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I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to password-protect posts (some, not all, and for now I think just future posts, not back posts). I’ve been having so much trouble figuring out how to write in this space now, with my gaze shifting from myself more to the world, and with other things going on that are not necessarily easy to write about in the public gaze. I’ve been getting more and more open here about my real-world identity, have been sharing this blog’s existence more and more with people in my real-world life, and because of that I’ve been continuing to feel more and more like I don’t know how to approach this space anymore. I know I sound like a broken record; I’ve been repeating that same thing for months now, in every post. But I think password-protecting might help, might make this space feel less exposed.
Let me be clear, though: this is mostly just a psychological trick I’d like to play on myself. I have no intention of excluding anyone at all from reading, and I ask only that you send me an email (alphafemmesf at gmail dot com) or comment on this post if you would like the password, and I will be *more* than happy to send it along. In fact I will be excited to have folks ask for the password – it will mean that somehow, y’all are still interested :)
So, in the next day or two (probably today), I will be posting two things:
- a password-protected post with what’s going on in my life lately (teasers: summer plans, ongoings in my relationship, navigating our peculiar brand of non-monogamy, family happenings, grad school, sexxx…)
- real-life photos of me! with my face! and: they are pin-up photos, so they are hot ;)
A best friend. That’s what the purpose of this space is supposed to be. Best friends love unconditionally, but give you a good wake-up slap in the face when you need it. You can call a best friend in the middle of the night – either because you’re laughing hysterically, sobbing uncontrollably, or having a ranting jerkfest.* You tell a best friend anything or everything or whatever the hell you feel like. Maybe you don’t tell them anything for a while but that’s okay because they know you’re still there.
The other thing about a best friend is that it’s reciprocal. A best friend isn’t just there for me. I’m there for her. I want to be here for this blog. I’m not sure how exactly to articulate what that means, but I guess it’s like this: my relationship with this blog needs nurturing. I need to be true and honest with it, even when it’s giving me a hard time. I need to present my whole self, not just my queer/femme/sexual self. I need to give back to it, as much as it’s given to me. I guess giving back to the blog means giving back to you guys, everyone who reads and cares about me. I am so grateful to all of you — I read every single comment, even if I don’t respond to it invidually. I check out every single one of you who follows me on Twitter, and am in awe that I have a new follower. I don’t even remotely take you for granted. I wish there were more I could do to say thank you to all of you! Maybe there is … I’ll think on it ;)
Having my blog know my name helps a lot, in a weird way. I can say, “hi blog!” and it can say back “hi Eva!” and it’s magic! I’m no longer a faceless pseudonym. Well, ok, I’m still faceless. Not sure if/when that’s going to change. But y’all can hope!
Anyway, now I just need a purpose for my life and I’ll be all set. I wonder if I can be a professional best friend?
In other news, I just exfoliated and did a facial mask, and my skin now feels like butter. Win!
*I’m really going to try not to have embarrassing midnight-phone-call-type blog posts here. You know what kind of embarrassing phone calls I’m talking about. The ones that you cringe at the next day, when you call your best friend back and say awkwardly, “erm, ooooooops, sorry ’bout that…” I’d really rather not have cringe-worthy posts glaring at me from my computer screen begging for deletion, wondering who on the worldwideweb has already witnessed that embarrassing display… Yeah, let’s keep this a mature best friendship, mmkay?
It’s afternoon, I just returned from an excursion to the Haight to pick up a few pairs of fishnets and frilly lacy things for burlesque, and now I’m sitting in my favorite chair in my living room, the chair that gets all the afternoon soon. In fact, the sun is streaming in with so much vigor that I can barely see my computer screen–reflective glare, and all that. I like the sun too much to be bothered to move.
It’s the kind of afternoon that calls for music and lemonade. I don’t have lemonade, unfortunately (though I do have two quarts of local strawberries from the farmers’ market this morning), but I have music in abundance, and putting music on reminded me that I’ve been promising Kara that I would do a music post for a while now (she did one a while ago, and I discovered we have overlapping taste!). “Music post” being a post in which I share the music I like. I’ll probably do these sporadically, since there’s absolutely no way I can put everything I like in one post.
First of all, I will warn you that this is going to be a pretty chaotic post, just because my music taste varies so widely and I want to share a little bit of everything so that you get the “big picture” of what I like to listen to. So I’ll give a little sample of my favorites of the genres I listen to.
1) Classical (I started playing classical piano when I was 5, and have always been an avid classical music listener). My favorite composers are Schubert, Brahms, and Shostakovich. One of my favorite pieces is Brahms’ Piano Trio in Bb Major (which I’ve played with my brother and sister!).
2) Popular music. I’ve gone through quite a few phases of what I like, but I’ll just share some of my more recent favorites. I tend to like electro-pop and indie pop.
And I really really really love this Lady Gaga song… sorry…
3) And now a few random things! I adore Jimmy Cliff.
And last but not least…
That’s my favorite from their new album, Sainthood. You didn’t think I was going to do a music post without something gay in it, did you?
Thank the freakin Lord — I have internet. (For the past few days, I’ve been bumming off my neighbor’s unsecured (but very weak) signal.)
I ordered internet before I left for the East Coast back in May from a local service provider, hoping to avoid the likes of Comcast and AT&T. Great idea, but it meant there needed to be two installation visits, rather than just one. Since I was going to be gone, I left it for my girlfriend to deal with. She tried, but with the logistics of trying to let people in and blah blah blah it’s not interesting, nothing actually got done while I was gone. So when I got back on Sunday, we still didn’t have internet, and there were still two installation appointments ahead.
Fast forward to today — final installation appointment happens, and hooray! The green light is on! And I have internet.
…Sort of. Turns out, I managed to scramble something in my computer by resetting the router the wrong way, and it took me all day and finally a frustrated (and expensive — $35, since my warranty had expired) call to NetGear’s tech support to figure it all out.
Long story short: I HAVE INTERNET, YO.
Which means … posting resumes … TOMORROW! I’ve got so much to say! Phew.
A long, long time ago, both Jude and FemmeFairyGodmother anointed me as a Beautiful Blogger. I have been remiss in not acknowledging and passing the award along, as I ought to have done, according to the rules, which are as follows:
1. Thank the person who gave you this award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Pass the award along to 15 bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic!
4. Contact the bloggers you’ve picked and let them know about the award.
Okay, so, first things first. Thank you Jude and FFG so much for thinking of me as a beautiful blogger, and sharing it with your readers! I appreciate the love :)
Now, 7 things about myself. Hmmmmmmmm.
1) I have mild scoliosis. It makes me kind of self-conscious about my back, because I know it’s not symmetrical. Yeah, I know, fuck that shit, celebrate uniqueness, yay! Still self-conscious about it.
2) I’m very much a book person. Love looking at them, reading them, holding them, smelling them, being surrounded by them. Libraries and used book stores are my favorite indoor spaces. I have a very, very hard time getting rid of books, and when I moved to California, about 2/3rds of the stuff I shipped were boxes of books. I could never feel quite at home in a place without shelves and shelves of books.
3) My favorite color is mustard yellow.
4) I used to love dollhouses and collected miniatures. This was maybe from about the age of 8 until the age of 14. I built my own dollhouse when I was 8 and then became fascinated with furnishing it and decorating it. Foreshadowing? My favorite thing to do was re-arrange the furniture. I rarely played story lines with it, but I loved to take everything out, eliminate the clutter, put things back in and re-decorate. Also foreshadowing?
5) The hardest thing about my parents’ separation right now is that when I’m visiting them, as I am now, I no longer have time where I’m just hanging out on my own at their house. I can’t just be here anymore. I have to be spending time with them. So when I’m visiting my mom, she thinks it’s borrowed time and tries to cram all our time with activities and conversations and meals (tomorrow though? mother-daughter mani-pedis — not going to complain about that!). And when I’m visiting my dad, he thinks it’s borrowed time and though he’s not an activities person, we’re definitely actively hanging out whenever I’m there. It’s tiring. Love my parents, but it’s tiring.
6) The first time I ever kissed a girl, I wasn’t identifying yet as a lesbian. So afterwards, I thought to myself, “well, now I can say I’ve kissed a girl!” and I felt very accomplished, akin to the feeling I get when I cross something off a list. Little did I know…
7) I do not support the institution of marriage on an intellectual level. And yet I really, really, really want to get married, and I even want some parts of my getting-married process to be somewhat traditional. I want to have an engagement ring and a wedding ring, I want to have a ceremony where we exchange vows, I want to wear a beautiful (maybe even white) dress and have my best friends and family there, I want to symbolically and publicly commit myself to my spouse. Hypocritical? Yes, certainly. And I do intend to be absolutely intentional about everything that goes into it. But, well, it remains an institution I don’t intellectually support. I’m banking on coming up with some sort of compromise in the next few years before it would ever even come up.
And now! Part 3: pass the award along to 15 bloggers I have recently discovered who are beautiful. Well, let’s be honest: I don’t read more than a few dozen blogs, and there certainly aren’t 15 that I’ve discovered recently and committed to reading on a regular basis. But there are a few, and I’m really thrilled to take this opportunity to tell you all to GO READ THEM. NOW. Some of them are newer bloggers, and some are just bloggers I hadn’t read until the past year. Without further ado:
1) Mackenzie blogs at Queer Grrl in the City and she is one of my absolute favorite blogs now. She’s the kind of writer who not only has a way with arranging words, but also has a way with using them to really reach you. And she’s an absolute sweetheart. I want every one of you to add her to your blogrolls.
2) JB at To the FemmeMobile is another one I have in my Google reader. She’s funny, candid, adorable, and so fucking astute I can’t handle it. Everything she writes, I’m like “omg! yes!” She writes about things butch/femme, things sexy, things gender queery, and things like getting bitten by a dog.
3) Kaitlin writes at Not Just a Femme and she is one of the loveliest, funniest, sweetest people I’ve met online thus far. I was Twitter friends with her first, and when she moved to her current blog home, I started following her blog, too. She doesn’t post super often, but her posts are just as personable as her tweets and her comments on other folks’ blogs (including mine!) and I *almost* feel like I know her in real life, even though I don’t. YET.
4) Kara, who writes at The Adventures of Kara and Jessica, is one of my new favorites too. She leaves some of the sweetest, most supportive comments here, always so supportive and positive and encouraging. She blogs about sex, kink, fashion, and “regular” things (music, life, etc.) over at her and her girlfriend’s blog, and I’ve gotten some great ideas from her, both sexual and fashionable. She’s kind and generous and really smart to boot!
And lastly, I’d like to throwback to both Jude and FFG, since they’re both relatively new reads of mine as well. Jude hasn’t failed to make me laugh once in the time I’ve been reading her blog. She has the amazing ability to put a hilarious spin on daily life. On top of that, she’s got an amazing relationship with her wife which has been proof for me that yes, marriages can work, commitments can last. I wish I could adopt Jude as my lesbian aunt.
And FFG really is like a femme fairy godmother. I love her posts doling out relationship advice and cosmetic preferences. She’s the type of person to envelope you in love and warmth and goodwill. And her Butch Swoon list, featuring real-life butches, is, well, swoon-worthy.
So, that concludes my Beautiful Blogger awarding. This turned into quite a lengthy post! But if there’s anything you’ve gotten from it, it’s this: add these folks to your list of blogs to read.
Well, that post on sexual violence was supposed to be Part I of IV, and I was going to do all four this month, in April, partly because it’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month but mostly because I thought it would be easier for me to write it all at once and altogether and then get right back to my regularly scheduled ruminations about my life and my relationship. I also sort of felt insecure about it, like maybe people wouldn’t want to read something so serious and harsh on my blog, so it’d be better for everyone if I just hurried up and got it all out of the way. Except that something happened that I wasn’t planning on, and what happened was I sort of ran away. I hit publish, and then turned off the internet for a week and a half. I mean, I was reading other people’s blogs and doing other stuff on the internet. But I didn’t look at any comments and didn’t check my email or post on twitter or poke my head above ground at all. But the weirdest part is I didn’t even realize I was doing that until a week later.
I guess it just needed time to sit there and have its own life for a minute before I came back to it. And it’s fine, I’m totally fine, I’m glad I wrote it and glad I shared it, and thank you all so so so much for your comments. You can’t possibly know how much they mean to me. In a funny sort of way, my healing in the past few years has been much aided by all the love and support I get now from people in my life; it’s like I can remember that time of my life but also picture the warm and loving spirits of people now saturating the air around the 15-year-old me who had no idea they were there at the time because she was hurting too much to see them, but knowing they were there all along somehow helps me now in a way that doesn’t feel entirely retroactive. It actually is almost as if I’m beginning to learn how to re-remember, re-live that time a little less lost. Memory is a funny thing.
Anyway, to get back to the original point of this post, I don’t think I’m going to be writing parts II, III, and IV quite yet. It will happen, but not this month, and for the time being I’ve got plenty of other things to write about.
Beginning with:
We have a new home! I tweeted a few weeks ago about how disappointed I was that the perfect little garden home we wanted went to another applicant — and Jen told me that it must’ve happened for a reason — and was she ever right! Back story: I currently live in a sexplex (you know, a house divided into six units, duh, minds out of the gutter people!), two flats per floor, and the flats on each floor are flip-flops of each other. The landlord’s son and daughter-in-law have lived in the flip-flop flat to mine for the past few years, and they mentioned at the beginning of April that they might be moving somewhere bigger soon. My roommate and I got excited for a hot minute about the possibility of me and the lady love taking over their flat, but then we never heard another whisper of them moving and figured it wouldn’t be happening for a while, and promptly forgot about it.
Until last week, when suddenly, one day, they were gone. The very next morning I called our landlord, and said (more or less), “hey, you know, my girlfriend and I would be totally happy to move into that flat for you, if you could keep the rent where it’s currently at. It would be so easy for you, you wouldn’t have to renovate it or show it or anything, and you know me already, and I’m already a part of the building family, and, you know, we’re awesome tenants, so how’s about it?” And WHADDOYAKNOW? He fell for it! Well, almost: he did bump the rent up a bit, but it’s still well below market rate for our neighborhood, and it’s got TWO BEDROOMS. So much space! A guest room! A music room! A library! An office! A ballroom! So many possibilities! It’s a mansion you guys, and for so cheap. No, it doesn’t have a garden, but it has a sunny little back deck of sorts, and I’m going to see about having a little herb garden back there. And moving is going to be CAKE. I just have to drag everything next door. Like, three feet.
We’re so excited. May 15th will be the first day of our lease, so that I can move everything before I travel for two weeks starting May 18th. I think I’m going to die of asphyxiation from holding my breath until then, I’m so excited. Our OWN PLACE! :)
I’ve written about enough for now, so I’ll just leave you with a little souvenir of a fun photo shoot I did yesterday. The lady love, who isn’t even a photographer, snapped about 100 shots of me in my bedroom, and they came out so lovely! The lighting is just the gorgeous sunlight filtered through my translucent insulating blinds.
In lieue of a real post, of which I have several in the line-up in the coming days (including one that’s very overdue in response to an email I got asking me about my career goals/interests… and another that’s BDSM-related), and because I’ve been overworked lately (still at work at 9pm on Thursday) and haven’t had time to finish any of them, I’m going to post the music video to the song I will be performing my burlesque act to in May.
I have to thank SublimeFemme proFUSEly; she first posted this video a few weeks ago and I would never have come across it if she hadn’t. I’m so happy she did, because I love this song. I love the video too. I knew that I would need to find a song that makes my body want to move of its own volition, and this one does it.
Also, I realize that my subject line makes it sound like this post was going to be about sex. Sorry to disappoint. Next time. Because, well, I have been a bad girl…
I certainly didn’t expect this to happen, but, well, I am a lezzy, and this is a personal blog, so semantically, anyway, this sort of makes sense:
I’ve been nominated for a Lezzy Award in the Personal Blog category.
So, what this basically means is that one of you (or several even!) likes my ditherings here well enough to think I deserve an accolade. I am deeply flattered. Thank you!
If any of the rest of y’all are inclined to nominate me too (nominations are being taken until February 22nd, at which point the top 5 blogs in each category with the most nominations will become Finalists), here’s how you do so:
1) Click on that pretty pink square right up there.
2) Click on that blue banner right at the top of that page that says “The 2009 Lezzy Awards – Nominate Your Favorite Blogs! – Click Here”
3) Copy/paste my URL in the “Personal” section (is it weird that my fingers kept accidentally typing “sextion”?) of the little pop-up box.
4) Lather, rinse, and repeat every day! If you feel so inclined.
5) Also don’t forget to nominate your favorite blogs in the other categories. Check out my blogroll for my favorite blogs if you’re lacking inspiration!
And I might just add that regardless of what happens, I’m touched that I was nominated in the first place, and that in itself is a gift. When I started writing here, it was just me and my thoughts. I never, ever imagined that I’d be getting several hundred page hits every day, or that I’d have people reading and commenting and sending me kind and thoughtful emails. People care, and that’s pretty fucking amazing. So thank you all so much.
And if you’ll excuse me, I have some real posts to draft. I’ll be back in the morning!
You ask for it, you get it. All of you who are not grammophiles, kindly ignore.
“Strap on” is a verb, as in, “I’m going to strap on this dildo.” In queer/kink lingo, the object (“this dildo”) is often left out because it’s implicit in context. (In other contexts, not so much: “I’m going to strap on my seatbelt.” Not that anyone actually says that.) But the phrase “strap on” has two components: strap (a verb), and on (a preposition). Together, they make a verbal phrase. A hyphen is not used because the verb will change form according to person and tense (“I strapped on yesterday,” “she loves strapping on” etc.). So as a verbal phrase, it’s “strap on,” two words, no hyphen.
As an adjectival phrase, it needs a hyphen. The rule is that when two or more consecutive words make sense only when understood together as modifying a noun that follows, those words (excluding the noun) need to be hyphenated. Think of, for example, the phrase “small business.” “I own a small business,” but “I belong to a small-business community.” The phrase “small-business” is an adjectival phrase that describes the word “community.” Another example, taking a verbal phrase, might be “follow up.” “I will follow up with you tomorrow,” but “we need to schedule a follow-up call.” The phrase “follow-up” describes what kind of call it will be.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “but strap-on isn’t an adjective!!!!!!!” You’re right, sort of. It isn’t anymore. See above, where I said that the verbal phrase “strap on,” in a queer/kink context, has an implied object. Well, it’s sort of the same thing with the adjective version. “Strap-on” is a modifier to the same implied noun that was the implied object of the verbal phrase. So in the above example, it’s “dildo.” Make sense? (So, in line with these rules, “motherfucking” as an adjective really ought to be “mother-fucking,” and why it isn’t is something I’ll never understand. But I digress.)
Now, through lots of use, “strap-on” has acquired nominal function of its own (as has, for example “follow-up”: “let’s schedule a follow-up for next week”) and doesn’t even need a separate noun to modify. It speaks for itself. But grammatically speaking, it follows the rules of an adjectival phrase.
