attraction

oh, man! andrew really is hot. what's gotten into me? i'd totally love to meet him in person but don't know if it'll actually happen. besides, he's in a relationship albeit one that crosses a continent and an ocean. still, there's nothing wrong with fantasizing.

i don't know. i've been thinking a lot lately about why i act, think and feel certain ways. i've also been reflecting a lot on stuff that's happened or that i've experienced in the past and how it shapes who i am today. i'm only now able to start writing about a lot of stuff b/c time and age have provided distance and a different perspective on things. it's for personal development, too...sort of the original purpose of this journal--to grow and work through a lot of stuff i never confronted head on. i really hope that understanding myself better can help me better guide my clients and also keep me from getting really uncomfortable when i see clients who are similar to myself. in particular, a lot of college students i've worked with have reminded me so much of myself several years ago. i thought i'd grown a lot since finishing school but sometimes i see that in some ways i'm still the same person...feeling like a girl on the brink of womanhood, and sometimes feeling like a woman on the brink of girlhood again; a paradox of both insecurity and confidence.

maybe it's really not so far-fetched for me to lust after someone's voice. it's no different from celebrity hearttthrobs--fantasizing about people you've never even met. also, i've always found brains and intelligence to be a real turn-on. it's something i always seek out in guys i date, even if some people see it as snobbery. it's the most intense and fascinating thing to find yourself falling in love with someone's mind in addition to all of the physical stuff. it helps me click with another person on an even deeper level and feel closer and more intimate. i've been in situations where there was one but not the other and at least for me, i need the whole package if a relationship is meant to work. without it, the spark just isn't there. and maybe that partially explains why i'm so picky.

actually (and surprisingly) it was during college that i first learned just how complex human attraction is. never mind that i'd recently come from my first relationship with a boy two years older who was at MIT. it was at college that i realized it was possible to fall for someone's intelligence--purely based on brains and charm. at age 19, i became totally infatuated--head over heels--with someone in my lit. class. it shocked and unnerved me to find myself sitting there absolutely mesmerized by this one attractive individual and their beautiful, eloquent, flawless analysis of nathaniel hawthorne's novels and willa cather's short stories. once again, i was thrust into feeling like i did as a 13 year old: blushing, daydreaming, and tongue-tied during class discussions, getting all excited and getting the butterflies whenever i saw them around campus.(getting that flustered) normally doesn't happen to me and i didn't think it was supposed to happen like that at college! i know i'm not the only one to have experienced such an uncomfortably intense, unexpected crush on someone, but it threw me for a loop and totally caught me off guard and led me to ask myself a lot of questions. it gave me a lot of insecurities and made that period somewhat of a tentative, unhappy time for me. i couldn't truly make sense of it all for a while until i talked to my friend kyoko, who said something similar had happened to her. i felt more liberated from it when i hooked up with rob toward the end of my sophomore year and we were talking and he asked me about what makes women find someone attractive. when i gave honest answers about what people i found attractive and why, it sort of intrigued him and made our fling more exciting and intense. i guess i can finally see and clearly understand what happened to me from a developmental perspective.

and what was my point in spilling all of this out? i hesitate to say more for fear that it could inaccurately portray what i'm like. and later i may need to censor and delete this unflinchingly honest entry. but there it is--using that analogy (sexy brains: sexy voice) helps me realize that maybe it's not so strange that i'm in love with this cute guy's sexy british accent.