Archive for Blogging
Synchronous linkhronous
One of the questions in the post below merges into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few days. Handy.
How desirable/feasible is a stable multi-way relationship?
Open for business
I seem to be adopting a vague advice-giving role. It’s kinda fun, and nice to be reaching a point where I actually have useful experience to draw on. (Aside: Aunt Agony would be a great nom de plume for a column about SM.)
Questions in the pending pile include:
• The aforementioned 2a – which went something like, “Yes, yes, that’s how you act, but what about how you don’t act? What about overcoming fear and the instinct to defend against invasion?” (wrt falling for third parties)
• Then we have “Is a permanent multiway relationship desirable and achievable?”
• “You’ve mentioned affairs and dishonesty. What changed?”
Anyone want to know anything else?
I promise not to write about mucus
Egads. I had no idea such vast tracts of internet real estate had been claimed by women ‘trying to conceive’ (TTCers).
It makes for scary reading. The blogs are ok – if women want to write about the thickness of their cervical mucus that’s their business – but the forums and chat rooms are infuriating.
There are endless women with names that probably aren’t ‘Permanently Apoplectic of Tunbridge Wells’ asking, for example, whether a TTCer can take B vitamins.
It’s a reasonable question (as it’s the one I was googling 
but the same person writes again: Hi, I’m still waiting for an answer.
And then again: No one’s answered my question yet. I’m getting really worried about whether I should stop or not. Can someone help?
Then: I really need someone to reply soon. I don’t know what everyone’s problem is. It’s an important question.
All in the span of 15 minutes.
So much intellectual laziness! It took me about 97 seconds to get google-consensus on an answer. On a forum it’s usually as easy as searching their archives – yet people sit back barking questions, demanding answers and refusing to do any work for themselves. Gah.
I guess this is true of any forum, but there seems to be a certain sort of crazy pervading the pregnancy sites.
Anyway, my other question was whether or not my lube was spermicidal. I answered that one all by myself by reading the label – a rewarding act as I came across this gem:
Avoid contact with ears.
Woah. The world contains some much kinkier people than I’d realised, if we need to stop folk lubing up their ears.
Self-censorship
I have gone back and edited a post on here, at the request of someone mentioned in it.
And I have written posts I’ve never intended to publish, usually because they talk too intimately about someone else. (Writing helps me make sense of my thoughts, so these unpublished pieces serve an important function.)
Once I wrote something that I intended to publish, but decided against at the last minute. It was about a work issue and reactively written – a childish, angry mess.
Is prudence the same as censorship?
I’m not going to publish a post I haven’t written about my new job.
I’m not angry, just frustrated, but something tells me maybe I should exercise a bit of caution. It might get messy, it might not. I don’t know. Hopefully I can figure it out and resolve things soon.
No on 8, too late?
Last year Californians voted in favour of changing their state constitution so that marriage is defined as a union between one man and one women.
It was previously defined as a union between two people, meaning the state recognised same-sex marriages. The amendment is called
Proposition 8.
Now the “Yes on 8″ guys have filed to forcibly divorce all same-sex couples married before the amendment was passed.
I am not American, and I don’t expect to ever marry a girl, but this shit should matter to all of us. The video below is beautiful and
heart-rending.
25 things
A Facebook meme. I think they are supposed to be random, surprising, amusing. Mine turned more exposé, hence it’s posted here, not on FB.
1. I am 28
2. I have suffered from two major depressive episodes, and a few minor ones. I accept that this might happen again so now instead of pushing back I look for ways to live round it.
3. I don’t mind the idea of not existing, but I am worried about death being painful.
4. When waiting for the tube, I am paranoid that someone is going to push me onto the tracks (see above).
5. I have two body piercings and a tattoo.
6. I lost my boy virginity at 14. It wasn’t a very good idea.
7. I lost my girl virginity at 18. It was an excellent idea.
8. I have lucid dreams, like the kid from Waking Life.
9. I am fascinated by psychedelics, but sometimes find them challenging. You have to be comfortable inside your own head. My mother thinks all drugs = escapism; she is wrong.
10. I never want to stop learning.
11. I want to have children, and already feel a sense of loss knowing that if I do a good job bringing them up, one day they will out-grow me.
12. I have started writing a graphic novel about fish, and a thesis about post-evolutionary psychology taboos. I wonder if they’ll ever get finished.
13. When I was 14 I told my chemistry teacher I would rather have a job I liked than good pay. Last time round I got both – now I am spoilt!
14. I am a control freak, and I am guarded with strangers (aloof). It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I realised these things.
15. I make a mean toad-in-the-hole.
16. I have been to high class orgies with wall-to-wall Champagne, cocaine and beautiful people, and only ever had an alright time.
17. I have fallen into bed with friends, pissed and giggly and wearing mismatched underwear, and always had an amazing time.
18. I once sustained concussion giving head in a bathroom in Bangkok (with a bellyful of whiskey and speed).
19. I don’t own any bathroom scales.
20. I read the Dao De Jing when I was 21, and was amazed that someone had verbalised what I felt about life.
21. My favourite novel is The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo.
22. Martha Gellhorn is the famous figure I most admire, and probably the writer who has most inspired me.
23. I try to be honest with myself. This blog is a tool in that process.
24. I like who I am.
25. Life makes me smile.
Challenging psycho-social experiment
I’ve made another blog, to talk about the highs and lows of starting a new life a million miles from everything I’ve known and loved for the past 28 years.
On the assumption that I’m gonna send the link to propah grown-ups (family &tc), I’ve decided it’s gonna be PG-level content.
Except, I spend most of my waking life talking, thinking and writing about sex. (I rarely dream about it 
). Keeping it clean is going to be quite a challenge.
I hadn’t realised the extent to which I was afflicted until I tried to write about the fact that the nervous excitement is making me manic *without* mentioning that I was moved to bring myself off in the toilets at work, just so I could calm down enough to concentrate on something for more than eight and a half seconds.
It’s fun being this crazy without being depressed. I’m generally hypomanic, so I have highs but the lows always have a lot more impact. But this is full on mania and I’ve been bouncing around, grinning from ear to ear for more than a week.
Notably, I have a very specific sense that all my systems are running at capacity. My mind feels sharper, my appetites are insatiable (food, booze, sex, drugs, spanking, hardhouse) and I can’t seem to sit still for a second.
Dunno how sustainable it is, but at the moment life is like being at the best theme-park ever!
Observation
Concussion is bad for many things, but it is good for having lots of time to blog.
Sacred and profane
I hesitated to write the word cunt on my Facebook profile yesterday, because my mother was likely to be reading. Apart from being quaintly old fashioned, this struck me later as being pretty silly.
Sure, it can be offensive – if I shouted “I hate you, you stupid cunt,” at my sister, she’d be right to be upset. But I could shout “I hate you, you pygmy toad,” with equal malice and that would hurt too. In that case it wouldn’t be the words used, but the sentiment conveyed that would be distressing.
When we break it down, we generally agree that no letters have mystical powers. Yet this particular combination of them produces one of the most powerfully offensives sounds an Anglophone can make. How odd, when you think of it like that.
Of course, I realise it’s not the sound, it’s what the sound represents that we find offensive. But again, when you really think about it, it’s pretty strange. Other body parts fail to elicit the same reaction – mouths can be just as dark and wet as your common or garden cunt, but no one quails at the word ‘gob’.
I think we, the sacred feminine, the proud possessors of the mighty cunt, must be partly to blame. Even ardent non-feminists chastise people fiercely for using the word, perpetuating the myth that a sound or a label can be a dangerous thing.
Perhaps you could argue that gender-specific abuse is derogatory to one sex or another, yet male genitalia provide us with a host of insults without engendering the same hullabaloo – dick, prick, knob, cock are all cheerfully offensive.
Perhaps because Englishmen have been making fun of their cocks since at least Shakespeare, they are now inured to the shock of referencing them.
Who knows, if grown men paled and swooned when reminded that they have genitalia, maybe I’d suddenly be a whole lot more cautious about using the term knob-jockey in front of my mum.
