thread of inappropriate professional attachments

I'm not feeling it right now.

We had to work together quite a lot today and I couldn't even look him in the eye. I just felt really awkward though he was trying his best to be professional and friendly and it was all actually OK.

I also really miss the mood-enhancing kick of having a crush. Life feels pretty chilly and unfun without one now.

the defining trait of a crush is that it's short-lived

well, one of them anyway

share with me crush songs to get this stupid NIN song out of my head

YEAHHHH. hugglez bomb WHITE CHOCOLATE CHEESECAKE love that nick btw. so brave to send that email. if i was him, id respect u 4 being so professional and it's NOT CRAZY AT ALL. u should have a co-meeting with HR to discuss it still i think.

f hazel i prescribe 10 ccs of ALICIA KEYS stat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srMBZiqNMaM

This is p much the best crush song in the world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlaEpd-DZZU

The Fun and Games - The Grooviest Girl In the World

(At least, the high, happy wheeeeeeeee! part of the crush.)

(I have never been a NIN fan in any way, but watching that Closer video always makes me happy and excited in a terrible sort of way.)

((I disagree, though, that crushes are inherently short-lived. Some of mine have ached for years.))

This experience has really driven home something kind of awful about sexuality which I kind of knew as folk-wisdom but had never really grokked as a personal experience.

That finding someone physically attractive and liking/respecting them is nowhere near as powerful an aphrodisiac as finding someone physically attractive and being annoyed/irritated/wound up by them. That the combination of the two things is actually deadly, in that attraction and annoyance both feed one another in this synergistic way that spirals out of proportion. And also that the whole thing picks up an element of competitiveness, whereby wanting to sleep with that person takes on an element of competitiveness, and becomes like scoring a goal in a game, that the object is "getting one over on one's opponent" by tricking or pushing them into sleeping with you. Which is an awful, awful way to think about sexuality when it comes down to it. And I hate myself for feeing that way about sex, and yet I still sometimes do.

Eh I've had that kind of sex, though, and it's not very good? Because there's no intimacy, the impulse on both sides is basically selfish, to "win." I understand the compulsion, believe me, but the finale doesn't really appeal anymore.

For me, it's really the only kind of sex that *is* any good, because intimacy is a distracting thing that kind of gets in the way of a good shag.

Not that I'd remember or anything :-(

that fun and games song <3

I have a crush on Alicia Keys who has superpowers of product endorsement and dog reviving

we would be a great team because I like to buy things and pet cats

wcc breaking down the "she's annoying" truth bomb to an extent

Yeeeeah I was going to say!

pretty distracting cleavage situation today :-/

need to go through the many updates in this thread since last I looked, but just a quick update:

Holiday worked! coupled with no longer working with her so much. The painful relinquishment of cathexis, the gradual acceptance of the dulness of quotidian office life, were slowly taking their sad but necessary progress, greeting out my soul (<--strong factor of IPA is clearly boredom - this has probably been already mentioned.)

But I've just had a train journey after work with my IPA, ("6Are you getting the train? Cool! Let's get it together!") who was just -*melts* - and I was a stammering incompetent fool (I've got this thing - I can't speak properly around her and her only, it's like some kind of verbal apraxia).

And now I'm spinning it all out into insane reinforcement of those relinquished psychological habits of attachment.

Actually I'm not. I'm doing the sensible thing and sitting in a pub posting to ilx. DO NOT THINK OF THE IPA. She's a cool person, yes. You are an adult male who can both handle that and understand the requirement, important for everyone not just you but her as well, not to build internal worlds around people and then project them from the inside to the out. Unfair. Unhealthy.

Another beer I think.

Another beer I think.

Perhaps you'd fancy an IPA (India Pale Ale)?

ha! I did think of that when I wrote it.

but they don't do IPA in this pub, so I ordered Pride Indtead.

Call me Fizzles Bunyan.

Christ, don't. it sounds like a medical condition.

*instead.

where's f'ing iPhone autocorrect when you need it.

I have always preferred to call you Rubber Lips.

Wait. No. I was thinking of another Fizzles. You I call Mr. Fizzles.

Unfair. Unhealthy, and yet almost impossible not to perpetuate, once those habits have been established.

the dream is better

Last night has reminded me that my IPA is neither ginger nor Cornish nor has a ponytail so really this entire thing is absurd and I should stop being stupid about it. I have always had a very clear type, he isn't it. I should pull myself together and direct my lusts elsewhere.

(These things are easy to remember when in a decent mood and of a clear mind, and almost impossible to stick to when my brain is misfiring as it has been lately.)

wcc, you have such a clear type. the other day i saw a guy on the bus that was so your type i would have snapped a pic if was a creepy person. you would have flipped

Yeah, I saw one of those too...

he had a thom yorke-like face but a bigger nose and very red hair. he was dressed in a suit that was slightly too small inc. highwaters and was carrying some huge old book.

Mixture of "Thom Yorke" and "very red hair" sounds almost irresistible.

Oh, gingers, you are too delectable. Except after last night, I think I am rather more excited about Richard D James than Thom Yorke again. He has ginger arm hair. It is rather too much in the universe of ssexy.

I just wish I could stop feeling horrible and conflicted about OfficeBoy.

But then again, I have really been feeling ~this~ a lot, lately:

http://media-cache-ec5.pinterest.com/upload/184506915954135371_8AX0sWx1_b.jpg

None of these people work in my office, though, so this is an inappropriate thread to be discussing this on.

I'm gonna go look at pictures of St Kilda now.

some well-timed teasing got me put in a playful headlock for a few brief, blissful seconds this afternoon

that description has got an humbert humbert ring to it.

(i'm not comparing you with him, just the wording)

i just watched that on saturday so...

i've only read the book, but anyway i'm glad i put in that sincere disclaimer.

Can inappropriate professional attachments apply to friendships or acquaintanceships?

A former manager got fired for having an "inappropriate friendship"...with me. I mean, we went out to dinner after work and stuff. I suppose that was wrong though, and what are the ethics? I later apologized to co-workers because some of them didn't get along with that person.

Also, what about when you shouldn't participate in or contribute to something because of a conflict of interest or bias?

Like, um, cos, a family member of mine has an acquaintance who wants discounts on services and stuff. Just because he went to the same high school. My relative frankly can't stand this person or his circle and is kind of bitter about high school in general and told the receptionist to just screen out all phone calls.

I mean, sure - they are losing business, but I think your business ethics are compromised when you open the doors for toxic people.

barista messed up my order and so i got an extra beverage today. i stopped off at her office and placed it on her desk and told her it was for her. she got up to hug me-- hands already in the air-- and a fellow co-worker actually stepped right in between us to grab something in the most comically timed way imaginable. we high-fived over her and i walked back to my office, looool.

my professor wrote IPA on the blackboard today and asked if we knew what it stood for and I thought of this thread.

did it mean india pale ale?

was it a beer professor? do you go to beer university???

hahaha, he actually said that when no-one spoke up. but in this context it stood for international phonetic alphabet.

haven't talked to her this year. freed myself of the shackles. feeling good. looking forward to independence, thoughts no longer obsessively turning over one subject, and making all other subjects attendant upon that main subject or chucking them out if not.

three things recently felt like they had relevance to this however:

1) an interview with George Saunders where the interviewer says at one point

We’d been on the subject of death for a while. A friend I loved very much died recently, and I was trying to describe the state I sometimes still found myself in — not quite of this world, but each day a little less removed — and how I knew it was a good thing, the re-entry, but I regretted it too, because it meant the dimming of a kind of awareness that doesn’t get lit up very much.

the fact this relates to death is probably a good example exemplary of the greedy melodramatic bathos of the lovelorn - co-opting the genuinely moving or tragic in language or moments to the cause of self dramatisation. not sure it's a bad thing - can look rather absurd from the outside. but anyway, yes, that dimming. (after all part of the dangerous seduction of the IPA is the excitement (nascent love) it brings to the dull (monotonous work).)

2) Taylor Swift singing 'I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to' - a version of Elvis' I Forgot To Remember to Forget You, I guess, but I like the recursive sense in T Swift's version: you think you're ok enough not to worry about falling back into thinking about them and seeing them, and if you're still thinking that you're still enmeshed. An addictive mentality. That line's from All Too Well, a song that also contains the line 'I might be OK, but I'm not fine at all' - a very good description of maintaining day-to-day life amidst the unimportant foolish misery of IPA heartbreak).

3) A line in James Merrill's The Book of Ephraim (I posted about it here)... well, it's the final line from this bit anyway:

Lodeizen, Hans, 1924-50,
Dutch poet. Author of Het Innerlijk
Behang, &c. Studies in America.
Clever, goodnatured, solitary, blond,
All to a disquieting degree.
Plays a recording of the "Spring" Sonata
One May night when JM has a fever;
Unspoken things divide them from then on.

That description of an unbroachable silence growing between people, until they become alien to each other who once had each other so well known - of losing people through silence - is great. There's also a feeling that 'unspoken things' is representative not just of silence, but of 'dark unnatural things', malign entities - unspoken because we must not speak of them - that come between people, populating the space between them and muffling the human desire to communicate, sowing death and sadness (after all the last time you speak to someone is a kind of death, the last time you properly speak to them).

Anyway, there was a rapprochement today, 'How are you?! are you busy?! thanks for the cd! (now you thank me, he said darkly. but there can be no backsliding. IPA is for drinking. Or a handy tool for analysis of and instruction in a læẽgwəd͡ʒɪz sound system.

~*Our Last Day Together*~

;_;

:(

but there can be no backsliding

correction: there can be some backsliding.

grady, i have a feeling some of us possibly including me are half-hoping you say/said something enigmatic with a pleasant but slightly dodgy undertone on your way out the door and that if you do/did you will make a full and frank report.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyg1tw3ATW1qb7modo1_500.png

estela otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=temGFM84c4A

Fizzles needs thread to initiate professional rapprochements