Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I mostly liked Victoria Coren's take on That Book, which "puts the 'b' into anal"; pointing out that everyone's finding it difficult to read made me grin with schadenfreude. (Though calling safewords "nerdy" is a new one on me!)

Mystified by what's supposed to be sexy about it, she decides it's that the dommy guy can make the woman eat.

We need no longer pretend that those clothes are coming off against our better judgment. But what kind of a hussy says openly that she'd like a stack of pancakes and syrup? As if she cared not a fig for social rules of weight and waistline?

A couple of my friends have decided in recent months that my kink is denial, and mock me mercilessly for this at any given opportunity (it's impossible to argue with someone who says you get off on denying things; try it sometime).

Fuck that. My kink is clearly pancakes.

“You might want to hide Lost Girls somewhere your parents won’t see it,” Andrew sensibly pointed out as he walked past it, just sititng on the floor next to my computer desk.

“Good point,” I said. “I already thought I was doing well to have moved the Valentine’s Day card I got from Stu from off the cork board in the kitchen...” (He didn’t sign it, not with his name anyway, but i’m sure they’d comment on how Andrew’s suddenly got so good at drawing airplanes and I just don’t want to have to think about that.)

“And your dildo,” Andrew said.

“I don’t have to hide that!” I said. “It already lives in my sock drawer!”

“And they’ll be staying in our room!” Andrew said.

“I don’t think they’d... look... through...the drawers,” I said, sounding more worried as that sentence went on.

Andrew cackled mercilessly. “But is that a risk you want to take?” I could hear him grinning; i didn’t even have to look.

“But... where can I hide things if not in my very own bedroom?!” Okay, I’ve since thought of reasonable answers to that, but that’s not the point! The point is that i’ve never had to think about parent-proofing my house before! Gah!

Dear Brain,

My life, as I have recently noted, has become bewilderingly full of people who love and fancy me.

So what, then , is wih your recent streak of giving me SEX DREAMS

WITH PEOPLE I DON’T FANCY!?

No love,
Holly

(P.S. I’m abstractly pleased that it was in both cases good sex and that one time was with a woman; it’s nice to know the plague of boyfriends* hasn’t made me forget about them entirely.)


* To make this entry a little bit less content-free, I shall point out that the specific plagues have been chosen. Stu immediately asked if he could be an STD (and when Oliver pointed out that this might be how he signs his infamously-typolicious text messages, I told him he already was one). Dan wants to be a rhinovirus, even though he doesn’t know what that is, he just likes the sound of it. Andrew’s gone for scrumpox, which is his favorite STD and the name he gave to our pub quiz team the week that we actually won. After he said he learned this from a Monty Python song I had him and Stuart baffling me by singing this song about venereal diseases at me.

This [p.s. naughty words in the title but not really unsafe for anything] is why I was thinking last week, as I was making sure none of my skin was touching any of my other skin, that it’s amazing Greek people are still with us because I can’t imagine how they reproduce.

i was reading james joyce, and it made me think of you ;) he said.

I was speechless -- well, typeless really, considering it's instant messages -- for a moment. Having dropped out of Victorian and Modern Literature (thank all the gods I don't believe in for that!) before we got to Ulysses, I am woefully inexperienced in James Joyce, having only read a handful of the stories in Dubliners.

Thus unsure whether to be flattered or worried, I was instead just rabidly curious at what could make my friend think that. Further explanation was finally forthcoming: i was actually thinking of the passage that led to one of the first trials for obscenity in america... :D

Ah. Well, that's all right then!

Finally he found it for me and I had to grin.

"Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere- seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom- and no one is corrupted."

You can blame it, perhaps, on reading Tipping the Velvet when I was waiting for my train, but on the way home in a very busy train there was a girl I bumped into, my clumsiness only exacerbated by the fact that I had my little backpack on my back and a big heavy box (new printer) I was lugging around by a piece of string wrapped around it. There was not room for us on the crowded commuter train -- I murmuered a "sorry" when I first nudged up against her when more people tried to get on the train after I did; she said it was all right and was one of those few who sounded like she meant it -- and even less room when the train started moving.

I was terribly awkward (especially being aware of how British people like the illusion of Personal Space no matter how crowded their surroundings) but somehow still deliciously conscious of her leaning back on me as we swayed with the train, my nose near to the nape of her neck, I couldn't help studying the curls that fell from under her hat, the earrings that dangled from her ears, moving as we did, back and forth with the motion of the train, and most of all the way she, yes, leaned back. Her weight and warmth on my shoulder and my arm, so that I couldn't stop fidgeting with that hand, ostensibly holding onto my cumbersome box. That she made not even token efforts to apologize perfunctorily to, or move away from me made it somehow more complimentary to me than if she'd acknowledged me; she didn't mind me there.

Oh god. It may be dreary and overcast but I can have no doubt that it's spring.

(I hope I remember to delete this in the morning, eh?)

Thanks ruudboy, this'll give me nightmares, but my friends list is full of perverts so they'll probably like it.

diffrentcolours has just inadvertently reminded me of the multiple times over my Christmas break that I came a bit too close to telling my mom that vegetable shortening, a.k.a. Crisco, which forms such a large part of her cooking is all but unheard of in the UK, to the point that I'm sure I learned from a fellow Midwest ex-pat (with, needless to say, a far more interesting life than mine) that the only place you can get Crisco in the UK is in sex shops.

It wouldn't do any good trying to reassure her that Crisco is -- apparently! -- good for things I don't know anything about. I think just knowing people who have gone into sex shops would be bad enough.

My family have a low threshold for naughtiness.

How do you feel your carer/parent(s) attitude to relationships/love/sex etc. affected your attitudes?

I promised lostpositive I would answer her question in an entry of its own rather than a comment, because knowing me it'd get too long.


When my brother was a freshman in high school, my mom had a conversation with him that ended with her wandering to my room and saying "Just like it was for you!"

I, probably, looked up from a book. What had I done now? I was very sensitive to her lumping us both together in stupid/bad/disrespectful things that "the kids" did. We were such different kids that it irritated me to no end.

"Just like you weren't allowed to date until you were sixteen," she said.

"What? Really?" Is that all? Hey, wait a minute... "You never even told me that!" I said. My brother was fifteen at the time. I was seventeen.

That's what my parents taught me about relationships: you can't have one until you're sixteen. Well, clearly that wasn' tmuch of a problem for me. I wasn't so much as asked to dinner or a movie until I was 20.

My mom was married when she was 20. My dad was 23. It's hard to think of them at that age. Well my dad still retains a streak of enjoying loud music, crazy driving, and low-level silliness, but he is otherwise a reticent farmer from the Midwest. My mom frets about unpaired socks and what hamburger-riddled thing to make for dinner tonight, and too never talks about much... certainly not things like love. How did they manage it? They clearly love each other; I've never doubted that for a second, but how did they ever find out they did?

My mom actually told me a few weeks ago that in cleaning out the attic in preparation to finally insulate it, she found a box of the letters she and Dad sent to each other when they were dating. Before I could even express my delight over this she went on to nonchalantly tell me that she threw them away, of course. I was speechless. So I guess I'll never know how they managed to fall in love. I can't picture it at all. (Except for this.)

I have always been happy to be touched and told nice things because it never really happened in my childhood. I felt a glutton for affection when I was in college and suddenly had friends who'd hug me and let me talk about anything. And I knew that'd be important to me in a relationship, and that's one of the things I appreciate most about Andrew; he's the best giver of hugs and listener to my stories that I know of. So I guess my parents taught me to appreciate the opposite of them in that respect.

As for sex, as davmoo says, I can safely say that if I relied on my parents for information I would not know that there is a difference between girls and boys.

My mom did check out a couple of books from the library for me. One was the standard "how babies are made" thing and the other was called something like Now That You Have Your Period. Which I didn't, actually, and I didn't even know what the hell it was talking about. I read the books, of course — I read everything — and I still didn't have any idea how this baby-making actually worked or what to expect of my period when it did show up.

And they never talked to me about sex. Oh, except when my cousin got pregnant when she was sixteen; in a Catholic family this is even more a crisis than usual, and I remember during one of the discussions about it my mom looked over at me (I was not otherwise part of the discussion) and said "You better not ever do this!" I, about twelve, had no plans to do so. I still didn't even know how I could possibly get pregnant even if I wanted to ... and it would be another dozen or so years before I had any reason at all to fear I might be pregnant. (I wasn't. Don't worry.)

Other than that, nothing. Oh, I heard mom talk about how she was hoping my brother wasn't having sex (though she didn't say so in so many words of course) or at least that he wouldn't get his girlfriend pregnant... but even when she told me that, she never said she hoped that I wasn't having sex or getting pregnant! Admittedly that didn't seem my style at all but I was in college by then and could've been getting up to anything! She wouldn't know! And she worried about far more ludicrous things (once when there was a piece about increasing meth use on the local news she told Chris and I we better not try that), so wasn't I worth a little sexual paranoia?

It was rather disappointing to find I was not. If even your mom's sure you're never going to get laid, what chance do you have?

I don't think any of this affected my attitude to sex, though, except to keep me from ever talking about it. By now I'm happy to pretend that I don't know anything about sex and have never done it. And I'm married. They have to let Andrrew and I sleep in the same bed now (it was actually considered the lesser evil to put him in Chris's room back when those wounds were fresh and raw rather than let him stay in my bedroom with me before the wedding). Still I'm happy to believe that I've never had sex, when I'm around them, just as I believe they've never had sex. That's even more unimaginable than them falling in love.

And hey, I'm adopted. It could be true.

I saw this in a souvenir shop yesteday and spent the rest of the afternoon regretting not buying it.

Apart from the times when I was thinking Surely you can't fit enough of it on there to be worth bothering with! (I only saw it for second at the checkout, and wrapped up in a little plastic box. It looks a little more impressive in the photo. My yearning only increases.)

In other tube-related titilation, I have changed my desktop's background image from a snapshot of the Minneapolis skyline (I like looking at the road signs in front of it; the exit to W 94 particularly) to a photo I stumbled over today when looking for something else; this lovely Escheresque photo of the Morden station. (Lest you wonder, Morden is way at the southern end of the Northern Line, which goes more or less through the middle of the tube map, so it'd be way off the naughtiness scale, according to the above knickers.) The last few times I've minimized the browser window, the photo's given my brain that feeling that your elbow gets when you hit it just wrong, but I figure that sort of thing must be good for me.


P.S. Andrew asked me to mention that The National Pep's new EP, Love Punks Want to Make You Cry, is now available, for the princely sum of £2 or $5. At the moment you can get it directly from him, if you paypal the money to andrew@thenationalpep.co.uk, but it'll soon be up on CDBaby too.

Friday night Andrew got more scared than he'd ever been. Friday night I probably scared him more than I've ever scared anybody before (though I suppose my mom could give him a run for his money at least).

It's no good to scare someone you love. But I think it's even worse if you don't even remember doing it.

I could've done without that discovery.

( How my clown pajamas got their (sorta) public debut. )


( Wherein my favorite breakfast is complimented by an ambulance man. )


( The sex scene. )

I've been fine ever since. Exhausted, but fine. Life goes on; that's my favorite thing about it.