This would be easier were I naked but lately I’ve liked the feeling of my nipples popping out over something — and the more times they can pop out the better. Given the right outfit they can be tucked away and then spill forth dozens of times, each time more surprising than the last. ¹

While we relax and talk his hands never stop moving. He plays along with my surprise-nipple fetish, pulling my top down to pinch and knead and cup hot handfuls and I want it never to stop. “I’d like to have this done to me all day long,” I say.

It would, he agrees, be nifty to possess a bra with a cunning built-in device that would mimic hands capable of caressing and tweaking and cupping all day long.

“No,” I say, “I’d rather just have you follow me around with your hands in my bra.”

Do you think anyone would notice?

1. Yes, I know they’re in there and that they’re going to come back out. It’s still sexy and surprising. Is that so wrong?

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This post, A New Kind of Bra, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, September 2, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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This post, So true, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, September 1, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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When you come right down to it, the question becomes one of scale and time. Does the scale of what’s written match up with the meat-space magnitude? Does time flow the same inside and outside of text? How often is there a disconnect from artistic license or bad memory? Considering scale and time it must be terribly disconcerting to read here something that references oneself. Reading things about myself no matter how favorable sends me into squirming worry even faster than toe-sucking. ¹

Thus are the dangers of blogging and reading what’s blogged, and we won’t even touch the trouble over things that must go unsaid, the very very many things that must go unsaid. You should be asking yourself about every blog you read: What is this writer not saying? What should she be saying but isn’t? What subjects did she once talk about so freely but now does not? And most importantly, why?

Answer those and you’ll have a better grasp of the truth.

1. This is why it is best, I guess, that I only ever slept with one other sex blogger, though ohmigod there a few to whom I would give my very soul, if I believed in such a thing, in exchange for a single night. It is safer that way.

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This post, Scale and Time, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, September 1, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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You see, I enjoy being on the very bleeding edge of cleanliness when it comes time to part my legs. I’d be happiest if I could step directly out of the shower and into bed, but as that kind of scheduling brings up problems of its own, I’d allow that perhaps two hours could pass between bathing and (ahem) eating before I’d be too twitchy to relax.

I know this is silly; and these rules don’t, mind you, apply to anyone but myself. The memory of a sharp note of sweat on a partner’s skin can make me breathe heavy and swallow hard weeks after the antecedent, and I don’t think I’ve ever turned someone down for for being too funkified. At least not in recent memory.

If I have an early date on a night the kids’ father comes here to take care of them I can bathe at my leisure before he arrives, then beat a hasty retreat the moment everyone is settled. The problem arises only on nights when the ex comes here and I have a late-starting date, because due to my aforementioned neurosis over cleanliness, the getting-ready portion of the evening must take place with the ex in the house.

He has to hear me; he must know what’s going on, for what possible reason other than imminent nekkidity would require a half-hour shower at seven o’clock at night? Why else would I kiss the kids goodnight at leave at five ’til eight, wafting behind me the scent of shampoo and barely contained glee, adjusting the altogether inappropriate underwear concealed beneath my clothes? As keenly as I anticipate being naked and touched and very well-loved, it is disconcerting to walk out of the home — a home that, if I’d have been a different kind of person, would have provided everything in every aspect of life I ever could have wanted.

But I wasn’t, and it didn’t, so I try every week to juggle the needs for hygiene and privacy and sex and fail every time.

Oh. I’ve just right this very moment thought of another solution, but as it involves refusing any offer of oral pleasure, I think it can safely be rejected out of hand.

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This post, On the Subject of Cleanliness, originally appeared on aag on Tuesday, August 31, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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In this frosty land the government wouldn’t show a preference for eaters of any particular flavor. There would be no test before being granted a job or any other benefit. An employer couldn’t inquire “Do you eat chocolate ice cream?” at an interview, as your preference matters not a bit in your ability to work or receive.

Schools would not sell ice cream, but neither would they stand in the way of students bringing their own. One student likes vanilla? Go right ahead, the school would say. Eat up. Enjoy. Another likes chocolate? Have at it. Just don’t try to shove your butter brickle down the throats of your table-mates, or scream that they’ll burn in hell for their scoops of strawberry.

Would schools teach about the various kids of ice cream available in the larger world? Perhaps, in the right subject area. If responsible science agrees that one should eat a balanced diet and not just ice cream, or that one should avoid the varieties to which one is allergic, or that utterly no research has shown a correlation between ice cream consumption and pedophilia, then those ideas should be shared.

Privately, however, citizens could shout out their ice cream beliefs no matter how unscientific to the high heavens with no interference. You think chocolate ice cream is the very best? Set up a store and serve nothing but. If you feel so strongly, prohibit vanilla-eaters from crossing your threshold. Go right ahead, if you wish, and incorporate The Church of Chocolate Ice Cream; preach each Sunday about the evils of Neapolitan and refuse to marry any but the most ardent chocoholics.

From the sidelines I might think you a very great fool, but I would not interfere. I would not interfere because, given enough time and the vagaries of reproduction, chocolate ice cream might not always be the ice cream of choice and The Church of Chocolate Ice Cream might not always be the most powerful; meaning that churches and governments should be as far removed from one another as can possibly be managed and that each one should stay out of the other’s business.

Why is this so hard to understand?

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This post, Chocolate Ice Cream, originally appeared on aag on Monday, August 30, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

That atmosphere will inevitably be formed by the blogger’s personality. The blogosphere may, in fact, be the least veiled of any forum in which a writer dares to express himself. Even the most careful and self-aware blogger will reveal more about himself than he wants to in a few unguarded sentences and publish them before he has the sense to hit Delete. The wise panic that can paralyze a writer—the fear that he will be exposed, undone, humiliated—is not available to a blogger. You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality.

–”Why I Blog,” Andrew Sullivan (via Chelsea G. Summers)

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This post, To blog is therefore to let go of your writing, originally appeared on aag on Friday, August 27, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

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This post, , originally appeared on aag on Friday, August 27, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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I’ve been out of the traditional workforce for eleven-plus years now. Were I to reenter it in my previous capacity I would no doubt be fired on the very first day for saying “fuck” in front of seventh-graders.

Best to keep on working from home.

(source)

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This post, Degradation of Social Skills, originally appeared on aag on Friday, August 27, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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In this instance, however, I had not even enough time to put down my purse and keys; in fact I barely manged to rip off my glasses before he pushed me back on the stairs and slid down my throat. Worry about where to put my hands? There was no need! They dug into his ass to keep him from tumbling down the stairs, and before the time I’d normally have spent trying to get into character had passed my clit was thumping hard in time with his strokes into my mouth.

“I kind of attacked you the second you walked in the door,” he said afterward, curled behind me in the bed. “I hope that was ok,” and while I assured him that it most definitely was, I had to wonder for whom it would not be ok? Who wouldn’t like being the recipient of such extreme desire that it could not be put off long enough even for a purse to be set down or glasses to be removed?

Seriously, who wouldn’t like that?

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This post, Who Wouldn’t, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, August 26, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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If anything I worried that the other parents would cast scandalized eyes upon the one mommy who didn’t even stop but merely slowed as she drove past the school; or at least upon the part of the mommy they could see, which would be the foot, connecting to the child’s fanny, as she was booted without warning out the minivan door.

But then summer’s final weeks dwindled down to days, then hours and minutes. The child, dolled up in an outfit selected weeks in advance, vibrated day and night with barely-suppressed glee. Superimposed on the image of her beaming in a hand-me-down fancy dress and bright-white shoes was another from six years in the past when this child’s sibling started school and I, for the first time in years, was left to my own devices for hours every single day.

For ten weeks I did everything I could think of to find a child to adopt short of setting out with a dowsing rod. So convinced was I that I’d never get to raise another small person that those ten weeks felt like eons; until finally on a frigid November morning her mother signed paper after paper, weeping, and then handed over to me a fat blond infant. If those ten weeks were decades then the past almost-six years have been minutes, and standing in front of the school seeing my little girl and that round newborn all at once yanked unexpected tears from my eyes and from my chest a sob that every other bleary-eyed parent must have heard, were they not each immersed in their own ruminations on the plastic nature of time.

Given the uncontrollable seepage from my eyes at the departure of this child, I will hold out no hope that next year, which will bring the send-off of the last little fledgling from the nest, will be any less tearful.

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This post, The First Day, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, August 25, 2010. Tweet This Post!

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