Begging the question of whether whores (who get paid) or sluts (who don't) are more reviled in our society, the infamous blogger Belle De Jour has finally outed herself. Not surprisingly, she's a well-educated woman who works in scientific research -- hardly a well-paid field despite its own kind of glamour and allure.

I couldn’t find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn’t have my PhD yet. I didn’t have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva; and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would. The difference between living in the Highlands and living in London is massive. I hadn’t really thought that one through.
[...]
I don’t know that prostitution would necessarily be one’s first choice, I say. Starbucks? Waitressing? Bar work? Bunking down on a friend’s floor? “Yeah, you could work behind a bar. But how many hours would you have to do just to pay your rent? I couldn’t even get an overdraft at that point, though of course once I started depositing so much cash they offered me a mortgage, about three months later! And I wasn’t prepared to borrow from friends or family. To be honest, the writing-up of a thesis takes up so much of your time and so much of your energy.”

So: hookerdom. “Yes. I didn’t object to the concept.”

Full article here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6917495.ece

This morning I was indulging in a bit of self-flagellation about my writing, or lack thereof, and I remembered something cheqyr said to me some months back.

It was something along the lines of "it doesn't really matter how you write, it's the act of writing that's important."

So who cares if I'm not writing my three pages a day every morning? Oh, right, my inner perfectionist, sitting in her walnut-paneled library with her hair up in a bun and her steel-rimmed glasses.

I saw Shortbus last night. Polymorphous perversion, I think that was the term some L7 headshrinker came up with in the 60s to describe anyone who isn't a candidate for membership with the Family Research Council. Polymorphous couplings, real people having unsimulated sex, the importance of female orgasm, John Cameron Mitchell (of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame), a script that was developed by the actors themselves and not approved by a ginormous movie studion -- what's not to love?

Watching it made me feel a bit nostalgic, somewhat regretful. Shortbus takes place in New York City, and in typical New Yorker fashion, the characters and indeed the film itself exudes that confident, annoying assurance that New York is indeed the center of the universe. In my 20s, long before 9-11, I had aspirations to move to NYC. The more I got to know the city, though, the more it overwhelmed me. I grew up in a bedroom community about 45 minutes away by Metro North express train, but very rarely took advantage of my proximity. Later, when I was living at the end of the Hudson line, I fell in love with the place. Later, my love for the place evaporated in the cold, hard light of things like the cost of living, especially compared to my earning potential at the time.

I settled on Boston because it had some of New York's cosmopolitan feel but wasn't as intense and sprawling a place to live. Every city has its sprawl -- its purgatorial rings surrounding its juicy center. Boston may not be as big a Tootsie Pop as New York, but you won't break your teeth trying to get to the chewy center.

Sometimes it seems that people's favorite pastime is to dump on this city, though. While I was waiting for the cross-town shuttle in Harvard Square, two folks started in on the old litany of complaints about My Fair City: it's too segregated, the streets don't make sense, it's not as cosmopolitan as New York, bla bla bla bla bla.

Maybe it was the annoying timbre of the woman's voice, maybe it was that I was going to be late for my meeting, maybe I hadn't had enough leafy greens. Maybe it was because I, a white woman who actually enjoys talking to people of different nationalities, had engaged both of these brown-skinned people in conversation only to watch the conversation devolve into a diatribe about how generally inferior my chosen home town is -- and how racist and segregated to boot. Whatever the reason, I got fed up. And I didn't want to keep silent.

"They want it that way," said the pleasant young man (possibly Latino or Pacific Islander) on his way to work in Central Square to the Indian woman on her way to Beth Israel for a cardiac stress test.

"Who is this mysterious they?" I countered. "Did to think that maybe the white people in this city don't want it to be segregated either?"

They looked at me in shock.

"People love to complain about Boston. It really irritates me. I chose to live in this city, not New York. And you did too, apparently. If you hate the place so much, why don't you leave?"

"I don't think that's very fair," countered the woman. "You can't just follow it up with a prescription like that. It's free speech, you know. You don't have to talk to me."

"You're right, I don't. But it is free speech, and I'm free to tell you how annoying it is when people come along and complain about my town. It's not New York City, it's Boston."

"Oh, I love Boston-" said the nice young man, the same nice young man who'd been complaining about the pattern of the streets and the nasty Powers that Be intent on preserving their lily-white neighborhoods. But his attempt at peacemaking got lost in the shuffle. The woman didn't hear me.

"I wish you luck with your appointment," I said, firm, final, trying -- for my own sake, not hers -- to return to some level of cordiality. And stormed off until I was out of earshot.

What does this all have to do with the movie Shortbus? At one point, one of the characters, suffering under the weight of a profession she's grown to hate, agonizes over her predicament.

-What if I don't have enough money to live in the city? Where would I go? Fresno?

I have no strong desire to live in Fresno. But I'm sure that there are people there who make art. There are people all over the world, and there are other cities too. New York is awesome. I know that. It's got things you won't find anywhere else on the East Coast. But it's not the only game in town. Even in Fresno, I'm sure you can find artists and kinksters and perverts. Thanks to the power of the Intartubes, you can probably find them that much faster.

The reason why this issue affects me so much, of course -- the reason why I raised my voice to some poor woman at a bus stop -- is because my relationship with New York is deep, complicated. Long-standing. In another life I may have ended up in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn. Riverside. In another life I would be able to take mass transit 24 hours a day. Would smell that particular salty-muddy smell of Long Island Sound, the confluence of fresh water and salt, that smell I remember from my childhood. Smell it and live in it, along with the smell of hot dogs and car exhaust and hope and desperation. Would live and work and walk and fight and elbow my way through crowds of people, a different mix of people, brown and blue-black and lily-white and all the lovely tones in between, live in a place where the Boston Irish don't predominate. Live on a grid.

But I don't. I live here, a gentle little city built on cowpaths, a conglomeration of villages still with their separate boundaries, a mass transit system color-coded and sprawling like a web built by a drunk spider. A place where you can drive 20 minutes up the road and go cross-country skiing for $30, or live your whole life jammed up against your neighbors and car-free. A place where gay couples can legally marry, where indy bands and artists thrive and work and play, a place where health care is a right and not a privilege.

But I grew up in the shadow of New York City. It's my white whale. It's a dream I used to have, a fantasy that needed to stay a fantasy. It's someplace I like to visit once or twice a year. It's not my home.

My home is here, with all the web of community and love and memories I've built here for the past decade. My home is here, with Army Guy.

Which is the other reason Shortbus makes me nostalgic. Nostalgia isn't the same thing as memory. Nostalgia filters memories through a pink filter. It erases all the angst and loneliness, all the alienation and uncertainty, and leaves just the glamour, the excitement. The fantasy of youth.

Youth isn't wasted on the young. Only the young have the resilience and the stamina to put up with it. As much as I like to look back fondly on my 20s, I wouldn't relive them.

And I wouldn't re-make the choices I've made. Well, maybe the ones around unsecured debt. But not the lovers, the relationships, the moves, the experiences. I don't regret my wild and crazy past, and I don't regret my commitment to Army Guy.

"I'm afraid you're going to build up a head of steam over all these parts of yourself I'm asking you to give up," he said.

The fact that he even cares about that makes me love him more. He'd never steal the skin of a Selkie. He'd sit on the shore and talk with her until she folded it up of her own free will and tucked it into the thatch of their house.

Subject: What a real man dreams about

  Hot yellow Sun. Virgin sea shore.
Together You and your girlfriend. In private.
Surf and swim, play beach games, relax.
And when the Sun sleeps, have the best sex ever...

She'll love You more:
Grow up your Love Banana. All girls LIKE BIG.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, a real woman dreams about the same thing. And I can just go out and BUY a love banana. Good to be a girl sometimes :)  

The pleasure of my thighs
For Mark

Maeve offered him even the pleasure of her thighs
- From the story of the Cow of Connacht and the Battle of Cuchulainn

The pleasure of my thighs,
     my hated thighs hidden
by Victorians shrunken
by historians retouched
by photographers pried
by your fingers,
marked by your thumbs unwitting always
a mark or two or three discovered
days after our collisions a memento
of the pleasure you took in those thighs
and gave in return, thighs
I keep trying to love

Frances Donovan
April 2008

Here are some seemingly unrelated facts that, if taken, as a whole, can tell you something. Comment with your take on what that something is:

• 80 degrees and sunny is too hot.
  
• I need to find a pair of wide, palazzo-style, linen pants that fit without doing the sausage-casing-thigh, slightly-too-tight-waistband, gaping-vagina-pocket thing.
  
• I lost eight pounds since I joined a gym less than a month ago.
  
• I upped my chest press weight to 20lbs for the second time today. Still working on form with the higher weight.
  
• Sea Legs by The Shins (Wincing the Night Away) is my song du jour. Or de semaine. If I were still in college I would totally write a paper explicating the lyrics and what they have to say about the insanity of falling in love.
  
• I'm totally boy-crazy. I wish it would stop. But not really.
  
• The latch mechanism on my hood finally gave up the ghost. The nice Russian man who inspected my car (even lubed up my squeaky driver-side door!) told me about a junkyard in, I think, Waltham, where I can get a new one. 128 Garage on Green Street. I can't find the phone number anywhere.
  
• I like pizza.
  

Her name is Nika, and she looks totally hot in a bathing suit, or next to your surfboard. She'd really rather sit on the shore and watch you surf, but once you've worked up an appetite -- so to speak -- you can bring her back to your place for some hot action.



She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but with tits like that, who cares, right?

And check out what she looks like once you get the bikini off.

The best part? She'll never ask you what you're thinking! Or care if you don't go down on her.

Print work can suck my big fat dick.

No, really. It's silicon, and detachable, and BLUE, just like one of the FUCKING SHADES of BLUE I've been staring at all day long!

But not, apparently, the right shade of blue.

Charcoal gray is not blue. The one blue is not the other blue.

Goddammit, if this is what print work is like, then you can take all those lovely luscious bond stocks, fold them until they're all sharp corners, and...

PAINT THEM BLUE!!!!

I hate printers. Especially Ambit Press. I so very much wanted to like them. But they SUCK! They cannot get the right color BLUE!!!!! PMS 5415 should be PMS 5415. But it is NOT!!!!!!

I am leaving the office at 4PM and I am going over there and then I am going to get my little Irene a strawberry milkshake. And then, fuck it, I'll do some more grownup stuff.

That doesn't have the color BLUE!!!! in it!

I'd forgotten... June 20. Father's Day. Quick is flying to La Isla on Father's Day with her father -- papi, the man who used to call me his daughter. She still hasn't told him, I think, that I left her, even though it's been over a year.

Of course, she also never held my hand or kissed me or called me honey in his presence.

I still remember that morning in Elmira, waking at the crack of dawn, after that horrible ride in the rain to see her brother in the state prison as he was dying, her father reading every fucking sign to himself in Spanish (for 7 hours straight!). And then, after the visit to the Elmira State Prison -- which seemed to me like Stamford High School, but on a grander scale and with bars on the windows, right down to the cinderblock walls and the smell of stale cafeteria food in the visitors' room -- after the visit with her brother, who had lived with AIDS for over 20 years, whom I had met while he was emaciated and barely clinging to life in a hospital in the Bronx, one in which there was no cafeteria but a frickin' McDonald's in the lobby... I'd hurried home from work to drive to the Bronx with her then, had packed a black suit, and he'd checked himself out of the hospital three days later, had volunteered to dig through the rubble of Ground Zero after September 11 more than a year later. So I wasn't sure he was really going to die this time, because they called him the cat.

In Elmira, he looked reasonably healthy--filled out. Incoherent, but healthy. With a swollen torso where his liver was trying to leap out of his body to get away from the abuse, but at least not emaciated. At least he didn't need diapers.

But when I woke in the hotel room -- a nice hotel, of course, because Quick always travels in style, with a connecting room to her father's, where she spent all her time -- what I realized is that she didn't need me. That this was one more tragedy I didn't have to be a part of.

No, that's not quite right.

All I knew that morning, when I woke up in the queen-sized bed two feet away from the one where she slept, was that I was going to have to leave her. My spirit guide was there -- maybe one I'd never met before, maybe one I'd had to drive for 7 hours through driving rain and a constant stream of babble in Spanglish to the wide-open skies of Elmira to find. And it told me quite clearly:

You will have to leave her.

So I did. I did it badly, ripping the bush up from the ground in pieces and chunks. It hurt. I left her. I left her father and her family too.

I don't have a father.

I never did.

He died when I was 15, but he was gone from my life long before then. He was gone as a father even before I was born.

The Cat is dead now, too, and his daughter will grow up grieving him, or burying her grief behind things and people and highs and dramas and anything but empty spaces where the pain might surface.

I have a deep well inside of me. Up from it springs prosperity, abundance, wealth, jewels, crystals, flowers, loaves and fishes, a myriad of words and properties. Up from it springs joy, passion, love, grief, anger, fear, pain, guilt, shame.

And peace, finally.

Peace. Shanti.

Come, shanti. Come.

So I got a call from my ex-girlfriend yesterday. Or, more accurately, we were chatting on IM and she asked me to call her. I've been trying to help her get a Friday receptionist, so I figured she wanted to talk about that... or do some friendly chatting.

But NOOOOOO....

I call her, and she says, "I am very angry at you right now. But I have XYZ client on the other line, so I'll have to call you back."

So then I get to sit in my office and feel like a little schoolgirl about to get spanked by the principal. What did I do? Why is she mad? Okay, it's her feelings, and probably doesn't actually have anything to do with me. Unless it was....

You know. Like that.

So I'm expecting her to bawl me out for taking her umbrella or something, and at about 5:30 PM, she hits me with "I'm mad at you because you left me, and now you're acting like we've never been in a relationship."

Sheesh.

It was more complicated than all of that, of course. You spend five years and a few hundred dollars in therapy with someone and it's bound to be more like a piece of baklava than a plain bagel, if you know what I mean.

But the long and the short of it is that we rehashed all the reasons why I left, why she was mad. And finally, I got sick of being the wrong person (yes, I DID leave her right after her brother died, and yes, she DID come back from his funeral in PR to snoop around on my computer and discover I'd been trolling for cheap sex on Craigslist)--and I reminded her of why I'd felt the need to go trolling for cheap sex in the first place. Can you say "dry marriage?" I knew you could!

There were some voices raised. There were some tears. I got my Irish up, as they might say.

And I felt silly about the whole damn thing because you see, the thing is, it'll be a year ago that I left her come July 4. Independence Day. And I'm dating a nice girl I like a lot. I've even been through the love blender with someone else. But still, for a variety of reasons, I continue to be in contact with her.

This argument of yesterday evening makes me think of two things:
1) Thank GOD I left that woman! All we ever DID was argue about who was feeling what! Our mouths would open and words would come out, but the message never seemed to reach the brain of the other person. And guess what! I'm NOT TO BLAME! There is a NEWS FLASH!
2) I hear from other queer women that their exes are resurfacing. I think what I just experienced might be chalked up to marriage backlash of a different sort than Shitt Romney's camp had in mind.

Okay, that's enough ranting for one day.