Shark week

Seriously.

Seriously you guys.

This is the only good thing about periods.

 In addition to being sporadically emotional, the following week also includes the following awesome things:

Random food cravings.

Cramping that sometimes makes it difficult to stand up/sit down/hold any comfortable position except this one:

Amounts of blood that will vary between almost none to fucking torrential downpours, with no warning at all or ability to predict which you will spend your day dealing with.

Quite possibly the worst thing, though, is having to deal with the total irrationality that you are both voraciously horny yet almost unable to let people get near you physically because keeping it together mentally is taking all of your energy.

Flowers

I was getting some online just now.

Then these popped up on the main page of FTD.

The way my mind works, I immediately thought of getting some just so I could go out in public and randomly chuck one as hard as I possibly can at somebody. At first they'd be all, "what the fuck?! You just hit me with a rock." but then they would see the incredibly heartfelt and romantic message and be all, "d'aww I can't stay mad at you."

This concludes your foray into the way my mind works sometimes. Curtain closed.

Deafiquette

For those of you not in the know, I work as a sort-of sign language interpreter. I say sort-of, because I'm not technically an interpreter. I work with students who have cognitive disabilities as well as being Deaf, so my job consists of taking classroom content, condensing it into easier to understand tidbits, and then translating those tidbits into ASL (American Sign Language). An actual interpreter would do classroom content to ASL and skip the middle step.

Side note: what is the difference between and interpreter and a translator? Besides the fact that one is spelled -er and the other is -or, although they're phonetically said the same? I'm genuinely curious. Spoken languages are translated (i.e. English into Spanish), but spoken language to Sign is an interpretation. I think I have the beginnings of a very deep discussion about this brewing, but at the risk of sounding too stoned, I'll skip it for now.

I sometimes wonder about the parallels between the job that I do and my particular lifestyle proclivity. I'm not a big fan about making comparisons between cultural minorities. I'm not trying to say that somehow the Deaf experience is similar to mine. I'm just saying that it's cathartic sometimes for me to answer the increasingly stupid questions people ask about deafness, when I can't always answer stupid questions about poly in the same manner.

Munchkinland

Every so often I will wander into straight people land and be all like, "the fuck is this place?"

 Not that I'm surrounded by people who are kinky, poly, queer, what-have-you on a daily basis. Or that if somebody is one of those aforementioned things, I am automatically going to get along with them. I sit through my fair share of conversations with people "in the community" slash "in the scene" slash whatever the fuck hive mind term you want to use to try and justify the idea that we're all supposed to hold hands and sing along all like, "the way you think is amazingly precious."

There's a special faction of straight people land, though, that is entirely baffling for me. This is the place where I call Frisbee "a  friend," as in, "I am going to go camping this weekend with a friend." And then when said people find out that Frisbee is a man, that I'm going camping just with him and not bringing Now-hubby along, they get all, "say whaaaat?"

As in, the idea that I have a friend of the opposite gender and he is my friend and not somebody who started out as Now-hubby's friend and now I am also friends with him sort of by default - that makes these people collectively lose their shit.

Slutty

The German and I were talking a few days ago about the word "slut." It's a word that has quite a bit of meaning behind it, depending on who's saying it and in what context it's being said. I ran across this little blog entry this morning that I thought was pretty interesting.

Here's my favorite quip from it:

There is a difference between being a slut and being a cheater. One is not necessarily the other. I find this difference to be alarmingly important to make distinct. I would never shame someone for being a slut. Well, I don’t think I would necessarily “shame” someone for just about anything, but you get my point. Having sex isn’t a crime and it doesn’t hurt anybody… unless it does. If you are legally allowed to have sex as much as possible with anyone of consenting age and willing mind, what more do you want? You could have an orgy, you could have an open relationship, you could just have an endless string of one night stands. Why commit to someone and then break their heart to get something you could have had before all of that?