Stranglers and Sex Addicts

Today a coworker of mine called his wife to tell her about a coupon he received in his email...this is gonna be a long one.

I should have known that this morning when I woke up forty-five minutes after my alarm was supposed to go off. Yesterday I received a software update to my Droid that happened to install a new alarm clock app, which took the liberty of importing all my old alarms. It also, however, took the liberty of setting the ringtone on them to "silent" which I now know from experience will not wake me up.

Last night I got to watch my beloved Buffalo Bills. I don't have cable so I went to the nearest sports bar I could think of, and was pleased with my choice. For whatever reason no one was in the back room when I arrived, which had the 60" in it. They also have $2.50 pints of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. So for the first ten minutes of the game I got to privately watch the game in style. Then a group of people roughly my own age came and sat down at the long table I had been inhabiting. The group was three women and one guy who was a tool, but also completely harmless.

I pitied that man. He was obviously putting in time with the blonde, but in doing so he has had to listen to her and emasculate himself in front of her friends--which were more like self-esteem bolstering satellites than actual comrades. Though even more than pitying him I pitied myself, because I had been enjoying the Bills in peace and now I had to hear nonstop yammering. It ranged from haranguing Nathaniel (full disclosure: I refer to all random schmucks as Nathaniel) to join their volleyball team to one of the most labor-some things I've ever had to listen to: this woman planning her birthday parties.

That is correct, party should be plural. She went on and on about how her birthday was next Wednesday, a good six days later, but that there would be parties each day for a full week encompassing her birthday. They would begin this Saturday and run through the following Saturday. In the course of the discussion though, she thought about backing the start date up to Friday, then vocally considered moving it up to last evening as they were already in a bar so it would make the most sense. At this point we are talking about ten days of parties (which I can assure you are in no way parties by any of our standards) that were evidently mandatory. Even most emperors of Ancient Rome who didn't mandate ten days of celebration in their honor.

They clearly could have taken a lesson from this woman, especially in corralling a servile entourage. She continually made condescending remarks to Nathaniel about how he works at Starbucks, which mainly centered around accusing him of being attracted to the seventeen and eighteen-year-odl girls that come in the most disgusted tone. Well isn't that the shock of the century. She might as well have derided him for having a Y chromosome while she was at it. He obviously folded like a paper bag, and the birthday proclamation continued. About three quarters of the way through it, I finally understood for the first time in my life why some men become stranglers. I suddenly saw the connection between someone sitting through enough of that and becoming a serial killer whose mode of execution is strangling women.

I endured mainly because the Bills, though unspectacular, inspired some hope in me that they actually are going to start playing some football. They still have a ways to go, but fundamentally they are playing better football. Let's get 'em, Bills!

I'm not going to get into how it all started, but the other day I became acquainted with the warning signs of being a sex addict. They are as follows (as per Rochester Sexaholics Anonymous):

Adultery
Promiscuity
Compulsive masturbation
Use of pornography
Internet sex
Unhealthy relationships or persistent erotic fantasy


Well that pretty much describes half the people I know. This is just like those women beating up on Nathaniel at the bar for his attraction to eighteen-year-old girls. Suddenly pretty much nearly universal traits are symptoms of some great perversion and/or illness. Give me a break.

This made me think extensively about addiction: I wondered what the most one can enjoy something before he/she is addicted to it. Where is the line drawn in which one crosses from having a "healthy appetite" for something to being an addict? Feel free to leave thoughts as comments.

Chernesky out!