I have an extraordinarily high threshold for how long I can look at various objects, furniture, and fabrics. Even if I have no intention of purchasing any of these things, I find great joy in just contemplating them and imagining their possibilities in my mind. I think this is what my partner calls “shopping,” and by comparison, his threshold for this is very low.

When shopping with Seth, I am always slightly on edge, because I never know when his patience is going to expire, and so I am constantly trying to gauge how much longer I have left until his threshold is reached, and he begins launching his campaign to return home.

Seth wasn’t with me in Cappadocia, watching this potter, but I had something completely different that was making me nervous. The man would regularly ask for volunteers to come up and help him create his next piece, and I was terrified that it would somehow end up being me.

I imagined multiple situations where my clay starts spinning out of control and splatters all the people, walls and ceiling of the cramped art studio, and an even weirder scenario where the man starts trying to Patrick Swayze me from behind…

Luckily, the gal he selected appeared to already have a substantial degree of competency behind a potter’s wheel. And while things never spun out of control or turned into Ghost, the overall process of him helping to guide her hands through the clay was, honestly, quite sensual.

It was by no means sexual—what was transpiring between this man and the young woman he was teaching— but the process was viscerally engaging and sensual enough of that I remember thinking…

Ah. I can certainly see how a screenwriter might have seen something like this and thought, “This would make a very sexy scene between a hot woman and her hot dead husband!”

🏺👻🏺👻🏺