I stood in the optometrist yesterday with two different frames in my hands. One pair was slender, black, square lenses. Very simple. Very sophisticated. The others were thick and shaped on the sides with sleek silver lines over matte black metal. Very modern. Very bold.

I stood there for fifteen minutes looking at the two damn frames, realizing that they curiously represented one of the constant decisions I make when representing myself. I bounce continually between portraying myself as a mature, clean-cut and put-together young intellectual, and a quirky young artist with strange taste and bold decisions. I swing between blazers and denim, plastic and pearls.

Fuck it, I thought to myself. I put the silver and black frames on the counter and clicked my card down. I am only young enough to do this once.

And that’s true. I am only young enough to wear these glasses once. I am only young enough to shave my head and dye my hair blue once. I am only young enough to dress like a schoolboy once. I am only young enough to wear my heart on my sleeve once.

And if I work on it enough, I’ll be young enough once to do whatever I want to, for as long as I want.

When I lose contact with someone while chatting via IM or email, I immediately, automatically brainstorm several reasons for the radio silence. And they’re not rational reasons, oh no. I don’t think, “Oh, he must have been pulled away from his computer to deal with work stuff,” or “Oh hey, maybe her Gmail is crashing.” No. I think, “Maybe he was dive-bombed by a giant bird,” or “It’s the Apocalypse. Maybe it hit the States before Australia.”

I am irrationally afraid of the dark, and of milkshakes, and of drains. Respectively, because I’m afraid that ghosts who live in the dark will kill me violently, because I sometimes imagine tiny mice bones floating in my milkshakes, and because I think that tentacles may come out of drains and drag me down into the pipes.

I have a running monologue of songs, poetry, and replayed conversations in my head. All the time, alternating between profound and inane, and often involving scenarios in which I steal laptops to buy plane tickets to fly to Tokyo to become a jazz singer, except I don’t steal and I don’t sing jazz. This turns off only when I’m reading, which is why I love to read, and when I’m writing, which is why I need to write.

Quickly, here are three sites I’ve just started reading:

Fail Blog
Made me laugh until I cried. Generally in poor taste, sometimes very offensive. However, my willingness to accept (or, to put it another way, take with suspension of activism and anger) this sort of thing is precisely why I managed to love Sin City.

Mod Blog
With my new tattoo in the works, this blog has been an amazing inspiration. It’s occasionally gruesome, occasionally funny, and more often gorgeous work. I’m reminded again and again how much I like body modification, although I have very few mods on my own body. (And yes, this has sparked the forcible tattooing fantasy. Again.)

Mod Fetish
No relation to Mod Blog, a website that collates pornographic images of women in odd poses. It ranges from soft to hard to, uh, weird (the squids are particularly weird), and has a general theme of objectification. I like weird pornography sometimes. Not because it’s arousing (usually it’s not) but because I like to collect strange things.

In many ways, laying my cards on the table is necessary for me. It’s one way I manage my decisions about other people, and I need the little bit of protection bluntness provides in my relationships. It’s my way of saying, “If you’re going to hurt me, I want to know in advance. In fact, right-the-fuck now, if you please.” But of course I don’t say that specifically. I say other things instead. It’s very late. I’m not sure this post is making sense.

That protection is important because, you see, when I think something’s right I go for it. I almost always make decisions fast, reassess, and think my way back to my first conclusion. When my instinct and my reasoning says that the relationship is good, I am a no-holds-barred, hell-or-high-water, second-date-with-a-Uhaul person. I mentioned in my previous entry that I moved in with May three weeks after we started dating, which was five weeks after we met. To most people, that’s insane. Insanity didn’t occur to me at the time; I just moved in, and three years later, here we are.

And it worked because we knew where we stood, even when where we stood was shaky ground. So in some ways, being as rude, straight-forward, blunt, direct as I am is not just a personality quirk. It’s how I keep my decisions conscious, and how I make connections, and how I learn, and demonstrate, trust.

Today we rode a winding train out into the Blue Mountains, hiked along the edge of a yellow-gold cliff dropping off into a massive valley, and then took a pitched-steep staircase down and down and down again to the floor of the cool, dark rainforest. Then we caught a cable car back up into the skyline, and, wandering back into the little town, ended up in an amazing cafe, with dark wood walls and no right angles. And as we walked, climbed, and ran, May was small. He was precious, he was my own. Sometimes I can’t figure out if I’m an outdoor-loving-dominant-girlfriend trying to drag my boything along with my adventures, or an out-of-breath adult trying to keep up with an exuberant six-year-old romp.

Today I took May shopping for clothes. Not really full-on, because as adept as I am at unplanned shopping, he is not really the type for retail excursions. I suspect that the most stereotypical ‘girl’ trait I possess is a love of shopping, which I didn’t admit to much when I was younger because it usually made people look at me as though my IQ was leaking out my ears. But it’s true. I’m a bargain-hunter to the bone; yard sales, vintage, crafts, op shops and all. It’s like a game with rules that only I can play. I love it.

Anyway, to bring this a bit back on track, today we looked for a harem slave outfit for him. That is surprisingly difficult, because although I do have a harem kink, I don’t really have the specifics of what that looks like worked out. I know I want gold and white, and if I had my way there’d be forcible tattooing involved. As it stands, we work within the confines of our lives.

I used to not really like them. I mean, I didn’t really mind the appendage, as a general rule, but neither am I one of those women intimately caught up in the mysteries of peni. Trying to work my way around being a sex-positive woman with little interest in penetration meant that I did spend a fair share of my time dodging their involvement in my sex life. And gentlemen, love you though I do, I happen to find most of you far more attractive in jeans than naked. What can I say? I’m a costumer. I like strategic clothing.

But May’s penis is swaying my opinion, and has been for some time. For one thing, it smells good. I have met some confronting smells, and some neutral ones, genitals that simply did not smell at all. I happen to think women smell nicer than men. So to find out this late in the game that the penis can smell genuinely good? That is unexpected, and gleeful.

I’m not a dirty girl. I know, I know. But I’m not. I’d rather be clean, I’d rather smell nice. I’d rather not roll around in pools of my own sweat and bodily fluid, although I will, in the heat of certain moments. And thus the real crux of my wariness. Eventually penises, big, small, rosy, smelly, clean, dirty, shaved, unshaved, eventually in our encounter they will spurt bodily fluid at me. That can be a literally amazing moment. It can be splendid, it can be tumultuous ecstatic free-fall.

But once the aftershocks wear off, I can’t help but think that semen just…smells awful. I hustle May to the shower, I laugh as he wipes the goo from his own eyes. And once he’s clean again, I let his back next to my skin.

Celebrity crushes are a strange, strange breed of crush. They seem to simultaneously juxtapose free objectification and huge amounts of access. Or, to put it another way, I mused once upon a time that seeing Superman fall to his knees in pain was far hotter than seeing a random man do the same. Why? It’s all in the emotion. Superman and I, we have a history. He has a character. He’s that much closer to real while still being essentially fake. A living fantasy.

This Michael Rosenbaum/Lex Luthor thing has gone on for months. He’s taken up permanent fantasy-harem residence. He spends most of his time crying.

I find the length of this crush a little disturbing, actually. I’ve never seen Rosenbaum in a single other film (apparently he did drag for Sorority Girls?) and at this point he is Lex Luthor. And Lex Luthor is…damn. He is the hottest super-genius potentially submissive brilliant asshole ever to walk the face of comics.

And in case no one has noticed yet, yes, I do have a thing for submissive, brilliant assholes.

One of the reasons this is a little disturbing is because I’ve realized recently that Rosenbaum’s facial structure is an almost exact match for a boy I knew in high school. Now my high school memories are getting a bit confused, and a whole lot steamier.