Happy International Women's Day
As I sit quasi-motionless in front of my laptop, save the rhythmic movement involved in shoving stale Haribo Polka into my gob, justifying the gluttony with the thought that heck! I might be nourishing a foetus, it occurs to me that I have divulged more intimate, raunchy details about my sex life at work than I have to most of my friends, my diary, or the random revelers I bonded with at Oktoberfest some years ago.
It felt strangely tolerable last fall when, in response to some friends' inquiries about us creating our own sagrada familia, the Jeebsters laughed to the panel of inquisitors that we had, in fact "lancé la machine," the machine referring to our respective reproductive organs. The matter of fact descriptions that followed bordered more on the clinical than the pornographic, and I was inspired to chortle that if they wanted a demonstration of our current favorite techniques, the machine was programmed to start in 10 minutes. No one laughed.
And this with good friends of ours, whose questioning I assume signifies loving curiosity. What to make of the deeply graphic discussion in which I found myself engaged on the subject of "launching the machine," on my way to pick up a quiche for lunch today?
The subject arises innocently enough: your co-worker's kid was sick yesterday morning, you ask how the little one is doing today, they describe projectile vomiting and skin inflammations in places you generally avoid imagining prior to eating, and the interrogation whips around to when you, darling uninitiated, are planning to spend your own mornings mopping up your toddler's puke.
Repeating a phrase that you've witnessed successfully sum up your current status as a baby machine, you proudly announce, "Eh bien, la machine est lancée et là... on verra." And with that, you smile a lippy, crinkly-eyed smile, content with your linguistic recall and the idea that the baby talk peu ragoutant is likely over.
Mais non. Now that your interlocuteur has pierced the film of co-worker small-talk and glimpsed the potential for the co-mingling of fecund minds, gloves come off and any assumed boundaries regarding sex and its concomitant pleasures are displaced permanently. Get ready to describe - in exhaustive detail - your breeding habits. And feigning labored circumlocution only works so often; my attempts to fake searching for the mot juste were systematically met with colorful terminology and gestures.
It felt strangely tolerable last fall when, in response to some friends' inquiries about us creating our own sagrada familia, the Jeebsters laughed to the panel of inquisitors that we had, in fact "lancé la machine," the machine referring to our respective reproductive organs. The matter of fact descriptions that followed bordered more on the clinical than the pornographic, and I was inspired to chortle that if they wanted a demonstration of our current favorite techniques, the machine was programmed to start in 10 minutes. No one laughed.
And this with good friends of ours, whose questioning I assume signifies loving curiosity. What to make of the deeply graphic discussion in which I found myself engaged on the subject of "launching the machine," on my way to pick up a quiche for lunch today?
The subject arises innocently enough: your co-worker's kid was sick yesterday morning, you ask how the little one is doing today, they describe projectile vomiting and skin inflammations in places you generally avoid imagining prior to eating, and the interrogation whips around to when you, darling uninitiated, are planning to spend your own mornings mopping up your toddler's puke.
Repeating a phrase that you've witnessed successfully sum up your current status as a baby machine, you proudly announce, "Eh bien, la machine est lancée et là... on verra." And with that, you smile a lippy, crinkly-eyed smile, content with your linguistic recall and the idea that the baby talk peu ragoutant is likely over.
Mais non. Now that your interlocuteur has pierced the film of co-worker small-talk and glimpsed the potential for the co-mingling of fecund minds, gloves come off and any assumed boundaries regarding sex and its concomitant pleasures are displaced permanently. Get ready to describe - in exhaustive detail - your breeding habits. And feigning labored circumlocution only works so often; my attempts to fake searching for the mot juste were systematically met with colorful terminology and gestures.
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