61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Hooksexup's videogame blog: Friedrich Nietzsche, River City Ransom, angry nerds, and the horrors of time. So, you know, business as usual.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Veronica Mars returns (maybe), RuPaul is haunting us (definitely), and the Dexter "Pscyho Therapy" quiz (creepy.)
There are two chairs opposite from the one occupied by my therapist, one directly across, the other slightly off at an angle. With unfailing regularity, I choose the one off to the side it makes the encounter friendlier, I think, as if he and I had struck up conversation at a cocktail party, rather than placed ourselves in opposition across an invisible chessboard. Despite the fertile material this choice could provide any self-respecting analysand, the other chair would have no significance in my life at all, except that one day, at the start of an early morning session, I spied a pair of women's underwear lying at its base. It was a pair of thong underwear, in fact, lavender, and, I was strangely relieved to note, cotton.
"What's that?" I asked my therapist, pointing dramatically at the offending lingerie.
My therapist, a tallish, mild-mannered guy in his forties, peered in its direction, then got up and walked over. It turns out that the only thing worse than spotting a thong in your shrink's office is watching your shrink pick up that thong and examine it in his hand, perplexed. "It's a thong," I finally blurted out, immediately embarrassed, as if I had no business knowing the name of this kind of intimate apparel.
Shrinky, as I call him to my friends, turned so many primary colors in such quick succession I was concerned he might convulse. He struggled to maintain his composure, but failed, throwing his head back and giggling uncontrollably. After a bit of this, he tried to address the situation "It's not . . it's not . . " but then resumed laughing out loud again for almost a full minute, as I sat there sourly, like the only sober girl at a party full of stoners. It's not what you think, was what he had wanted to say. But of course, he thought better of it, afraid of even such a limited statement's power of suggestion.
What did I think? It's probably not what you think.
First, I figured, it must have fallen out of somebody's gym bag yes, this banal rationale from an editor at a sex magazine
Then, I thought, no: he and his girlfriend peeled each other's clothing off in the office last night just as it was getting dark. Deeply enveloped in post-amorous haze, she couldn't be bothered tracking down a mundane scrap of underwear as she redressed dreamily for dinner out. That's it, I thought with conviction and no small amount of envy. That has to be it. Never mind that I don't know whether he's single, married, newly in love or plugging away at the personals.
"It must have fallen out of someone's bag," Shrinky finally got it together to say, looking at me earnestly, coughing, then resuming last week's line of questioning about my high school track anxieties. I left thirty-seven minutes later.
Nobody at work bought the gym bag excuse. And no one thought much of my alternative theory, either. Instead, the anecdote (I couldn't email my friends fast enough) became a kind of Rorschach test for the way people thought about sex. From one thong developed fully formed sexual narratives waiting to spring from their minds.
"Honey, the guy's clearly doing a patient," my friend Steven told me. I had the feeling he thought men who pursued psychiatric degrees did so solely for the purpose of pulling off just such inner-office sexual heists. Lovely and devoted to his own girlfriend, Steven is nonetheless an avowed proponent of socio-biology and frequently reminds his female friends that most men are dogs, genetically programmed to disseminate their seed compulsively like highly efficient farm equipment. His never-failing explanation for any kind of odd behavior I experience at the hands of a man in my life, be it a date, a colleague, or the grocer: "He's probably trying to make it with you." Now Steve seemed truly concerned. "Are you going to keep seeing that guy? I mean, maybe you should report him."
"I believe it came from someone's bag," said my friend Melissa. I was relieved a regular exerciser, Melissa no doubt understood the day-to-day hazards of changing after a workout at the gym. "But I don't think it came out accidentally. I think some female patient of his has a bad case of transference. In other words," she surmised, "it's not what he was trying to tell you . . . it's what she was trying to tell him." This theory is perhaps my least favorite, no doubt because I play no significant part in it. But I wondered what it revealed about Melissa that she herself longs for the love of a father figure? That she worries she comes on too strong to men? That she does come on too strong to men?
At a party later that week, I ran into a friend who had brought along her father, himself a therapist. I think he actually rubbed his chin as he mulled over the various theories. Then he started to chuckle. "Of course," he said, "tee hee, we shouldn't, hoo hoo, forget one other possible scenario . . . " He shook his head and giggled again. His thinking became clear to his daughter. "Dad, she works at a sex magazine," Elaine told him. "You can say the word 'cross-dresser.'"
A friend of mine at work I'll call him Mack, and reveal no other identifying characteristic other than that he writes a popular weekly column about literature's greatest sex scenes had a more subtle interpretation, at least, than Steven. "Let's say it did drop out of someone's gym bag the night before," Mack theorized. "Why didn't he see it on the floor in the morning when he got to work? You know, maybe he somehow wanted you to see it, wanted to provoke you that way. What was he trying to tell you? For all we know, he deliberately put it there for you to see . . . do you get the feeling he's attracted to you?" Mack's analysis, I realized, reflected a nuanced understanding of the conscious and subconscious modes of seduction, in keeping with his own highly complicated relationship to that art. (Ultimately, of course, his thinking boiled down to one thing: "He's probably trying to make it with you.")
I ultimately chose to believe that the underwear had fallen out of someone's gym bag (accidentally or no, it's not my problem). After all, I'd never have conclusive proof of another story, and this one seemed as likely to me as any other, more likely, in fact, given that I both like and trust Shrinky. Besides, if I didn't go with that theory, I'd probably feel compelled to find someone new, requiring weeks of catchup on all my boring issues.
What struck me about my friends' interpretation was the certainty with which they explained their theories everyone was so convinced, convinced, that the sequence of events had played out as they imagined, it was as if they'd already rented and returned the video. In the end, I was persuaded of only one insight: that our assumptions about sex wall up our psyches, preempt new scenarios and run possibility into the ground. But we should be able to see ourselves as the protaganists of more than one sexual narrative if not, we run the risk of making repeat performances in the same sleepy role, be it the naïf, the seductress or the unrequited lover. Therapy might help shake up that storyline. But so can attention to the workings of other peoples' minds. I listened closely, and I found that their narratives helped me reshape my own.
