joreth | Entries tagged with me manual

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The picture is a little bit outdated - this was taken before I added several more costumes and before I really nailed down the color coding, so it's not very consistent in this picture, but it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

Misanthropic humanism (n): When you know ppl suck but still get pissed when they're mistreated, exploited, oppressed, & deceived. #Atheism ~ @TheGodlessMama

"Wishing everyone on the road would die in a fire and also have affordable health care and the right to use any toilet they want." ~ Rachel Primeaux Jordan

Finally found my philosophical worldview label.

When your partner *sees* you...

Franklin: What I love most about my wife Joreth

Joreth takes zero shit from anyone about anything. Try to manipulate, judge, or emotionally blackmail her and she’ll laugh in your face. She never, ever asks questions like "is it weird if I do thus-and-such?" or "will people like me if I do this or that?" What you get with her is her raw, unfiltered self. You never have to wonder where you stand, you never have to search for hidden meanings. She is who she is without fear or shame, and she apologizes to nobody for being who she is.

Runner up: her passion. As far as she's concerned, if you don't love it with every fiber of your being, it's not worth doing.

Every time some man asks why I'm wearing my iPod (or now my phone) on my arm, I cock my head to the side and say in a blatant "this should be obvious, why are you even asking?" tone:

"No pockets," or "pockets are too small."

It's my way of constantly reminding people of casual and everyday sexism.

Women never ask me why I'm wearing it on my arm. They sometimes ask me if it's a health monitor (as do some men), but they always say what a good idea it is if they bother to say anything at all (except my mother, who sometimes wishes I wouldn't wear it when I'm dressed up, which is exactly the time I need it most because - no pockets!)

To be fair, about half of the men also think it's a good idea, but every comment about my armband has to be prefaced with a question about why I'm wearing it in the first place. These men simply can't come up with the answer on their own. Women know why I wear it on my arm. That men don't is a symptom of how habitual it is for men to not consider what it's like to exist as someone other than them.

Who asks me about my armband is literally privilege in action. That's what privilege is like - small, everyday, relatively unimportant stuff that some people never have to think about and others of us have to spend time, energy, or money to compensate for. In order to ask about my armband, specifically why I'm wearing it, one has to be able to look at me, recognize my attire enough to identify the armband, and never have had the necessity to try and find a place to carry one's phone because a convenient phone-carrying place was built in to literally every possible outfit that one has ever purchased (which itself is often purchased without much thought other than price and approximate fit).

Imagine going through life never once needing to consider how you might need to carry the 3 most important things to carry around on a daily basis - keys, wallet, phone. And never realizing that only some people never have that consideration.

It should be obvious why I wear my device on my arm - because I fucking want to and it's more convenient or comfortable or useful than alternatives, otherwise I would wear it somewhere else. This shouldn't ever have to be asked.

Found a couple of new identity words that I like, but I don't think they feel right on me. (All words written in the feminized form because the post is referencing a feminist movement regarding the labels).

I posted back on Cinco de Mayo the differences between certain labels for people of Mexican descent, and how I preferred "chicana" over "Latina", as a reclaimed, formerly derogatory word that emphasizes the dual nature of being of mixed ethnicity and living in the US as well as the association with activism.

A few years ago I learned about "chingona" and "maldita". As far as I can tell, "chingona" derives from the verb "chingar", which is "to fuck" and is considered vulgar - a swear word. But more than just "a fucker", a "chingona" is colloquial for basically "a fucking badass" and is also a derogatory slur that some are attempting to reclaim, particularly the feminine version that I'm referencing in this post.

A "maldita" is a step beyond "fucking badass", somehow. The literal translation is "damned" or "cursed" or "accursed", but the colloquial use as an identity label is like a chingona on steroids? They are kinda like Spanish words for "thug", with similar classist and racist undertones and a similar embracing of the term by some.

These are words that I would have vehemently rejected when I was a teen, back when I also rejected "chicana" because of the class implications of "gangbanger", "thug", "good for nothing", "low class", etc. I wasn't one of *those* Mexican-Americans. I spoke proper English and I had a proper education and I lived in the suburbs and I eschewed gang violence and tattoos (and used words like "eschewed").

I live very far from the gang violence I grew up on the peripheries of back in the '80s today. Now I live in poverty, often in a house that would have fit right in with the ghettos I turned my nose up at. I still eschew gang violence and I still speak with a "blank" American accent (slipping into a Southern drawl every now and then).

But many people have been blurring the lines between "thug" and "activist", and many of them have been reclaiming words that are normally used to condemn and dismiss them. Like "chicana". I feel that my temporal distance from the California gangs of the '80s and my observations of how civil unrest is sometimes deliberately masked by oppressors to resemble general "thuggery" has given me a new perspective and newfound respect for the title "chicana".

With my memories of the gangs and my distance from my Spanish-speaking culture, I don't feel that I can claim "maldita" and "chingona" for myself, nor that I fully understand all the subtle cultural nuances of the terms. But I like that I learned about them and I like that they exist. I think they'll be rolling around in the back of my mind for a while.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170417034346/https://soyxingona.com/about-me/what-is-a-xingona// - "A Xingona is a woman who is on her game. Basically she has skills that no one else has strived for only by first hand experience. Xingonas aren’t brought down by bias, machismo, prides, and over-rated ego. She gets shit done because she can and she will."

https://alvaradofrazier.com/2012/07/14/frida-kahlo-chingona-artist - "The term 'Chingona' is a Spanglish term, slang, for a bad ass, wise woman, powerful, individualist, self-activated, a woman who lives a life for their own approval, self-empowered, a strong woman..."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-i-define-my-chingona-fire_b_5887de69e4b0a53ed60c6a35 - "Chingona: noun. 1. a Spanish slang term meaning 'bad ass woman'. Although the word 'chingona' is a Spanish term, it is not limited to Latinas. A chingona is any woman who chooses to live life on her own terms. PERIOD. She is the scholar AND the hoe. At the same damn time. OR she is neither. The point is: she gets to choose. And whatever choice she makes, is the right one."

www.buzzfeed.com/connordunlap/build-an-80s-mixtape-and-well-tell-you-which-gu-x669

"You got: Nebula

You've got hard edges because you have a soft, easily breakable heart — just like Nebula. People are often wrong about you, but when they earn your loyalty they earn it for life."

I'm OK with this result in spite of the fact that the author of this quiz knows jack shit about '80s music. Half of this shit wasn't from the '80s and the other half wasn't in the category listed. One Hit Wonders? Like the one band that is in the Music Hall of Fame with 6 Grammys? Or the bands who had multiple hits?

Never mind the fact that the music in the movie series centers around the '70s.

It has been 5 years since I discovered that there is a symbol for adoption. Apparently I am doomed* to be represented by hearts.

The triangle stands for the 3 relationships in an adoption - the biological parents, the adoptive parents, and the adopted child, which some organizations apparently refer to as a "triad". The heart weaving in and out of the triad stands for the love that ties the three relationships together.

Not all adoptive arrangements turn out to be good ones, so I imagine there will be some people (probably adoptees) who do not accept this symbol. In my case, I think these elements are particularly appropriate.

*(I grew up hating hearts because they were "girlie". So it was with great reluctance that I embraced the infinity-heart poly symbol, which I only did because, at the time, the alternative was a freaking *parrot*, which was even worse than the heart and harder to make into jewelry, and nobody came up with anything that the collective community liked better, although some of us have tried)

*sigh* Met a really cute NASA engineer who is also a very good swing dancer, and who has taken it upon himself to learn other styles of partner dance. I knew it would be too much to hope for that he was poly, but he *does* come from an area where another dancer recently came out as poly, so it might not have been *that* big of a fantasy.

Except he's ULTRA Christian.

Reason #46 why I hate living in Florida - unlike other similarly-sized metropolitan areas, the partner dance scene is conservative and religious so I can never hope to find potential dating partners who also know how to dance. At best, I might meet guys who are open to me teaching them some basic dance steps. Which is fine, I enjoy teaching and I enjoy sharing my passion.

But what it usually means in practice is that we end up breaking up before they ever get proficient at dancing and I don't have anyone to challenge *me* to get better; I never get to play the student so I never progress above my current level, which is advanced-beginner or maybe beginning-intermediate.

I have only ever dated one person who is as good (technically, he was better) of a dancer as I am, and we only danced maybe 3 times while dating.

Dancing is such a strong passion of mine that I feel a distinct black hole in my life that I don't have a romantic partner to share it with. I *did* have a couple of partners who were actively working on learning how to dance while we were dating, but for logistical reasons like distance, I never actually got to dance with them and, as I said, I don't have the opportunity to challenge myself.

Of all the things that white men could have decided wasn't "masculine" enough, they had to choose dancing. Y'know, that hobby that has strict gender roles where the man is in control and athletic and gets to hold women in his arms, and requires a good sense of rhythm and is guaranteed to attract the attention of just about every woman in the room? Yeah, that's not "masculine" enough for white dudes, so for generations, we dumped dancing as a culture until most white men are convinced that they can't dance and never developed an interest in it.

Yay fragile white masculinity.

However, in some religious circles, partner dancing is still encouraged. Mormons and that weird "progressive-conservative" southern Christian type still partner dance, so in this backwards superficially-progressive state if I want to dance, it's with people who have a strong religious faith. Which is fine for dancing, but pretty much rules them out as a potential dating pool.

"Orlando is really just a small southern town with delusions of grandeur." ~Joreth Innkeeper

https://web.archive.org/web/20200812000957/https://powderroom.kinja.com/mixed-and-mixed-up-1611452213

"Place me in a room full of people from the island and yeah, I look white by comparison, but put me in a room full of my mother's side of the family or my wife's and suddenly I look quite dark. It's not how we identify that matters, but how people identify us – and most people aren't going to look at us and say "Oh, you're mixed, a bit of both." They'll pick which seems farther from them..."

To most people, I look white. My grandparents were immigrants and didn't speak English. But they insisted on assimilation, so my mom and her siblings learned English in school and my mom doesn't even have an accent anymore. Her siblings still do, but they stayed in Texas and married other Latine people.

My mom, however, married a white man (who doesn't speak the language). She never spoke Spanish at home, so I never learned it until I took it in high school. And then, I learned Castilian Spanish, like, from Spain. My high school Spanish teacher was an Olympic athlete who immigrated from Spain after he retired from sports. We learned proper grammar and pronunciation and how to read. After 4 years, I STILL couldn't speak to my little Mexican abuela (grandmother).

My dad's father refused to attend his son's wedding to my mother, because he was marrying "a spic". He didn't want all her Mexican-American relatives to show up and park their cars along his nice, suburban street because the neighbors would "think the Mexican Mafia is in town". He lived in a suburb of Los Angeles - not exactly an area bursting with white purity and because of that, a really hostile history with race relations (ask me about the zoot suit riots sometime, no it's not just a song).

Eventually my mom and grandfather reconciled and she learned to call him "dad" (the way everyone on both sides of the family call all in-laws). But I never forgave him for that.

Later, my sister got pregnant by a boy who was half-black - a neighbor who lived across the street from my cousin's house, around the corner from my grandfather, and a boy we had grown up with our whole lives. This same grandfather who didn't attend my parents' wedding, refused to look, speak about, or acknowledge in any way, my nibling when he was born. The infant, and later toddler, waddled all over his house when my sister came to visit him, and as far as my grandfather was concerned, there *was* no baby in his house. Because the kid was a quarter black. And yes, he said this, I'm not guessing.

After a couple of years, my sister actually moved down to LA to live with the father's parents (across the street from our cousins, around the corner from dear old gramps). So she was there *all the time*. My nibling was the sweetest, most even-tempered, caring and compassionate kid I've ever met. He was so concerned for everyone else's happiness. Eventually he melted my grandfather's heart and my grandfather came to love him too, just as he came to love my mom. So my sister forgave him. It was "just his way", he was "just born in a different time".

Bullshit, so was my grandmother and she wasn't an asshole.

Anyway, my point is that to most people I look white. So I am the recipient of a lot of white privilege, which I see as a burden but the fact is that my life is easier than others in some ways. But I am not white to everyone. I chose to leave the public school system for high school and attend a very prestigious private school. It was the first time I was surrounded by a sea of blonde hair and blue eyes. There were other minorities there, but I definitely stuck out with my so-dark hair and then-tanned skin.

I am treated as white by the people of my own heritage, a heritage I was kept from in the interests of my mother's family's survival - an outcast in my own culture - and I am treated as a minority by some white folks even though my upbringing and experiences are closer to theirs than any other.

I am treated however is most convenient for the other people to view me. Lately, with my pale skin from never going outdoors in this thrice-damned hellhole of a state, it is more convenient for people to treat me as white, meaning that other white people talk to me as if I'm "one of them", i.e., a racist fuck too. I hear all the shit white people say when they think there are no POC around to judge them.

I used to be proud to talk about my Scottish heritage, but not in many years. These days, I'd rather wear the Mexican-American label, even though I have been disconnected from my culture throughout my life, because I want more people to consider how arbitrary their racist judgments are, and I want them to look me in the face and understand that I am one of those people they just made a joke about.

"Being mixed means, more so than for any other racial group, how we identify is out of our hands. We get identities put upon us, and it's only by coincidence that those identities match our own. Society doesn't make it easy to not fit in a single box, and if there are two boxes to choose from, we get pressured to choose one. Our monoracial brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers all police us to some extent."

"I knew it was because I wasn't white, but being mixed meant I was white, in a way. It meant that despite being every bit as culturally white as my white friends, I had this Latino baggage hanging over my head and seeped into my skin which did nothing but cause trouble. It meant that no matter how white I was, I wasn't white enough. I was always going to be ambiguously brown".

"I don't speak Spanish like a gringo – one of my dear friends has told me that I definitely don't exhibit the issues most white Americans seem to have with the language. But I don't speak like anyone actually does. My Spanish is the Spanish of a student of Spanish, not a native speaker, and my accent is mishmash of various accents which sometimes leaves my consonants indistinct and my emphasis slightly off."

"And I realized I stood in a multidimensional web of hierarchies where I was privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others.

Feminism, socialism, anti-racism, fighting for queer rights – these things are inseparable for me. They all tie together. And it's being mixed which opened the door for me to see the Gordian knot of oppression rather than just the few strands which pertain to me directly."

It turns out that my most treasured passions are all basically one form or another of kink, as I posted about 5 years ago after a particularly exhilarating camera gig I had:

Riding the downhill side of the stagehand's version of the "performer's high". #SweetAgony

Working in entertainment is a lot like what I get out of #BDSM, now that I think about it. Euphoric highs mixed and intermingled with physical pain, followed by utter exhaustion, and maybe an emotional crash or two, but maybe not, you just don't know until it hits.

Smiling through the sweat and the tears, anger mixed with pleasure, and the dichotomous twins of an excruciating awareness of the physical self and a simultaneous fog of floating consciousness, disconnected from the body.

#AndNowToSleepPerchanceToDream #ForOnTheMorrowAtOFuckThirtyIAwakeAgain #AVLife #backstage #StagehandKink #LivingTheDream #RockNRoll

www.buzzfeed.com/andyneuenschwander/which-female-mythological-monster-are-you

Accurate

You got: Harionago

The Harionago from Japan often appears as a woman with long, beautiful, flowing hair...that has sharp barbs or talons at the ends. As the legend goes, the Harionago laughs at men who pass by on the street, and if the men laugh back, she stabs them with her hair. In short, the Harionago takes no bullshit, and neither do you.

Just FYI: I have a "user manual" for myself. The long, in-depth version is a tag in my blog for all the blog posts that are about me at http://joreth.dreamwidth.org/tag/me%20manual and a shorthand "cliff notes" version is built from a template created by Cunning Minx and can be found in its own blog entry at https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/301768.html.

I have yet another sort of Me Manual in the form of a YouTube playlist of songs that I feel represent me or some aspect of me. I call this Joreth's Theme Music and it can be found at www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMySpg8nvA5OSIHTfi6XwgQdbEQSyLjoq

Watch on YouTube

I also have a playlist of songs that represent my biggest frustrations and topics that are very personal to me. I call this playlist my Killing Spree Playlist, as I jokingly refer to the playlist I would have on my iPod if I some day finally snapped and decided to climb a water tower with a sniper rifle. This can be found at www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMySpg8nvA5Ml3lMWhzUJMc78UVwnd8gM

Watch on YouTube

I highly recommend creating your own Me Manual or User Manual. You can use the very convenient form that Minx offers or you can create your own. Sharing yourself through song or other forms of art is an interesting and creative way to supplement a more plain-speaking sort of Me Manual like the text-based Q&A template that Minx offers.

I then also encourage everyone to share them with prospective partners, current partners, and friends, and I encourage everyone to *read* the user manuals of their lovers and friends.

www.helpguide.org/articles/suicide-prevention/suicide-prevention.htm

I decided to start being open with my depression and my occasional bouts with suicidal thoughts. I decided to do this when I acknowledged that it is possible to continue to *live* while still being suicidally depressed. I acknowledge and accept that these thoughts are part of my condition and that I don't have to act on them. That makes it easier for me to talk about it publicly.

But because so many suicidal people do not talk about their depression or their thoughts, a lot of people are under the impression that, because I might mention something about death or hopelessness, I must therefore be in danger. Really, it's when I don't talk about it that I'm probably in the most danger.

And then I get all the usual reactions to people who have no idea how to handle other people having complex emotions, which is bad enough, but it's compounded by the fact that I'm not actually in any immediate danger so I don't *need* that assistance even if it was helpful, which it isn't.

A lot of the things on this list don't apply to me because of my decision to talk publicly about choosing to live while having suicidal thoughts. My talking about death isn't a "warning signal", but it might be for someone else. I'm talking about death because I can't handle needing to comfort other people with their own fears and concerned feelings about me while I'm also going through my own struggles with my own feelings. I can't do the emotional labor for the both of us anymore.

So I'm talking about it to normalize talking about difficult subjects so that the rest of y'all can learn how to do your own emotional labor so that you can better support those people you're feeling all those concerned feelings about instead of making us try to make you feel better when we feel like shit first.

So, even though a lot of this article doesn't apply to me, personally, I'm sure they apply to other people, and this list of Don'ts is particularly applicable to me.

"But don’t:

Argue with the suicidal person. Avoid saying things like: "You have so much to live for," "Your suicide will hurt your family," or "Look on the bright side."

Act shocked, lecture on the value of life, or say that suicide is wrong.

Promise confidentiality. Refuse to be sworn to secrecy. A life is at stake and you may need to speak to a mental health professional in order to keep the suicidal person safe. If you promise to keep your discussions secret, you may have to break your word.

Offer ways to fix their problems, or give advice, or make them feel like they have to justify their suicidal feelings. It is not about how bad the problem is, but how badly it’s hurting your friend or loved one.

Blame yourself. You can’t “fix” someone’s depression. Your loved one’s happiness, or lack thereof, is not your responsibility."

I especially love this line here: "It is not about how bad the problem is, but how badly it’s hurting your friend or loved one."

One further note on the warning of antidepressants. When I went through my therapy the last time, the doctor began to prescribe something for me that would increase my "motivation", but literally in the middle of writing the prescription, I said something or other that made her change her mind and she prescribed something to lift my mood first but that wouldn't necessarily give me more motivation.

(No, I have no memory of what either drug was or what the mechanism was to isolate those two specific emotions. I did some research later and it lined up with what she said, but now I'm left only with the memory of the *effect* of this conversation, not the details. So accept it on face value).

The thing is, that I had at that point reached a place where I was a high risk. I was willing to die. But I couldn't get up the motivation to actually get up off the floor of my storage unit, where I had fallen to sob hysterically, to reach for my gun on the upper shelf. That lack of motivation was, literally, the only reason I didn't die that night. It was just too much effort to go through with it.

So, later, I went to the therapist and we discussed options and she changed her mind on what drug to give me in the middle of the session. Now see, my depression is situational, not necessarily my brain chemistry. And my situation changed shortly thereafter. So we don't really know if the drug worked or I just got out of that depression on my own.

But what I do know is that my *mood* lifted before I gained back my motivation to do stuff. It was still some time later before I could feel motivated about things, I just didn't feel so *hopeless* anymore. And that's when I did some research about the drugs we talked about and the incidents of people who accomplish their suicides after they begin taking antidepressants.

So I now believe that there are 2 parts to suicidal depression: a lack of hope, and a lack of motivation. And I believe that if a person who is suicidal ever gets their motivation to do stuff back before they lose their sense of despair and hopelessness, that's what causes them to take their own lives.

And if we're prescribing them shit that makes them feel motivated to do stuff but they haven't gotten over whatever makes them feel hopeless as fast as they gain their motivation, that may contribute to why people suicide after taking antidepressants.

So if you know someone who is suicidal and who is finally convinced to start taking medication, be aware of this motivation / mood split.

This post was made in March of 2017, where I first discovered that I may have a rare form of synesthesia (unfortunately I did not post what the song was, and I no longer remember what triggered it):

One of Franklin's posts mentioned how he doesn't viscerally *feel* music. This was the first time I had ever heard that some people don't feel music physically. It's a stunning revelation for me but I don't have a long, insightful post on that subject right now.

This concept, however, keeps rattling around in my head, so I suppose I will eventually write something about it. Right now, though, I just listened to a song that immediately made me tear up and feel awash in a complex set of emotions that I have no real-life situation from which those emotions could be applied or are coming from.

I also felt the physical sensations of liquid fur bouncing around inside my head. None of those descriptors makes any sense at all when put together like that, but that's still the sensation I feel.

When I hear certain male voices in certain pitches and timbers, I get this soft, smooth, comforting tactile sensation in my skull that my only analogue for is my former cat's utterly soft fur. Her fur was so soft that even rabbit fur doesn't do it justice, but it wasn't that airy, thin, fluffy sort of fur of a long-hair cat. It was the thick, dense, *weighty* fur of a short-hair cat or, well, a bunny. It was the softest fur I have ever felt.

When it's a bass voice of the right tonal qualities, the sensation flows like a liquid down my ear canal and into my throat. When it's a baritone voice, it bounces around like a springy ball of cotton fluff in the general vicinity of my ears on the sides of my head. When the voice is rough like many rock singers' voices are, the soft furry feeling takes on just a hint of abrasiveness, but a pleasant scratch like a somewhat stiff makeup brush on a patch of skin that you didn't quite realize was just a tiny bit itchy. Maybe more like a soft dog fur than my bunny-cat's fur.

So I'm sitting there, listening to a song that has no personal relevance in my life at the moment, feeling this scratchy, furry cotton ball bounce around behind my ears and feeling an overwhelming sense of loss and yearning for something that doesn't exist, and feeling the exquisitely painful relief that comes with the physical act of shedding tears.

And it occurs to me that some people can't experience this. My first thought is that I am extremely fortunate to have this experience. My second thought is prompted by my depression, which has to butt it's head in and ruin everything, and which says that if I didn't exist any more, I wouldn't have to feel all these feelings that are threatening to overwhelm me right now.

So my "real" brain, the part of me that is "me" in between depressive episodes, wrestles back control for a moment to remind myself that these feelings, even though they're threatening to become too much to handle and even though some of them are sad because of the content of the song, these feelings are exactly what we fought to have back. As many songs say, sometimes we try to feel pain just to stop feeling nothing at all. These sensations are *exactly* what make the experience worth it.

And then I remember once again that some people don't experience music this way. And this all happened in less than one bar of music.

There's no point or moral lesson here. I'm just sharing a glimpse of what it's like in my head when I listen to music to hopefully illustrate how powerful and important music is to me, and maybe to provide a connection point to others who experience music similarly and maybe aren't aware that there are others like them or that there are others who aren't like them.

I wish everyone could experience music the way that I do, at least once.

And then later, I made this post:

April 23, 2017 · Shared with Public

So, remember how I have begun wondering if I might have synesthesia because of how I "feel" sound? Someone mentioned that touching a certain thing tastes bad to them and I have that same sensation but with other items. Newspaper, chalk, and chalkboards taste bad when I touch them with any part of my skin but my fingers are the strongest, and they also make my inner ears hurt when I touch them - the ear canal near my throat.

Which, incidentally, is where I "feel" a lot of music too. Touching newspaper feels like someone rubbing sandpaper on the inside of my skull behind my ears, and it "tastes" kinda like what sandpaper feels like. The action of rubbing sandpaper doesn't have a "taste", but that's what it feels like.

It's like how, nowadays we can say something tastes "blue" and everyone knows what that means because of blue, vaguely fruity-ish flavored candy and drinks. But to me, "rubbing sandpaper" has a "taste", that isn't like if you put a piece of sandpaper in your mouth and tasted the physical paper. And I don't get that taste *from* sandpaper, either. But "rubbing sandpaper" has a taste, and that's the taste I get, along with a sensation of rubbing sandpaper around inside my head about where my ears and sinus canals are, whenever I touch newspaper, and to a lesser degree, chalk and chalkboards.

So if I refuse to pick up a piece of newspaper when we're hanging out together, that's why. It's very unpleasant. Now if you'll excuse me, just thinking about this for this long has made me really need to eat or drink something to get the taste out of my mouth, so I'm gonna go finish my Fanta and french fries, and go to bed, and try to not think about newspaper anymore.

"So, do you and your partner..."
Um, I'm poly.

"OK, but which one is your main one?"
Um, I'm poly.

"Sure, but who do you love?"
Um, I'm poly.

"Who do you spend the most time with?"
Um, I'm poly.

"What is your favorite book?"
Um, I'm poly.

"What is your favorite movie?"
Um, I'm poly.

"What's your favorite food?"
Um, I'm poly.

"What about just favorite *type* of food?"
Um, I'm poly.

"Surely you have a favorite ..."
Um, I'm poly.

"If your house was burning and you could only save ..."
Um, I'm poly.

"No, but if you could only save your partner..."
Um, I'm poly.

"Listen! Your partner or your cat? Which would..."
My cats. Plural. Remember? I'm poly.

#polyamory #poly #polyamorous #FeelingSnarky #UnlessHeIsPassedOutHeCanSaveHimselfBetterThanMyPetsCanAndICanAtLeastCarryMyPets #AllTheCats #UhIAmPoly

I wrote this post on Facebook 5 years ago. It turned out to be disturbingly prescient for a relationship I started after this post was written and ended more or less for this reason.

Me: I need this information to assess where I should place my boundaries.

Them: It hurts me that you would even ask me about that! Don't you trust me to tell you? Your boundaries make me feel bad. Don't you care about me to let me in?

Me: Sure, it's cool, I'll just do the emotional labor so that you don't feel bad.

If people wonder why I'm so standoffish and hard to get to know on an interpersonal level, this is why. It's easier to keep people at a distance than get into fights over who should be shouldering the burden of emotional labor. If I push, I'm a nag or I'm disrespectful of someone's hurt feelings. If I don't push, then I don't feel safe so I place my boundaries farther out and then I'm "cold" and "emotionally distant". Which hurts their feelings.

When I was a portrait photographer in a studio, I used to have lots of clients bringing in their toddlers and babies. It was my job to make their bratty, cranky, frightened children look like the advertisement photos of baby models who were deliberately selected for having traits conducive to producing flattering portraits (including temperament and parents whose patience was increased by a paycheck). I would spend more time than I was supposed to, patiently waiting for the parents to get their kids to stop crying and fussing.

Every single session, the parents would exclaim how patient I was! How did I do it?! What I couldn't tell them was that I had built a barrier in my head to tune them out. I just ... spaced. I did not notice the passage of time and I wasn't really paying them any attention. I just let my muscle memory control the equipment and make the noises that got kids to look and smile. It's an old trick I adapted from getting through assaults by bullies as a kid - tune out, mentally leave the body, make the right mouth noises to get the preferred response.

That kind of emotional labor management takes a toll. I couldn't express any irritation or annoyance at the client and I couldn't leave to let them handle the kid and the photographing on their own. So I learned to compartmentalize and distance myself while going through the physical motions.

But the price? I now hate kids. I used to like them. I was a babysitter, a math tutor, and a mentor and counselor. I originally went to college to get a counseling degree so that I could specialize in problem teens from problematic homes. Now I want nothing at all to do with kids unless it's an environment where I am teaching them something specific and I can give up on them the moment I am no longer feeling heard or helpful.

That's not what made me not want children, btw. I was already childfree-by-choice at that time. I just still liked them back then. Now I can only stand certain specific kids who are very good-natured, interested in my interests, and able to function independently (as in, introverted and not dependent on my attention).

So, yeah, I can do the emotional labor. But the cost is high. Doing the labor for too long, to the point where I have to shut myself off from empathy to bear the consequences of doing that labor, results in my emotional distance. That's what happened with my abusive fiance. He wanted a caretaker, not an equal partner. Everything I did to remain an independent person "hurt" him. I bent a little in the beginning, as I believe partners are supposed to do for each other. But eventually catering to his feelings while putting my own on the back burner took its toll.

So I shut down. In the end, I was able to watch him dispassionately as he lay on the concrete floor of our garage, supposedly knocked unconscious by walking into a low-hanging pipe conveniently in the middle of an argument. And then calmly walk upstairs without even a glance behind me to see if he was following. He described my breakup with him as "cold", like a machine. I had run out labor chips to give, even to feel compassion as I was breaking his heart.

Of course, I didn't recognize his behaviour as "abuse" until years later, or I might have bothered to get angry instead of remaining cold. Point is, emotional labor isn't free, and if you don't pay for it in cash or a suitably equitable exchange, it will be paid by some other means. I don't mean we should never do emotional labor for anyone, just that it needs to be compensated for because it will be paid one way or another.

Since this method has served to end several relationships with abusive men where I never felt "abused" because it didn't "stick" (I just thought of them as assholes), I don't feel much incentive to change it, even though it would probably be better to either not take on so much emotional labor in the first place (which is hard not to do because I *want* to do some forms of emotional labor in the beginning as an expression of love back when I'm still expecting a reciprocal exchange) or to leave or change things before I run out of fucks to give.

But I do eventually run out of fucks to give and I do eventually stop taking on too much emotional labor. And it always seems to surprise people when I do. Because I was so accommodating before so that I wouldn't push "too hard" or seem "too selfish". But that always comes with a price. People are often surprised to learn that.

From April 30, 2019

Y'know what? Breakups are not any easier when you're poly, and not even when you have casual hookups.

I knew before we started that my FWB and I had an expiration date. I knew that it was always going to be literally good friends with some extra and then back to friends. I "knew the deal going in" and it was always a lower emotional involvement than other relationships.

By mutual decision and a calm discussion, it still fucking hurts to lose a relationship. Having existing partners, having a really good date recently with a new person and feeling some NRE and hope about its potential, knowing ahead of time that the end was coming, knowing ahead of time that it was always temporary ... none of this stops it from hurting.

Poly people are still people. Loss isn't any less painful just because we have other partners. Loss also isn't any less painful just because we accepted the price when we accepted the deal.

I'm fine. I'll heal. But today I'm going to be sad.

www.quora.com/How-would-you-react-if-your-husband-requested-a-threesome-with-the-third-partner-being-a-male-for-cis-couples/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How would you react if your husband requested a threesome with the third partner being a male (for cis couples)?

A. Well, since he knows that’s one of my fetishes and we’ve had quite a few already, it would be more surprising if he *stopped* suggesting MFM threesomes. For us, it would be the same as any other sexual request or suggestion he would make. If it were a newer partner, though, I would be surprised and highly enthusiastic. It’s hard to find straight cismen who have gotten over their homophobia enough to have at least the same amount of willingness for an MFM threesome that they seem to expect women to have for FMF threesomes.

But I suspect from your question that you are implying a suggestion of bisexuality, assuming that the husband in question is requesting an MFM threesome so that *he* could have direct sexual contact with the other man.

Since I tend to date straight cismen (much to my own annoyance), I would be absolutely thrilled if any of my cismen partners were to start exploring bisexuality, especially if they were willing to include me in part of the process, since I have the same thing for hot gay man sex that many straight men have for hot lesbian sex.

Unfortunately for me and my fetishes, two people in a threesome or other group sex encounter do not need to have direct sexual contact during the encounter in order to have the encounter at all. Most of my threesomes tend to involve two people of the same gender teaming up to pleasure (or torture, depending on the kinks involved) the one person of another gender, since I’m straight and my partners tend to be straight.

So having my spouse suggest a threesome with another man, and assuming by the implication of the question that this would include some male bisexuality explorations, I would first ask him what he managed to do in order to unflip that switch in his head that makes him regrettably but undeniably straight, and then I’d start planning with him who and how and when and where.

So far every single match online who was even a slight possibility has failed my second test (the first one being "can you even read?" with my bio having specific terminology).

As a "single" woman, a poly person, and someone who prefers kitchen table poly in particular, I prefer to meet people for the first time in social settings. I like meeting at parties and public events. The other person can even bring their friends with them. I realize this isn't common, but it's what I prefer to do.

This does several things - it keeps me safer from danger because I'm in a familiar setting with other people, it gives us both an "out" if we don't click. They have people they can talk to, I have people I can talk to, someone in the group is bound to be That Person who can keep even a limping conversation going, one of us can always leave early because we're not really "ditching" someone if they're there anyway for the event itself, if the other person sucks, we can use our friends as a buffer, etc.

And finally, it shows me just how comfortable they are with the idea of polyamory, or even just with someone being sociable and outgoing and having their own friends. I don't have a lot of free time, so I tend to combine activities so I can see the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time.

I also prefer for my partners to get along with each other, at least socially, if not become friends. So I want to see how well these prospectives handle meeting my friends. How well they handle me sharing or splitting my attention. I am not a beginner relationship. I throw people in the deep in right away because I don't have time or energy to teach them how to swim.

And I want my friends' opinions on the new guy because I don't trust rose colored glasses. I don't need my friends' "approval", but I want some independent verification. Plus, the social event is usually an activity that means a lot to me. How accommodating is he of the things I'm passionate about? How interested is he in the things I'm interested in?

I know that not everyone likes large social events, but that's a compatibility issue in its own right with me. If they really hate social events that much, we're not going to get along long-term. I also know that it's hard to have a more personal connection in these kinds of settings, but that's not what I'm looking for when I arrange them. I would have had to develop some kind of connection before even inviting them out. Now is the time for me to see if there is any real-life chemistry in a safe, controlled way.

And only then, if I don't instantly hate them on sight (something that happened to me when a guy I met online from out of town planned a week-long trip to meet me, which really sucked for both of us), I'll plan something more personal and intimate to get to know each other better.

And so far every single person (but 1) who has made it past the first test has failed this one. Every single person I agreed to meet from an online dating app has said they'd meet me at some public event and then failed to show up.

So, guys, when a woman you're interested in says that she is passionate about this thing, and she would like to meet you in this context, don't fuck that up. She is inviting you into her world in a way that gives her a feeling of control and safety. When a woman you know invites you to a thing she is really interested in, don't fuck that up. She is inviting you into her world, to share something with her that sparks joy in her life.

These are Bids For Attention. When Bids For Attention go unacknowledged, people pull away. When it happens enough times in proportion to the investment already made into the relationship, this will kill the relationship.

And for something that hasn't started yet, it really only takes once or twice. So now even guys I was actually interested in meeting are now off the table for me. They totally lost their chance by refusing (not being "unable", but *refusing*) to meet me under the circumstances I proposed.

Because it's not like I'm a passive communicator or someone who drops hints. I've said outright that this is how I prefer to meet people and why. Quickest way to kill any interest I might have in you is for you to ignore my Bids For Attention, to overlook my safety concerns, and to dismiss the things that I'm passionate about.

A few years ago I wrote about a dance situation where I was sliding into a depressive state but putting on my best pretend-happy face (https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/387838.html). I went out dancing and met up with 2 friends that night - one dancer and one non-dancer.

The non-dancer and I had been having some incredibly intimate conversations recently and we were getting to know each other *really* well. He saw the effect that the endorphins had on me and thought I looked happy. I was smiling, outgoing, and having one of my best dance-skill nights where I was totally killing it on the floor. The non-dancer saw all of that and remarked on how happy I looked.

The dancer friend and I had not had that same level of intimacy and we only knew each other marginally well. But after one 3 minute song of full-body contact, he could see the depression behind the smile and the dance endorphins.

So now I want to give another example of how partner dancing gives people amazingly good non-verbal communication skills.

In 2019, I started a casual relationship with another dancer. We were becoming pretty good friends, but we still had some barriers up in the emotional intimacy department. We were having fun, but that's about it. But he's a fantastic lead and can build very good partnerships with his follows on the floor. I'll call him Michael.

We had not told anyone in our dance communities that we had been sleeping together. First of all, we weren't *dating*, so it felt weird to be making announcements about a casual relationship, but second, we are both community leaders and we didn't want to make things weird with overlapping our private and public lives.

Plus, he's ultimately monogamous and available for a dating relationship, so eventually he would want to find a romantic partner (probably from within the dance community) and having everyone already know that he's hooking up with someone else tends to make potential monogamous dating partners keep their distance. He would, of course, disclose to anyone to whom that information is relevant, but it didn't need to be public knowledge. Ah, the complex, twisty rules of mono culture.

I have another friend, who I'll call Anne, who is also a dancer. She and I have a similar level of platonic emotional intimacy - decent friends but still getting to know each other. Anne and Michael have their own friendship with each other, and it's possibly a closer emotional relationship than I had with either of them.

So, on this particular Wednesday night, I went to my usual dance event, and I met a guy there who was interested in using the venue. The manager wasn't there that night, so he wandered over to my event to make connections. So we chatted and I let him in on how our event was arranged and stuff. I'll call him Nick. I was feeling some chemistry between us, but I wasn't sure how much of that was real and how much was just because I had really good sex earlier in the day and I was still all after-glowey.

I found out that, in addition to Nick being a promoter, he's also a Latin dancer. So I invited him up to my DJ booth to pick whatever song he wanted and to dance with me. So we did and he's a fucking amazing dancer - one of the best I've ever danced with.

Earlier, he had given me his business card, offering to help me with promotion of our event. It felt like a pretty typical networking type of exchange. Later, while bent over my laptop looking at music (he also gave me a ton of his own music, so we were talking and exchanging files), he suggested I call him to get together and do more music exchange when we had time and more drive space, and he gave me his personal number.

Now, this could have gone either way. It could have been more networking, or it could have been a soft flirt to see if there was interest. I enthusiastically accepted his number, y'know, to exchange music. Then we danced. He said several times that he was impressed, given that I'm not a Latin dancer, I'm a Ballroom Latin dancer (which is different) and a beginner at that.

So I put on a bachata, which I like better than salsa, and we danced again. Then he mentioned another style of dance that I might like and when I asked him what it was like, we danced again. I was definitely feeling the chemistry. After the 3rd dance, the conversation lulled, and I excused myself to mingle with my other guests and friends. Here's the relevant part...

As I was walking across the rather large dance floor, apparently I was smiling. Anne and Michael were standing next to each other, both watching me (everyone had stopped what they were doing to watch me dance with Nick just a moment before). Michael remarked to Anne that I looked happy.

Anne, knowing that I often get trapped by men in uncomfortable conversations because a) I'm a woman at a nightclub and b) I'm the event host who has to make the rounds and talk to everyone, suggested the possibility that it might have been a tense smile. Keep in mind that I'm still a good 50-60 feet away and it's dark with flashing, disorienting lights.

Michael, without taking his eyes off me, said "no, that's a happy look". Apparently Anne glanced sharply at Michael as she realized that he was able to tell the difference between my happy smile and my pasted, polite but tense smile. She looked at him, looked back at me, back at him, back at me, and on the third glance back at him (all of which I could see as I walked towards them), she asked him if we were sleeping together.

Surprised, he looked at her, admitted it, and then asked how she knew. She said that the first clue was his knowing the difference between my smiles, and what confirmed it was the expression on his face as he watched me walk over to them and his relaxed posture, as well as my own body language while I walked towards them.

All of this happened in the span of time it took me to walk across the dance floor. When I arrived, I told them all about who the guy was and mentioned that I got his number. Michael said "see? Happy smile!"

So, here is someone I have been dancing with for months able to tell at a glance from across a *dark* room the difference between genuinely being excited about something and being polite to a new person and my general enthusiasm for the activity. Because he is getting to know me very intimately through dancing. The sex helps, but that's relatively new compared to how long we've been dancing together, and also sex is very contextual. Dancing expresses a lot of different emotions, and we can feel that with the music and the body contact. And here is someone else who I have *not* been dancing with but who has general non-verbal communication skills, and who *has* been dancing with the other person in this scenario so she knows *his* body language almost as intimately as I do.

He can read me, she can read him, and through our mutual connection with him and our general skills, she can infer my mental state too. Kind of like the dance version of metamours.

I know that a lot of people don't like dancing or think they're bad at it. But I can't stress enough just how valuable those skills can be in interpersonal relationships. I've known some people who are just naturally that intuitive, but I don't know of any other activity that people can practice that develops this level of intuitiveness and awareness of other people. This is an activity that can *teach* and *improve* exactly this kind of non-verbal communication and intuitiveness regardless of one's starting point in intuiting non-verbal communication.

I would like to encourage more people to try partner dancing, or at least to learn lead / follow exercises, to add one more *incredibly* powerful tool to their relationship toolkit.

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.

There have been a lot of rumblings in my various communities about the lack of accessibility for basically everyone other than straight white educated cismen. One popular option that a lot of people are choosing to take these days (and I wholeheartedly support them) is to look at the speaker lineup, and if they are the only POC or woman or disabled person or whatever on the lineup, then to decline the invitation to speak.

Another option is to do the same thing as a guest. A third / fourth option is to do the same thing *as* straight, white, cismen and to do it publicly as a way to give up your seat for someone who is not (especially if your "seat" is on a panel or podium discussing accessibility issues).

As I said, I support this choice completely. However, the consequence of all POC and women and disabled people et. al. refusing to participate is that these events *remain* white, straight, male, and able-bodied.

So, if we are a member of an underrepresented demographic, and we get invited (or accepted) to speak at an event where the speaker lineup has less diversity than we'd like, and we have the spoons or the matches or the hit points for it, and our lecture topics work this way, I'd like to propose doing more of this in addition to our boycotts.

Give our lectures and workshops and panels in ways that absolutely do not benefit the people who are not us but that do benefit the people we are trying to make these events more accessible for.

This will not be applicable to everyone who speaks. It's most easily demonstrated with something like hearing loss because accommodating people with hearing difficulties tends to be *inconvenient* for people who can hear, whereas many other forms of accommodation benefit everyone or most people even those who do not *need* the accommodation.

One of the things that I do is, in my Simple Steps workshop, where we take dancing exercises and learn how to apply them as actual communication tools, we deliberately arrange this hands-on workshop so that men have to touch other men. Everyone other than straight cismen is socialized to allow some form of physical contact (often whether it's wanted or not), but straight cismen get to indulge in their homophobia because of the homophobic culture.

So we do not accommodate them. They are forced out of their comfort zone in our workshop.

Obviously, this has limitations. People who have mental health issues regarding physical contact will find our workshop difficult for them. We made a choice to focus on this one issue, and the nature of the workshop is to be hands-on and interactive. But the same goes for the ASL speaker in the original meme here - people who have eyesight problems would have had difficulty in his lecture too.

Another thing that I do is I make many of the events I host to be either child-friendly or low-cost / free (or both) because poverty is one of my pet SJ issues. I am not a fan of children. But I make as many of my events child-friendly because I know how expensive child-care is and how difficult it can be to participate in a community when everything costs money and time and there are children at home. Children running around an event is inconvenient to many adults. But without childcare options, poor people (and mostly women) are left out.

I will be considering some of my more popular lectures and workshops to see if I can adapt them to make them less convenient for various target audiences, to illustrate this point. If there is a way to make your lectures more accommodating to the people you are representing while simultaneously making it less accommodating to the non-representative audience, please consider this act of civil rebellion in lieu of just not participating at all.

If we want separate spaces, that's one thing, but if we're asking for more inclusivity, some of us have to be the ones to barge through the door. Otherwise, the room will remain monochrome because we've all decided that forcing the door open is too much effort.

No photo description available.

Event Organizer: We're sorry, there won't be interpreters at the event where you are presenting about Deaf things, sign language, and interpreting.

Me: No problem, I'll present in ASL without interpretation. Hearing people will have to get by.

EO: Ummm ...

I presented for 25 minutes, and opened with a couple of slides in written English that explained the situation. Told them to stay, so that they could "learn a lesson they didn't come here for." They all did.

People don't seem to understand that everyone has a right to life just not at the expense of someone else's right to choose to not support that life with their own body. We get it when it comes to organ donation, but for some reason not full-body donation.

www.quora.com/Would-you-opt-for-an-abortion-or-put-your-kid-up-for-adoption/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What are the reasons you would chose to abort a child rather than carry it to term and put it up for adoption?

A. I don’t want to be pregnant. As said elsewhere, there shouldn’t need to be any further explanation. I do not want to donate my body to the incubation of another.

Lots of people don’t want to be organ donors either, but nobody is lining up to take away their right to bodily autonomy and force them to donate organs without their consent, even though it would save someone’s life. Even though it would *kill someone* to refuse to donate. An actual human person with history and loved ones and memories and plans, unlike a fetus.

I do not want to be pregnant. My reasons for why I don’t want to be pregnant are not necessary for anyone else to know. I want to have the same rights to bodily autonomy that you have as a corpse, where even in death, nobody can make you use your body to give life to another if you don’t want to, regardless of your reasons why.

I don’t want to be pregnant and it’s my fucking body. That’s enough of a reason.

www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-considered-being-dumped-as-a-blessing/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever considered being 'dumped' as a blessing?

A. Yes. I was dating a man who was abusing his other partners. I do not feel that he abused me, but only because I, coincidentally, hadn’t done anything that triggered his insecurities that led him to abuse his partners.

Abuse comes from a belief that it is OK to control another person. At the time, how I behaved was exactly what he wanted from me. So he had no need to attempt to exert his control over me because I was already doing what he wanted.

Then he got another girlfriend, and shortly thereafter she started dating someone else. That triggered his insecurities. So he attempted to control her to assuage his insecurities. She resisted that control, so he tried harder to control her, and it spiraled into abuse.

By the time I finally saw what was going on between them, *really* saw what was happening and not just believing what he was telling me about their relationship, I was in a position to be open and available to new relationships myself.

But because I saw how he was treating her, I got angry at him. I decided that I would not coddle him by making any concessions in my new relationship to make him feel better. I was just going to throw him in the deep end by allowing my new relationship to progress however it wanted, with no feedback from him.

He *really* did not like that. He had never before had a partner who didn’t give him a voice in her other relationships. He felt personally betrayed because his vote in my other relationship didn’t count.

Because his relationship with his victim had escalated to a ridiculous level, *all* of his other relationships were suffering. So he was constantly putting out fires - first trying to rein in his victim, and then trying to soothe his other partners (who he had already cowed into submission) who felt neglected by how much time he was spending reining in his victim.

Every relationship in his life was falling apart because of his one partner who kept resisting his control. His other partners had long since given up control to him, and I (until that point) hadn’t needed any controlling.

So his reserves were low. He had no more patience and no more ability to handle a partner who resisted him. And then I came along and did something that freaked him out (I started dating someone new), and not only did I resist his control, but I did so easily and without any conciliatory or apologetic attitude about how my resistance to his control might make him feel.

His victim, who did not realize he was trying to control her and all the drama was because she knew something was wrong but she couldn’t figure out what - she would resist his control but she would feel really badly about it because she couldn’t seem to understand why she kept "hurting" him.

I, however, had no such confusion. When he attempted to insert himself into my other relationship, I said plainly and immediately that he had absolutely no say in the matter of what I did with my body or time or emotions and he certainly did not get a say in what my new partner could do with his own body, time, or emotions.

I stood my ground. This shocked him so much that he dumped me with almost no build-up, surprising everyone around us. To all of us in the network, it seemed that my relationship with him was the only stable one he had. We didn’t have any of the constant drama that came with his victim trying to figure out why the gaslights kept changing levels (that’s a reference to the movie from whence the term "gaslighting" comes), and we didn’t have any of the arguments that he had with his other partners about how they never got to see him anymore because all of his time was taken up trying to manage his victim.

He and I were wickedly compatible in almost every way. We were even more compatible in some ways than he was with his wife of 20 years. So, to everyone in our network, our breakup came out of nowhere. It took one email exchange over this new partner of mine, where he insisted he should have a say in our relationship and I said absolutely not, and then he dumped me.

At the time I was hurt and angry. I had just lost my place to live and had to be "rescued" by a friend offering me a spare room, only to have that "friend" torture my cats while I was away resulting in both of their deaths. That was the 2nd of what turned out to be 7 moves in 2 years. I lost my housing, my cats, my boyfriend, and even my new partner decided to move to another state right when we got started (although we did not break up), and even my local community staged a coup against me when I tried to oust a guy who was beating his wife so I lost my entire social network too.

It was too much for me all at once, and I fell into a suicidal depression. A few months after that breakup, his victim finally escaped and she and I had several opportunities to talk about our experiences with him. I learned about a lot of things that happened in their relationship that I hadn’t known at the time because of the way that he controlled the narrative of their relationship.

So, in hindsight, him dumping me was probably the best thing he could have done. If he hadn’t, I would have stayed with him and continued to try and work with him on getting past his insecurities when he actually had no intention of getting past them because they were too valuable as a tool he could use to control his partners. I would have continued to minimize his abuse of his victim because I couldn’t see her side as clearly while I was romantically linked to him (although I had begun to see more of the truth before we broke up).

I was not ready to leave him, so I would have stayed with an abuser for much longer had he not made the decision for me. And I’m glad now that it didn’t drag on longer. I didn’t get out of there without scars. I’m not sure how bad the damage would be if I had stayed longer. As it is, I’m still not fully recovered. So I can only be grateful that he didn’t string me along any further.

When I look back over my past and think "would I really erase this from my history if I could?", most of the time I don’t think I would. As many people have said in other contexts, the experiences I went through have made me who I am today. Going back in time and preventing myself from having some of those bad experiences means I would not have come out the other side as the person I am now. So a lot of those experiences I would go through anyway.

But not this one. I would erase this entire relationship if I could. I would erase all the good memories along with the bad ones. I would do this for a couple of reasons - 1) I don’t like having all those happy memories tarnished by the after-knowledge that he was ultimately abusive and he fundamentally does not believe his partners can make decisions for themselves; and 2) I do not think that he deserves the memories of our good times or of my intimacy and vulnerability. I would take that away from him if I could.

Since I can’t rewrite history, all I can do is be grateful that he ended our relationship before I would have.

www.quora.com/Are-you-in-an-open-relationship-If-so-what-is-the-most-challenging-part-for-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Are you in an open relationship? If so, what is the most challenging part for you?

A. Having to constantly answer questions about how “difficult” my relationships are, or people wondering how I deal with jealousy or scheduling … basically dealing with other people thinking that I’m doing anything at all different in my relationships than they’re doing.

I have relationships, just like everyone else. Some of them are effortless, some of them take work, some of them are totally wrong for me, some of them are bliss, pretty much all of them are some combination of the above, just like everyone else.

The only difference is that I have more than one romantic relationship at a time. Everyone has more than one relationship at a time - you all have parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, in-laws, relatives, exes, co-parents, etc. You all have to manage and juggle multiple important people in your lives. Those relationships are all different from each other, even when they have similarities.

We are having all the same relationships and they feel the same way to all of us. I’m just overlapping my romantic ones, that’s all. There’s nothing more or less challenging about my multiple romantic relationships than about any of my other relationships or about other people’s relationships.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVOHz8YhnWU/

Answering that last question about casual sex without feelings verbalized something that I felt but hadn't quite brought to the forefront of my brain yet.

I have always been confused by people who ask things like how to have casual sex without developing feelings. And I think it's because they're coming at it from literally the opposite direction as I do.

I don't have casual sex and then try to make my feelings match. I have casual sex BECAUSE CASUAL ARE MY FEELINGS.

They're choosing the structure and then trying to shoehorn the feelings in to match the structure.

I'm looking at my feelings and going "what structure works best with these feelings?" and then I have that kind of relationship.

And it occurs to me that this is exactly the same problem as the Unicorn Hunters and like every poly newbie ever. They're all picking a structure first and then interviewing people for a job position that requires a mandatory suite of emotions.

Whether it's casual sex or emotionally intimate partnerships, I have the feelings first, and then pick the structure to match. If a person is simply not prone to high sexual attraction / low emotional attachment, then by having the feelings first and choosing a matching structure, they will, just by the "signal flow" if you will, rarely or never have casual sex.

If a person tends to have high sexual attraction for people without a strong emotional attachment, and they have the feelings first and pick the structure to match, then they will just naturally have lots of casual sex without "catching feelings".

But if a person picks the structure first, and either they pick a structure that runs contrary to their natural tendencies of sexual attraction vs. emotional attachment or they are the sort of person that is capable of a variety of mixtures of those two things, then they try to fit people into the structure, they are likely to wind up having the "wrong" feelings for the type of relationships they are in.

And then, if that person has any sense of entitlement or lack of respect for their partners' agency, they are likely to use that relationship structure to coerce their partners into something they don't want.

This is being girlfriendzoned. This is when someone sabotages condoms to get someone pregnant to keep them around. This is when they dismiss the other person's feelings with "you knew the rules when you signed up". This is cowboying and cuckooing.

We, as a culture, pick our relationship structures first and then try to fit people in them. We do this with friends, with intimate partnerships, and with fuckbuddies.

Don't do that.

Feel your feelings, and then pick the relationship structure to match. If you don't have casual-sex-feelings, then don't get into a casual sex relationship. That's how this works. It doesn't work by getting into a casual sex relationship first and then trying to prevent yourself from developing feelings other than casual-sex-feelings.

I don't worry about "catching feelings" for my casual sex partners because the whole reason they are casual sex partners is because the feelings I have for them are casual-sex-feelings. I'm not going to "catch feelings" because I already HAVE feelings. The feelings I have are casual sex ones. I have high sexual attraction + low emotional connection feelings. That's why it's a casual sex relationship.

This doesn't mean that my feelings absolutely won't change over time, but that's a different discussion. All relationships metamorphose over time. My point is that the reason why people have such a hard time with the concept of casual sex and how to handle "catching feelings" is the same reason why certain types of poly people try to prescript their relationships into equilateral triads or whatever - they pick the structure first and then try to find people to fit.

You will have much more success in all your relationships if you have your feelings first and then pick the relationship to match. And "casual-sex-feelings" are valid feelings. There is no need to prevent "catching feelings" in the event of a casual sex relationship if the feelings you have are the ones that match.

Image at www.instagram.com/p/BVOHz8YhnWU/

www.quora.com/How-do-I-keep-from-falling-in-love-with-my-fwb/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How do you handle a casual sex relationship without developing feelings?

A. You don't. You can't control your feelings. Your feelings will do what they will. When I have casual sex, it's *because I don't have a strong emotional connection*, not the other way around. I don't get into a sexual relationship and then try to keep my emotions casual. I have a low emotional connection to someone with a high sexual connection, so I structure the relationship to be a casual sex one because *those ARE my feelings for them*.

Some people just seem to be wired to have their emotional connections and their sexual attractions linked in some way - either having sex causes an emotional attachment or they can't have sexual attraction without that emotional connection first (see: demisexual).

I am not one of those people. I can have sex with or without emotional attachment and I can have emotional attachment with or without sex. If I start a relationship under one premise and then discover that my feelings about the relationship fall under another premise, I discuss with my partner what our options are. If they are open to renegotiating the relationship to match, then great!

If not, I decide if it's possible for me to just have my feelings while in a relationship that doesn't match. My feelings are my own. They are not the responsibility of the other person to manage, and I do not have to act upon them. I can have whatever feelings I have, I can feel them, experience them, lean into them, and my behaviour is whatever I believe is most appropriate for the situation.

I have had romantic feelings for a number of people who did not return my feelings, so we maintained a platonic friendship for a long time. I did not pressure them to get into a different sort of relationship with me, I did not remind them of my feelings for them (thereby making them uncomfortable), I did not behave in any way other than platonically, I did not pine away for them, I did not plot or scheme to use our friendship as a vehicle to steer, convince, or "trick" them into another kind of relationship, I just felt what I felt, and I appreciated the friendship for being what it was.

Sometimes I have romantic feelings for a casual sex partner that are not compatible with remaining in a casual sex relationship, for some reason. Wanting something different from them makes what I *do* have with them feel hollow or inappropriate. When that happens, I have to end the casual relationship for my own well-being. I do not stay in a casual relationship hoping that, if I just stick around long enough and am good enough in bed, he'll eventually come around and give me the kind of relationship I'm really hoping for.

You can't control your feelings, you can only control your behaviour. You can't stop yourself from "catching" feelings, if that's just what your feelings want to be. You can reduce exposure to certain activities that might encourage emotional bonding, such as not having any in-depth conversations, not going out in public together in ways that feel like "a date", meeting at neutral locations, not meeting their parents or friends, etc.

But if your feelings are going to develop through sexual activity, there's nothing you can do about that. Have a conversation with them to see if they'd be amenable to a more emotionally intimate relationship with you if that happens.

If they are not, you choose - continue to have a sexual relationship without a reciprocal emotional attachment from them and enjoy it for what it is without pressuring, cajoling, convincing, coercing, or hoping for something "more"; or end the sexual relationship if you are not happy having one with them where they don't reciprocate your emotional attachment.

But the best way to minimize the odds of developing an emotional attachment to a casual sex partner is to not get into casual sex relationships when you have an emotional attachment to them in the first place. Get into casual sex relationships *because the feelings you have for them are casual sex feelings*. Those are legitimate feelings to have for a person.

It's not a "lack" of feelings, it's a particular type of feeling. You may still catch teh feelingz, but, for most of us, if we're capable of having that particular kind of feeling in the first place, we are less likely to be the sorts of people who develop emotional connections just because we're having sex with someone. Our sexual-attachment-without-emotional-connection-feelings are real, valid, legitimate feelings in their own right.

People who tend to develop emotional attachment through sexual relationships tend not to really feel that low-emotional-attachment-high-sexual-connection in the first place, so they are always fighting the development of what's more natural for them to feel. I don't have to fight that because I am already feeling the feelings that are appropriate for the relationship style that I'm in.

So, have the feelings first (or at least, recognize the potential of what your feelings might want to become), and then structure the relationship to accommodate. Have casual sex relationships *because you have casual sex feelings*. Trying to structure the relationship first and then force your feelings to fit the structure is often a recipe for disaster.

Q. What's the most romantic first date you've ever had?

A. That's a tough one, actually, because I don't "date" very much. I tend to get into relationships with people I meet through my social circle, and it's really difficult to make a distinction between a "date" and friends doing things together. Even dinner and movies is not reserved only for romantic interludes. Platonic friends can do those things too.

So I don't have very many first dates. I meet people through my social circles, we hit it off, and usually we make out and then decide if we want to be "in a relationship" or if it was a one-time thing, or an ongoing casual thing. After we decide to be in a relationship, we might do date-like things, but going on dates with a boyfriend who was a friend that you already know pretty well is very different from a classic "first date".

There is a tendency for guys who do the "ask a near stranger out on a first date" thing to be guys who aren't part of my sex-positive communities, so on the rare event I go on a more classic "first date", those events tend to be rather bland and uninspiring, usually following some kind of trope because they don't know any other way to start a relationship with someone, especially someone they don't know very well.

But a few "first dates" have stuck out in my memory as being noteworthy. My first night with my most recent ex is one that comes to mind. But when I think about this question, one of my most memorable "first dates" has to be with my high school sweetheart, because we didn't just have a romantic first date, we also had a good meet-cute.

I got myself invited to a Halloween party at this guy's house who, as I found out later, didn't even want me to be there because some douchebag I met at camp that summer spread some rumors about me. But my friends were going, so he let them bring me along.

He was big-time into vampires (still is). And I mean, not like he read Twilight (that hadn't even come out yet) and thought it sounded pretty cool. I mean he researched vampire lore from different cultures and throughout history. As did I, which is how I knew he wasn't full of shit or just one of the many goth wannabees who thought they looked badass with plastic fangs and black eyeliner. I didn't know this about him yet though.

At this same party, I met another guy who was blind. He said he liked listening to movies but it was better if someone described the scene for him. Lost Boys was on the TV, so I described it to him, which was really easy for me to do as it was one of my all-time favorite movies and I also had that whole vampire-lore background thing to fill things in and go off on tangents. That's about where my soon-to-be high school sweetheart took notice.

Then some things happened for another story. But eventually, he finally got around to asking me out on a real first date. He took me to Santa Cruz, after the Boardwalk closed. Those of you who are not from NorCal in the '80s, or not borderline obsessed with vampire flicks might not know that the Santa Cruz Boardwalk is where Lost Boys was filmed. I honestly don't remember what we did, if we did anything, earlier in the evening. It was a quarter century ago, after all. But I remember this ending.

We wandered around the closed Boardwalk like the dopey '90s teens that we were, finally finding ourselves strolling along a moonlight beach, the sound of waves crashing on the rocks as the soundtrack to our date. As we turned a corner around some rocky outcrop near the shoreline, with the cold moonlight hard overhead, we came face to face with an entire colony of sea lions hauling-out for the night. Letting out a roar of warning, the one closest to us, the one we startled, charged.

We took off running across the sand, back up the way we had come. This was not my first time being chased by a wild animal because I had encroached on its territory, and it would not be my last. But it was my most fun. Unwilling to end the evening, we moved from the scene of the teenage undead and the much scarier and meaner wild life, to his karate dojo where, as one of the assistant teachers, he had the keys. We spent the rest of the evening making out on the mats right there in the middle of the dojo, because my fetish for unusual places was well and firmly established by that point already.

So, I'd have to say one of my all-time favorite meet-cutes was bonding over a passion for Lost Boys and Bram Stoker's Dracula at a Halloween party, and one of, if not the most romantic first date I've ever had was traipsing around the filming location of Lost Boys, getting chased by a territorial sea lion, and making out in a karate dojo on the eve of Christmas Eve.

Now that I think about it, as much as I hate the plot of most rom-coms, if you were to do a cheesy '90s semi-gothy teen version of a rom-com, our story would probably make a good plot for one, complete with "started out disliking each other" followed by miscommunication and ensuing hijinks. There were even romantic rivals trying to split us up and nearly a "love triangle" plot with "which guy will get the girl?" tension.

Maybe I'll write out the whole story someday.

www.vox.com/2016/3/18/11255942/morning-people-evening-chronotypes-sleeping

I've been suffering from this since childhood. I say "suffering", although it's not a hardship at all when I'm just allowed to follow my own clock - the suffering is because the rest of the society won't let me. It typically starts up in the teen years, and most teens outgrow it as they age, but for some of us, it lasts pretty much for the rest of our lives.

I'm on the far end of the bell curve, with my internal clock being set to bedtime around 4 AM and waking around noon or 1 PM.

It has been an ongoing struggle just to get people to understand that it's not something I can fix or change, and I can only barely compensate for it and that comes with some extreme consequences. No amount of "just get on a schedule" fixes this problem. I've tried both therapies listed in this article, and like the subjects of the article, all it takes is one day off my therapy schedule and the whole thing resets.

So now I don't bother - I sleep and wake when I feel like it unless I have a gig the next day and then I just deal with the jet lag. It's one of the reasons why I do the work that I do instead of a regular 40-hour a week job, but it also means that I will never make a lot of money because I can't keep it up every day, so I only take a couple of gigs a month and fill in with lower-paid side work that has later hours.

"It turns out our internal clocks are influenced by genes and are incredibly difficult to change. If you're just not a morning person, it's likely you'll never be, at least until the effects of aging kick in.

And what's more, if we try to live out of sync with these clocks, our health likely suffers. The mismatch between internal time and real-world time has been linked to heart disease, obesity, and depression. This all amounts to a case — not an absolute case, but a compelling one nonetheless — that we should listen to our bodies and not the alarm clocks. "

www.quora.com/Would-you-be-offended-if-someone-wanted-to-have-sex-with-you-but-not-date-have-a-relationship-with-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you be offended if someone wanted to have sex with you but not date/have a relationship with you?

A. Seeing as how I frequently proposition people for the same, I wouldn’t be offended at the *desire* at all. I might be offended at the *way* it was asked or offered. I find it completely inoffensive to acknowledge that two people may be incompatible for a romantic relationship and yet still have some sexual attraction to each other. If that’s the spirit in which the proposition is made, I wouldn’t be offended at all.

But if he looked *down* on me, if he didn’t think I was *worthy* of a romantic relationship, if he felt ashamed of being connected to me, if he was concerned about what other people might think of our relationship, if he saw me as a challenge to be won, if he was interested in me merely as a living masturbatory aid and an interchangeable body and it wasn’t personal to me at all, if he was dismissive of me, if he felt entitled to sex with me, if he felt I owed him sex for any reason, if he felt he was doing me a favor by offering sex, if he did not respect my consent and continued to pursue me after a rejection … if he felt any number of things that wasn’t just a sincere and genuine attraction to me as a person in a sexual role - *that* would probably be offensive to me.

All kinds of relationships have value, including sex-only without emotional connection or intertwined commitments. Not everyone needs to *like* every kind of relationship, but they all have value.

www.quora.com/Would-you-have-a-separate-bedroom-from-your-significant-other-and-why/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you have a separate bedroom from your significant other and why?

A. I do not sleep well with others.

I have back problems and I need to sleep in a semi-reclined position (that means partially sitting up). It makes my pillow arrangements inconvenient for people who sleep more traditionally laying all the way flat. So I can’t really cuddle or snuggle with someone while sleeping, and if we’re not going to be touching at least part of the time, what’s the point of sharing a bed?
I am a ridiculously light sleeper. I wake at *everything*. My sister used to sneak into my room at night to steal my clothing and my cassette tapes. My parents refused to allow me to have a lock on my bedroom door because they felt it was too “secretive” and they wanted access to my room at all times (they did not listen to me when I offered for them to have a key and they did not see any violation of privacy here).

So I became super sensitive to motion at night. I could hear the air pressure change outside of my bedroom door when someone approached. I woke every single night to my sister attempting to sneak in, once I developed this sensitivity. Every night *for years*.

So sharing a room with another person who snores, tosses and turns, mumbles, moves, or gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is incredibly disruptive to me. No matter how many hours of sleep I get, when I share a room with other people, I sleep so poorly that I feel jet lagged all the next day.
I have several sleep disorders - Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, Sleep Paralysis, and Night Terrors. With the DSPS, my internal sleep clock is off by about 6 hours. My body does not think it’s bedtime until around 4 in the morning and insists that it’s not time to wake until noon. Sharing a sleeping space with people who are on a different sleep schedule is disruptive to both of us, as one of us is not yet tired and still active while the other is already asleep and then reversed in the morning.

With the Sleep Paralysis and Night Terrors, these things are both triggered by regular disruption of the REM cycle, at least for me. So, things like hitting the snooze button repeatedly for several hours (yes, I’ve done this) will trigger an episode, especially if I do this for several days in a row. Also, people who are restless sleepers and move a lot will interrupt my REM cycle enough to trigger an episode. So are snorers.
I’m also probably a synesthete. Synesthesia is a condition in which experiencing something with one sense is received as another sense. So, like, some people taste color, or they actually visually see sounds. My version is that certain sounds produce an actual physical sensation in my body that is not just the standard “air vibrations entering the ear canal” sorts of feelings, nor is it that internal thumping feeling everyone gets with really loud bass. My favorite feeling is the sound of one particular type of singing voice that produces the sensation of what I refer to as “liquid cat fur” gently rubbing down the back of my throat.

Snoring produces a painful, rage-inducing feeling in my head and chest. I absolutely cannot sleep when there is any kind of snoring at all, even the occasional one-off snores that happens to almost everybody. It will wake me instantly with pain and rage. I’ve had to learn how to sleep with earbuds in playing music at full volume just to drown out the sound of snoring because sleeping through loud music and hard things in my ears was less painful than hearing that sound.
On top of all of these health issues, I’m polyamorous and introverted. The introversion means that I really need space that belongs just to me, where I can feel safe and go to recharge and where nobody else is allowed in without my express permission. In most house layouts, there are very few options for giving people their own space, other than bedrooms. And as I live below the poverty line, affording a home with a shared bedroom and all the normal rooms and also private space for everyone quickly starts to become very expensive. It’s easiest to make the private space also be everyone’s bedroom.

The polyamory means that I am likely to have multiple partners. If I live with more than one partner, then all my health issues are compounded because there are more than 2 people all attempting to sleep in the same room. Trust me, I’ve done this, and it did not end well for me. I was in a group once with 6 people and they all insisted on sharing a bed together. After the novelty wore off, it became a living hell for me with 3 different snore patterns, 2 “morning people” to my “night owl” pattern, no privacy for sex, and crawling in and out at the foot of the bed without disrupting anyone else to get to my space. Even giving everyone our own bed-sheets did not solve the problem of different preferences in ambient sleeping temperature either.

If any of my partners do not live with me, then when I want to have them spend the night, I either have to kick an existing partner out of his own bed (and then have sex in a bed that someone else sleeps in, which doesn’t bother everyone but does bother some), or we have to have a house big enough for a spare room that’s dedicated to guests and that goes empty the rest of the time. I don’t usually have the money for houses big enough to have rooms that are only being used occasionally.

If I live with one partner, and our house is big enough for a shared room and a guest room, we might as well just each have our own bedroom. That way nobody gets kicked out of their “own” bed when a guest comes over. Then there are no hurt feelings over used sheets, interruptions of routine, feeling “left out”, etc.

My personal preference is to live in my own, self-contained space like an apartment. My ideal fantasy is to have that self-contained space be on shared property with other partners, such as an entire apartment building for everyone in the network where we all get our own self-contained space and also a “common area” where we can come together for large family meals, recreation, etc.

This way I get my own room, I get All The Closet Space for my costumes, I get a work space for my hobbies where my clutter and mess doesn’t impact anyone else, and a kitchen where *nobody touches my knives except me*, and yet I can walk barefoot down the hall, or in some state of undress, to the next door over to visit with a partner or metamour, and there is enough separation between us that sounds of sex or loud music or enthusiastic video game play are not intrusive to anyone.

This whole sharing a bedroom thing is a relatively recent trend in human history. We have tried a whole slew of different sleeping arrangements, each with their pros and cons. There is no reason to believe that the house layout of one master bedroom for a romantic couple and several smaller bedrooms for children with common rooms like a kitchen and living room, is the “proper” configuration. That was a lie told to us by post WWII propaganda in the United States trying to force everyone into a nuclear family setting for a capitalistic, patriarchal society.

Family structures have varied all over the map throughout time and across cultures. This one particular configuration should not be the “default” that everyone falls into automatically, and those who don’t are considered deviations. If anything, this nuclear family model is the historical deviation, and it’s turning out to have less and less applicability as American and Western European cultures evolve into more ethical structures allowing more freedom for individual variation and preferences in people’s pursuit of happiness.

I think more heteromononormative relationships would benefit from separating sleeping quarters and developing personal spaces within shared homes the way some of us who do relationships differently have done with our own families. This doesn’t mean that people can’t be *allowed* to share sleeping space when they want to. Just that having their own space and learning to accept sleeping apart as a “normal” option for relationships (rather than a sign of a problem) helps in developing autonomy, individuality, and solves a lot of poor sleeping habits that we Westerners are kinda famous for.

Once we start sleeping better, the rest of our days tend to get more productive and we become generally happier, which will spill into the happiness and success of our romantic and familial relationships. We currently spend a lot of money on various products designed to mitigate or compensate for the problems that come along with shared sleeping space. Those are problems that could be solved entirely by simply not sleeping together (when our circumstances and finances allow for it).

www.quora.com/What-dance-steps-can-you-name-off-the-top-of-your-head-How-many-of-them-can-you-actually-do/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What dance steps can you name off the top of your head? How many of them can you actually do?

A. This reminds me of that scene in My Cousin Vinny where Marisa Tomei is on the stand and the prosecuting attorney is challenging her to tell him the correct ignition timing for a particular car and she keeps saying that she can’t answer the question and the attorney reacts as though he caught her in a lie, that she doesn’t actually know enough about cars to be an expert witness. So the judge finally interrupts and says “WHY is it a trick question?” and she goes on to explain that the car he’s demanding to know about doesn’t exist so she can’t give the correct ignition timing for it.

What do you mean by “dance steps”? And in what style of dance? This question isn’t really asking for a thing that exists without some kind of clarification.

At last count, I could name 34 specific partner dance styles,

I have at least tried 23 partner dance styles and 3 choreographed dance styles, not counting line dances (I haven’t the foggiest how many of those I have tried) and I can do 15 of them with some proficiency. Each of those partner dances has a “basic” step, but each of those “basic” steps are totally different from each other. So, do I know 1 step or 23 steps if we’re just counting the basic step?

In all of the partner dances, they have so many steps that I don’t think all of them have been categorized. You may be able to find a list of specific patterns allowed in competition for each of those partner dances, maybe, but a lot of patterns are not allowed in competition, are “street” variations, or are made up on the spot by individual dancers. And most of those don’t have names to them. Or have different names from different people.

Now, even if we just take the 15 partner dances I can do with some proficiency, I couldn’t possibly be able to list off all the individual patterns I can do in each of those 15 styles. I have no idea how many patterns (or steps) I know. I’m a follow, which means that my dance partner comes up with the step that we’re about to do and non-verbally communicates to me what I’m supposed to do. So, basically, I know as many patterns in each partner dance style as all of my dance partners ever in my history of dancing and in my future know how to communicate to me how to do.

That’s a lot of steps.

Then we move to the 3 choreographed dance styles that I know - Bollywood, Jazz, and Tap. Each of those styles also has their own repertoire of steps, some of which are catalogued and some of which are made up on the spot or are regional variations.

Again, I couldn’t even begin to list how many of those steps I know. I have probably forgotten more steps than I could remember just sitting here thinking of them (and I probably never learned their names), but if someone does one of the steps and I try to copy it, I’ll probably remember it.

Next we get to the types of “steps” that get randomly thrown into social freestyle dancing where a dancer could dance the entire song just doing that one step (twist, mashed potato, the jerk, etc.) or they could be mixed and matched in a collaboration of freestyle dance moves at a nightclub or dance event. I currently specialize in 1950s-1960s dances and solo charleston, and I spent many years as a goth dancer in goth and industrial nightclubs. Once again, there are so many steps for each style of dance, many of which were never categorized officially or named and some of which are just made up on the spot, and most of which were borrowed from and built on other dance styles, that I couldn’t even start counting them all.

(Goth dance “steps” are particularly fun and are often given satirical names like “Kick The Smurf” and “Change The Lightbulb” and “Start The Lawnmower” and “Pick Up The Dollar Bill On The Ground” and “Pluck The Apple From The Tree And Admire It” and “Stuck In My Coffin”.)

And then there are the line dances! Most country and urban line dances have a tendency to reuse the same handful of steps just in different combinations - things like the grapevine, the jazz square, the charleston, stomps, kicks, heel-toes, ball changes, etc. Pretty much all of these steps exist in one or more of the other styles of dance, such as jazz, ballet, tap, and even some partner dances like cha cha, country two-step, and more. So there is probably a heavy overlap between what steps I know in line dancing and what steps I know in other dances.

But since there is no over-reaching Catalogue Of All Dance Steps somewhere, and many steps are made up on the spot, there’s no way for me to know all of the steps that I know. For a lot of steps, I don’t know that I know it until I do it, and then I can think “oh, right, this is THAT step!” Most of the steps or patterns that I have learned, I was not taught the name of that step, just how to do it.

So the closest I can come to answering this question is by saying that I know 24 partner dance *styles*, 15 of which I know with some degree of proficiency, 3 choreographed styles, 1 of which I know with some degree of proficiency, and so many line dances that I never even bothered to keep track.

If I had to guess, I probably know at least a dozen specific patterns or variations (dance “steps”) for each of the dances I know with some degree of proficiency and at least 3 patterns or “steps” for each of the dances I have at least tried. There is some overlap. Add that to the freestyle dance “steps” and the line dance steps, if I just estimate or round my numbers and say, maybe that I know about 10 specific steps for every style of dance I know (partner and choreographed) with about 1/3 overlap plus the freestyle solo dance steps, I would hazard a guess that I probably know more than 2 or 3 hundred individual patterns or “steps”.

Now, if I was a choreographer or a Gold level competition dancer, I would probably know an order of magnitude more.

As always, individual variations occur when talking about TRENDS. This is a discussion of TRENDS, so of course individuals are going to have some variations.

I was raised middle class by people whose parents were poor but moved into middle class, so my parents fit very firmly in the middle class category here on all boxes. My mother especially. There's a particular sort of mindset in immigrant families who are trying to assimilate - they tend to aspire to middle class and they also tend to be the rule-keepers of the classes, whether they ever reach the class they're aspiring to or not.

So I see a lot of my upbringing in the middle class category and therefore a lot of my values come from that category as well. But I also see that I have developed a handful of traits from the poverty category since becoming an adult and going into poverty myself.

It's ironic to me that I make more money per hour than my parents ever did, and I have to work fewer hours in a month to make the same salary that my parents (jointly) did, but because of the economy and everything (especially rent) costing a larger portion of income, I am poorer than my parents who had a mortgage on 2 homes, 3 cars, and 2 children.

I actually make very good money by 1980s and 1990s standards. And I do have the luxury that I only have to work 5 days a month to pay the bare minimum of my bills. But that's because I live at poverty standards, with cheap rent, cheap cars, and the lack of acquiring *things* (although, by "things", I mean valuable items - I have a LOT of "stuff", which are mostly my tools and hobby items, such as 3 whole boxes filled with fabric and 6 boxes filled with rhinestones, pipe cleaners, fake flowers, earring hooks, etc.)

If I could work the job that I have at a normal 40-hours a week, I would be quite squarely in the upper middle class. But I don't get that many hours. I might work 40 or 50 hours in a single week, but that will be the only week I work that month, and possibly the only week I work for the next two or three months.

In the '80s and '90s, even working only one week a month, I would have easily been able to afford the kind of life my parents provided for me - a large 4 bedroom home in the suburbs of the 3rd most expensive city in the world to live in, private school, music lessons, enough vehicles for the children to have their own when it came time to drive, having children at all, etc.

But today, my very good salary yet few hours gives me a literally mouse-infested, termite-ridden 2 bedroom apartment with no straight lines or right angles anywhere in it in a crime-filled neighborhood, an 18-year old car that I literally keep together with zip ties and tin foil, and the bulk of my "disposable" income is spent on immediate pleasures like nice restaurants and dance events and stylistic clothing because I know I will never have anything for the future, so might as well enjoy my money now.

Not that I never save for the future, of course. But that's my middle class upbringing. I saved enough to buy my RV in cash, for instance, and every car I've ever owned was paid for in cash. And I'm putting money away for the Honeymoon / Moving Road Trip if Canada ever accepts our immigration application (and if not, I'm still going to take a road trip and I might just move out to Seattle whether I have a job out there or not because #GetMeOutOfHere).

But my parents would have forgone all personal pleasures to save for the future, as I frequently did as a teenager living in that middle class home. Now, however, I impulse spend on immediate pleasures because that's what someone does who is suffering from depression that's caused by economic suffering and who genuinely does not believe one will ever have health insurance or a retirement fund and can't even imagine the circumstances in which either are possible.

I am able to save up large amounts of money, but then something serious happens like my engine throwing a rod and needing either a new car or a new engine, or my 2 root canals at once, or my cat becoming terminally ill. So I don't have any *confidence* in savings. I know that something big will happen to drain it all as soon as I build it up. That's the poverty mindset talking.

So I save only for very specific goals, because I know it's futile to just "save", generically, to have some kind of "nest egg" to live on in the future. Which means I have the impulse to dip into it every now and then for present-day spending, as in the poverty category. Whereas for my parents, saving is, itself, its own goal. My mom seeing her father lose all his money, she's also very aware that middle class is not secure. But, even though they also save for specific goals, they mostly just save as a general rule. They *manage* their money, while I *use* my money.

So, in my own personal experience, this chart tracks true. My parents are middle class and their values match every box in the category. Many of my values are in the middle class category because that was my early exposure, but I have developed some poverty class values since becoming poor and living this way for nearly 20 years, and I can see when and where the changeover happened.

May be an image of text that says 'If I'm ever murdered or kidnapped, please don't make up lies about me. I do not light up a room. Everyone doesn't want to be my friend. People don't automatically take notice of me. have a smart mouth and two friends. Tell 20/20 that.'

I won't actually care, because I'll be dead. But a more fitting memorial than flattering stories for me would be honesty, as that's one of my strongest held values.

She had a fierce temper. She pissed off a lot of people. That's because she liked cats more than people. She was wicked smart but had "gifted kids syndrome" and suffered from depression and anorexia, so her life never quite went in the direction of her childhood dreams. She made a lot of mistakes, but learned from most of them.

She felt empathy so strongly that she was frequently overwhelmed by it and lashed out at those she felt were harming the ones she felt empathy for. She had a strong protective streak, but not a maternal one - it was more like an avenging angel of punishment and retribution, only without any cool superpowers.

She was not good, she was not evil; she was a meat body driven by a belief engine and influenced by her environment and experiences, which means that she was flawed but she tried, and that's OK.

Watch on YouTube

As a former musician and a dancer, this really gets under my skin. As someone who is proficient enough in music to have developed an intuitive sense of things, but who was never trained on how to *teach* this stuff, I can't always explain it.

But when I teach people how to dance, I actually use math. Because music is fundamentally a mathematical construct.

And I know that this [4/4 time - 2nd and 4th beat] thing is a product of my culture. It's why I had a hard time with some Bhangra dancing, because a lot of tribal and folk music emphasizes the 1st and 3rd beat (when it's 4/4 time, which is not always true in folk music). I'm aware this is a cultural thing.

But in Western music, this is one of my pet peeves. Which is why I love Harry Connick Jr. so much.

Just another entry for my Me Manual:

Q. What’s your favorite dessert?

A: Depends on context. Creme brulee, strawberry cheesecake, bananas foster, chocolate chip banana bread pudding with whiskey caramel sauce, Dessert Lady carrot cake (specifically *her* carrot cake), our wedding cupcakes (cinnamon spice cupcakes with Irish Cream pudding frosting), strawberry poke cake, pumpkin bars, S'mores dip, vanilla ice cream stirred up with chocolate syrup and eaten with my dad watching late night TV sitcoms...

I think it's safe to say that "dessert" is my favorite dessert.

#WhatKindOfDessertDoYouWant #Yes #SweetTooth #ThereIsAReasonWhyIAmABaker #BrowniesAndCupcakesAndPiesOhMy

Explaining the difference is still very difficult for me. It's very much a "I know the feeling when I feel it" kind of thing. This is just how the difference manifests *to me*.

www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-romantic-relationship-without-sex-and-a-best-friend-How-are-the-feelings-different/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What's the difference between a romantic relationship without sex and a best friend? How are the feelings different?

A. For me, the difference is intention.

In a friendship, everything is taken on an as-is basis. We are friends, until we aren’t. We hang out together, unless we don’t. Although there might be *hope* for continuity and longevity, there is no *expectation* of such. I go for long stretches of time not talking to my friends, and when we get together again, it’s as if no time as passed. We just pick up where we left off.

This works for me in both platonic friendships and FWB type friendships.

But, for me, *romance* includes the intention of continuity and longevity. We have more of a commitment to actively working on the ongoing-ness of the relationship, whatever the structure of that relationship might be. It’s less of a default of being together and more of an active participation in being together, with explicit plans and intentions to continue things or work on things or being together.

It’s a very subtle difference, and not something that outside observers are likely to be able to see. But from within a relationship, it *feels* very different to the participants.

There is not a difference in the *potential* level of emotional intimacy. Each of my friends and partners has their own unique amount of emotional intimacy, because that intimacy is made up of the two of us in that relationship.

So, a "best friend" and an LTR partner might have a comparable amount of emotional intimacy. But it will be different kinds of intimacy because the two *people* are two different people but not because the two relationships are different relationship categories.

Because of the nature of each intimate connection being unique, sure, there are friends with lower amounts of intimacy than romantic partners. But they're not lower in intimacy because they're *friends*, they're lower in intimacy because that's just how that relationship worked out.

I suppose that, because of the nature of my romantic relationships having *intention* of continuity and longevity, that sort of by default, I do have an expectation of emotional intimacy there. I don't have those intentions with friendships, so I don't have an expectation of the amount of emotional intimacy, so my friendships can range all over the map.

Same with sexual relationships - just because we're having sex, I don't expect there to be emotional intimacy by default, so my sexual relationships range from no intimacy to all the intimacy. But I also tend to be more descriptive than prescriptive, so it's not so much "I have decided that we will be romantic partners, therefore I now have expectations of emotional intimacy".

It's more like "I noticed that this relationship really wants to be emotionally intimate and I would like to be intentional about our continuity and longevity, which would make this a romantic relationship for me".

Some of my non-romantic friendships have that same level of emotional intimacy, but I don't feel the pull to make things intentional. That's what makes them not romantic to me.

And then, just to make things even muddier, I do have some platonic, non-romantic relationships with some degree of intention, and those relationships get categorized in my head as "non-romantic family". Those are even harder for me to tease out and explain why they're different, though. I think it has to do with the specific things that I feel intentional about.

https://www.quora.com/What-does-committed-relationship-mean-in-terms-of-polyamory/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What does "committed relationship" mean in terms of polyamory?

A. There is an atheist saying: “I contend that we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you”. It means that everyone lacks belief in gods, so when you ask what it’s like to not believe in *your* gods, it’s much like what it’s like when you don’t believe in other gods.

Commitment in polyamory is much the same thing. Everyone commits to a variety of things in their relationships. Polys just don’t commit to sexual exclusivity. Otherwise, we commit to many of the same things. When you took your wedding vows (or when people do, if you, reader, personally haven’t gotten married), there were all kinds of commitments in those vows, and I’d wager that none of them were “I promise never to let my genitals touch anyone else’s genitals”.

For instance, these are my wedding vows. I’d bet some of them sound pretty similar to a lot of your monogamous wedding vows:

I commit myself to you
As your spouse
To learn and grow with,
To explore and adventure with,
To build and create with,
To support you and respect you
In everything as an equal partner,
In the foreknowledge of joy and pain,
Strength and weariness,
Direction and doubt,
For as long as the love shall last.
We exchange these rings
To symbolize our connection to one another.
They represent a commitment
To honor and respect one another
And to recognize
The agency and essential humanity of each of us.

See? Nothing in there about genitals or sex. All we did, really, was leave out the parts about forsaking all others and the part about forever, but the rest is pretty similar to monogamous vows.

A friend of mine once said that being poly is kind of like being vegetarian, where people find out that she doesn’t eat meat, so they ask “OMG what do you even eat then?!” as if the absence of meat means that, literally, the majority of foodstuffs on the planet don’t exist. There’s so much more to eat besides beef, chicken, lettuce and Wonder bread, and if you thought about it, you’d realize that you eat a lot of the same things that vegetarians do too, they just don’t eat meat.

Because polys have to think a little more deliberately about the kinds of things we commit to, since there isn’t really a social template to follow and we can’t just do things by default, some of us probably have come up with some commitments that monogamous people don’t make. I’m not saying we’re *identical* to monogamy only without sexual exclusivity.

In fact, I’d even bet that *monogamists* aren’t identical to each other and y’all make some commitments amongst yourselves that are unique, or at least not common or that not everyone else makes too.

I’m also childfree by choice and solo poly, which means that in addition to not being sexually exclusive, I also don’t make commitments to things like co-parenting or cohabiting. So, I’m sure that some of my personal commitments are things that other people don’t make in their relationships. But they’re still normal sorts of things to commit to that even mono relationships could benefit from.

And a lot of them are things that a lot of people do commit to, but so much of monogamy is by default and by implicit assumption. So, if pressed, a lot of people could probably admit to some of them being values they also hold, they just never really thought about it or said it out loud like a vow.

I have so many things that I commit to in relationships, that I wrote a whole page on my website that I managed to get more than 20 blog pieces out of when I broke it down by each commitment that I make in my relationships:

www.TheInnBetween.net/polycommitments.html

The full explanation of each point is on that page. The bullet list is:

I am committed to respecting my partners' autonomy, agency, and personal sovereignty - that is, respecting their right to make informed, un-coerced decisions and to be responsible for their own decisions, their right to act according to their own free will, and their right to own their body and control what happens to it.
I am committed to respecting my partners’ right to make their own life choices.
I am committed to doing my best to practice flexibility and compassion with regards to the paths my partners may take in life.
I am committed to respecting the roles that other people play in my partners’ lives.
I am committed to allowing my metamour relationships to find their own structure and direction without forcing them into a predetermined shape.
I am committed to considering my metamours as "family" regardless of the structure or emotional closeness of our individual metamour relationships and to treat them accordingly.
I am committed to working through problems with my partners starting with the assumption that we love and cherish each other and are therefore really on the same side.
I am committed to supporting my partners in being the best version of themselves that they can be.
I am committed to taking care of myself so that I can be the best partner I can be.
I am committed to protecting the safety of myself and my partners through informed consent and risk-benefit analysis of behaviour, prioritizing evidence-based reason above emotional justification.
I am committed to addressing issues early in order to prevent them from becoming too big to handle.
I am committed to prioritizing situations, not partners, because all my partners are a priority.
I am committed to including my partners on the higher ring of priorities in my life (partners / work / pets / family emergencies / etc.) and to not passing them over in favor of other events or people too often.
I am committed to accepting assistance from my partners when needed, and sometimes just when it would be nice.
I am committed to limiting my actions and words which have the intent or goal of harming my partners, although I acknowledge that some decisions I may make for the benefit of myself or my relationships may result in hurt as a consequence, unintentional or not.
I am committed to be as clear about my expectations as possible, both with myself and with my partners.
I am committed to choosing the Path of Greatest Courage by always being honest with myself and my partners while simultaneously allowing compassion to dictate the delivery of my honesty.
I am committed to prioritizing the happiness of the individuals over the longevity of the group if / when those two values are in conflict.
I am committed to discussing harm reduction plans and contingency plans for when bad things happen, because I understand that we can’t always prevent them from happening.
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 becoming a friendly ex should a breakup occur and the situation is such that it would not be harmful to remain in contact, with the understanding that “friendly ex” is a statement on my own actions, not the structure of the post-breakup relationship.
I am committed to choosing partners who share my values so that they also make similar commitments to themselves, to me and our relationship, and by extension, my other partners (their metamours).
I am committed to not expecting anyone to live up to the Perfect Poly standard, including myself.
I am committed to allowing myself and my partners the forgiveness and the freedom to be flawed, to have bad days, and to occasionally fail to live up to expectations or commitments, providing that the bad times do not outnumber the good times in either frequency or emotional weight and the commitment to prioritizing individual happiness over longevity still holds.

Honestly, the frequency with which monogamous people ask polys incredulously about what we could possibly commit to if sexual exclusivity is off the table kinda makes *me* want to question *them* about the kinds of things *they* commit to, since they can’t seem to come up with what else we might commit to on their own.

“But what do you commit to if not sexual exclusivity?”

“Wait a minute, what do *you* commit to? Is sexual exclusivity really the only possible relationship commitment you can come up with? Is that really the only part of your relationship that makes it stand out as something special? That elevates this relationship above all others? Is this really the only difference between your marriage and all your other relationships? That you have sex with just this one person? What happens if one of you gets sick and you can’t have sex with them anymore? Is that the only thing holding your relationship together? If you can’t have sex, does your relationship fall apart because you have no other commitments to each other? What do YOU commit to besides sexual exclusivity?”

https://www.quora.com/Would-you-ever-consider-a-new-relationship-with-someone-who-previously-dumped-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you ever consider a new relationship with someone who previously dumped you?

A. I have considered it. I have given second chances. I have gotten into several relationships with people who dumped me previously. I have regretted every single instance of this. Without exception.

Every time the second chance ends, I get bitter and say “no second chances ever again! If we break up, it’s for a reason!” And then someone comes along and, for some reason, I justify to myself that this one is different because of whatever specific circumstances. It’s never the exact same thing twice, but that’s because everyone I date is a different person. The relationship itself was different. The breakup was different. The reasons for the breakup was different. I wanted different things back then than I do this time. Whatever, it’s always “different”.

And not once have I ever been correct.

Not only have I never once been correct, but I regretted the second chance to the point of actually wishing I could undo the entire thing. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but for the most part, I’ve learned things from those mistakes that make me who I am today. If I were handed a magic telephone booth and told I could go back in time to change whatever I wanted about my own life, most of those things I wouldn’t actually change.

These second chances? Yeah, I’d change them. I’d erase the whole fucking thing. I’d get rid of all the good times that went along with them. I’d delete any lessons I supposedly learned from them. I’d get rid of the whole second chance for each and every one of them.

So here I am, still stinging from my most recent poor “second chance”, still angry about it, telling everyone about how I keep saying that I don’t do second chances and that each time I do is somehow an “exception” to the rule, knowing that I will probably find some other “exception” to justify doing it again in the future. And that I’ll write another blog post or social media post or advice column or whatever, telling people that second chances are bullshit and I don’t like to do them.

I am, apparently, an incurable optimist hiding in the skin of a cynic. I ought to listen to the cynic more often.

Jenna Seacrist
January 31, 2019
Men who find out you’re submissive in a casual conversation and immediately start trying to assert their dollar store brand version of dominance over you are the weakest race.

Of the few guys who have bothered to read my bio on Tinder, this is basically what happens when they get to the part where I mention kink. It doesn't even say "submissive", just "kinky".

"Oh hai, I like to tie people up and deny them orgasm, how does that sound to you?"

Not very original Alex, and not very kinky either. Pretty entry level stuff, really. How do YOU feel about 6 months of forced edging on a rigid schedule followed by forced orgasm by sounding while tied up in a straight jacket, and then later stripped naked and tied to a chair outdoors in a predicament bondage scenario where you have to figure out how to eat dinner surrounded by people who are all clothed and eating normally and not feeling very sorry for you at all?

Or what about humiliation play involving a forced pegging in a public dungeon?

Or some public consensual non-consent play that literally stops everyone else in the room to watch the take-down scene where two men try to rape one small woman AND MANAGE TO FAIL without her assistance?

Or how about figging?

Or wasabi nasal fisting?

Or branding?

Or electro-bullwhips?

Or having your girlfriend walk up to you while you're on the phone, putting her knee in your chest to pin you down, piercing your ear, and threading a spiral earring into the holes?

Because that's what kink looks like in my family.

A cast of characters like Awkward Yeti, of the various body organs, but personalities to fit my own quirks. In this case, we have #AnorexicBrain and #AnorexicStomach and #SleepDisorderHormones

Brain: We will focus on the task at hand.

Me: But it's not the task I want to be doing! I have important shit to do and this is just surfing the...

Brain: Focus...

Brain: Focus...

[hours pass]

Me: [finally remembers something I actually want to get done online, to justify sitting at the computer this whole time]

Stomach: OMG HANGRY RIGHT NOW MUST HAVE FOOD OR WE WILL DIE!!!!!!!

Me: Fuck, dude, chill out! I'm right in the middle of something, I'll get food in like 5 minutes.

Stomach: 5 minutes is way too long! We'll be starving before then!

Brain: I will then cut off all the hunger signals so that you can focus and direct the body immediately into starvation mode! Metabolism! Slow down! Circulation! Drop! Fat production! Speed up!

Me: No, wait, you don't have to do that, I'll get up in a minute, I just meant, y'know, tone it down a bi....

Brain: Focus...

Me: [back to task]

[a few hours later]

Stomach: WTF WILL YOU GET OFF YOUR FUCKING ASS AND FUCKING EAT SOMETHING ALREADY WE ARE ALMOST DEAD RIGHT NOW WE ARE LITERALLY DYING RIGHT THIS MINUTE!

Me: Shit! I forgot to eat again. OK, here, I put some food in the microwave, it'll be ready in 3 minutes, calm down!

Brain: Oh, see there? Food is started! Problem solved! Nothing to see here, move along, everyone go back to what you're doing, all danger signals can be turned off now.

Stomach: Hold on, last time we did that, she forgot...

Brain: Focus...

Me: [goes back to the computer for another couple hours]

Stomach: DED NAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sleep Disorder Hormones: Nope, sorry, time for sleep. Everything shut down immediately! This is not a drill!

Me: But... [sleep]

www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-ridiculous-thing-you-and-your-spouse-fight-about/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most ridiculous thing you and your spouse fight about?

A. Franklin and I once got into an argument at a kink convention. We were waiting in line for registration and someone walked past us with some kind of bright, unnatural hair color. I don’t remember what color it was, but it caught our attention. Franklin called the color by one name, I called it by another name. And I don’t mean he called it “carnation pink” while I called it “rose pink”, I mean we called it by actual different color names. We were both adamant that it was the name we called it. We were both shocked that the other apparently saw a totally different color.

For some reason, this debate felt personal and I had to insist we drop the subject. It got all wrapped up in my feelings of being dismissed by a partner, of having my judgement questioned, of being ‘splained at (because I’m a photographer and a lighting technician - I literally get paid to create color with light), of a whole bunch of other things.

I couldn’t understand why he was disagreeing with me, or why he saw the color so differently. Unlike the stereotype, Franklin is also a photographer and used to work in printwork, like, magazine layouts and stuff. He actually has a really good, nuanced eye for color. But we saw this color so very differently.

Later, we had a totally different conversation that clarified things for me. It’s not that we saw different colors, it’s that we both saw the exact same color and we just arrived at it from different perspectives.

You see, I work with light. Color in lighting is an additive process. You add colors together to get different colors. Franklin works with ink, which is a subtractive process (https://www.xrite.com/blog/additive-subtractive-color-models). You take colors out to get other colors. When you add all the colors of light together, you get white. When you add all the colors of paint and ink together, you get a dark, murky brownish, greyish black.

I see the world in terms of how light waves interact with each other. Franklin sees the world in terms of pigment. I see the world in RBG and he sees it in CMYK

Once we got to the root of the problem, the argument no longer upset me. It was simply a matter of coming to the same conclusion from two different perspectives - neither of us was wrong, but in different contexts, we each had different perspectives.

It’s my experience that “serious” arguments over “silly” things are really symptoms of deeper things like worldviews or perspectives. We could have just let this argument go and dismissed it as being “silly” because the name of that person’s hair color was completely irrelevant to anything important in our lives (or we could have asked him the manufacturer’s label for that color and solved the debate). And, honestly, we did both let it go.

But when an opportunity came up to look deeper into the conflict, I took it, and discovered something more important at stake - it wasn’t really about the name of the color, it was about respecting each other’s different experiences and knowledge bases and perspectives. We had the opportunity to learn more about each other as individuals, and through that learning came more understanding, which came greater respect.

So, while certainly plenty of “silly” arguments exist that have no real deeper meaning, I’ve learned that if an argument about “silly” things feels serious, it’s worth looking into why. This was a “silly” argument. But had we just let it go at that, without taking the opportunity that the subsequent discussion afforded us by making a connection to that “silly” argument, we wouldn’t have reached this better understanding of each other, and we quite possibly might have had an actual, real serious argument later where we were unable to find common ground because we hadn’t had this experience of seeing each other’s perspectives.

Not all perspectives are “valid” in that they’re not all equally correct. Sometimes someone really is just wrong about something. But, in this case, approaching a color from an additive perspective vs. approaching it from a subtractive perspective are both valid, in that they’re both legitimate approaches to arrive at a color. We got to see that about each other, and we can take that respect for our different backgrounds and experiences into our future conflicts, which have helped us to find common ground at times when it feels like we are seeing two totally different colors.

And now we play-disagree ironically about which is better - RGB or CMYK.

Btw, just in case anyone else needs this info, I found a menstruating aid that can be worn during sex.

I decided to finally try out a diva cup type thing so I could go without underwear (which means no pads, and even though I can't wear tampons (TSS), I didn't want the string hanging down either). I assumed I would be limited to no PIV, just other activities with a cup in, and that was fine as long as I could show up in a short skirt and no underwear and not get blood everywhere.

But right next to the cups was this package of something called Softdisc (disposable discs) that said on the side it could be worn during sex. I know there are other products that can be worn during sex, but this was the only one on the shelves that said so on the package. Probably my very first time wearing an internal menstruation aid shouldn't have been a product I had never heard of before while doing something ... questionable with it on.

But I tried it on the night before to get the hang of it and to see if it would trigger my TSS or otherwise be uncomfortable, and told him that if he could feel it and it was bothersome, we could stop and do other things. He was all for trying it.

It's a large plastic ring with a soft, crinkly bag attached, like an internal condom, only the bag is much shallower. You squeeze the ring to make a long strip instead of a circle, and push it in and *down*, not up. Then, once it gets past the pubic bone, you push the ring up to form a seal around the cervical opening. It just kinda hangs out there, hovering above the vaginal canal.

I could feel the ring with my finger (which is good because how could you take it out if you can't find it again?) so I assumed the hard ring would either be uncomfortable for him or get slammed into my cervix. Neither happened. He said he could barely feel it and it wasn't uncomfortable, and I didn't notice it at all.

However, it did slip a little, so I spotted afterwards until I changed it out. And because it wasn't sucked up where it should have been, it slipped a lot during a bowel movement push. That's how you remove it, btw, you push to make the ring more accessible and then hook a finger under the ring and pull while still pushing your bowel muscles.

So I would recommend changing it after penetration, but it worked as advertised. And now I can have penetrative sex while on my period! (I don't like messy sex, so I refused to before)

https://poly.land/2017/06/22/crumple-zone-partners-bear-impact/

This feels like a very surface-level introduction to something that I've been complaining about for some time. I don't have time to go into it more right now, but I think this will become inspiration for a longer post.

"if a person within the web is particularly skilled at doing emotional labor? They’ll often end up as a lightning rod for it."

"Folks who are in emotional crumple zones are the ones others worry the least about upsetting or hurting. Not because they don’t have feelings. And not because they don’t get hurt easily.

Indeed, many folks in the crumple zone are actually quite sensitive — to their own emotions and to the ones of those around them. But the reality is that their own hurt feelings don’t cause inconvenience to others."

In my case, it plays out that I take responsibility for my own emotions and don't expect other people to "fix" me or do something about a problem that's internal to me.

The double edge to this sword is that I end up dating men who *like* the fact that I don't make them responsible for my own emotions. But how is that a bad thing? you might ask. Well, it becomes a bad thing because it attracts both emotionally mature people AND people who don't like to do any emotional labor in relationships and expect their partners to do it all for them.

So my partners get complacent that I'll do the work on myself and compensate for their lack of relationship management skill and they coast along in a relatively drama-free relationship. Until I have an actual problem that requires their participation. Suddenly it's all "drama" and "I can't handle this right now" and "I'm overwhelmed, I need to leave" and "you're too much work".

My last major breakup was with someone who ghosted me slowly. After not having seen him in literally months, I asked him to tell me what kind of time commitment he *could* agree to. He insisted that our previous agreement of spending a long weekend every other week at my house was doable.

After another couple of months of still not seeing him, I mentioned one date night per month, where we leave the house and do something that requires focused attention on each other. One date night per month. Another month or two passed by with not only not seeing each other, but he also just stopped responding to my text messages. I finally got to see him when he felt obligated to a favor he had agreed to a long time prior.

In that confrontation, his response was to accidentally admit that his video game time was taking precedence over my request for one date night per month of concentrated attention. You see, I was fine to spend time with, as long as he didn't have to feel any inconvenience from my feelings. As soon as I started expressing unhappiness at his lack of participation in our relationship, he got "overwhelmed".

When we saw each other regularly, he told me how soothing it was to be in my presence. But when he stopped seeing me regularly and I started expressing sadness and disappointment, he pulled back even more to avoid facing my inconvenient emotions.

My most recent "minor" breakup was with someone who I knew would feel challenged by polyamory. So I was as up front with him as possible, telling him that there would be challenges, but that I would work with him every step of the way. After all, he was the one who insisted that he try, and I quote, "all in with an emotional connection or nothing". I would have accepted a quick rebound fuck and moved on, but he insisted that it had to be a "real relationship" and I was dubious at his ability to handle that.

Just as I started to let my guard down and show him my vulnerabilities as part of this intimate relationship he insisted we have, he tells me that "a relationship shouldn't be this much work" (keep in mind we *hadn't yet actually started dating*, we just had 3 dates where we talked about what we were interested in) so he's getting back with his ex-gf because she already knows him and won't put any demands on him to grow or challenge his preconceptions of love. Of course she won't, that's why he dumped her in the first place - he was bored and envisioning a lifetime of beige. But now, faced with potential "challenges" and "growth", suddenly that life without challenge seemed safer. Yes, he actually said all that.

I am always the partner who has to deal with my emotions on my own. I'm the "poly veteran", so obvs I'm an expert and don't need help. As soon as I exhibit any difficulty or ask for someone else's help in managing the relationship, I become "inconvenient", "challenging", and "difficult".

I'm the one people date because it's so "easy" to be in a relationship with me ... until it's not, and then I'm the one that gets dumped because fuck forbid my partner have to take the reins for a while and give me a space to be the mess in the relationship.

www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-questionable-thing-that-could-be-found-in-your-room/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most questionable thing that could be found in your room?

A. As mentioned elsewhere, that depends on your definition of “questionable”.

It could be my crossbow with the pistol grip.
It could be the targets I hang over my bed with the very tight groupings from both handguns and rifles.
It could be the hitch rings installed on the bed frame.
It could be the biohazard sticker on the metal container in the corner of the room.
It could be the tupperware container with … well, the remnants of *something* in it.
It could be the 10 gallon drum of liquid sitting at the foot of the bed.
It could be the 5-foot tall chest of drawers with sex toys in it, arranged by kink in each drawer.
It could be the 5 different bottles of cleaning chemicals sitting in the middle of the room right now.
It could be the pile of chain and rope on the floor.
It could be the giant stack of papers with the top piece showing the stamp of the city police department.
It could be the several boxes of ammunition I happened to stumble over the other day.

So, y’know, define “questionable”.

As I sit squarely in the middle of the season that triggered my last bout with depression, I came across this Facebook post I wrote towards a lull in the depression. It's interesting reading it again almost 2 years later. Although I think I have pulled out of the depression itself, I have not, in fact, gotten past my self-doubt of my character judgement, and I wonder how much of my inability to trust my own judgement has interfered with my ability to date and meet people in the past couple of years (really, this year shouldn't count, since I'm also not meeting people because I refuse to date in person, which, on top of my prickly online personality, means guys don't generally stick around long enough for me to consider them worth dating):

REALLY long rambling. Basically, I'm just doing some introspection out loud.

My last several breakups have severely undermined my confidence in my ability to judge character and make good partner choices. First was the guy who managed to date 2 feminists and then go full on misogynist "but misandry!" after we all broke up (his choice to breakup, btw, he's not doing some incel "the feminists dumped me, therefore women suck!" thing).

Next was the guy who abused all his other partners and I didn't see it. Then was the guy who ghosted me and I gave him another chance, only to have him ghost me a second time. Before that second ghosting was a casual partner who ghosted me once, I gave him a second chance, and he also ghosted me again.

Then came the dude who was so terrified that I would find someone to replace him that he dumped me for his ex-gf, because that makes sense. #HeLiftedMeUpAndThrewMeDownCryingPleaseDontHurtMeMama

So in the middle of my depression, I'm having a serious self-esteem issue over my ability to make good choices for myself. Which leads me to questioning and probing at some of my patterns, trying to identify and recognize them.  I noticed one pattern several years ago, but couldn't really identify it. I could tell *something* was a common thread, but not quite sure what. I think I may be zeroing in on it.

I have different kinds of attractions to people. I'm sure others do too, but I'm interested in mine right now, to troubleshoot, not trying to identify some Grand Unifying Theory Of Attraction that other people might also feel.  The most obvious is sexual attraction - we have a chemistry where we feel drawn to each other, aroused, can't keep our hands off each other, etc.

And I have an aesthetic attraction to someone where I just find them so pretty that I have to keep looking at them. For most of my life, I mistook this as sexual attraction. This partly contributed to my early confusion about my orientation. I thought I was bi because I found some women so aesthetically attractive that I felt I had to keep looking at them. But, it turns out, at least in me, the aesthetic attraction and the sexual attraction are two separate axis that may or may not cross and when it comes to women and femmes, they do not cross.

I can have an intellectual attraction to someone where we click really well on intellectual interests and pursuits. I get excited just thinking of the conversations we could have together.  I also discovered something that I'm starting to call my Fascination Attraction. I have noticed that there are a few people in my past who I felt drawn to in a unique way. I felt a kind of fascination with them that wasn't really any of the above attractions.

It's kind of similar to the fascination that some people might feel when looking at a particularly interesting insect. Some people find insects gross or creepy or weird or scary or whatever. Some people find insects beautiful. But some people don't find them to be either, they just find them *fascinating*.

And, of course, it's not purely aesthetic for me, but chances are that the person I feel this attraction to isn't necessarily *conventionally* attractive. Not that they're *unattractive* - I mean, they often are considered attractive - just that, well ...

Let's say that the Avengers is a lineup of what counts for "conventionally attractive". If you look at the whole cast, there's actually a pretty decently diverse range of appearances, given that it's still Hollywood. I've seen a handful of different Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic/Good/Evil charts using Avengers characters. There are quite a few archetypes in that cast. But, because it's Hollywood, for all their diversity, they're still *conventionally attractive* within their archetypes.

So, let's say that the people I feel this Fascination Attraction to fit a description more like "interesting". Even given the range of Avengers-attractive, they might be more aptly described as "interesting" *even if people also happen to find them aesthetically attractive*, if that makes sense?

That's really my type, if I could say that I had a "type" at all - interesting. I like people with interesting faces. Sometimes that falls under the category of "conventionally attractive", sometimes it doesn't.

So, I have this Fascination Attraction. I'm not entirely sure what is drawing me to this person, because it's not aesthetics *even if they happen to be conventionally attractive* and it's not intellectual attraction *even if they happen to be intellectually stimulating* and it's not even sexual attraction *even if we happen to have sexual chemistry*.

I don't really know how to describe it, except that it's recognizable to me as this kind of attraction. I can go through my romantic and sexual history and pick out which of my previous partners I felt which of these attractions for that drew me to them initially (over time, as I get to know someone, my attraction tends to be more nuanced and pull from several different directions).

But the point of identifying all these different types of attractions is to recognize patterns associated when I act on the different types of attractions.

For instance, when I act purely on sexual attraction, I tend to find out after the fact that we have radically different political views and I might regret either getting to know them better or having started a sexual relationship. Like my mechanic, for instance - the homeopath conspiracist who thinks cigarettes won't kill him but chemotherapy will and that David Hoagg is part of a troupe of "crisis actors" who fake mass shootings.
Like, sure, he was a good fuck back in the day when we were sleeping together but holy shit! I still haven't decided which is worse - finding out just how much of a barking moonbat he is or knowing that I used to get naked with him now that I know his bizarre ideas.

So, when I feel an instant sexual attraction to someone, I probably ought to rein in the hormones a bit and ask myself, do I really want to fuck someone who will very likely turn out to be my opposite, politically speaking? Or am I willing to have the sexual experience and just go out of my way not to get to know him, so that I don't have to deal with that knowledge if he turns out to fit squarely in my Sexual Attraction : Wild Beliefs bell curve.

This Fascination Attraction, now ... that's an interesting one. See, when I have casual sex with someone with wildly divergent sociopolitical views, I don't feel anything particularly strongly, except perhaps some embarrassment in some of the more extreme cases. But with the Fascinators, that's where the roller coaster rides seem to happen. Extreme highs and lows. More regrets. More "I wish I had known that up front" thoughts. More "maybe I shouldn't have" or "maybe I should have gone more slowly" or "maybe I should have taken the other option".

I'm not yet sure if this is consistent across the board. I have to do more plotting of my history chart to see if the correlation is steady or if there are any exceptions. But with my recent self-doubt, it makes me very nervous when I find my interest in someone hitting that Fascination Attraction button. I feel drawn like a moth who knows exactly what will happen when I touch that flame but I go anyway.

So I hit the brakes and pull back, and then I second-guess my second-guessing, and down goes the spiral. With my depression and my recent painful dual breakups, I find myself less inclined for emotional attachments and more interested in casual relationships or hookups, but that leaves me open to the Fascination Attraction, which I am now second guessing because of the depression making me doubt my ability to judge people well or make good choices.

And 'round it goes.

I'm really kinda anxious for this whole depression thing to fuck off for a while. It's making me lonely and driven to pursue finding partners but also to back away from potential partners because I assume I'm going to fuck it up by choosing poorly. Catch-22.

https://www.quora.com/I-m-an-aromantic-virgin-who-wants-to-have-sex-Should-I-just-do-it-with-someone-since-there-won-t-be-a-special-guy-in-mind/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. I’m an aromantic virgin who wants to have sex. Should I just do it with someone since there won’t be a special guy in mind?

A. I don’t believe that anyone else can tell you what you “should” do with your own body. But I can say that I wanted to have sex for the first time just for the sake of having sex, and not for any sort of romantic ideals connecting sex and love.

So I did. And I don’t regret it at all.

I chose someone who fit my requirements at the time, including the fact that he also did not want a romantic commitment from me, we had sex, I got my “first time” over with, and I went on with my life.

I’ll be totally honest, it was not *everything* I had hoped for. I actually had another person in mind, but he backed out at the last minute, so I went for “next best”. I believe that it would have been more pleasurable had I either had the chance with the first guy or I had waited to find someone equally suitable, rather than “well, you’ll do”.

That said, however, I’m glad I did it the way I did. I learned some things about myself and I have continued to take those lessons with me throughout my life and expand on them. I enjoy sex without a romantic attachment, and I enjoy having the freedom to choose when I want sex with that romantic attachment and when I want sex without it.

So I won’t tell you that you should “just do it with someone”, and I most certainly won’t tell you that you need to “wait for that someone special”. If you meet someone and you feel it’s right for you and they consent to it, then go for it.

Make sure you get a good sex education in terms of STD protection and treatment (and contraceptives for hetero sex), maybe do a little research into power imbalances to make sure you aren’t being taken advantage of and you don’t accidentally pressure someone or take advantage of someone else, and then if it feels right for you, you can make an informed decision to have sex just because you want to, not because you’re “supposed to” (or, alternately, you don’t put it off just because you’re “not supposed to”).

Dudes - show even the barest minimal effort in who she is as a person. Trust me, it will totally make you stand out from the crowd.

Right now, I am open to both LTRs and casual relationships. I can totally have casual sex without an emotional connection to people. I am capable of having a purely physical chemistry with someone without it being related to how I feel about them as a person. And I'm non-monogamous. If I express interest in a guy, it's *almost* a sure thing under these conditions.

So I'm on Tinder, which is all about the quick, physical attraction version of matching. I see a guy that I find attractive. I'd consider hooking up with him. Only problem is that I don't want to get blindsided, yet again, by someone who expresses interest and then suddenly pulls back because of a problem with who I am as a person.

If we don't match, then we don't match, and that's fine. Just don't lead me on thinking that we do and I start to get attached and then pull the rug out from under me because of an integral part of who I am.

So, I "like" a bunch of profiles, and I make the first contact email, because I have no problem being a woman who does that. But I squeezed a whole bunch of controversial labels into my character-limited profile to get all that shit out up front. Then, I send everyone some version of the following message:

Me: Since we matched, you had to have found me interesting in some way. Did you read my bio? What parts interested you? Does any of it suggest we might not be compatible?

So far, without exception, everyone has responded to my message with a variation on this:

Him: think we would get along just fine, and it doesn’t hurt that you are crazy beautiful😉
Me: OK, but that didn't answer my questions

Dudes. My profile is one fucking paragraph long. All you'd have to say is "hey, you're an atheist? Me too!" or "actually, I don't know what solo poly means" or "honestly, I swiped because of your pictures, but now that I see your profile, I don't think I'd get along with a feminist, but thanks for messaging me!"

THIS IS NOT HARD. I'm totally setting you up for a win here, or at least an easy out. Put forth ANY effort. ANY. AT. ALL.

**Edit**

To be fair, I was finally able to drag out of about 2 or 3 people a response to my initial questions. So far about half of the people I had to say "but that didn't answer my questions" eventually answered them, sort of.

Most of them I ended up unmatching with because, as I said to one of them, it shouldn't be this much work to get a guy to pay attention to who I am when that guy *says* he's interested in me.

There are a couple-three guys who I didn't send that particular question to because they actually had info in their own profile that I was able to respond to. So I opened my conversation with something specific to their bio - "hey, it says you like dancing, what kind of dancing do you do?", "you're a camera operator? Me too!", "you just came back from Korea? What was that like?"

Again, Tinder bios are one paragraph long. It's really not that difficult to read and comment on something in the profile (assuming there is anything specific in the profile to comment on, besides "I like food, music, and hanging out"). The bio even pops up over the second picture when you're swiping through their pictures. Just pick one thing in the bio and comment on it.

And when I message you first and *ask you to pick one thing in my bio and comment on it*, then fucking do that.

This is a post I made on Facebook on January 28, 2019, and it was commentary on a link of some sort that is now deleted so I have no idea what the original content was that prompted me to write this post.

But it's about my experience with suicidal depression, so I'm archiving it here:

I spiraled into a suicidal depression about 4 or 5 years ago and managed to claw my way out, but only barely. The depression was right there behind the wall, waiting for an opportunity to come back. It sometimes sent raiding parties over that I would have to battle for a day or two, and scouts in the form of random anxiety attacks, so although I felt that I was out of the depression, I wasn't quite out of the woods (to mix all my metaphors).

I was suicidal as a bullied child, but I pulled myself out of that one so far that I didn't even recognize that time in my life as "me". I knew that it had happened, but it felt disassociated, like a movie I had seen. I couldn't remember what depression felt like. Until I hit it again a few years ago.

Now, I got kicked back into it thanks to a major breakup, a minor "breakup" that was still intense for all its shortness, and a forced move. That's what my depression is related to these days - loss and instability. I'm not naturally prone to depression, it's situational. I've just had some really shitty situations for a really long time now.

So, because of the depression a few years ago not completely going away, and then getting pushed into another one a few months ago, I'm starting to forget who that non-depressed Joreth was, like *that* was the "situational" version of me, the movie version, and I don't really remember what it feels like anymore to not be depressed.

I'm now remembering times in my life where things kinda sucked as extensions of my depression (because memories are malleable). I'm starting to identify as a person with depression, rather than a person who happens to be going through a depressive episode right now or who happened to have gone through depression before.

This is becoming my new normal. And I have to be careful because that nihilism was one of the stages prior to the suicidal ideation starting to slide towards action. The only reason why I didn't actually attempt suicide the last time was literally because my apathy was too strong to motivate me. But I had started preparing by putting my affairs in order. That "this is just my life now" was the first step off that ledge.

#GetMeOutOfHere

https://www.quora.com/What-is-an-activity-your-spouse-introduced-you-to/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is an activity your spouse introduced you to?

A. BDSM and skepticism. Neither are really “activities” so much as they are very large concepts. Before I met my spouse, I had always been naturally kinky but I had no idea there was a community and a body of literature and … just and. There is so much to BDSM! I had no idea. I just had these compulsions to do certain things, and I didn’t know anyone else like me, so I was muddling through it on my own and making a lot of mistakes.

Then I met my partner. He teaches workshops in kink. Through him I learned there were safer ways to go about exploring the things I wanted to explore, and other people who would join me on my adventures willingly and enthusiastically, and so much more about consent, about who I am as a person, about who I wanted to be, and about the intimacy and connection that can be made through kink with another person.

I actually started dating him by explicitly saying that I wanted our relationship to be a teaching one, where he introduced me to this and other things and he worked with me on certain things. That blossomed very quickly to a relationship between equals, rather than a mentor / student one, with a deep, rich, nuanced connection that we have today.

He also introduced me to skepticism. People think that “skeptic” means “one who doubts”, but it doesn’t. It actually comes from a Greek word for “to question”. Skeptics question things. They are often optimists, endlessly curious, and surprisingly hopeful. But they are grounded in reality.

I had an awful lot of silly beliefs that I *thought* I had questioned and investigated and were sound, but they really weren’t. He showed me how to *really* investigate, how to really explore, how to identify good sources from bad ones, and how to use the method of scientific inquiry to arrive at sound conclusions rooted in reality. My world was literally changed and figuratively turned upside down as everything I had believed up until that point was shown to have been false, or at least misleading.

And because of that, my world actually got bigger, more colorful, more fantastical, more amazing, more detailed, and filled with more mystery and wonderment and awe than before.

My life is better because of Franklin Veaux, in measurable, tangible ways. I am a better person because of him. Even if we still sometimes hold differing opinions and sometimes I get to teach him a thing or two. Maybe even because of that too.

Profile

Joreth

The Inn Between

Page Summary

Costume & Wardrobe Storage Solutions For Everyone
Misanthropic Humanism Is Now My Worldview Label
Being Seen
Asking About My Armband Is A Privilege Display
¿Que Es Una Chingona? Some Discovered Identity Terms
Which Guardian Of The Galaxy Are You By Mix Tape Selection?
Adoption Symbol
Why White Men Decided Dancing Is Unmasculine I'll Never Know
Mixed And Mixed Up - Culturally & Ethnically Ambiguous
It All Comes Back To Kink & BDSM
Which Female Mythological Monster Am I?
Everyone Should Have A User Manual - Get Creative About It!
How To Help Someone Who Is Suicidal
In Which I Learn About Synesthesia
Um, I'm Poly.
The Cost Of Emotional Labor In Relationships
Even Casual Relationships Still Hurt, And Even When You're Poly
But, Ladies, A Threesome With 2 Dudes?!
Almost 100% Track Record Of Being Stood Up By Online Dates
Yes You Really Can Do Exercises To Improve Your Non-Verbal Communicaiton Skills
Bachata Makes Me Better At Blues Makes Me Better At Bachata...
Malicious Compliance & Public Speaking
Why Would You Choose Abortion Over Adoption?
Have You Ever Considered Being Dumped As A Blessing?
What's The Most Challenging Part Of Open Relationships For You?
Feel Your Feelings Then Choose The Relationship To Match
How To Not Catch Teh Feelz In Casual Sex
What's The Most Romantic First Date You've Ever Had?
If You Are Not A Morning Person You May Never Be
Is Casual Sex Offensive?
Why Would You Sleep Apart From Your Significant Other?
How Many Dance Steps Can You Do?
Hidden Rules Of Economic Classes
My Honest Obituary
The 5/4 Trick And Why Music Is Math
My Favorite Desserts
What's The Difference Between Non-Sexual Relationships & Platonic Friends?
What Does Commitment Mean In Polyamory?
Do You Give Second Chances?
Dollar Store Brand Dominance On Tinder
#ThingsIWantToToon: Awkward Joreth
The Most Ridiculous Fight We Ever Had
A Menstruation Aid That Can Be Worn During Penetrative Sex
The Crumple Zone: Partners Who Bear The Impact
What Is The Most Questionable Thing In Your Room?
Depression & Self-Doubt
Should I Just Go Ahead And Have Sex?
Adventures In Online Dating - Mr. No Effort
When Suicidal Depression Becomes The New Normal
What Is An Activity Your Spouse Introduced You To?

August 2024

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Ranty Lessons by Joreth

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