Why is Polyglotism an Aphrodisiac?
I haven’t had sex in over a year, and with the number of medications I’m on and my general intellectual obsessions, I’m good at controlling and sublimating my sex drive, or sometimes just ignoring it. I honestly don’t have too much faith in the human species, and since sex (even casual and even with a condom) is the root act that keeps this whole thing going, it also makes it hard to work up much verve for the act.
I’ll still masturbate every once and awhile, but if you told me I had a choice between sleeping with a supermodel or walking my dog in the park while listening to classical music and watching sunlight break through the trees, well, it’s me, the terrier, the chestnuts, and some Glazunov.
Pity me or despise me or whatever, but I’m just being honest.
Anyway, I am not God’s gift to women in the looks department, though I’m not exactly hideous either. This means that, without effort, I probably won’t have to deal with female attention most of the time anyway. Some women are attracted to artists, writers, etc., but I don’t go around advertising my profession, so that’s out. I also don’t look like a writer or a creative type, and look in fact more like maybe an ex-jock who’s let himself go a bit. I look like I sell cars, maybe, which is fine, because I don’t want to look like what I am. My mission, my reason for being, my salvation in writing, has helped me get through horrible times, where I was not only invisible to women but almost a nonentity to myself. If I were to catch my reflection in the mirror during these low times, I might have jumped, startled, only to realize a moment later that Hey, that’s me. I’m still here, and existing. Shit.
Despite my general reclusiveness and my indifference to sex, love, women, humanity, the whole ball of wax, occasionally I must stagger out of my hermitage and do things like buy groceries, which necessitates some nominal contact with the opposite sex.
I walk through the public with figurative blinders on, ignoring hard stares of feminists who maybe hate me for living or maybe the warm smiles of women who are at least willing to recognize me as a fellow human and something perhaps other than a potential rapist. Again, I live a pressure-free life (at least when it comes to sex), so these non-interactions are a cakewalk. If I want to ogle women I’ll go to the strip club (and tip well and not touch them or try to chat them up about their real names). But I haven’t been there in awhile either.
Sometimes, though, because I have a host of medical issues due to some injuries I picked up in the war, it can’t be helped and I have to deal with women, each, in their way, attractive to me.
Occasionally I go to the nail salon here, not because I’m vain or metrosexual or a mafioso, but because, after one extended field problem when I was stationed in Germany, I contracted this weird sort of variation on trench foot which randomly erupts on me from time to time. This massive dry crack appears down the center of my foot, and the Cambodian ladies with their warm porcelain bathes and various salves manage to make the pain go away and the dryness abate.
One of the girls in the salon is very cute, maybe in her early twenties, with a squeaky voice that might be irritating if it was an affectation, but is actually endearing because the voice is hers and part of the totality of her whole character. She has a big ass, strong thighs, flowing brownish-red hair, and warm saucer-shaped eyes.
Yes, she’s cute, and yes, I tip her well, and no I don’t flirt with her, and yes, after our sessions, I usually go home and fantasize about burying my face in her ass and pussy while she deprives me of oxygen with her squirming, bumping, and grinding, in her quest for the ultimate orgasm irrespective of my needs, those needs being sexual as well as the more prosaic need to breathe.
Anyway, one time while I was in the nail salon some months ago, I got a call from my ex-girlfriend on my cellphone while the young Cambodian-American girl was working on my foot. My girlfriend is German, and we met in graduate school, where she was working as a teacher’s assistant, and I was acquiring my MA with a little help from the GI Bill (a lot of guys who were in the Army don’t know that money is available for vets even at the graduate level).
Our relationship was accidental (as are all of my serious relationships), a sort of clash, like two particles randomly bumping into each other and fusing to create a new, more intense entity. I needed help with my German sentence construction, and she was available. She slept over one night and it happened.
The thing about me is that I have very little confidence, “game” or motivation, but once the actual preliminaries, dances, and rituals are out of the way, women get attached to me. I’m not bragging, since skill as a cocksman doesn’t really get you all that far in the real world (maybe in porn), but me and my girlfriend became very tight.
We talked, in German, over the phone, for about an hour, about who had dropped out of the language program, and their reasons for leaving school (professional differences, job offers cropping up elsewhere, pregnancies, and so on). Eventually the call ended, and I told my girl “Auf Wiederhören!”
In German, there is a distinction between how one bids a friend farewell in person, versus over the phone. To use the official, traditional goodbye over the phone would make no sense, as you would literally be saying, “See you again,” to the disembodied voice on the other end. “Auf Wiederhören” is more appropriate, because it deals with the promise of future hearing rather than seeing.
After I hung up (or turned off) my phone after talking with my girlfriend, I looked down at the pretty Cambodian girl who was dealing with my screwed up foot. I rarely looked down during these sessions, because there’s an uncomfortable implied power dynamic that borders on something like psychic fellatio when you look down on someone from a high perch (I hate shoeshine stands for the same reason).
But the sixth sense we all have told me that there was some sort of tension coming from the girl working on my feet, and the fact that she had stopped working also made me curious.
“What language is that?” She asked, smiling, beaming practically. We’d never shared more than a couple perfunctory words before that.
“German,” I said.
She proceeded to unburden herself, talk up a storm about what she was doing at the local university, what her parents thought of her career path, how they were disappointed that her own skills with the Khmer language were deteriorating …
Look. I am not one of those stupid or incredibly dense men who believes that every time a woman is personable to me that she is trying to flirt with me or sleep with me. I’m aware that a lot of women are naturally cold toward men in general, because they understand that even a modicum of kindness will be misread as practically an invitation to start dry-humping the woman’s leg, friction burns and chafing be damned.
Having said that, however, I would also have to be totally blind (rather than just totally indifferent to the corporeal world around me) not to have noticed how the girl’s treatment of me changed not just then and there, but thenceforth and thereafter.
It got to the point where her father (who co-owns the salon with her mother) started to stare daggers at me from behind the newspaper he leafed through while waiting for customers as his daughter worked on my feet, this despite the fact that I never really reciprocated her attempts to talk beyond a couple of grunts and curt answers to whatever question or story was coming my way.
Eventually, I solved the problem of the discomfort I caused for myself (and whatever irritation I caused for the girl’s father) by ceasing to go back to the nail salon. I’ve noticed that if I apply lotion rigorously and routinely to the place on my foot where the large crack usually appears first as a wrinkle in its pre-fissure stage, I can keep the problem under control.
And, if, in my solitude and hermitage, I’m occasionally hit by a wave of horniness, and in my cowardly seclusion I decide to rub one out, her image is still strong enough in my head to run some Khmer Sutra Goddess fantasy through my brain, lost in the strong, tanned, and toned sinews, muscles, and exquisite soft fatness of the sexy little Apsara (goddess of the clouds in Hindu and Buddhist religions), serving her whims in the pagoda of my feverish daydreams.
Still, I wonder why fluency in German, of all languages, would have had that effect on the girl? It’s a well-worn cliché that knowing Romantic languages (especially poetry in these languages) is a tintype Lothario’s go-to ruse (almost as lame as having a cute little dog as an excuse to start a conversation with a girl).
German can be beautiful, but in most mouths it is mostly abrasive, fricative, a floundering of consonants begrudgingly admitting the vowels that flow so freely in Spanish or French. And all the German poetry I know is expressionistic and nightmarish verse about putrescent crypts and angels who land among battlefield revetments, breastworks, and trenches in the Great War, their wings getting soaked by cloacal effluvia of blood and shit emitted by dying soldiers. It’s not first date stuff, and even if someone can’t speak the language, they can get the gist and tone just from the unfolding scansion of the recital of the poem. If you don’t believe me, listen to this reading (without looking at the images) of Georg Trakl’s poem Grodek: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YSz...
And yes there is German Romantic poetry (see a good example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76KGU... ) but it’s not really my area of expertise.
Anyway, to return to my original question, if I had to guess why women are attracted to Polyglotism, I think it has a deep evolutionary basis, probably in proving that one can find a way to navigate among other tribes or groups without immediate recourse to violence. I don’t worship at the feet of the Mahatma (Ghandi told Indians, for instance, to enlist in the English rolls in the Great War, thinking it would hasten Indian independence), but understanding or at least the attempt toward understanding can sometimes temper or obviate violence. I saw this in Iraq and in Germany. American soldiers who spoke fluent Arabic (after studying in Monterey, California) were embraced immediately by some of the LNs (local nationals) and invited to literally break bread with them in their own midday chai tea roundtables.
In Germany, in garrison, I had a high-and-tight military haircut and was obvious a part of George W. Bush’s great imperialist war machine, but I noticed that a lot of the rough edges in various interactions (with everyone from the Polizei to the local kid working the pizza Imbiss) were tempered and smoothed after my German improved at least enough to show that I was trying to learn their language.
And why was I trying? And why am I still practicing, despite the fact that I have no desire to return to Germany, and will probably never talk to my ex again (even though I miss her so bad it hurts)?
Hell, I don’t know why I plod along with my German exercises (or with my writing for that matter), but I do know one reason I don’t do what I do: I’m not trying to get laid. I have my hands, my imagination, and I’ve also acquired a couple of other things I’m not willing to sacrifice in exchange for vagina at this relatively late stage in the game: peace and dignity.
I’ll still masturbate every once and awhile, but if you told me I had a choice between sleeping with a supermodel or walking my dog in the park while listening to classical music and watching sunlight break through the trees, well, it’s me, the terrier, the chestnuts, and some Glazunov.
Pity me or despise me or whatever, but I’m just being honest.
Anyway, I am not God’s gift to women in the looks department, though I’m not exactly hideous either. This means that, without effort, I probably won’t have to deal with female attention most of the time anyway. Some women are attracted to artists, writers, etc., but I don’t go around advertising my profession, so that’s out. I also don’t look like a writer or a creative type, and look in fact more like maybe an ex-jock who’s let himself go a bit. I look like I sell cars, maybe, which is fine, because I don’t want to look like what I am. My mission, my reason for being, my salvation in writing, has helped me get through horrible times, where I was not only invisible to women but almost a nonentity to myself. If I were to catch my reflection in the mirror during these low times, I might have jumped, startled, only to realize a moment later that Hey, that’s me. I’m still here, and existing. Shit.
Despite my general reclusiveness and my indifference to sex, love, women, humanity, the whole ball of wax, occasionally I must stagger out of my hermitage and do things like buy groceries, which necessitates some nominal contact with the opposite sex.
I walk through the public with figurative blinders on, ignoring hard stares of feminists who maybe hate me for living or maybe the warm smiles of women who are at least willing to recognize me as a fellow human and something perhaps other than a potential rapist. Again, I live a pressure-free life (at least when it comes to sex), so these non-interactions are a cakewalk. If I want to ogle women I’ll go to the strip club (and tip well and not touch them or try to chat them up about their real names). But I haven’t been there in awhile either.
Sometimes, though, because I have a host of medical issues due to some injuries I picked up in the war, it can’t be helped and I have to deal with women, each, in their way, attractive to me.
Occasionally I go to the nail salon here, not because I’m vain or metrosexual or a mafioso, but because, after one extended field problem when I was stationed in Germany, I contracted this weird sort of variation on trench foot which randomly erupts on me from time to time. This massive dry crack appears down the center of my foot, and the Cambodian ladies with their warm porcelain bathes and various salves manage to make the pain go away and the dryness abate.
One of the girls in the salon is very cute, maybe in her early twenties, with a squeaky voice that might be irritating if it was an affectation, but is actually endearing because the voice is hers and part of the totality of her whole character. She has a big ass, strong thighs, flowing brownish-red hair, and warm saucer-shaped eyes.
Yes, she’s cute, and yes, I tip her well, and no I don’t flirt with her, and yes, after our sessions, I usually go home and fantasize about burying my face in her ass and pussy while she deprives me of oxygen with her squirming, bumping, and grinding, in her quest for the ultimate orgasm irrespective of my needs, those needs being sexual as well as the more prosaic need to breathe.
Anyway, one time while I was in the nail salon some months ago, I got a call from my ex-girlfriend on my cellphone while the young Cambodian-American girl was working on my foot. My girlfriend is German, and we met in graduate school, where she was working as a teacher’s assistant, and I was acquiring my MA with a little help from the GI Bill (a lot of guys who were in the Army don’t know that money is available for vets even at the graduate level).
Our relationship was accidental (as are all of my serious relationships), a sort of clash, like two particles randomly bumping into each other and fusing to create a new, more intense entity. I needed help with my German sentence construction, and she was available. She slept over one night and it happened.
The thing about me is that I have very little confidence, “game” or motivation, but once the actual preliminaries, dances, and rituals are out of the way, women get attached to me. I’m not bragging, since skill as a cocksman doesn’t really get you all that far in the real world (maybe in porn), but me and my girlfriend became very tight.
We talked, in German, over the phone, for about an hour, about who had dropped out of the language program, and their reasons for leaving school (professional differences, job offers cropping up elsewhere, pregnancies, and so on). Eventually the call ended, and I told my girl “Auf Wiederhören!”
In German, there is a distinction between how one bids a friend farewell in person, versus over the phone. To use the official, traditional goodbye over the phone would make no sense, as you would literally be saying, “See you again,” to the disembodied voice on the other end. “Auf Wiederhören” is more appropriate, because it deals with the promise of future hearing rather than seeing.
After I hung up (or turned off) my phone after talking with my girlfriend, I looked down at the pretty Cambodian girl who was dealing with my screwed up foot. I rarely looked down during these sessions, because there’s an uncomfortable implied power dynamic that borders on something like psychic fellatio when you look down on someone from a high perch (I hate shoeshine stands for the same reason).
But the sixth sense we all have told me that there was some sort of tension coming from the girl working on my feet, and the fact that she had stopped working also made me curious.
“What language is that?” She asked, smiling, beaming practically. We’d never shared more than a couple perfunctory words before that.
“German,” I said.
She proceeded to unburden herself, talk up a storm about what she was doing at the local university, what her parents thought of her career path, how they were disappointed that her own skills with the Khmer language were deteriorating …
Look. I am not one of those stupid or incredibly dense men who believes that every time a woman is personable to me that she is trying to flirt with me or sleep with me. I’m aware that a lot of women are naturally cold toward men in general, because they understand that even a modicum of kindness will be misread as practically an invitation to start dry-humping the woman’s leg, friction burns and chafing be damned.
Having said that, however, I would also have to be totally blind (rather than just totally indifferent to the corporeal world around me) not to have noticed how the girl’s treatment of me changed not just then and there, but thenceforth and thereafter.
It got to the point where her father (who co-owns the salon with her mother) started to stare daggers at me from behind the newspaper he leafed through while waiting for customers as his daughter worked on my feet, this despite the fact that I never really reciprocated her attempts to talk beyond a couple of grunts and curt answers to whatever question or story was coming my way.
Eventually, I solved the problem of the discomfort I caused for myself (and whatever irritation I caused for the girl’s father) by ceasing to go back to the nail salon. I’ve noticed that if I apply lotion rigorously and routinely to the place on my foot where the large crack usually appears first as a wrinkle in its pre-fissure stage, I can keep the problem under control.
And, if, in my solitude and hermitage, I’m occasionally hit by a wave of horniness, and in my cowardly seclusion I decide to rub one out, her image is still strong enough in my head to run some Khmer Sutra Goddess fantasy through my brain, lost in the strong, tanned, and toned sinews, muscles, and exquisite soft fatness of the sexy little Apsara (goddess of the clouds in Hindu and Buddhist religions), serving her whims in the pagoda of my feverish daydreams.
Still, I wonder why fluency in German, of all languages, would have had that effect on the girl? It’s a well-worn cliché that knowing Romantic languages (especially poetry in these languages) is a tintype Lothario’s go-to ruse (almost as lame as having a cute little dog as an excuse to start a conversation with a girl).
German can be beautiful, but in most mouths it is mostly abrasive, fricative, a floundering of consonants begrudgingly admitting the vowels that flow so freely in Spanish or French. And all the German poetry I know is expressionistic and nightmarish verse about putrescent crypts and angels who land among battlefield revetments, breastworks, and trenches in the Great War, their wings getting soaked by cloacal effluvia of blood and shit emitted by dying soldiers. It’s not first date stuff, and even if someone can’t speak the language, they can get the gist and tone just from the unfolding scansion of the recital of the poem. If you don’t believe me, listen to this reading (without looking at the images) of Georg Trakl’s poem Grodek: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YSz...
And yes there is German Romantic poetry (see a good example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76KGU... ) but it’s not really my area of expertise.
Anyway, to return to my original question, if I had to guess why women are attracted to Polyglotism, I think it has a deep evolutionary basis, probably in proving that one can find a way to navigate among other tribes or groups without immediate recourse to violence. I don’t worship at the feet of the Mahatma (Ghandi told Indians, for instance, to enlist in the English rolls in the Great War, thinking it would hasten Indian independence), but understanding or at least the attempt toward understanding can sometimes temper or obviate violence. I saw this in Iraq and in Germany. American soldiers who spoke fluent Arabic (after studying in Monterey, California) were embraced immediately by some of the LNs (local nationals) and invited to literally break bread with them in their own midday chai tea roundtables.
In Germany, in garrison, I had a high-and-tight military haircut and was obvious a part of George W. Bush’s great imperialist war machine, but I noticed that a lot of the rough edges in various interactions (with everyone from the Polizei to the local kid working the pizza Imbiss) were tempered and smoothed after my German improved at least enough to show that I was trying to learn their language.
And why was I trying? And why am I still practicing, despite the fact that I have no desire to return to Germany, and will probably never talk to my ex again (even though I miss her so bad it hurts)?
Hell, I don’t know why I plod along with my German exercises (or with my writing for that matter), but I do know one reason I don’t do what I do: I’m not trying to get laid. I have my hands, my imagination, and I’ve also acquired a couple of other things I’m not willing to sacrifice in exchange for vagina at this relatively late stage in the game: peace and dignity.
No comments have been added yet.
