tuckova: crush as in grapes

so you're nine, and you're visiting your friend, and you're both kissing the picture of david cassidy on her sister's record, which you have borrowed for the purpose of kissing this picture. to be honest you don't get it, but it seems expected, and since she's nice enough to play with you, despite being popular (which you are not), kissing a picture seems a small price.

or age thirteen with another friend after you both have finished singing all your favorite songs into your tickle deodorant, you talk about how much you both love whichever star, which in this memory is paul stanley, the guy from KISS with the star on his right eye. you do not actually know much about paul stanley but having a crush on him seems, again, important. his favorite color, you sigh, is purple, which is also your favorite color, and you love him so much, you were made for loving him, baby.

and this goes on, through junior high and high school, these obsessive crushes that you do not get and yet become increasingly adept at faking, since you are an outstanding liar. the whole thing seems really pointless: what possible purpose does liking someone who does not like you back, who possibly does not know you exist, serve? and then there are practicalities, like they're already married or they're about a thousand years old or whatever.

except now you are thinking about it, that what these crushes did was train girls for the experience of unrequited love. it seems a stretch but you just learned that tickling trains you for combat so that crush on judson scott might have been helpful, if you hadn't been faking it.

if, for example, you had been trained for unrequited love in high school, it might not have messed you up so badly when that one man came to visit later, asked you to marry him, and then called you a week later (when he'd gotten back home) to discuss what to do on his upcoming date with a girl who he said was not as smart as you are but was there, which you were not. again you are fortunately good at faking your feelings, so you gave him some advice. a movie and a sunset, it was, a movie that required some hand-holding and a hill from which you had watched the sunset yourself: it was a great view. you generally try not to think about that phone call. it was, you imagine, what the ninth gate must be for people who had crushes on johnny depp.

and so anyway now you are older and your training in unrequited love has been basically like bloody mel gibson style slaughter when what you have ever wanted is some tickling. and you're noticing that you do better when you don't care what happens. when you like someone without thinking for a minute whether it is practical or feasible or reasonable or even right. and so what you are practicing now, you realize, is crushes. you still can't handle stars, because it's too much like artwork, which you love to admire but do not love to love. but it's the same feeling you observed in your friends those years ago: the desire to know everything. the feeling that every small thing is a window on further fascination. the near-complete detachment from caring whether the object reciprocates. the total disregard for practicality.

this is working pretty well for you. you had some questions this weekend over whether maybe it wasn't a little...skeevy... to objectify people like this. whether perhaps it wouldn't be healthier for you to want a return on your investments. whether it serves any purpose, since it's not like you can retroactively protect your damaged heart. but then you shoved some more wood in the chipper and thought about long fingers and puns and in jokes and how it's not really about you at all, these crushes, but about being a mirror for people who might otherwise be afraid to look at themselves and are therefore missing out on what you can see. it perhaps serves no purpose and it is certainly not practical, but it is, you have to admit, terribly fun.

Comments

I had a huge crush on a coworker a few years back, a totally pointless episode which distracted me not so much from doing my work at all, really, except when I'd run in to him in the hall and say, how's your day, and he'd say something like, good, look, i have ice cream, and then i'd go back to my desk and IM my friends about how i'd just been sexually harassed by my crush. what a hottie. i haven't blushed like that since who knows when.

Posted by: pam | May 02, 2007 at 03:11 AM