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DEAR MR. BLUE: How much is too much?
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Dear Mr. Blue, Let me get right to the point. I think I am addicted to sex. I'm a healthy
20-year-old woman and I really can't focus on work and school unless I
have sex at least three times a day, preferably four. I find myself waking up at 6 a.m.,
shaking my boyfriend awake and satisfying my desires. I find myself sometimes skipping
class to work in a quickie, staying up all hours of the night ... you know the
rest. I'm lucky to have a loving, affectionate, devoted boyfriend who is
more than happy to help me continue my addiction. But I honestly enjoy
myself! Am I just a normal 20-year-old? Or should I
treat this like an addiction? Awaiting your sage advice Dear Awaiting, I don't have any sage advice, only questions of my own: How do you
manage to stay in school? I assume your parents are supporting you and you don't have to
work, but really, sex four times a day raises real time-management issues, unless you've got
the drill down to 10 or 15 minutes. My second question is: How long has this been going
on? The boyfriend is going to wear out his organ, even with the use of industrial-strength
lubricants, and eventually he is going to lose interest as well and go into the priesthood and
take a vow of celibacy and be darned grateful for it. Sex, my dear, as wonderful as it is,
can't be wonderful four times a day. It just can't. So if you're still pursuing the quota,
chasing diminishing returns, this strikes me as obsessive behavior. Perhaps you might, in
between getting dressed and getting undressed, find someone with a certificate on his or her
office wall -- a psychologist, a minister, a mechanical engineer, somebody -- and ask
them. Dear Mr. Blue, I need to make some changes in my life. I'm 29, single and live in a midsize Midwestern
city. I got my degree in French and taught in a French high school for a year. Then I
came back to the U.S. and started going for an MBA, but I realized that I despised business
courses and would end up zoning out during class. So I started writing theater reviews for
an alternative weekly. I liked doing that a lot. I have a day job at an agribusiness
corporation, which pays the bills, but I can't imagine doing this much longer. I've been
yearning to move to a more international city, thinking my chances of finding what I want to do would be greater. Am I
too impulsive? Why can't I seem to focus? Bored and Anxious Mr. Blue Garrison Keillor's column appears every Tuesday in Salon Books.
Feeling blue about your prose? In the doldrums over your last date? Ask Mr. Blue. Dear Bored, You're young, dear heart, and you're searching around for what you're meant to do. You're enterprising, and you've found something you like a lot, and you need to let these things sort themselves out. Keep the day job for a while -- say, until the end of next summer -- and start to plot your move to a bigger city. You're focusing just fine, but hey, it's a tumultuous time in a person's life. Of course, New York is the city that presents itself first. A city where theater is a major industry, a city of international trade. But consider Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Or a dozen other places. In any case, it's perfectly normal that you feel yourself drifting. It's what we do at that age, if we're lucky. Some poor people get all nice and secure in their 20s, and then they have to try to accomplish in their 40s or 50s what you're doing now. You're ahead of the game. When I was 29, I was doing an early morning radio show, spinning the disks; I was bored silly and wondered what would become of me. It's a great age. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm a 38-year-old single woman. I have a great job that allows me to travel and I feel very fulfilled except for one thing. My parents divorced when I was very young, and my father got custody of me and my two sisters. He remarried when I was 7, so I've been with my stepmother most of my life. I've had absolutely no contact with my mother all these years. I've been having thoughts of finding her. I have no memories of her whatsoever, and my father has never spoken of her in all these years. I've been thinking about this for so long, I can't be objective about it. This could hurt a lot of people, including my stepmother, whom I love very much, but a part of me feels like such a coward for not pursuing this. What in the world should I do? Confused Dear Confused, Find your mother and make contact with her. Write her a letter and tell what's happened in your life. Seek her out. Your stepmother will not be hurt by this; surely, she knows that you love her, and that's the important thing. Your curiosity about your mother will not diminish with time. The longer you think about her and about whether to find her or not, the larger she looms in your mind, and really she is simply a human being. The person who is being hurt is you. Be strong, and screw up your courage, and write the letter and make the phone call. Dear Mr. Blue, I love my husband, love my children, loathe my job and my suburban house and all I really want to do is move to the mountains, think, write fiction, finish raising my two teenage daughters and look at pretty trees. Everyone thinks I'm nuts but me. Miserable in the Midwest Dear Miserable, If your family is firmly planted there on the frozen tundra, enjoying the cheese sandwiches and the hockey, you'll have to conspire pretty hard to pry them loose and trundle them out to the mountains, and do you really want to be responsible for everyone's happiness? Do you want teenage daughters looking at the snow-capped peaks and mourning their lost happiness in the cornfields? A husband who subscribes to the old hometown newspaper and drives a hundred miles to a liquor store where he can buy Leinenkugel beer? And who is going to pay you to look at pretty trees, my dear? You'd better write your big commercial novel first, and meanwhile settle for hills and dales. You're not nuts, just jumping the gun. First you write the novel, in which two teenage girls escape from their nutty mother and run off to the mountains where loathesome suburban men lure them to a house surrounded by beautiful trees and where, in the last chapter, their mother arrives to rescue them. This novel becomes an Oprah Book Club selection and Dreamworks buys the movie rights and you and your lovely husband take the proceeds and purchase that big A- frame in the Grand Tetons. The girls will be at Mount Holyoke, but they'll visit in the summer.
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