OT: I’m not sure exactly what this is and I’m trying to attribute it to misallocated blood sugar

John Bateman (Richard Armitage) and Maya Lahan (Laila Rouass) do something, I’m not sure what, on top of a table, in Spooks 9.3, and Bateman looks at them in Spooks 9.7. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

The first week back is usually hard and for some reason, although the day’s end was in sight from its very beginning, and I kept saying to myself, “only x more hours,” today was especially difficult.

I leave my office and it’s like a very taut tarp strap that originates somewhere in my loins snakes up through my abdomen, catches on the nape of my neck, and eventually hooks up on the frontal lobe, where it digs into my grey matter. Everything the cord moves through starts to itch and ache and bother me. The cord’s already tightly wound, but as I become more conscious of it, it seems to seize up even more, and my shoulders and my jaw clench and my brain starts to ache persistently with a certain kind of need. I know of only three good ways to address this problem quickly, only two of them are availableat present, and only one’s acceptable (except under extreme duress). Unfortunately, the thing that’s acceptable, you can’t do in a coffee shop, which is where my after-work Internet connection is. Well, I suppose I could, but they’d arrest me, and I go on purpose to a shop that attracts a lot of cops so that I’m comfortable staying as late as I need to to write. It occurs to me that I should go home and do it and then come back. But I struggle against giving in to this particular need. I resent being a slave to this feeling — I can’t tell if it’s physical, or emotional, or neurochemical. All I know is what it makes me want to do. Badly. Intensely. Inevitably.

I can’t think. I drive home, apply solution #3, and come back. What (snort) amazing virtue.

When this feeling used to surface, as it did often during my first four years of grad school, I’d come home and assault the physicist boyfriend, who exerted a kind of sexual pull on me that I’ve never experienced before or since, right then and there. I’d burst through the door and if he was home, I’d rip his and my clothes off immediately and simultaneously. At the beginning he thought it neat to be wanted so intensely in this way, to have such an eager girlfriend, but as our relationship wore on, my needs started to make him feel like an object. “This is not about you wanting me, or even about the expression of desire,” he said, not only once, “it’s just about relieving your built-up tension.” Men with emotional scruples. Sigh. I admit that I was 23 and though I understand now what he meant, at the time, I didn’t really get it when he complained that I was using his body to self-gratify. Though he wasn’t my first, he was 30 and had several more intimate relationships behind him than I, so he had better data for comparison. The only thing I really regret any more about that relationship from my perspective now is how (relatively) little tenderness he got from me. I’m not an especially tender lover, but I can see, in retrospect, how much he sought that and how persistently I ignored his needs.

This feeling of coiled up tension desperate for release has reemerged since the move and it’s a bit foreign. I was so exhausted and so down for so long that I just didn’t feel this sort of thing. Now that I’m on the upswing again I’m experiencing sensations I’d forgotten, but it’s a weird thing, because the physicist was right; it’s not the same thing as desire. It’s just some kind of physical or emotional or neurochemical combination that manifests itself as a burning tension and causes me to want to — well, you know.

[This is kind of a building block, so please be patient. I will get there.]

~ by Servetus on January 13, 2012.