Tag Archives: thoughts

Why Do I Blog? Some Thoughts.

After editing this, it occurs to me it should be two separate posts, both developed more fully, but that’s a lot of work. I’ll try to expand a bit on the “social” aspect, or even the socio-political aspects I allude to, in another posting, and I’ll post this here & now as-is. That way, you get something to snack on, I have less guilt about underproducing, and we both have a happy Friday. šŸ˜‰
I’m thinking a lot about blogging today, because I’ve been asked to talk to a couple small groups of keeners tomorrow and talk about why I blog, what my process is. I’ve got some thoughts on that, but, I guess I’m ultimately a little unsure what “blogging” has to do with it.
Me, it’s just writing for an audience I have access to. It’s just writing.
We’re lucky these days. We live in an era where having a thought, having a voice, it means something. The world is literally at our fingers.
A thought doesn’t have to die alone in the dark ever again. Continue reading

Thoughts on a Saturday morning, before coffee, no less

Do you ever have those dreams that are all too real, you wake up, and your mood’s already shot?
I’m supposed to have a nice day today. Got someone coming by about 1 for an hour, then I have to head out to my father’s 64th birthday — a crib tournament. Oh, “whee.” What freaks me out is the Guy’s disappointed he can’t go (he of gimpy leg and crutches). I suppose that’s a good sign — he actually wants to meet my folks, which is likely happening Monday. Whack, hey? A late-night rendezvous with the Guy is scheduled this evening, and I’m sure that’ll be up to its regular real-good-stuff, but I’m still grumpy.
I don’t recall the contents of the dreams, just “dead Dad” as synopsis would suffice. I suppose this is one of the reasons you want to listen to your voicemail before bedding down for the night: You have one of these all too real dreams, and the message indicator’s blinking at you, it’s a little disconcerting.
Anyhow, I know my mood will shift. The big pressing question is, it’s an unpredictable Wet/West Coast day: Do I take my little ol’ scooter all the way the hell out to the burbs, some 45 klicks, and risk the rain? If I do, I imagine the “Warm me up NOW” demand on the Guy could certainly provoke fun and games when I get home.
Oh, dilemmas. Anyhow, like you care. All right, then: Smut, smut, smut, smut. Happy?
No, last night was another good night with the guy — kissin’ like fiends and, well, yes, okay, we had the dirty s-e-x thing, too. The Guy’s kicked the codeine, and it seems like my evil tricks do indeed stir the creature from its dark depths all too well. I wasn’t planning on fucking the boy, but hey, sometimes the best laid plans should be laid aside in favour ofgetting laid. So, we did.
It’s fun, this relationship journey. It’s like you carry a mental notepad and keep score of every little thing you learn. (Well, if you don’t, you should.) I’m forming this hierarchy of things I can do to rile the Guy, and lord knows he’s got his list on me.
But there’s this other list, this list that continues growing of things we both share loves for. Writing, reading, film, they’re all at the top of the list. We’re both very, very passionate about words, and he’s incredibly invested in my writing, which rocks me all the day long. But then there’re those inconsequential little things that really add up to “a hill of beans” in this big ol’ world. Both of our favourite frozen pizzas are McCain’s International Sicilian thin-crust pizza (which those bastards don’t sell at the Canadian Superstore.) We’re both big Anthony Bourdain fans. We both dislike mushrooms. We both can cook well. We’re both cute but a bit on the geek-chic-y side of things with glasses. Yada, yada, yada.
Maybe it’s true, maybe opposites do attract. But do they stay united? I’ve never found that they did. I’m enjoying the fact that not only do we share passions for the word, for each other, et cetera, but we share inconsequential little likes and loves, as well as very similar life experiences. Some days, it freaks me out a tad. I feel like Jim Carrey in Truman, as if I’m beginning to realize the joke’s on me.
Up there in the cosmos, Ed Harris as god, chortling a “hardy-har-har” as he watches with grand amusement while I begin to realize, yes, it really is all too very good to be true.
But just because I feel that way, doesn’t mean I actually believe it. I just continue to be the more cautious one in this relationship, but the caution’s starting to fade a little. The Guy makes a point of telling me how much he digs me, and often, because he’s finally in the position where he doesn’t need to be the analytical one anymore. He gets to read this shit and see, “Hey, she’s analysing it and being cautious. Cool.” He sits back, enjoys the knowledge that I’m not running into this as some madly possessive swooning chick who’s already searching out wedding bands (and that’s NEVER gonna happen, babe). Most guys don’t get the experience, probably, of having an articulate girlfriend who can reason out all the beginning stages of fear/apprehension/knocking down walls in a relationship. I suppose it’s an interesting experience at his end.
And, honestly, as a chick, this is a bit of a rare experience at my end, as well. Not a lot of guys tend to be so forthcoming about their feelings — and not in a I’m stalking you kind of way, and not in an I’m needy kind of way, either. No, he’s pretty casual in how he expresses his feelings, and it keeps it comfortable and simple.
I think keeping most of the in-between-evenings contact confined to email means we don’t feel too tethered to the other just yet. Our only phone contact this week was when I knew he was having a lousy day and I left a message to the effect of, “I’m sorry for the day you’re having, you’re in my thoughts. I’m looking forwards to seeing you, and I hope your day’s improving.” His only contact with me was essentially a “I was thinking of you and wanted to hear your voice” type message. Yes, both were voicemails, and I suppose we probably both felt fuzzy afterwards. Then, it’s back to email until we happen upon each other. I keep my life, and albeit limited to crutches, he keeps his.
But, when we’re together, dude says all the right things, and I try to, too. Okay, well, no, we’ve both said ridiculously bad things at times — we’re both painfully irreverent, and it sometimes means ludicrous things get said in bed that are followed with five-minute laughing fits, which I love — but they’re bad things said in the right way.
So, sharing passions should be the backbone of a relationship, but the commonalities make it fun. This is fun. I’m enjoying it. And I know I’ll never have to be forced to eat mushrooms when he cooks for me. Wicked.
But Jesus, was that a depressing dream. Hey, I know. I’ll make bacon for breakfast. Bacon fixes EVERYTHING. Right?

Who I Am and Why I Bother

Hi, there. Iā€™m Steff, and Iā€™ll be your pilot.
I seem to be getting new readers every day, and I wonder what their reactions are when they get here. Iā€™d like to say a little about myself and what my little mission is. So. Without ado.
Who am I? Well, I ainā€™t your standard-issue sex writer. Iā€™m cute, but Iā€™m more comfortable in jeans and a funky shirt than anything else. I ride a scooter. I listen to indie rock and know what the inside of a mosh pit looks like. I work with kids sometimes. Iā€™m smart, Iā€™m independent, I live alone, and Iā€™d rather be single than in a less-than-filling relationship. I went to Catholic school as a kid, was elected to the student body in college, always had good grades, used to volunteer a lot, always have done well professionally, can work a room and schmooze with the best of ā€˜em, have never worked in a sex trade, havenā€™t had a lot of partners due to old-school ethicsā€¦ Et cetera.
In short, I really am the good girl next door who likes to play a little bad from time to time. Any parent in the world would be thrilled to have me in the family, but god forbid they ever find the home videos.
As a result, being a do-gooder goodie-two-shoes for most of my life, coming to terms with my sexuality has been a long and hard path. I went through hellacious battles with self-esteem, with judgment, and with self-scrutiny. I wondered if giving head meant I was a whore. I was scared that being a hard-core lover girl in the bedroom would mean Iā€™d find a $100 bill by the bed when I was through. I didnā€™t want to be this thing I had inside of me, this chick who wanted to tear into a guyā€™s flesh and devour him whole. It was dirty, wrong, and in Godā€™s eyes, not something I should do. Sex was for procreation, not for entertainment, was the memo Iā€™d gotten.
I was passionately religious in my youth, and itā€™s the case with anything I ever come to believe: I get behind it with a vengeance. Catholicism was no different. The Sound of Music was my favourite film (and I have the special edition on DVD now, heh — “the hills are alive with the sound…”). I wanted to be a nun. (Itā€™s why thereā€™s a really sexy nun in the banner of this site. Hell, she gets me hot. I like to imagine sometimes that I really did it, I became a nun, and some man some where gets me so goddamned riled that I throw down my Bible and my rosary and take ā€˜im down then and there. Well, thereā€™s always role-playing.)
I kid you not, man, but every time they spoke of Jesus getting spikes driven through his wrists, I had to sit on my hand ā€˜cos I could imagine the pain of stigmata. I remember the funny look my mother gave me when I told her that at the age of eight. She said, slowly, “Well, that’s very… pious of you.”
It was fucked. I was intense. I drank the Kool-aid, and then I learned about the world at large in my teens. I began reading about cults, about the myth of religion, about the world religions, and I learned all the similarities and all the fear tools. I began asking why a god who was supposed to be love personnified would make us bodies that could know such incredible pleasure, and then sit back and laughingly tell us it was a sin to know it. Not the god I had in mind, I thought. I started walking away from organized faith while swearing to keep the ethic (and I have). Then began the slow process of learning to get past guilt.
Then that was followed by this process of really owning my self and my body on my own terms, learning about sexuality. I began seeing what the lack of sexual expression seemed to do to all the old housewives and husbands I knew. I knew I never wanted to get old that way. And I wanted to be alive now.
I then explored my sexuality in the confines of my relationships, and was doing really well at learning about my more confident self inside.
But then, life. Life threw me a curveball, tossed me some death and depression, heartache and loss, and I gained weight, lost my sex drive, and with it, a lot of my will to live life as it deserves to be lived. Whew, I fell apart for about three or four years, into this horrible cavernous place of blackness, despair, and shame.
Then, whammo. Got into an accident, shouldā€™ve died, didnā€™t, realized I was the luckiest bitch ever, and a stupid one for wasting my life, got my shit in gear, began losing weight, got back into writing, and started having some serious experiences in the circle of life once again.
Rediscovering my sexuality* for a second time, after literally learning that whatever didnā€™t kill me made me better, stronger, faster, has been a fucking miraculous experience. Every week Iā€™m a better, cooler, sexier chick whoā€™s more in touch with who she was than seven days previous.
So this place is as much a record of my journey ā€“ but with certain details kept for my enjoyment only ā€“ as it is a reflection of my anger for having to have fought this hard this long to get where I am now. Women, when it comes to sexuality, are the victims of a system that has idealized the notion of sex without ever really talking about what the real components of it should be. Men, therefore, are victimized by a system of their own making. Funny how that works. We live in a society that fucking worships sex and hasnā€™t got a goddamned clue how to have it. This, my friends, is the Age of Irony.
And some of us out here on our sexual soapboxes hope to turn the attention where it needs to be ā€“ on the fact that this is an act shared between consenting adults using only what ā€œGodā€ gave them, their bodies. How sex ever became perceived as being so amoral is beyond me. It can be wildly fun, tragically passionate, incredibly tenderā€¦ sex can be anything you want it to be.
If you only know what you want.
And I guess thatā€™s what my goal is. To play a small part in helping people learn what they want. By writing positively in an everyday gal kind of way about sexuality and about sex acts that are normally written by people who are, well, a little more enthusiastic and lifestyle-ish about it, I try to take what some might consider exceptional sex back into the realm of the ordinary.
Iā€™m just an ordinary gal with an extraordinary appreciation of sex. And I like to share. So, welcome to my world. I hope you stick around awhile.

*The interesting thing is, the more I learn about my own sexuality, the more I realize I need to know about others’. Every human body is unique, but there are commonalities of experience, and the more we learn about others’ loves and needs, the more we’re able to adapt to our own. It’s when I stopped looking at just me for my growth that I finally began to grow. We need others. And sexuality, well, it’s about others.

Sigh.

It’s Monday morning, and a thought occurs to me. I need to get laid. I’m really frustrated at this topic of marriage that I’ve been on for the last couple of days. It’s been a Pandora’s Box of sorts for me. I had no idea my parent’s divorce bothered me this much. Honestly, I just had no clue that all these years later, it was an issue. I think we do this to ourselves sometimes, just shut the box, and walk away. You know, save ourselves mentally/emotionally.
I’ll be doing some thinking on this myself, but for myself. I always thought I was happy they split, but I never saw the connection between a few things that happened then, and some feelings I have about the world now. I won’t be discussing it anymore for awhile, but that’s just how it goes. Ultimately, a good thing to be aware of, no doubt. I pride myself on being hyperaware of myself emotionally, being able to get a grip and self-analyse, but whew, once in a while a shock rolls along and this is that. There’s probably some dead-mom issues rolled up in it, hence why I’ve been getting kind of militant on the topic.
I’m not too crazy about acting militant, either, so.
However, the real world beckons, in far too many ways. Right now, I’m staring down the barrel of another couple weeks of work without reprieve. I may cancel something this coming weekend if my sanity continues to deteriorate, but I live the kind of life right now where work comes in droves, or not at all, and the notion of “time management” is as ironic as it is impossible. It’s time to end this shit and get back into the 9-5 for mental stability and, hey, maybe even a social life! But obviously one doesn’t snap fingers and see a presto-chango-better life result. That said, finding work has never been that hard for me, just a matter of whether the job I want is out there. Fact is, I know I’ll have a job I like before summer rolls around — and that’s all that matters. Summertime Steff needs stability and lotsa cash in her pockets.
I’ll probably post something tomorrow about a conversation I’ll be having with a doc about getting an IUD. I’ve been on the pill for a few months now, having quit it a few years back when it was doing strange things to me, and I’ve been unhappy with it ever since. In fact, I went completely nuts when estrogen sent me into la-la-land back in October, and I’m longing to be back to my old self. Granted, it’s been a lot better since October, when I switched to low-dose Alesse, but I have to confess: my sensitive regions aren’t as sensitive as they used to be. It’s wrong to lose sensitivity on the vagina or any other place. What fun is masturbation? Anyhow, I’ll report on the conversation and maybe share some enlightenment for those considering the same move. The pill sucks, man. Jesus.

anonymous encounters

i awoke from a dream in the dead of night. this on my mind.
* * *

ge05

shared moments in darkness
suggested, stolen
but always squandered.
a refuge
in this detached loneliness,
youā€™re nothing of permanence
just fleeting
in the stupid immature hopes
something more might be
but in reality
nothing can be, nor will be
as all things end
just beyond that door.