The Pros and Cons of Conference Sex

I seem to have a reputation among my friends for picking people up at every conference I attend. It's now a running joke. Nobody asks me how my paper went. They usually look and me with a smirk and say "So?" And I usually have a story to tell.

When flings are flings, the stories are usually not hard to tell. When an affair becomes more complicated or something more important seems to be happening, it's hard to describe to other people--hard to describe without sounding like a Hallmark greeting card, that is. Emotional drama has a Freudian feel about it, whereas social drama seems to exude allure: it appeals to people's sense of prurience and their desire to know the sordid details of other people's live. And we can play to that in telling our stories.

But it's this other thing that stymies me. I can tell you that I met an amazing woman at The Stupids. I could describe the intensity with overused words and cliches. I could talk about sarcasm as the "obstacle" to the happy ending of a romantic comedy that spanned only two days. But somehow, I think, this really means something only to people whom it's about. And even then it's incomplete, barely a gesture. I guess it's just hard to write about desire in the first-person singular. All this is just to say that something very peculiar is happening with this woman and I don't know what the narrative arc is yet. So the story does not yet make sense as a story.

The one thing that does seem to be "the story of my life," though is that my desires seem always to be played out over long distances and often via technology. I've considered this in other blog entries, but I wonder what it's really about. But more to the point, I wonder how one does it well. I'm especially concerned with balance: with balancing the life of the here and now with the emotional life of the elsewhere; with balancing the non-computer here and now with the virtual here and now. Past experiences are good teachers and I guess short of predicting the end of a story too far in advance, the best one can do is occupy the space of "unknowing" or "not-yet-knowing" without being utterly consumed by the lack of knowledge itself.

That, I suspect, is my lifelong project.

Posted by Bush Whacker at June 8, 2003 10:41 AM