, what I told Karen — I thought she and I were on the same wavelength. That we were psychic twins. Amazing thing is, this didn’t scare her off.
I’ll skip most of winter break. I had a disastrous reunion with GF v1.0. You’d think after two years I could manage a let’s-be-friends scene, which was all I wanted*, but I didn’t give sufficient credit to my capacity for sheer unmitigated assholishness.
Winter quarter: Karen and I had one class together, Physical Chemistry Lab. She sat with Kira (we were all Chemistry or Chemical Engineering majors), I sat by myself. We had a senile instructor, Professor O’Konski, who provided endless jeering entertainment. Once, for example, he drew a stick figure of two-legged creatures and four-legged creatures (I think this was meant to demonstrate some subtle point regarding reaction kinetics) and said, “Here are the cowboys, riding on their cows.” I’m not kidding.
I’d have had more stories from that man, save for the fact my attention was riveted not on him but on Karen. Specifically, on trying to work up the nerve to ask her out. My tongue would not work. I had no trouble calling her on the phone, nor had I any qualms about dropping in at her apartment unannounced. I found ways of getting us together, but not in a manner that would be confused with a date. No, when it came to asking her out, I was verklempt**.
At the beginning of class one day, I passed her a note:
“This is a gimpish way to go about it but what the hell. Would you want to go out with me?”
I’d hoped she would pass the note back with a “Sure!” but no such luck. She made me wait until after class. Then she cornered me in lab, with Kira standing over her shoulder as bouncer-on-call.
“Are you going to explain this note to me?” she said. “What’s a gimpish thing to do?”
I hooked a couple of fingers around her arm and dragged her away from Kira.
“Will you go out with me?” I half-whispered.
“Elaborate!”
“Huh?”
“When? What? Where?”
But I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I mean, jeez, did I have to have everything planned? So I invited her over for dinner the following Saturday night. I gave her my address. As she walked back to her lab station, she called after me: “Jeez, some people are shy.”
Friday night, Kira and Stan walked over to my apartment in the rain. “Kira wants to see your apartment,” Stan said, but I think actually Kira wanted to check me out a bit closer. She borrowed a few books from my bookshelf, undoubtedly a ruse to see which books I had on my shelf. Fortunately, my 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, and Autopsy, Volume 3 were safely tucked away. And, fortunately, the half-naked Billy Idol poster belonged to my roommate Russ, not me.
Following a detour to Mama’s BBQ for Stan, the three of us returned to Kira’s apartment. Karen was there. We all played cards until 1 AM. That evening, the feeling returned — what I called kismet yesterday. A sense of inevitability.
On Sex and the City, the women hump their beaus like brain-lesioned rabbits and date for months before the subject of marriage ever comes up. Yet here I was, thinking about the future, the far future, and we hadn’t even dated yet. Sure, Sex and the City is a 21st century phenom, while all this stuff with Karen, that was in the OLD days — the 80s! Did people even have sex back then?
D.
*And isn’t that dishonest as hell.
**Fake American Yiddish, courtesy of SNL: overcome with emotion.
Some people have decided to cast their BlogHop votes according to their honest opinion. This misguided policy has shunted Shatter off the first page of their ‘Best’ list. Take a look at that list and ask yourself: does Whurdsderodan really deserve such status? Or Coffee Achiever? Or Much Ado About Me? It’s up to you, my non-voting lurkers, to boot yours truly back into the stratosphere. CLICK ON THE DARK GREEN SMILEY FACE (just check out the right-hand margin . . . scroll up a bit . . . there.) And, while you’re at it, hop on over to Bare Rump’s Diary and do the same for her. You wouldn’t believe how many arachnophobes are bringin’ the old girl down.
21st Anniversary: T minus 3 days
Karen and I met during my last year at Berkeley. I had recently changed my mind about my future. All of those pre-meds I had despised for the last three years — well, I still despised them, but I decided maybe they knew something I didn’t know. Mind you, I had zero interest in patient care, but that (my counselor told me) wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. There was this new creature, see. All the rage at places like Hahvahd or Stanford. They called ’em MD-PhDs. I’d get to live in a lab like a PhD (something I wanted at the time) but I’d get paid like an MD, and NIH would rain grants down upon me, a veritable golden shower . . .
Anyway, this change in direction meant I had to take a hard look at my appearance on paper. The one thing I lacked was research experience. And so, in Fall Quarter of my senior year, I cast around looking for a lab, and soon found myself with Professor Sung-Hou Kim.
I was years-young and world-stupid enough to get deliriously excited over the prospect of twenty hours work per week with no pay, and in that mood I first laid eyes on Karen. I left Melvin Calvin Lab and skipped over to Hildebrand Library. (I did a lot of skipping in those days, skipping and moping. A sure target for the Moonies.) I had to tell someone of my stunning good fortune. I ran over to a table where my friend Stan sat with two girls I didn’t recognize. I began to effuse, but Stan would have none of it.
“What?” I said. “Are you still mad at me?”
He was mad about something, and it was probably me. He’d dropped in on me at my apartment earlier that week, unexpected, and I hadn’t been too welcoming.
“Should I be mad at him?” he asked Karen and Suzie. They both kept quiet. You couldn’t really answer a question like that.
Later, he told me that Karen and Suzie were roommates, and I could take my pick. Later still, he found out that Karen had a boyfriend and retracted his offer. (Stan was like that back then. Different.)
This bummed me out. He’d hyped her to me — told me how smart she was, how she took math classes for fun. (Karen denies this. She says all of those math classes had a purpose.) It didn’t take much hype to keep me interested.
It wasn’t love at first sight. It wasn’t even lust at first sight. No, what I felt was far more ominous.
Kismet.
D.
That honeymoon glow
Early in the 1989 flick Sea of Love, Al Pacino’s character, a cop, indulges in a bit of thinking-out-loud with his partner (John Goodman). Pacino paints the picture of a first date for Goodman. Guy wines and dines the girl, gets her back to his apartment, does the wonder of me routine —
The wonder of me. When Karen and I first saw Sea of Love, that phrase jolted us out of our grad school-numbed complacency. For in those words, she saw me, and I saw myself. Yes, I had done this to Karen on our first date. Oh how I did it to her on our first date.
Hose down your minds, please. “Wonder of m”e refers to that state of being ON. You’re trotting out all your best stories. You’ve cranked your wit to the whip-cracking-snapping point. Baby, your cortex had better glisten, especially since the gal you’re dating takes Complex Analysis for fun (that’s mathematics, folks, not Freud).
It never lasts. Eventually, someone (me) develops a cortical flat tire, and some moronic, indefensible opinion slips the lips. You hope this happens after she’s fallen in love with you.
And it gets worse. One day, you realize you’ve run out of shtick. You have no more stories to tell, and before long you find yourself breaking up lengthy silent pauses at restaurants with, “Isn’t it nice that we can just be together and not have to say anything to one another?” And she says, “Yes, it really is,” but you know she’s thinking, Christ, what happened to him?
That’s when you start making shit up. That is the birth of fiction.
Well folks, I’m here to tell you, we’re still dating, and I haven’t run out of shtick yet.
Tomorrow: my close brush with man-titties.
D.
Born-again virgins and other sex dwarves
Isn’t it nice
Sugar and spice
Luring disco dollies
To a life of vice
Listening to Soft Cell’s Sex Dwarf today, my spaghetti bowl brain meandered over to John Mason, wannabe groom to runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks. Mason, you’ll recall, declared himself a born-again virgin. Stop snickering. I’ve heard all the jokes, and none of ’em were very funny. Rather than ridicule the guy, I began to wonder what would drive Mason to take a vow of chastity, and to call himself a “born-again virgin.” Ignore for the moment the obvious explanation (he’s a newbie born-again Christian, and thinks “born-again” is a way cool adjective), and consider the possibility that maybe he really, truly wants to be a virgin again.
And now, ask yourself this question: if you could have it all back in a Samantha Stevens nose-twitch, would you take the offer? Would you recapture your lost innocence?
All of her lovers
All talk of her notes
And the flowers
That they never sent
And wasn’t she easy
And isn’t she
Pretty in pink
The one who insists
He was first in the line
Is the last to
Remember her name
There’s a bit in The Rocky Horror Picture Show where Frank-N-Furter sings, “I want to come again,” and the audience responds, “So does Brad!” The joke being that Frank-N-Furter has just deflowered not only Janet (Susan Sarandon) but also her beau, Brad (Barry Bostwick), and Brad isn’t complaining. Rocky Horror delights in the loss of innocence, and it’s not alone. Think of The Graduate, Summer of ’42, Dangerous Liaisons, and, for you youngsters, American Pie. Here in America, anyway, we really seem to love cherry-popping.
But it’s a love-hate relationship. Apparently, we draw the line at single-digit-age homosexual pedophilia; Fox News convicted Jackson even after he’d been acquitted, and that seemed to be the mob’s reaction, too. Only the cognoscenti — like author-lawyer Andrew Vacchs — seemed unsurprised by the acquittal.
and you shouldn’t have to pay for your love
with your bones and your flesh…
Loss of innocence isn’t necessarily sexual. When Jackson’s “little friends” think back to their time at Neverland, what will sting the most — memories of undercover cuddles (at least), or of their parents, who put them in that position (and for what?)
Deflowering is an inadequate metaphor for loss of virginity, which is itself an inadequate metaphor for the loss of innocence. This has nothing to do with sex. It has everything to do with the sudden ejection from childhood’s illusory sense of security.
Abuse victims lose it in one acid instant. The rest of us lose it by degrees. For me, two moments stand out above all others. The first occurred soon after my high school girlfriend and I broke up. We’d only been together for three years, but at 19, that seemed like forever. There came an evening when we finally said goodbye to one another for good. For keeps. We wouldn’t see each other ever again — quite possible, too, since I was going to college 400 miles away. And I felt like a bird kicked from the nest long before he’d been fledged.
The second time: roughly two years later. I’d been with Karen for about a year, and we were sure we’d get married. We had it all planned out — I’d been accepted to med school at Stanford, and she’d been accepted to Stanford’s graduate program in Chemical Physics. We were down in Southern California visiting my parents over Christmas vacation when she got sick. A bit of numbness at her ankle, spreading up her leg. Once she got to the hospital, things happened fast. On the way to X-ray (this was pre-MRI, mind you), a nurse gave her a shot — “To shrink the tumor,” she said. They let me stay with Karen in the hospital room that night, which surprised me since we weren’t married and this hospital had a bunch of nuns running around in it. They treated us both really nice. This was scary.
I think I had my big moment the following night. The tumor scare had passed, but the diagnoses the doctor tossed around weren’t too reassuring (even at that early date, I think MS was fairly high on the list). So we didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed increasingly likely that it would not go away anytime soon.
That night (don’t laugh) it struck me that life wasn’t fair. Yup. That was the first time it hit home. It should have hit home a long time before that (another story for another time), but I guess it never did.
She waves
She buttons your shirt
The traffic
Is waiting outside
She hands you this coat
She gives you her clothes
These cars collide
Maybe we focus on the sexual angle because that, at least, is a pleasant (or at least humorous!) memory. And, maybe for some people, the loss of virginity does equate with the loss of innocence. But for me, and I suspect for most people, loss of innocence meant coming to terms with the real world. I wouldn’t take that innocence back no matter how much you paid me — because it would only mean having to lose it all over again.
John Mason: abstain all you like. You can’t regain your flower. You wouldn’t want to.
D.