I spent a lovely 32 hours at home this weekend, after getting stuck in traffic for five hours and driving through Greenwich, Connecticut, which I had never done previous to that point, and seeing all these mansions (or rather, not seeing them, because they're all gated and far back from the road and the only thing you can really see is their huge tracts of land and apple orchards and stables and tennis courts), and feeling grossly out of place driving my dented Honda Civic along the road with Lexuses and BMWs and Audis surrounding me on every side.

That's certainly not the Connecticut I live in.

After spending several months high and dry in terms of a love life, minus a few blips, I'm finding how physically-driven I've become. I find myself searching for rings on left hands when I meet guys at work. I turn on the charm at parties with guys who I don't even find attractive, and I feign attentiveness and laugh heartily at their inane jokes. And I fantasize about being a more uninhibited woman, who has guiltless one-night stands, who picks up strangers in downtown coffee shops, who is gloriously sexy in her sexual independence, who has no emotional cares or qualms or conservative feelings about exacting pleasure for pleasure's sake.

And so then I sit alone in my apartment and eat chocolate cake and return to being me, who is very much the opposite of all these things, and wouldn't know how to initiate a purely sexual confrontation even if she was given written instructions.

And really, that's not what I want, and that's why I'd feel guilty about getting it. It's not like I don't have opportunities - I can count at least two that I have in the bag, I'd just have to linger in a hug or tilt my head a certain way or turn playfulness into prowess, and I'd be taken and ravaged and left afterwards feeling empty and abused.

I can't fully fathom why I pay such attention to the rules.