Things worth knowing about

Having been having sex now for around 10 years, I am still sometimes surprised by people who know absolutely nothing about the clitoris. Well, there are really three varieties of terribleness when it comes to clitoral neophites. (Yes, I've encountered women who fit into all three of these groups as well.) The first has never heard of the clit and has no intention of ever learning about it. It's like if somebody brings up the clitoris they jam their fingers in their ears until the topic is over.

The second version has heard about the clitoris, but have absolutely no idea where it actually is. Is it somewhere near the bellybutton? Is it to the right of your labia? Is it actually inside the vagina somewhere? These people will put their hands lots of places, but none of it will be on the clitoris. Sometimes they might actually luck out and find it, but at that point it's like not seeing the forest for the trees.

Third version knows exactly where the clitoris is, but has no idea what to do with it. Do you just sort of...poke it? Do you begin by furiously rubbing it and ignore all other parts of the vulva? Who the hell knows. But hey, you found it! So that counts for something.

For awesome stuff about the clitoris, I direct you here.

MIA

I found this decent little tidbit on r/sex the other day on good and bad reasons to open a relationship. I'd like to add the single poly perspective and say that you can also define yourself as poly if it's something that makes you happy. Even if you're not in a "relationship" yet and you just want to be open and honest with anybody you might wind up dating that you won't be entirely exclusive. I understand that relationships are work, and that you can't be happy 100% of the time. And you don't have to reach bouncing off the walls types of happiness. That shit can be irritating.

Just...general okayness with open/poly/whatever being what you want and who you are.

Also, there's this pretty neat article up on Vice about poly. The closed vs. open relationship chart near the end is something I haven't seen before, and interesting.

Good advice

If you don't know about Fairly Odd Parents, you should. If nothing else because then you can appreciate how this meme was created.

Voted most likely

The school year is beginning again, and with it all the fantastic team building exercises that are forced upon workshop participants. Build the tallest tower you can using only paper plates and straws! Sit back to back with a partner; one of you describes a picture and the other has to draw it. Get it? We're working on clear communication and being a good listener.

Honestly? I feel like they should just have you do this damn stuff during the interview process if it's so important to job function. Maybe instead of asking that question about what a person's greatest weaknesses are. "I'm sorry, your resume was stellar and your references all check out, but you couldn't work on a team to play a game of charades without being a total ass-hat, so we're going with a different candidate."

In any case, we were in our classroom today setting things up for the students to come in tomorrow.
We have a few new full-time assistants, so those of us who have been there longer were going over the dynamic of the room. As part of this the lead teacher had us include, "something important to know about you" in our intros when we were introducing ourselves to the newbies.

Since I've been pretty good about the whole, "be honest in appropriate situations" thing, I decided my "something important" was going to be telling everybody about Now-Hubby and Frisbee. I think I phrased it as, "I'm married, and am also in another significant relationship." One of the newbies totally shocked my by saying she has a relative who's in a similar type of relationship. And the rest of the newbies just sort of moved on and accepted it.

Cheers, fellow co-workers. Let's go write some acrostic poems and share them with the group.

Bag it up

Marie Claire of all places has a very decent article about condom use in their September issue.

For a totally better and awesomely informative look at contraceptive use in the United States in general, check this out.

And finally, if you're a woman and are looking for an alternative form of birth control, you could always consider this as well.

Self-aware

This past weekend Frisbee and I went to a birthday party. One of the other people that play frisbee was turning a fairly significant age. I'll leave it up to you to guess which number.

 

After the party had been going on for a few hours, I found myself hanging out with one of the frisbee folks that I find fairly attractive. For the sake of clarity, I'll call him Newcastle. So I was hanging out with Newcastle, and we decided to go outside where some of the other frisbee people were playing a game in the parking lot. On the way outside, I put my arm around him and asked if it was okay. I told him all the reasons that I think he's a pretty cool dude.

When we were heading back inside later, I was holding his hand. When we were almost back to the front door of the hotel, he stopped me and told me all the things he liked about me.

Which was pretty much everything, except for the fact that I'm married. I asked if it was because he didn't believe me when I said Now-hubby is okay with me flirting, etc. with other people. Newcastle said it's just not who he is - that he likes to go on "dinner and a movie" type dates, and be exclusive. I asked if it was because he actually didn't find me attractive and was just trying to let me down without hurting my feelings. He said I'm pretty much, "his perfect girl."

Then he asked if I wanted to kiss him.

Which I did. Up against the wall of the hotel. For at least the next five minutes. It was phenomenal. We eventually stopped because the whole me being married thing was "too much" for him to get over. These are the frustrating ones. The potential good things that I have to let go because there's a fundamental difference in the way the other person approaches and thinks about things. There's definite interest on both sides, but it just doesn't work. No matter how much I reassure and communicate and answer all the questions honestly.

 The super frustrating part came once we were back inside and he said, "Seriously, though. Where are the girls like you?" And I just wanted to scream. I am a girl like me. And I'm right here.

Who, what, and where

Relevant story: I was playing Clue with Frisbee and some of the other frisbee folks this past weekend. I never realized that, according to the official rules, when you make a guess you have to not only be in the room you're guessing, but also move the weapon and person you're guessing into the room with you. Let's say you're playing as Professor Plum and about to go into the Library to make your own guess, and then Mr. Green pulls you into the Hall to accuse you of murder. Then you're stuck trying to make it all the way back to the Library (unless Green gives something away with his guess and you don't want to go to the Library anymore). It's sort of an interesting sabotage move. Also, I guess it's a thing with the frisbee folk (not in the official rules) to sometimes guess cards you have in your own hand? I'd never played that way before, either. That was fucking confusing.

In any case, this is sort of a neat analogy about how game rules relate to polyamory. The author uses Monopoly, not Clue. Side note: I dislike Monopoly as a board game. But sometimes I would make the little characters from the Monopoly board fight gang wars with themselves using the weapons from Clue. That was fun.

Past perfect

Switched at Birth madness!

First of all, Daphne and Jace - if you're going to be Facetiming about your secret plans to take down the senator, do you think maybe this would be a good time to use only ASL? Why are you speaking and signing at the same time? This seems like a fucking perfect way to get caught. Everybody in the fucking office and at the spa can hear you talking about your secret plan.

Secondly: The scene where Bay and Emmett are watching a movie they made. "Night of the Living Deaf." No, it's not that type of movie. It's like a zombie flick they did in ASL together. They were dating when they made the movie. That's important, I guess. Anyway. So Bay and Emmett are watching the movie together and there's a scene where they kiss. And oh man wouldn't you know it but Bay's current boyfriend walks in just as they are watching that scene.

And like a totally normal boyfriend, he gets totally jealous because the person who's kissing him now used to kiss other people, and that is totally fucking unacceptable. It also makes it worse because Bay is still sort of friends with Emmett instead of hating his guts and refusing to hang out with him like a totally normal ex-girlfriend would. Imagine that, right?

Time Tested

In good news, James Deen has an interview in September's Glamour which, although only one page long, is very good. He's an eloquent motherfucker, that's for sure.

In not so good news, I was late for work today. A coworker had asked me to cover her shift, and I forgot to write it down on the calendar at home. Thus, about an hour of the shift was missed. For all intents and purposes, not a great thing, but also not a completely unforgivable thing either.

At the end of everything, I gave myself points for not falling apart into a total wreck about making a mistake. I didn't feel good about missing part of the shift, but I didn't completely shut down emotionally, either. I was angry with myself, but only for about an hour or so. I didn't spend an entire day inside my head telling myself I'm not good at anything because of this. It's something therapy lady and I talked a lot about. Not stopping how I react to things completely, but trying to lessen the amount of time I spend reacting to things and the severity with which I react to things.

Sometimes I can't keep my shit together when everything is perfectly fine and awesome. So being able to keep it together when something not so awesome happens is a good feels.

The one where I watch The Canyons

Last night I noticed on tumblr that The Canyons was available to rent online in a couple different places. I'd been interested in seeing it because:

1. This guy was in it:

2. Bret Easton Ellis. Like him as a writer. Not particularly crazy about the movies so far, but they're not so abysmally terrible that I'd actively avoid one.

For those of you who are interested, the imdb summary is actually pretty much the entire plot. Now-hubby says I'm being "generous" by saying it wasn't terrible. The way I look at it, if you're even vaguely interested, there are worse ways to waste an hour and a half of your life. Here's the main takeaways.

1. James Deen can not act. Or walk like a normal person. There's a really subtle line between actors who are playing their characters and actors who actually are their characters. I had actually fairly high hopes that James Deen would transcend that line even though his main motivation for acting so far has been, "and then you're going to nail this chick until her eyes cross." Ah, well. He tried.

Also, maybe I was just over-analyzing everything, but he sort of walks like he has no idea how walking works.

2. Lindsay Lohan has not aged well. As Now-hubby pointed out several times during the movie, she's 5 years younger than he or I. I feel like the make-up people didn't have any particular motive to make her look as bad as she does, that's just the way things are now. Sadness.

3. Bret Easton Ellis has some fucked-up shit to say about relationships and sex. This one is actually not a bad point. American Pyscho had one part in particular that made my vagina almost completely close up with fear and also almost made me throw up. (It's in the book, not the movie. I'll just say three words: rat, brie, vagina. shudders) Rules of Attraction was pretty non-standard as far as the relationships that happened there. And The Canyons is rife with stuff that's just sort of like, "daaang." I like that.

Circle

Today's, "Hey, you thought you were living your life as a successful adult well hey remember this?" crippling moment of self-reflection came about because of Stay Together for the Kids coming on the radio.

I dislike talking about my parents and my past, because it can sometimes feel like I'm pointing to one specific moment and saying, "see? This is why I have problems. This specific moment in time." I want to be clear that's not the case. It's more a shit pile of stuff that's sort of always teetering around me. I've got a pretty good fence built up around it, and have slowly started shoveling out the shit until maybe I could make something useful out of the plot within the fence. But as I'm working, every now and then, something will come tumbling off the pile and fall at my feet and completely ruin my ability to think in a functional manner. This can happen when I'm not even in a bad mood to begin with.

That's what happened today. I was on my way to work after having a completely fantastic time with a fuck-friend of mine. This song came on the radio, and I spent the next 20 minutes inside my own head trying to get myself back together.

The story behind it: the time I went with my mother for freshman orientation stuff at the University I was going to attend. Things had fallen apart pretty hard the year before - a whole lot of things had come to a head and had wound up with me getting pulled down a flight of stairs and then limping halfway to work after getting the awesome bombshell drop that something I thought was shitty was entire levels of shitty I hadn't even considered. We never talked about any of it, and things just kept spiraling. I was getting out, and this was maybe one of the last times I'd ever be alone with my mother again. I played this song specifically during the road trip. I prefaced it with something like, "this song makes me think about home." In my head, I thought, "everything sucks and I wish I didn't have to run away from it as the only way for it to get better. Talk to me."

Absolutely. Nothing. She mentioned something about how fast I was driving the car, and I took the CD out and put something else in.

So today this song came on the radio and I thought about that road trip. And I thought about what it felt like to be so completely shut down when I was trying to express something emotionally. And then I thought about how people around me now will ask me if I want to talk about what's bothering me, and how it makes me so angry that I can't. How it's all completely internal; the idea that I somehow shouldn't have a problem, because nobody wants to hear about it anyway.