The Journal Of The InnKeeper

New TransFlag Phoenix Design Available at www.PolyTees.com

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 19:19:02 GMT

New for Pride month! Our exclusive Trans Flag Phoenix design on dozens of t-shirts and other products!

Visit the revamped & updated Poly Tees to find many of our old favorite t-shirt designs now reinstated and a whole bunch of new slogans recently added.

Plus, only 3 more days left to get 15% off your entire purchase!

Almost all of our designs are customizable too! You can choose from a wide range of products for each design, many products are available in different colors, AND if you go to the product detail page for most of our designs and click on the "edit" or "pencil" icon below the image, you can even change the design color and print type!

Also keep checking back with us because new designs are being added all the time.

Visit www.PolyTees.com for all our new inventory and sales!

I have been working for MONTHS to get this site back up!

Several years ago, my shirt printer decided to get rid of all text-based designs, which were the vast majority of my designs. It was such an overwhelming process to put them all back in that I kept putting it off.

Well, I finally got most of them back up (the ones I could remember, anyway, and the ones that the printer's moderators aren't currently holding "in review") and I added a whole ton more, just in time for Pride month.

If you see a design that you like but it's not on a product you want, or you almost like it but want it tweaked in some way (like my "Independently Owned & Operated Since 1977" shirt and you want your own year), or even if you have a totally new idea for a design, please let me know either through email or comment or PM on any social media you can find me on and I'm happy to make those customizations where I can for no extra charge.

So please visit the shop and like & share the links and pages with others! Income from this store is partly how I am able to survive when my industry dries up for the summer and (how I hope to survive once I finally leave this hellhole of a state and don't have a job waiting for me) and thanks to all my designs getting purged, I haven't had this income in several years now. So your likes, thumbs up, positive reviews, comments, engagement with the page, and shares are SUPER helpful!

comments

Costume & Wardrobe Storage Solutions For Everyone

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 23:57:07 GMT

I keep getting asked about costume storage, and I'm rewriting the same answer over and over again in costume and cosplay groups, so I decided it was past time that I made an actual blog entry about this.

I have a lot of costumes. I mean, I have A LOT of costumes. And a lot of dance clothing. And dress-up clothes. And work clothes. Let's face it ... I just have a lot of clothing in general. When I still lived in an actual dwelling, I had a 2 bedroom apartment so that I could use my entire second bedroom as a walk-in closet. I don't mean that I wanted 2 bedrooms so that I could use both closets, I mean that the whole bedroom was one giant fucking wardrobe.

After moving into an RV, I needed some kind of long-term storage option for all my clothes. After a handful of years and some trial and error, I finally came up with a system that I really like. I'm very excited about my new storage system.

I found that 28 quart "under bed storage" bins have roughly the same volume as cardboard file boxes (also called "letter boxes" and "banker boxes"), which is what I was using to store everything in before (because they were uniform in size and shape and both big enough to be useful but small enough to carry and limit the contents for weight control).

Plus, because they're longer and flatter, I can put clothing in it with fewer folds, leaving them on hangers and in garment bags and just sort of "accordion-folding" them into the plastic bin. And the plastic holds up better than the cardboard. Also, I color-coded the bin lids. My costumes are all in white bins, my regular clothing is in silver lids, and my "not one costume, but a bunch of the same item" stuff like petticoats and corsets are in green bins.

The picture is a little bit outdated - this was taken before I added several more costumes and before I really nailed down the color coding, so it's not very consistent in this picture, but it got more consistent later on.

I have one bin per costume (or one costume per bin) with all of its bits including accessories and shoes (other than those costume elements I reuse in multiple costumes, like my petticoats). Each costume gets a checklist for all the items that belong to the costume, with the line items that are stored in that bin checked off and the "shared" items not checked off so that I know to look for them in another bin.

These checkists are in a plastic sheet protector and I use wipe-off markers to write on the plastic over the paper when I check something off for an event or to make notes, so I can just wipe it all off afterwards and still have a clean checklist.

And THEN, I have every single individual clothing item and element recorded in a free, online database that includes its location.

When I go to a con, I can just pick up the bin for the costume I want to take, check the checklist to see if there are bits located elsewhere, and I take the whole bin. If I am flying instead of driving, I take the garment bag containing the costume out of the bin and pack just the garment bag with the costume.

I made a template version of my database so that anyone else can use it. All you have to do is create a free Airtable profile, then click the link that takes you to my template, and "copy" that database into your own profile. From your profile, you can edit the database however you want.

I highly recommend this method or something similar. For my non-costume clothing that needs to be stored, I put all clothing items of similar type (i.e. "club tops", "work shirts", "suits & slacks", "pants", etc.) into these bins, tight-rolling them the way that flight attendants pack their clothing (tutorials can be found on YouTube for this very efficient and compact folding method). These items are similarly catalogued into my database so I can find them later. It's truly a space-saver that also protects my clothing from pests and the elements. It's also super useful for moving.

If you're looking for a better storage method of clothing and soft-goods, I recommend buying a bunch of under-bed storage bins and if you want to get really organized about it, some sheet protectors for checklists, some chalkboard labels for the outside of the bin, and some different color lids to color code. Then check out my wardrobe database template for boss-level organization.

comments

Bachata Makes Me Better At Blues Makes Me Better At Bachata...

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 21:38:11 GMT

I originally posted this on Facebook on April 24, 2019. I'm archiving it here so that I can look back over my progress in my dancing skills in the future.

LONG post about dancing -

I am not a blues dancer. I have never really enjoyed blues, compared to the other dances, because it's very spontaneous and there are very few rules to it. I don't improv well. I like ballroom because there is so much structure.

Even though they are also spontaneous in that, when you get out on the floor, the lead has to come up with the next pattern off the top of his head, and a good lead will match the pattern to the specific part of the music so that a good dance becomes a visual representation of the music itself, where the dancers ARE the music, the patterns are all existing patterns that we learn.

They have a vocabulary of patterns to choose from and I can learn and memorize those patterns so that when they throw one at me spontaneously, I already know what to do. And even if I haven't learned that particular pattern, the structure of the style of dance we're doing gives me guidelines to infer what my lead wants me to do.

Blues isn't like that. Blues just takes everything that the dancer knows from lindy hop, jazz, tap, Argentine tango, Charleston, and whatever else that particular dancer happens to know, and throws it all together with no *real* basic step (there kinda is one, but it's not helpful once you leave the basic and start improvising, whereas with ballroom, as long as you keep your feet moving to the basic, everything else will follow from there) and the follow dancer (me) not only has to interpret what the lead is trying to get them to do, but also has a lot of freedom to make up whatever shit the follow wants to do in the spaces between.

This is not my strong suit.

But then I got introduced to Bachata. Bachata is basically the Latin version of blues dancing. It's all that improv but arranged around an actual basic step, so there is my structure. And I got introduced to it first in a nightclub and then again at social events.

Learning how to do a street dance actually in the "streets", as opposed to taking lessons, is a different thing. It's a more organic feel. That makes it harder, for me, actually. But it's how I've learned almost all of my dancing once I took that first basic "social dance" course in college where the instructor taught a different ballroom dance every week. With that format, I didn't get a very deep introduction to anything, but I learned how to follow and I learned how to apply things I learned from one style to another, and I learned how to connect - how to connect with a partner and how to connect all the different dances together.

So I learned bachata, and in nightclubs, it's a very sensual, flirty dance. As opposed to in the classroom where it's very formal and stiff. And I fell in love with it. Through bachata, I get all the touch that I'm missing in my personal life with no local partners. After I learned how to just let go and lean into the bachata, blues suddenly got easier for me to connect with. It's still my least favorite of the dances, but I realized something last night.

My local FWB is a fantastic lindy hopper. He's also an instructor. We were talking last week about how we both feel stuck in this intermediate level because we both spend all of our time teaching newbies and never getting to dance with people who are better than ourselves, so we don't have much opportunity to advance further.

I want to be a better, more advanced dancer in general, and he wants to become a better teacher of advanced patterns (he is a better lindy hopper than I am, but I am proficient in more than a dozen different dances and he only really knows lindy and ballet, while he can fake it at a small handful of other lindy-adjacent dances).

So we got a little bit excited at the thought that he could practice teaching me more advanced moves which would help him improve his teaching style (since he usually teaches beginners and doesn't really know how to break down the more advanced stuff that he knows how to *do*, just not teach) and I could dance with someone better than me who could take the time to help me actually improve, not just throw something at me on the floor and hope that I grasp the concept in a 3 minute song well "enough".

With my love of bachata and not actually knowing any bachata dancers to dance with regularly (and not having the time to go to bachata clubs regularly), with my recent regular exposure to lindy hoppers who also do blues dancing, with now having made a dance friend who explicitly wants to learn how to teach better, and with starting up a sexual relationship with said dancer so I feel more comfortable being physically affectionate with him in general, I've been seeking him out for blues dances when I would have avoided blues songs in the past.
And although I am still not as improv-y and as fluid as people who connect with blues dancing, I am feeling more ... loose and experimental in my blues dancing.

One of my limitations is that I can do a lot of patterns, but I don't feel comfortable doing "flare". That takes a degree of confidence in one's dance knowledge and skill that I just don't feel. I don't know when is the right time to wrap my hand around my head and shoot it out and pose, for instance, because I don't feel very confident and I don't want people to see me doing something that screams "I know what I am doing!" when I clearly don't.

This has held me back in acting too - I keep not wanting people tho think that I really believe what I'm saying or doing. Like, I want them to know that *I* know that it's all make-believe. Which completely defeats the purpose of acting. So I am not a good actor.

Flare is something I could learn, I just haven't had the time to take any flare lessons and I haven't had any dance partners that were in a teaching sort of role (it's not generally considered appropriate to "teach" people in a social setting, especially if they don't ask for it first). But I did notice last night that I am relying less on maintaining the basic pattern as a "filler" when my partner throws something improv-y at me, and I'm allowing myself to "feel" the music the way that I always did when I danced solo in goth and industrial clubs.

My FWB dance partner says that he wants to learn how to break down the moves he does so he can teach other people, because he doesn't really know how he does them. He just connects to the music and he just *feels* it. That's also how I experience music, and dances like blues and bachata are the sorts of partner dances where you can really bring that connection into the partnership of the dance. You can in literally any style of dance, but the more fluid and improv-y the style is, the more connection you can bring, IMO.

He often dances with his eyes closed, so he can feel the music better. So our interpersonal connection has to be strong since he's not relying on visual cues but all physical touch and "energy" to communicate. And the event that I host is longer than normal events, so by the end of the night everyone is pretty fucking exhausted. I play more slow lindy and blues at the end of the night because it's all we have the energy to do, and everyone seems to appreciate being able to dance while also just kind of leaning on each other.

Wanting to be close to him because of our newish sexual connection, wanting to dance with him because he's just a good dancer, wanting to do the sensual street dances like bachata and blues because I'm a little bit touch-starved, wanting to improve my dancing skill, and being so energized by the music but so tired from the long hours that I really want to keep moving but can't quite keep up the same level of dancing as earlier in the evening, has all led to me doing a lot more blues dancing and seeing improvement.

So I told him last night that he was making me a better blues dancer, even though we haven't even started any explicit teaching sessions yet. Words of Affirmation is one of my Love Languages, and since that's a thing he wants to improve at, that compliment seemed to mean a lot to him.

The reason why I realized that I was becoming a better blues dancer is because of the new guy I met last night. He's one of the best Latin dancers I've ever danced with, and he threw all sorts of patterns at me that I had never even seen before, let alone done. I managed to keep up well enough to impress him, seeing as how I'm not technically a Latin dancer (I know mostly Ballroom Latin, which is kind of a stuffy version of Latin dances).

I threw in a bachata after we salsa'd, because I like bachata better than salsa, and afterwards he said that I should try Dominican Bachata if I like the slow bachata we did. I asked him why, what's the difference, and he said that Dominican Bachata is more ... just more. He couldn't quite explain it in the moment (I was expecting, like, an explanation of the basic pattern being different or something), so he just started doing it solo.

The music was not Latin at all, it was a lindy jump blues song. But he said that Dominican Bachata could be done to anything and somehow managed to make a Latin dance fit jump blues music without losing the Latin flavor but also looking like it went with the song.

So I watched him for a few bars, to see if I could pick up the basic pattern out of his fancy steps. And I couldn't, really, but bachata (the regular one I'm used to) is kind of a marching step and merengue is definitely a marching step, so I figured I could fake it, I screwed up the courage, held out my hand, and yelled "lead me!"

And he did.

I had no fucking clue what I was doing, but I blended lindy moves with merengue patterns and Latin hips while following his lead, and by the end of it, we were alone on the floor and everyone else was applauding.

And I credit my ability to do that to my increasing familiarity with blues dancing, thanks to my new FWB.

comments

The Keynotes That I Could Give At The Drop Of A Hat

Tue, 12 May 2020 02:34:23 GMT

https://www.quora.com/A-conference-in-your-field-had-a-last-minute-cancellation-what-keynote-speech-could-you-give-on-short-notice/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. A conference in your field had a last minute cancellation, what keynote speech could you give on short notice?

A. This actually just happened to me. I was scheduled to give a presentation at a conference, and the day of, someone canceled and I was tapped to fill the slot in addition to my scheduled talk. I have several that I can give with short to no notice and I can participate in panel discussions on a very wide range of topics with little to no notice.

I am available to come to any type of event where a talk about relationships and communication is appropriate and I can tailor my existing topics to match your group, as well as develop new talks for your group. I have very reasonable speaker fees and I can work with individual groups and your budget. This is not my primary source of income so I have some flexibility in accommodation.

My partner, Franklin, and I are also going on a road tour sometime in the near future (dates TBA) where we can be booked together or individually to speak at your event or as a Guest of Honor at your event along the way. Please contact me for more information.

The Five Love Languages For Polyamorous Relationships:

Adapting the concepts from Dr. Gary Chapman's "The Five Love Languages", this workshop will cover what the Five Love Languages are, how to identify yours and those of your loved ones, and how to use them to better facilitate communication. The ideas on this workshop can apply to partners, primaries, secondaries, spouses, metamours, FWBs, friends, and just about anyone else! The Five Love Languages is just one more tool in the toolbox for clearer communication, expressing emotional needs, and showing love in relationships.

Breaking Up Ethically:

Former sweeties Joreth and Sterling team up on a book about how to break up! The main part of this book is now a workshop! Our society puts a lot of emphasis on the Fairy Tale where each person meets their soul mate as a teenager and lives Happily Ever After. Consequently, we never really develop any skills for how to break up with someone in an ethical way. We are also inundated with a lot of really bad models for breaking up. After a very successful breakup (and some very dismal breakups), these exes share some tips based on personal experience, community observations, and a background in psychology and relationship communication on how to handle breaking up with someone ethically and compassionately and how to get dumped with dignity.

[can be presented with Sterling or solo]

Present Like A Boss:

How to craft a polished presentation for any topic and any venue, how to find your "voice" & "style" as a presenter, and how to use PowerPoint! We'll cover basic tips and tricks for speech writing and stage presence, how to choose your own presenting style, little-considered flare that really makes your presentation stand out, and technical lessons on how to use the PowerPoint software and other technological considerations. Attendees are encouraged to bring their laptops with them and try out the PowerPoint lessons right there in class! Basic how-tos for the beginner along with some interesting tricks that even experienced speakers might not know, from a public speaker, teacher, media representative, and a PowerPoint Operator for some of the biggest public speaking events in the country.

Joreth has spent time in just about every public speaking situation you can imagine, including performance (acting, dancing, singing). But in addition to being on stage, Joreth has also spent the last couple decades or so working backstage at concerts and large corporate conventions with arena-sized audiences and the top audio and video technology. She brings her technical expertise as a camera operator, PowerPoint operator, and video engineer to explain how presentations look from the inside and back end, to better improve the experience from the front.

Simple Steps to Better Communication:

Like dancing? Want to learn? Don’t like dancing? Can’t dance? Want to communicate better?

This workshop is for you!

Partner dancers communicate with each other using a non-verbal process called Lead & Follow to negotiate steps and navigate a crowded floor with other dancers and obstacles.

Joreth & Sterling will break down this communication technique into simple exercises and explain how they apply to your everyday, interpersonal relationships. You will receive real, practical tools to take home with you and increase your awareness and understanding of your partners and metamours.

[can be presented with Sterling or solo, and also with or without a focus on a particular style or category of relationship]

Poly 101:

Do you know someone who is polyamorous and want to understand them better? Do you work with clients who might be polyamorous and want to better serve them or work with them? Have you just heard of this word and want to know a little more about what it means?

This is the presentation for you! This presentation is for laypeople, counselors, and anyone who might be curious about the basics of polyamory and isn’t necessarily polyamorous themselves. We will cover some terminology, a little bit of history, and how it all works in a way that will help you to get a better handle on what all this stuff is when you talk to someone you know who is polyamorous. And you may learn a little something about yourself in the process!

Polyamory & Skepticism:

What in the world does polyamory and skepticism have to do with each other? Isn’t that, like, doubting everything you hear? Why would you want to mix that with romantic relationships?

Both polyamory and skepticism are incredibly misunderstood terms, and have more to do with each other than one might think. In this discussion, we’ll go over some vocabulary - what people *think* they mean and what they *actually* mean, some principles and core concepts, some parallels between the polyamorous and skeptical communities, and where the two overlap and where they diverge.

We will also address when, how, and why it’s important to put a little skepticism in your polyamory (and maybe a little polyamory in your skepticism?)

Funny thing about nerds - part of the definition of a nerd is someone who is passionate about certain subjects and, with very little prompting, can talk about that subject in detail and minutia for ages.

Funny thing about me is that I'm not just a nerd, I'm a Renaissance nerd - I have LOTS of subjects that I can pop off about for literally hours at a time (see my recent post about someone casually mentioning Mexican gang slang resulting in a 5 hour lecture with multimedia examples on Cholo Culture in the 1980s in California).

So, just off the top of my head, here are some things that I think I could give a talk about with no preparation (but if I had time to prepare, I could give a fucking fantastic presentation about), many of which could be given as a broad overview of the subject or broken down into specific components and given as their own 30+ minute talk:

polyamory (and almost every sub-section of that as its own talk);
kink;
science education;
skepticism;
poly and skepticism;
polyamory in movies;
solo polyamory;
- why solo polyamory is not inherently contradictory with cohabitation;
the history of partner dancing (and the history of its music);
the history of each specific partner dance;
how to partner dance;
how to figure out which first dance to learn;
dance shoes and which ones to buy first;
how to use dance exercises as a non-dancer to improve your relationship communication; how to breakup ethically;
the 5 Love Languages;
the misconceptions of MBTI;
how to give a presentation (with further advanced modules of stagecraft by itself and how to do a decent PowerPoint by itself);
The Winchester Mystery House;
Theatrical lighting 101;
Life As A Career Stagehand (seriously just gave this talk to a couple of middle school classes a few weeks ago);
Dealing with the media (how to interview for a news article or show without coming out looking like a fuckup):
Tablecloth Circle Skirt Construction;
how to make rewearable liquid latex outfits and boots;
vaccines - the science, the history, the scandals;
Pockets Are Political;
The politics of fashion in European and American history;
What is and is not actual fashion in:
- the Victorian era
- the Edwardian era
- the 1920s (no fringe!)
- pre-WWII
- the 1950s;
White appropriation of black culture in music;
How "I like everything but rap and country" is racist propaganda;
The interconnectedness of music genres;
You probably don't "hate country music" because you probably don't even know what it is;
How American politics and racism influenced music which influenced dance which influenced music which influenced politics...;
Cholo culture;
The Chicano movement;
How the Chicano movement led to Cholo Culture;
The role of women in either the Chicano movement or Cholo Culture;
The Zoot Suit Riots

So if any of these topics is of interest to your community, group, conference, or event, or one of these topics sparks an interest in adjacent topic or question and you would like for me to address it, please let me know.

comments

What Do I Commit To If Not Sexual Fidelity? - Relationship Fluidity And Flexibility

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 04:19:09 GMT

* I am committed to allowing the relationship to find its own structure and direction without forcing it into a predetermined shape and to considering alternate structures and directions before automatically resorting to breaking up when situations and priorities change.

I am committed to allowing the relationship to find its own structure and direction without forcing it into a predetermined shape and to considering alternate structures and directions before automatically resorting to breaking up when situations and priorities change.

This is the natural extension of the previous commitment. In addition to committing to being flexible with plans within a relationship, I want to be flexible about the relationship itself. As I mentioned before, I have a style of poly in my head that I idealize - the close-knit poly family. I need to be accommodating to the individual needs of each relationship and to make sure that the relationship follows its own natural path. Sometimes those paths twist and turn a bit. When they take a sharp left turn, it may not be necessary to get off the path entirely just because it's no longer going in the direction I thought it should. Sometimes, I may be able to follow a new path.

Just to make sure that metaphor was perfectly clear, I am reminding myself here that there are more than two states for romantic relationships - together or broken up. I have already established that I can accept a variety of relationship configurations and that I do not want to prescript my relationships. So here I am establishing that I will not let my relationship descriptions turn prescriptive once we get in them. If, some time into a relationship, one or the other (or both) of us decides that our life needs to look different than it currently does, I am reminding myself that it may be possible to simply readjust our relationship to look different too.

When I first started dating Franklin, we lived 3 miles away from each other. Then he moved to Gainesville. Then I moved to Orlando. Then he moved to Atlanta. Then he moved to Portland. If either of us had insisted that our relationship was a local relationship and could only be a local relationship, it would have ended with the first move to Gainesville a mere year or two into it. Instead, what I got was a long-distance relationship that has, as of this post, lasted more than a decade, brought me valuable life lessons, been a source of joy and comfort, taught me how to become the person I wanted to be, and introduced me to the people I consider my intentional family and those I feel the most connected to anywhere in the world (with the exception of my best friend, who I met through another partner).

When things change, I do not need to automatically reach for the breakup card. When things change, I can assess if we can change with it. The relationship may not be what we originally hoped it would be, but then again, it might be something just as valuable or more that we never anticipated if we give it room to just be.

comments

Reminder: You Know Someone (me) Who Has Had To Pull A Weapon In Self Defense Multiple Times

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:53:34 GMT

This is your occasional reminder that I have actually had to pull my knife on a man 3 times in my life, since I started carrying one.

Assault, harassment, and intimidation are regular, "normal" parts of most women's lives, and definitely a part of mine. In absolutely none of the cases where I had to pull a knife out and brandish it was I "dressed for it" or "asking for it" or "sending mixed signals".

In all 3 cases, it was actually after work and I was wearing my military cargo pants and steel toe boots with no makeup or attempt at hair styling. I was in a casino lounge with my other coworkers, minding our own business and not interacting with any other patrons, at a party at a friend's house in a conversation with my ex (who was not the one I pulled the knife on), and at a gas station working on my car.

There are *lots* of times when, in retrospect, I should have pulled a knife on a date or a "friend", but because they were not strangers, I just kept giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to find non-violent ways out of the situation. I even remained "friends" with many of them or continued to date them long after the fact (or while the behaviour was ongoing).

Being attacked by strangers, while common, happens less often than being assaulted by "friends" and partners. Had I pulled a knife on someone I had some kind of relationship with, I guarantee you that I would have been accused of "overreacting" or of being the aggressor or the "assaulter" for having escalated it to violence with a weapon. We are taught to fear Stranger Danger when the worst of our danger comes from intimates.

But, the thing is, it has *never* occurred to me to pull a weapon on a partner or a "friend". Because each and every time, the severity of the assault is not fully recognized until afterwards, when I've had time to see that my brain won't stop replaying the incident and I'm getting more and more upset over it, since I couldn't afford to react in the moment or else risk escalating something, namely his wrath.

My instinctual response is to freeze, make myself smaller, and smile to placate him into thinking it's not a big deal so that he doesn't get angry at me. The last time I actively fought back against a "friend" who was assaulting me, I got my shoulder dislocated for the effort. I have not fought back since then (I think I was 14?). I go very still instead.

When my ex-fiance used to sexually assault me at night by touching my genitals when he thought I was asleep, if I would get pissed off at him and try to leave the room to go sleep on the couch, as I was attempting to get out of bed, he would tell me that if I left right then, my precious figurine collection (which I loved dearly, almost everything in that collection was a gift) would be damaged.

I know now that this is a clear cut case of abuse, but that's not something I knew back then and I'm not entirely sure that, had I been told, I would have recognized it as abuse while I was going through it. He never once laid a hand on me in anger, or threatened to, and I never feared that he would. *That* was something I would recognize as abuse. But not the sexual assault and not the threat of property damage.

It would never have occurred to me to respond with violence to someone who was not being violent towards me, particularly with someone I loved. Partner abuse is a much more complex and insidious thing than stranger assaults.

And I have had enough of both that I have pulled a knife in self-defense 3 times so far. I'm lucky none of them had a gun.

comments

Ah, The Drama Of Living In A Slum

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:38:07 GMT

So, I had no idea, but the apartment upstairs (the one that leaks water into my place every day) was rented by a man. I have seen a man coming and going every so often, but several months ago, I saw a *woman* move in. She introduced herself, we've chatted a few times, I've given her cupcakes, and she was all apologetic when I ran upstairs the time my entire fucking ceiling started leaking all over the apartment to see what happened.

A few days after she moved in, I discovered she had kids when they peered out from the window at me, when her car was gone and I assumed she wasn't home. Shortly after that I started posting about kids having races upstairs and pounding back and forth across my ceiling.

Anyway, she wasn't a great neighbor but she wasn't terrible either. Fast forward to the whole leaky ceiling thing and I've been trying to get my management company to fix it since before the hurricane. Not that the company isn't doing anything, but the maintenance people keep not showing up to fix it.

Now, we have yet another maintenance guy here. He came out a few days ago to inspect it, and through him, I discovered that the apartment upstairs was supposed to be vacant on the 28th. I had heard that she was getting evicted (although she told me that she was leaving because she hated living here), but I didn't know when. Apparently, the *guy* on the lease told the company that he *was gone*.

But she still lives up there.

So the new maintenance guy has been trying to get upstairs to find the source of the leak. Yesterday, after confirming several times that the apartment is supposed to be vacant and the person on the lease verified that he is gone, he drilled out the lock on the door and put a new one in so his plumber can get in there today while I had the day off, to give him all day to work on the leak.

Today, the plumber tried to get in and found that the new key, that was installed yesterday, does not work. So he went off to do another job and the head maintenance guy came back to solve the problem.

In the meantime, her car came back and is parked in the yard. So now the head guy is standing outside with a cop pounding on the door above my head demanding to open up. Since she hasn't after several minutes of pounding, the cop gave the go-ahead to the maintenance guys to drill out the lock again. So now they're up there drilling, while the cop hangs out, eating a brownie and shaking his head over how complicated this whole thing is.

Y'know, if the first maintenance guy had just come back when I made the first complaint last fall, this whole thing would have been a lot more simple, and I wouldn't feel bad at the idea that someone who is in a bad living situation (like I was a few years ago) might be having her place invaded before she's able to get out.

Had I known any of this about her squatting before I started complaining about the leak, I might have lived with the leak a little longer, to give her some time. But when they sent (a different maintenance team) out who cut a hole in my ceiling to investigate *and then never came back to fix it*, I started getting more insistent. And my management company responded immediately with these guys who are actually trying to do work. But in order for them to do work, they had to get involved in the drama upstairs.

Apparently, when the lock was changed, someone actually climbed up to the balcony and entered through the balcony door, because that door was open. And then they did something to the new lock - don't know if they changed it over night or they just damaged the tumblers to prevent its use.

Cops just said they found some "drug paraphernalia" inside, and they gave the maintenance guy permission to just clear it out, so at least nobody is going to jail for drugs. I asked if he found any kids hiding upstairs, because she often leaves them there alone, but he said no. Her car is still here, but nobody is there.

So here we are.

And no, I don't think that buying a home would solve my problems either, because then I'd have to pay for all this shit myself, which I can't afford to do. This is just what life is like when you're poor.

comments

Would People Be Interested In A Serial Publication On Abusive Relationships?

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 19:58:58 GMT

I'm working on my memoir. I've always expected it to be published (like, on my blog or something) either post-mortem by a loved one, or at least near the end of my life. It always felt ... I dunno, presumptuous, to write a memoir while still young enough to have more stories to tell. I suppose if one had a particular segment of life that had an identifiable ending to it, that would make sense.

My memoir is basically a chapter-by-chapter review of my poly explorations, to see how I've grown and the mistakes I've made over time. I'm also working on a book about breaking up. This is more of a how-to, self-help sort of break up manual. Although, to be honest, more than a little of the "do not do" stuff is shit that I've done (and the rest is shit that I've had done to me).

Recently, I wrote about having to block an ex over something that, by itself wasn't really a big deal, but was symptomatic of a larger picture of abuse, and then I ended up telling the whole tale of our breakup where he physically tried to restrain me from leaving.

As I get more informed about what abuse is and isn't, I look back over my history and I've come to recognize that more and more of my past relationships were abusive and I just never recognized it because, to me, that's just how relationships go, according to my expectations from my culture and the sheer commonality of the behaviour I've experienced.

Like, early on in my relationship with Franklin, we discussed something that I call Octopus-Hands - how I've been on dates, and just hanging out with "friends", who have suddenly tried to touch my breasts, and when I knocked their hands away, they grabbed for my crotch, and when I tried to block there, they used their other hand to go for the breast again...

Franklin was appalled. He couldn't even fathom that this would happen at all, let alone be common. When he expressed surprise, I responded with surprise at his surprise, telling him that this is just what it's like being a woman who dates men. Like, it surprised *me* that someone was surprised that it happens. I think it was my first sign that my experiences weren't "normal" - or rather, they were "normal" in the sense that they were common, but they're not "normal" in the sense that they're acceptable or universal.

I talk about my abusive ex, who didn't abuse me because I didn't "take" it but did abuse someone else, and I talk about my abusive ex-fiance who *did* sexually assault me and gaslight me on the regular. But I never considered that other ex, who tried to prevent me from leaving, and who did the whole pussy-grabbing-while-asleep-after-I-said-no-sex-tonight thing to be "abusive" until I wrote out the story recently.

The growing realization of just how many of my past experiences were actually, unambiguously abusive combined with my writing of a book on how to break up, and the periodic drive to get back to my memoir all combined at once yesterday to forge an idea that popped into my brain.

What if, after my how-to breakup book is published, I rewrite and release a serial publication of some sort detailing every breakup I've ever had (that I can remember)? Maybe I can crowdfund it, and each breakup will get its own release, perhaps on my blog, perhaps as an e-booklet or something? Might this be something people would be interested in?

If not, I'll end up publishing my original story anyway, probably as the original blog series, but later in life as planned. I was just struck by the confluence of subjects and events and wondered if I could connect all these things together.

comments

I Think My Parents Are Finally Getting The Hang Of This Whole Poly Thing

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 04:00:18 GMT

I think my parents are finally getting the hang of this whole poly thing.

Since we got married (at my parents' house), my parents finally remember and recognize Franklin as my partner. Because he's always been long-distance to me, he isn't in a lot of my pictures that I post online and I don't have a lot of "we did this thing last weekend" stories about him, so it was easy for my parents to "forget" that I'm dating him. But now he's a legal spouse, so that "counts" to them.

During the whole wedding extravaganza, they had a chance to meet Ben, who is our Squiggle Designated Extrovert and can charm the pants off of anyone (especially girlfriends' mothers). Both of my parents just fell in love with Ben, who made himself indispensable during the wedding by filling in the gaps wherever someone was needed. Ben has the same sort of "family" connection that I do, which is that family-of-origin of the partner is important so he makes friends with parents & siblings of partners that even outlast the romantic relationships. I still send holiday cards to my high school boyfriends' parents.

So now they can't pick just one of my partners as the "real" one, because Franklin is the spouse and the person I've been with for 13 years and Ben left such an impression on them that they continue to text each other directly just to see how each are doing.

I had to actually reassure my parents that neither I nor Franklin would feel slighted if my parents developed a friendship with Ben because of his outgoing, friendly nature that makes him so easy to like. They were concerned that we would feel that they were undermining or dismissing our married relationship by befriending Ben, so I got to have yet another poly talk with them about the independent nature of solo poly relationships and the solid self esteem of both of my partners who do not take things personally when people like or dislike the other one because it has nothing to do with them personally.

Now my parents actually tell me to pass along their hellos and well-wishes to both partners!

#polyamory #ItOnlyTook20YearsButTheyMightFinallyBeGettingIt #ParadigmShift

comments

Need Mailing Addresses!

Tue, 30 May 2017 22:17:57 GMT

We're printing All The Things today and tomorrow and mailing out formal invitations next week! And the only way to get the address for the ceremony locations is through the mail! Which means that we need your physical mailing address to send you the information you need to attend mine and Franklin's wedding, and we kinda need it right away. The formal invitations will include all the details of the date and location, directions, lodging information, FAQs, RSVP cards, Pre-Wedding Party info, etc.

You can download our wedding app, or login to the wedding website to give us your address and update RSVPs, or you can contact us in literally any other way that will reach us and we can update your address in our wedding app database on your behalf. Then, if you prefer to do things the traditional way, you can RSVP using the included pre-addressed, stamped RSVP card in your formal invitation.

Please don't worry that you're "inviting yourself" - if you can see this post (and one of us hasn't blocked the other or otherwise refused to engage in multiple or all forms of interaction (see my recent post about temporary or contextual blocking vs. total blocking boundary violations)), then you're not "inviting yourself", you are invited!

But, since we don't have your mailing address (and probably your email address too, hence the public and generic posts), we can't send you an invitation yet. That's why we have to reach people this way. So you're not "inviting yourself", you are invited, but we need your contact info.

You can find our wedding app and website by visiting http://bit.ly/SquiggleWeddingCon and clicking on the RSVP link in the sidebar. Only 2 months to go!

comments

Street Cat Saga Updates

Tue, 30 May 2017 21:50:09 GMT

The latest chapter in my Street Cat Saga: Some of you may remember that I posted recently about now feeding the original 4 feral cats (one of whom was pregnant), an orange tabby, a new black cat, a possum baby, and a raccoon?

For those who missed it, I have a family of 4 feral cats living under my house - 2 black males and 2 tortoiseshell-tabby females. Both the females have these tabby facial markings that result in exaggerated eye stripes and remind me of old Hollywood "Egyptian" makeup, so I've named the cat with the true tortie markings Nefertiti and the pregnant cat with the tortie patches and tabby stripes Cleopatra. The two black cats are Mark Anthony and Julias Caesar - Titi, Cleo, Tony, & Julias for short.

I planted catnip under the house to attract ferals in order to keep the mice away, now that I finally got rid of all the mice in the house. And it seemed to work because these 4 hang around all the time. But they're very skittish about people and won't let me touch them. So I started leaving a bowl of cat food out on the back steps. Tony is the bravest and will wander into the house when I leave the door open. Occasionally he will convince one of the two females to investigate with him, but they are uncomfortable and will dart out again as soon as they see me. But Tony will now allow me to touch him.

Occasionally, a very large orange tabby will come up to the steps to eat, and if any of the other 4 are there, they will arch, hiss, and run away. He doesn't seem aggressive, but he also seems confident that he will eat the food. He is obviously not part of their pack.

One night, I left the back door open and a possum wandered in. These don't run out when they get scared, they back into corners. So I spent half an hour chasing it out of the house while trying not to hurt it. A few nights later, I heard loud crunching, which is unusual for the cats. So I peeked, and found the possum eating out of the food bowl. A few nights after that, I heard the crunching again and went to peek, but this time I found the teeniest little baby possum scooping food out and eating it! Around this same time, a fairly large raccoon had started making late night appearances at my back door when I had food out too.

Recently, I was on my front porch doing laundry and saw a black cat shape and reflective eyes. Thinking it was Tony, I clicked at it as I usually do. But this time, the cat immediately ran towards me and cautiously up the porch stairs to meet me. This was a totally new black cat.

The new black cat is clearly not a feral, but possibly abandoned. She has a rabies tag and ratty collar but no other ID, and she's REALLY friendly. She has no problem coming when I click at her and she loves being petted. She also has no hesitation investigating the house and doesn't freak out if I wander around the house, even if I block her path. She is clearly used to human companionship.

So today she wandered in while the back door was open. So I sat down in the living room and she came right up for lots of love, even resting her paws on my leg and kneading (which was very painful, given that she's a street cat with sharp claws).

My food was in the microwave so I got up when it was done and sat back down on the floor to eat and pet her. I haven't been pestered by a cat while I was eating in a long time, so what used to annoy the crap out of me was quite amusing as I tried to eat and fend off a nosy cat. She managed to knock her head into my bowl, spilling some food on the floor, so I let her eat it. Normally I don't feed people food to pets, as it's bad for them, but I imagine it can't be much worse than whatever street cats manage to scavenge normally.

Now she's wandering around the house again, and even took some time to sit on my lap while I typed for more pets. She's more anxious than house cats - hardly able to sit still in any one place for more than a few seconds, but totally comfortable in my presence and in my house.

Well, that was a close call. Tony and the new black cat officially "met". The new one is hanging out on my front porch and the door is propped open so she can come and go. Tony wandered in from the back door, as is his usual entry. He made it all the way to the front of the house and into my front bedroom. I followed him around, because he's an intact male so I usually watch him to make sure he doesn't spray.

Well the new cat saw me and came back in looking for attention. Eventually Tony wandered back out of the room and they came face to face. The new cat seemed curious, but Tony's tail started swishing. So I nudged her back towards the front door and Tony darted towards the back door.

But then they both turned back around to face each other. She moved closer, but Tony arched and hissed, so I stepped between them and they both ran out their respective doors. Tony slowed down when he reached the porch steps and seemed to no longer be agitated, but he didn't stop to eat from the bowl at the top of the steps and went straight for under the house, where he often hangs out.

Tony does seem willing to come back. He has since wandered into the house a couple of times. But because of the weather, I keep my doors closed and the air conditioning on more often now, so I don't see any of the cats as often as I used to.

The new black cat (whom I haven't named yet) has come in and spent the night with me 2 or 3 times. The first night she slept on my bed with me, but the next couple of times, she slept on the floor in the living room. I'm apparently going to need to get a litter box so that I can shut the door while I sleep and not have her damage the house.

She often spends her time cuddled up to me on the couch while I'm crafting, or on the floor at my feet when she comes in. But since the weather has turned and I keep my doors shut, I haven't seen her in a few days. I appear to have been adopted, though.

comments

Reminder: Our Wedding Is Public & Coming Up Soon - You're Invited! Arrangement Details Here

Wed, 10 May 2017 19:13:26 GMT

A few reminders:

1) Our wedding is public so if you can read this, you are invited (with only a few exceptions and they probably know who they are, mostly involving people I've had to block - if I've ever told you to fuck off, especially if I knew you in real life and I still told you to fuck off and then blocked you on all forms of contact, then you're probably not invited).

2) Plane tickets are going up, so make sure you make your travel arrangements soon for the wedding. San Jose (SJC) Mineta International Airport is the closest airport to the traditional ceremony and Seattle (SEA) International Airport is the closest airport to the handfasting ceremony.

Also remember that you need Northwest Recess event tickets to attend the handfasting ceremony.

3) We have secured a block of rooms at an inexpensive (for Silicon Valley) hotel that is the closest hotel to the location for the traditional ceremony. This means that the rate is locked in and will not increase even as regular room rates increase. Any rooms not claimed under that room block 30 days before will be removed from the block and you will have to pay full price to get a room, assuming there are any left by then.

You don't have to stay here. We chose it for convenience and proximity to the wedding location and you can choose other accommodations if you prefer, but prices are going up. Silicon Valley in summertime is not a cheap place to visit, so make your reservations soon.

If you are getting a room there, please let us know so that we can adjust the number and types of rooms available. If you tried to reserve a room and the kind you wanted (2 double beds or 1 queen bed) was not available, let us know and we can add more of those rooms to the block.

4) We will be sending out formal invitations with instructions, maps, addresses, etc. in less than a month, so make sure you RSVP with your email address and mailing address before then to receive them, even if you aren't sure yet.

You can fill out the RSVP form, leave the specific events blank, and just add your addresses and comments for now if you want, and then come back and change your RSVP later.

All of this information and more, including relevant links, located here: http://bit.ly/SquiggleWeddingCon

comments

My New Blog Home!

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 21:04:31 GMT

I've been on LiveJournal since May, 2006. It's amusing - my first post says "don't expect too much, I don't have time to keep this updated." Since then, I've gotten ... prolific. But recently LiveJournal moved its servers to Russia (having been bought by a Russian company quite a long time ago). Now, it's subject to Russian laws.

Specifically, it has 1 provision that affects me and 1 provision that could potentially affect me: according to Russian law, any blog or community read by more than 3,000 readers is considered a 'publication' and is subject to State controls on publications, including the provision that the blogger or moderator is legally liable under Russian law for any content posted by any user; and blogs are prohibited from "perform[ing] any other actions contradictory to the laws of the Russian Federation."

I don't think that I have more than 3,000 readers, so I don't think I'm considered a "publication" by their standards, although I might someday have that many readers, or maybe I do and I'm just not aware of it. I don't think of myself as being that big of a name. But Russia does have some laws regarding content. The Russian "gay propaganda law" forbids discussion of "sexual deviancy," which includes LGBTQ issues and "propaganda of non-traditional relationships" is forbidden by this law.

Now, I don't think I'm in any real legal danger here. I seriously doubt I'm going to be arrested or sent off to Russia to stand trial or anything. But my LiveJournal blog could just up and disappear someday. And, frankly, that's been a possibility for a while, although not for reasons of archaic and barbaric "sexual deviancy" laws.

I've been wanting to move away from LJ for some time now, mainly because people keep telling me that it's an outdated platform. Which I think is a shame, because it does everything I ever wanted in a blog. It keeps a running log of my posts, it archives them, it allows comments and gives me control over comments, it gives me design control, it's free, it doesn't take up the limited server space that I pay for on my website, and it also gives me a convenient way to follow the blogs of other people. It's basically Facebook before there was Facebook with more personalization.

But every time I looked into moving my journal over to another platform, I came across technical problems. Until recently, there was no good way to copy everything from LJ (posts, comments, design style, user icons, permissions, etc.) and set it back up on another platform. There were some clunky ways to do it, but I always seemed to hit a wall - this exporter stopped at X number of posts, that exporter didn't get comments, this other platform refused to accept my LJ password even though it's supposed to transfer from one to the other ... stuff like that.

I was able to find an archival service that could back up my posts on my own hard drive, but I had other problems getting that archive to upload somewhere else. And there were a couple of other options that were just above my technical expertise, so when looking at the long set of instructions, my eyes bugged out and I just gave up.

But with this new Russian law thing, I was motivated to look once again and this service was recommended to me. Dreamwidth offered a built-in exporter/importer that grabs all the content I wanted it to grab and actually worked, unlike some other platforms that just kept telling me that my username or password to LJ was incorrect when it wasn't. It's a free service, and it appears to have a similar "friends list" sort of reader for other Dreamwidth users. Not that I really have time to keep up with a blog reader in addition to my FB and Twitter streams (which most people use to link to their blog posts anyway). But still, I like the option. Which means that if you have a Dreamwidth account, hit me up with it and I can follow you back.

So, for now, Dreamwidth is my new blog home and you can find it at http://joreth.dreamwidth.org. I have it set up to cross-post to LJ, which is also set up to automatically tweet links to new entries. If I can figure out a way to cross-post directly from here to Twitter, I will do that instead of tweeting my LJ. But comments are turned off on LiveJournal so if you want to comment, you'll have to come to the Dreamwidth site, which uses OpenID so that even people without a Dreamwidth account can still participate (a plus over LJ). If you choose to link to one of my blog posts, please use the Dreamwidth URL from now on. I *think* I have it set to include the Dreamwidth link on the LJ cross-post, but if not, I will. I still have to go through all my 1,300+ posts and manually update links to LJ posts so that they now go to my DW posts, so that's a long-term project still in the works.

Also, Dreamwidth is still, as of this posting, importing all the comments from my past posts. Their servers have been working overtime lately with the mass exodus from LJ and things are taking longer than normal. As it was, I had to wait in the queue for about 40 hours before the blog posts imported.

As always, my website is www.TheInnBetween.net and links to my blog and my most commonly used social media can be found there. I have accounts on most social media but I only use Facebook, Twitter, and my blog regularly. But if you want to find me somewhere, search for Joreth, Joreth Innkeeper, or some variation on The InnBetween.

comments