thread of inappropriate professional attachments

the dream is better

Last night has reminded me that my IPA is neither ginger nor Cornish nor has a ponytail so really this entire thing is absurd and I should stop being stupid about it. I have always had a very clear type, he isn't it. I should pull myself together and direct my lusts elsewhere.

(These things are easy to remember when in a decent mood and of a clear mind, and almost impossible to stick to when my brain is misfiring as it has been lately.)

wcc, you have such a clear type. the other day i saw a guy on the bus that was so your type i would have snapped a pic if was a creepy person. you would have flipped

Yeah, I saw one of those too...

he had a thom yorke-like face but a bigger nose and very red hair. he was dressed in a suit that was slightly too small inc. highwaters and was carrying some huge old book.

Mixture of "Thom Yorke" and "very red hair" sounds almost irresistible.

Oh, gingers, you are too delectable. Except after last night, I think I am rather more excited about Richard D James than Thom Yorke again. He has ginger arm hair. It is rather too much in the universe of ssexy.

I just wish I could stop feeling horrible and conflicted about OfficeBoy.

But then again, I have really been feeling ~this~ a lot, lately:

http://media-cache-ec5.pinterest.com/upload/184506915954135371_8AX0sWx1_b.jpg

None of these people work in my office, though, so this is an inappropriate thread to be discussing this on.

I'm gonna go look at pictures of St Kilda now.

some well-timed teasing got me put in a playful headlock for a few brief, blissful seconds this afternoon

that description has got an humbert humbert ring to it.

(i'm not comparing you with him, just the wording)

i just watched that on saturday so...

i've only read the book, but anyway i'm glad i put in that sincere disclaimer.

Can inappropriate professional attachments apply to friendships or acquaintanceships?

A former manager got fired for having an "inappropriate friendship"...with me. I mean, we went out to dinner after work and stuff. I suppose that was wrong though, and what are the ethics? I later apologized to co-workers because some of them didn't get along with that person.

Also, what about when you shouldn't participate in or contribute to something because of a conflict of interest or bias?

Like, um, cos, a family member of mine has an acquaintance who wants discounts on services and stuff. Just because he went to the same high school. My relative frankly can't stand this person or his circle and is kind of bitter about high school in general and told the receptionist to just screen out all phone calls.

I mean, sure - they are losing business, but I think your business ethics are compromised when you open the doors for toxic people.

barista messed up my order and so i got an extra beverage today. i stopped off at her office and placed it on her desk and told her it was for her. she got up to hug me-- hands already in the air-- and a fellow co-worker actually stepped right in between us to grab something in the most comically timed way imaginable. we high-fived over her and i walked back to my office, looool.

my professor wrote IPA on the blackboard today and asked if we knew what it stood for and I thought of this thread.

did it mean india pale ale?

was it a beer professor? do you go to beer university???

hahaha, he actually said that when no-one spoke up. but in this context it stood for international phonetic alphabet.

haven't talked to her this year. freed myself of the shackles. feeling good. looking forward to independence, thoughts no longer obsessively turning over one subject, and making all other subjects attendant upon that main subject or chucking them out if not.

three things recently felt like they had relevance to this however:

1) an interview with George Saunders where the interviewer says at one point

We’d been on the subject of death for a while. A friend I loved very much died recently, and I was trying to describe the state I sometimes still found myself in — not quite of this world, but each day a little less removed — and how I knew it was a good thing, the re-entry, but I regretted it too, because it meant the dimming of a kind of awareness that doesn’t get lit up very much.

the fact this relates to death is probably a good example exemplary of the greedy melodramatic bathos of the lovelorn - co-opting the genuinely moving or tragic in language or moments to the cause of self dramatisation. not sure it's a bad thing - can look rather absurd from the outside. but anyway, yes, that dimming. (after all part of the dangerous seduction of the IPA is the excitement (nascent love) it brings to the dull (monotonous work).)

2) Taylor Swift singing 'I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to' - a version of Elvis' I Forgot To Remember to Forget You, I guess, but I like the recursive sense in T Swift's version: you think you're ok enough not to worry about falling back into thinking about them and seeing them, and if you're still thinking that you're still enmeshed. An addictive mentality. That line's from All Too Well, a song that also contains the line 'I might be OK, but I'm not fine at all' - a very good description of maintaining day-to-day life amidst the unimportant foolish misery of IPA heartbreak).

3) A line in James Merrill's The Book of Ephraim (I posted about it here)... well, it's the final line from this bit anyway:

Lodeizen, Hans, 1924-50,
Dutch poet. Author of Het Innerlijk
Behang, &c. Studies in America.
Clever, goodnatured, solitary, blond,
All to a disquieting degree.
Plays a recording of the "Spring" Sonata
One May night when JM has a fever;
Unspoken things divide them from then on.

That description of an unbroachable silence growing between people, until they become alien to each other who once had each other so well known - of losing people through silence - is great. There's also a feeling that 'unspoken things' is representative not just of silence, but of 'dark unnatural things', malign entities - unspoken because we must not speak of them - that come between people, populating the space between them and muffling the human desire to communicate, sowing death and sadness (after all the last time you speak to someone is a kind of death, the last time you properly speak to them).

Anyway, there was a rapprochement today, 'How are you?! are you busy?! thanks for the cd! (now you thank me, he said darkly. but there can be no backsliding. IPA is for drinking. Or a handy tool for analysis of and instruction in a læẽgwəd͡ʒɪz sound system.

~*Our Last Day Together*~

;_;

:(

but there can be no backsliding

correction: there can be some backsliding.

grady, i have a feeling some of us possibly including me are half-hoping you say/said something enigmatic with a pleasant but slightly dodgy undertone on your way out the door and that if you do/did you will make a full and frank report.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyg1tw3ATW1qb7modo1_500.png

estela otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=temGFM84c4A

Fizzles needs thread to initiate professional rapprochements

xpost oops it's in spanish lol, oh well

fizzles, did i briefly meet the subject of this attachment? my visual memory has faded but i can recall that there was definitely cause for distraction

Italian, actually.

which is the Italian title of Love, Actually.

grady, i have a feeling some of us possibly including me are half-hoping you say/said something enigmatic with a pleasant but slightly dodgy undertone on your way out the door and that if you do/did you will make a full and frank report.

she kind of beat me to this tbh!! all I had to do was give a knowing smile and nod, which was more than enough.

she took me out to lunch btw

<3 grady shows us how to leave

nice

did i briefly meet the subject of this attachment? my visual memory has faded but i can recall that there was definitely cause for distraction

I don't think that would have been possible tbh (tho it is possible you briefly met an appropriate and perfectly sanctified attachment, who I also knew in a professional capacity - not quite such a catchy thread title).

Need to practice grady's nod and smile. way things have gone generally I'd look like a yokel with a twitch.

but there can be no backsliding

correction: there can be some backsliding.

― Say Bo to a (Fizzles), Tuesday, 5 February 2013 21:37 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.joethorn.net/wp-content/themes/editorial/functions/thumb.php?src=wp-content/uploads/ezra-prays-600x315.png&w=606&h=0&zc=1&q=90

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Bruegel%2C_Pieter_de_Oude_-_De_val_van_icarus_-_hi_res.jpg

The sun is hot stuff, fizzles. Next time epoxy yr feathers.

she is nothing like the sun. more like a quasar.

need wings of elemental adamant from the core of Pluto.

and to flap very hard.

Damn bro that's a hell of a pedestal you're building

yeah, tell me about it. rest assured she's just a v nice person who I like a lot. not, idk, Cleopatra or anything, nor am I on some self-destructive jag like Bob in Hamilton's The Midnight Bell. but we're close professionally and like elliptical orbits seem to have times of great closeness and at other times for us to be distant from each other.

distance is safest and easiest to either envisage escaping from, or having escaped from, or in the process of escaping from the attachment, but is a lot less fun than the closeness.

basically I'm happier in her company than out of it, and I've resigned myself to being hooked until I'm unhooked. and well, you never know - we do have a ball from time to time.

in fact both Ezra and Icarus were chosen as much for their portrayals of indifference or embarrassment of the rest of the world (idk the story behind the durer - but that's what it looks like). obv such things are v important to the person going thru them - the most important thing - but to the outside world there is at best a bafflement. think Kipling's a rag a bone and a hank of hair.

I shd probably shut up rly, as it's been veering twds 77 territory for a while, but there is a large part of me that finds it not unamusing or without interest.

we do have a ball from time to time

if ever further clarification were needed

(please answer in pictorial form)

Just starting to experience this for the first time. Not sure I'd find my crush remotely attractive outside of the workplace environment, but I'm curiously unmoved by this realisation. If anything it adds a slight air of mystique to the attraction.

Fortunately I'm spared all the awkwardness that's supposed to be attendant on this sort of situation by the fact that she's married and a decade older than me, and I'm kinda viewed as the baby in the office. I'm not sure anyone takes me very seriously yet. To that extent I suppose this is more like crushing on a teacher than a colleague, even though she is the person in the office who's nearest me in age. Still, it's quite nice though. Again, as with teachers at school, I suspect it'd be near impossible to work in a office with more than a couple of members of the opposite sex and not fancy any of them even a little bit.

In fact, upon reflection, this is EXACTLY like fancying the teacher at school - the fact that she's married and unattainable is the whole point I think. Never really thought about it in those terms though

Miss Fenwick. I must have been about five or six. Distraught when she married a German. Genuinely felt the barriers were not insuperable. Feel WD describes appropriate inappropriate professional attachment and I shd listen and learn.

imago - ill have a think about a pictorial representation of our hi-jinks, but in the meantime you did remind me that I have a... inappropriate er... something attachment to the grouping of women at the far left front of Poussin's Triumph of David, that is at least partially informed by my IPA tho largely in spirit and deportment than featural resemblance:

http://iamled.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/triumph-of-david.jpg

I always figured lj would return, i forgot about the rules of the sequel- add spawn

Aliens in Dulwich Picture Gallery. Examining catalogue nos etc. Ah balls, anyway. it's the thread for it after all.

xpost and, ah, easy there fella. I may leave trails but I prefer them of breadcrumbs than actual ID parades.

Miss Fenwick. I must have been about five or six. Distraught when she married a German. Genuinely felt the barriers were not insuperable. Feel WD describes appropriate inappropriate professional attachment and I shd listen and learn.

We should probably hang fire on this sort of judgement at least until I've got through a Christmas party or a leaving do or something. I may turn out to have feet of clay yet, definitely have previous with hugely inappropriate declarations of, if not love, then certainly affection/lust on these sorts of occasions.