Episode 34: First Kisses

For most people, youth is a time of watching the world go on around you and knowing you're not a part of it yet.  Young people are eager to act like their parents or like adults in general, to feel like they're grown-ups and matter and not just kids, forced to watch life from the sidelines.

Before your first kiss, you were probably aware of the world of boys and girls and kisses and romance and love, but it was a world of other people.  It was something that would probably involve you in the future, but you weren't sure how exactly.  But until that first kiss, you were just an observer.

What struck me about my first kiss was that it was pretty quick and not nearly as crazy or strange or gross as I expected.  Sure, it baptised me into a world where I was a player in the game of romance, but that realization only hit me in retrospect.  In the moment, I was just caught up in the thrill of a new experience.

My first kiss taught me two things:

1) The significance of most things become apparent only in retrospect and it's better not to dwell on them at the time.  My first kiss was better just experiencing it and being so incredibly happy than it would have been if I spent the time thinking about what it all meant.

2) I never was on the sidelines, it just felt that way because I hadn't been up to bat yet.  Every day you're able to go out and experience the world is a day you are practically commanded by your own mortality to live life to its fullest.  This isn't to say that 6 year olds should go around making out, but every culture has some sort of ceremony where a young person becomes an adult (bar mitzvah, confirmation, weird walkabout where you go into the forest and talk to the tree spirits, etc).  Your first kiss is a reminder that, from here on out, you can't just sit back and wait for life to be handed to you, like your parents packing you lunch boxes.  You have to go out there and experience it yourself.


The Panel: Buffy, Dave Grabiner, Gun Street Girl, Rudy Gilman

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Episode 33: First Dates

First dates are rituals.  We're out with strangers and we don't know them and they don't know us.  We connect by going through mutually understood rituals that we both know and, along the way, we slowly reveal ourselves.

It's not just dates.  When we meet new people, we go through the ritual of "Hi"  "Hello"  "I'm Will"  "I'm Barack"  "It's nice to meet you" etc...

A lot of dates go through the pretense of not acknowledging that a date is a date.  We're meeting for a drink or we're getting dinner.  But saying "Do you want to go on a date with me?" is so up front as to ask someone if they like you before giving them the chance to like you.  So throughout the evening there is an undercurrent of "do they like me?" "are they attracted to me" "is this a date?" as people go through motions, pretending not to like each other.

The kiss is one of the first real moments of a first date.  People often don't kiss unless there is some attraction and it often reveals the difference between someone who is mildly interested, regularly interested and very interested.  It's the beginning of the end of the impersonal ritual and the start of a personal connection in an often isolated world.

The Panel: Buffy, Gun Street Girl, Greg

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Episode 32: Taxicabs

John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you're making other plans.  In an earlier episode, we discussed whether making out is an end unto itself or just a waystation en route to bigger and more sexual things.  I took the opinion that making out is an end unto itself because, if you keep focusing on what happens next, you miss out on all the fun along the way.  At some point, people have to stop and smell the flowers because constantly thinking about tomorrow is an express ticket to your grave.

Time spent in a taxi is often wasted time.  It's time you zone out and wish to be over so you can focus on your destination.  But taxi time is still time you get on Earth, of which there is a finite amount.  Thus, it should count, it should be enjoyed.

If you get into a taxi with a makeout partner, enjoy the taxi makeout.  Don't focus on getting to the apartment or on what's to come.  Enjoy the moment you're in now.  Take in the gritty urban mise-en-scene.  Or take in the middle-of-nowhere rural or suburban mileu through which life takes you.  Live it to the fullest and be grateful for it.  Because that moment, full of pleasure but also anticipation, where you're not standing still but in motion and alive and headed somewhere: that's as good as life gets.

The Panel: Dave Grabiner, Bryce.

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Episode 31: Location

The first several times I watched a dog get walked, I was fascinated by the process wherein the dog sniffs around for the perfect area to relieve himself.  He hunts intently and then, just by these branches over here, determines this is the right spot to pee.  I wished he could articulate what was it about that spot that was any different from the other spots or why it matters at all where he does his business.  But, regardless of the why, I knew that there was some spot that made him comfortable for some reason.

People are the same way.  They sniff around for a grand location where they can make out.  Somewhere romantically lit.  Somewhere that sets the mood.  It's hard to explain what, and when you find it, it's sad not to kiss there.  It's sad to stand before the Eiffel Tower or Rockefeller Center's Skating Rink and not kiss.  But why?  Maybe we'll never know what a dog is thinking, but what makes us care where we do something we often don't even keep our eyes open for?

I posit that what we look for in a kissing location is an escape.  Sometimes we kiss in bathrooms and closets to hide from the world and romantically embrace in private while the world outside carries on.  Sometimes we kiss on scenic overlooks because it's all part of a beautiful fantasy that stands in stark contrast to our dreary lives.  Sometimes we kiss on dancefloors, where we become free of having to talk and be ourselves but just let go and give in to the music, to dance and to each other's tongues.  And sometimes we kiss in easy places like couches or beds because that's where we escape from our quotidien lives anyway when we sleep or relax.

What does it say about the world that we so desperately want to escape it?  I don't believe that the world is a bad place, but I do think it is exhausting.  Perhaps in old age we will become weary of it altogether and welcome the kiss of death, but until then, I think that kisses let us have a small respite from the world so as to give us something to look forward to in our waking lives.  If the best way to unite people is to make up a common enemy, maybe the best way to make our daily lives more interesting is to make an exotic other and to make us wait for it, want it and once in awhile succumb.


The Panel: Dave Grabiner, Bryce, Buffy, Greg

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