Benefits

As I tried to catch my breath between the many woes of Lily Bart and the excruciatingly tight heterochromatin that had wound itself around me, I found myself playing host to a rather perturbed Janice. A Janice who was wringing her hands, and pacing the floor of my room furiously. She'd open her mouth as if to say something, but then stop, and pace some more. After a while, I began to imagine the slender Janice as a sort of pendulum vacillating between a 'yes' and a 'no', and like an overeager 'Jeopardy' contestant, I wanted to know the question! After a while of pacing and fretting, and providing me only half-answers, Janice finally came up with the truth. When the answer given to you is, "Yes, um, NO! Um...yeah...", the question is usually, "Will you have sex with me?" That was what Janice was asked too, as was revealed through a series of 'tasteful' yet plain text messages, by a rather personable gentleman. It's odd, really, constant reader, how nonchalant that conversation was. There was no thunder, no lightning, no whimpering animals, no baleful moon signalling the portentous rape of Virtue! It was all very casual. As I pondered upon Janice's question, I made a rather startling discovery of my own: sex didn't frighten me anymore. I was surprisingly okay with it. I remember how severely I had judged myself at first, I had called myself a number of things from a Perverse Hedonist to a Whore, and then imagined myself as some sort of a failed Samuel Richardson character, someone whose Virtue had just not been Rewarded. Of course, rewards were to be reaped, but these were hardly the spiritual kind! Yet, we are hardly living in a conduct novel from the 1700s!
When I dove into it, I was basically looking for love in the gutter. I still am looking for love, not in the gutter though. I have a fairly good idea about what is sold there anyway! Yes, love would be wonderful! But a person needs to be 'taken care of' as well. Is that really so wrong? Personally, I do not condone casual sex i.e. the promiscuous kind, the kind when you become the human equivalent of a fondue pot. The moralistic issues that come with it are things I am not going to touch upon. Primarily, because morals are techy, touchy things, and you don't flash your morals in public: that is simply impolite! The only thing that concerns me about Fondue Variety Casual Sex is that one exposes oneself to so many risk factors of disease! Imagine yourself emerging from a fairly sheltered cocoon into an STD Clinic where you await results, and wonder what became of your life, and how far away you've strayed from the plan! It's debilitating!
What I am proposing, and it's not completely unheard of, is the presence of a friend. You can do homework together, and even 'take care of one another'. Gone is the furtive embarrassment of fumbling for a name in your head, as you finally achieve your culmination. There is no need of lying next to someone in the semi-darkness, gazing upon their supine form and trying to wonder what kind of a person they truly are and whether you things would have been different if the two of you would have done coffee and taken in a movie. Like a, you know, date? What about the hurried dressing, the shower of shame that follows when you return home, the emptiness of how meaningless it was, and, not to mention, the awkwardness of running into them in a public place, once again searching for a name in your head, and turning red in the face, out of embarrassment this time,not ecstasy? Gone! Having a 'solicitous' friend takes care of all these minor problems. The whole affair can be so civilised that it hurts! Class in the morning, and barely any in the evening!
The advice I finally gave Janice was a little jolting, even to me. I said, "Do whatever YOU want, as long as YOU want to do it. Don't do it because he wants to, and whatever you decide to do, I shan't judge you for it." We all judge, it's a fundamental fact, and I am not going to deny this. The inverted snobs have their own form of judgment called meta-judgment wherein they judge those who judge. Hell, I judge too, but there are people whose motives and actions I do not question, and Janice is one of them. She texted me last night, informing me of her decision. I wrote back telling her to let me know in case she needed anything else. I put my phone aside, shut the gargantuan biochemistry volume, poured myself a cup of milk, and walked over to my window. Outside, a milky night sky was spread taut against the canopy of The Great Beyond, and no stars twinkled. The roads were empty, desolate, while a few windows of the surrounding rooms still had their lights on. There, in the deep of the night, I tried to imagine what was going on in those rooms. Would me saying that one, at least one, of those rooms contained people who were entwined in each other, be such an unfair guess? To me, these moments when I walk over to the window and look outside are transcendental in that it's almost like taking a step back from a messy, insensate blur only to discover that what you are looking at is Pollock's No. 5. This time, as I stepped back, I looked at our lives, the likes of Janice and me and Hamlet. Our lives had subtle differences, but fundamental truths like high-octane majors, demanding work schedules, calendars with entries scribbled in in personalised, space-saving short-hand, and jobs that took a lot out of us despite it not seeming so, were all common threads. These are our lives, and to add the tedium of coquetry to this? By heaven! While I will always pray that Something Meaningful makes its presence known soon, the interim period, you will admit, is a disconsolate one. These are our lives; is it so wrong to just want to be held? Even if it is a simulacrum of love?

Until the next time,
GossipGuy.