A VERY WOMANLY TOUCH

One of my coworkers doubts my sanity at this point.
While I grasp the reason, which I concede is moderately understandable, the logical explanation I offered for my behaviour failed to satisfy, and may have made the perception worse.
You see, he is not a smoker.
It means nothing to him.


IMAGINE WHAT IT FEELS LIKE

You may remember that my job involves substantial telephone work, yes?

While I am on the phone, listening attentively to someone two thousand miles away talking about how their mother-in-law's car failed to start so she had to call a tow truck and rent a limo to attend the wedding of her favourite neighbor's granddaughter which meant that funds need to be wired especially because the very expensive rent-a-limo got into an accident and crushed the hand painted antique municipal garbage receptacles at the corner of Grove and Podunk and the mayor's donkey and that is why that invoice which is past-due will have to be only a little bit later yet (three months), my hands need something to do.

I'm a very good listener. I am sincerely interested in all these details, and my voice tells them so. It's a question of modulation, you see.
Regarding how I sound and how I respond, I betray that I am actually a warm and social person. It's just that my body language well and truly doesn't.
Bit of a disadvantage face-to-face, but in phone conversations it's entirely immaterial.

My body language, when I'm on the phone, involves doodling, twiddling, eye-rolling, yawning, scratching, twitching, wiggling, vibrating up and down, kicking my desk, and a few minor ticks.
As well as playing with my tobacco.

It was that which caught his eye. He sits five feet away from me, and he had never noticed it before.
While I was enthusiastically uttering the fourth or fifth "oh reeeally, do tell" into the phone, I noticed his eyes following my fingers, which were meticulously separating a sheet of pressed flake strand by strand, so that I could dry the product for smoking sometime later in the day.

[Rattray's Marlin Flake - a 'full dark Virginia', with a certain amount of black leaf in the recipe. It comes in foot long strips, and like most tobaccos it is tinned too moist for immediate smoking. And flake also needs to be rubbed out or teased apart. Hence my actions. Marlin Flake smells lovely, by the way. A nice aged almost chocolatey fragrance. Darn good stuff. ]


His eyes were wide, appalled, and fixed upon the tobacco. So after I got off the phone, I explained what I was doing, and showed him the roll still in the tin. Which looks like some kind of jerky. It's a fascinating product. That style of tobacco used to be far more common, but nowadays there are only a few manufacturers with that keen an attention to detail, as well as the love of the craft.
A pity, really. Quality smoking material.


"You know, I never really got into tobacco."


I muttered something about how coffee, tea, tobacco, spices, and perfumes all share certain unique and fascinating traits, and had an air of romance, adventure, history, mystery, attached to them. Interesting!
It didn't help. He's a man with a healthy life-style.
Such things mean nothing to him.
No imagination.


I've got the rubbed-out flake on a sheet of paper between my computer and the phone. Tobacco when it's drying feels cool and silky-velvety to the hand.
Very sensuous. Very erotic.
There are good reasons why it is described in feminine terms.

I like stroking it with my finger tips.
Mmm.



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