Episode 47: Metal in Your Mouth

There are three kinds of mouth-metal I can think of: tongue rings, mouth rings and braces.  After much thought, I think I prefer mouths the way the Lord made them.

I've only ever kissed someone with metal in their mouth once.  It was a tongue ring, kind of a small rod with small orbs on either end.  I recall it was kind of cool, but definitely a novelty.  I have no idea how it felt for her.  But I remember in college seeing girls with tongue rings and thinking, "there is someone with a wild sexual side" and also thinking "there is someone who's not making out with me."  This is why, the one time I got to make out with such a person, I thought "ha ha!  I've achieved this kind of making out!"  But that alone is novelty, not a sustainable basis for making out enjoyment.

The other kinds of metal, lip rings and braces, pose the same level of novelty, but make a mouth look less human and more... gross actually.  There are ways for lip rings to be cute, but I'm afraid they'll get in the way, accidentially hurt you.  And braces are only cute because they suggest innocence and up until you wonder how clean the teeth underneath can be.  And the more you think about why they suggest innocence, the more you get creeped out at yourself.

So ultimately, I'm sad that I haven't experimented here more.  But a cool personality and/or outfit and/or general attractiveness can do a better job than metal to show how wild or innocent you are.


The Panel: Heather, Gun Street Girl, Krazy Kristina

 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player

Episode 46: Lengths to Go

Western narrative fiction follows a standard formula: There is a need.  A character works towards resolving that need.  The need is resolved or the character fails.  This holds people's attention and gives them a payoff in the end.

The problem is that real life doesn't work this way.  Most of our actions do not work towards resolving a well-defined need.  Virginia Woolf observed in Modern Fiction in 1919:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions -- trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there, so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon feeling and not upon conviction, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

But Mrs. Dalloway is not as engaging for most as, say, The 40 Year Old Virgin, because our cultural sensibilities are hard-wired to easily follow these stories.  I believe Claude Levi-Strauss wrote on this subject, but I only know it from reading Stephen Booker.  Anyway, in order to enjoy a story, we need to in some way identify with a protagonist (there are exceptions, I know, but generally this is the case).  And sometimes life really does have well defined goals that we set out to achieve.  And some of those are the lengths we go to hooking up.

Some people say we do some things "just for the story" and I don't think that's by itself a bad thing.  Why not interrupt a humdrum life to have the kind of adventure that movies and books suggest only happen to others?  Why not be a star and be our own protagonist?  Beaudrillard would argue that, by doing so, we are modelling our real lives on fake fantasy (Howard Beale in Network has a great line about how TV watchers have been fooled into think "the tube is real and your own lives are fake").  But as long as we live with these stories and fictions, I believe there is some value in being a part of them, too.

The Panel: Kid Korea, Party Cat, Gun Street Girl, Greg, The Gentleman, Buffy

   Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player

Episode 45: Friends

When I was in college, I thought I had an original idea: everyone should be allowed to make out with whoever they wanted on the condition they also made out with whoever wanted to make out with them.  I thought it was a fair exchange.  It turns out Aristophanes had the same idea in 390 B.C., so it wasn't as original as I thought.


Still, when I suggest this concept to people, it is as unpopular as science in Oklahoma.

The reason is, I think, that there are lines we don't want to cross, even in exchange for some great benefit.  We don't want to kiss people we don't like, maybe because it changes who we are.  By kissing Sally, I become "someone who kisses Sally" or "one of the people who kiss Sally" and that sticks with me.  And maybe I don't want to be one of those people, for whatever reason.

Kissing friends changes the friendship.  It acknowledges a reciprocal sexual dimension to it, and for some people, it's too inaccurate to even pretend or there are insecurities about the degree to which it's really there.  Even though these changes are all in your head, they're part of the kissing experience.  I could advise you to ignore them and indulge, but the weird ephemera around kissing is what makes kissing fun, it's not just the tongue rubbing.  So if it gets too much or too weird, maybe you're better just being friends.

The Panel: Heather, Gun Street Girl

Listen Now:

  Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player

Episode 44: Anticipation

I have a particular expertise in snatching failure from the jaws of victory.  There's no such thing as a sure thing for me because my ability to screw up the solidest of locks is unparalleled by anyone outside of Martha Coakley.

That's why I'm afraid of waiting to kiss someone, because the right moment may be after something messes it all up.  As soon as I see that we both want something, I grab at it because, in every moment we wait, there's a 1 in a 10000 chance I'll make a joke about midgets or that your ex-boyfriend will text you and you'll realize you belong with him or that you'll suddenly become sick.  And 1 in 10000 is a small number, but every second that number multiplies.

But my favorite part of roller coasters is that long climb when you hear the cars clicking against the track as you climb really high, knowing about the exhilarating drop ahead.  And the more I play daredevil, taking my 1 in 10000 shots one after another, the more nervous I become about whether or not this will really happen, the more I can appreciate the moment at the very top: the hand-hold and the eye contact and smile.  The unspoken: hey, we like each other, don't we?  And while lips and tongues can do that, eyes and smiles can do it more softly, and more powerfully.

And just like a first kiss is as exhilarating as a roller coaster drop, your heart really starts racing when the car stops and you just know what's going to happen next.

Feel-good movies end with people having their conflicts resolved and optimistic about the future.  And that moment pre-kiss is the closest I get to that: conflicts resolved, risks cleared and a bright rising sun ahead.


The Panel: Toby, Gun Street Girl, Cate, Cecily

Listen Now:

  Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player