it is about sexism and body image issues, about social pressures on women, but i also felt it was about bulemia and anorexia, about the anxious compulsive and the other self in OCD (the more the anxious self indulges in compulsions believing it will help, the more restricted the other-normal self's life becomes), about how we all have different parts within oneself and how we indulge one hurting the other sometimes...
i think i have started to understand better what is meant by the 'female gaze'. it is somewhat an undoing of the default male gaze, wherein everything is viewed from the perspective of men. what pleases men, how do they want women to be to look to smile to behave. am i pretty only when a man finds me so. am i attractive only when i realize a guy cannot help being attracted to me.
i have before on this same blog asked myself the question of whether i get turned on by men who are turned on by me. and i do think there is something to it. something conditioned something i am unable to unlearn and undo despite being conscious of it. the quiet guy I met in Budapest had some of that effect on me.
but with this person who i am finally getting to know after six odd years of eye-locking across public and professional spaces, it is different, although still heavily influenced by my position and conditioning. i first heard of him when hubbby (then not) raved about his work around 2005, and i helped him understand something in his paper/work. i absorbed that hero worship which continued over the years. and then about 12 years later when he interviewed hubby and then finally hired him, i had this premonition or dream about him and myself.
yday he and his wife finally came over to dinner. i barely slept the night before and this night after. i've been conversing with him and her in my head for months now and the conversation grew more intense in anticipation.
i usually ensure i do the things that scare and excite me, but i also believe it is futile to try and fight a strong pull for something. i have written even about this in my post about binge watching, addiction, and emerging like a sphinx from what remains after giving in to desire to its expiration.
i was the one who did not give up on inviting them despite multiple failed attempts. after knowing him, but also them, for a lil bit, i had to have more. but i had to have more also to erase his unconscious gazing at me which happened recently again when he saw me after about 5 months: i was having breakfast with hubby at his conference where i had tagged along to holiday after and felt someone's gaze on me. looking toward i noticed him and raised my eyebrows in acknowledgment as if to say 'ah there you are, how have you been?' but that did not break his gaze and took me back to before dining with them; somehow i had hoped and felt that that would change things given now we knew each other. i then half waved, gently, to break his stare, and he averted his eyes, mumbling a hi which i could not hear because he was a few tables away. i went with hubby to say hi after we were done eating to once again break that ice. and we chuckled over some inane things, all three of us. he said 'See you' into which i read a million meanings.
so they came for dinner last night. as usual i felt i messed up with not serving not heating not cooking the right way. both him and his wife left aside the baingan peels, the baingan i had cooked in that Turkish manner without its minced red meat and substituting for the pine nuts with corn. i wanted to tell them it melts in the mouth despite looking tough and stringy. but i felt that would be too controlling and instead gulped down my disappointment with my baingan and their eating habits.
he turned the coaster next to him over and examined it carefully. its from Japan but we haven't been there yet, its a gift. i noticed him do that and wondered what he thought of it in connection with us. he peered at the books in our bookshelf, at our pics on the fridge and the travel magnets there with a half smile on his face which made me squirm/blush. he watched every facial movement of mine as i spoke with him, his wife, their son, my hubby. and i have realized no one else i have known in my life so far has understood the language i speak with my eyes and my face, the way i smile or stifle one, the way i give a lopsided one sometimes, the way i draw back, or guffaw, or just look back into people's eyes with intensity that sometimes when i am self aware of makes me uncomfortable myself.
i have now increasingly been seeing myself as i imagine he has been seeing me. after they had left yday i sat in his spots and tried to see what he could have seen or did see. his gaze is defining me now. why is he so curious about me, and what else is it if not curiosity. for some unknown reason i am not curious, i already feel like i know a lot about him, from hubby, a lot that also feels coincidentally like me myself. even yday he said he had recently found Ronny Chieng... ditto here.
and today is his birthday. i knew yday, facebook had told me, but i did not reveal that, and i somewhat also forgot.
i found it admirable when his son said that his father was probably the best loser in sport he had known, but laughed out loud when he also said that when he does win he cannot help gloating about it for days.
when they were leaving he said my name aloud and blanket invited me over to play Bridge with them. 'Oh' was all i could muster.
two days ago, hubby was teasing me in his parents' company. he said in all my childhood pics, my sister could be seen free and childlike while i was always prim and proper. and then yday while we were waiting for these guys to arrive, and i told him i was feeling hot and cold because i was nervous, he teased me again saying i would now have to be a 'good girl'. i asked him if he generally thought i was a good girl, and what that meant. i have forgotten his exact words, but they were something to the effect that i wouldn't do bad things. am i too much of that?