Hurt

Lately, I’ve been wondering why it is that sadists very often say about their masochistic partners, “And then I decided to hurt him a little” or “I really wanted to hurt her then”.

I rarely notice masochists saying, “And then she decided to hurt me for a while,” or “I could tell he really wanted to hurt me.”

It might just be me, but I notice doms (sadists okay whatever yeah I know S&M and D/s are not the same thing can we move on please cool mkay) saying this hurt thing a lot.

And I rarely notice it in reverse.  I hear subs talking about the specific ways they like to be hurt–specific types of pain or specific implements.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be?  This is a genuine question.  I am pretty sure there’s a linguistic difference but I’m not sure why.

Maybe because in English it’s quite natural to say, “I feel pain” but not “I inflict pain”?

Maybe because “I hurt” in the passive sense has an emotional connotation that people tend to stay away from?  Or it just seems to suggest bad pain?

Could it be that the infliction of pain is really different for the top, who isn’t, of course, feeling it–it’s all just pain?  Whereas the bottom feels the nuances?

My sadistic streak is my weakest link . . . it’s hard for me to bring myself to hurt someone, even when I know the person is getting a great deal of pleasure out of it.  And so I  struggle to understand sadism; I can’t wrap my mind around it very well, which gets in the way of things between me and Robbie.  With everything else, I can see things fairly well through his eyes, but when it comes to hurting, I start to feel very lost.

And that’s a shame, because I not only like when he hurts me; I need him to hurt me.

Edit 1: I realize I have only noticed women dominants talking about hurting their boyfriends, not male dominants talking about hurting their girlfriends.  I have no idea why this is.  Maybe my sample is skewed.

Edit 2: In my further search for evidence I just found this post by Dev, telling about a time Jos asked her to hurt him.

Okay so let me rephrase the question: am I the only one who thinks this is the way people talk?  How do you talk about pain, if you want it?  How do you talk about hurting, if you want to do it?

Tell me everything!

Graphic pics at tears.of.eros.

 

Where in the World Is Sera?

I’m here.  But not really.  Because in two weeks, my cats and I are moving again, back to my home town.  I’m moving into my mother’s basement apartment.  I decided it made more sense for me to live with her, rent-free, and job hunt at the worst time in probably the last 3 decades than to have her subsidize me to the tune of $Obscene/month in order to stay where I am and work at my wonderful but part-time and pathetically paying job.  (Did that sentence make any sense?)

So this is just to say that I’m here, but not totally.  A little distracted.  More soon, thinking of you, wish you were here, and so forth.

Illustration by Kenny Harris (a.k.a. Sicksheep) via Illustrophile.

 

Chez Robert

 

This visit, as an experiment, Robbie and I agreed that I would get to do a lot of the cooking.  I have been begging to do this for months, because I love to cook and because cooking for someone is an obvious way to provide service.  (Why did I say I wasn’t a service submissive?  I forget.)

Usually, having me cook is inconvenient, because Robbie lives with folks not all of whom would appreciate my cooking.  But this visit we have had his place to our ownsome, and I have gotten to whip up quite a few things that pleased him.

Last night, as we sat down to a salad that I’d made and some sausages he’d grilled to perfection, I began to brag about what excellent food we’d put on the table, between us, the last week or so.  (Apparently, one of my frequent conversational themes is, “Look at what a great team we make.”)  And I poked fun at myself for ever having believed, as I did at one point, that our respective eating habits and preferences were such that we’d be unable to have a happy relationship.  (I’m nothing if not hyper-dramatic.)

Robbie looked at me a little confused.  He didn’t remember what I was talking about.  “Don’t you remember,” I said, between bites of sausage and mouthfuls of beer, “that fight we had, about two years ago, when I wanted to talk about food, and you said that you thought menu planning was the least of our problems?”

“I don’t remember the fight, but you’re right, if we lived together menu planning would be the least of our problems.”

He looked at his sausage, and I waited for what he was going to say next.

“It would be cock for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he said.  He took a drink of beer, warming to his theme, while considering the label on the can.  “Would you care for an appetizer?  Could I offer you some cock?  No?  Well then you must be ready for the main course then–big, steaming cock.  How about dessert?  We have an excellent mousse au cock.”

He looked at me, totally deadpan.  “Care for a digestif?”

I was in fits of giggles by now, but he wouldn’t stop.  “Perhaps you would like to choose our special menu, table d’hote. Seven courses of cock.  Magnifique.”

“No,” he said.  “I don’t think menu planning would be our biggest problem.  I don’t think it would be a problem at all.”

Amen to that. 

The work of Roy Stuart.

 

Ties to the Land

Robbie owns five acres of stunning farmland, a fact I don’t think I’ve mentioned here before.  His land is so beautiful he often jokes that I’m in the relationship for his property rather than for him.  The joke is funny because we both know it’s a litte too close to the truth.  The first night I met him, he took my hand and led me out to show me the back fields, and the night sky above them, and wrapped me in his arms while I sighed happily.  “Feels like home, doesn’t it?” he murmured into my ear. “It does,” I nodded.

It still does, now more than ever.  He and I have plowed and planted here, buried and raised pets, kissed in virtually every corner.  I’ve written so little this visit because we’re in the midst of laying out a garden that is 2800 sq. feet, or maybe 2900–I forget, or he recalculates.  In fact, there has not been a whole lot of time and energy for things besides eating, working, eating, and sleeping.  (Especially since I sleep 11 hours a day when given the opportunity.) 

Nonetheless, Robbie has done more than his share to facilitate fun in the midst of farming.  A couple of days ago, he had me string a trellis for the 6″ snow peas and snap peas that are eager to climb something, anything.  I wove and tied binder twine (or is it baling twine?) in a zig-zag pattern between two horizontal pieces of clothes-line.  The plan is that at the end of the summer, we can throw pea vines and binder twine directly into the compost bin. 

Robbie had to teach me a few knots in order for me to make the trellis: a square knot, to tie pieces of twine together, an overhand knot, so that I could tie the twine to the wire, and a half-hitch, so I could secure the overhand knot.   Well, he didn’t so much as teach me the knots as teach me the names for them, and make me aware that motions I’d been making rather randomly all my life were distinct and distinguishable.  A half a day spent tying scratchy fibers definitely got my bondage juices flowing, though, and Robbie is more than attuned enough to me to take advantage of any and all juices he notices.

Later that afternoon, I took a shower and asked if there was anything more to do.  He said he had a particular task for me that might give me an idea of what my long-term farming “duties” might be like if I were around the place more often.  It turned out that this involved wearing a chest harness while I raked up a few grass cuttings from the front lawn and put them around some plants as mulch.  When I’d done that comfortably, Robbie tightened the ropes and gave me another job to do–possibly the difficult task of taking a nap.  (After three years, he is getting accustomed to my habits.)  And after one more readjustment of the ropes, I got to set the table, make a salad for dinner, and sit down with him for a bit before my ropes came off. 

I love rope almost as much as I love Robbie and his farm–in honesty, it is sometimes difficult o say which holds pride of place in my heart.  I was thinking about rope today, and about this post, and about how if I wrote it, I might be able to explain how deep and primal my love for rope is.  I thought about two 7-week-old kittens we have on the farm, and how, the other day, their mother plopped herself down in front of us and started to nurse them.  While the kittens pawed and kneaded her belly, the mother cat’s eyes were almost shut from pleasure.  A steady purr rose from the entire group.  Bondage is like that for me–a comforting presence, a steady pull that makes me feel loved and wanted, content and happy.  And luckily for me, the ties that bind me aren’t just literal.

More images from the phenomenal Yuko Shimizu.

 

Infectious

I am so thoroughly bummed out.  I have a zillion posts in my mind, I have all sorts of interesting pictures to share, I am leaving tomorrow to go see Robbie–and I am hideously sick.

Well, hideous is a considerable overstatement.  This is one of those colds that just lingers around, and lingers, and feels sort of like the results of spending a night in a smoky bar drinking too many different things.  I’ve had it for about a week.  It is time for it to leave.

I hope I’ll be able to write some things from Robbie’s house.  But he’s assured me he has plenty of work for me to do, and we usually manage to keep busy.

Hope everyone stays safe and well!

. . . via modfetish . . .

 

Meltdown

Robbie has been melting my heart lately.  He has been trying so hard to be considerate and thoughtful that I can’t help but find him amazing.  This is inconvenient, because in some ways I’ve become pretty invested in and inured to the notion of our relationship as inherently dysfunctional and doomed, and it’s scary to let any hope back in.  But the hope is there, anyway, flowering and budding away like the young fruit tree that I gave him for his birthday this year.

I’ve been watching in fascination as Gray Lily over at Journey Into Submission has reinvested herself and devoted herself to her relationship.  Fascination, and a bit of jealousy.  I feel twinges of envy whenever anyone’s love life is going well and mine is not; for some reason, it’s worse when the people involved are kinky.  I think it might be that I feel like everyone else is doing it right, and we’re not.   If you saw us lying, spent and sweaty, in bed together after a raucous fuck, it would probably be hard to identify anything we’re doing wrong, but I still have that nagging sense that well . . . we’re dysfunctional and doomed.

Gray wrote recently about how she can truly be herself in front of her partner in bad times.  This twisted something in me; Robbie finds it hard to deal with my see-sawing emotions, although he is better at handling them than most men (people?) I know.  When I cry or get distressed, he’s often a rock.  Later, though, he tells me frankly that the intensity of my feelings alarms him, and I feel like my confidence in him, and my confidences, get held against me.

So when, earlier tonight, one small work-related issue sent me into a tearful tailspin, I hesitated before dialing his number.  But Robbie has far more professional experience than I, decades of working in and negotiating complex organizations with exacting and rigorous standards.  So I called.

He was amazing.  He listened, he was patient, he let me cry, and he gave me great advice.  He even ignored me when I argued with his attempts to put things in perspective.  I said, “Who’s been sprinkling fairy dust on you lately to make you so fabulous?”

“Me,” he said.  “Now, what do you need to do next?”

I told him that I had to finish a paragraph of a letter I’d spent the whole weekend trying to write.

“Right.  So you can write that now, or you can sink further into your meltdown.  Which are you going to do?”

“Write the paragraph.”

“Right.”  And then he told me that he was going to walk his dog and shut the house up for the evening.  He suggested I finish what I was writing before he called me back, in about an hour.   I did it in three minutes, and then I wrote this.  Nothing like motivation to help get a job done.

Really sexy, fun photos over at fre_nate’s flickr photostream.

 

Double-Take

Contrary to my expectations, I had a terrific time visiting Robbie.  We got along really well–only one small tiff, by my count, probably more by his–and I really enjoyed his company.  I’m going to go see him again in another week, and I’m looking forward to it.  More about that soon.

One of the good things about this visit was that I got to show him one of my two new corsets.  They are really beautiful–so beautiful I’m almost scared to wear them–and the one I’ve gotten enough nerve to put on looks great on me.

I put it on for Robbie and he was salaciously appreciative.  He enjoyed me and my corset most thoroughly.  The next day,  I put it on again and came downstairs for breakfast, feeling more than a little embarrassed at being hugely overdressed for a country house at 10am on a Saturday.

I needn’t have been embarrassed.  As soon as he saw me, he literally did a double-take.  The last time I saw him do that while looking at me was about 3 years ago, when I came down for dinner on his birthday in a long skirt, silk shirt, and stockings with garters.  (Apparently, he later managed to convey to me, he can perceive garters under my skirts at an almost instinctual level.)

It was good to see him gazing at me like that again.  It’s nice to feel valued in his eyes.

No big point here–I’m just warming up to start posting again.

Photo by and of the talented Katie West of Avolare.

 

If I Were a Pro-Domme: A Lite Satire

Here’s what I know about My schedule for the next two weeks:

After I write this, I’m taking a nap.

Thursday I’m free.

Friday, May 8, I have to send My best friend an e-card for her birthday and take the dog to get a bath.  I will be available in the afternoon and early evening; contact Me soon.

This weekend, May 9 and 10, I hope to go for drinks with someone who refuses to call me back, so it may turn out that I actually have time.  If you’ve been trying (and failing) to go out with Me, and can risk being stood up for someone I like better, text me.

Thursday, May 14, I’m going to go see Robbie, and he’s going to fuck me blind.  As a result, from Tuesday, May 18 to Thursday, May 20, I will only be accepting appointments to have My feet worshipped.

Over the summer in general, My plans are ill-defined and amorphous, but like everyone fabulous, I have an array of parties, events, and jaunts to resorts to keep me busy.  July weekends in particular are looking pretty iffy for me.  I can’t keep track of all of them, but you can, by consulting My calendar.

I hope that’s helpful to My legions of admirers.

Photos via Male Submission Art.

 

Je Suis Une Femme Sexuelle

My wonderful and generous internet buddy trinity-pup “gave” me this sexy blogger award (aka meme).  Because I adore her and because she and her latex catsuit are sexy indeed, I am now addressing the challenge of listing 5 sexy things about myself.

I have a hard time knowing what is sexy about myself.  I know what I think is pretty or attractive or even beautiful about myself, but that is because my other women notice it and tell me.  It’s not usually what men find sexy.

Robbie gave me the best understanding I have of what is sexy about me.  He told me all the time why I was sexy–not just to flatter me but because he really wanted me to understand and see it in myself, I think.  Or maybe to get into my pants, again, and again and again.

In any case, seeing myself through his eyes was a wonderful experience.  So here is what Robbie would say was sexy about me:

1.  My breasts.  He once told me that I have “nearly perfect” breasts.  I don’t see anything imperfect about them; they have always been ample without being saggy.  I have have medium-sized brownish-pink nipples that are very sensitive but can also take a lot of pain and tugging and all that good stuff.

I have spilling-out-of-my-dress breasts.

2. My mouth, which according to Robbie is “generous”.  This is, I assume, his way of telling me I have a big mouth.  (It’s genetic–people in my family can fit god-awfully large objects into their mouths, and I am no exception.)  It’s also his way of saying that I give good and plenteous head, which I hope is true.  My lips are full and I have a big, open smile, which makes me happy, or more accurately, is the result of my happiness.

3.  My mind.  It’s pretty devious at times.

4.  The fact that I orgasm easily.  For a long time it would never have occurred to me that this was sexy, but that’s because I wasn’t having sex in front of, or with, multiple people.  Having been parties where I have come without much provocation, I can say that people seem to find this aspect of me sexy.  You’d think they’d never heard anyone moan in ecstasy before.

5.  And my favorite: the way I walk.  I don’t know that it actually looks good, but it feels great. I learned to walk this way when I was living in Paris.  It used to drive me crazy to see French women walking all over Paris with these impossibly sexy, runway walks and haughty expressions.  They were doing some kind of rolling thing with their pelvises, like pivoting on an imaginary dildo as they walked.  So I copied them, and when I am feeling sexy, I walk like that.  That walk makes me feel sexier, and feeling sexy, as everyone knows, is the best way to be sexy.

The first day I met Robbie I put on this sexy French saunter as I was walking towards his car, with him behind me, and he told me later that he had noticed my hips swaying.  He said at that moment all he could think about was ass-fucking me.  My take on it is that he would have thought about ass-fucking me the first chance he had to look at my ass, however I was walking.  I’m just that ass-fuckable.

* * * * *

I’m incredibly grateful to trinity-pup for linking to me; I’ve had a total block about what to write and this was a good way to get going.  So I’m going to send the award to four sexy ladies who have written about how they occasionally get stuck for something to say, or are particularly stuck now.

~ mia.  we all want to know how things are going with you and the radiator–are they hot and heavy?

~ kitten in change.  I know you’re sexy, with or without the slavery.

~ penny.  sexy in a freeform way. 

~ hannah.  Incredibly beautiful, incredibly sexy, a fabulous sex-positive role-model, and incredibly quiet at the moment.

 

The Hidden Life of Doggie Masks

I stumbled across this video the other day in the New York Times.  I wish I could embed it.  I really liked watching it.  It’s about two working-class brothers who made their fortunes by launching a leather business in Pakistan.  It took them time to succeed because in a place with an extensive garmet industry, they had to identify a niche market.

You see where this is going yet?

They make bondage gear.  The first thing they made was a straightjacket.

What really moved me about the story was not the rags-to-riches tale of the two brothers, who really do seem to have been through the school of hard knocks, but the attitude of the journalist.  There was no sneering or giggling-behind-his hand at his interview subjects.  In the wake of the publicity bizarre articles like the one SF Weekly recently published about Kink.com, kinky people can become paranoid that everyone hates them and that the media is out to get them.

It’s nice to remember that it ain’t necessarily so.  It’s good to see that some folks, like the lovely, 25-year old woman who has designed and sold garments for the company for three years, can look at a dog collar and recognize both their own desires and the desires of others as part of the great pattern of human nature.

[Picture?  Oh go-on. I'll put a picture up later.  I'm at work--you do some work too.]

Edit:  Okay, pup, your patience is an inspiration.  Here you go.

 

Move It On Over

Sometimes, I think I am getting almost defiantly used to being broken up with Robbie.  A few months ago, while broken up, I took a literal (and yes, petty) step in moving on.  I changed the passwords to this blog, my fetlife profile, and my yahoo email account, altering it from the password we created together to one that I made for myself.  I changed the locks, literally and figuratively.

The only problem is that I hate the new password.  I came up with it on a day I was feeling particularly low and self-loathing (probably around the time I was chain-eating donuts) and when I type it now, I feel correspondingly glum.  I loved the last password, and so I guess it’s back to the drawing board.

And speaking of drawings and locks and playin’ around . . . I give you a selection of the inventive designs of Fernando Vicente . . .

. . . found via ponyXpress.

 

Pain-Kissed

I always hate admitting that I am a masochist.  But certain events in my daily life make me unable to avoid concluding that I love pain.  This weekend I noticed that the lack of steady pain in my life is making me zany.

Yesterday, my friends and I were in the garden at the house pruning some spikey undergrowth.   My friends’ thumbs are just barely chartreuse, and so there were no gardening gloves around for us to use.  I didn’t mind; in fact, I could barely feel anything on my hands.  My friend must have asked me at least a half dozen times–and perhaps a dozen–how I could manage to pull back the bush and the stickers without benefit of the suede driving mitt she had scavenged from a closet.

I dunno how I did it; it wasn’t difficult.  My hands were scratch free after the afternoon’s exertions, but when I went inside the house later, I felt a little tingling on my legs.  Oh, I thought, perhaps those plants WERE scratchy.  I looked down and saw blood trickling down my left calf, but my chief reaction was an inner smile.  I love the marks of pain on me, even if those marks are not inflicted by a lover.  They make me feel tough.  I was never much of a tomboy or a jock, and the cuts and bruises I accumulate from adventures–outdoors or in–are the closest I get to feeling like my body accomplishes things.

There’s more to my masochism than a feeling of achievement, though, or even a high pain threshold.  Actually, there’s a lot more to it.  I feel like I could write posts and posts on it.

Today what I want to say is–last night I bit my lips raw, without noticing what I was doing, just, I think, because the scratches on my legs reminded me that I was itching for pain.  I noticed my lips today while drinking some hot coffee, and I was thinking about the pain, and how I process it, and thinking that when masochists tell vanilla folks, “It doesn’t feel like pain”, that that’s a lie.  It does feel like pain.  But it doesn’t feel bad.  And all I could think of, because of my burning lip, was the way that spicy food hurts your mouth–and about how very much more I like spicy food than I like bland food.

I’m feeling stumped about how to get pain without doing something kind of yucky or self-destructive.  I think that realizing that I want the sensation is actually a good thing, a good realization.

This post has no ending.

Picture from the very cool and cooly-named tumblog Every 7 Seconds.

 

Bad, Stupid, and Completely Misguided

The other day, Dev over at Devastating Yet Inconsequential talked about some stuff that had come up in recent scenes with her boyfriend.  She expresses her own thoughts better than I could express them, so I’ll quote her:

Writing this post is very fraught for me.  I’m in territory that actually feels too personal for a blog post, but this is still the best medium I know of for really working out my thoughts, and the context I include so that other people can understand me often turns out to help me understand myself later.  I worry that this post will make me and/or Joscelin look bad, or really stupid, or completely misguided, even though, from my perspective, we have always had more or less sound reasons for our actions.  So I am going to try to write it.

And she did.

I wish I were as brave as many bloggers whose work I read.  I have, it seems, finally gotten over my challenges in producing smut.  If any smut were happening in my life, I’d be happy to tell of it (schedule permitting, of course.  One by-product of a long distance relationship is that when you do get smutty, you pretty much want to concentrate on it, and jam it in, as it were.)

As for putting pen to the personal, I’ve been able to produce a good amount of personal junk.  I am good at whining about my state of misery.  Or at least, my whines are prolific, if not original and full of flair.

Writing about things with Robbie is harder–increasingly so.  There is so very much to say, and so little I feel I can say online.  He regularly and repeatedly denies it, but I regularly and repeatedly have the impression when I write something here about him, he gets woefully upset.  There have been specific times when something I’ve written here has sparked a problem between us, and other times when I think it has just increased our pre-existing level of frustrating, miscommunication, and disappointment.  And it has always been the case that while writing helps me work out my own thoughts, Robbie gets lost in my verbiage.  (I wrote “gets lost in his own verbiage”–a Freudian slip, since his long missives often confuse me, too.)

The main point here, if I’ve not reiterated it to the nails-on-blackboard point, is that I understand the urge to protect yourself and your partner in writing.  The thing is, the same impulse is a high-priced ticket to a fan-fucking-tastic case of writer’s block.

So today I’m going to venture into the world of things that make me look bad, stupid, and completely misguided, and admit that there is a blogger out there–a really popular and well-loved one–whom I hate.  I mean, hate with a red-hot, cinnamon-stick passion.  I mean, hate so much I would consider e-stalking the person, if it weren’t so immoral, vile, and pathetic.  I mean, hate so much that I have to exert my utmost self-control not to write evil comments on this person’s blog.  I mean, hate in a way that makes you wonder whether you’re really a nice person after all, because, dammit, nice people don’t have feelings like this.

I have only a hazy idea of why I hate this woman–for it would be difficult to hide the fact that her femininity is part of why I dislike her.  I know I am jealous of her sexual and writerly powers, while, at the same time, feeling certain that I am sexually and authorially superior to her.  Whatever insight, soul, gentleness, passion she has–I am convinced I have more.  Whatever wit, deviance, education she possesses, I know I am cleverer, more twisted, more brilliant.

She has a better body than I do, undoubtedly.  She has more readers, demonstrably.  She has more people commenting on her work, evidently.  If you are reading this, you are almost definitely not she.

For a long time, I thought I hated her because I hated her kink, and that her turn-ons represented something that I could never embrace.  Then, for an equally lengthy period, I thought that I hated her because I craved her kink, and because I couldn’t bring myself to embrace what I most deeply wanted.

Having ventured, sexually, into some of the deeper waters that this woman has explored, I feel confidant in saying that it’s not whipping or punishment or spanking or control or orgies or waterplay or rope or bondage or 50s-style marriage or breast torture or infidelity that I fear.

But something about her just irritates the fuck out of  me.  If I wrote more about this person, she might be more identifiable, and so I’ll try to bring my rant of distaste to a close.

The problem is that my story has no moral, and stories without endings leave me nervous.  I certainly have not learned to love this person.  I have not reconciled myself to her, nor become indifferent.  I still stop just shy of stalking her, internetically, and still wonder, every time I feel the upsurge of anger when reading her words, exactly what my problem is.

I think I have to admit, though, that if I can fall in love with a stranger over the medium of the internet, as I did with Robbie, then I can fall in hate with one.  And that is a very unsettling thought.

Images by Manuel Vason, stumbled upon thanks to ponyXpress.

 

Nights When I Could Taste the Salt On His Skin

A couple weeks ago, a friend asked me what I write about here if I’m not having sex.

Exactly.

Last night I was lying in bed, late, and from nowhere my mind conjured Robbie’s smell and taste.  If I named the components of his smell, it would not sound flattering: tobacco, coffee, soap and shampoo, a hint of urine, the oil from his skin.  Rolled together, the scents smell like chocolate or toasted almonds or anything light and edible.   I started to cry.  I chided myself for getting emotional, and then I thought, well, that’s stupid.  Cry if you want to.

Today I got up and started to get ready for a weekend at home with my family.  The last three Easters in a row I’ve spent with Robbie, but this one is just not in the cards.  I just pulled down my suitcase to pack (my plane leaves in a few hours; typical) and I realized that I hadn’t unpacked after my last, most disastrous trip there, the trip during which I gave him back my collar.  The suitcase was full of clothes that I’d left at his house for months, and the clothes were full of the smell of him.

Now I’m sitting at my desk with a lapfull of soft black cotton shirts and pants.  They are drenched in his smell.  I want to hug them and hold them until I can turn his smell into solid him.  But I’ve got to go catch that plane.

I’ve got the feeling that it’s a lonely time ahead.

Odysseus and Calypso, by Max Beckmann.

 

Just a Little Bit of News

I’m getting used to this posting-more-often thing.  And so even though I don’t have much time to write what I want to write, I’m posting.

I talked to R. last night after a week of exchanging serious emails with him.  I needed the conversation; I’d been having so many sad, grieving dreams about us that I hadn’t been able to sleep through the night on Wednesday and Thursday.  He calmed me down enough so that I can just be for awhile, just do my thing, and let him do his.  That’s good.

As for my thing, I’m heading out tonight to hang out with a woman R. and I met last Thanksgiving.  She’s smart and kinky and kind, so I’m looking forward to that.  And to the chance to see a new place.  Hell, I’m even looking forward to the DRIVE.

I’m not looking forward to getting lost, though.  When I went to have dinner with the women the other night, I got thoroughly lost, and finally resorted to calling my family to get them to google directions for me.  This happens virtually every time I drive somewhere, and it’s only getting worse with time.  My mother’s entire family wanders through the world in a daze of lost-ness, while my dad’s side is more oriented.  On this occasion, my sister, who has a grid in her head, managed to give me perfect directions, complete with landmarks, by looking at a map on the computer in her office, 2,000 miles away from where I was.  I would have hated her if she hadn’t been so nice and I hadn’t been so very fucked.  So today I’m getting a map–if I don’t flake out and forget.

That’s about it.  I’m feeling lucky to be alive, and happy, which is about all anyone can ask for.

And I’m feeling glad that I found this photo gallery–The Night Day, with photos by Keffer, via ponyXpress.

Edit: I just realized that might be a hookah pipe next to the woman in the picture.  I was thinking it was a whip.  Shows where my mind flows . . .

For our purposes, let’s pretend it’s a whip, okay??  Thanks.

 

The Company of Women

After I started dating Robbie, my social life fell off precipitously, from a rich round of dinners and drinks with friends to basically nada.  This wasn’t his fault, or even mine.  By unfortunate coincidence, five out of seven of my closest friends moved out of state a few months after Robbie and I met, and my work changed in a way that meant I was encountering far fewer people than I once had.

At the moment, I’m living with one of those two friends.  She has a very active social life, and for the moment at least, I’m being encouraged to tag along as she lives it.  In the last week I’ve gone to two women-only dinner parties and met eight new people.  Like someone who’s been in a cave for too long, I’m stunned and blinking at the light.  (And like anyone who’s been alone too long, I have a lot to unlearn.  Last night I caught myself pushing food onto my fork with my fingers–twice.)

In addition to being a sexual switch, I’m a social switch.  Most people think I’m an extrovert; inside, I feel like an introvert.  I spent years training myself to interact fluidly with other humans, and I feel I have lost the knack.  Still, at a dinner party full of women, one has to adapt fast.

This company of women is soothing right now.  They all talk about the same things–husbands, children, in-laws, houses–and since I have none of those things, I don’t feel on the spot.  I listen as stories of other lives flow over and around me, and wonder, idly and with remarkably little panic, whether I’ll ever experience the things they’re talking about.  A year or two ago the prospect of not being married, not having children would have filled me with hysteria.  Not now.  I may just be so stunned by life I can’t feel anything, but that’s fine by me.

I suppose it’s a bit like reading a novel, talking to these women–one of those well-written, contemporary, affirming tales of love and adversity.  For although all my dining companions have all been wealthy, they have not necessarily had easy lives–there are insane relatives, husbands or children with cancer, and the looming economic threat that shadows everyone these days.

But this is not what figures in their dinner conversation, and it’s not what I get out of it.  When I said, a few days back, that I felt vile, fat, and disgusting, I meant it.  I have not paid much attention to my appearance for some time.  Robbie lives in the country, where the main object in winter is to beat the cold rather than to pull together a “look”.  Under our existing agreement, my hair has needed neither cutting nor styling.  Makeup has been optional, and I have opted out.  It would be the usual “letting yourself go”, except it feels unusual somehow.  I can’t put my finger on how, today, so I won’t try.

In the wake of our disastrous weekends together in February and March, I did what any smart girl would do–I bought lipstick.  Being especially smart, I also bought eyeliner.  On alternate days, I even remember to dab some of this stuff on my face.  I seem to remember how to make myself up, which is handy.

My collar is gone, which hurts–it feels like a part of my body is gone, amputated.  On the other hand, this means I get to wear necklaces, and I have been adorning myself with long strands of beads, fascinated by how they look in the light.

I watch the women and look at their scrubbed faces and careful ensembles.  They let me into their circle.  I’m not sure if this is healing, and I am not sure if this is love.  The company of women can be a harsh place.  But right now, its surfaces and appearances, its brittle, glittering rules and customs, are as much as I can bear thinking about.

The unmistakable Audrey Kawasaki.

 

Cycles: New Moon

(Though the phase of the moon is wrong . . . )

From Twisted Monk:

I need to shed my skin for you.  The beast that lives just beneath my skin needs out, I can feel it growling. Claws itching to be set free as it hungrily paces, back and forth, looking out at you from behind my eyes. It snarls and nips, a base creature driven by the most basic of needs. Hunger, hunger for you. It longs to be set free, to slink across the bed and sink its fangs into your warm, willing flesh. To feed, to consume your body. Muscles ache and fingers twitch as at the prospect of being set free upon your naked body.

That beast, the thought of loosing control of it frightens me, but not you. You welcome my snarls with open arms. The uglier, blind with lust and rage I become, the tighter you pull my thrusting hips to you. You do not fear what I can become, you invite it. Sinking fingernails into my skin you tug and pull, quickening the beast’s release.

Tonight the moon is full and I must howl at it, to bare my fangs and sink them into you while we fuck. Please, dig your fingers into my skin and pull, free me from this skin suit and welcome my dark, animal soul out and into your bed.

 

Kay-Fucked

I do not want to write.  I shouldn’t have to write.  Even if I did want to write, I wouldn’t want to write here.  Even if I did have anything to say, it wouldn’t be anything about sex.  And if I say anything about sex, or even not about sex, he’s going to read it and it’s going to fuck things up.  Besides which, I have nothing to say, so I should just shut the fuck up.

These are the sort of thoughts swirling around in my head right now.  The writer Annie Lamott calls this type of stuff, which most people have playing in our minds at varying volumes, Radio Station K-FKD.

If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo.  Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is.  Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime . . .

At the moment, I am feeling seriously kay-fucked.  Part of the time I spend thinking about how vile, fat, and disgusting I am, how old, with crepe-y skin and thinning, whitening hair, how barren, how utterly useless, how profoundly friendless.  The rest of the time I spend prancing about thinking that I rawk, professionally, and that my amazing talents as a writer, thinker, speaker, and ******* [insert my real job title here] are going almost completely unrecognized.

I am up for a promotion.  I have a serious feeling I won’t get it.

As for my relationship, it is in deep freeze.  Some might–actually most people would–view it as over.  I prefer to think of it as hibernating.  Say n’more.

I’m spewing all this because really, there is not much else to spew.  For a few days, I was obsessed with eating Boston Creme Pie Dunkin’ Donuts.  I thought I would write a post entitled “Cream Pie”, and then shock my faithful readers with the realization that I was actually talking about donuts.  But I got hung up on the question of the proper way to illustrate the post, which, as I have mentioned before, is occasionally often always a major undertaking when I contemplate putting something on this blog.  If I don’t have the picture, I won’t post the words.

And so I surfed around for tasteful yet interesting cream pie pictures.  There was this one, almost perfect but for the nasty hint of blood in it.  I even had a bad dream about someone being fucked until she bled.

So I thought perhaps just an ordinary cream pie–the Boston kind–would be fine.

But really, unless you’re feeling like shit about yourself and have a donut-sized version of one of these shoved up under your nose and you’re aiming to consume it within twenty seconds of purchase so that you can add the empty brown-n’-pink D&D bag to the growing pile in the passenger side foot-well of your car–well, frankly, I don’t think this kind of picture has much frisson.

So anyway, I woke up today itching to write.  And I’ve been thinking a lot of chelseagirl, whom I adore.  And about how she wrote her way back to awesomeness, painstakingly, after a breakup.  There’s no way out but through, as Robbie used to say.  So, whether we are broken up or hibernating, whether I am brilliant or utter crap, whether the sun rises tomorrow or not–I want to keep writing.  Because that’s one of the few things more satisfying than a cream pie, of either kind.

 

Interference

My blog was down last week because I didn’t like Robbie’s reaction to something I posted.  I got mad at him for getting upset at me, and I made everything here private.  A couple hours later, I made everything public again–or so I thought.  Apparently, I forgot to press “save” when I republished everything.  For two days I wondered why nobody was visiting me.  *Sniff*

Lately, it’s been hard to write because of the emotional interference from my relationship.  Robbie claims that he’s not upset by what I write, but in fact, we often have fights after I’ve posted about something that happens in our relationship.  On the other hand, we often have fights, so it’s not clear that the correlation is causation.

More than that, I feel that lately, whenever I get the urge to write about something between us, especially something sexual, my overall message or mood is whiny or negative, and I don’t like that.   I don’t want to write about that.  Robbie pointed out to me in a series of major emails about a month and a half back that most of my comments about our sex life are negative.  That upsets me because I don’t FEEL like our sex life is negative; I enjoy it immensely, and frankly, it’s one of the reliably amazing aspects of us.  It doesn’t take much for a discussion about chores to get snippy, but man, we can fuck for hours without anything going majorly wrong. So why DO I complain?

I’m not entirely sure, but I think it has to do with topping from the bottom, an urge to tell him, “Ur doing it wrong!”  (He’s been saying for months that this is what’s going on, but do I listen?  No, because he r doing it wrong.)  It’s not even that he’s doing it wrong in a way that is bad and needs to get fixed right then.  It’s more like, “If you always did it this way, it would suck, so just FYI, this could improve your technique”.  But it comes out sounding like a “hissy fit” (his phrase).

I’m pretty sure that I’m being a negative sub, rather than him being a jerky dom.  Why’m I sure?  Well, the weekend after he sent those emails, I had a 30-second opportunity to top him.  I got so upset by what I perceived as his “criticism” of my flogging technique (he was “whining” because I hit him in the ear, the big baby) that I threw away the flogger and stomped out of the room, crying.  There was a little more to it than that, but mostly, I was pissed that he wasn’t letting me just beat him like I wanted to.

It was a good lesson for me.  If he threw down the metaphorical flogger every time I whined?  We would have no sex.  Ever. The more I top, the more I get how hard it is to be a top.  Sheesh.  It’s enough to make a switchy girl roll over and moan, “Beat me, Daddy, I’m yours”!

 

She’s Not That Into You

I have been toying with the idea of sleeping with someone I am mildly acquainted with from this-yer-Internet-thingy. I have been toying with it, with him, and with my libido. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed about this; I figure he is man enough to handle it. Besides, he reads my blog—I’m assuming he’s aware of what a nut-case I am, and has adjusted his expectations accordingly.

The thing is: I don’t like sex that much. This might be an odd thing for a sex blogger to write. I don’t think of myself as a “very sexual person”, as so many sex bloggers do. (I think of myself as an inveterate pervert, which is different.) I don’t crave sex—not in the abstract. It’s only been within the last five years that I look at a person I’m talking to and think about what it might be like to fuck them. I never look at strangers and think that I want to sleep with them (okay, almost never). Vanilla sex is not a treat for me unless I have huge sexual chemistry with someone, and that is rare. The mere rubbing of pinkish swollen bits doesn’t get me off.

There was a thread recently on the ever-ire-provoking Fetlife that asked the age at which folks had “figured it out”—figured out the distinction between love and sex. I wanted to answer, “What distinction? I’ve never figured it out.” Having sex with someone, in the absence of deep affection, is heartbreaking to me in ways I can’t express. It always feels like a terrible loss to me, a loss of a piece of myself and of an incredibly special moment. (“Moment” is an insufficient word. I want to use a word like flower or orchid or symphony or something, but those would sound cheesy. Nevertheless, the spiritual, universe-shattering dimension of sex, the sacredness of sex, seems to me spoiled by inopportune timing.) It’s true that I’ve slept with people that I wasn’t in love with, and on two or three occasions, I even felt that strong emotional tug linking the two (or three or four) of us. But mostly, sex—and I mean intercourse—does not work for me without the love. (This might be one reason I find it easier to sleep with women I’ve just met—they’re not trying to shove a piece of their flesh into my most sensitive spots. Yeah, I know—leave fisting out of it, okay?)

Robbie gets this about me, finally. After months and months of arguing about “others” (aka group sex), he gets that I’m not about to step up for the gangbang anytime soon. I would love to, in theory. I really want that, and double-penetration, oh, and all kinds of other vile and humiliating things—in my fantasy world. But when the cock hits the pussy, I get tight and weepy and I wanna go home, now.

Robbie said to me a visit or two ago, “I understand that you need love to get open and juicy.” It wasn’t until he said the words that I finally admitted it to myself. This is one of the very good reasons to have him in my life—he understands me better at times than I understand myself. I need love.

He’s not that way. He needs attraction and mild admiration, affection. How I cope with his more frankly sexual self is a topic for another day.

But today, it’s enough for me to admit to myself, and out loud, that I’m just not that motivated to meet a new partner and get laid. I don’t think of it as a fun prospect. Actually, I think of it with terrible trepidation (although with no little arousal)—I think of it as frightening. Even if I feel affection and warmth and attraction to the person (as I do, in this case, to my prospective partner), I need the shelter of love, of its compassion and acceptance and commitment that love brings.

That, or wide unbridled animal lust. One of the two.

* * * * *

I’m really curious to hear what other people think. I was walking down the street today and wondering: is the prospect of having sex, for other folks, like the prospect of going out for dinner, to me? Do they think, cool, great, fun, this is an awesome chance to relax, kick back, have a good time, treat myself and feel good? The notion is just astonishing to me. Do people really fuck that recreationally? I’m in awe of that capacity. It seems like a wonderful thing to be able to do.

Tell me, oh internet denizens—is “casual” sex easy or hard, fun or scary?

Photos by Cornelie Tollens, via fluffy Lychees.