Printed Displays of Affection

I thought Lissa was mad at me because I didn't want her to encase her corpse in plastic. Turns out she was just using me for an article.

A few weeks back, she asked me, nonchalantly, what I thought about the possibility of her donating her body to the grand exhibitionist science of cutting people up and displaying their sharded innards in plastic in museums. I said I thought she'd be right 'purty, but that I had some reservations about the body-cutters who would do the deed. We sparred about it, me raising ethical objections and she parrying them, and then we moved on to other topics.

Then a week later, we had one of those monosyllabic phone calls that are the hobgoblin of relationships. Instead of launching into the usual effortless chatter that we've been relying on as an essential primate-bonding ritual to make our  long-distance relationship work, she answered my questions in grunts.

Being me, I pestered her with all the arrows in my quiver--belligerent berating, quiet cajoling, matching her silence for silence. All I got out of her was the old news about how she wants a vacation and an assistant at work.

So we hung up early, and I worried, fingers poised above the relationship panic button.

"Maybe this is what it'll be like once the novelty wears off."
"Maybe this is just an off night."
And scariest of all: "Maybe this is what she sounds like when she's about to tell me something I really don't want to hear."

A fitful night of sleep later, I got an email from her. It was a draft of an article about plastination that she's been working on for weeks. I, unwittingly, had provided a quote. She'd been using me as a lab rat all along, secretly storing away my commentary on the subject for publication. The bad mood of the night before was partially due, she said, to a sudden attack of guilt about her sneakiness. 

Some people have diaries. Lissa has editorials.

Ethical issues of quoting someone without their knowledge aside, it's probably trouble to be dating someone who uses her private life as fodder for public work. But her penchant for Printed Displays of Affection is one of the reasons I love her. I partially fell for Lissa after reading her published rant about the hopelessness of hooking up with straight girls. (It hit a nerve. Sue me.) So even though I'm haunted by the specter of her breaking up with me via newstand, I'm largely a fan of being filed in the public record. After all, I can fight back with the occasional public confessional of my own. And there will always be a paper trail.

Comments

[bixi]

oh this is adorable. Now help me find Lissa's piece on hooking up with straight girls - I can't find it on the dig website! and I remember loving it.

missing you, jules!