[LINK] How does it go again?

[rfmcdonald]

The Tin Man has a rather good post up ("Me Likey") about the mechanics of desire.

Sometimes I think about my feelings. I try to “see around” them. If you say or look at a particular word over and over again, like “yogurt” (yogurt. yogurt. yogurt. yogurt.), the word loses any sort of meaning and degenerates into a series of random sounds or letters.

A similar thing can happen with feelings. I might be sitting on the subway one day, see a guy in a t-shirt sitting across from me, and feel attracted to his arm. There’s just something about his arm that turns me on - perhaps the way the guy is displaying it, perhaps the tendons on the arm, perhaps the arm’s skin tone or the arrangement of the arm hair, perhaps the way the color contrasts with the t-shirt, perhaps the way the rest of the arm disappears tantalizingly up the shirtsleeve. I keep looking at the arm - surreptitiously - and as I stare, the arm eventually devolves into a random shape of flesh with no accompanying context. I start to wonder why we’re attracted beyond all proportion to a lump of flesh of a particular shape. I still find myself attracted to the arm, but now these other thoughts and concepts have become mingled in with it, competing for my attention and complicating what had been a nice simple attraction.

Go, read.