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My Concerns About the Present State of Female Sexuality
I think this is important, because it ties into many of the things I feel and think, as well as tying into the things I touched on in my feminism post. There is a part 2 coming that I plan to elaborate on in a post of my own, from my own perspective.
Disclaimer: if you don’t want to hear about my sex life, skip the first big paragraph. It’s just for context.
Ok, here we go.
I am a sexually-active 25 year-old woman. Over the last 10 years, I have had sex in relationships, outside of relationships, with men, with women, with people that meant the world to me, and people that I downright didn’t like or didn’t care about at all. I’ve had boring vanilla sex and transcendently awesome vanilla sex. I’ve had kinky sex that didn’t do a damn thing for me and kinky sex that has completely changed my views on life. I’m friends with virgins, porn stars, submissives, dominants, and people who blush at the mention of 50 Shades of Grey. I’ve examined sex from romantic, psychological, physical, and social viewpoints. I’m not quite a sexpert, but I do consider myself somewhat of a sex nerd. I’m just pretty into sex as a thing…
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Adam Sessler, and the End of an Era
Now that's a face you can trust.
This might come as a bit of a surprise to you, but I am a nerd. A big one. I don’t confine myself to just one or two branches of the Geek Tree either. I am a multidimensional dork. Tabletop gaming? Yep. Live action role playing? Uh-huh. I’ve even added boffer fighting to my repertoire. Comic book fan? Oh yes. I even find myself in the nerdiest of all possible corporate professions. That’s right. I’m an accountant. I am an all-around geek.
But of all of my nerdy pursuits, my favorite is video games. I was a PC and console gamer back when Combat! and Adventure were awe-inspiring. I was jaded before Super Mario Bros. came out (I owned E.T. for the Atari 2600, after all). Video games have been a life-long love of mine, and that hasn’t changed. Luckily, my wife shares this passion with me, and our side-by-side TVs and separate XBox 360s mean that we can both stay up until 5 am playing Skyrim or ME3 and not feel guilty about it. In fact, we’ve been known to apologize for going to bed and leaving the other to game by themselves. It’s our main hobby.
We don’t watch a lot of TV, because that gets in the way of all the multiplayer Mass Effect playing we can do, but there are a few we always catch. Top Shot. Archer. The most obscure one, however, would be one found on the G4 network. You probably have never watched it, because it mostly shows Cops and its teenaged counterpart Campus P.D. No one should ever watch those shows. My wife and I used to watch two of their shows religiously – Attack of the Show, which was about pop culture with a heavy emphasis on technology and other nerdy things and went to shit when Olivia Munn left, and our favorite of them all, X-Play.
And Now, A Rant About Cupcakes
This is a cupcake.
I love me some cake. I mean, I love it like a fat kid loves redundancy. My whole life is littered with the cakes I’ve seen and tasted, from my grandmother’s Red Velvet cake (with vanilla frosting. Seriously, people, cream cheese frosting? Are we in Communist Russia? Am I to begin standing in line for beets next? Cream cheese frosting is ONLY acceptable on carrot cake. Nothing else. UPDATED: I let my rage get the best of me. Cream cheese frosting is delicious on pumpkin or other spiced-cake product. I stand corrected.) to the cherry cake pops my wonderful wife made a couple months ago. I fucking love cake, just to be clear. Love it.
This includes cupcakes. Ahhh, the sweet, glorious cupcake. It’s a mini-cake all its own, a piece of heaven made for one hand, allowing a cake lover like me to eat a cake without having to use a fork and plate. From EZ-Bake ovens to school bake sales to after-game treats to something to make a bunch of goddamn kids shut the fuck up for 5 minutes, the cupcake has a well-deserved legacy as a beloved American treasure. Like so much of our precious heritage, however, this glorious symbol of utter deliciousness is being denigrated and desecrated before our very eyes. If we don’t act soon, the cupcake as we know it will be gone, tossed carelessly in the compost heap of forgotten culinary treasures like so many crumb-lined paper wrappers.
For fuck sake, people, LIVES ARE AT STAKE. Possibly.
Love You, Carl
Cheers to you, buddy.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to write this. I already know it won’t be as good as I want it to be, or as good as he deserves, or really convey how I felt about my friend and the role he played in my life or how important he was to me or how much I’m going to miss him or any of those things. But I have to try, because my brain won’t stop trying to write this, and so I’ll try to put it here. My shitty little nothing blog is no place to try to immortalize one of the greatest people I’ve ever known, but it’s all I have, so I’m going to try.
Carl Spicer was one of my friends. The word “friend” does a bad job conveying the role the people who are important to me play in my life. My friends are my family, the ones I have chosen to surround myself with. I love them all, quietly but fiercely. I don’t show much in the way of emotion, generally, so it isn’t something that I usually convey overtly. But those people that are part of my life, that I am lucky to know and be close to, are as important to me as any blood relation.
Carl was a very special person, to me and to everyone he knew. He was kind, gracious, warm, genuine, funny – really and truly, he was one of the best people I’ve ever known. I never heard him say a cross word about anyone – he’d bust balls with the best of them, but I never once heard him demean or complain about anyone. I am sure he lost his temper from time to time – he was Italian, after all – but I never saw it. He was calm and generous in words and deeds. I compare myself to him and I am humbled. He’ll always be a better man than I can be.
He dealt with cancer for a long time, but this past Friday night his fight was over. He was 51 years old. Too young. Just too fucking young. He deserved more and better. I get angry when I think about it and I want to rant and rave and it’s taking everything I have right now to not let myself do that. I’m pissed off that the sun comes up and the fucking world spins and everything looks like it just doesn’t matter that he’s gone and I’m doing a terrible job right now keeping it together and not getting furious again.
I’ll never be able to tell someone who didn’t know Carl what they missed by never meeting him. That makes me want to cry, that I just don’t own the words to impart the man that he was so that a thousand years from now in some way someone who read this could feel a pang inside themselves and feel just the vaguest sense of loss that gnaws at me right now. I envy the people that believe in an afterlife, sometimes. Right now is one of those times. They can convince themselves that it’s a just world and that one day when they pass they’ll be reunited with him. I believe there is no afterlife. I can’t convince myself otherwise. So I’m jealous.
But I will see Carl again, when I dream. Every time I stand on my deck he’ll be there, sitting down with a beer in front of him, smiling. I’ll see him in the eyes of my friends, and I’ll hear his voice echoing from the walls of my house and all the places he went. He made my life better by being in it. Now he’s gone, and my life will always be a little worse because of that fact. But I’m grateful to have known him. I’m lucky. I miss you, Carl, and I’ll always miss you.
The last words he ever said to me were the same words he said every time we parted. “All right, guys, I’ll see you later. Take care.” I wish I could see you again, Carl, but I’ll do my damnedest to take care and make sure that the people I care about know how I feel about them. I want you to do the same thing. Tell the people you love how important they are to you, and look at them and squeeze their hand because you never know if that’s the last memory you’ll have of them.
I love you, Carl. I love you all.
I Got Interviewed Like Real Authors
And you can read it here! Well, to be honest, it doesn’t read like one of those staid, normal interviews. And that’s what happens when Evelyn Lafont, aka Keyboard Hussy, and I sit down to chat (virtually. I was sitting, at least. I can neither confirm nor deny that Ms. Lafont was or was not sitting). There were some technical issues, but honestly, it just makes it funnier to me. It’s entertaining, and she’s awesome and funny in her own right – if you don’t believe me, check out her Keyboard Hussy site, the VampLure online magazine (an homage to the trashy women’s mags of yore, and hilarious – Suicide Jeans!), and her novel, The Vampire Relationship Guide Volume 1. I owe her a debt of gratitude, but she would probably prefer a debt of TRENTA and a million dollars in Starbucks gift cards.
Go read it.
So, A Week Off Kind’ve Happened…
It certainly wasn’t intentional. I took last Tuesday and Wednesday off from work, since I’d agreed to cater a 40-person dinner on Wednesday night, and figured that it would be a good idea to give myself actual time to do it. The best part was that Lady Aravan volunteered to do the desserts and took those days off as well. Tuesday, we got up, did Bob’s cardio exercise, felt great, and went clothes shopping. Had a great time, got home, started prepping some food and throwing stuff into slow cookers. So far so good, day off and still worked out! Read the rest of this entry
Five Things for Monday, May 10th
1. My novel is now on sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s website, even a couple of Indian websites and a couple of Asian ones. Crazy. Before I did it, I said I’d be pleased if I sold a dozen copies. I’ve sold 15, so I am now officially happy. I’ve set up a Facebook page for it and already have over 40 fans, a couple of whom I don’t know and never met. It’s cool. I was afraid to set one up, feeling like the world’s biggest narcissist, but Lady Aravan had a good point: I want to write for a living, and I need to promote the thing as best I can. She’s right. Now I just need to stop checking the page incessantly.
Holding Your Novel
I got the proofing copy of my novel in the mail yesterday. Holding your own book in your hands for the first time is surreal. So is flipping it open and looking at words that you vaguely remember writing, but still feel alien and strange. Some of it seemed like it was written by someone else – I literally cannot remember writing those words, even though I know exactly the scene it represented. Flipping it open to a random page, I would see phrases that chunked like a frozen brick on a sidewalk, while others that sounded almost literary.
Winter in Derenemyn 