imprinting?
back in elementary school, on one sunny summer afternoon, this boy in my class named chad called me his "girlfriend". girlfriend?!?! huh? "well, sure -- you're a girl and you're my friend, right?" swoon!
i remember this moment so vividly. i couldn't have been older than 8 or 9. it was by the slide at the playground where i went to daycare in the summers, a couple of blocks away from where my mom worked. several of my our lady of victories elementary school classmates also spent the summer months there. at snacktime, the daycare people gave us those gross cookies that look like flowers with a hole in the middle that everybody wore as rings (they looked like these, only not so fancy). but having some of my school chums around made it fun. and having chad call me his girlfriend?!?! wow. i mean, chad was way cool. he lived in ocean springs and his uncle played for the los angeles rams!
why am i thinking about this now? my all-time favorite nerdy NPR show is currently on -- "wait wait ... don't tell me", and one of my celebrity crushes is one of the panelists -- mo rocca.
so i was thinking about mo rocca, and i realized that he bears a striking resemblance to another celebrity crush of mine, justin theroux. and then i got to thinking about other celebrity crushes, like mark ruffalo. and then i started thinking about the men i've dated, and almost all of them, and in a broader sense, the vast majority of the men that i've ever been attracted to, are thin, have brown hair, and brown eyes. you know, like chad.
and that got me to a chicken-and-egg type of curiosity... you know, did my pre-pubescent crush on chad become the advent into my preference for dark eyed, dark haired men? or was i already wired to find this attractive and chad was just the earliest manifestion?
um...
...this post is so so so so so so goddamn self-indulgent, not to mention utterly worthless! but at least it gave me the excuse to do internet searches for pictures of my celebrity crushes.
posted by emily @ Saturday, March 25, 2006
3 comments
3 Comments:
mine was marybeth, and while that might have led to my softspot for small girls with golden ringlets (the likes of whom i've never dated, not once, although to be fair post-puberty there are passing few women who fit that description), there's another funnier story.
we became handholding sandbox buddies in first grade. in second grade, a pilot program set up four classes in a different school that had previously held only grades 3-5. marybeth stayed behind at the other school while i went on to the new one.
in 3d grade, however, marybeth reentered the picture at the new school, where our divergent streams rejoined. and once again, to the mockery of a couple of close male friends, for a couple of glorious days i found myself at lunch holding hands with marybeth and walking the perimeter of our school's park at recess.
i don't really remember what happened, although it must have had something to do with her friends staking out the same anti-opposite-sex position that my friends had done (given our age, this is hardly surprising) -- one day, i approached her in a hallway near a staircase (i can still remember it vividly, and have been able to corroborate my memory recently since my brother teaches at that school now and his classroom, last i visited it, was just around the corner from this very spot), and she wouldn't speak to me. as she headed into the stairway in a throng of class-changing children, i persevered, watching her dissent from the high-rails at the landing. she looked up from the first landing as she turned back in my direction to continue downstairs, and called out (in that voice of nightmarish loudness that attends all verbal humiliations of childhood): "You faggot!" to this day, i have no idea why, and i doubt either of us really understood the import of the word; and she and i never spoke again that i recall.
the chicken or egg aspect: was she merely the first woman of many to mistakenly assume i am gay, or was she the cause of the not infrequent misapprehension?
oh honey, it's with nothing but love that i admit to you that your comment made me laugh out loud! and you know i love you dearly, but, well, you can add me to that list of women...
truthfully, i never thought you were gay, but i did wonder when we first became friends if maybe you weren't entirely straight...
xoxoxo
sandy?
hmmmm... is this the point where i remind you of a certain dark spot in my fairly recent dating history where i may have been involved in certain indiscretions with a guy who was sorta-blonde? and we all know what a shitstorm that was. yuck.
i think it's probably for the best that i stick with what i know.
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