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Thursday, February 7, 2008

Friendship Candy

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Sweet and Fun

We have been meeting quarterly for the past couple of years, though we missed each other for the past six months while Pat and I were in India. Once again, it's just the two of us.

Tonight, we lean in close for the first time, and I flatter myself during my drive home that the servers must have noticed us and totally misread our body-language.

After he returns from the men's room, I say softly, "Your trip to the men's room gave me a gorgeous view. The woman directly behind you -- no, now, you can't turn around -- is stunning."

And I sneek one more peek, just to be certain. Yes, she does have yellow-silk hair to her shoulders, blooming cheeks and lips, plus eye-glasses with glossy-black, plastic frames, sitting on a straight bridge of a noble nose; the glasses make her look like a female Clark Kent -- her appeal, unsuccessfully hiding behind the lenses. And she's wearing a mauve, woolen scarf around her long throat.

And then my friend leans in to tell me about the amazing guy he saw at the gym the other day -- "black hair, blue eyes -- a killer combo -- the sort of beard that even when it's shaved leaves a dark-blueish shadow, which is just so masculine, and he also had high, beautiful cheekbones and a square jaw," he says, holding his hand around the top of his athletic neck.

Both of us are monogamous with our long-time partners, and we agree that life is full of such visual gifts in any case, thank God. "I'm convinced: My sexuality is the engine that makes my whole life work," I say, grateful for his friendship, and the comfort around him to say aloud such a bold sentiment.

"You're reminding me of the theologian whose work I featured in my thesis;" my friend went to seminary before joining IBM. "There was a great book about his theology, *Eros Toward the World*."

I just went hunting and found the following review excerpt:
This original and important work retrieves and develops the often-neglected but extremely fruitful notion of eros in Paul Tillich’s thought. Alexander Irwin’s recovery of Tillich’s rich concept shows how eros is a crucial dimension in human existence and a driving force in all human creativity—in art, social ethics, politics, and religion.

Desire drives my creativity.

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