Many years ago, before my husband and I had kids, we had a good friend, who was bright and caring and yearned to travel and explore, and he was a finagler.
There are philanderers , and then there is this fascinating sub classification of finaglers, who are philanderers who get around rules by being polite and open about their philandering.
It's really quite clever, to be unabashedly open with friends and family and those you want to finagle with and those who are partners of who you finagle .
It throws everyone off, and no one knows what to do or think. Or even how to be pissed off.
You are kind of like the bored bad boy at the party, only you are very polite and caring about it.
He'd even ask me, when my then-not-husband was not around, who was his friend, if I would like to finagle with him.
I'd punch him in the arm, and tell him to shut up and bug off. I guess I just understood that was who he was.
He seemed to have a part-time fascination with openly finagling partnered women , while being very nice and thoughtful with their partners.
He ended up finally getting together with a French woman, who knew of his finagling ways, who got pregnant and constantly wore high heels , every day, to my astonishment, even on hikes.
I think he was wandering around in China, doing photography and writing, when their first kid was born back in Paris .
Later, he married someone else, worked his way up to high pressure journalism jobs and fancy homes and more offspring.
I can't imagine he ever left off his finagling, which I guess retained some nice-bad-boy access to some exemption clause found in the Peter Pan Principles.
I do remember, that once he knew you were a friend and not a possible finaglee, he'd drink lots of wine and want to talk long bullshit analyticals about the origins or contributing factors to his finaglesse. Like ruminating over a trunk of precious stuff.
Which bored me to tears, because there was nothing substantial he'd be contemplating, instead just wanting an audience as he gathered up his rationalizations, perhaps now and then wanting a pardon for anything lousy that his being oh so kind and open might not have covered sufficiently.
In the meantime, my beloved and I had a kid first , my honey working overtime at a cooperatively owned garage, coming home exhausted and polluted by fumes, dancing a crabby baby to sleep, and then spending hours at the laundromat with the diapers purring in the washers and dryers.
While this guy trotted the globe and got fancy cameras and explored and had terribly in depth Lefty conversations and finagled his way here and there.
My husband was not a finagling type, but definitely ached to travel and write and photograph. It was a mean juxtaposition, the car mechanic with kid versus the traveler.
We would get postcards and letters from far off places with little tiny words describing adventures in beautiful fine print. And my beloved would of course be disconsolate for weeks after.
In the meantime, our finagler friend would return now and then, from his vast exotic travels , and could be seen surreptitiously gazing curiously at our our delicious homespun bond ,as he did some pretty thick yearning of his own.
There are philanderers , and then there is this fascinating sub classification of finaglers, who are philanderers who get around rules by being polite and open about their philandering.
It's really quite clever, to be unabashedly open with friends and family and those you want to finagle with and those who are partners of who you finagle .
It throws everyone off, and no one knows what to do or think. Or even how to be pissed off.
You are kind of like the bored bad boy at the party, only you are very polite and caring about it.
He'd even ask me, when my then-not-husband was not around, who was his friend, if I would like to finagle with him.
I'd punch him in the arm, and tell him to shut up and bug off. I guess I just understood that was who he was.
He seemed to have a part-time fascination with openly finagling partnered women , while being very nice and thoughtful with their partners.
He ended up finally getting together with a French woman, who knew of his finagling ways, who got pregnant and constantly wore high heels , every day, to my astonishment, even on hikes.
I think he was wandering around in China, doing photography and writing, when their first kid was born back in Paris .
Later, he married someone else, worked his way up to high pressure journalism jobs and fancy homes and more offspring.
I can't imagine he ever left off his finagling, which I guess retained some nice-bad-boy access to some exemption clause found in the Peter Pan Principles.
I do remember, that once he knew you were a friend and not a possible finaglee, he'd drink lots of wine and want to talk long bullshit analyticals about the origins or contributing factors to his finaglesse. Like ruminating over a trunk of precious stuff.
Which bored me to tears, because there was nothing substantial he'd be contemplating, instead just wanting an audience as he gathered up his rationalizations, perhaps now and then wanting a pardon for anything lousy that his being oh so kind and open might not have covered sufficiently.
In the meantime, my beloved and I had a kid first , my honey working overtime at a cooperatively owned garage, coming home exhausted and polluted by fumes, dancing a crabby baby to sleep, and then spending hours at the laundromat with the diapers purring in the washers and dryers.
While this guy trotted the globe and got fancy cameras and explored and had terribly in depth Lefty conversations and finagled his way here and there.
My husband was not a finagling type, but definitely ached to travel and write and photograph. It was a mean juxtaposition, the car mechanic with kid versus the traveler.
We would get postcards and letters from far off places with little tiny words describing adventures in beautiful fine print. And my beloved would of course be disconsolate for weeks after.
In the meantime, our finagler friend would return now and then, from his vast exotic travels , and could be seen surreptitiously gazing curiously at our our delicious homespun bond ,as he did some pretty thick yearning of his own.
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