Tuesday, May 31, 2011

In Which Thomas Enters from Stage Right in a Recreation Vehicle

The nearly impossible has occurred. My lackadaisical participation on OK Cupid has yielded a gem.

First of all, I should mention that Lachlan and I have not managed to get in touch at an appropriate time--a lot of bum luck going on there--and I have hardly heard from Caleb except a feeble "thank you" for the letter I wrote him. I was starting to get a little antsy, especially given the growing closeness and increasing time investment between Simon and Ruth. They are totally cute together and I am happy for them, but my relative lack of play has left me with a bit of an appetite.

Luckily, I've been able to coax Simon's clothes off a few times in the past week. If he hadn't been in the mood, I don't know what I could have done with myself. Besides, he's looking so swarthy and sexy since the sun has decided to come out for several days on end. I can hardly be expected to resist.

Okay. Back to the main plot: Enter Thomas. He messaged me rather out of nowhere last week sometime asking if I wanted to go "blow shit up" with him. Naturally, I was intrigued. I had never noticed him on OK Cupid before although he is poly and we are a 99% match. As it turns out, it makes perfect sense why our match percentage is so high. We immediately got along very well, I felt comfortable presenting myself as I am, and conversation was easy. I admired his idiosyncratic, fuck-all attitude and lifestyle; he lives on extremely little money (he is in the beginning stages of building a business on the web), he almost never goes "out," and he almost always seems to find something novel and creative to do instead. I found him interesting and sweet, but I wasn't sure I was attracted to him in more than a friendly way. We ended that first meeting with me reaching to hug him awkwardly and him making an awkward attempt to kiss me that resulted in a sideways peck on the cheek.

I guess that after the first time I met him and felt only the mildest flutter of potentiality regarding the carnal side of things, I thought that he was probably just not my type. I also felt that dating someone like him might represent a weird sort of overlap with the territory that rightfully belongs to my relationship with Simon. I was surprised how quickly my assumptions and my degree of enthusiasm could change.

It turns out that his nerdy, shy, somewhat nervous persona does not extend far below the surface. First of all, he is incorrigibly adventurous in very particular ways. The twinkle in his eye when he talks about getting into mischief is adorably boyish. He has a serious affinity for uncharted, forgotten, or forbidden places. He peeks in every dumpster; he prefers to stand and sit in liminal spaces; and he loves to trespass. I can identify with this impulse. We had a great time busting into a nearly deserted hotel and taking advantage of the swimming pool...and the sauna, which we had to ourselves...

Second, he apparently loses all his jitters as soon as he starts to get aroused. His sexual personality is startlingly assertive and dominant, but perfectly balanced by an acute sense of patience, respect for boundaries, and frank solicitation of consent. Part of me wondered if he had somehow found this diary and studied it to be so educated about my desires. (He did try to find it after I told him it existed, but to my relief, he only came up with my public blog.)

Another part of me just thought that perhaps his levels of emotional maturity, sexual experience, and confidence are a bit further advanced than what I'm accustomed to. He is seven years my senior, and has been through many phases of social, personal, and sexual development in his life. (He has a few jaw-dropping and hilarious stories about the odd places, circumstances, and people he has somehow survived.) He spent several years behaving, as he put it, like a complete slut--not the ethical kind--and has long since reformed those habits. He has had several major relationships, both mono and poly, and he has calm and mature insights about them. When he speaks about all this, he doesn't stoop to blaming or bashing any of the women he has known--always a good sign! It seems that in general, he has already been through many of his lessons and racked up quite a bit of knowledge about what women want. Furthermore, unlike Caleb, he is not in the midst of any huge personal upheavals or regressions, and so I can trust the relatively uncomplicated nature of his interest in me. All of these details make it feel easy on the affective level to open my body to him.

As far as the rest of that equation goes, the boy is a fucking monster. I seriously have no idea how he seems to just know.

After hiking up to a bald rock face with a breathtaking view (no joke, soaring eagles and all that) for a picnic and sneaking into the hotel for a swim and a surprise makeout session in a darkened sauna, we returned to his RV. He was so gentle at first; he had lured me there in the first place by offering to observe the same underwear-on rules as we had agreed on in the sauna, and he kept his word. I think he must have somehow remembered me mentioning the soreness I still feel over the idea that I might have rushed things with Caleb, because it seemed like Thomas knew to be particularly sensitive to my need to feel more secure. (Again, how did he know?)

Aside: I really don't know why I've been putting up with this vague attitude of entitlement from men like James for so long, or why I've come to expect it, or why I'm so surprised when a man is genuinely respectful of the boundaries I set for physical intimacy. Society has trained me in the most worrisome way. Nevertheless, I was super excited that he was such a gentleman and I didn't have to worry so damn much about that particular struggle. I was able to just enjoy what I was doing and feeling without wondering if I would have to resist being pushed further than I had already said I wanted to go. When I thanked Thomas later for his respectful behavior, he playfully mocked me by saying something like, "What? You're thanking me for not date raping you?"

So yeah yeah yeah, he was gentle and sweet. And then? And then?

I had the most delicious feeling when we were fooling around in this dimly-lit trailer under a streetlamp that I was being mauled over and over and somehow living through it. How did he know how much I love to be gently but firmly and authoritatively manipulated, to have my legs and arms and entire body picked up and placed where my lover wants them, to be enfolded, spun around, held down, parted and pressed into? Is it because most women love the same thing? I thought that there were many women who preferred soft caresses and light touch. Or is that just an invention of the social construct of femininity? Anyway, it was exhilarating.

He turned out to be deceptively strong and hard-bodied, too. If you saw Thomas in a bar, you might peg him for a wallflower. His posture isn't particularly assertive, his voice falters and cracks a bit, and his eyes flutter around as if looking for a place to land. In other words, he is easy to feminize in the imagination as a beta personality. I don't think I am alone in the tendency to assume that outward assertiveness and physical prowess somehow go together, and that shyness and physical weakness are likewise correlated. Yet again, my useless stereotypes were proven wrong.

I think I first noticed his actual shape when he was holding onto the upper edge of a window frame that was weirdly positioned in the pool, a sort of useless portal. His arms were stretched over his head as he held himself up, and the blue light reflecting off the water outlined him against the window. I felt a tingle deep in my belly when I noticed how beautiful his arms and shoulders are. His back was turned towards me, so I was free to stare. That may have been the moment when I realized that I had jumped to a hasty conclusion about what kinds of bodies I can and cannot feel sexually attracted to...because right then, I certainly felt an intense desire to feel his arms around me.

Later, in the dim light that stole in through the cracks in the curtains, the effect was even more dramatic. I could hardly believe his strength; he could easily pick me up by clutching me to his chest, pressing one hand into the middle of my back, and sitting up. When I was squirming against him this way, my fingers would land on impressively firm pectoral muscles, slide over sinewy shoulders, and claw at the rippling flesh of his back. His hands were strong and incredibly sensitive, too. Although he mostly grabbed and pushed and pulled (which, as I've said before, is a delightful habit to discover pre-packaged in a lover), his hands made these wonderfully intelligent shapes and paths, neglecting no part of me. All this with no penetration or even oral sex. It was terrifically intimate and exploratory in a way that I feel like haven't experienced since I was a teenager, when the delight of sexual play was not so cluttered by the expectation of an orgasm.

Feeling how we interlock and move while we were fully clothed was both a delicious glimpse of delights to come and a joy unto itself, intense in a very different way from the actual fucking that we are probably going to be doing in approximately ninety hours. (Can you tell I'm excited?)

If all continues to go well, we've agreed that the ideal situation for both of us involves a fairly regular relationship in which we expect to see each other once a week or so on average. He has also agreed to meet Simon at some point in the not-too-distant future. His other partner, on the other hand, has no desire whatsoever to meet me. I am fine with that, but I hope for her own sake that she can change her mind and realize that this town is too small to expect not to run into me, or us, by accident at some point. She may as well come around to the idea that we should be friendly, but it's hardly my place to say.

Wow. I have spent a lot of time composing this hymn to my new lover. I have nearly forgotten that I still need to work today. I can hardly blame myself, though, for losing my concentration when I have electric jolts vibrating through my organs at frequent and unpredictable intervals. Wish me luck getting it together, reader.

Monday, May 16, 2011

In Which Rain Makes Time for Inspirational Reading and Lachlan Makes a Date

I have discovered an icon, reader.

I can't believe I had not yet heard of the work of Catherine Millet, art critic and author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Harvey, my dear sweet decorative roommate, suggested I borrow the book from his shelf, and since then it has been consuming the hours I've spent trapped indoors while I've been menstruating. I'll finish a few pages and then find myself wandering off into beautiful worlds of fantasy, the object in my hands forgotten for a moment. Then I'll remember myself, read a few more pages, and repeat the process. I suppose this makes it a notable example of a book that is not exactly difficult to put down, not because it is dull, but because it is best savored bit by sumptuous bit, like a box of truffles. (I feel similarly about Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.)

This is the original jacket art:


In the introductory section about Catherine's childhood:

"The little gang would come and wait for me late in the afternoon at the end of the road. They were happy and playful, and spotting them one day, the student's father said with a cordial note in his voice that I must be a hell of a girl to have all these boys at my disposal. In fact, I had given up counting. i had completely forgotten my childhood investigation into the permitted number of husbands. I was not a 'collector' [...] I was happy simply to discover that the delicious giddiness I felt at the ineffably soft touch of a stranger's lips, or a hand fitting itself over my pubis, could be experienced an indefinite number of times because the world was full of men predisposed to do just that. Nothing else really mattered." 

This sets the scene for the rest of the memoir, which details real-life exploits of a woman living in Paris during a sexual revolution that created a cultural space for a new community of sorts. Through this community of sexual liberation, Catherine realizes her apparently inborn sluthood in ways that would make even the most sexually prolific and shameless person blush at times.

Group sex is the most constant preoccupation of her narrative; she describes so many orgies and gang-bangs featuring her own body as the primary cum receptacle in the first fifty pages that I was left feeling a little spinny, like I myself had been through an ordeal. Not to mention the wetness between my legs, the constant presence of beautiful men all around me (*sigh*, my life is so hard), and the fact that I've been in my moon and unable to completely ravage even one of them...

Even as I throb with sympathy with her exploits and her perspectives on them, I am distracted by a few enormous problems. First, the issues of avoiding pregnancy and STD's are only vaguely touched on; she once mentions contracting the clap, but writes it off as "the shared fate of those who fuck a lot." No one in the scenes she describes ever thinks of using any sort of protection, and the hotness of these scenarios is largely predicated upon the immediacy that the privilege to fuck barebacked affords.

I can't go too far in the direction of identifying with this part of her narratives because in the age of HIV and other ever more sophisticated viral assaults on human sexuality that are my generation's inheritance, it is futile and irresponsible for any ethical slut to even dream of hetero intercourse without the necessary inconvenience of condoms. I myself have spent a great deal of effort trying to learn how to make these awkward few moments sexier, to incorporate them as a normal part of sexual interaction, that I keep wondering when these characters in her drama are ever going to get sensible and put on a goddamn rubber. The riskiness of the idea is not even arousing to me, and in fact can be rather distracting.

Second, the brand of sexual liberation in which Millet's real and fantastical sexual universe participates is uncritically heteronormative in its basic assumptions and practice. Men are almost always initiators, and women are almost always passive recipients. Men are seed-sowers and women are fertile fields. Lesbians are treated with tolerance, but as peripheral and somehow sexually crippled outsiders. There are absolutely no gay men, and the one trans person who made a brief appearance was treated as an amusing aside.

The liberation Millet espouses is so limited to one particular orientation--that of an enthusiastically heterosexual and submissive female-bodied woman who, like many porn stars, portrays the image of one who lives to give men pleasure and see them ejaculate, preferably on or inside her--that I am left wondering where all the queers and feminists are in this "revolution." They can't be far away, but Millet does not concern herself with their concerns at all.

I realize that my objections have much to do with generational and cultural differences, and that a woman writing an honest personal memoir cannot be expected to pause to pontificate upon issues that she feels do not concern her. That's why I still love this book. Nevertheless, I thought it deserved mentioning.

Here is a sample passage from her early twenties:

"Victor's birthday parties impressed me the most. [...] Eric would settle me onto a bed or a sofa in one of the alcoves, respecting some vague custom by taking the initiative to undress me and put me on display. He might start to rub me and to kiss me, but then would immediately hand me over to the others. I would almost always stay on my back, perhaps because the other most common position, in which the woman actively straddles the man's pelvis, is less adapted to intervention from several participants and, anyway, implies a more personal relationship between the partners. On my back, I would be stroked by several men while one of them, rearing up to make room and to see what he was doing, would get going in my sex. I was tugged and nibbled in several places at once. [...] What I remember most is the stiffness between my legs after being pinioned sometimes for four hours, especially as many men tend to keep the woman's thighs spread well apart, to make the most of the view and to penetrate more deeply."

This is common, if perhaps even a touch less graphic, of the narrative style of the sex scenes that make up almost the entirety of the book. She speaks of all the loads of sperm dripping from her cunt as man after man after man comes inside her. Men lining up outside a work van on a busy Paris street to step inside and have their way with her. Men throwing her over the hood of a car in a parking deck and fucking her, one after the other. Taking a cock in each hand, one in her mouth, one in her ass, and another in her cunt.

...You get the point. And always, always this rather detached, self-involved tone. Her perfectly amoral attitude towards the pleasure she gets from sex is one of the most amazing things about the book. I am a bit envious of the ease with which she dismisses shame as a sort of baffling vestigial psychological function. If I had been equipped with that attitude from such a young age, reader, I wonder if I might not have ended up in a similar position. (Pun intended.)

I suppose I should at least mention that I have a date with Lachlan sometime this week. I have the vaguest sensation that he was rather intrigued by my reason for turning him down last time. He certainly called back much faster when I asked him if he wanted to see me this week than he ever did before. It might also be that he is in a better mood; his voice sounded less troubled or harassed than the last few times we spoke. I wonder if he might not, in some small way, wish to prove that he is capable of not being a downer. He doesn't need to prove it to me, but I'll be happy to let him try. I'll also be more than happy to show him I'm still attracted to him. Mrrow.

Signing off, lovelies.

Friday, May 13, 2011

In Which Carnita's Lover Bails Out and Simon's Lover Draws Closer

It is a sad day in Polyland, reader. I'm supposed to still be in another town with my dreamboat. But I'm back in Appalachia, where the humid, mildly overcast and sprinkly day seems to mirror the weather in my head. I woke up after 1:00 pm today after staying up until 5:00 am to write Caleb a very long letter that I now wish I could just copy directly here, but I think I may have to get used to the impermanence--or exceeding permanence, as the case may be--of hand-written letters because I love writing them. It felt so appropriate to have an actual pen in my hand and a very specific audience in mind.

Anyway, I feel like I have a tiny steel steam-powered sigh generator lodged in my chest since I drove away from Caleb's house in Smalltown North Carolina yesterday.

I guess I should at least mention that his meeting with Simon on Monday night went very well. He came over for dinner, and they had a pleasant conversation about nothing in particular, and it all felt so incredibly normal. I tried to leave them well enough alone for short periods of time, walking off to sit on the metal rocking-duck that unaccountably bounces on its spring in our yard. Watching them get along so easily and without my help warmed my slutty heart. I remind you, reader, that this was a first, as was the overnight trip.

An aside: In other news, Simon took the opportunity of my absence for the evening to invite his major love interest over to the house. The re-cap I got of their time together is the one thing that actually made me feel a lot better for a while. They had dinner, posed for some zany photos for our roommate, and then apparently ended up quite naked together in our bed. Things are coming along so well for those two, and I am squealy-little-girl excited for them. Unfortunately, there are a few of our (nosy, gossipy) mutual friends who are positively scandalized by the whole situation; I spent the better part of an hour defending their relationship last night when someone decided to offer me her unsolicited opinion about the matter. I think I did a passing job of explaining why she would do best to mind her own damn business and shut her trap.

Back to Caleb. I arrived in Smalltown on Tuesday night after anticipating this trip for weeks. For a couple of hours, it seemed like Caleb and I were both trying, blushing and awkward, to adjust to the startling aloneness and domesticity of the whole situation. I immediately jumped to cooking dinner, which was, if I may be permitted to say so, absolutely delicious. We hardly touched or made real eye contact for a few hours--we were both apparently very nervous--but finally, as I was chopping a mango, he came behind me and placed his hand in the small of my back. I shuddered, my scalp tingled, and my spine seemed to lose its resolve to stay upright. I turned around to face him, startled again by how tall he is, and he stooped to kiss me. I could hardly breathe for the spasms that kept rolling through my organs and out of my fingers. Yes, the electricity is very real with that one.

Somehow, I finished making dinner, we ate, and we poured drinks. (Actually, he barely drinks alcohol; I believe he was having an iced lemonade. Isn't that cute? ...Le sigh. I am hopeless.) We continued our conversation with him doing most of the talking. The main topics were the anxieties and preoccupations that have typified his last few months' psychological dis-ease, which has caused him to seek professional therapy, and which would be the same thing to cause the tender new bond between us to get warped within the next few hours. I am trying to think of how to efficiently explain his pathology, but I can only seem to think in terms of themes. I'll try to summarize:

Caleb is going through some sort of identity crisis and self-esteem nosedive that causes him to feel extremely anxious and preoccupied with a pervasive sense of inadequacy. Consequently, he is in a very self-involved head space, constantly and rather obsessively questioning the foundations of his identity as a man, as a sexual creature, as a partner, as a father, and practically everything else. He feels extremely self-conscious all the time and has enormous difficulty staying present in the moment.

He says, "I can't ever figure out what to do with my hands, and I'm completely distracted by what other people are thinking about me. It's like I'm surrounded by mirrors all the time."

(I would love to help him figure out what to do with his hands, but no one can really help him with the other thing.)

This episode, which has lasted a few months, seems to have been partially triggered by an experience with a woman whom he had been pursuing for a while. His interaction with this woman, who was in no way over her ex-boyfriend (by her account a very physically powerful, sexually dominant, masculine guy), led Caleb to develop a very unhealthy reflex of constantly comparing himself to this mythical man whom he had never even seen or met.

When he told me about this detail, I must have said something mildly dismissive because he pulled out a little piece of paper to show me as some kind of "proof." I was floored. Scrawled in red marker on this piece of paper was the question, "What do you think HE would be doing right now?" Apparently, Caleb had taken it off of his bedroom wall before I arrived, but now he was showing it to me. I just stared at him slack-jawed for a while, and he seemed to take some kind of weird satisfaction at having driven home the point that he is Extremely Fucked Up. I could have slapped him.

Anyway, Caleb seems to be aware that the problem has nothing really to do with the mythical rock-climber, but this other guy has become the symbol of Caleb's personal failure of self-valuation. Dude With Big Muscles, Huge Cock, and Otherwise Inscrutable Masculinity is just a place-holder, a shape that can give solid form and dimension to the space that had apparently been opening up in Caleb's psyche for just such a crisis. He must have been ripe for a major regeneration.

I hope that he still wants me once he gets through this phase. He said yesterday that he regretted our timing, and I can clearly see why, but I found myself arguing that people seek out the things that they need when they need them and that the timing may not have been an accident at all. I think I actually believe that?

So, conversation went on this way, about CockManDude and other related topics, and we kept pausing intermittently to make out. On maybe the fourth time we shut ourselves up by otherwise occupying our mouths, things progressed to a more sexual place, and he asked in a tone that was suspiciously, not-believably casual, "Do you want to go lay down?"

I wish I had detected that note of forced coolness at the time, but I didn't have enough information right then to consider that he may have reservations about intimacy. (I didn't find that out until the next morning.)

This scenario is an example of one unfortunate effect of the widely shared concepts of masculinity in our culture: the expectation that men should always be ready and willing to have sex. Perhaps if he had not been so influenced by these sorts of expectations of his behavior, he could have found the courage to tell me that although he is very attracted to me, he wishes to slow things down a bit...anyway, that didn't happen, and it may not have changed anything besides. I can't help wondering, though.

The sex was beautiful for me--a culmination of lots of anticipation and desire--and he seemed to be enjoying himself, too. He knows exactly what to do with his mouth and tongue, which are wide and soft--knew me better than I know me, it seemed. His cock is shaped perfectly to tickle that very deep-in place that I know can't be the famed G-spot--it's on the dorsal rather than the ventral plane--but which makes me have to choke back screams of pleasure whenever anything touches it...and with me on top of him, his anatomy is just so that when he is all the way inside me, his cock presses that spot hard. Mrrow. I really, really hope that the first time was not the last time.

I might have to depart the main story for a little aside here about this baffling anatomical detail. I really must figure out what is going on in there that causes one of my favorite sensations in the world. Is my screamy spot an overdeveloped prostate? Is it just a particularly nervy place on the back side of my cervix? I can't really tell, and the feeling can only really be triggered by a very specific shape and size object coming into my vagina at a very specific angle. I am always really excited when I find it, and I usually end up begging my partner to stay right there. It usually happens when I am on top, or when I am on my back with my hips raised and my lover is on his knees.

I mentioned that Caleb is apparently the precise right size and shape, and I should explain that. It seems like the shorter a guy's cock has been, the more likely it was to hit the spot. I had some of the most amazing sex with a lover I had a couple of years ago whom we'll call Max. One of the remarkable things about Max is how exceptionally tiny his erect cock was, but I loved it! It was perfect...it could find my spot, and I could thank it by putting all of it into my mouth! His little dick made me very happy. Caleb's is nowhere near as small as Max's--it's about perfectly average in length, actually--but it is fairly chubby, especially at the base. I have no doubt that I wouldn't be singing these praises for a guy with a nine-inch cock.

Even more digression! So I am not sure if I have ever talked about Oscar here. This was one of two major college boyfriends. He's very sweet and totally attractive--tall and sinewy like a greyhound, with piercing gray eyes and a tendency to always be the most sharply-dressed man in the room. We're still good friends, and have had several joyous little romps since we stopped dating. Nevertheless, even years later, when we found ourselves tangling in my bed after a few beers on my porch, I had to stop him before either of us were finished because his cock is simply too big for me. I remembered that it had been much the same when we had been dating; I was constantly having to ask him to ease up, not go so hard or deep, or even to just stop because I was in too much pain to go on. My poor cervix really just doesn't like to get bruised, and I unequivocally prefer to fuck and to go down on cocks that are on the small side, even though I don't prefer men whose general physiques are on the small side. Lucky for me, there seems to be little correlation between height, weight, and penis size.

Back to sex with Caleb. I keep going back through my memory and trying to find signals that may have indicated that something was off, but everything I can think of is so ambiguous. Mostly I just keep finding images in my head of all these cute facial expressions and sexy little noises he makes in his throat...

As soon as he came, he jumped up and ran off to the bathroom. When he climbed back under the sheets, the thunderstorm that had kicked up in the last few minutes seemed to absorb all of his attention, and I wasn't sure what to do or say. He was completely awake and alert, but clearly avoiding talking to me, and only vaguely responding to any touch. With a different guy, I might have decided that he was just doing the stereotypical "man" thing, emotionally and physically withdrawing after sex. I wouldn't have been pleased by that revelation, and I probably wouldn't sleep with such a fellow ever again. However, I'm pretty sure that Caleb is not built that way. He is more like Simon--very sensitive, affectionate, and accommodating. Maybe I should have realized that if he clams up after sex, something is actually wrong.

Blah blah blah, shoulda coulda woulda. I guess what I really mean to say with all this quibbling over my decisions is that I will now be able to learn from this experience. I can't ever truly regret mistakes that I make, after all. Regret and nostalgia are still some of my most insidious enemies because they both require conscious suspension of so much truth, foregrounding only those aspects of concepts and memories that serve a particular purpose. (Did I just define ideology? And does that make my connections between regret and nostalgia rather more ludicrous or shallow? Eh.)

For the rest of the night, I struggled to sleep. I even got up around 4:00 am to read in the living room and ended up falling asleep for a few hours on the couch. We cuddled a bit in the morning, and when we decided to get up, he made me an impressive breakfast. This is when the topic of sex came up more explicitly--it took until after it had happened, unfortunately--and I mentioned that it doesn't exactly make a girl feel good to be flatly ignored and given the silent treatment after she's been fucked for the first time.

He was sorry and made himself find the words to explain: he had discovered through this experience that he is too self-involved to feel truly present during intimate encounters because he is constantly distracted by performance anxiety. He noted with alarm that when he tries to think about the best sexual experiences he has ever had, they were the instances when he had put on the best "show" for his partner. More mirrors, in other words. By having sex with me, he had only psychically had sex with himself, and he had gotten quiet because he was freaking out on the inside about this.

This is probably tedious to read, so feel free to skip it. I know that later on, if and when I'm feeling really down about losing this guy, I'll appreciate reading a play-by-play that can dispel my memory's self-accusing distortions over time.

Over the course of several hours in the afternoon spent lazing around his house and talking more, I eventually came to the conclusion that I should go home. He had decided that he can't "do this" right now, although he would like to try to shape himself up into a person who can. He said that part more than once in different ways--basically suggesting that he planned to try to do the work on himself that he needs to do in order to be functional in a relationship...and that I would be the first to know when things had changed.

He reiterated that he still wants to see me when he comes to my town, but we'll see if that really ends up being true. Furthermore, I won't know until that situation arises how much I will be willing to tolerate the sensation of never being the one who is in control of what happens between us; anything that happens at this point will be at his behest alone. I may tire of that.

I have to congratulate myself because as bad as I felt and still feel about how things are turning out with him, I behaved in the most graceful, understanding, and supportive manner that anyone could ever ask for. At least I do not have to regret how I behaved. I was a perfect gentlewoman, stirring up no unnecessary drama but still making my feelings for him quite clear. I packed up, hugged him chastely (dammit!), and drove back home.

This post has taken two days to write, and there is still so much that I haven't gotten around to! I wanted to tell you about my time spent in Empathyland, about the gift of sadness, about my little flirtation with a weird artist boy, and about this year's perennial bloom of my ongoing friendship with AndrĂ©s. But alas, I have to go pack for a weekend with Simon's family at their lake house. I will try to write more, but that house always feels quite crowded. Meanwhile, I wait yet again to find out whether I have thoroughly freaked Caleb out with my ridiculously long letter. ¡Vaya con Dios!

Monday, May 9, 2011

In Which Caleb Comes to Dinner

This is sure to be a very short post because the best things about the latest updates are yet to come in the next couple of days.

I was completely floored last night when Caleb called last night and suggested that he meet Simon before I come to visit him. I mean, my newest dreamboat is voluntarily taking the initiative to meet my original dreamboat. I am still having trouble believing my luck.

In about three hours, the three of us will be sitting around our kitchen table figuring out what to talk about. Wow. I'm nervous. Caleb texted me and said he was a little nervous too...so I just told him that he should just show up at the house with his penis hanging out of his pants and then tell Simon his cooking sucks if he wants a new best friend. Giggles.

Then, tomorrow afternoon, I'm headed to Caleb's house in the country.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

In Which Lachlan Blushes Through the Telephone and Carnita Admits a Need

Aurgh, frustration. It's lucky that I had martial arts practice right afterwards, or I might still be a little kinked up on the inside.

Lachlan called yesterday. I was rather floored that he had decided not to flake out on the little thing that had started to blossom between us. All signs seemed to be indicating that I wouldn't hear from him again...but it's also possible that I have just been a little pessimistic about people's emotional fortitude since James tucked tail for something like the third time. Nevertheless, my scalp rather prickled with excitement to hear his voice.

The slightly frustrating part was that after I dutifully explaining to Lachlan that Simon and I had agreed not to, er, take any new lovers at the moment--seemingly giving my ginger cutie a bit of a complex, judging by how his voice cracked, he stammered, and he generally seemed super embarrassed--I hang up and tell Simon about the conversation, only to find out that he had been operating on the assumption that I would continue seeing Lachlan. My guts sank a bit at this news. After all the hours of communicating with each other, you would think that this sort of thing would be very clear, but somehow I had missed one of the most important, concrete facts about our agreement.

This little flub was no big deal--after all, I'm perfectly uncertain of Lachlan's intentions, and I'll see him at Transformus in two months anyway--so I guess that a minor miscommunication is better than an enormous and/or damaging one. I've definitely learned that we should be a bit more explicit next time. On the other hand, "more explicit" could begin very quickly to wander into the territory of "more legalistic."

...And in case you're unfamiliar with my typical response to things I perceive as rules, I could try to show you evidence of my penchant for breaking them, but I might get arrested for revealing that information. So yeah. Me and Rules aren't on the best of terms, so just about anything else can serve as a more effective moral compass to me.

In other news, Simon and I have been batting around the idea of finding a room in a house to rent, both for our amorous adventures and our alone-time needs. Daniel, my adorable, just-as-new-to-poly friend, had a few persuasive arguments to make about it when we talked on Monday. He spoke of distance strengthening the bonds of love, of options making life more beautiful and rich, and of other sunny, attractive-sounding outcomes of the two-house partnership model. Simon was hesitant to throw his support behind the idea, but to his credit, he is giving it serious thought, and we're talking about it. More communication! Ha!

In all seriousness, despite Simon's hesitance, I've quickly realized that having another option of where to sleep, make love, and hang out in private is for me an eventuality rather than just a possibility. While I love having awkward, partly-clothed romps in public places sometimes, I'm already tired of the fact that I have no other choice. I've really never had any affinity for the branch of kink that interests itself in the risk of humiliating discovery while in the act, and it's only a matter of time before a cop walks by that tree at the wrong time...

Alright, I think it's time to get back to the grind now. Digital kisses to all my lovelies.

Monday, May 2, 2011

In Which Carnita Feels Ambivalent About the Day's Events and Recovers from a Long Talk Hangover

The news media announced in the wee hours of this morning that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. At first, I was delighted to hear it. Soon afterwards, I started to realize that there are probably plenty of eligible replacements ready to spring up in his place--perhaps several at once, which someone in the blogosphere compared to the effect of cutting off one of a hydra's heads. And the three that grow out of that wound may be even more pissed, even less cautious, and even more desperate for glory than old Binny himself.

Not to mention that after my original reaction to hearing this, I recoiled with remorse to realize that I had been celebrating the death of a human being by the hand of other human beings. This is clearly at odds with my commitment to nonviolence. Furthermore, bin Laden's death has done nothing to change the American addiction to homogenizing the world in its image, often by the assistance of force and horrific violence--you know, the most basic and legitimate complaint that bin Laden and his followers had against us as a nation.

Anyhow, politics and war are not subjects I care to spend much time with here, so I'll leave it at that. I'm nothing if not ambivalent about this event. I was, however, happy for the validation Caleb felt when his prediction that Obama would be the president to catch the elusive bin Laden came true. You see, when Caleb worked as a campaigner in 2007 and 2008, this idea was one of the most emphatic points of persuasion he used when discussing politics with voters.

I remember this; when he started the spiel with me, I would nod and throw in a sincere-sounding "mm hmm" from time to time so that he would keep talking and I could be free to stare at his beautiful mug from close range. Now I can relax about that since I am free to look at him almost as often as I'd like, and I can actually enjoy getting to know his intellect, his heart, his motivations and beliefs...and of course, his (almost certainly endearing) habits while he sleeps or orgasms or concentrates on something very intently. Oh, I can't wait.

Were you wondering how I was going to get back around to the main plot? Marvel: I went from bin Laden to Obama to Caleb, and as always, somehow back to sex. Call it a talent.

Phew. Speaking of our most beloved topic, I am beginning to find out what the people on the forums mean about polyamory sometimes entailing that we spend so much time communicating that we rarely get around to having sex. Simon and I certainly spent an inordinate amount of time discussing things yesterday and last night, and I feel completely emotionally exhausted. Nevertheless, I think it is important to re-cap the results of our labors.

I'll start with positives so that I won't feel too bad about the possibility of having to rush through the ickier bits. I'm sure I'll have plenty of time, possibly my whole life, to think about and work on the particular issue that made part of our conversation unpleasant even if I don't get around to writing about it today.

The main positive development is that Simon and I agreed to a few timely things regarding his mental health and my...um...sluttiness index.

Simon has been suffering from pretty severe anxiety lately. I am not surprised that a transition like this would bring it out of him--it isn't the first time and won't be the last, I'm sure. Anyhow, his end of our little bargain was that he is going to take some responsibility for his mental health and apply some intention and goal-setting to that process. We can't have him descending the spiral into the dark land of constant panic attacks.

My end of the deal is that I am going to slow down in the New Lover Acquisition department, focus on what is happening right now (i.e. Simon and Caleb), and try to be as present as possible for those things and--*gasp* maybe even some other aspects of life!--as possible. I agreed that when we first started discussing polyamory seriously, I felt so liberated and excited that I went a bit boy crazy. That was probably a necessary little phase, but now I'm ready to tuck in a bit and set a reasonable pace with all this relationship-building. I agreed not to seek out any more lovers at the moment and to try to tone down my fairly constant sexual vibrations, and I feel remarkably confident about that decision.

For instance, it was so lovely hang out with my poly friend Daniel at the park today without wondering what the whole interaction was about. We could talk like old friends about our relationships, play with the dogs, and lie around in the grass on a sunny afternoon without confusion. I know that doesn't sound like much to get excited about, but lately it has been difficult for me, in the presence of any attractive man, to keep my curiosity and hyperdriven sexuality from becoming an issue that interferes with comfortable interaction. I feel like even my roommate, for whom I have nothing but platonic feelings, has started to feel a bit creeped out by my affection, or perhaps just the way I'm always oozing with it. I was beginning to feel marked--as obvious to everyone I meet as a bitch in heat. That may not be a terrible problem in itself, but I believe that it will be healthier to allow the hormonal morass to dry out just a touch.

I think that I was wise to skip the gloomier topic because I have run out of time to write for today. I send my love to my two new readers. I have like three now! Incredible, isn't it? If you're here and hiding, by the way, do speak up. Signing off.