Making out is its own reward

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/making_out_is_its_own_reward.html

by jseliger • 16 years ago

65 21 16 years ago

blogs.suntimes.com

jseliger• 16 years ago

Note that this link comes from the discussion of Feynman - "You Just Ask Them?" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1196928 .

wallflower2• 16 years ago

Thanks for posting the link. I just read the entire page, hundreds of comments. Fascinating. Like very few writers - Ebert has a rare gift of making people write back to express themselves. Everyone has personal stories. Reading through the hundreds of responses, Ebert has made them happier by letting them express them.

Two comments stood out.

"Let me share my favourite guidance from Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, my mentor in life: "Life is the accumulation of all the moments we live. One who cannot live meaningfully today cannot hope to lead a brilliant life tomorrow. No matter what grand plans one makes, if he does not value each moment, they will be just so many castles in the air. All the causes in the past and all the effects in the future are condensed within the present moment of life. Whether or not we improve our state of life at this moment will determine whether we can expiate the evils we have caused since the infinite past and be able to build up good fortune to remain for all eternity. The key is whether or not we have faith strong enough to decide that this may be the last moment of our life. The above passage, therefore, gives us the principle for changing our karma."

Two:

"Here is an homage to the passionate kiss, in a poem by a romanian poet, Nichita Stănescu - "They kiss". In beautiful images as well, next to the translation http://bit.ly/54KtKw Wonderful kissing pictures, then and now: http://bit.ly/b2sWCI ('Le Baiser de L'Hotel de Ville') , http://bit.ly/bjtZAV

Ebert: I just tweeted "They Kiss." Yes, the video plays perfectly once the poem has been read. Such a melodic language. And I love your taste in movies and books on your blog. "

wallflower2• 16 years ago

One more:

"I don't know what happened in normal co-ed colleges. My best pal Shapiro and I enrolled at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs New York, the year it went co-ed. Maybe two dozen young men in a sea of thousands of horny, curious young women.

In addition, I was a rock'n'roll musician with a hot band duded out in the heighth of nadsat fashion. I was also an athlete, currently tops in gymnastics. What a hunk I was. What a stud. A thoroughly modern and sexually enlightened young lion! The pick of the litter was always mine to be had. I engaged with oh, 5 or 6 whole women over the course of about a year. I may be exaggerating.

Shapiro was a skinny nebbish with glasses. Could hardly even play guitar. His hobby was candle making. He planned to be a marine biologist. His hero was Alfred Korzybski and he liked baseball.

One Sunday afternoon I paid Shapiro a visit. He told me he'd been depressed the night before, so he'd laid awake counting up the women he'd been to bed with in the past year here at Skidmore. One hundred twenty five, he said plaintively. With his penchant for honesty and mathematics, I knew he wasn't exaggerating."

By Tom Dark on January 15, 2010 11:01 AM

Ebert (about my pal Shapiro, nebbish, stud, self-made multimillionaire): What does a guy like that have?

---A complete and utter lack of pretentiousness, is what I finally learned. We're still pals. If it's any consolation, he's been sick a few times. Albeit, he's fine now.

---And now, what does a guy like Roger Ebert have? I went nuts over your last essay and you've topped yourself again. This memoir of yours: if you really want to help save the world, we'll need a chapter titled "How To Do That."

ErrantX• 16 years ago

Brilliant! Made me smile and nod a few times. Choice quotes;

Like many old farts my age, I don't know what to make of the sexual habits of younger generations. I hear about Hooking Up. ..[SNIP].. Let me assure you that Hooking Up was discovered long before it was named.

and

Some of the truest words I've ever written are:

It is more erotic to wonder if you're about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.

enneff• 16 years ago

That latter quote is wonderful.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

I'm not sure I agree on all of his points (particularly the stuff about my generation and sexting and so forth), but this struck me:

> "They "go places in a group of friends." Jeez, haven't these kids ever heard of ditching your friends in order to...whatever?"

This is the only way I know things. This is the only way my peers and I in my generation have ever done things. Maybe I'm not in the right subculture or whatever, but for us dating almost entirely arises from the above... I wonder how "dating" worked back then?

Osmose• 16 years ago

I find it odd to try and spend time with someone I like while other people are around. The 1 on 1, "Let's do something like ping pong or a movie together" model seems more natural to me.

(I'm 21, for a generation reference)

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

I wonder how "dating" worked back then?

Even before dating-via-Facebook, etc., I think things were different.

From watching Happy Days, etc., I conclude that back in the day, people used to "date" multiple people in parallel, and were only monogamous if they were "going steady".

But by the late 70s to early 80s (when I was of the age), this wouldn't have been tolerated. You can only be "dating" one person at a time.

So maybe the doing-things-as-a-group thing is a work-around that's allowing a person to interact with more potential partners than the one-at-a-time rules would allow.

jcmhn• 16 years ago

But by the late 70s to early 80s (when I was of the age), this wouldn't have been tolerated. You can only be "dating" one person at a time.

My time was a bit later, late 80s to early 90s - but at that time the general rule as I experienced it was that above-average women and exceptionally attractive men could get away with multiple dating partners, but it was off limits to the majority,

powauth2• 16 years ago

But also people are now more: A) more sexual with who they date B) are friends more with the opposite sex.

I still recall that when I was in high school, my mother was confused how I had both a girlfriend and several close female friends. Society is definitely different.

abossy• 16 years ago

Going in places in a group of friends is the only way I know things also. In fact, asking a girl on a date almost certainly implies interest in her and even the chance of "hooking up" afterward. All this is on top of the apprehension of the formal interaction a date requires, which isn't appealing to either party in the least.

This is in the Western U.S., and I'm 23. I hoped that as I moved past college and into the "adult" world this would change but the fact that others have experienced it indicates that that may not be true... and I thought it was just me.

SandB0x2• 16 years ago

I was having this conversation recently - half the time it appears people aren't sure if this drink, this lunch, this film, this whatever constitutes a "date". Very few of my friends will approach strangers, it's always through mutual friends, parties, etc, and when it's just down to two people it could legitimately be a date or just an instance of everyone hanging out where |everyone| = 2. Things still work out, but traditional dates do appear fairly rare.

roc2• 16 years ago

His confusion at the younger generation seems mostly due to his trying to piece together the reality from lingo, pop culture and conversations overheard.

E.g. sexting is no more a substitute for physical interaction than the phone was/is. it's still all about contextualizing and coordinating actual physical interaction.

"go places in a group of friends" is more a precursor to a traditional date. It's the meet-and-greet stage, without being explicitly paired off to lower the pressure and expectation. It's also (in large part) a side effect of suburbanization. When you need a ride from a parent to get anywhere, it's a lot simpler and more discrete to say "group of friends" than "this girl I want to get to know". The goal of most kids in any such group is still to ditch the friends.

At least, in my day it was. Which wasn't all that long ago, but technology makes social behavior a fast-moving target.

Locke1689• 16 years ago

I'm not really sure this is Hacker News, but I'm gonna respond anyway. He also confuses a lot of terms. This is definitely someone from the outside looking in.

Sexting, for example, is something only done by high school students. It is a "hey, I'm sitting around with no top on, why don't you run the 2 miles to my house and I'll sneak you in the back door so we can fuck."

"Hooking up" is nothing like he believes. People in relationships don't hook up. Hooking up is when you go to a party with a bunch of people, find someone who you dance with for a little while, make out, then head back to $place and sexile $roommate.

I don't even want to get into Greek life.

nkohari• 16 years ago

I hate to make a meta-comment, but what in the world does this stuff have to do with Hacker News? I continually see people complaining about newsworthy but non-technical articles being posted, and yet hundreds of comments on these posts. Is the HN community really that sex-starved?

rglullis• 16 years ago

Here we go...

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

davidw• 16 years ago

What's "intellectual" about the article?

Also, how do we know that it's "good hackers" voting this stuff up?

That little clause is a wormhole to the redditverse, as people use it to justify pretty much anything.

A much more fun game is "7 degrees of hacker news", where you try and create the most tenuous link possible to defend the "HN worthiness" of an article. Like saying that "Well, this is about hacking, because, see, they had restrictions, and they learned to hack around them! See!" I'm sure others can do better.

(Not that it's a bad article, of course... it's just not something I'd consider germane)

kylemathews• 16 years ago

Seriously. I don't come to Hacker News to read about sex.

SandB0x2• 16 years ago

I'm sure it'll blow over in a day or so, plus a break from "N Ways to X your Y with Clojure" every now and then isn't harmful. I think psychology and sociology are interesting to everyone.

Making out is its own reward

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