3. Saturday Night

Sunday, June 8, 2008

I’m altering this 50 posts in 50 days plan to accommodate a more flexible word count. I think I’ll post at least 200 words a day. Hmm. Yes.

I went to a ‘nilla party last night, one train stop away. The party itself was quite fun: I curled up in an armchair with a Dita Von Teese book and an awesome chick I’m trying to trick into being my friend. (I think it’s working.) We made creamy chocolate drinks in the blender and talked about dating men, and dating women, and the differences therein.

I timed my trip back to catch the 12:07 train. At the station I met another girl from the party. We chatted, keeping each other company in the light drizzle. When the train pulled up and we got in the door, we found a group of six or seven young men who immediately started talking to us. “Hey ladies,” they hooted, “how’re you tonight? How about you stay here with us?”

We walked to the other end of the car and sat down, still talking. When my stop came a couple of minutes later I turned to her. “Do you want me to stay on the train with you?” I asked, nodding at the group of men.

“No thanks,” she said. “It’s only more one stop, I should be okay.”

As I got off the train one of the men was hanging from the open door. “Hey girlie, hey, you fucking slag,” he yelled. “Does your friend like to suck dick?”

As I walked up the stairs I looked back at the train windows. One of the men was walking toward her seat. The train slid under the tunnel and out of sight.

I wish I had stayed on the train, and just taken a cab home from her stop. I wish I knew her last name. I wish I had her number. I wish I knew what had happened.

I hope she’s all right.

Labels: Filed in Drabble, Fear, Friends, Sydney | Comments (4)

Six Months Later

Sunday, April 13, 2008

It is almost six months since the day I fought with a family member and this blog eventually went dark. I wrote for two months on that story, and then stopped. It would be nice to think that the issue also stopped, that by refusing to write more about it I essentially exorcised it from my life. But by now we should all know better.

It is time now to revisit. It is, in fact, insistently necessary.

Many of the comments I recieved during the initial shock commented on my strength, or my rationality, or the capability demonstrated by my reaction. I remain grateful for the support and kindness, although at the time a part of me thought this was all a bit odd. I just did what I had to do, I thought. I did what I needed to do to survive and still be able to look myself in the face at the end of the day.

I commented recently on Under The Boot that although I have more issues than I can shake a stick at, most of them don’t make it to this forum. Most of them sit in a wasteland of stubbed text documents in a folder on my desktop, abandoned. What I didn’t mention in the comment is that even these stubs are an achievement for me. I keep them around long after they become just bits of digital clutter.

My family member and I eventually decided to leave our argument alone, brush it under the rug and go on with our lives, so to speak. Here’s what you have to understand for the rest of this to make sense: this is exactly the way I’ve dealt with every pyschological issue since I was ten years old. It has taken me years, tears, and a lot of wincing at my own stupidity to get me to acknowledge and address issues head on, to write down my musings, to practice self-awareness. Even now I’m not very good at it. I often approach problems sideways, wending my way like a crab.

I moved to Australia, I essentially erased my life and started over, and I thought that would be the end of it. I thought to myself, Damn it, I have dealt with this. Enough is enough. This pain is firmly locked away in a dark part of my mind, if not exorcised completely.

Of course I was lying to myself. Of course that was complete bullshit. Of course it still hurts. Probing the wound is as easy as reading my archives.

I still, occasionally, cry until I’m exhausted enough to sleep. I still find my self-confidence weakened. And I still sometimes want to scream whenever my family member comes to the phone, flush with that initial childish anger: 

I turned 25 last month. I’m just a kid. I’m not supposed to hurt this much. 

It didn’t have to be this way. 

Why did you do this to me?

And because I am brilliantly twisted enough to make even this into a completely personal guilt trip (instead of a partially personal one), I can’t help but think that if I were really as strong as I appear to be, things would be better by now.

This blog has slowed to a trickle, and if the truth be told, it’s not just because I uprooted my life and lost my Internet access. It is also because this forum has undeniably changed, and it’s becoming clearer to me as time passes that the changes are not for the better.

One of the reasons I like blogging is that I like to go back and read what I’ve written. I like to mine my old words for new ideas. I have not read back in several months, because when I try to I cannot get my family member’s face out of my head: their thoughts when they read my words, their concern and outrage. The red carpet of our living room that I stared at while they yelled at me over Thanksgiving weekend. I begin to think that I should just change the blog’s background to a picture of that damned carpet, and give up any hope of ever separating msyelf from that pain again.

What this means is that every time I open a new post and begin to write, the words feel ungainly and weighted. Everything is filtered through the lense of potential pain. The headline flashes: Who Might Be Reading This Time?

I wrote that I would continue to speak out because I recognize that speaking out helps people. I still believe that. I refused to move this blog, find a new place, go to ground and drop from the radar. I figured that doing so would be useless, the damage done.

But I didn’t manage to throw off the hurt and worry and blithely continue. Not just here, but in my entire life, things changed. My fantasies changed. My kinks shifted. Even the way I kiss my boy changed, for a little while. I tried to keep writing, keep teaching, keep fucking and playing, while it became increasingly clear that every time I wrote, taught, fucked, played, I was committing a political act.

I wanted desperately to retreat, to be safe again, to just sweep it all under the rug and get on with things, maybe in a different way, maybe the same. But I didn’t, because politically and personally I don’t believe I should have to retreat and disappear to make things better.

It is cloyingly noble, and it makes me a bit embarrassed. Especially with this next part thrown in.

I have to admit something, and doing so is painful in itself. I was not prepared for how exhausting it is when the only thing that keeps me writing is the uncanny idea that if I don’t keep writing, the sexual terrorists will win. 

The initial explosion didn’t kill me, but the little everyday grinding reminders might yet finish me off.

Perhaps this entire thought process bespeaks of lack of “closure”, but I’m not so sure. I have been told many times over the years that I need to “have it out” with my family member. Have it out over what, I ask, and why? I remain convinced that it is not in my or my family’s interest to force a fight to death or disownment. I think that if I’m going to move forward, I’m going to have to do it on my own.

In the meantime, I don’t know what to do about this blog. Maintaining it is both satisfying and upsetting. I have to work hard to get the joy out, like the whole thing is a vat of olives pressed one too many times. 

Much of this sounds melodramatic and adolescent. I’ve tried to avoid that. It’s hard not to sound adolescent when all you want to do is whine that life is shit and it isn’t fucking fair. But it seems necessary to acknowledge this thing that is still happening to me, six months later. 

The truth is, I feel damaged. I am terrified that the damage may be irreparable.

At the time I was devastated, yet confident. Now I’m just tired. I’m fed up with politics and censorship and bad writing and family drama. I’ve had enough, and I’m pissed that this pain keeps hanging around and making me cry on warm nights.

Labels: Filed in Annoyance, Attacked, Out, Pain, Politics, Self-Awareness, Sydney | Comments (22)

Postmodern? Part 1

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

This weekend May and I went to a play party. It took us three weeks in the country to find a place to play. It does, of course, help to know people.

The party invitation called for “Fetish formal.” Facing our new built-in closet, May wrinkled his nose in frustration. “I hate dress codes,” he repeated, pulling on a transluscent grey tank top that matched his pants. He posed in front of the full length mirror. “Is this okay? It’s not even black.”

“You look great, love,” I said. I enjoyed the way the shirt framed his shoulder muscles.

A party with a fetish formal dress code makes both of us wary. I wondered if there would be play, at what level, if we’d be interested, interesting. What was the age group, what was the space like, what was the ratio? Should we bring our whips, the rope, the knives?

When we met Ms160 and Sol on the corner, we had no large toys with us. I’d stuck my villainelles, tiny hand-made steel points that Switch and Boy so beautifully created, in my purse. We piled into the backseat of their car and drove the few minutes to the party through dark, small streets. We all laughed at Sol’s brilliant parking job in front of a high wooden fence.

Ms 160 led us to a row of nondescript doors. “Damn, I don’t remember which it is.” We stood awkwardly between two buildings, debating the decency or indecency of knocking on some stranger’s door at 10pm in full fetish gear.

Across the street some guys and girls were hanging off a porch, drinking from green bottles. I peered up the stairs behind a screen door that was propped open. A girl, one of their friends I thought, with more green bottles, saw me peeking in. “You’re the next one over,” she smiled, coming down the stairs. “You can knock. They’ve got a doorman.”

“The outfits gave it away, right?” I thanked her.

The doorman, in a tuxedo, ushered us up the stairs into a beautifully done up apartment, decked with candles, pottery, plants, dramatic lighting. I felt distinctly as though I should avoid moving quickly for fear of breaking the place, or burning it down. We dropped our coats, retrieved drinks from the elegantly laid table, and circulated through the building. Ms 160 introduced me and May right and left. Characteristically, names dropped from my head as fast as they entered. I complimented our hostess on her veil, made cleverly of metal wire and rhinestones and glittering like a Mardi Gras mask.

Eventually May, Ms160, Sol and I found ourselves in the dungeon, testing out the frames of the equipment and picking up toys from the rack to slap them against our arms. “They run this as a B&B,” Ms160 said, “So you can rent the whole thing out for a night, close it off and have your own private dungeon.” She pointed out the TV stand with a built in cage. There was another cage under the bed. The floors were hard tile, which I regretted, thinking of the possibility of flinging May against the ground.

At one point my boy ran up to me excitedly. “They have tie points in the shower!”

At another, I chatted in the hallway with a young blonde woman, laughing and enjoying a respite from feeling socially awkward. “I’m assigned to the door,” she said, “so I just try and snag people as they go by and get them to entertain me!” May joined us a moment later.

“This place is really nice,” he said, gesturing toward the dungeon. “It’s very schmantz” -our private word for fancy- “and postmodern.”

“You just called the dungeon postmodern,” I glanced at him.

He wriggled a little. “Yes, so?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You just called the dungeon postmodern.” Our new blonde friend dissolved in laugher.

After a little while we grew to miss our singletails. The boys were sent into the night to fetch them. Ms 160 and I climbed the stairs to the upstairs living room, settled on a couch and watched as a woman in a zippered black latex dress was tied to a beautiful wooden x-cross lacquered in red and hung with silk. In the meantime, Ms160 told me the amusing story of the male dom who had started a fashion trend of wearing leather chaps, thus confusing all of the dominant women at the party, who suddenly found themselves surrounded by dominant men with their bums hanging out.

A lovely boy in just such chaps passed by us occasionally, offering tidbits of food on a tray and occasionally stopping to say hello. Watching him leave, I decided I might very well be warming to the aesthetics of ass-less trousers.

Eventually our boys came back. The whips came with them.

Heads up, the second half of this story will be passworded.

Labels: Filed in Anecdotes, Art, Date Stories, Friends, Maymay, Scene, Sydney | Comments (9)

Broadcasting Live From Sydney

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

One thing I’ve never quite mastered is the art of making an entrance. I’m a bit too conscious and a bit too critical; the poise of such drama escapes me.

It’s been surprisingly difficult to find the time, the energy, and the inspiration for a big, juicy comeback entry for you all to chew on. Suck on? Is that too dirty?

First, there’s the culture shock I keep holding my breath for, the shock I never got when I moved to New York City, but which I kept expecting for months after I’d moved in. I keep thinking this time I’ll get it, this time I’ll be shaken by the differences.

Though my friends are resembling little aching gaps in my life which hurt dreadfully at times, thus far, culture shocked I am not.

Then there’s the nitty gritty, the thousand-and-one administrative items of moving to a new country. Every day I cross a few off, and every day more come piling on. Bank accounts, cell phones, Internet access, furniture. Where can I get a good cheeseburger at 4am? Does this city even understand the concept of mozzarella sticks?

Then, there’s the psychic weight of everything I’ve missed here online. Would you like to know how loquacious you are, my sexy friends? In the three weeks that I have been primarily offline, you have managed to push 984 new items through my RSS feeds. 984. For bonus points, I’d like to dare you to guess how many of those items belong to Richard.

The concept of catch-up is at this point laughable.

And finally, there’s all that tricky expectation. There’s the nagging thought in the back of my mind that I should manage a piece both delicious and spectacular, that in the months since I’ve seriously written here I should have garnered something that would make for a good re-entrance. I do have plans, to write about Sydney’s Mardi Gras and queer spaces and the visual representations of gender and power (again.) Also about the last play party in New York, the flesh and the screams and the sock monkey pajamas.

I am dreadfully out of practice. My narrative voice has gone all rusty and tangled, leading me down rapid tangents and far too eager to abandon me.

May and I spent the first week and a half here stressed out of our minds. We barely ate. We couldn’t stop fighting. We were staying in a tiny hostel room with bunk beds, going slowly mad from the nightly separation of skin and flesh. Now we’re in another hostel, another tiny room with bugs on the floor and our things in haphazard piles, but with a double bed that is devious and enchanting. I am having trouble waking up in the mornings, some sort of weird jet-lagged throwback.

I get caught up in the nasal reverberation of Australian voices. The coffee is better, the food is too expensive, the wind is warmer, the ocean is closer. The wireless options are pathetic. The grass is amazing.

Sydney is, as I remembered it, a fabulous city. But it’s also a real city, a home. That means it has quirks, disappointments, secrets, tricks that I have yet to master. There is a part of me that thought this move would be easy. Simple. The physical logistics of the adventure have been slow and frustrating, but they’re manageable. They’re working.

That part of me focused on the physical logistics with such ferocity that the all thoughts of emotional health were smudged out. Truth be told, I am a little lost. Perhaps more than a little. Perhaps my life has been through one too many massive upheavals in the past three months.

But lost or found, shocked or not, consider this my self-conscious, rambling, entirely pointless and decidedly undramatic re-entrance. I am online again.

Labels: Filed in Announcements, Maymay, Sydney | Comments (17)