In your face

Have you noticed those websites that follow your searches and apply enticements that may invite you to enter an unknown place and over a period time purchase?

It is what technology does now. You can be followed with every click then analyzed to provide you with opportunities to explore what you are interested in.

I’ve talked before about “personal space” and this technology invades mine. I want to go here and it wants to send be there. I say, “Get out of my face.” And cancel. Sorry marketers but this trick does not work on me.

Going to the grocery store I notice the same thing. If I stop to select a product and someone pulls up behind me or even close to me, I will move on. I’ll even go around the aisle and come back again giving the other person time to make their selection and move on. If the space is filled with someone else, I decide it is not worth it and will go somewhere else. I’m sure this is a phobia but I just don’t like getting too close to people unless I invite them into my personal space.

Some head doctor would say, “That is why you live alone.” I would say, “For 9/10’s of my life I have lived with someone else, so there.” Then I think of why these people shared my personal space. Some were family. I had no choice with them because they were there before I was. A roommate in college was not my choice but it worked out well. Then it was marriage. I had never lived alone so maybe I was scared and needed a support system. Marriage is like a roommate with benefits. It took me a number of years to figure out living with another and having “personal space” was difficult if not impossible.

Then for a couple of years, I lived alone. Every room in the house was my “personal space”. I could get up when I wanted to, go to sleep when I wanted to, and I was master of the remote control. It could have killed me.

So I fell back into inviting another into my “personal space” only to realize I had lost it. Maybe this is what we are supposed to do. Compromise or surrender, I could never decide. I found a way to get my “personal space” and seem to enjoy it now.

But with all that said, it is not what I was intending. My message for the moment was getting in your face. Not like a drill instructor who has to persuade you that you are not a person but a team, or a coach yelling in your face giving you trauma over dropping the ball through humiliation before others, but the more pleasurable meaning of “in your face”.

When you invite someone close enough for a kiss, you are sharing you “personal space” with someone else’s “personal space”.  I’m not talking about a kiss on the top of the head by your elderly aunt or that peck on the cheek for a European greeting. I’m talking about that slobbery exchanging of spit and pressing lips together. There is some kind of switch that goes off when you and another press lips.

One of my favorite activities as a teenager (and still now) is called “making out”. It was the exciting acceptance of getting “in your face” with possibilities for much more. The “making out” could be done in the back seat of a car or on a couch (until interrupted by a mother who’s sly smile knows what is going on because she has been there before) or anywhere you can feel private and together. “Making out” has the potential to lead into other possibilities or it can just leave you thrilled and wanting for more.

Unfortunately after the simple pleasure of “making out” and the wandering hands and sweating palms get to second, then third and then a homerun, the innocence is lost. We bypass the enthusiastic pleasure of just enjoying another person who has invited you into her “personal space” and go directly for the home run.  

That is until she says, “Get out of my face!”