Slaughterhouse 44

START TIME: 11:16 PM
END TIME: 12:00 AM
WORD COUNT: 614

“What makes a woman fascinating?”

Wow. On with the klieg lights again. Buy the ticket, take the ride…

What makes a woman fascinating to men? Wow, I could probably fill this up with a whole bunch of really shallow anatomical descriptions and call it a night, but I think that would cheat the enterprise.

The rationale that I always use when people are explaining relationship difficulties to me, (and what I try to keep in mind as I’ve had one or two of those along the journey myself) is not that women are treacherous and men are scum; the problem is that both genders are entirely human. Horrifically flawed, ruled by varying ratios of logic and emotion, capable of horrible behavior, callous insensitivity, occasionally distracted by something shiny, or something curvy, or something forbidden.

I mean, fascinating can take on a number of definitions, and if your eyes are open wide enough, you’ll never be bored. We as human beings invented jumping rope, lava lamps and Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm. But women, specifically – a smart woman and a certain glance can make you feel like you can cure cancer and win the Boston Marathon before lunch and maybe take the afternoon to sort out this cold fusion thing. (She can also glare at you a certain way or laugh at you at the wrong moment and shrivel your heart to the size of a caraway seed, but the adrenaline rush is worth the risk.)

But I don’t think I’m describing anything outside of the realm of human interaction. There’s nothing in that description above that would be any less true if the genders were reversed, and maybe I’m doing a better job of describing friendship regardless of gender. I’m fortunate to have a number of people in my life, both men and women, who could probably finish my sentences for me if in the middle of one of them I were smacked by a bus.

But yes, there’s an acuity about smart, attractive, talented women, that does me no good in my quest to live a distraction-free life. I do find it fascinating that I could decipher weird network problems, pair a wine, identify artists, recall salient details from a book I read 20 years ago and run until other people want to fall to the ground sobbing and hyperventilating – but alongside the right woman, time, reason, 80 IQ points, and my ability to speak polysyllabically – they all disappear. Among some of my most prominent memories are the times when I opened my mouth to speak and no sound came out. I like to believe that through age, experience, repetition, and wry detachment, this will go away. I like to joke with people that “I could be on a date with a woman with two heads, and I’d know how to look at the one on the left and sigh, ‘You have the most incredible smile, and you ‘“- glancing quickly to the right – “have the most intoxicating sparkle in your eyes.” The terrifying part is, by now I know better. I shrug my shoulders and begrudgingly acknowledge that I’m far too reticent in some situations, in addition to being a really crazy, jumpy bastard.

So I guess what makes a woman fascinating is not unique to gender, because again, I don’t think you need a Y chromosome to feel any of what I described, but merely the idea that even someone like me, whose whole life is cut from logic, sautéed with logic, and served alongside logic after simmering in a logic sauce – can look up and find that same life governed by emotion. Like anything worthwhile, there’s a balance. If anyone finds it, I’d love to know.