I haven't been able to post very much this week. I've been covering a big conference for my day job and have been swamped from the time my alarm sounds until the time I turn the bedside lamp off before collapsing into sleep somewhere after midnight. The world starts to look a lot different when it's dark and you're still doing something work-related, especially when there is a superficial veneer of the social laid on top.
Last night I was having drinks after a long day with a game developer and bloviating in a frazzled rant that evaporated into the air almost as soon as my lips closed around the tail end of my thoughts (Anyone think that's homoerotic?). There were two other couples in the bar, an old man and woman who looked like tourists in loose-fitting variations on beige. Then there was a couple tucked away in the corner who spent the whole two hours I was there making out with one another.
I kept looking at them. Neither person was especially attractive, and their kissing was almost meek. The man was clearly enraptured with the woman. He leaned into her the whole night, while the woman sat back smiling but still leaning away, forcing him to move towards her. She kissed him with her hands on his face, indulging brief moments and then pushing him away. Once or twice an hour they would lose each other in an octopus embrace, mouths straining to open wide, chins undulating around some unseen force passing between them.
I was rating them as I watched them. I was deconstructing the whole thing, analyzing who was doing what and trying to trace what their outward comportments were saying about their feelings. In the middle of a conversation about work, a medium to which I've dedicated a large part of my life's energy, I was perpetually distracted by an insinuation of sex.
In an interview I did a few weeks ago I closed with this question, "At the end of The War Room, James Carville said that next to love, a person's labor is the most valuable thing they have to share in life. Who do you make games for? Do you have an idea of who you're sharing your labor with?"
Sometimes the line between labor and love is vaporous. They are not separate things. So tomorrow it will be a challenge to avoid getting drunk and making lewd passes at colleagues because my sense of the perforation between personal and professional is non-existant. And then one of these nights I may finally have sex in a taxi.
Previous Posts:
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman
Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On
Sex Machine: Monogamy is for Losers
Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl
Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet
Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor
Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch
Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men
Date Machine: Sex in the Office
Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra
Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation
Love Machine: Can You Be Friends With an Ex?
Sex Machine: How Soon, Sex Toy?
Date Night: Kissing in the Rain