0004 Zelera 14: Dividend

The last three weeks have been one extended metaphor for the idea that large returns can come from regular investments. I shall try to deal with the details, but if nothing from here makes sense, take it as read that this is what I'm trying to say.

Three weeks ago, Kin came out here for an extended stay, and having her around has been an absolute delight. Since her arrival, we've talked of games, philosophy, role-playing, spirituality, identity, sociology, psychology, and the future. We've shared media, explored mutually-intriguing ideas, and generally had some of the most fulfilling intellectual experiences I've been able to enjoy in a long time.

Also around that time, the Lapinian Embassy sent an ambassadorial force down to Portland for a weekend, to hook up with the locals. During that time, I discovered that the best prank I had pulled on anyone in eight years was convincing myself that I was "just a bunny," when in fact I had been Hare the whole time. I also had the chance to realize, in very concrete form, that among a small group of my friends, every power dynamic and every interpersonal interaction is negotiable, and that if we don't like how a scene is going, we can change it. My life has, at least visible to some, an OOC window. This was a major epiphany, and a delight.

Two weeks ago, after a year of planning, SNAP 5 ran. I wouldn't say it went without a hitch, but it went better than I think we had any right to expect. The event itself was a success with its audience; of the forty teams—almost two-hundred people—nobody quit, nobody complained of not having fun, and something close to half the teams actually finished! Now, true, the winning group finished almost forty-five minutes ahead of what we assumed our pathologically-fastest case could be, which led to some awkward staffing problems, but most of our crises were, I think, invisible to the audience. The only two glaring errors of which I'm aware were a site failure early in the route, in which we had to direct people from one plaza to a less-nice-but-more-accommodating one across the street; and a site puzzle requiring some external cluing that I set up incorrectly because I had two minutes to put it together between crises and nobody double-checked it since I was the one that designed it in the first place. Still, we went from never having hosted such an event as a group to having done so credibly and competently with minimal error in just under a year, which I think is quite a feat.

We should be in a state to post the puzzles in some kind of formal format first, but anyone wanting a chance to look at what we built should see Jessie's temporary repository. If you'd like to solve a puzzle, take a look at the PDFs without the "guide-" in front, first. I wrote most of the guides explaining the tricks, but I make no claim as to their ability to follow to someone who isn't a puzzler-by-trade. At this point, none of these are spoilers, since the event's over, but this isn't the final form of these documents, so don't be surprised if they change.

Finally, starting some time around late Kimya night and extending well into... some time later, I had the chance to play around with hypnosis... or more to the point with someone in a hypnotic state.

Now, to fully understand why this is so significant, I need to pause here and talk about my own head. Growing up, one of my closest associates—I would have called him a friend, perhaps even a brother, at the time—was interested in hypnosis, and he was a very dominant personality. Meanwhile, I was socially backwards and, while I was strongly opinionated, I was lousy at asserting myself and ended up being the omega of my social circles, doing what I was told. This made for a bad combination, as one might rightly surmise. The two things to come of it were a single trigger of little more use to anyone than a parlor trick, and an intense dislike of feeling like I wasn't in control of my own thoughts.

As a result of this, I've always been leery of the mind-control fetish that runs somewhat rampant in my social circles, and the prevalence of really skeevy badly-written brainwashing porn on the interblags only reinforced a lot of my old bad ideas. Now, while I fully recognize that "really skeevy badly written $FOO porn on the interblags" will accept damn near any variable substitution and still return a true value. That said, in an unfortunate for-me-not-thee moment, I always had some lingering negative connotations attached to this, and while I wasn't ever hostile about it—I hope—I never made any effort to rectify my opinions.

As is typical for how my life works, events transpired to present me with a perfect opportunity to do this... by being given someone else's control codes and some not-so-subtle hints that this would probably be the best way to share an intimate moment.

A mutual friend said in his wind-up speech that hypnosis was a fantasia of role-playing, brainwashing, and meditation, with a result somewhere in the middle of all of them, a receptiveness to suggestions and a desire to play along combined with a somewhat altered state of mind. How much of this is scientific, and how much is mutually-reinforced faith, I couldn't tell you. At this point, I'm really losing interest in figuring it out. The important thing is that, in the car on the way home, I had the chance to slip Kin's control code into the middle of a conversation, and suddenly I had a very eager pony-droid looking for an order to follow.

Now, at some point in all of this, I did issue an explicit order to store an archival copy of everything that happened and to dump memory, so right now I'm not entirely sure how much she remembers of what went on, and in the interest of not being a kiss-and-teller, I'll spare everyone the pointed details, but three relevant events did come out of all of this:

1. I had to confront my own personal history with mindgames and accept that the person with whom I had initial contact with the idea abused it, as he did a lot of other things. I knew, intellectually, that this was the case, but I never really think about him in those terms.
2. I had to confront my oft-repeated claims that I'm more sub than domme. I still won't accept the idea that I'm more domme than sub, but I think it's safe to say that I've left the "subs that can domme" camp and gone over to the quot;switches with preferences." I'm okay with this, really, but it wasn't something I expected. You'd think by now I'd get used to my world changing out from under me.
3. Ponydroids are very high-maintenance, but are worth every bit of effort and then some.

That last one there has really served as a capstone for the whole trip, at least for me. It's been incredibly awesome having Kin out here, and I'm really looking forward to the three of them moving out to Seattle.

I'm not home right now, but if you want to leave a message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.

0004 Yortera 07: Delivery

Wow. A week into the new year, already. Normally, I would've taken great pains to commemorate Thilafa, but events have not favored it. That's a pity, really; I do what I can to mark the holidays and important events of the Lapinian Calendar. After all, if I'm not going to use my own calendar, who will? And yet, that's the drawback, too. Because nobody else is using it, nobody else accounts for it unless I make a big deal of it. I imagine it's a little like trying to get Yom Kippur off from work without using vacation days. "You celebrate what? That's not a federal holiday, is it?"

Ceci n'est pas une blague juive.

Yesterday was the first beta run of the puzzling event that we're hosting, and it went far better than it could have. I'd be lying if I said everything ran without any problems whatsoever, but that's what beta-tests are for. More importantly in the short term is that the fundamental theories of everything I wrote will work. I'm working on some revisions, but my contributions to the event should survive in something close to their present forms. This is a good thing, as the live event runs in a little under a month. Now is not the time to have to rebuild anything from scratch. I've got a few revisions that need to be made, here and there, but they're all manageable, and I've got every confidence that things will go well for the real thing.

Less confident at the moment am I of how well I'll be at interacting with humanity at large for the next few weeks. In the time leading up to the beta, I had a lot of late nights, and near the end of last week, it started impacting my ability to get enough sleep to function at work the next day. Under other circumstances, I probably wouldn't have cared so much. However, I'm down to the last week-and-a-half of the quarter and my big Get-This-Done project doesn't look like it's going to complete in time, for reasons that have some to do with me and a lot to do with other people's Get-This-Done projects that kept them from being to help me with mine. What this ultimately means is that even if I can't get my stuff together on time, I need to at least look like a dedicated and hard-driving employee, trying everything possible to meet the target, so I can say at the end that I really couldn't have done anything more. Showing up late and hopping around in a daze won't help my case.

It's not even really that I care about this particular project itself, so much as the fact that my boss is using it as a benchmark against my ability to do team-lead and project-manager-type work, which is the big path to promotion right now. Making matters worse is the fact that I really can't do any of the technical work myself, so I'm having to juggle other people's availability to accomplish it. It's highly frustrating, and it's made this quarter... well, to be blunt, it's sucked. I don't want to be a project manager, so much as I want to be team lead, and apparently at T-Mobile or at least for this manager one implies the other. So, I learn, even though I'm not sure I'm very good at it.

Outside of the work complaint itself, I'm just feeling oversocialized right now. Those of you reading this who're extroverts, go ahead and skip to the next major heading; you're not going to understand this part, and that's okay. I've had to hook up with the same small group of people multiple times over the last week to work on this event, culminating in roughly three miles of walking and taking notes in the cold yesterday. Then I went out to dinner and we talked about everything that had happened over the least ten or so hours. I really haven't had a chance to get much downtime in a few weeks, and as we get closer to the live event, that's really only going to get worse. I know that at least one weekend I'll have to myself between now and then; Orbus and Mufi are going to Norwescon, which happens to be the weekend before SNAP, but outside that break, I know I'm going to be seeing a lot of people I already kind of feel like I've already seen a lot of, without much chance to recharge in peace.

Nobody plan on talking to me on Zelera 2 or the weekend of the 9th. I won't be here.

In other completely unrelated news, the sibutramine seems to be doing exactly what it seemed like it was going to do when I first started taking it. My weight this morning was 346.1 pounds, down from 364 when Dave weighed me two weeks ago. I'm eating between 1200 and 1300 calories a day, and while I'm hungry from time to time I never really get the yawning-chasm food cravings that used to plague me. I don't feel the urge to eat when I'm not hungry. My weight situation is actually improving for the first time in eight years.

Now I just have to go back for some bloodwork so that Dave can verify that my liver is still functioning. Ha-ha, only serious. The odds are small, but it's worth checking. After that, I should get a refill on my prescription, and that should set me for a while. I'm not sure how often the blood tests are necessary, but for now, I'll take it.

Jessie mentioned to me not too long ago that apparently I've been carrying myself better since I started seeing a positive change in the scale. I believe it, but it's surprising to me. I'm still obese, but I'm finally feeling like I have a plan and that that plan is coming together. I'm starting again to feel like some of the things that I want are actually going to be able to happen, if not today then soon. I'm looking forward to feeling comfortable about myself again, about making clothing decisions that look good instead of simply covering the necessities. Dobbs help me, I'm actually starting to seriously consider a fursuit... and some other things.

This is, in its own way, all tied in to the big talk that happened during my last Portland visit. These are all interconnected parts of a whole. I've all but quit City of Heroes; all that remains at this point is the install on my hard drive and the automatic payment on my account that I haven't deactivated in case the next big release interests me enough to return. I haven't exactly been vegetarian, per se, but I've been close enough as makes no odds, and the few times that I haven't stuck with it have been either necessity or a minor step outside, with no real urge to walk away from the path I've chosen. I'm even starting to rediscover a lot of my sexuality. It's embarrassing to put it that way, but even I have to admit that the weight gain hurt my self-image considerably, and seeing the progress, I'm starting to feel confident in my existence as a sexual being again.

In that sense, I've actually been looking at porn again, both creating and consuming. In specific, yes, I've been after the furry bondage again. Most of it is a wasteland of I-can't-help-myself and you-forced-me and the like, and the context is as much a turnoff as the subject matter itself might be intriguing. Every so often, the search does turn up a gem, but by and large it's uninspiring, which is a shame because I know what I like and finding it is a challenge.

Last night, as I was winding down for bed, I happened across A Private Heaven. In a strange way, this is perhaps the worst thing that could've happened. I wanted something fairly quick, fairly arousing, and easily forgettable. What I got was... well, read it. Go on; I'll wait here.

Finished? No? I'm serious.

So, now that you're done with it, let me tell you about how it made me feel. I talk a lot about wanting the characters in the media that I peruse to invite me into their heads. That's what I got out of this. Ignore the exposition; it was bad, and it was handled clumsily. Ignore the insertions; the names could've been changed and I don't think anyone would've noticed. Ignore even some of the individual aspects of the scenes that you didn't like. Some of them were cheesy and others were highly improbable. All of that aside, this story touched me, because I saw on the page and in my mind the words and the ideas that I had had before then, that someone else had made concrete, albeit fictionally.

I could go here into detail about my headspaces and what I do with them, but in the nine years that I've been keeping this journal, I've already done it before and I don't much feel like going into it again right now. Perhaps later, if the time is right and the mood strikes me. What's important right now is that for all its faults, I felt as though the characters were telling my story as much as theirs, and that moved me. It excited me, sure, but more importantly, it impassioned me. It wasn't validation from another person, but it was pretty close.

If nothing else, it gave me ideas of what to strive for, and on the nature and shape those ideas could take.

Welcome to my private heaven.

It's been far too long since I've updated this, as usual, but this time I think I have a reasonably good excuse: I've had a lot on my mind, and I wanted to make sure I said it in as well-reasoned and carefully-considered a manner as possible. There's been a lot of discussion-provoking thought of late, and I wanted to take the time I needed to mentally masticate it into something reasonable, rather than follow my gut response and post the first thing that came to mind. As I've said before, I'm a writer, not an orator. My first inclination is usually to make a great bloody mess of everything because I'm posting from the hindbrain and the fingertips, not the cerebrum and the mental digestion center. My first drafts of things such as this are usually very visceral, and unpleasant even for the author to review later.

Some time back, an infamous video of the excesses at gay pride marches made the rounds. This got a number of people very distinctly put out and they all wanted to share this link with the world, each saying in some fashion, "go look at this for yourself" adding no additional content. Now, this internet-Crying-Game trick really doesn't impress me, and when three of my friends all post within minutes of each other, each suggesting I look at the same thing and none offering a single word of commentary, I pretty much wrote off the whole thing as very likely some gimmick. Ultimately, however, I was dragged into the fray and I watched, but I had the sound off on my computer at the time, so I sat through several minutes of scenes from pride parades with absolutely no commentary whatsoever. No voice-over, no slurs, no nothing. Just scenes of people trying to be pretty, people trying to be flashy, people making public home movies, that sort of thing. I saw nothing in the footage at which I took offence, and promptly wrote the whole thing off as a "whatever".

Let me repeat one important part of that paragraph, because it will come up later: I saw nothing at which I took offence in the gay pride march video. Public sex doesn't bother me. Drag doesn't bother me. Leatherboys don't bother me. Cops in uniform marching in pride parades annoy me, but only insofar as cops in uniform—or indeed, people in most traditional uniforms—annoy me, and I suspect most of that is a mental shorthand for people assuming that the uniform and by extention the role in society that wearing the uniform connotes makes them somehow more deserving of preferential treatment and exemptions from the social mores governing bad behavior. I don't get the same response for flight attendants or astronauts than I do for military types and police. Nor do I get it for doctors. I do get it for business suits, though. In fact, upon further reflection, I think this particular response is limited to uniforms and jobs that people assume grants them some kind of social privilege.

That, however, is an entire essay unto itself, perhaps one I will inflict upon the public after I have had time to digest it more fully. For now, my concern remains the video and how it relates to my sense of cultural alienation.

After my initial soundless screening, in which I found the whole thing to be relatively boring, I discovered quite by accident that there was in fact a voiceover to the images. So, I went to try to load the video again after fiddling with my sound, and within five minutes I had closed the browser tab in which YouTube had started spewing its noxious contents and gone on to other things. The words being read off-camera for the benefit of the audience were more annoying and, dare I say "offensive", than the contents of the video itself. I didn't bother sitting through the whole thing, because to me it became apparent within the first few minutes where the speaker was trying to lead with his arguments, and by this point I had seen the explosions in everyone's blogs over it and I didn't feel like listening to the whole speech. If anyone thinks I missed anything really important, let me know, but I doubt I'd get anything more out of it than I already have at this point.

Now, the point of bringing up this video is not to rehash old arguments, or to try to open old wounds, or even to try to bring affront to folks, but to show this as the starting point in my latest winding thought process about my beliefs, my views, and where I stand vis-a-vis the society around me. This video was really just one example of what I consider a much larger disconnect. I know I've talked about this before, but at the time I focused very heavily on religion, and while I consider that important, it's not the only point at which I differ from "my fellow Americans". I'll be mentioning it again here, but only as part of a larger picture.

So, before this conversation turns into what some people will no doubt interpret as angst and whining, let me establish what I mean when I say "this is not my tribe":

My politics are different.

When I say different here, I don't mean by a few degrees, either. I mean different. I am, very likely, sufficiently to the left and bottom of the average American as to be considered one of the "dangerous nutjobs". For those of you who haven't seen the Political Compass site, go take a look and take their test. The American public, by and large, falls in the top-right corner. Senator Kerry, contrary to popular opinion, was not a "leftist". He was merely less to the right than Bush. Nor was he a libertarian; he was merely less authoritarian than Bush. This country doesn't have a viable liberal/libertarian party. We have a center-right mildly authoritarian party and we have a far-right strongly authoritarian party, and these are painted as the political extremes. I'm so far outside the political extremes that I really don't even register on the map of the American political landscape. For those of you who are numbers-fetishists, I came in at -5.13 Economic (Left/Right) and -7.74 Social (Top/Bottom). By their calculations, that puts me at slightly more anarchistic than the Dalai Lama and only barely less collectivist.

My religion is different.

I warned you that I'd be mentioning this again, but this time it's with a little more data. The University of Minnesota's sociology department recently found in a study that atheists are America's most distrusted minority. As one of the estimated three percent of the American population that doesn't believe in a supreme being, I am by and large excluded from public debate on many issues, simply because of the assumption that I lack any sense of morality because I lack faith in a higher power. The two positions are by and large unrelated to each other, but they're inexorably wed in the minds of the typical American, and this keeps me from really having any voice on moral issues in public. It's not that I don't have opinions and beliefs, but that because I lack religious grounding they don't count nearly as much as others', no matter how ridiculous or obviously wrongheaded they might be. American culture has improved overall in its tolerance of differing moral and religious views, but when it comes to atheism it hasn't gotten any further than the 1950s when the Communists couldn't be trusted not to drop the bomb because God wasn't staying their hands.

My sexuality is different.

This one is such a big category that I'm really going to have to break it down into manageable chunks.

First and foremost, I'm a furry. Why include this under sexuality, you ask? Because to be quite blunt, the human form does not interest me sexually. Yes, I'm serious. The human body, by and large, does not push any of my buttons. It just... doesn't. This has several odd side effects, one of which is that a lot of marketing just slides off of me. If it's a product designed to make people look sexy, or if it's advertised in a fashion that plays up the sex factor, it's probably just not going to register with me, or if it does it's going to be a in a negative context. I don't "get" fashion, generally speaking. I mean, I undesrtand the purpose, but I don't really get the point, because I'm pretty much immune to the results.

This isn't to say that I don't find some people more attractive than others. I don't want this to come across as "you all look the same to me". That's not the case at all, and if that's the impression I'm giving then I'm doing it wrong. What I really am trying to say is that any sexual attraction I have to people is based on intellect and personality, not on looks. I do find some people physically interesting, and others physically uninteresting or even unappealing, but I can't say I've ever seen anyone that I thought was sex-worthy based solely on how zie looked.

This also isn't to say that I don't have a sex life. I do, and it's fairly dense if not exactly regular, but it's loaded with ideas that would probably leave a lot of people scratching their heads. I have a lot of kinks, and some of those probably don't even look like kinks to the outside world. If either of these strike you as funny, you probably understand what I mean.

All of that probably ties very heavily into my next bit, which is that even post-op, I'm still what I would consider as heavily dysmorphic. I don't like my body very much, I never have and I doubt I ever will. Being overweight doesn't help, but that honestly isn't even the root cause. I hate being tall. When I imagine myself, I'm still a little pudgy, maybe ten or fifteen pounds over ideal, but I'm short. Not impossibly short, not micro, but a much more reasonable five-foot-seven, maybe even up to five-nine if you really make me stretch. That's where I want to be, yet here I am towering in at six-foot-four. I hate it. Make no mistake, I loathe being this tall, for reasons that go far beyond my inability to find clothes that fit that I like, assuming I can even figure out what that would be. I'm not too keen about the hair I still have from my pre-transition days, but that's less disgust and more annoyance. It's something like my weight that I can fix, but that I know will take time and dedication. The height is what really kills me; it's beyond my ability to rectify, and it makes fighting with everything else really feel like a waste of time. Knowing I'll never get to where I really want to be, why extend the effort to fix anything else?

My relationships are different.

This is related to both sexuality and politics, but distinct enough from either that I think it deserves its own category. I'm polyamorous and polysexual, though not currently expressing either. Infidelity, to me, is what you do that your partners don't know about. If my wife's happiness is expanded by sleeping with someone else and I trust that person, then it expands my happiness by letting her do it, and vice versa. I believe that the question of whether same-sex marriage should be legalized is so antiquated that the very fact we have to ask it reveals an undercurrent of barbarism about our society that makes me uncomfortable. I support polygamous marriages, human-robot couplings, furry-human relationships, dogs and cats living together, and a whole host of other groupings that would probably make most mainstream Americans really disturbed. Jessie and I have invited others into our relationships, and while they haven't worked out in the long run that doesn't mean we've given up on the idea of it ever possibly happening.

Any one of these things would probably on its own take a social revolution to correct, perhaps even two or three to slowly bring society closer to the direction in which I think it ought to move, but each of these takes time, and rarely can more than one or two be fought at a time lest people burn out and give up out of apathy. Civil rights, equal rights, human rights, each of these fights had to happen on its own more or less in isolation, even if the underlying principles behind each are the same, because people still work on stereotypes and we still suffer from hindbrain diseases and poor biological programming. Right now I'm looking at so many struggles to make myself part of the mainstream that I can say I honestly don't believe it will happen within my lifetime.

When I make noises about "going to Canada", it's not that Canada is any better than America. It is in some ways, but it's more removed in others, with the added alienation of being an expat and even to some degree of "being an American", which has in recent years become something of a stigma, even if I'm nothing like the other people with whom I share a place of birth. Really, the cry is a desire to find a home whose laws and culture more closely resembles my own, but truth be told there really is no such place on earth right now. I mean, Canada's a step in the right direction, maybe even a couple of steps, but it might not really be any grand improvement in the long run.

Ideally, I'd join up with an anarchocollectivist Free State Project and take over Vermont or Washington State or the like. That, however, depends on there being as many "freaks" as I'd like to dream of there being, and of all of us being in a position to move to the same place to take over the local legislature and enact the kinds of laws that would make us happy. I can't really see that working out in the long run, but it's a great fantasy.

Come sail away with me.

Today's entry will contain both a sex meme and intimate discussions of post-operative biology. You have been
warned.

First, a meme. Actually, it's not really a meme, so much as it's a questionnaire. An actual meme would be a self-propagating idea, and in this instance I suspect the actual meme is "emulate your friends and fill in these blanks!" However, since the term "meme" has become associated with the online survey that one encourages those one knows to complete as well, I shall endeavor to use the vernacular. The original questions were horribly vague and ill-written, so I've taken the liberty of trying to interpret the questions into some semblance of a proper grammatical list. This may have changed the sense of some of the questions, but if so it's entirely accidental.

At any rate, here we go:

What is your sexual orientation?

Mu. I mean, seriously, the question is meaningless. I'm a male-to-female transsexual happily mated with a
male-to-female transsexual that regularly engages in sexplay and pillowtalk with a broad variety of males, females, and "other." Body is irrelevant. Mind is all-consuming. So, I suppose therefore I shall coin a new word: egosexual. I find people's thoughts sexy. Your spicy brainmeants turn me on.

How often do you think about sex?

To answer this question, I would first have to quantify what percentage of my thoughts are actually sexual,
as distinct from those which are engaging that stimulate sexual ideas as a side effect. Given the way my train of thought can go from pancakes to Poincaré to penetration to programming without warning, I dare not pierce the veil drawn carefully around this mechanism. It might lose its magic.

How often do you have sex?

What constitutes sex? Joining the Smart Patrol is only one fraction of the whole of potential intimate contact, which in turn is only one fraction of the whole of potential intimate experience. William Gibson once wrote a story about alien life forms that had sex by touching hips while drinking alcoholic beverages at a bar. "Crystal Cold" from the One Must Fall: Battlegrounds "soundtrack" is pretty damn close to sex. I'm sure things others consider sex would leave me standing confused.

What has been your worst sexual experience?

My ex. Imagine the response a physically virgin, pre-awareness transsexual must have had under the "tender guidance" of an abusive boyfriend with a few years of sexual experience. Imagine earning the nickname "Mr. Floppy". Imagine having a lover that only ever wants to be tied up and penetrated but refuses to reciprocate with anything more than a handjob once a month. Imagine any talk of sexual interest other than penetration ending with "that's weird and I don't like it". Imagine spending six years in that relationship. Imagine looking forward to the abuse because at least it's not being alone

What are your thoughts on cybersex and phone sex?

I think there should be more of both. I think people who treat cybersex and phone sex as somehow fundamentally different from physical intimacy are fooling themselves. The two experiences aren't directly analogous, but they aren't as removed from each other as people would like to claim. If it's not stimulating the parts of the brain that turn you on, you're not doing it right, and that goes for any act. Likewise, if it's pushing your buttons, then you're on the right track. A hand is far more intimate than a cursor, but both have the power to arouse.

What are your thoughts on casual sex?

As opposed to... what? At what point in the relationship between people does sex stop being "casual" and
become something else? Let me approach this from the other side and say that people who "cheat", which is to say people who have sex with other people while maintaining agreements to not sleep with those people with still other people, are a major turn-off for me. I don't belive that affairs are acceptable. That said, if everyone involved knows and nobody's bothered by it, then what does it matter?

What is your favorite euphemism for masturbation?

Close your mouth, relax, pinch one cheek between thumb and forefinger, and then gently but quickly pull the cheek away from the cheekbone and push back towards it.

What sex toys and fetish accessories do you own?

I have several zillion neurons sitting between my ears and several dozen square feet of skin loaded with
touch-sensitive nerves. Anything beyond that is a prop.

What do you consider to be the least sexy body part?

All of them are pretty funny, really.

What is your favorite body type?

Mu. See above for explanation.

Do you like body hair, yes or no?

This is another one of those all-or-nothing issues. A proper pelt or bare skin, or something else entirely, but weird mutant hairs or stubble are not part of my gameplan.

Are you monogamous?

Part of what makes this quiz so damn funny is the fact that the questions are so leading. The assumptions
behind them are incredible. What does "monogamous" mean in this context? Can someone be called monogamous—literally, one mate—if zie's in a committed and faithful threesome? If my mate entices me into subspace and then orders me under the dinner table to service everyone at the party, what then? What if I have standing permission to sleep with a set number of people that my mate has vetted and found acceptable for intimacy? Sexual fidelity, like sex itself, is not a mere pair of polar opposites: faithful or unfaithful, male or female. There is a broad spectrum of commitment ranging from "I sleep with anyone I wish and feel no need to tell any one partner about any other" to "I sleep with one person and that one person only to the exclusion of all others," with a myriad of variants between.

What styles of underwear do you prefer?

Those that emphasize the contents and inflame the mind. Those that are incongruous with the body beneath and encourage embarrassment and secret vice. Those that are sexy and slutty worn beneath the strictest business suit.

Do you prefer pornography or eroticism?

What's the difference?

How large is your pornography collection?

What I find arousing can change at the drop of a garter. Thus, what I consider pornographic can change at any given instant. If I list only those things which I find appealing right now, my collection is very small. If I include anything that's ever aroused me that I've kept for that purpose, my collection is quite large.

What is your favorite hair color?

Assuming for the moment that I find bodies in general appealing, I'll go out on a limb and say that I like either grey hair or well-done subtle-but-unnatural shades. Bright colors tend to turn me off, but I think a tasteful head of soft pastel blue or deep hunter green hair would be absolutely gorgeous.

Do you prefer kissing or cuddling?

Cuddling. To quote from Bloom County, "lip-mashing is an oddity in the animal kingdom".

Which ethnicity or nationality do you find most attractive?

Again with the body obsessions. How about instead I talk about the cultures I find attractive and sexy?
Cheerfully propagandistic, repressive societies give me perverse interest because of the opportunities for furtive groping and hiding sex acts from the commissars. This could be anything from the KGB to the HUAC, but it's the hidden-vice angle that gets me.

Which furry creature do you find most attractive?

Ah-hah! Now we start getting into the realms of the interesting. Of course, being a being of many
moods, it depends on context and person. Somebody has to wear the body well, and what looks good on one personality will not necessarily work for all of them. When I'm in a mood for a dominating, powerful partner, I go for heavy predator types: bears, big cats, wild canids. When I'm feeling dommy, I prefer prey species: rabbits, mice, domesticated dogs. If I'm feeling ambivalent, what I find attractive can swing wildly, and whatever strikes my fancy has a strong chance of pushing me into one mindset or another. Irrespective of mood, vivid fur patterns such as stripes, spots, rosettes, and the like are always a positive.

Which furry creature do you find least attractive?

Male lions do not do it for me. Sorry, they just don't. They don't look sleek or regal; they're just silly. Lionesses, however, are still a go. Aquatics and avians don't interest me, though wings on regular furries are strangely compelling; they have the power to lend supernatural and otherworldly appeal to otherwise unremarkable creatures when done properly. Horses and hoofed mammals in general don't actively hook me, but I wouldn't kick one out of my bed.

What is the most unusual kink you know, not necessarily your own?

Every kink is unusual, in some fashion. After all, kink is personalized, and what you find kinky may turn off someone else. In fact, it probably will. Further, the Sears and Roebuck Theory of Kink suggests that if you select a random object from a Sears and Roebuck catalog, somebody somewhere is likely <sound of cheek smacking> either to that object or to pictures of it. In addition, I have myself acquired kinks over time as people have successfully pitched them to me in a fashion that I could myself find arousing. As a result, I try very hard to think of every kink as equal in some fashion. If I deride it today, it's probably what I'll be fantasizing tomorrow.

What are your kinks?

In no particular order, the most prominent of my ever-changing set of "that which turns me on" are

Lactation

Perhaps it's a nature of not being able to do it, at least yet, but this pushes my buttons hard. I want to be able to nurse others. I find the idea of others nursing from me powerfully arousing. I want bigger breasts that will support more milk.

Pet Play

Putting down the burden of humanity and being an animal turns me on. Being treated as an animal, or a toy, or someone's plaything, really turns me on. Let me be th' buni. Yes, it's probably creepy. I don't care.

Exhibition

I want to be seen. I want to be shown off. I want to be exposed. I want to be used in public. The chance of being caught pushes the same button, hence the discussion above about propagandistic societies.

Bondage

Tether me, hobble me, restrict me. Take away my hands, my voice, my legs. Make me less than whole.

Piercing

Mark my body in a permanent way. Tie me up with my own body. Put cool metal through my hot flesh.

Chastity Play

Let me be aroused, but don't let me climax. Keep me on the edge of release as long as you can.

These are, of course, only a subset of my interests, but they probably make up the lion's share of them.

---

Last night, three years post-op, I achieved for the first time a climax brought about by another person's direct actions.

Until this point, whenever we played together, whatever else was happening, it was my fingers between my legs, me playing with myself while other people did other things to me elsewhere. If it wasn't my fingers, it wasn't going to lead anywhere. However good it felt, it wasn't going to make me orgasm.

Jessie was tender, intimate, careful, and very very insistent. She touched me expertly, and I responded. It took time, and at times I thought I was going to have to stop again, but she didn't want to quit and I didn't want her to do so. I wanted it, after so long, and apparently I was ready for it, because when it happened it was one of the most incredible releases I'd ever had.

When the rush and thrill had faded, I felt as if the disappointment and doubt in what I had done to myself in 2002 were finally gone. I had been afraid for so long that I would never feel another person give me that release, but it happened and everything felt... perfect.

To hell with the hype. There was something magical in that moment, something I may never feel again in any other orgasm, but that I know I've achieved it once, and that was enough.

It only gets better from here. 

I never quite seem to manage unmitigated good news or bad news any more. I think the sign that life has hit the long stretch from maturity to the grave is the realization that everything evens out on a long enough time scale,
and that positives and negatives will, in any life, happen with equal frequency. The secret to happiness isn't avoiding the bad stuff that can happen; it's focusing on the good stuff instead.

Of course, that doesn't help those of us who are by nature pessimistic worriers and perfectionists, but it's a nice idea anyway.

I missed Jessie's birthday on Monday, and I didn't even realize it until zie said something to me last night. Zie'd been out of sorts for a few days, but I couldn't figure out why and zie didn't really tell me until we were curled
up in bed last night, and suddenly zie reminded me of that and I felt like a total schmuck.

Now, in my defense, I don't have a good head for dates. Not only do I rarely remember what day it is, I don't place "today is the nth of xtember" with "the nth of xtember is a special day for this reason" until at least the (n+2)th, sometimes not even until the middle of ztober. It's kind of embarrassing, really; I don't even remember it's my own birthday some years. 

So, on top of everything else, for me to have forgotten such an important day—important because I say it is, and always have—was seriously bad juju. I'm still upset about it this morning, though at this point anything I do to correct the mistake will make me feel worse, not better. Now that the damage is done, bandages on the wound will only call more attention to the wound; they won't help it heal.

On the up-side, I finally had the proof that everything through which I put myself, all the torment and abuse I faced going through my transition, proved a few nights ago to be worthwhile. I had my first post-operative orgasm.

Something of such phenomenal importance, one might think, would get mentioned as soon as it happened. It would, but the truth is that there's absolutely no way for me to describe it. It was... it was right. My body responded as it felt like it should. I felt at that moment like I could've pushed myself into damn near anything and succeeded. I probably could've gone for two or three of them, in fact, if sleep hadn't claimed me almost immediately afterwards.

Like I said, the ups and downs tend to come in even measure after a while. It's focusing on the positives that makes life worthwhile. "It isn't that I don't suffer; it's that I know the unimportance of suffering." My mate will probably get pissy with me for quoting from That Damned Book, but I think this time it's more than reasonable.

Right now, I don't know how I feel. Rather, I know how I feel, but it's a set of disjoint emotions, the cumulative result one of confusion and ambivalence.

Tonight, after twenty-seven months of prepartion, two years of hormones, eighteen months of RLT, fifteen months of waiting for surgery, three weeks of hospital time, two weeks of physical recovery time and seveneen seconds of foreplay, Jessie and I made love for the first time with my new body.

The results were... inconclusive. 

I was horribly nervous when we started, like some twittering virgin on her first date. In many ways, I was. I'd been dilating for weeks, of course, but I'd never had anything up there that wasn't hard plastic or visibly being
guided by someone else. I'd only ever put my own fingers in there a few times, and that was more to prove to myself that I could more than anything else. Jessie had trouble keeping an erection, and several times before we even managed to tie we'd had to pause for more lubricant or other things.

Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of trying to find some position that would work, I lay on my side and Jessie took me from behind, which took a little effort but seemed to work fine, with the one caveat that I couldn't
really feel anything except pressure around the opening and inside. When Jessie began actively thrusting within me... well, frankly, it hurt. I wasn't tense, and I don't think Jessie had the wrong angle or was doing something incorrect, but every push hit the back wall, and the repeated hits started to get sore after a while.

Part of me wanted to call a halt to everything, but I knew I needed to see this through to the end and so rather than say "this hurts" or some other damper on the situation, I simply lay still and tried to let Jessie enjoy things. Except, Jessie wasn't enjoying it either. My mate was so nervous about hurting me, about my not enjoying things, about everything that could go wrong that zie couldn't achieve orgasm, and eventually zie had to pull out of me to take things into zir own paw until zie was so close that anything could have set zim over the edge, and then within half a dozen thrusts within me again zie was done, and all I had was blood and lubricant on my sheets, bodily fluids all over my thighs and a pain in my crotch.

Before I started transition, masturbation was necessary, and it was physically enjoyable but emotionally crippling. During transition, masturbation was an infrequent need, physically stressful but usually fun if my arm didn't grow
fatigued first, emotionally upsetting but still stimulating. Now, there've been fun moments, but on the whole sex was just painful, and it wasn't even emotionally stimulating. It was just... there. A part of me felt good knowing
that Jessie was in the "right" hole, but it just... wasn't what I expected.

In my first relationship, the first month my boyfriend and I were together, I didn't climax once. It took four tries for Jessie and I to achieve an orgasm together when we first moved in with each other. This is no different in its own way. Unfortunately, while I'm consciously aware that this was my first time, that sex is no different from any other act and takes time and practice to get good at performing and that we were both too nervous to really
actually enjoy the event, there's still the part of my brain that bought into the hype that sex would solve all the problems I'e had with my body and that this would be some magical act performed instinctively by any two people in love with each other.

More than anything, I think I'm embarrassed and upset with myself at having fallen for another Big Lie. Society is filled with them, like "the media try to be objective," "the two-party system is a success," and "the earth is round." They're falsities so pervasive that they take on a semblance of truth just because of the number of people who believe in them, but that really have no basis in fact. I've tried so hard to be honest and open about myself, my transition and my expectations of everything as a result, but here I fell for the classic motif hook, line and sinker.

Of course, looking at it afterwards, there's a lot of other facts that I know are important factors in what happened but that don't make me feel better. I was incredibly nervous, as I said, and so was Jessie. Zie was, in fact, so
nervous that when zie did climax, it wasn't fun for zim either. It had been too much effort. It took forever for us to find a position we could use. We had no experience. I could go on, but the point is that I shouldn't have expected it to be this grand thing the first time, and I let myself get swept up in the hype and anticipation and then I let myself get hurt when it wasn't like that.

I feel like a fool.

I can only hope that when next we try this, we take the time to do it better and remember what we did this time so that it's better for both of us. I refuse to accept that this is how sex is going to be for the rest of my life.

---

In other news, I've been back to work for a week now, and it's as if I've never left. No work has amassed since I left, though many projects are waiting for someone's authorization or signature or something to start, and others are hovering on the edge of being released from the drawing board to start being implemented. Meanwhile, I'm playing a lot of Freecell and reading Slashdot and the Register.

I still haven't got my diary from Thailand into shape for posting as entries in my journal proper, but that can be tomorrow's project, I suppose. I spent most of Wednesday unclogging a mailing list, and I've been debugging some configuration issues that have arisen from the server move. All in all, my life is starting to return to pre-trip levels, whatever those are. 

I'm glad I went, but I'll be a hell of a lot more glad when I can really enjoy the body I bought while I was away.

I wouldn't wish days like yesterday on anyone.

I found out first of all from my doctor that there are no endocrinologists in the area that do hormone replacement therapy that take my insurance. This means I have to pay for all of my treatments up front and then hope that I get reimbursed afterwards, which means I have to budget far more than I would like for medical bills that, supposedly, should be the domain of my insurance company. After all, isn't that why we have them?

Next, my passport application has hit another snag. Now they want proof of my surgery. "It doesn't matter what your driver's license says; it's what's between your legs that counts." No, that isn't a direct quote, but that's the essential tone of the letter I received. Thankfully, they also said that if I hadn't had the surgery yet and needed the passport for the surgery, I could submit all of my other docs and a note from my surgeon saying when my surgery is scheduled. It's not a problem, but it is one more delay in getting the damn piece of paper that clears me for overseas travel, and they've flat-out admitted that they've lost my old one so if they don't give me the new one, there's going to be a real problem.

Finally, I contacted my bank to inquire about personal loan interest rates and found out that they don't offer them! They've got home, home improvement, car, et cetera, but nothing that doesn't involve some kind of major capital
purchase, and medical doesn't count. Again, it's not a crisis, but it's a delay in getting things settled and prepared for my trip. A friend of mine has offered to vouch for me to get a Navy Fed account, and according to him they'll give out loans on practically a handshake, so I'm not panicking but I am annoyed.

My weight was back up to 260 yesterday morning, and that always depresses me. I did such a good job of losing the weight, but I did it by punishing myself and generally starving myself, with the help of appetite suppressants which are no longer available over the counter. I even spoke with my doctor about getting back on them, and he just said the prescription strength ones weren't covered by insurance, which prices them out of my range for now.

If all of the above weren't enough, I've been worrying a lot about my finances these days. Trying to schedule a loan from the bank, I've felt increasingly under the microscope to pay off my debts to my credit cards and get back onto an even footing, but... 

... this is where my life gets extremely complex, or at least it feels like it does.

As I have established elsewhere in these writings, I am a very easily dominated person in certain basic ways. I'm very submissive, and I am, by my own admission, too easily influenced by the emotional states of my peers. The idea that one of my friends, someone I trust, being upset or mad at me, or even unhappy if I have the means of "correcting the problem," makes me sick to my stomach. I can take on any depth of self-deprivation if I know (or believe) that doing so will benefit someone close to me. I try to save the universe, and I fail because I don't know how to save myself first, no matter how much Ayn Rand I read.

Is it a fundamental lack of self-esteem? I don't think so. I do think, though, that it's a result of having grown up alone. All through my childhood, I made friends by doing things for them. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect, is the fear that saying "no" to my compatriots will make them leave me. Jessie suggested it last night, and I denied it then, but looking at it, I suspect it's closer to the truth than I might like to admit.

I'm still afraid of being alone, and I'll hurt myself to make sure I'm not. I don't go in for masochism, but I'll put up with a lot of crap from people that claim to want me around. My first relationship is a good example of this.

The budget, then, is a major source of emotional headache for me. Because I control the purse strings in the family, my job is to say no to the requests of others, and every time I say no my guts clench up and I want to curl up in a corner and die. I'm still trying to win the approval of those from whom I know I don't have anything to prove. I don't make enough money to be able to say yes to everything, but I can't say no without feeling bad, and when it comes to money this is a dangerous game.

---

I'm going to change tacks for a moment, and switch over to a related subject. A few weeks ago, I entered into a dominant/submissive relationship with someone with whom I've grown very close over the years we've known each other. It satiates the screaming demons inside of me, to serve and know that even when I misbehave, my servitude pleases my mistress.

By "mistress", it's pretty clear I don't mean Jessie. Zie knows, zie accepts, zie doesn't understand entirely but zie supports and even encourages it somewhat.

So far, it's only been online, mostly because of the distance between us, but in part because of all of the above factors and because of my own mildly obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I fixate on things very easily, and in something so reality-warping, this would be a very dangerous thing again. I trust my mistress implicitly, even out of scene, not to do anything to hurt me, but she and I both agree that this should not become a relationship that overwhelms or controls either of us. We both have mates outside of it, and we both have lives, and if it ever interferes with either, it should be ended.

Over the weekend, I had the chance to actually play out some small measure of this, with someone not my mistress. Despite my would-be top not being overly skilled or interested in the scene, I still found it very seductive. I feel protected, knowing that at least within the confines of the scene, someone is going to take care of me, and that even if I'm punished it's out of tenderness. I know that to truly be a submissive, one must want what the dominant wants, even if it's self-detrimental, trusting in the top to protect and make safe. 

It's this sense of giving up control that I find so darkly attractive and so dangerous. I already struggle with the fact of being the primary income in my family. My mate, as much as I may love Jessie, is not well-suited to being "in charge". (If zie were, I think zie and I would have entered into that kind of relationship long ago and never regretted it.) The chance to not be in charge is one that I could far too easily accept as proper, and if I were to try I'd likely hurt many more people than just me. 

Having the chance to explore it in person, to actually experience the role of the submissive and then have someone critique me afterwards and give me pointers on how to be a better pet left me breathless and anxious. I walked around with the collar I had been given around my neck for the whole of the weekend and even wore it into the office on Monday as a piece of jewelry before realizing that I had been letting it take over my thoughts and removed it.

There is, I tell myself, a time and a place for everything. However, it's hard to confine an emotion that one would like to feel at all times to a limited set of times and places, even knowing that only by doing so does it become possible to experience it at all.

---

Now to tie these two threads together.

Jessie hasn't worked in eight months. Zie gets up when zie wants, goes to bed when zie wants, knows that the money is there to pay for small indulgences without having to think, has never been denied anything by me, and has, in general, little in the way of responsibility beyond keeping the apartment looking nice. Even that doesn't have to happen if something interrupts, or even if zie just forgets, zie knows I'll be irritated but I won't kick zim out.

In short, zie's been leading the life that I wish I could have, albeit with a bit more freedom than I might necessarily want.

I dumped core last night, telling all of this to Jessie at two in the morning. I've felt that Jessie hadn't taken the job search seriously. I'd had a background nervousness as the sole income earner for a while, but it's been really heavy lately with everything else going on, the times I've spent in the control of someone else putting the times I've
had to be the bitch about money into sharp relief and making me more uncomfortable.

I don't want to give up the satisfaction and happiness I find in servitude, but I need some way of keeping it from becoming an escape mechanism, and the best way I know to do that is to lessen the negative impact everything
else has. The fastest path to that end involves Jessie getting a job so that I don't feel I'm the only one supporting us and thus making all the decisions about where the money goes. It's probably a strange coping mechanism in my head, but it's there and I work with it and I've led a happy life so far, even with all the ups and downs.