Lost in Translation survival crushes and bromances

I had to travel to Melbourne for work. The first night completely away from the kid.  Felt like a long day, 5:30am wake up, airport run, flight through turbulence, commute and traffic jam and a conference filled with 40 minute long presentations. 

By the second day,  I recalled Peep Show when Mark and Jez go on a double date to a modern theatre performance and think they may explode of boredom before intermission. I also recalled Lost in Translation, the survival friendship between Scarlett Johanson and Bill Murray. 

Each of us at the conference, dying of boredom, may have hoped for a Bill or a Scarlett. My boss had many invites to accompany mature ladies to dinner, but was relieved I wanted to decline all offers so we could spend cocktail hour in the lounge of our 19th floor apartment, watching the sunset. 

As the night darkened, we joined in the dinner plans of Jed, who had delivered a conference presentations on resilience. A radio voice, young and male, reprieve. Not a Bill though. Dinner confirmed he was well loved/high self esteem, but he had studied anthropology. Great! The distribution of health resources is a political and economic issue, to do with how we believe society should function. 

 After dinner at a crappy Southbank restaurant (my boss confessed he would have preferred to have known my interest in hipster dining in Fitzroy or Richmond), we drank in Flinders Lane and some pub found after a fruitless search for a whiskey bar. By this stage I'd been drinking since 6pm, keeping up with a six foot ex-basketball player, in that zone one gets as you walk around and talk rubbish with people you will never see again. I called out "knuckles" and we bumped fists, my boss explaining it to Jed, all three of us parent bonded. It reminded me how Kathy returned from Geneva, sighing about the missed opportunities, the fellow intern whose attractive girlfriend was just his attractive flatmate, now destined to become her unobtainable fantasy man. Charmain Clift wrote an ode to the real men in our life, reminding women who sigh about husband's failings, once he was a man in the prime of his youth, whilst you force the mantle of responsibility, you might also smother the playful fun loving joy. 

So to my husband, the constant. I appreciate and recall the younger version of himself, the kind hearted and conversational man I met, and see his energy coming through in the kid. Parenting a son is a chance to revisit my husband as a young man, discover what he might have been like as a boy. 

I asked my boss to elaborate and define his meaning of bromance. We agreed it isn't the same as "girlfriends" who shop and go to ]movies and drink champers. There is an element (according to him) of aspiration and identity, finding a male you really admire the masculine/energy qualities in and would like to be like/be around to help you achieve that physical state. The closest equivalent, is to have a female friendship that is without competition, only encouragement and fulfilment of character.