Things I Won't Ever Blog About

I will never blog about my dating habits, romantic life, sex life (except if there's some sort of feminist/women's health spin), or if and on whom I have intellectual/real life crushes.

Why?

Comments I made to my friend, Hipster Law Prof Dude:

The funny thing about law school is that there are few professors under the age of 40 at most schools (there may be more at lower ranked institutions) who may be considered moderately attractive. Hardly any can be considered objectively attractive. I remember there were two at Bourgie Law School, who got excessive fawning over. Their joint "Night of Exotic Cuisine and Exquisite Conversation" dinner at the annual public interest auction would go for $600+, as divided by 10 or so people--mostly women. A cabin for a week in Vail, CO would go for $300-400. Yes I was one of those girls. The point is, much of this type of schoolgirl behavior occurs because law school is it's own weird environment, a sort of Gilligan's Island where if you had to choose between Thurston Howell III, The Skipper, Gilligan, or The Professor, you'd go for The Professor--because he's the most attractive of the bunch, but by no means the most attractive of the entire population of men (just on your island).

I go for intelligence first, but I admit that there must be a level of attraction. I wonder how the men handle the schoolboy aspect At Bourgie Law School, there were two female profs under 40, but they were not crushed on (I don't know why, but they weren't). Instead, guys chatted animatedly (I was there) about Prof. Deneuve, who is almost 60--but with a killer figure and great bone structure. You could tell that she was even more beautiful when she started teaching at 27. It's weird, isn't it, being on Gilligan's Island. That's like going for Mrs. Howell if Ginger and Mary Anne were considered plain.

I fear sounding frivolous, violating a certain zone of privacy, and being the diary-keeping fluffernutter of the blogosphere. But more than that, it is much more fun talking about such things in the abstract and analyzing them from a sociological perspective (with tie-ins to pop culture) than it is actually talking about the underlying behavior. I don't think my personal life is very interesting. But abstracting from the mundane lived experience to the more pneumatic "universal" is a lot more fun. It is more fun writing about a bad date or ended relationship (ongoing/current is off limits in the interest of The Dude's privacy) than actually going through one. (Although I always thought "Dude du Jour" was a great pseudonym, I think "The Dude," with the definite article, is the way to go.) But there shall be no blogging about Dudes other than Platonic Dudes--friends are bloggable (the stories tend to be less dramatic or intensely private), romantic entanglements (and enemies) are not (potential for hysterical drama). It's this self-imposed blogger code of ethics--there is a certain zone of privacy I have to keep, and there's things I can't do from under the veil of pseudonymity. Much as I and my classic oversharer nature would like to.

But anyway, back to the original point: academic crushes happen, but the mere fact of their existence (like blog crushes) is less interesting than examining why they happen in the first place. Greil Marcus once compared every great living or dead musician/band to a television show. "M*A*S*H is like U2, because both got preachy in the end." The more I think of it, the more I think law school is like Gilligan's Island. A bunch of people who signed up for one thing (a 3 hour tour) and ending up in a situation they are desperate to away from (completely cut off from the real world).

Hang in there, Little Buddy.