Dyspraxia.

I guess I haven't posted about this before. It's sort of a weird topic, because it's something that on the one hand I consider "minor," not worth making any big kerfuffle about, and on the other hand it affects me literally every day. I have Developmental Dyspraxia.

For me, this mostly means that I have tremendous difficulty thinking about spatial relationships, including the ones relating to my own body. I walk into doorframes because I don't know how wide my shoulders are. My handwriting and drawing are terrible because I can't figure out which way my hand should move to make the shapes I'm thinking about, and I have to hold my pen a weird way. I am absolutely useless at any form of sport or dance, and I... kinda walk funny.

Mentally, I can't estimate the size or distance of objects. I mean, I can tell the difference between a skyscraper and a pencil, I'm not The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but I can't necessarily tell three feet from six feet. And I have some sensory weirdnesses; certain sounds and textures give me an intolerable case of screaming meemies for no good reason. (The worst thing: chewing gum. Ugh. I freaking hate gum.)

All this was a lot worse when I was a kid. Back in elementary school I would freak out or even throw up when I couldn't handle certain situations, and my lack of coordination was to the point where my ability to stay upright was pretty tenuous. If I was startled or upset or even just laughing too hard--hello, floor. I couldn't really handwrite until about fifth grade.

I'm better now. I had some occupational therapy, and a lot of practice just learning to exist in the physical world. I don't have grace--I'll never have grace--but I do fine at work and at most of the activities I want to do, and the impacts on my daily life are more of the "gosh I'm clumsy and quirky" variety than anywhere in "oh crap I'm disabled" territory. (While I was writing this post, I got up to get some milk out of the fridge. I tried to open the wall next to the fridge. Oh well, quick readjust. I probably shouldn't be a surgeon.)

Maybe the only weird thing is how other people perceive me. If someone pays attention, they can tell that I'm a little different, but they don't usually make the "oh, this is an actual disorder" connection. More often they characterize it as a part of my personality--positively that I'm silly, or negatively that I'm careless. Much as people tend to perceive my frizzy hair as some statement that I'm wacky and free-spirited, instead of just being the way it grows, people perceive me walking into stationary objects as some strange form of self-expression. The idea that I'm just, you know, the goofy absent-minded walking-into-tables type seems to characterize me. And I don't usually bring up that no, I really wasn't able to tell that I was going to hit that table. Most of the time I'd rather be a doofus than a special-needs kid.



In terms of sex, it hasn't been that big a deal, since by the time I was old enough to have sex I was compensating pretty well for the major stuff. It would certainly be nice for certain activities to have a better sense of rhythm and coordination, but I do okay. Likewise I might be attractive to more people if I could present my body in a less flailing manner, but there's more than enough people who are indifferent to or charmed by a little flailing.

Also, if you tell me your penis is twelve inches long, I'll have no way of knowing that it isn't.

Little Miss Perfect.

Another day, another woman threatened with the release of a sex tape. Because it would totally ruin her if anyone knew she had consensual private sex with her own husband. Except it kind of would (not as bad as ten years ago, maybe, but see her try to do anything with children or government now--the mere fact that this made international news tells you we as a society aren't exactly cool about it), so, yuck.

Every time one of these comes out, the water-cooler talk is the same: "This is why I'd never make a sex tape. You just don't know where it'll end up! I'd never do anything like that!"

And that's damn right, I would never make a sex tape!

Other things I would never do include: getting pregnant by accident, staying in an abusive relationship, gaining weight, losing weight, getting upset because of something that was said to me, putting up with sexual harassment, getting in debt, saying something rash on the Internet, getting drunk, giving in to social pressure, or making any bad or irrational decisions ever in my entire life.

As someone whose life contains absolutely no mistakes, flaws, or unexpected circumstances, I just can't muster up any sympathy for these... these humans.

Crisis averted.

I found a lump in my breast. I panicked for a moment. I have to see a doctor now! No, I have to see a doctor as soon as these gigantic black bruises on my breasts go away, because in my last bout of illness I had enough "that's just a hickey... I guess I bruise easy... YES I FEEL SAFE AT HOME" to last me all year.

(It makes me sad, in a way, that no one ever comes to the ER with identifiable BDSM marks. Or even hickeys! I have noticed, however, though most women don't groom their pubes, a surprisingly large number of men shave their chests. Makes EKGs easier.)

And then the lump went away. Guess it was just a hematoma.

I'm a little bit on the fence about whether I should go get poked at and mammographied anyway, but since I'm only 25 and I can't picture a way to tell the story to my doctor, I think I'll just let it go. I'm pretty sure cancer that size doesn't just heal in a couple days.

...Although if it does, shit, I need to get this to the attention of the medical community but STAT.

Oogyboogykajoogyism.

I have a declaration to make. After being told by oh so many people what a feminist says, does, feels, looks like, believes, votes for, buys, boycotts, dates, fucks, and generally is, I have come to realize I am not a feminist. I am actually a follower of a hitherto unknown gender philosophy. As founder of this unknown philosophy, I claim the right of naming it, and I now identify as a follower of Oogyboogykajoogyism.

The fundamental tenet of Oogyboogykajoogyism is that all genders and sexualities deserve equal human rights. As an Oogyboogykajoogyist, I believe in equal opportunity in the workforce, in fairly shared childrearing and household duties, and in freedom of gender and sexual expression. Oogyboogykajoogyism is dedicated to fighting sexual violence and all forms of physical and emotional abuse, and is opposed to the degradation of any gender or sexuality in the public discourse.

Oogyboogykajoogyism also kinda has a thing about Cosmopolitan magazine.

And that's it. There's no other baggage. No one to tell me "oh, but you're not a real Oogyboogykajoogyist if you don't do this" or "since you're an Oogyboogykajoogist, I assume you do that." No one to backhand-compliment me that I'm sure not your typical Oogyboogykajoogyist. No one to tell me that I'm a bad Oogyboogykajoogyist and I'm doing it wrong. No one to write me off because I'm just another angry Oogyboogykajoogyist. As a totally novel philosophy, it has to be taken on its own terms.

I hope you will follow me through the exciting process of transforming this into an Oogyboogykajoogyist blog. I expect great things.



Come to think of it, while I'm at it, I'd like to redefine my gender as an oogyboogykajoogman. That should help even more.

(An oogyboogykajoogman has a female body, but only some of the other traits of a woman. Therefore, when one of them looks or behaves in an unfeminine way, they are not an imperfect woman, but a perfect oogyboogykajoogman.)

Fucking like an actuary.

To the Federal Aviation Administration, a human life is worth about $2.7 million. Oh my God, that's horrible, right? Well, you can dispute the amount, but the way the system works, there has to be an amount. In philosophical terms a human life may be worth infinity dollars, but when you're building an aircraft, you can't spend infinity dollars on safety features. Every design will let some people die, and you have to assign a specific number value to decide exactly where you draw the line between "this airplane is unsafe" and "no one can afford this airplane." If adding five-point harnesses to airline seats would save 10 lives and cost $30 million, then those 10 people are knowingly--and, although I wouldn't like to say this to the families, reasonably--sacrificed. They die not from cheapness but from compromise, from the understanding that if we want commercial air travel then we accept some deaths.

And this is why sometimes I have sex with strangers.

I'll admit right now, mea culpa, I haven't done the math. If I were really working this FAA-style I'd assign the benefit of gettin' some strange a dollar value, then multiply the odds of every possible adverse event by their assigned dollar values (1% chance of getting the herp x $500 worth of sadness caused by the herp = $5 Expected Herp Cost), and subtract costs from benefit to determine whether the sex breaks even. I haven't literally done this.

But I'm aware that there is math going on. The one thing I will not do is insist on a 0% risk. That's not sensible, reasonable, or possible. I won't even insist on the absolute minimum risk. Telling me "condoms have a failure rate" doesn't scare me--I know it; I'm neither ignorant nor in denial. I've simply estimated that it's still worth it.

So it's from the same philosophy, not a contradiction, that I won't fuck strangers without a condom. The Expected Herp Cost goes up too high, all the passengers on the plane die, and it's not worth my $2.7 million anymore. Taking calculated risks doesn't mean I'll take any risk.

A corollary of this approach is that not only should you avoid saying "I'll only have sex if it's infinitely safe," but you also need to not say "if I got the herp, that would be infinitely bad." You can't designate it as a moral failing or a sign that you're a disgusting or stupid person--you just happened to win the Virus Lottery, that's all. You're going to suffer some negative consequences, but you aren't going to be ruined. (I've noticed that some sex-positive circles are actually terribly judgey when it comes to the subjects of STDs and unwanted pregnancies, as if someone with these is not only shamefully irresponsible, but somehow an affront to sex-positivity itself. Sex couldn't possibly be positive and also sometimes harmful!) The fact that I don't have the herp means that I'm lucky, not that I've been doing everything right. And--whether you're a virgin or a streetwalker--you too. The amount of luck you needed might be different, but it was some. Nobody can say "I didn't need luck because I was smart."

And will I be steering this post in a circle if I point out that that's no excuse not to be smart?

My vagina is an airplane, and every time I take it up, I know that I might fall. I have a seatbelt, but I do not have wings. But I fly my vagina-plane anyway. Because it's worth it to see the world fall away beneath me, to break through the clouds, to tilt away toward the sun and soar.

A bittersweet emergency Christmas.

I drove an ambulance for two years. No one ever died in my truck. Not one. Plenty of people were dead when we found them, and a few died before we could load them, and I'm sure many died shortly after we dropped them off.

The one who came closest was D. We picked him up at a nursing home, to take him home to die. When we got there he was already doing that fish-breathing dying people do, those desperate irregular gasps like each breath is a load they can barely lift. His son was by his side, holding his hand.

My partner mouthed to me, "Let's move quick. He's CTD." Circling The Drain. Ha ha! Like in a potty! We are monsters because if we were human we couldn't help people. Have you ever had to pick up human fingers and put them in a bag? It's a lot easier to do if you're a dumb callous jerk.

So we were monsters, and loaded the truck fast, and drove to his home. The whole way there D gasped, on and off, sometimes stopping for a long moment and seeming still but then finding the strength for one more breath. He reacted to nothing in the world, not sound nor sight, but when his son held his hand, D held it back. Weakly. And he held on. For fifteen miles, with my own breath held at every traffic light, he held on. We got to his home. His whole family was there. They were all around him, in his own home where he'd raised his children and played with his grandchildren, when he finally stopped gasping.

We put him in his own bed, and washed his face, and pulled the sheets up nicely. We made him look okay, look comfortable. He'd made it home.

---

M was the very opposite. We came to take her from her home so she could die in a hospice. It was better for her there--she'd get more care, be kept cleaner and medicated more consistently, and the burden would be off the family. It made sense. But it wasn't her home.

M wasn't old, but she had cancer. When we came into the room and saw her, she was, like D, seemingly unaware of anything. She did not look at us, did not move when we said her name. But when we got ready to take her out of her bed, before we had even touched her, she stopped breathing.

I touched her neck. I felt her heart beat a few times, weak and irregular, and then just a thready little thrill, and then nothing. For long enough to be sure, nothing at all. The family looked at me expectantly. "She's gone," I said. It felt like a stupid cliche, but I couldn't think of a better way to say it.

Her husband lost it. He forgot we were there, forgot his own family even. He just crumpled and sobbed. It wasn't dignified in any way; he wailed. He kissed her and kneeled by the bed and bawled until snot ran down his face. We let him be. I went into the living room and made calls to our dispatch, the hospice agency, and the funeral home. We realized we'd left our jump kit in the bedroom, and I snuck back in as unobtrusively as possible behind the husband to grab it. I needn't have bothered. I could have set off a grenade behind him and he wouldn't have known.

She had to die sooner rather than later to do it, but M, like D, didn't die alone and she didn't die in a strange sterile place. Although both of them seemed to know nothing of the world, I think they knew when they were home.

---

R didn't die in front of me. We came on the same mission as M, to take her from her home to a hospice. Her home was nice--not fancy, not big, not in a nice area--but nice. It was clean and calm with art on the walls and her bed was was big and old and looked comfy. The place we were taking her was also clean and calm, but the art was all generic soothing landscapes and the beds had plastic mattresses. This was her last moments in any place that was home.

Her husband, quite elderly and moving slowly, followed us out. He wasn't coming in the ambulance. Presumably he later came and visited her in the hospice, but this was the last time he would be home with her. In the parking lot, before we loaded her into the ambulance, we paused so he could say goodbye to her. He didn't say anything. He bent down, slow and unsteady, and kissed her like no one was watching.

---

We were cleaning a corpse, once, at the ER. Like ya do. The girl helping me clean him was kind of a sensitive type, definitely not a subscriber to the "I'm frivolous and callous because I care" philosophy, but she was holding it together okay. He was on the older side of middle-aged, not really old enough to die, but he'd been obese and a lifelong smoker and heavy drinker and that helps us make it okay in our minds. If someone didn't take perfect care of themselves, you know, that means they sorta deserved it and we shouldn't feel so bad. It's not that we're evil, it's just that we'll believe anything to not feel so bad.

But we took off his shirt and suddenly the girl started sniffling and holding back tears. I looked and I knew why. He had a tattoo that read, "If love could have kept you alive, you never would have died." Underneath was a picture of his daughter.

---

There are two paintings hanging on my wall. They're from a woman I cared for, way back when I worked at an assisted living facility. She had to leave the facility when she broke her hip and her health got worse, and she gave away most of her paintings--there were dozens--to the aides. One of the paintings is from long ago, back when she was healthy. It's an exotic market scene, rendered in blue and gold with wild, abstract brushstrokes, with birds in cages and vaguer figures suggesting hanging fruit and gourds.

The other painting was from after she suffered the brain injury that put her in assisted living. It's clumsy and simple, painted with the brush held in a twisted, contracted fist. But what's more noticeable is that it's an entirely literal, dead-center and unembellished image of some nice flowers in a pot. All of her paintings after the injury were like that.

But she never stopped painting.

You all get screwed equally!

Insurance company rep: "We recognize gay marriage in this state, so male or female, doesn't matter, your spouse is covered. Because of this, we don't cover unmarried domestic partners of any kind. Male or female."

Even though they end up insuring far fewer people in the end, I still can't help but feel a little heartwarmed.



(The question of polyamorous marriage kinda runs into a hitch here. Asking an insurance company to cover my husband or wife shouldn't matter to them [actually, women have higher healthcare costs, but as long as the overall population is still 50-50 it doesn't matter who's paired with whom], but asking them to cover my husband and wife would be a different thing. Maybe they'd just have to say "okay, but we're gonna charge you for it" and come up with a new "Family Plus" rate category.)

Autographs, photographs, and love.

I've come to realize that getting a celebrity's autograph is pointless. Meeting a celebrity in person can be a giddy experience, but the scratchy signature they make--probably you'll never even look at it again, and if you do, the only joy in it is remembering the meeting. And what a waste if the only thing you remember about the meeting is "oh yeah, Bruce Campbell--I made him write his name on some paper and then I walked away." I've met a couple famous people since and I've shook hands or exchanged a few words, left without any souvenir, and been happy.

For the same reason, I don't take a lot of photos. Occasionally I'll take touristy (or naked) pics to share with people, or I'll take a stab at artsy photography, but I almost never take photos of my friends; I don't do bar pics or party pics. Looking at the photo won't take me back to the day when "MOOSE EARS!" was the funniest joke ever told. Nothing will take me back to that day. And that's okay. I had that day. And do I really want to relive "MOOSE EARS!" forever when the future might hold, say, "T-REX HANDS!"?

It's a shame to waste a moment by trying to make it into an artifact. Life is ephemeral, memories don't have shit on experiences, and any artifacts that don't rot or demagnetize will be incinerated when the sun swallows the earth. Realizing this is what made me able to fall in love.

Love is wonderful and warmfuzzy and joyous, and it always ends in pain. There's no "happily ever after," because in real life, the story keeps going until you break up or someone dies. The best you can hope for is to get hit by a bus together.

Except that's not true. The best you can hope for is to spend a summer evening lying in the grass with your head on his belly, hands loosely entwined, talking about nothing, watching the orange glow of sunset wash over the clouds. The moment isn't forever; it's only good. Better to love and lose and all that. Better to go through the cycle of suffering, to want and not have, to have and not keep, to endure the pain every time around, than never to have those moments at all.

At the end there's nothing. I don't have a damn thing to paste in my scrapbook or frame on my shelf. Even the memories cause more grief than joy to think about. Why the fuck did I even bother? Because I was happy. And that time is as real as now.

I don't want to lose love. I want those ephemeral good parts to be as long and as many as possible. I don't like that love--or life, for that matter--is temporary. But I accept it. It's worth it.



This isn't a breakup or pre-breakup post or anything like that. It's just a reflection. Right now I'm in a happy relationship, and I worry sometimes that it'll hurt when it ends. Telling myself "don't think about that" doesn't work with my model of thinker, and telling myself "maybe it'll last forever" sells about as well as saying that my kitty went to a nice farm upstate. (Also, I feel like staying with someone forever no matter what is about as pleasant as a thirty-year-old crippled cat with cancer still staggering helplessly around some farm.) So instead I tell myself "it will hurt. That's the price you pay."

I'm willing to pay. The price is fair--no, not fair, it's a goddamn steal for all this joy. Just bill me later, please.

Gross.

Sorry about the posting lull. Work's been brutal. I get home and I'm just whoof until it's time to go out again. I think it's just the season(I don't know why Christmas would make people get sick more, but it seems somehow inevitable by ER logic that it would), and things will be saner around January 2nd.

Anyway.

It occurred to me that my greatest fear when it comes to being outed to family, coworkers, or other kink-unaware people in my life is not that they'll find it shocking or bizarre. (I'm maybe a little afraid that they'll find it totally boring and unremarkable, and then what will I do with myself?) My greatest fear is that they'll find it gross. There's a certain cachet to being "that weird girl who goes to freak parties and does some freaky shit." There's no cachet whatsoever to being "that gross girl who goes to disgusting parties and does some nauseating shit."

I'm weirdly torn. Part of me gets off on having a shocking secret identity. The other part of me wishes that constant lies-of-omission weren't a part of my life. Partly because I'm naturally a very (probably too) open person, and partly because I think all the squares in my life just think I'm boring. Because I can't say "I was at a fetish party and I got spanked inside a spaceship," and I don't want to make up some elaborate lie, I apparently do nothing with my Saturday nights. I met all my friends "at a coffeeshop" and when we get together we "hang out." Whooo.

Fortunately, the answer to all my nail-biting is simple--anyone who doesn't know me well enough to know the "real" me doesn't actually give a crap one way or another. They're way too busy fretting over what I must think of them.

Rebellion.

Last night at work was bad. There were too many patients, not enough nurses, and I spent all night running through a giant mess of blood and screaming. There was a lot of blood last night. And more relevantly, a lot of yelling--pain yelling and angry yelling, but most of all the yelling that comes from pain but shows itself as anger.

How to get through it? The money's not nearly enough. The "helping others" stuff can get pretty abstract when you're "helping" people by telling them you can't help them and you can't really give them an ETA on when someone can, sorry. My rapport with my coworkers is nonexistent. What I have, then, what keeps me from turning to tears or rage or complete blankness when a drunk lady takes a piss on the floor and laughs at me for having to clean it up, is the bruises on my tits.

They're nasty and beautiful. (NWS of course.)

The bruises remind me that I'm more than this. I'm not working because that's what I do, I'm working to support who I really am. I'm not someone who eats and sleeps and works--I'm someone who still has dreams and pleasures. I am someone who sneaks away from the cage of tedium at every opportunity.

Sure, I put on a uniform and smile at people I hate and fill out forms no one will ever read. But these are only things I do, not things I am. And the bruises are proof of that. They mark me as a strictly part-time cog with a side gig moonlighting as a human.

It's not just the bruises. It's this blog, of course. It's all the time I spend and things I do with my friends. It's the red in my hair and my lack of panties. It's every time I write, draw, craft, sing, dream. It's every time I go out with nothing in particular to do, just to be out. Sometimes it's just sitting quietly. And it's hardly special to me--it's the reason we have parks and movie theaters and sports. Recreation. Re-creation. When the world destroys a bit of me, I rebuild myself.

I like sex because it feels good, of course. But also because it's an unproductive, unapproved, uncivilized, thoroughly self-indulgent way to spend one's time. How wonderful.

Three boundaries.

There's three different levels of boundaries that I run into in BDSM. And hell, regular sex too.

1) What I actually enjoy--more than this and I won't be having fun.
2) What my mind can tolerate--more than this and I'll get genuinely frightened or angry.
3) What my body can tolerate--more than this and I'll actually be injured.

I tend to play like enough of a fluffy little bunny that 3 is almost never a risk, but sometimes it's hard to make the distinction between 1 and 2. There are times that I'm willing--even find it somehow important--to go to level 2, but those times are few and serious. When I'm just having funsies with my budsies, I really want to stay within boundary 1. And that can be hard to communicate. It's a downer, and sometimes considered uncouth, to "yellow" or "hang on, honey," not because of any danger but just because you're not getting off. But it's a much bigger downer not to.

Hanging in there because you're able to put up with something, while letting your partner think that you're just lost in ecstasy, sometimes feels like the easy or polite thing to do. It's also a great way to guarantee that you get the same thing next time, and that your partner never really knows what you like, and that sex feels a little bit like a chore. As so often is the case, being polite is nice, but being so polite you don't communicate isn't doing either of you any favors.

Tales from the set.

Before I was an EMT, before I was a sexblogger, but considerably after I was a pervert, I spent several months working as propmaster and assistant art director on an independent horror film. A very independent horror film. (Because I'm about to dish dirt, some of which may be of dubious veracity, and because my real name and the real names of the dirted are in the credits, I can't post the title. Just think of it as Evil Dead, only without the breakout success or the Bruce Campbell.)

----

It was shot in northern Washington State, up near the Canadian border. Two of the producers, a couple with Actual Hollywood Experience, housed me in their guest room and took me under their wing as a sort of surrogate daughter--a sometimes cluelessly awkward daughter, but a dreadfully earnest and energetic worker with an almost puppylike devotion to my surrogate producer-parents.

The other producer--let's say "Muffy"--was woman with extremely rich parents whom she still lived with, and it was their money she put into the project. She even made her mom cook most of the "catering" for the crew. (At other times, we were fed by a real catering company--which gave us the leftovers from various weddings and events.) She also cast herself as the female lead, and pushed for the script to be the Muffy Story Featuring Muffy.

Other characters on the film:
-The director, who used a pseudonym comparable to "Robert Nightshade" and insisted that it be used exclusively on the set, although his actual name was more like Bobby Shmuckler. He was most notorious for asking the camera operator to widen out a bit on a bikini shoot, because, well, "Uncle Bobby likes the feet." He was also notorious for... I'll get to that.
-A Big Name Hollywood Actor from a very famous TV series who made our lives hell by being usually stoned, sometimes drunk, and constantly obnoxious. No-name community theater actors would painfully and precisely soldier through take after take until he finally deigned to say something sort of close to his lines. Midway through the production he unexpectedly shaved his head, which created a serious continuity problem for us. We solved it by painting his head brown.
-An endless supply of identical blonde Canadian model-actress-whatevers, who showed up, cried about having to do a nude scene, did a nude scene, died, and went back to Canada.
-Our "stunt coordinator," who ended up doing more security and general grunt work than stunts, and was a Special Ops veteran and Hell's Angel (I'm still fairly convinced he really was both) who had a lot of stories about killing people. Once we were startled by a sudden noise outside, and he leapt to the window, literally growling and pacing like an animal.

---

Fully aware that he had neither a great story nor lush visuals to sell, Bobby Schmuckler wrote in plenty of lush visuals of the other kind. There were a lot of nude scenes on the film. On one of them, we were between shots and the Canadian model-actress-whatever was wandering around in that fluffy white bathrobe that signifies "nude scene" in the movie world.

We were shooting in an actual abandoned asylum. A small corner of it had been niced up and secured for production purposes, but the rest of this vast building was empty and crumbling. Excursions through it always brought up surprises--a huge number of dead cats (one with three eyes), an operating room where lobotomies were performed, squatter nests, places where the walls were entirely broken through and plants grew into the building, and for some reason, one room with a giant knee-deep pile of broken glass. It was also so thoroughly, so blatantly haunted as to make me believe in haunting. But although this building was abandoned, two other facilities were still active on the campus: a center for troubled youth, and a Level 3 sex offender facility.

During filming, one of the sex offenders snuck into the facility kitchen, covered himself entirely in aluminum foil, and escaped. He was later caught on the other side of our set, still foil-wrapped for freshness. Not one of us had noticed him.

Anyway. Back to this nude scene. The lights for the next shot were taking a while to set up, and the model-actress-whatever wandered off in her bathrobe. She went to the fence of the sex-offender facility, where the guys were out in the yard, and gave them all an eyeful.

And that's how our movie production caused a prison riot.

The model-actress-whatever was sent back to Canada and our makeup artist was recast in the part.

---

As propmaster, I had many... unique... tasks on the film. One of my favorite was being asked to craft a realistic poop ("get me some Taco Bell and I'll craft that for ya"), then being asked to make it edible. Tootsie Rolls and some patient, truly loving sculpting saved the day.

There was also the problem of a tunnel that was supposed to be yards and yards long, but was, in reality, maybe fifteen feet. We put up pipes in the background and rearranged them for each shot, so the actress ran past the same wall with different pipes three or four times. It kinda worked.

Our best props failure came when it was time to kill off one of our favorite actors, a local theater guy who'd always been exceptionally helpful and decent to the crew. As our twisted way of giving him a good sendoff, we resolved to give him the messiest, nastiest death in the movie. We decided to use a cannister of compressed air and literally gallons of fake blood to create a spectacular arterial spray. On the second try, the rig worked perfectly and the spray was enormous, ceiling-staining, red-raining, beautiful.

On the first try, during testing out in the parking lot, we over-pressurized the cannister and it exploded. No one was seriously injured, but boy, did it look bad.

---

Another casting problem concerned the main monster of the movie, an evil female ghost. Our first actress disappeared. Our second actress drunkenly climbed a lamppost and swung from the top, then disappeared. (I mean, not immediately. But like the next day.) Our third actress disappeared. At his wits' end, or maybe just seizing the moment, Bobby Schmuckler decided to cast the only performer he could really rely on: himself.

He took this role very seriously. He got fitted for a bra. Although the ghost only appears in shadows and flashes and wears a floor-length dress anyway, he demanded the makeup girl shave his entire body. (They later ended up dating.) With a flowing wig, ruby red lips and pale cheeks, and long acrylic fingernails, he made a darling ghost. Although it could be hard to take him seriously when he directed in costume.

---

Places we set off fire alarms on this movie: the asylum, the public library, the best hotel in town at midnight, and the producer's house. But the only one that we actually set on fire was the asylum. It didn't burn down or anything. It was just, you know, a little bit on fire.

---

Amazingly, the movie was finished and distributed and I now own the DVD. Muffy took over the editing (via the editor's penis, you heard it here, folks) and it was made into the Muffy Story Featuring Muffy, but there's still plenty of drag-monster action, Canadian titties, and for me, so many happy and strange memories. It's kind of a terrible and nonsensical movie, but even to an outsider it has that wild, improvised, 3 AM, let's-put-on-a-show spirit in it, and I love it.

Everything once.

This afternoon I taught myself to solder components to a circuit board. I didn't really have a specific project to do, just a soldering iron and a practice board and the feeling that it's one of those skills I really ought to have. And I had the funny feeling, fitting resistors and capacitors into the board, that this wasn't so different from learning to take a fist.

Er. It's not exactly the same. But there are far more feelings in common than you'd expect. The sensation of learning to use your muscles in a new way, the initial rush of "wow, this is easier than it looks" followed by the setting in of "no, there are tricky parts and I won't be an expert on my first day", and the unparalleled pleasure of gaining a new skill. (And overcoming fear; soldering is more frightening to me than fisting, because my spatial perception is so screwy that I have to focus very hard not to touch the iron to my skin, whereas my tactile perception in my vagina is quite fine indeed.)

I want to try everything once. Everything that isn't evil or dangerous, at least. Even if I weren't at all bisexual, I think I would still have to have sex with a girl once, just to have done it. And indeed I don't like buttsex, but nonetheless I'm glad I've gotten fucked up the ass a couple times. To never try something, to die without even knowing what it's like, seems horrifying to me. I once had the opportunity to eat mealworms and I turned it down, and I'm still kicking myself.

I'm only going to live so long. I want to live a lot. I want experiences broad and deep, but if I have to choose, I choose broad. I have, at age 25, lived in 13 cities or towns, held 9 jobs (not counting innumerable short-term gigs; these are only the multi-month formal employments, here), and, by now, fucked 27 people. I suppose you could see this as a sign of some disquiet in me, a sign that I haven't found what I'm looking for--but this is what I'm looking for. I don't want one simple life. Although, you know, maybe I could try that for a bit...

Pantheism.

I believe that God is the universe. Everything that exists is a manifestation of the divine--a divinity that may not be "good" or personally interested or even purposeful, but is beautiful. God is the atoms and God is the clouds in the pale-blue winter sky, God is mold in the drywall and God is IRS form 2290 (Heavy Highway Vehicle Use Tax Return), God is you and me and Kim Jong Il and Carrot Top.

I've been asked how this differs from atheism, and I'm not entirely sure. I don't believe in the divine violation of natural laws, although I do think we haven't (and maybe won't) discovered all natural laws. I don't believe that existence has a purpose, at least not one useful to humans. Maybe the only difference is that I see atheism as a philosophy without worship, and I worship the beauty of existence. (I tend to worship the pretty parts more, but hey, I've only got a human brain to work with here.) I love the world, I believe in the world, in a way that "I'm not religious" really doesn't cover.

My point is, when I gasp "oh God, oh God" during sex, I'm not kidding.

Beyond body acceptance.

Some days I look in the mirror and I just see fat and awkwardness and totally unmanageable hair. I try and tell myself that I'm beautiful, and that beauty is a totally artificial concept on top of that, and that the social pressures shaping and enforcing beauty and particularly female beauty are positively disgusting, but some days, I'm just not buying. Especially when I've got zits too.

On those days, I remind myself that, well, that person I mentioned doing CPR on a little ways back? They're alive now.

I remind myself that I graduated college at 19 and that at 12 I pulled a man having a seizure out of a swimming pool. I remind myself that I have my name in movie credits and that I once drove an ambulance lights-and-sirens hell-for-leather around a stock car track. I remind myself that I've wetted down a beached dolphin and I've explored an abandoned asylum, been on the national champion debate team (parli) and built trails in trackless wilderness, fucked a Calvin Klein model and broken into the set of "House" during filming. I remind myself that I've helped save more lives than I can even remember. And if there weren't all that going for me, even if I hadn't lived such a dramatic life, I'd still have what anybody has--a huge list of lives I've touched and things I've done, of differences I've made.

Don't you fucking dare tell me all that's nothing unless I'm a hot little hardbody too.

It's good to like your body, but you know, your body isn't the biggest deal about you. (Or rather, your beauty isn't the biggest deal, since few people insulting your body can be dissuaded by hearing how many pounds you can lift or how quickly you recover from injuries.) It's a heartbreaking waste to take a human being, a person rich in history and abilities and relationships and ideas, and judge them on how nice a decoration they make. Maybe that's inevitable when it comes to strangers, but you damn well know better when it comes to yourself. When you're judging your appearance, you're only judging one tiny part of your self.

So I don't tell myself "I'm pretty, really I am" on ugly days. I say "Maybe I am ugly. I'm still fucking awesome."

Squirt?

Rowdy and I had been fucking for a good (oh, a good) while. We'd actually gotten to my can't-talk-can't-think point and come out the other side still playing. In an insatiable mood, but figuring Rowdy was starting to get worn out, I started using the Hitachi Magic Wand on myself. Silly me. Rowdy grabbed it and started fucking me again while grinding the wand into the intersection of our bodies.

In the middle of the rapid-fire, blinding mess of orgasms that came (and came and came and oh God came) after that, I felt something... different. Good but not exactly better, not some amazing explosion, and not some gigantic spurting tidal-wave gush of fluid. Just different. I reached down and the wetness there was thinner and much more copious than usual. "Did I just...?" I asked, and neither of us was sure. Afterwards, there was a little puddle on the bed where I'd been.

Did I squirt, or just get wetter than usual, or, um, pee a little bit? I don't know, and honestly, I don't really care. (I kinda hope it wasn't pee.) Whether I hit some arbitrary milestone or not, I had some fantastic orgasms and that matters a hell of a lot more to me. I know some guys are into squirting because "it's the female orgasm you can see!", but seriously now, nobody's at risk of not noticing my orgasms. (I mean, nobody in Middlesex County, seriously.) If it doesn't feel different than, eh, nice party trick I guess.

But it's cool to see what my body's capable of. And a little brain-breaking to have some of it be things that serious grownups will seriously argue don't exist. It's like having the goddamn Loch Ness Monster in my vagina.

Freely given.

It's a little scary at first, but awesome when I think about it, that Rowdy not only can but does get sex and love elsewhere.

Because he still wants to get it with me.

I don't want to be needed. I want to be wanted.

Union and Intersection.

I don't have a favorite sexual position. I have, however, a favorite sexual position with everyone I've been with. With Keith it was missionary, with Alan it was me on top and him thrusting from beneath, with Tommy it was doggy-style, and so on. And the funny thing is, in these people's other relationships, they had different go-to positions.

The geometry of bodies, genitalia, and personalities always fits together differently. It's hard, and not too common, to truly be "a doggy-style guy" who carries doggy-style from partner to partner and fits it in with whatever they are. It's the relationship, and not either (or should I say any) person in it, that dictates these things. (Also, the relative length of your thighs.)

Of course it goes beyond just positions. One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how it applies to kink. The reason I'm waffly about whether I'm a switch, bottom, sub, or just really horny is because I'm each of these things to different people. I like to be dominated, but only by the people I like to dominate me, if you get my drift. It's 20% "can I tell that they genuinely enjoy being dominant," 20% "are they any damn good at it," and 60% "I don't know, fucking magic." And I'm not describing simple attraction here--I can love fucking someone but not particularly want them to dominate me, just because the magic is different with them.

And of course it goes beyond sex. Alan and I liked nothing better than to cuddle up on the couch and watch 5 continuous hours of "Intervention" and "COPS." (I was filmed by "COPS" once. Funny story.) Rowdy would probably start chewing off his own arm after ten minutes. Neither one of them is wrong, and more importantly, neither one of them is less me. They're just different sides of me, brought out by different people, in whom I myself bring out different sides.

I don't know if it's right to say I'm a different person with every partner. I'm a different person with every relationship.

Proverbs 22:6.

Something that seems to get lost in a lot of discussions on sex ed: sex ed is not just for children and teenagers. It's for future adults. It seems like there's a lot of talk about what a fourteen-year-old needs to know, and not about what a person will eventually need to know. A lot of statistics and speculation about teenage sexual activities and STDs and pregnancy, and not enough about these things in the general population.

High school isn't about learning to be fourteen years old. Most kids show up already knowing how to listen to terrible music and sleep until 3pm on weekends. Why teach a fourteen-year-old biology or trigonometry when the only job a fourteen-year-old is likely to have is burger-flipping? Because you're not teaching the fourteen-year-old; you're teaching the future thirty-year-old doctor or architect.

(Digression: I really wish schools did more to teach for adulthood in general. I'd gladly have given up a semester of Western Civ to have had a class on "how to find a job and an apartment" or "how to treat minor illnesses and when to see a doctor." There's a place for high-minded well-rounded education and I don't want to be one of those dicks who asks "when am I ever gonna need to know about stupid old ancient Greece?", but I'd gladly sacrifice a little bit of Greece to get in a couple hours of lecture and discussion on "how to tell if something is a scam.")

And sex, as it so often turns out, isn't some sort of special case. When you teach a fourteen-year-old how to put on a condom or what consent means, you're teaching a twenty-year-old. And a thirty-year-old. They may not look it right now, but when you teach sex ed to a bunch of immature teenagers, you're teaching college students, married people, parents, police officers, journalists, legislators, and sex ed teachers. You're telling them things they'll remember, and maybe still rely on, when they're a bunch of fifty-year-olds.

You wanna stick "all you need to know right now is abstinence" on them?



P.S.: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." I didn't want to make the actual quote the title because I didn't like the "he" language but felt it would be artificial to remove it, but now you don't have to look it up.

Subliminal virtue.

There's one good thing Cosmo does in every issue. They have a recurring feature, "Red Hot Reads," where they excerpt sex scenes from romance novels for your "his stalwart member plunged between her quivering petals"-reading pleasure. And in every single scene, there's something like this:

"Janey," he said, "I can't wait."
Janey felt the same way. All she could think was more. Jason slipped on a condom, and she guided him inside her. She lifted her hips to his... then pulled away. She lifted again, taking all he had to give her. Then he was grinding too, matching her rhythm. The sensation was so unbearably good. Rich, erotic, amazing. Soon he increased the pace.

It's never declared with fanfare, but the Red Hot Read always includes a condom. The condom is mentioned in passing and treated like a normal thing. It takes just one line--hell, half of a line--to mention, and although one instance of it doesn't do much, the preponderance of stories that include condoms in this way spread the idea that a condom is just a regular part of sex. It becomes part of the audience's model of how sex is supposed to go.

(Now I feel sorta bad that I don't often mention condoms myself. I use them absolutely every time; I just have a habit of considering them so normal that they go without saying, and my audience sufficiently sophisticated that you would understand that.)

In a way, this is more effective sex education than a straight-on screed about how you must use condoms because they're very important and you'll get horrible diseases and give your partner horrible diseases. Direct speech has its place in education--casual mentions in cheesy sex scenes won't tell you how to use a condom properly or what it's for--but sometimes fails as persuasion. Some people will use a condom because they're told it prevents AIDS and babies, but some will only use it when they're convinced that's what normal people do.

Now I just wish Cosmo would go further and model, say, consent in their stories.
"Janey," he said, "I can't wait."
"Neither can I," Janey said. All she could think was more.
A tiny difference, but it changes the heroine's reaction from lying there sending out consensual thought waves, to giving explicit enthusiastic consent.

Stealth propaganda isn't as much fun to write as direct screeds. It doesn't vent your spleen, and it can sometimes feel like a dishonest practice. It also raises questions of "do I want to perpetuate the beauty myth and heteronormativity in my consent-modeling romance novel, or do I want to risk losing my audience?" But it reaches people whom no degree of "Come on guys, you gotta wear a condom because it's really really important, listen to me" ever can.