ask, and you shall receive
|
Our little Thanksgiving vacation was perfect, in every way.
I neglected to mention before that it doubled as a celebration of one year of being together. One year! And I only love her more. I look at her sometimes in sudden shock, like how did I get here? What did I do to deserve this? What on earth, in my life, put me right here, in this moment, looking at this person next to me and feeling so overwhelmingly in love? It doesn’t cease to amaze me. The fleeting moments of “is this real?” immediately followed by the surge of warmth when I know that yes, it is. I love her. She loves me.
She slipped into my hand, one day. “I’m a hand bottom,” she said. Her hand sneaks into mine from behind, so my arm leads. “Well, I’m a hand top,” I said, “so we’re perfect.” “I also prefer holding hands with my left hand,” she said. And I like to hold hands with my right. Like a puzzle our hands fit together, the pieces are different but they match up.
What is this miracle that puts two people together and makes them love each other?
I love the holidays, starting around Thanksgiving and ending after Christmas. I’m one of those people who re-reads A Christmas Carol every year, who listens to Handel’s Messiah on repeat, who plays all the traditional Christmas carols on my piano and sings along, and who bakes more batches of holidays cookies and cakes than everyone I know together can eat. I realized this year, in light of all the introspection surrounding my parents’ divorce, that much of what I’m doing when I throw myself into the so-called “spirit of Christmas” is trying to re-capture some sort of intangible magic. I’m always seeking, somehow, to find that thing that makes me catch my breath in wonder, that thing that makes everything seem warm and cozy and perfect and exciting. I want to believe in Santa Claus again. I don’t know that I’ll ever actually succeed in re-capturing that, because the normal daily non-magic always interferes — it’s exhausting, it requires constant vigilance not to slip back into mundanity. I haven’t been successful yet. (Maybe when I have my own children some day?)
But, this year, especially in the knowledge that Christmas will be hard with my family, I do have some goals. I want to try my absolute darndest to make it special. Maybe it’s grasping at straws, but if I actually encourage that childlike excitement by allowing myself to indulge in many of the childishly exciting things, then I’m hoping that this holiday season will be special, and wonderful, and delightful.
Here are my plans:
- Thursday morning, mi’lady and I leave for what our friends have been calling our “Lesbithanksgiving”! We’re renting a tiny little studio cabin on the Russian River a few hours north of here. It has a hot tub. And that’s all we care about. We’re staying two nights, leaving on Saturday, and our plans for the 48 hours we’ll be there include nothing but bathing in the hot tub, sleeping, giving each other massages (we even bought massage oil for the occasion), reading, watching Mad Men, talking, and oh yeah FUCKING. We got a new toy that will get its debut! And we’ve been talking about all the sexy things we want to do to each other for days. After that rejuvenating mini-vacation, away from the stressful obligations of family that are so often present at Thanksgiving (at least in my family), I’ll be golden for embarking on the month of December.
- In the first week of December, mi’lady and I are (hopefully, assuming a certain stressful situation which I won’t bother going into here because it’s boring doesn’t interfere) going to go see Ovo, a Cirque du Soleil show, here in San Francisco. Granted, this isn’t Christmas-themed, but any spectacular show like that is bound to feel festive.
- The following week, we’re going to see the Nutcracker ballet performed by the SF Ballet! I haven’t seen this performed live, ever. As a little girl my sister and I had a video tape of the American Ballet Theatre’s version starring Gelsey Kirkland as Clara (she was one of my favorite dancers, back in the day), and we watched it every year (multiple times!), but I’ve never actually seen it live. I’m really excited about this, and these tickets were quite reasonably priced!
- And THEN, that same week on Friday, mi’lady and I are going to host a holiday party! Last year, when we’d just started dating, she had one at her house, and that was when her best friend walked in on us hooking up. Fun times. This year, we’ll co-host! Maybe even at my house, since it’s cleaner and much homier than her place (my roommate and I are much better decoraters, what can I say), and I’m going to bake lots of cookies and make mulled wine and hot toddies and roasted vegetables and any other ideas for vegetarian holiday party fare? And she’s in charge of the playlist :)
- Sometime in December we’re going to amble up to Union Street for their annual Fantasy of Lights. Lots and lots of pretty lights, candy canes, and general merriment.
- We’re going to watch Christmas movies! We probably won’t have time to watch that many — I mean, how many movies can two busy people actually watch together in one month? — but even if we just get one or two! I really don’t like It’s a Wonderful Life, she really doesn’t like Love, Actually, so any other ideas on Christmas classics? Last year we watched Home Alone, haha. And my favorite, The Snowman:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR1Ln-ctn5E]
Other ideas?
- Just in case this needs to be said again, although I’m sure it doesn’t, I’m going to bake lots of COOKIES!
- AND, I want to decorate. Last year, my roommate and I got a tree! We took it home with us on Muni, since we didn’t have cars. We definitely got some funny looks and smiles. This year, I’m with a new roommate, and our place is way too tiny for a tree. But I’m thinking maybe a wreath, or at the very least some candles and some holly and ivy.
- I’m going to make sure that I have an infinite supply of cookies (have I mentioned that already?), Christmas teas, mulled wine and cider, and Christmas music. Just so that whenever I, or anyone else who’s around, need a good dose of Christmas, I can get it.
Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.
Day 1 in Puerto Vallarta: GAY CRUISE!!!!!!!!!!!
 (Camera was aiming straight up at the sun in this one so I couldn’t see the screen at all… hence it being off-center. Sigh.)
When we were looking at lesbian things to do in Puerto Vallarta, Diana’s Tours was one of the only things that was listed for lesbians. It’s a full-day cruise around the Banderas Bay in a private yacht, including open bar, breakfast, snacks, snorkeling, swimming at a gorgeous private beach, lunch (mmm grilled talapia…) on shore, and the leadership of the amazing Diana, a tough butch Montreal transplant who one day 13 years ago came to Puerto Vallarta for vacation and decided to stay. (Would I had the courage to do something that impulsive!) So mi’lady and I thought “sweet! LESBIANS! and Diana can give us tips on lesbian nightlife!” (since none of the guidebooks, even in the gay sections, had anything at all to say about a lesbian nightlife).
We were wrong. We showed up at the dock the first morning (after confirming at breakfast at the (gay) hotel that we were the only women in the entire establishment), promptly spotted Diana, and were greeted with “You must be Alphafemme and Hr’lady! Welcome!” at which point we realized we were, in fact, the only women on the cruise as well.
Which was fine, of course. Gay guys are a ton of fun. We had a blast that day, and it was totally refreshing being around a group of 20 people with the knowledge that not one of them was checking us out. Plus all the guys were like “omg! lesbians! omg awesome! yay diversity! omg!” and so we felt very embraced.
But honestly, I don’t know that we would have felt as welcome, and might have felt somewhat out of place, if the leader of the tour hadn’t been a lesbian. Somehow, the fact that she was a lesbian validated our presence there. If the leader of the tour had been a gay man, though, and then we’d shown up to all the other passengers being gay men, we probably would’ve felt that we’d somehow not gotten the memo. That they only said they were a gay and lesbian tour in order to sound inclusive, but really, they didn’t actually mean it. Really, it’s just a gay guy party.
And as it turned out, there really isn’t anything for lesbians in Puerto Vallarta. Diana’s Tour is really about the lezziest thing you can do. We asked Diana whether it was just a low season in terms of lesbian tourists, and she said no — her cruise occasionally has a few women, but is mostly gay men. The gay hotels are all male-owned and phallocentric (for real — our hotel had pictures of penises EVERYWHERE). The gay bars and dance clubs are all populated entirely by gay men. The gay beach is a male meat market. “There’s one bar that’s lesbian-owned,” Diana told us, “but none of the clientele are lesbians.”
Where are all the ladies? I think there’s this devil’s spiral thing happening. Lesbians in general are not as affluent as gay men (24% of lesbians live in poverty, compared to 15% of gay men, and lesbian couples are much more likely to be poor than gay male couples–see this Williams Institute report). So financially, it’s not as smart to market to lesbians, because they have a much lower spending power than gay men. (Socially, too — and this is less measurable, but I would guess still a factor — I think lesbians and women are just taken less seriously than gay (and straight) men as decision-making consumers. Also, (white) gay men are just taken for granted as the picture of Gay.) And so gay destinations market to gay men, almost de facto. They include the “and lesbian” tag just to be inclusive, but when push comes to shove, marketing to both gay men and lesbians is hard — we’re different after all! — and so gay men get the push. We dykes get the shove. And then as a result of that, we don’t travel to gay destinations. We know they won’t be oriented to us, so we stay home. Or go into the woods. Or just go to straight places, where we won’t be completely irrelevant as the only women. Invisible, maybe. But not irrelevant.
I see two solutions:
1) “Gay and lesbian” has to start really meaning gay AND LESBIAN. If they’re going to cater to lesbians, cater to frickin lesbians! Show some tits and pussy! Blast M.I.A. and Tegan & Sara and Melissa Etheridge! Have women-specific events! Ladies nights! Anything!
and,
2) DYKES NEED TO GET OUT MORE. The end.
Note: I recognize that I am extremely lucky to be in a demographic that can afford leisure travel, like a trip to Mexico. I think, though, that this point easily transfers to a more general one: white gay men are the face of gay. And it sucks.
I’m home!
The trip was amazing. Except for the part where on Friday I got food poisoning and had a fever and was puking and shitting until Sunday. It slowed down for long enough for mi’lady and me to get massages on Saturday afternoon (about the only thing I could be coaxed out of the hotel room for), which turned out to be a GREAT idea because it totally massaged away my fever.
But aside from that, it was truly amazing. My birthday was on Wednesday and my best friend, who lives in Boston, called me in the morning to wish me a happy birthday and tell mi’lady that “alphafemme deserves lots of treats today!” Mi’lady laughed and said, “don’t worry, she’ll get lots of treats.”
Here is a list of her “treats”:
- she kissed me extra sweetly in the morning, and was extra sweet and cuddly as we were preparing to get up (this is a true treat, since she is NOT a morning person)
- she let me sit by the window on the airplane (it’s so silly that I love the window seat so much, especially since I’ve probably been on at least 100 flights in my life, but I do, I just love it! every single time it makes me get all existential and I just stare and stare and stare until we’re above the clouds)
- she arranged with the hotel ahead of time to have a reservation made for us at a lovely beachfront restaurant in Puerto Vallarta (called Amapas Sunset), and then she treated me to dinner and we went totally crazy and got waaaaay too much food and also quite a bit to drink
- …and then when we got back from dinner and went up to the room, I got the key out and was in the middle of saying “oh my god it’s so hot it’ll be so nice to get into our air-conditioned r—-” stopped short completely flabbergasted when I got the door open and noticed that there were rose petals all over the hotel floor, table top, dresser, and bed, and candles literally everywhere, glowing up the whole room, and there was even music on… (I don’t even remember what the music was, but it thankfully wasn’t anything too sentimental and mushy or I might have felt it was over the top) and I was completely floored, a bit overwhelmed, and felt almost like laughing because it’s so cliche! But so perfectly cliche. She knew it too, but she wanted to do something totally romantic and cliche for me. So then we took slutty naked photos of each other and messed up all the rose petals having dirty, noisy sex. Haha.
(Don’t you kind of wish that picture were one of the slutty ones? C’mon, admit it…)
- and THEN a bit later as we were finally getting ready for bed she said “I have one more thing for you” and I was like okay this is too much… but she went to her bag and took out a slim self-burned CD, on which she’d written “Alphafemme’s Birthday Song, 8/26/2009″ and I knew right away… she wrote a song for me! And recorded it! And put it on a CD for me! I couldn’t listen to it right away because she hadn’t put it on her iPod or anything and we hadn’t brought laptops with us (so that we could escape reality in its completeness), so I had to wait until today to listen to it. And this morning after I’d finally caught up on a bit of my work from last week I finally did get to listen to it, and I wish I could reproduce the words here because they’re so beautiful. But because this blog is anonymous that would be potentially bad for copyright reasons, but basically it was about how she loves me. And that sort of thing. And the best part? It wasn’t an annoying sappy song! It’s a bit funky, a bit poppy, a tiniest smidgeon ballad, very synthy, very, very her.
There is no better way that my fears from this post could have been addressed.
There is so much more to tell about our vacation, but I think for now I will just leave you with this gorgeous Mexican sunset:
Whoopee! I’m going to Mexico!
Wednesday is my birthday. Wednesday is also the day that mi’lady and I hop on a (direct) flight from San Francisco to … Puerto Vallarta! Yesterday, in preparation, I got a pedicure, and my toes are now painted a suitably tropical color. Late August is not, I must say, the best time to be going to the tropics. We’ll be there until Sunday (short and sweet) and the current weather forecast predicts thunderstorms every day. Ha. Coming from the bay area, though, thunderstorms are a rare commodity, so even if we do get them every day, it’ll be out of the ordinary and worth flying south for.
Plus, if it rains, it’ll just mean we’ll have to have more sex!
Speaking of sex, we’ve now each read one of The Topping Book (me) and The Bottoming Book (her). We do plan to swap and each read the other as well, but it’s a good start. We’ve talked about it some, and plan on talking about it (and doing other than just talking, ahem) some more while on vacation. We’ve both agreed that there are things we really like about the books and things we really dislike.
We like that they have made us think about how vital communication is to having satisfying, gratifying, and truly consensual sex. If I’m going to top her in a way that works, I have to first know what she wants from me, what turns her on most, what she thinks it means for me to top her, what it means to her to be submissive, what her limits are, et cetera. And conversely, she has to know what I want from topping, what it means to me to be a dominant, what expectations and needs I have from topping, and what turns ME on. I mean, right? It sounds obvious, talking about what you want. But really, it’s a lot to talk about. Certainly we’ve talked about our sex before–we talk about it all the time in fact. We generally talk afterwards about what worked and didn’t work, whether it was good, how it felt… We communicate during sex as well (and I find it to be absolutely a necessary part of good sex). But neither of us has really thought to really sit down, maybe even with pre-thought-out notes (!!), or even a pen and paper to jot things down, and truly discuss and understand each other’s desires, fantasies, and needs. I’m really, really excited about doing that.
One of the things that both of us disliked about the books, on the other hand, was that they seem very geared to people in some defined BDSM “Scene” whose goal it is to “Play” with other individuals who are also in this defined “Scene.” Mi’lady and I are monogamous and are not particularly interested in having “Playdates” with others, certainly not at this point and I’m not sure about ever. If our relationship ever evolves in that direction, then sure, I’ll consider it at that point. But I don’t think that that direction of development has to be a given, and that exploring BDSM with a partner has to involve this sort whole sort of BDSM culture. I don’t want to really go to dungeons, or have sex in front of an audience, or switch partners all the time. To me, sex and romantic love are very connected, and I don’t know that I want to try to unconnect them. (And additionally, I tend to only feel developed romantic love for one person at a time.) But the books, to me, seemed to implicitly enforce this idea that in order to do BDSM the Right Way, you have to be willing to open yourself up to this whole new way of contextualizing sex. And it’s not that I’m not open to it. I’m certainly very open to it on an intellectual level. But it’s a culture that just doesn’t feel like a good fit for me. And I just don’t agree with the notion that if you’re interested in BDSM, or if you identify as Kinky, then you must also somehow belong to this Culture-Capital-C.
Anyway… hmmm. I’d like to develop those thoughts some more later. When I’m not at work, haha. In any case, though, I’m sure you’ll hear more on this, if nothing else in the form of a full vacation report!
…and I’m back! It was brilliantly glorious to be without internet and cellphone service for three days. The first day I was going through an anxious withdrawal, feeling very cut off and absolutely sure that something horrible was going to happen that I wouldn’t know about because I was so cruelly cut off from the world. The second day, I was basking in the serenity of knowing no one could reach me. I didn’t have to be available! For anyone! I could shower without worrying that my phone would ring. I could go to sleep without the wary alertness that I might receive a text message from mi’lady. It was positively LIBERATING. And then going back to the fully wired reality… it was welcome, but not needed. I think I need to take technology vacations every once in a while. And perhaps relax a bit on the idea of needing to be constantly available.
***
Since I’ve been back, I’ve been working through some weirdness. It sprang up seemingly out of the blue. Mi’lady and I were tangled up in her bed, post-sex, marvelling about how we’ve been together almost nine months and it seems both much shorter than that (we haven’t settled into taking each other for granted! joy!) and much longer (how could we possibly have learned each other so well in such a short amount of time?). “You’re quickly moving into the rank of Second Longest Relationship!” she said, “as long as we stay together another month and a half, you’ll beat B.” I laughed, and said “my goal is to be your longest relationship, and then some!” “Well you’re… let’s see… 3/8ths of the way there…” she said. (Funnily enough, she’s 3/8ths of the way towards becoming my longest relationship too. We’ve both been in significant 2-year relationships previously.)
And then she got quiet and pensive. The problem is, I feel like there’s this standard that her ex-girlfriend has set (the Longest Relationship girlfriend, that is). She still feels all kinds of pain about this break-up, which is now over two years ago. She feels bitter that her ex says she learned through their relationship that she could be loved, while mi’lady learned only that she could be broken. She says it was like all that work, all that energy, all that love, all that time, all for nothing. And she still gets hurt when her ex does things like untag herself from pictures on Facebook that they’re both in. Mi’lady says it feels like her ex is trying to erase her from her life. “What was the point?” she says.
Sometimes I’m afraid that forever and ever, despite anyone else who comes after, no matter how much she loves them, she will never quite love the same. She loves me, for sure, but somehow she’s endowed her ex with all this power, this ability to cause her pain like no one else ever had and ever will have. Obviously I don’t want to cause her that much pain. I don’t even want her to give me the capacity to cause her that much pain.
But what I do want is for her to realize that it’s not her ex that hurt her that much, it’s she who let herself be hurt. My belief is that she needs to let go of her, take away the power she’s given her to hurt her. She put all of herself into that relationship, every last little bit. So when she lost it, she lost herself too. The reason I know this is because I understand it all too well. I did the exact same thing with my Longest Relationship, and I lost myself when she broke up with me, too. But then I took myself back. I’m still struggling with keeping myself, and not give myself away entirely to mi’lady, as I tend to do. But I want to find that balance, of how much of myself to give in order to have a strong, sustaining, loving relationship. And I want her to find that balance too.
I don’t want her ex to have this mythic status. The one who broke her heart. Is that crazy? Is that unreasonable? Do I need to just let it go?
I’m off with my family for a few days — the parents and two siblings and aunt and uncle and cousin and I are all going up to the Sonoma coast tomorrow morning. I won’t have internet, so I won’t be back here until Wednesday.
Quick tidbit, though. We’ve all descended on the grandparents in Palo Alto until heading up the coast in the morning. This morning, my grandma, in what she thinks is a concealed whisper, says to my sister:
“Psssst. Do you think Alphafemme has THE BULIMIA???”
To which my sister says, no, gram, she just eats well and exercises.
“But she looks so GAUNT!”
I do not look gaunt, people. I’m 5′6″ and I weigh 130 pounds. That’s a healthy, normal weight. Also, my grandma just saw me three weeks ago. And told me that the skirt I was wearing made me look chubby.
FAMILY, y’all.
|
|
