My new favorite thing: sex (and the like) in the shower.

On kink

In my racism class, for grad school, part of our "getting to know you!" introductory exercises had us think about labels and what we identify as, individually.

The list of usual suspects was on there - sex, age, race, ethnicity, economic class, etc. I added gender identity and sexual orientation, because I think about those a lot in the course of my work. I got to add them because there was an "other" category, for anything we wanted.

I got home tonight and was thinking about all the things I could put there, but didn't, and first on the list was my identity as kinky, sexually speaking. I would have completely forgotten about the exercise, except for the fact that we were talking about deviance this week, and how it's very easy to classify someone as deviant, and what that means.

The important thing I gleaned was that deviance is all in the eye of the beholder. Therefore, if the beholder is "American society as a whole", I, as a kinky person, am deviant. Highly deviant, if you want to get particular.

But anywhere else, I'm not so deviant. I'm an independent, mid-twenties, white, well-educated woman. I'm not dependent on anyone, or the government for that matter (except for student loans, but those are socially acceptable forms of dependence). In fact, I work to help make other people less deviant, in my field.

It also got me thinking about socially acceptable forms of deviance. It's okay to be gay (more or less), okay to be a working woman, okay to be anti-Bush, okay to be on Medicare or Medicaid (as an elderly or disabled person). In fact, we applaud people who are honest about these things - at least in the circles I run in; I realize that the "red states" might feel differently about them. But while I wouldn't have a problem describing myself as bi or lesbian or even trans in that "other" category, I still wouldn't feel comfortable coming out as kinky. Society as a whole would still classify me as deviant, and would try to stigmatize me for that deviance.

Hell, some days I do it to myself, for all of my liberal and sex-positive attitudes.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it sucks that kinkiness is still so largely stigmatized (as is sex as a whole, really), and that it's really hard to like yourself when the messages you get tell you not to, even over something as minor as one aspect of your identity. Not that identity is minor, but there are so many other things that I am that I don't think I should be condemned on one of them - one of them that really is quite fulfilling, thank you very much.

Fucking christ.

Amazingly enough, when I come home livid enough to spit killer bees, I'm not in the mood for sex. So no fun sex stories this weekend; in fact I don't think I even got naked except to take a shower (or sleep, Jay likes sleeping naked so I follow along when he's here). Jay wasn't entirely happy about that, so he tried this morning, which meant that I woke up crying and curling up in a ball.

No, this is not my normal reaction to anything sex-related from Jay.

Work has got me feeling really shitty; I compared it to an abusive boyfriend last night. Just when you finally think to yourself "Fuck this, I'm better than this bullshit" it comes out and apologizes, and promises it won't happen again, things will be different, and you have a great shift where you feel like you're on top of the world and you get suckered back in again and think "well maybe it will be different".

Except that I know it won't, so I don't know why I try. Except that I haven't got a new job yet, and I can't quit until the end of October, anyway.

On top of that, I'm getting sick. I called off last Tuesday because of just sheer tiredness, and it didn't help. I've been feeling off all weekend, and then today I woke up with a sore throat and a headache and a fever. Stunning. Getting sick as a dog is clearly very high on my list of priorities.

And to add to the fun, my nipples are for some reason hyper-sensitive, to the point where even thinking about having something touch them is painful. That's what ultimately woke me up and had me crying this morning - he went for the tits, and it was bad.

So I'm drugging myself up and eating throat drops like candy, and going to work and being bitchy, because I need the money and there's no one to work my shift if I call out anyway. Fucking awesome.

No, really.

Hey pro-tip. When I'm supposed to be gone at 2 (because I was in at 6), and I'm still at work at 3:39 picking up your mess, it is not going to add any positive mood points to come into the office where I am desperately trying to get some work done and ask me if I can do "just one more thing", because I will immediately assume that that thing is killing you, and plan accordingly.

Time for french to collapse in bed before anyone dies for reals.

Better man

I am, basically, an angry person.

I'm not any of those stereotypical "angry" people either - except maybe for the redhead bit. The world just pisses me the fuck off.

As I've gotten older, I've mellowed a bit, tempered the temper, if you will. I don't fly off the handle at the smallest things anymore. I've learned some serious self-control. I've also learned to let some things go.

But I'm still an angry person, and I'm never angrier than when I'm angry at myself.

Without going into a seriously long story of my life, I'm a perfectionist and set absurdly high standards for myself, although thankfully not in every area. The biggest problem here is that most of these absurd standards have to do with relationships. I can be absolutely intolerant of any fuck-up, perceived or actual, on the part of a romantic partner. It's not very pretty when I am.

Jay didn't even really fuck up, Saturday night, and to be fair, it was more or less of a set-up anyway. As nice as it would be, he is not in control of the weather, and so it was not his fault when the weather-dependent activity he was treating me to as our Big Date was no longer an option when we arrived. I had also spent the entire last day angry at myself, for a completely unrelated reason.

But once I'm that pissed off at myself, it's easy for it to geometrically multiply, and spew outwards, all containment lost. Once the Big Date did not live up to my expectations or plans, things got very ugly, very fast. The blame, really, is mine, just as it has been almost every other time something like this has happened.

The difference, though, was that I actually managed to tell Jay that I wasn't angry at him so much as I was angry at myself. Sure, I was angry at myself because of what I thought of as his fuck-up, and naturally, being an immature sort, used this as ammunition in my apparently continuing quest to rip him to shreds and reduce him to tears, but I at least let him know that the majority of my anger was because of me, not him.

Not that it really helped me, in the moment. I was angry with myself for consenting to date this fuck-up again, so really, that said some very bad things about me, didn't it? Wasn't I better than this? If Jay was the best guy I could find to date, that said that I was not nearly as awesome as I thought I was. And as soon as people found out - both that I was dating him again, and that he'd fucked up again - they'd be more than happy to tell me this. The relationship would reflect exceedingly poorly on my character.

To be fair, for a large portion of our college years, I was in some part held responsible, fairly or not, for Jay and his mistakes. Jay doesn't go to class? My fault. Jay doesn't show up to rehearsal? My fault. Jay doesn't do his homework, pay his bills, manage to show up to work on time, and I haven't seen him for a month because he's retreated to his room and isn't coming out and won't answer his phone? Somehow, miraculously, my fault.

So my absurdly high relationship expectations are both a product of character and socialization, which makes them very difficult to beat. I didn't say another word to Jay that night, after I'd gotten as much vitriol out as I could before guilt set in, but I was still angry about everything, to the point where the words "I love you" were no longer relevant to me and my experience. I went to bed without him, rolled away when I heard him join me. But in the morning, I was curled up next to him. I had a brief spat with my body, the weak-willed traitorous bitch, and then realized that I needed to get the fuck over myself. In the grand scheme of things, what "Jay did" was minor - a non-issue, really. Something that if it weren't him, wouldn't even register on my radar as something to fume over. Definitely not even close to a dealbreaker.

So I apologized, he apologized, and we had make-up sex. And I went to work on Sunday a much less angry person.

Moonrise, moonset

Funnily enough, I mind 5:30 in the morning a lot less when I've been awake the entire night before.

I went to sleep bathed in the light of the moon, around midnight. My room was unusually bright. I was highly disconcerted to be getting up at 4:30 in that same light, except that it was via the reflection of the moon off of the windows of the house next door.

It's still eerily bright outside, and I get to walk in it - part of my post yesterday deals with the fact that my car is in the shop and it will cost me lots of money to get it out. Oops. That's what I get for buying a used car, I suppose. So now I get to get up at the same time I would to drive to work for 6, except that I'll be taking the bus, so I'll get there around 7.

Also creepy - the utter silence outside. Well, not complete; I can hear the dull humming roar of the highway about a mile north, but that's it. No insects. No birds awake yet. No tree frogs. No one else awake except for the bus drivers. My dad gets up at 2 in the morning for work every day, and has for years. I have no idea how he does it.

I spent a month in England last year, and during that time, I drank innumerable cups of tea. Usually very, very good tea.

Tea was the beverage for nearly every occasion. Having company? Serve tea. Early morning? Have a cuppa. Meeting with coworkers? Tea. Relaxing in front of the telly of an evening? Tea, anyone?

I was a tea drinker anyway, but my experiences there just reinforced it. I came home with some lovely teas from Whittard's, drank them for a few weeks, and promptly forgot about them.

Tea is a comfort beverage. When the world is going entirely wrong, when nothing is right, and when all seems lost, things will turn out okay if it's still possible to make tea.

So I sit here, a cup of English Rose tea by my side, and realize that yes, things will all work out in the end. Even if right now, they seem rather bleak.

Individualism

The leather kick started a few weeks ago; I'm not sure why. Jay and I have probably discussed our relationship, and all of its aspects, more in the past month than we have in the entirety of the near-decade we've known each other.

He started by putting on the collar, which normally makes me quite pliant. This was no different, and I could feel the grin on my face over my entire body. Next came the belt - which he is ridiculously fond of - and the old cuffs. We've had a pair of neoprene cuffs for ages now, out of my love of waterproof items. In fact, these cuffs have something to do with the entry I want to make but not really, so consider this mention of them the start of a long road to recovery.

Ahem.

Then he got out the gag. Normally, I'm a pretty relaxed sub. I'm usually a big fan of what's happening to me, so I don't fight or struggle. I don't top from the bottom. I don't get bratty. I don't try to avoid the restraints - they are, after all, what I want (along with flogging and spanking and any number of other fun activities). But for some reason, gags tend to make me sassy.

As soon as he had it in my mouth - not even buckled! - I unleased an absolute torrent of the best insults I could come up with. It was highly entertaining, at least for me. I believe I started out with "Now that you have no idea what the fuck I am saying, I am going to fucking insult you. And your mother. I'd make fun of your father, but I do that anyway. Fuck you." And went on from there. Jay's pretty good at decoding gag talk, so I think he had an idea of what was going on, but chose to ignore it.

Now granted, I wasn't really trying to insult or hurt him in any way, so I know that if I'd wanted to, I could have gotten much, much more spiteful. Still, I think I'd gotten to the point of insinuating that every member of his family was an impotent, unlearned mouth-breather or something, before the gag started burning.

Remember how I mentioned that we had to get a new gag, because the old one tasted like burning? This was the gag that tasted like burning. Like BURNING. I have no idea what happened to this gag, but my mouth and lips were burning. So I very politely informed Jay of this, as best I could, and drank lots of water.

Since the gag was no longer an option, he decided to try to gag me with a pair of my underwear, which lead to more insults from me about his domming ability, rope skills, etc., because this attempt was a spectacular failure. The removal of the gag had not resulted in the removal of my attitude.

So Jay pulled another Dom card out of the deck, and simply informed me that I was not allowed to speak. Period.

I glared at him, but complied. He pulled out the second waterproof vibrator I'd bought (waterproof waterproof waterproof!), as he'd not had a chance to use it. I am here to tell you that he failed. Miserably.

The new vibe is harder plastic, and, well, he decided that he was going to press it into my clit as hard as he could, just to make sure that the vibrations were transferred. This resulted in much sighing and rolling of my eyes, and gave me the opportunity to mentally catalogue all of his deficiencies and search the thesaurus of my head for the biggest and most obscure words to describe them.

Still, he eventually noticed, and gave me permission to speak, so that I could tell him what was going on.

"You're doing it all wrong. Ass."

And with that I was not allowed to speak anymore.

He gave it another go, which was only marginally more successful than the first. I think - think - he was trying to get me to orgasm. Since I was getting tired, I laid back and started falling asleep. It wasn't exactly painful or unpleasant, but it certainly wasn't going to get me off, what he was doing.

He stopped at some point, and laid beside me. He cuddled me for a bit, which I wasn't having, because dammit, I was comfortable where I was and he was dumb. Suddenly, my left hand was free, and the vibrator was in it, and Jay was saying that what I would do is -

"I stab".

And I stabbed him in the chest with the vibrator.

I have no idea where that came from, but it was immediately the funniest thing in the history of the world, ever, as evidenced by my hysterical laughter. Jay just looked down at the vibrator - still in contact with his chest - and gave me that "Are you fucking serious" look, which made me laugh harder.

I laughed so hard I had tears coming out of my eyes. I could not stop laughing, and in fact did so for what probably amounted to a good, solid five minutes. I laughed so much that Jay looked like he was actually getting irritated with me. So while I was laughing - and thus defenseless - Jay hooked my wrist back to the belt, put away the vibrator, and plunged his fingers into my cunt, in search of my g-spot, and quickly found it, which shut me up right quick.

After he was done with me for the night, he gently let me out of the restraints - except for the collar, of course. And started laughing nearly as hysterically as I had earlier.

"Oh fuck. 'I stab.' What the fuck was that?"

After all

Having had my fill of existential angst, Jay informed me that he went shopping again, and that I was to open the box as soon as it arrived, since there was a surprise in it.

Not that the rest of the box wasn't exciting. We desperately needed a new ballgag becuase the old one tasted like burning, and I mean this in a literal sense. Jay has also decided that to go with some other bits and bobs of leather, he was finally going to buy leather ankle and wrist cuffs - locking, of course, which seems to be the theme. So this makes a locking collar, a locking pair of ankle cuffs, a locking pair of wrist cuffs, a locking ballgag, a locking waist belt (for fun attachment purposes) and a locking set of thigh spreaders.

I am really, really glad that I have lots of extra keychains.

The spreaders and the belt were in the last shopping trip, and Jay has decided that he does indeed like them. For some reason, he really loves the thigh spreaders. I think it has something to do with the fact that I can't close my legs. Amazing, that. I can't even close my legs when he's playing with my g-spot and it is beyond intense and I am almost crying, nor can I close them when he decides that vibrators are the best invention ever and he is going to make me enjoy them whether I want to or not. That man is starting to get far too devious, I think.

We'll probably try the new toys out at some point this weekend - I can't imagine Jay wanting to wait any longer than necessary. Oh, and the surprise? A brand-new stainless steel Collins speculum. Deeeeelicious. Seems he does pay attention at some points - a few weeks ago I'd mentioned how much I did in fact enjoy the one scene we did with a bit of a medical bent to it, and lo and behold. A girl could get used to this.