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I am a happy ’wabbit!
2008-04-20 17:08Today, on my way home from dropping
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plumtreeblossom off at her house, I overheard on NPR that Mary Roach had a new book out about the science of sex. It’s called Bonk.You can bet I placed an order as soon as I got home.
Snakes on a weekend
2006-09-03 21:18Then Friday evening I met
plumtreeblossom (whom I just almost mistyped as plumtreegoddess, but that’s not bad!), pheromone, and massagewhore to see Snakes on a Plane, which was a lot of fun. In that connection, I have to show you one of ariwriter’s userpics, which I just stumbled across in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
davis_square:Saturday I slept blessedly late, and then met
cathijosephine and darxus for brunch at IHOP (near my and cathijosephine’s places). We were all kind of sleepy, but had a good time. When I got home I realized I could make chicken and dumplings if I had chicken, dumplings, and other ingredients. So I went shopping and ended up getting home later than anticipated, but put everything in the crockpot and got a bit of stuff done on the computer before plumtreeblossom called to say she was at Quincy Center. I met her there and we went to the local second-run theater to see An Inconvenient Truth for $2.50. There wasn’t much that was new to me, but there was a lot that I knew in words and numbers that was a lot more powerful in images, and I was very impressed with it.We came back to my place, plopped the dumplings in the crock pot, and managed to kill the time while we were waiting for them to be done somehow. Then we discovered that the dumplings weren’t quite ready, so we popped I Am Curious (Yellow) in the DVD player (and ended up finishing it while we ate). Neither of us had seen it before, and it was weird and impressive and disturbing. (Does anybody reading this happen to know whether Martin Luther King was actually interviewed specifically for the movie, or whether they used archival footage? It sort of looked like archival footage.) Then there was dessert, and then
plumtreeblossom and I got to spend our first night together, which was lovely.Sunday morning (today) I slept very late (yay), and
plumtreeblossom was excited about IHOP, so I ended up having breakfast there twice in two days. That’s good; it makes up for all the time at the gym. :-) I’d been hoping that plumtreeblossom would join me at darxus’ place for movies today, but she had a lot of things she had to get done. (So did I, but I ended up not doing them.) So I dropped plumtreeblossom off at home and went over to darxus place. I was an hour late. cathijosephine wasn’t out of bed yet. Weekends are wonderful!ragingamazon joined us, and we watched V for Vendetta and Sin City (both of which I think we’d all seen before). Good stuff, especially V.I’m running out of steam, so that will do for now. Hope y’all are having fun weekends, too!
What a fabulous weekend
2005-08-08 23:59On Friday (into Saturday), I had a particularly lovely date with
cathijosephine. ( Read more... )Then on Saturday, after I dealt with a minor problem on my Mac, we got dressed and went to the Flea (the Fetish Fair Fleamarket, which usually happens twice a year). ( Read more... )
Saturday evening,
cathijosephine and I went out to dinner at Sol, the wonderful Brazilian buffet near her place, with xmelancholia, her husband, and their housemate, and thence to a fabulous and wonderful birthday party, with a spy theme. ( Read more... ) It was really nice to get the time with xmelancholia, and especially nice to finally meet her husband, who is a sweetie.On Sunday, I availed myself of the buffet
cathijosephine and I had discovered in the mall, did a little bit of window-shopping, and then came home and did some cleaning. I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I’d hoped to, but I’m a bit less likely to trip over things in my office than I was before.And today, I made my first trip of the summer to Canobie Lake Park, an amusement park in southern New Hampshire, with
eisa and maeveenroute. We had a great time. ( Read more... ) On my way to the car after ice cream, I had a great phone call with my mother. When I got home, I got to chat a bit with docorion, who had a highly productive weekend around the house, and now it’s almost time for me to go to bed.Sorry about the length — it’s been a very full weekend!
cathijosephine last night. I needed to run an errand (selling my South Park DVDs to somebody I found on craigslist) in Kenmore Square, so I let her know I was going to be around in case she wanted to get together. She invited me over for dinner, as she’s decided she wants to do a bit more cooking at home and a bit less going out, and we had yummy marinated portabella burgers with stir-fried snow peas on them. Then she had me make a yummy dessert she thought up while she did laundry. I forget quite all the details, but it involved cooking thinly sliced apples, lots of wine, milk (which turned into something vaguely like cottage cheese on contact with the wine, but it worked!), honey, cloves, lots of ginger, um, a couple other spices I think — oh, nutmeg! — and dumplings on top. It was so good! I am posting about it here partly so I will remember it the next time I’m feeling adventurous.Also, not last night but a couple weeks ago (just before I left for Hawai’i), we made three discoveries. ( Sexual TMI. )
Tonight after work I tried to go clothes-shopping for my sister’s and her husband’s wedding reception, but it was a failed endeavour. All I want is a white turtleneck. You wouldn’t think that would be so hard to find, but everyplace I went to assured me that since the days have just barely started to get a little longer, that was a ridiculous thing for anybody to even consider buying and of course they didn’t stock them. So I may have to wear Speedos or a mesh athletic shirt or something, since obviously it’s spring. :-)
After that disaster, which at least did score me a copy of Joy of Cooking to replace the copy I seem to have lost, I went over to
pheromone’s to hang out and play a game. We ended up playing Carcassonne, and it was lovely to see her. [Edit: I also picked up a gift I’d commissioned her to make which I am very very pleased with. Can’t share details quite yet. :-) Also had some yummy homemade peanut-butter cups she had made — wow! And I got to see M. who I don’t think has a LiveJournal account, and listen to some experimental noise. pheromone, am I missing anything else major?]Now, for some reason, I am really tired (despite sleeping long and well last night), so although I really should be packing and printing up directions and stuff like that, I’m just going to take the shortest shower I can manage and collapse into bed. Tomorrow I have to pick up my suit (you know, the one that would go perfectly with a white turtleneck? That one) and clean out the car and print directions and pick up the most wonderful
cathijosephine I can imagine and it’s off to see my wonderful family and see whether my sister and her delightful new husband actually managed to get any sleep the night before their wedding.You know, I have a very good life.
HPV 16 vaccine
2004-11-02 07:35The vaccine targets HPV 16, one of more than 100 strains of the human papilloma virus. [...] HPV 16 can trigger abnormal cell growth and is responsible for more than half of all cases of cervical cancer. The virus is spread through intercourse, oral or anal sex. [...] For those who completed the study and didn't start off with HPV, there were 12 precancerous lesions and 111 cases of infection among the 750 placebo recipients. No lesions were found in the group of 755 who received the vaccine, while seven women developed infections.The study followed a total of about 2400 women. None of the women who received the trial vaccine developed precancerous lesions, while 12 of the women who received placebos did.
(Now, go vote, if you’re a US citizen and you haven’t already!)
What I did on the 19th
2004-09-29 08:37dan4th’s and took a whole bunch of naughty pictures of him. He is posting some of the better ones, one per day or so, at http://pics.livejournal.com/dan4th/ — right now the ones I took are all in the Nudity gallery. (So far there’s nothing very explicit there; I make no guarantees for the future.)That was fun – first time I’d done a photo shoot like that!
Why have relationships?
2004-03-16 22:48ladytabitha asks, Why is a relationship desirable to you? I.e., why do people want to get into (romantic/sexual) relationships? Particularly diligent students of the common Eastern beowabbit (B. vulgaris bostoniensis) may wish to read my answer.Edit: I’ve copied it here for archival purposes, given that
ladytabitha doesn’t use that journal any more.That’s a fascinating question.
There are lots of different kinds of things I get from other people. Many of them, like a sense of deep connection, sex, and a certain kind of bubbly optimism, are things that I often get from romantic or sexual relationships than from other kinds of relationships. Many of them, like conversation, shared brainstorming, and laughter, I can get in platonic, casual friendships. So there are a lot of elements I want in my life, a lot of different social nutrients I feel I need in order to be a healthy person, and I seek many of them out in relationships with other people.
I’m kind of unusual in that I don’t tend to centralize these quests for various things in one person as much as most people do. That’s part of why I’m not monogamous, and of why the primary–secondary model of relationships doesn’t work as well for me as it does for some people. It’s been a long time, for instance, since I’ve regularly gotten deep romantic love and sex from the same people — not for any particular reason, but because those things are somewhat separable for me and that’s the way it’s worked out. Similarly, in different close friendships or loverships I get to exercise different facets of my personality: some people I love spending time with because I love having intellectual, almost abstract conversations with them; some people I love having warm emotional discussions with; some people I like to Go Out and Do Things with; and some people I just want to hold or be held by.
So there isn’t one reason I seek out relationships (or friendships), but several. I have a lot of things I’m looking for in my life, and no one person is going to provide all of them, but I tend to notice people who either happen to work well with me in a number of ways, or else who are really good at one particular thing that matters to me.
Another thing that’s a bit unusual for me (and sometimes gets me in trouble) is that close friendship and romantic love are very similar for me. There’s a cluster of things I look for in friends, and another cluster I look for in romantic interests or lovers, but the overlap is very large. So for me, the difference between friends and lovers is largely a difference of degree. (At least if you set aside simple sexual attraction, but I’m not convinced sexual attraction isn’t partly affected by the same cluster of personality traits, and I’m also not convinced that it doesn’t have at least some effect on who I form friendships with.) One nice consequence of this is that I almost always stay close friends with exes.
If I had to pick one thing that I look for in relationships, it would be something that I associate as much with my closest friendships as with romantic relationships: a certain sense of intimate connection, of emotional sharing, of uncensored communication, and of trust. It’s something I get in pillow-talk with a lover, but also in conversations with a friend when we’re connecting well.
Coming at this from a more practical perspective, one thing (some) people expect from a long-term capital-R relationship is living together, or at least spending lots of time together. So one reason to get into that sort of relationship is for the practical benefits of seeing somebody almost every day, of being able to get into those sorts of deep conversations while washing dishes or getting ready for work in the morning, of having fairly regular sex (or at least the fairly regular opportunity for sex if you and your partner want it), of having somebody who keeps up with your life just as a part of their day-to-day routine, rather than having to be brought up to date in spurts. And yes, I’d love to live with someone who was both close friend and lover (and/or play partner). But for much of the last decade of my life, until my (platonic) life partners moved to Hawai‘i, I was getting much of that sort of thing from people who weren’t lovers.
I feel like I’ve sort of gone off on a tangent, and I’m not sure I actually addressed the question you were asking, but hey, I like watching myself type. :-)
( peculiarity [and some correct stuff] )
Going off on a tangent here, one of the things I’ve noticed in the past few years is really important for my attractions is voice (and speech patterns). That doesn’t so much really grab me as (tend to) rule out some people. I tend (with some exceptions) to be attracted to people who speak fairly slowly, and to people who don’t have really huge highs and lows of pitch or stress in their speech. Not monotonous speech by any means, but near the center of their range, unless they’re expressing big emotions. I like a mixture of high and low overtones; I find very deep voices without any higher overtones very sexy, but also hard to understand, which sort of gets in the way. And I tend not to find high-pitched voices very appealing. I probably wouldn’t find my own voice very attractive, for instance. But, if match.com is to be believed, I’d probably find my general body type, my beard, the fact that I wear glasses, and my nearly-shaven (or in previous eras very long) hair really appealing.
1 This sort of thing, which is highly graphical and interactive and timing-dependent, is the sort of use of Flash that doesn’t make me retch.
A wonderful idea!
2004-01-21 23:03LJ slut stats
2003-12-24 18:30(Shouldn't I be packing instead of filling out quizzes?)
PS — Yay! I love my new hat!
(Hint: If you take this, select "Don't auto-format", and remove the <PRE>; and </pre> tags in the HTML that LJ-Match produces.)
The crush meme...
2003-09-18 00:33 beowabbit's LiveJournal Secret Crush StatsThe below statistics indicate what sorta crushes beowabbit has on his LJ friends! | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| What are your LiveJournal Secret Crush Stats? Tired of the sickly Suicide Girls? Faux geek porn got you down? Check out That Strange Girl. |
The categories in this one didn't really work for me — for instance, having to choose between “Crush you keep secret from that person” and “It’s public knowledge that you have a crush on them”. I didn't think too hard about this, and I used a pretty generous definition of “crush” (while still not counting everybody I might consider a relationship with). I was also very generous with the definition of “secret” (e.g., it hasn’t come up in conversation). Oh, well; mildly entertaining anyway. My graph does seem to be significantly different from others I’ve seen. I’m amused and surprised that my “No crush” percentage is lower than zzbottom’s. Oh, wait! He’s straight! *D’oh*, that explains it. :-)
PS — People are free to ask what category I listed them under, if they’re willing to (1) have me answer in public, and (2) correct me if I’m wrong (“That’s not secret! Why just this morning I heard Howard Stern making fun of you about that crush!”).
BiCamp this year went from Thursday night, August 28, through Monday, September 1 — Labour Day, so it was a bit longer than usual.
docorion went up early in Mr Toad (the green diesel Mercedes) on Friday and set up our tents, bless his heart. sionnagh was very uncertain whether she was up for going, but decided at the last minute to go with me. We had a lovely drive, and she read me some Harry Potter in the car (we took the Toyota wagon, which I’m slowly thinking might need to be named after the Water Rat).
Around the time we got to camp, though, she started feeling down, and after not very long decided she didn’t want to stay — for a number of reasons, but among them was the fact that fibromyalgia and somewhat chilly camping don’t mix very well. So docorion drove her down to her mom’s house near Hartford (not all that far from where BiCamp was).
I was kind of down for the first part of camp. Partly that was because sionnagh wasn’t there, and out of concern for her (she was actually having a great time down in Connecticut, but since I had really lousy cell reception I didn’t know that), but also because I was feeling lonely in general, and being around all the couples and triples at BiCamp was reinforcing that. I was in the kind of headspace where I was craving company and social interaction, but was feeling too shaky and disconnected to seek it out. I did have a great time hanging out and catching up with beetiger, a good friend of mine from college whom I hadn’t seen in at least seven years.
Saturday was better. It started with zzbottom and Juzika-Mauserl’s famous blueberry pancakes (with blueberries I’d helped pick that morning when I bummed a ride in to town to replace the contents of my toiletries bag, which had managed to wend its way down to Connecticut with sionnagh). That can’t be bad. And it had cleared and was bright and sunny, and I went down to the clothing-optional swimming hole and had a nice time there, although the water was cold and I didn’t stay long.
Saturday night was the potluck, which was fun, and after that a little celebration with cake for [onemintjulep, who has since gotten a LiveJournal account], who is just finishing his residency and becoming a Real Doctor. It was loads of fun. He’s really good people, and I wish I saw him more often than once or twice a year.
After that, I tried to set up my telescope (on the lovely folding camp table sionnagh had given me for my birthday), but discovered that it was broken. Bummer! So I came and sat around the campfire with [onemintjulep], missdimple, volta, bitty, and a few other people. (I forget whether zzbottom was still up or not.)
Sunday (which arrived after not quite but almost enough sleep) was even better — bright, sunny, and warm. It started with yummy omelettes thanks to volta, and proceeded at the swimming hole. Since it was warmer, I spent more time in the water this time, and also spent a lot of time hanging out with beetiger on the rocks. (She was giving mothra some vitamin D. :-)
On the way back to camp from the swimming hole, I ran into K., a classical and opera composer from NYC, whom I had had quite a lot of fun with at BiCamp 2002, after a few years of us having our eyes on each other but not doing anything about it. She assured me between kisses that we would find some time that weekend to boff like bunnies, and secure in that happy knowledge I returned to camp.
( Too Much Information of an emotional and sexual nature )
It had been fairly warm when we started, but by the time we were ready to leave the tent it had gotten quite cold, and it was a challenge to get out from under the sleeping bag to put our clothes on. But we managed. We wandered back over to a campfire for a bit, and then K. returned to the tent she was sharing with her sweetie A. (also up from New York City). I stayed up for quite a while, enjoying the afterglow and the warmth of the fire and the smell of the smoke and the bright stars and chatting, as people drifted off to bed from the campfire. Around two or so I went to bed myself, leaving bitty and volta as the last two people by the campfire. I later discovered that they stayed up all night talking, not wanting to leave the warmth of the fire.
The next day (Monday) we hung out and had breakfast and a plan arose to go hot tubbing at East Heaven in Northampton. ( Car troubles and diner dinner )
The food at the diner was not so great, but it was a fun time. Then most of us went to East Heaven for tubbing whiledocorion went back to Connecticut to pick up sionnagh.
Tubbing was a truly lovely end to the weekend! East Heaven is a very nice place, and I left feeling delightfully relaxed. volta offered to take Juzika-Mauserl and fallenpegasus back to Boston, since I’d been really looking forward to the long drive alone to relax and reflect on the weekend, and was also mildly concerned about timing and logistics. And as the big group was all saying goodbye, I got a nice kiss from somebody who hadn’t kissed me in quite a while, which was very pleasant and a nice little symbolic cherry on top of the weekend.
The drive back was fine, quiet and relaxing, and I got home feeling wonderful.
A five-question-meme question and answer in a friend’s journal got me wondering about this question (not that it’s not something I’ve wondered about before): Why is it that the dominant, powerful cultures across the world seem to have been very sex-negative, very repressive of sexuality?
(Disclaimer: I’m not a historian or a comparative anthropologist. I know not whereof I speak.)
Sure, there are lots of cultures that have very little sexual guilt and shame. The canonical example is described in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. But I have the impression that those cultures tend to be small and localized, not the conquering, continent-spanning ones. Christianity and Islam and Confucianism (using those terms as shorthand for the cultures, not to denote the religions themselves) have all been pretty sex-negative for most of their history. I don’t know much about precolonial India, but I know it was more sex-positive than modern India — but the British Empire very successfully imposed a deep prudery on the subcontinent.
Actually, Victorian England is an interesting example. Prostitution was extremely widespread and pretty accepted, and judging by what statistics we can come by, there was overwhelmingly more sex between men and female prostitutes going on than sex between men and their wives. But it all had to be kept just under the surface, with a little bit of tension between what men did and what they talked about in public, driving the engine of sexual shame and guilt and fear. And of course the fact that so much sex was semi-underground had terrible consequences for the spread of disease. I think Victorian society may have been a mirror image of modern American society, where sexual tolerance is on the surface, but there’s a deep vein of sexual guilt and shame just beneath the surface.
So, maybe this is just a coincidence, and a cross section of the Earth’s cultures five hundred years ago or five hundred years from now would show a different picture. But I don’t quite think so. It sort of looks to me like there’s some sort of correlation between sexual repression and geopolitical success. If that’s true, why? What does sexual repression do for cultures that gives them an advantage over their neighbours? Are ascetic people, afraid and ashamed of their inner sexual beings, better warriors than their neighbours who are busy boffing like bunnies? Before modern medicine, was unrestrained sexuality too much of a risk in terms of deaths in childbirth and the spread of disease? (Of course, before contraception lots of mixed-sex intercourse would have equalled lots of babies, but I don’t think that explains all of it, since there are many other ways to express your sexuality, and avoiding something because it has consequences you don’t want is different from avoiding it because you think it’s a source of evil.) Does a sexual economy of artificial scarcity make it easy to use sex as a carrot to control the people? Or just to harness their libidos for other things, as described in 1984? Do people learn self-discipline through repressing their sexualities that makes them more efficient citizens? Or do I have cause and effect reversed, and is it political and military power and geographical spread that leads to sexual repression?
And if any of this is true (and of course none of it may be; I’m making this up as I go along), then why do Europe and North America since WWII seem to be bucking this trend? (There are a lot of reasons I can think of, including greater population density and mobility leading to greater anonymity.) If there is some sort of quasi-evolutionary advantage to sexual repression, what does it mean for western culture that we seem to be getting less repressive — or will that last?
Best essay in response gets rewarded with oral sex. (Or a sparkly sticker. Offer void where punishable by stoning or burning at the stake.) [Beware of the comment length limit, if you really want to write an essay.]
docorion, who called my attention to this patent, says that this either “falls into your ‘What were they thinking’ or your ‘A product whose time has come’ categories. Maybe both.”Without further ado, United States patent number 6,485,773.
Personally, I use an extract of the sap of certain tropical plants, following coagulation through exposure to air for this purpose. Or a refined transparent petroleum product, depending.
