To Suffer Just a Little

At a shoe boutique yesterday, the following exchange:

Chiara (holding a pair of red, strappy heels out at me): Aren’t they faahbulous?

Me: Yeah, they’re cool.

Chiara: They better be, they cost enough.

Me: Too bad you don’t have a birthday coming up with which to scare me into buying them for you.

Chiara: Shuddup.

Me: What?

Chiara, with a gleam: Should I try them on?

Me: Are you thinking about buying them?

Chiara: Ab-so-lute-ally NOT.

Me: Then why would you want to try them on? You know you like them and you know you aren’t going to buy them. What’s the point?

Chiara (sighing): Just to suffer a little?

And she wistfully put them back on the shelf.

I found it a telling thing to say. I don’t enjoy to put myself through the turmoil of being near to something I desire, but can’t have. This is why I never enjoyed strip clubs as much as I wanted to enjoy them; window-shopping annoys me.

That said; I have the enduring and silly problem of being sexually attracted to mannequins in storefronts.

Chiara regards this as evidence of my immaturity. I am assured by others that this is normal for a man of my height and weight.

Pygmalion, so why not me?

It could, of course, also be residual sexualization from the 1987 film Mannequin starring Kim Catrall, which I distinctly remember as being the first time I felt sexually attracted to a woman. You can imagine what this did for the otherwise tepid Big Trouble in Little China.

This is probably a whole other blog, isn’t it?