Last summer was good and bad. I had a great time socially, overall, as my friends network locally was the best it's ever been. (Naturally, three of my best friends here moved at the end of the summer. Sad!). But I also wasted a lot of time on dead ends--bad dates, bad friends, bad hobbies. And so I find myself longing for a summer of true freedom to have fun that lasts and work that matters. A summer where I am not bound by bad habits and bad ideas, but instead make the best of each day without having to give my time and money to mistakes and morons.

It's difficult because sometimes, old temptations become more attractive. Let me give you one easy example. It's easy to say "I won't gamble" because all the gambling games you know require luck, not skill, and you know statistics. But what if, now, a casino opens up near your house that has blackjack, and you're kind of sort of good at counting cards? Now try to say no to gambling, given that your best reason for saying no is gone.

Life is more than just fighting addictions and temptations, but without fighting those habits and keeping them under control, we can't live. I know this month I've been a bit obsessed with habits and addictions. But I realize more and more that one has to really work at keeping oneself from being controlled. Aaron Sorkin spoke at Syracuse's convocation and had a great quote on how easy it was for him to be addicted:

"I've made some bad decisions. I lost a decade of my life to cocaine addiction. You know how I got addicted to cocaine? I tried it. The problem with drugs is that they work, right up until the moment that they decimate your life."

So the question I find myself asking is, how do we keep creating new reasons not to do evil? Summer is a time when a lot of us let down our guard. It's a time when we want to experiment, to try new things. But I have a healthy respect and fear of evil. It quietly whispers in our ear to try it once, and then we are left like a fish on a hook, struggling to move and breathe, wishing for freedom, yet throttled. So how will you avoid the hook this summer? Think about it.

  Last night, in a fit of whimsy, I put up a pulse about a redheaded actress I fancied. Yuvel Scharf was in a movie I recently watched and I was oddly smitten. I say "oddly" because usually I'm not attracted to women with red hair.


This created an interesting discussion in my pulse last night with a redheaded Xangan, and I felt I should follow up on it. Explaining how/why we become attracted to various types is a complicated narrative that doesn't get enough attention. And it has an immense impact on our future satisfaction.

For example, theoretically, I should be very much attracted to redheads. I love uniqueness in women, and redheads stand out quite a bit. I also tend to like various forms of passionate expression, and redheads, for good or bad, have the reputation of being more passionate than average. Yet, overall I'm not that attracted to the average redheaded woman. One theory could be that I simply don't run into many redheaded women, and that, if I met more of them, over time one is attracted to what one is surrounded by. This is why it's so important that television series feature minority women.

Regardless, I'm left to lecture my libido. It is not optimal to have types by physical appearance. Given that I enjoy a woman's personality and character, it seems dreadfully fickle to not date her just because her hair is the wrong shade or her nose is not pointy enough. Having physical preferences for dating is not sensible unless it's a rather obvious "I am not attracted to unattractive people." Right? Just to mess with you, you can now imagine me wagging a finger at my waist and demanding improvement.Trust me, there have been times where I all but yelled at my libido "LOOK JUST SHUT UP AND LIKE THIS JEWEL OF A WOMAN ALREADY, YOU OVERLY SELECTIVE LITTLE..." only to have my libido ignore me and start drooling over some dark-haired coquette it noticed three years ago. Strangely, libidos are rarely in the mood for lengthy conversations.

Hilarious side note: a redhead just walked right in front of me at the bookstore, and she is cute. Perhaps writing this blog is curing me. I am amused.

So what's the point of this blog, besides allowing me to lacerate my cheek with my attempts at wittiness? It makes one wonder, "Can attractiveness and desire be learned?" Because if not, it perhaps creates a world that we don't want to live in. Where sexual desires are engraved in stone, we are to some extent merely slaves to a libido we don't understand nor control, and a husband stops being sexually attracted to his wife just because at 31 she's a bit less toned than she was at 25. Don't listen to the ravings of the sexually deluded who try to romanticize a stubborn, unchanging, frozen sexual passion as being progressive. If we had the choice, and I am not sure we do, we do not want to live in a world where sexual desires are completely unchangeable. At the end of all this joking, I must admit this is a more serious topic than I thought when I first wrote this bit of whimsy. Having strong sexual biases as a single, unattached person, on a logical basis, seems to be a strong inconvenience, right?