Just Because
…I find this song ridiculously hot:
Emerald “And I just can’t resist the urge to stand here in the light…I get off on you getting off on me…”
-Halestorm “I Get Off”
Archive for Sex+ Diversion
January 30th, 2010
Emerald “And I just can’t resist the urge to stand here in the light…I get off on you getting off on me…”
-Halestorm “I Get Off”
Emerald “And I just can’t resist the urge to stand here in the light…I get off on you getting off on me…”
-Halestorm “I Get Off”
November 3rd, 2009
-Sparks “Minnie Mouse”
Minnie Mouse Club
I love Halloween — especially when I get to dress up. This year I have also quite enjoyed reading the various Halloween-themed posts I have encountered around blogland. I myself am a little late with my post-Halloween post, as a fair amount of time for me over the last few days has been devoted to a submission deadline and watching the World Series (which I much enjoyed the last two nights…and not nearly so much tonight).
On Halloween night, in fact, my evening was spent watching said series and eating way too much candy corn. I had, alas, no trick-or-treaters, by which I was not surprised since I live in an apartment building (and a security one at that) and have not had trick-or-treaters any of the years I’ve lived here. (The presence of trick-or-treaters is yet another of the many things I look forward to about having a house!)
The night before Halloween, however, I was all dressed up and out trick-or-treating myself — well, not really, but I was out in public and food was involved. While my plans for the evening changed at the last minute, it did not affect my costume. ; ) As pictured here (both front and back!), I dressed up this year as Minnie Mouse.
I noticed as I was composing this post that “Sex+ Diversion” is at this time my most-used blog category. What a diversional blog I apparently have. : ) And isn’t it funny that I created the “Sex+ Diversion” category just for our trip to Walt Disney World earlier this year — and now, of course, I use it to categorize this post about this year’s Halloween costume, which I chose in honor of said trip.
I hope everyone had a lovely Halloween weekend, and best wishes for a beautiful November.
Love,
Emerald
-Sparks “Minnie Mouse”
October 25th, 2009
Halloween Past and Preview
So, Halloween is this weekend. I love Halloween. Even back before I appreciated all the seasons and did not feel a fan of fall, I still liked Halloween. This year, I have a Halloween party to attend on Friday, and my costume is all ready to go. Yay!
A few years ago I had an opportunity to dress up for Halloween for the first time in a number of years. A good friend of mine was having a party. I didn’t know what to go as, and I encountered a number of cute costumes as I perused the familiar lingerie websites where I did much non-Halloween shopping for possibilities. My attention was caught by a bee costume that I found one of the most adorable things I had ever seen.
At the same time, there were a couple references to bees that had occurred in my experience recent to that time. I had read for the first time The Secret Life of Bees a couple months prior and found it one of my favorite novels ever. I had just made the decision to leave the day job world for the sex work world, and I had procured and profoundly appreciated a documentary called Portraits of a Naked Lady Dancer — produced by Queen Bee Productions.
Thus was the first time it occurred to me for a Halloween costume to be not a random choice but rather something that seemed relevant to my experience during the given year/time. That influence was there when I chose to go as a bee that year. (Later, when I met Rick, whose favorite holiday is Halloween, he informed me that he had consistently chosen his Halloween costumes that way — the idea didn’t even seem to be a surprise to him when I shared how fascinating I had found it.)
Incidentally, last year I did not have an opportunity to dress up for Halloween, but following the theme I just described, if I had I knew exactly what my costume would be. The reading of the Japanese-themed Amorous Woman by Donna George Storey, along with making the acquaintance of Donna both online and in person, were significant aspects of 2008 for me. With this introduction to Japanese culture and fascination particularly with geisha, I determined sometime in September that if I had a Halloween party to attend that year, I would go as a geisha. Alas, those plans did not work out, but even though I did not actually get to execute it, the costume choice of geisha for me was a distinct reflection of my response to Amorous Woman and the immense pleasure of being personally acquainted with the author.
So back to the bee costume. I love my bee costume, and as I commented on P. S. Haven’s recent Halloween post, I would love to find more opportunities to dress up as a bee and use it again! I also wrote a story inspired by the costume (and a little bit of autobiography…) that Alison Tyler included in her K is for Kinky anthology.
Here I am decked out as said bee following the Halloween party I attended that year:
I also determined that I wanted to be glittery (not unusual), so on Halloween evening after I had assembled and donned my costume, I took the opportunity to sprinkle silver glitter over my hair and self in general. I did this because angels seem glittery to me. Well actually I did this because I love glitter and would do it all the time if it seemed appropriate to shed glitter everywhere I went, but anyway, I had a little container of silver glitter with holes in the top like a saltshaker and stood in front of the mirror shaking glitter on myself. Funnily enough, silver glitter is actually quite like salt in that even though you do not necessarily see it coming out of the shaker, it is indeed coming out. Failing to realize this, I kept shaking and shaking, not understanding why no glitter seemed to be coming out.
Uh, yeah…it was. When I moved, it was like Pig-Pen of the Peanuts cartoon except instead of a cloud of dirt, I had a cloud of silver glitter puffing around me. Turns out in the exact angle at which I was looking at myself in the mirror, the silver glitter wasn’t visible. A microscopic turn, and there it was. Oh, yes, there it was indeed…. I left a considerable trail of silver glitter in my wake everywhere I went that night.
Here’s the full-length costume (which would have been better taken not against a white background…):
It will likely not surprise readers familiar enough with this blog to have been reading back in April that this year, I am dressing up for Halloween as Minnie Mouse. My costume is ready to go, but I will not be stepping out in it until Friday when I attend the Halloween party on my calendar. (The next night, the actual night of Halloween, I am attending a concert to which I will probably wear my costume as well.) I plan to take pictures again this year, which I look forward to posting here if they turn out. ; )
Happy Halloween to all!
Love,
Emerald
“Dressing up to touch all this, I’m dressing up to dance all week…dressing up to be all this…”
-The Cure “Dressing Up”
August 30th, 2009
Spicy Summer Sundays Grand Finale!
The Spicy Summer Sundays blog tour concludes with an incredible grand finale today at the blog of Danielle de Santiago! Danielle offers a smorgasbord of mouth-watering recipes that include many of the spices we’ve celebrated this summer. He’s cut it up into bite-size pieces, with an introduction here segueing into amazing-looking recipes for chutney, oil, and vinegar.
Thanks, Danielle, for sending us out in such style!
Love,
Emerald
“So before we end and then begin, we’ll drink a toast to how it’s been…I’ve loved these days…”
-Billy Joel “I’ve Loved These Days”
August 23rd, 2009
-Green Day “She’s a Rebel”
Spicy Summer Sundays Week 13!
P. S. Haven shows off his salt today! Haven is covering this fabulous spice/mineral as this week’s host of the Spicy Summer Sundays blog tour. I’m sure he’d love it if you came…came by, I mean, and joined the discussion about pickles, writing, and persistent fantasies!
And check back next week for the Spicy Summer Sundays Grand Finale!
Love,
Emerald
-Green Day “She’s a Rebel”
August 19th, 2009
Yellow Lights and Long Summer Shadows
Earlier this week in my Spicy Summer Sundays blog tour post, I talked abut transition. As well I invited readers to talk about it, which they did so beautifully and thoughtfully that it has inspired me to continue to ponder the topic. (It appears I wasn’t the only one — check out the beautiful flash story Craig J. Sorensen created.) Yesterday as I was driving home, I noticed the “long shadows” that Rick had mentioned earlier as uniquely characteristic of evening in late summer. I wasn’t looking for them, but as I looked out the windshield at a large flowering bush, I suddenly did notice a particular kind of light. I realized the lighting appearance was that of the long shadows he had just been talking about — a sign of late summer.
As I mentioned in my poppy seed post, according to Traditional Five-Element Acupuncture we are in the season of Late Summer* — the season of transition. After writing the post and reading the extraordinary discussion that followed, I have been noticing transition more, and sometimes I have been deliberately pondering it as well.
As I noticed these long summer shadows, I simultaneously seemed to feel a quite vague, mysterious, and fleeting yearning. It occurred to me that transition may seem so fascinating to me because historically there has been an orientation in me distinctly disposed to focusing on extremes — a “one or the other,” “all or nothing,” black and white mentality. I remember when I was a kid, long before I learned to drive, I didn’t understand the purpose of the yellow traffic light. Seriously. It seemed to me you either go or stop — what is the in between of the yellow for? After I learned to drive, of course, the purpose of the yellow light made sense, but it seems funny to me that even now I can remember feeling genuinely confused by its existence.
Transition. The yellow light signals transition (interestingly, the color that corresponds to the Late Summer season in Five-Element Acupuncture is yellow). And in a way, transition flies in the face of that focus on extremes that has historically operated in me. Scarlett Greyson mentioned in a comment after the poppy seed post on Sunday the transition of fresh water to/from ocean water — an example I found exquisite, as well as one I don’t ever remember occurring to me. To the historical “extremes” perspective in me, there is fresh water and there is salt water. There are places of each. Somewhere in a cold mountain spring, the water is as fresh as can be. In the ocean, that freshness is nowhere to be seen in the utter saltiness of seawater.
Yet somewhere, there is a transition between. Somewhere, there is a meeting in which the extremes are not yet defined.
I felt actually startled when this relation between transition and non-extremes occurred to me, as I don’t know if it had ever quite occurred to me that way. Unsolicited, different areas of transition began to occur to me, along with how the historical orientation in me toward extremes may have influenced my perspective or experience.
First came writing. For almost as long as I can remember, I have loved the act of writing. Sometimes I have experienced it as evoking a near-euphoric feeling in me. In Jeremy Edwards’s Spicy Summer Sunday post, he asked what readers’ favorite phase of the writing process was. An answer I gave, very sincerely, is that one of my favorite parts of writing a story is when I finish it. I mentioned a possible reason for that as well, and a number of reasons for such have occurred to me before, but this drive yesterday was the first time viewing it in relation to transition had occurred to me.
I have noticed — numerous times — a part of my psyche that has seemed to operate with “the story has not been written yet” and “the story is done” being basically the two aspects it feels aware of or interested in. The middle literally seems like a blank. The act of writing, when I’m doing it, may feel magnificent, but if I am not writing and examining what to work on or do, I have often felt this orientation in me front and center.
As though it looks at the actual writing of the story as a transition. And it does not feel interested in that as per its zeroing in on the extremes — the story is either done or it is not started yet (or barely started during a time of aforementioned euphoria-producing writing but obviously not finished yet).
I wondered as this occurred to me what this part of the psyche in me does not like about transitions. Possible answers came forth again unsolicited. Transition may be a time of uncertainty, of disorganization, of fragility, and perhaps most of all (maybe in part due to those things) of vulnerability. It was not new to me to recognize that a part of me has historically not felt comfortable with those things. It was new to me to consider them specifically in the context of transition.
At which time sex occurred to me. When I was younger, the perspective in me about sex seemed often not interested in transition. In fact, it seemed distinctly opposed to it and wanted to pass over it as quickly as possible/practical. The orientation in me at that time was to literally go from determining the interest in and practicality of fucking someone to the act of doing so in as little time as possible. The area of transition was where things like emotion and, perhaps relatedly, vulnerability could develop. Of course in these encounters I was interested in mutual respect (in fact insisted upon it), connection, and to some degree affection, but serious emotional experience or certainly intimacy (which I’m not sure this part of me even had a conception of) seemed disorienting, frightening, or utterly foreign to this part of me and, according to it, were to be avoided.
When I first became a patient of Five-Element Acupuncture in January 2006, the layout of the five seasons was explained to me (the familiar four plus Late Summer), and it came to light also that each season presented unique offerings and gifts. At the time, I liked summer and that was about it and had found plenty of reasons to disdain the others. During the course of treatment, my acupuncturist presented the different offerings of each season, and a significantly new appreciation for all of the seasons and their incredible respective offerings developed in me (so much so that I was actually just moved to tears as I typed that).
As I write this I feel like the examination of Late Summer has perhaps been the least focused on for me. I’m not sure why — maybe because we haven’t seemed to work as much on that element in me (each season corresponds with an element in Five-Element Acupuncture, which relate to meridians in the physical body), or maybe because its being the transitional season has made it not seem so much like a “season” to me as the four with which I was previously familiar. In any case, the opportunity really seems prominent to me right now for me to appreciate and explore this season of transition. I feel deeply grateful as such.
Love,
Emerald
*I would guess that now we are actually quite close to or even into Autumn according to the Five-Element calendar, which does not follow or coincide with the official Western calendar (e.g., the Western calendar places the beginning of such seasons as summer and winter around their actual solstices, which according to the calendar of Traditional Chinese Medicine is actually their peak).
“And look for the stars as the sun goes down…just sit back…prepare for the best and the fastest ride…everything’s magic…”
-Angels & Airwaves “Everything’s Magic”
