In which I say things I oughtn't without even being drunk.

A recent telephone conversation I held with one of my friends from Indiana turned eventually to the subject of crushes. Specifically, he related that despite his current happy situation he retained if not a crush then at least a pleasant nostalgia for a crush on a girl he knew who had since moved away but with whom he communicated occasionally over instant messenger. I didn't really have anything to compare it to, which got me thinking on the subject.

I can state unequivocally at this point that I don't have a crush on anyone, or even the kind of meta-crush my Indianan friend has. The closest I can now come to experiencing the sentiment is an aversion to the smell of violets that I refuse to elucidate. In a way, I think this is a product of my living situation: I lived for two years in southern Indiana where my studies, in what to judge from the breakdown of students is a very "guy" field, limited my ability to break down the relatively high barriers to clique entry that exist there. Following that I lived in central Wisconsin for a year, and then for three months in San Francisco without a job. Not a lot of opportunity to meet people, in other words.

I know that developing a crush on a barista is de rigeur for people of my particular pretensions, but I can't say that I've ever succumbed. Not that it would have been difficult: By and large looks have been a prerequisite for effective java-slinging since at least 1990. Part of the problem is that crushes of this type require a certain flight of fancy on the part of the crusher. Crushor? That can't be right. Too "my first metal band". Anyway. The genesis of any kind of service/retail worker crush is in my opinion the wilful inability of the subject to make the crucial distinction, first expressed by my friend K. and me to get another of our friends to quit verbally fantasizing about our waitress, between "attracted to me" and "good at her job". If, standing in line at the coffee shop, you turn your head from the list of drinks which is totally invariant no matter what coffee shop you go to and you're getting the same thing you always get anyway, toward the front of the line, you will see that the smile you have been getting, and upon which you are building your vacation plans, is the same smile currently being flashed at the cranky old lady who never tips. At this point, you have two available cases: either A) that smile is the product of genuine sexual interest, with the subcase that said barista has at the very least some very complicated appetites that you'd do well to get yourself right with damn fast; or B) said barista is good at her job: she's being polite.

If your arrival occasions the breakdown of a forbidding grimace into some kind of Hallmark-card idiot grin, by all means go right ahead. That has never happened, though, and if you think it does, my hipster friend, you are being at the very least disingenuous regarding your attitude toward Meg Ryan movies.

Moving back from the general to the specific, by which I mean to myself, it's not that I'm philosophically opposed to the idea of the service industry crush. It's just that I can be, if history is any guide, without opening myself up to the danger of hypocrisy. This is not a fact of which I am proud. It speaks to two essential deficiencies: First, I need to meet more women. Second, as follows:

Somewhere on the Internet, there are a series of tests (faithweb.net, maybe? I dunno) that I took awhile ago which had the stated aim of diagnosing your propensity toward each of the seven deadly sins. According to them, I am an absolute fucking saint, in the traditional Buddhist sense of the word. I have freed myself completely from the wheel of samsara and I have in effect no appetites. I thought for certain that I would at least score well (badly) on Wrath, and veganism actually falls within St. Gregory's definition of Gluttony so that would be worth some points, but no. To Lust, I am similarly disinclined.

This puzzles me. The test's preambles warned that a low score might just be a sign that you're consciously repressing yourself, so I made certain that I answered the test not as myself, but as a bigger asshole caricature of myself. Still got me nowhere. Later I would read Gide's The Immoralist and be thoroughly unscandalized, so I think I'm reasonably jaded to begin with.

Apparently, therefore, I am just bad at lusting. This comes as a surprise to me, but of course I also thought I could pull off wrathful. This does not bode well for me. The Seven Deadly Sins, after all, aren't really "sins" in the original sense at all but rather habits of mind that are uniquely unbecoming of celibate monks. Their metastasis into the general culture was a side-effect of the accession of St. Gregory to the papacy and the further overvaluation of monastic life characteristic of the Middle Ages and of Western culture thereafter as a whole. The whole situation has obvious Nietzschean resonances, in that monasticism in general can be considered to be an Apollonian attempt to deny the human being's natural Dionysian impulses. Someone once told me that Catholic school had really done a number on me, and I laughed at him. Now I'm not so sure.