Saturday, May 8, 2010

Being Single

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I. The Allure of Strange Tongues

I used to sleep around with languages.
It was always so exciting at first, learning the irregular verb "to be." But pretty soon, the past imperfect shows up, and I'd lose interest.

I've gone to bed with Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. Played doctor with Danish; did it in a car with Turkish; flirted with Finnish *.
I got pretty serious for a while with French and Latin. I can enquire after your aunt's current (but not past or future) health in my high school French; and, with a BA minor in Latin, I can still recognize Latin phrases in books by former British public schoolboys.
But I never rented the U-Haul for any of these languages.

It was when I was taking community-college Arabic seven years ago that I realized the thrill was gone. Even with its sexy lingerie of an alphabet and the possibility of learning to say, "I want to buy a one-eyed camel," the new language just didn't turn me on. I didn't even finish the eight-week course.

Around that time, I realized I felt the same about dating.
When I was newly single, it was fun to go on dates. Men were a new language to me (my ex of thirteen years was a woman). Each one came with a whole new syntax. Or so it seemed.
But of course, there are only so many ways a language can be structured, and after a while they start to repeat.

I knew I had lost interest when a friend offered to set me up on a blind date and my spontaneous response was, "Do I have to?" It just seemed like work.

Of course, this all reveals way more about me than it does about love or linguistics.
The way I most enjoy other people is through words--in print or over coffee. Someone once said that my idea of going to bed with someone is lying down to talk.

II. Living Friction-Free

Living alone, as I have for twelve years now, fulfills my childhood wish for getting to do what I want, when I want.

The past couple days that's meant watching Henry Rollins on youTube till past one a.m. and then rolling out of bed the next morning to check on the British elections (all the Onion-worthy drama of the U.S. 2000 elections but--to me, at this remove--less of a clear and present danger).

I worry sometimes that without checks and balances forced upon my ego, in the form of another person I can't escape, I will become a dreadful narcissist.
That's the received wisdom, anyway; but I wonder if some people are better suited to loving other people at a distance and if I might be one of them.

I was relieved the other day when a friend told me I was thoughtful to other people. I worry about self-delusion, but I think I am nicer and more generous living alone. I suppose that's the equivalent of saying you love dogs or cats better than people: no credit to you--that's the easy choice.

(Though I can't say I've noticed people who've raised families being any more compassionate toward others than I am. Some are downright xenophobic and way more oriented toward "me and mine," in a scary tribal sense.)

III. Heat-Seaking Behavior at the Dentist

What is left deprived, however, is my body. Not of sex so much as of touch.
I was aware of this yesterday, as I lay prone in the dentist's chair. The dental hygienist had scooted in close on her wheely stool and was cleaning my teeth while telling me about her weekend plans at her cabin. (It's fishing season in Minnesota.)
Through the sensations of her scraping scale off the inside of my bottom front teeth (imagine cracking limestone off the White Cliffs of Dover), I registered the sensation of her thigh leaning against me.

My sense of personal space is average for Americans (between 1.5-4 feet, or 0.5-1.3 meters), and my conscious impulse was to shift slightly--in that minimal way you move when there are sharp implements in your mouth--so that we weren't touching.
But my body signaled, "Incoming body warmth--DO NOT MOVE!"
So I didn't move.

IV. What to Wear to Catch a Snark?

So, ...I don't know. Nothing's free.
The idea of being single for the rest of my life leaves me content, mostly.
It seems like a prerequisite for doing good work.
I'm such a late bloomer, but I feel I might could maybe do some good work as a writer in the future. That feels like hunting a snark, however--something that likely will "softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again."

[Illustration by Henry Holiday: "Fit the Eighth: The Vanishing," from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark]

Is it easier to catch a snark if you're alone?
I really don't know.
But I usually agree with Thoreau (one of nature's singles?), who warned against enterprises that require buying new clothes.
And after years of working at home and not dating, my clothes are
...well, here, let me show you my elbow.
So, not very date-ready.

And as for languages, really, my native one is enough of a challenge. English is morphing every day. If I want a hit of new vocabulary and syntax, I just have to hop over to ontd_st.

My favorite new (to me) netspeak is "tl;dr".
It means "too long, didn't read."
__________________
* "PieniƤ ovat silakat joulukaloiksi."
Finnish for "Herring are rather small for Christmas dinner."

7 comments:

ArtSparker said...

Heh, I think about all or most of This Stuff. Henry Holiday is wonderful - I can't believe I've never heard of him.

I hate the HSP label - but I find that input becomes so amplified for me - being around another person all the time seems like it would be an unmanageable amount of stimulus, or that one would have to become less responsive overall. I don't know that being in relationship mostly to art is better or worse on any scale than being in relationship mostly to another person.

Fresca said...

Good Saturday, Sparky!

"HSP"--I didn't know that term.
I think Thoreau was probably a Highly Sensitive Person.
(I'm more of a brute, myself...)

I love what you say:
"I don't know that being in relationship mostly to art is better or worse on any scale than being in relationship mostly to another person."
Right. Me neither.

Marz said...

Freskuh: hai. *spots you across the way in para-verse. waves.*

Your affair with foreign languages outlasted mine by a long shot.
In Japan, there was much fumbling and striving and stuttering to be half-understood. I've never gotten over the thrill of being able to tango with words again. English is my bread of choice; I delight in the familiarity.

Yeah - yep yep yep to everything you said about love. From a formerly aspiring Hermit: I agree. The thought of spending the rest of my life with anyone, no matter how strongly I love them, makes me restless. Maybe this has something to do with wanting being its own fulfillment, totally separate from having.
I liked what Art said about "too much stimulus". This can be true with Touch, too. I don't like hugs - I'd prefer a hand on my forearm, or a simple awareness of the dentist's thigh; there's the ecstasy; Imagination leads Almost into a garden.
(Also, this is why the Ontological Argument doesn't work for me: things are not always better in reality than they are in the mind.)

Thanks for sharing. I enjoy these 'space (inner)' posts.

CAPTCHA: sookies - that's just plain fun.

momo said...

heh heh! ontd can be fun. how about 'GQMF' and 'adorkable'?

I highly recommend a book by a distant acquaintance called Party of One: A Loner's Manifesto. It is about people (and I count myself as one of them) who do not always want to be social. http://www.annelirufus.com/partyofone/

Fresca said...

Dear Margaret:
On the other side of the glass that divides our universes, as you know but I just realized, your name spells TERAGRAM.

I think it must be so odd not to speak as/write in your everyday language the language you heard in the very womb. (Makes Nabokov even more amazing.)

Heh. I'd forgotten, but I thought that too about the Ont Arg--why is existence a higher good?

MOMO: Yes, many good neologisms on the nets, eh?

Thanks for the book recommendation.
Being social or not is different from being single or not, but, yeah, related.

Jennifer said...

Fresca, someone like you should never, in any sense, encounter the term tl;dr. It's the antithesis of Frescaness, I tell you. :)

Also, WV gives me "fanibile," which is just too good. Is that...like, being fannable, able to be a fan of? Or is it some form of fannish vitriol, fan bile? So many possibilities...

Fresca said...

Thanks, Jen!

I figure people who are prone to tl;dr (as a verb) are probably not likely to read my blog at all.

An acquaintance tells me she "skims" my posts, and I sort of wonder why she even bothers. But I suppose that's normal Internet reading style.
(And I do try to put pictures in to break up the text, since I like them too.)