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After a February so packed with work I hardly slept and the deposit of a juicy tax-refund check, my bank groaned under the unaccustomed weight of excess dollars. My mind raced with plans for them: Saving, heading off property tax payments, investing in the upkeep of my home.

Now, just one week later my poor account has been abused by:

• Three months of expensive (and unexpected) medication for my son.
• Replacement of a cracked windshield (how did that happen?).
• An appointment with a pulmonologist (which I was hoping to avoid).
• The necessity of a new (insert long string of obscene yet descriptive words here) transmission.

And the allergic cat is once again sneezing.

I think this is what they call the wheel of fortune, and right now it’s running me over.

So, anyone know how to rebuild a transmission?

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This post, Wheel of Fortune, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, March 11, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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“Kitten, am I too nice to you? Is that why you won’t go out with me?” Joe asked.

He was standing on the right of me holding a fresh bouquet of red roses that he’d brought in to replace the old ones that I tossed out.

Joe started bringing me flowers a few months ago. I went into the office one day and found a bouquet of red roses in a crystal vase on my desk.

The note was signed, secret admirer.

Sheila told me that Joe was my secret admirer.

But there was no secret about Joe's feelings for me. The man was smitten. It was clear for all to see. He wears his heart on his sleeves. I walk into the room and he stops whatever he’s doing to watch me. He stammers when he’s talking to me. He compliments me shyly every time he sees me. He smiles at me every time we make eye contact. He leaves Hershey chocolate kisses on my desk.

The other men in the office call him a fool. They tell him that he’ll never get me behaving like that. They tell him that if he ignores me, I’ll pay him attention. If he insults me, I will like him. If he acts as if he’s not interested in me, I’ll become interested in him.

I don’t know how they come up with that nonsense.

I like Joe. If I were single, I may even consider breaking my cardinal rule of not dating co-workers. Not all women are attracted to men who treat them badly.

I stay clear from them entirely.

If you’re so bad that you’re going around lying and cheating you’ll be history.

If you’re so bad that you don’t answer the phone when I call you, I’ll stop calling and
move on.

If you insult me, and or treat me disrespectfully, I will show you the door.

And if you’re neglectful of me, I can guarantee that we will not make it.

Be a bad boy and she will want you. They say.

What exactly does that mean?

I like intelligent men. I like a thinker and a doer. I like men who are well traveled and open and expressive. I like no-holds-barred men. I like men who are nice to me. Who treats me with respect and is not afraid to express how deeply and completely in love they are with me. The “LOVE” word doesn’t scare me. It will cause me to take a closer look at you. I will want to protect your love. I will treat it with honesty and kindness and respect. I will handle it carefully. I will be sensitive to it. It deserves no less.

Something would be seriously wrong with me to abuse someone’s love just because I can.

What’s weak about having the courage to expose your heart?

Nothing.

The ability to be vulnerable is not weakness, it is strength.

I can only love you if you let into your heart. I want to explore it. I want to understand it. I want to drink from it. I want to fall asleep in it.

Let me inside your heart.

“I think that you’re one of the nicest guys I’ve met in a very long time.” I said to Joe as he arranged the red roses in the crystal vase.

“If I’m so great why won’t you go out with me?” he said.
“I won’t go out with you because I have a boyfriend. And I’m happy,”

“I was going to start insulting you to get your attention,” He said. And I’m really not good at insulting women. I think that women should be revered.

“Smart women don’t choose bad guys over nice guys,” I said.

I stopped by the office today and there were Hershey kisses on my desk in the shape of a heart.

That man is going make a lucky woman very happy.

Someone watching closely might have noticed that the hair dryer was pointed toward her blond curls at most half the time.

But at seven o’clock at night on the floor outside the bathroom, no one was around but my middle child’s siblings, and for once they were uncharacteristically quiet, the eldest immersed in a book and the boy concentrating on getting every bit of shampoo out of his hair. If I’d tried a decade ago to blow-dry my little bookworm’s hair she’d still be shrieking today. I assumed that every child shared her fear of screaming hot wind; consequently with the younger ones I left the dryer under the sink and used only towels.

Until recently that is, when I unearthed that noisy gadget (my own hair outrageously revolts unless allowed to dry in its natural state) and turned it on the middle child’s fine blond hair one frigid night when I worried that otherwise she’d freeze. I anticipated revolt; instead she could not stop giggling as the air tickled her neck. “Don’t stop, Mommy!” she yelled. “The wind is making me laugh!” I’ve continued to make her laugh since then, gently detangling the hair as she wiggles and squirms. I point the dryer off at an angle, willing it to dry slowly. It’s not often that I get to see that child alone. It’s even less often that she’s still, so I brush and dry and linger for as long as she’ll let the wind make her laugh.

Unfortunately, I’m not certain there’s any amount of post-shower hair care — no matter how hilarious — that can make up for all the times this child, sandwiched between a pair of high-maintenance siblings, has had her needs deferred because her mother was needed somewhere else.

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This post, The Middle, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, March 10, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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Almost exactly four years ago the combination of heavy spring rains and my sump pump’s untimely demise lead to the spontaneous generation of a river below my living room.

This might have been nice (Consider the soothing babble of water! The dewy humidity! The bathing options!) but for the fact that a finished basement stood in its way. Being possessed of a crumbling marriage, difficult child, active toddler and a new-born whose adoption status rested on the blade of a knife, my ability to divert said river was at best limited. Furniture was moved to higher ground, insurance dried things out and replaced the carpets and while time more or less did its part to bring that part of the house back to tolerable standards, it was by no means fixed.

This fact nagged at me. Four years! I said to myself. Four years since the flood and still (STILL!) you haven’t replaced all the baseboards, you lazy girl you. Four years and you haven’t cleaned the detritus out from the storage room. Four years and you’ve not redone paint scarred by moving furniture, gigantic humidity-sucking fans and five-thousand trips up and down the stairs made by the water-buffaloes who call themselves your children. Four. Years. You fail at life.

Until such a point that I am able to spend several hours a day writing, a few more working on websites, even more writing for Jane, every waking one caring for the kids then the final three (or four) reading, I will not believe that my life is at full capacity. Oh, and I forgot to schedule in the hawt secks! At least every other day! Anything less than that amount of activity and I’m convinced that I’m the most intractable slacker.

This is poppycock, I know. But just try convincing the voices in my head.

Almost exactly four years after the flood, my darling boyfriend found himself with a brief break in his hectic schedule of international gallivanting and all-around troublemaking. “Can I come help you with some of your projects?” he asked, and before those little voices pointed out how horribly lazy it would be to accept the help, I’d said yes.

And so on a Monday morning just five minutes after the bus had pulled away from the curb I discovered a semi-nude man armed with a paintbrush in my basement. “Are you going to paint without any clothes on?” I asked, eyes wide with wonder and drinking in every bit of his exposed skin.

“Do you want me to paint without any clothes on?”

“Would you?”

“As you wish,” he said, and for the next couple hours I worked to the slap and roll of carefully applied paint, relaxing as (for once!) someone else took care of me.

Really? I should let people take care of me more often.

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This post, Flood Recovery, originally appeared on aag on Tuesday, March 9, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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For well over a year I was a supremely happy Liberator.com affiliate.

I was happy not only because my readers seemed to enjoy — judging by the number of purchases– Liberator’s affiliate banners, but also because I have adored every one of their products that I’ve tried. The Zeppelin? Heavenly. The Esse? Brilliant. And the Throe? If possible, I’ll take it to my grave.

So it was with extreme pleasure that I watched the dollars add up. Every time I logged into my affiliate account I imagined how much fun the items’ new owners were having and a happy jolt passed from brain to cunt.

Um. Surely I’m not the only one who gets slightly excited by this sort of thing?

Eventually enough dollars accumulated that I reached Liberator’s very high pay-out amount. Some affiliate programs issue payments at $50 or $100; Liberator requires $200 before they’ll pay. Is this because the products tend to be pretty pricey? Or because they figure that few will stick with the program long enough to earn that much? I don’t know, but since I’d reached the level without undue fuss I didn’t much worry. I gleefully clicked Liberator’s “Pay Me Now” button and waited for my miniature windfall.

Almost immediately I began to hear murmurings that all was not well in the land of water-resistant sex positioning furniture. “They’re delaying payments,” one rumor went. “The whole program is frozen,” said another, and my previous confidence began slipping. I fired off an email to the company requesting information. It went unanswered. More rumors reached my ears. Am I ever going to get paid, I wondered, realizing that by then it had been many more days than one might reasonably expect for a check to wing its way from Atlanta to the Upper Midwest. Does anyone have a number for their main office, I asked via Twitter, and Twitter once again proved itself to be capable of answering my every question.

Reader, I called them. Immediately I was connected to someone who was not, by her own admission, in charge of the program. She was, however, quite chatty. “We’re a couple months behind,” she told me frankly. “We’re paying the big guys — the ones we owe hundreds or thousands of dollars to — first. The little guys like you are seeing their payments delayed.”

Well that’s hardly fair, quoth I.

“Not much I can do about it,” she said, and that’s when I asked to speak to her boss. Of course she wasn’t around; I was encouraged to email her (I already have, I pointed out to no avail), and the conversation was over. Imagine my surprise when not even five minutes later my phone rang and on the other end I found the head of the affiliate program herself.

“Problems? In our program? Delays in payments? Of course not,” she said, and went on to explain fourteen ways to Sunday how they were just transitioning over to a new program and while payments might seem ever so slightly delayed in my perception, in reality everything was perfectly, glowingly fine. Just fine. In fact things were so fine that they’d decided to lower the pay-out amount from $200 to just $100.

Hm, I said. So might I have my check?

“Of course!” she gushed. “We’ll put it in the mail today!”

And the check did indeed arrive in the exact number of days one might expect for a missive sent from Liberator corporate headquarters. Only one problem. The check was not for two-hundred-plus dollars. Instead it was for roughly 70% of that amount.

What gives? I asked in an email to the head of the program. I earned twice the amount of your current payout, you promised to pay me, and this is what you send?

“You are so very wrong!” she said. “You earned over $200 but not all of that was eligible to be paid! You need to sell more in order to get your $200, you silly girl you!” And she continued on with an explanation I hardly heard due to a massive case of annoyance.

While I love Liberator products, I don’t love having to wonder if I’m going to get paid. Not even a little tiny bit. So how do I express my love without supporting an affiliate program which has (shall we say) issues? Here’s how:  I’m sending you to Amazon, which is the best of both worlds. You get fabulous Liberator products (if you so desire) and I get paid.

Doesn’t get much better than that.

————

Sending a big wet kiss and my thanks to Bacchus from ErosBlog who provided invaluable advice on the topic of affiliate programs and their foibles.

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This post, On Being a Liberator Affiliate, originally appeared on aag on Monday, March 8, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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This house is located on an island called Elliðaey near Vestmannaeyjar, a small archipelago off the south coast of Iceland. The house was given to singer, Bjork from her motherland as a “Thank You” for putting Iceland on the international map. Other images here and here.

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This post, I want to live here:, originally appeared on aag on Saturday, March 6, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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He was rooting around in his pants with the dedication of a mechanic working loose a recalcitrant spark plug. Son, I asked. What is the issue?

“My penis!” he cried. “It’s giving me troubles!”

Get used to it, I thought. Buddy, you’d better get used to it.

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If you haven’t already taken Heather Corinna’s Survey on Casual Sex, please do. Thank you very much!

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This post, Troublesome Penis, originally appeared on aag on Friday, March 5, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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Heather Corinna is doing a large study on multigenerational experiences with and attitudes about casual sex. The data will ideally be used for publication, but answers are completely anonymous and will only be used anonymously.

There’s a lot of buzz now about “hooking up,” the newest term for casual sex, though casual sex isn’t new at all — nor does it only belong to the current generation, despite often being presented that way. Unlike most of the buzz out there, she’s not interested in telling anyone how to have sex, warning people off any given kind of sex or in presenting any one kind of sex as “the best way.” She’s just looking for what’s real, both in sexual attitudes and experiences among a diverse array of ages, genders and sexual identities, races and sexual ideologies/constructions. The only requirements for participating in this study are being over the age of 16, and having had some kind of sexual partnership before, even if none has been casual.  The study will take around twenty minutes.

She would like the study to show as diverse an array of people as possible, especially since so often media representations or cultural conversations about casual sex are usually only about heterosexual white women or about gay men. She particularly wants to be sure LGBT people, people of color, those over 45 and social conservatives are adequately represented, so please share this link with your networks after you take the survey yourself, especially if your networks include people in any or all of those groups.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S97WR6H

If you don’t know who Heather is, she’s been working in human sexuality for around 12 years. She is the founder and executive director for Scarleteen.com, does sex education outreach at youth shelters and women’s clinics in Seattle, and has been a sex columnist and writer online for sites like The Guardian and RH Reality Check. She has also been published in a handful of anthologies and is the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know-Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College (DaCapo Press).  If you have any questions, you can contact Heather at hcorinna@mac.com

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This post, Heather Corinna’s Study on Casual Sex, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, March 4, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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You know what happens when you’re having sex on your back, folded in half with your head over the side of the bed and your partner thrusts really hard and you jerk yourself back up on the bed because you don’t want to fall on your head? Right, you strain your shoulder.

*ow*

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You know what happens when you spend three years chucking junk into a storage closet without ever cleaning it out? Right, it turns into a disaster area.

The storage closet that is my web host was so messy that I’ve taken some time over the past few days to do a thorough cleaning. Change is good, right? Right. Change is good. This change may cause some continued weirdness as I sort things out, so DO NOT PANIC if things are a little off.

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You know what happens when you start a pornsite based around strap-on sex? Right, it’s super-hot.

Want to see exactly how hot? FurryGirl is giving away a one-month membership to Cocksexual.com to someone who leaves a comment below describing in 200 or fewer words a strap-on experience they’ve either had or they’d like to have. Make sure to enter a working email address (visible only to me) so that I can contact the winner, who will be chosen by random draw at some point after the contest ends on Saturday, March 6th at 12:01am.

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You know what happens now? I’m going to baby my shoulder while deleting more files and YOU’RE going to go check out Cocksexual and then leave a comment below.

Have at it!

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This post, You Know What Happens?, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, March 4, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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What’s sticking in my craw is that this is Washington D.C. we’re talking about.  Gay Marriage: now legal in the Capitol city of a nation that foisted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” legislation onto its gay soldiers and the Defense of Marriage Act onto its gay citizens.  That a gay person can actually get married at the birthplace of so much  legalized oppression smacks of love amid the ruins, only much less romantic.  The idea that a gay couple can legally wed at such a place seems as preposterous as the idea that a lifelong commitment can begin at a drive through wedding chapel in Las Vegas.  The cultural dissonance is almost deafening.

The DC Irony casts into indisputable relief the fact that this contradictory legal-here-but-not-there/legal-for-a-limited-time-only, crazy-quilt state of affairs is absolutely intolerable.  A gay couple wed in D.C. (or Iowa, or Massachusetts, or Vermont, or Connecticut, or New Hampshire) has quite a bit in common with a Confederate Money Millionaire.  We can’t allow ourselves to be placated by the pretend rights put forward by state or local governments.  While it’s wonderful that small enclaves of equal rights do exist, it can’t be ignored that those rights are limited in scope and are held hostage by the questionable “tolerance” of the voting majority.
–The D.C. Irony

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This post, “The cultural dissonance is almost deafening”, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, March 3, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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My most romantic moments doesn’t happen on Valentines Day, Anniversaries, or birthddays. They happen ALL the time in every day moments when I’m not expecting anything to happen.
They’re not planned or orchestrated.
They just are.

They seldom come in diamonds and gold. In fact, my most romantic moments cannot be bought. But they are priceless.

Sheila at the office was complaining that her husband is not romantic because he doesn’t buy her anything. And when he buys her something, it's not what she wanted.

“What do you think?" she said to me.

"I don't think anything," I said.

"I bet your husband buys you gifts,"

"Sometimes," I said. "But that's not what makes him romantic to me,"

Well, what do you find romantic?"

"I find his thoughtfulness romantic,”

“My husband is thoughtful and loving. But he doesn’t by me gifts. He’s supposed to buy me gifts,” she said.

So what is romance?

My idea of romance is different from Sheila’s.

Romance is in his touch as he moves my hair from my face.

The way he kisses my forehead and pulls the blacket over my shoulder so that I don’t get cold.

It’s in the way he lifts my chin to kiss my lips when he comes home from one of his trips.

It’s the way he hugs me and kisses the back of my neck and sniffs my hair.

It’s the fact that he still calls just to hear my voice.

Romance is in the way he hold my hands ALL the time.
The way he sometimes sit on the couch for hours when I fall asleep in his lap just not to disturb me.

It’s the way he read passages to me from whatever book he’s reading.
The way he cuddles me when we go to bed at night.

Romance is in the way he’s always touching me…
The way he opens every door for me.
The pride with which he introduce me to his friends.

Romance is the fact that he want to have it all with me.

Romance for me is not in gift boxes wrapped with pretty bows...

It’s the little everday things that doesn't cost anything.

And today as I opened the package he left on my bed before he snuck away in the early morning…I opened it with a smile.

“I like the look of you in black peal earrings,” the note said.

It’s not the stuff that’s romantic. It’s the thought behind the stuff.
Kenny understands that.

***note: there may be weirdness here over the next 24 hours as i
make some updates. capital letters should also be
re-enabled at a point very soon.***

In a perfect world I’d make the transition from mother to sexpot in the exact amount of time it takes to wave at the bus, rip off my clothes and arrange myself provocatively upon the bed.

In the real world, however, inertia rules. Too many tasks — just like dirty clothes, mushrooms and fleas — breed more of the same; even when faced with my partner (whose path must surely have crossed that of the bus), even when he kisses me while shutting the door, even when I breathe in his scent of clean and smoke and barely subdued sex I find it nearly impossible to let go of the thousand bits of work that weigh on my mind so that my body for two brief hours can be allowed to take over.

But moments later I’m on the bed, as provocatively positioned as I can get without giving the impression of trying too hard. Even then guilt whispers that I really should be working instead of doing something so self-indulgent as watching this gorgeous man strip. Finally he is down to his shorts, so tight that his dedication to the scene is in no doubt.

Drawn in, I trace my fingernails down and around the generous curves; I kiss through the thin fabric as he grabs a handful of my hair and tugs down his waistband. His cock leaps free. “Get Daddy hard so he can fuck his little girl,” he growls, and I begin to do my level best.

Transition made.

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This post, Transition, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, March 3, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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I drove Allan home. I’d poured him three too many mamosas.

I am barred from his house and thought about letting him sleep at my place but knew RJ would have a fit. I took my chances and drove him home hoping that she wouldn't be there.

She was.

She met me at the door. “What did you do to him?” she demanded.

I smiled at her. “I poured him mamosas,”

“I thought I told you to stay away from my husband. I thought I told you to stay out of our lives,"

I'm always taken aback by how raw and intense she dislikes me.

“RJ, I’ve always been respectful to you because you’re Allan's wife. But shut the fuck up," I said. "Stop the bitching,"

"Excuse me?" she said with her hand on her chest looking shock.

She reminded me of a bully whose victim was no longer running and had sent a shocking blow.

"No, excuse me RJ. I’m not going to allow you to speak to me like this anymore. I have not done anything to deserve this. I'm not a threat to you. I was Allan's best friend for sixteen years before he met you. And your first order when you got married was to get rid of me. You didn't even try to get to know me. If you did, you've found a friend in me too,"

"What were you doing with my husband?"

"We were drinking mamosas and playing chess. Allan will always be my friend even if we never speak to each other again. You can't stop it, so shut the fuck up,”

I would like to blame my outburst on pms, but I’ve been dying to curse her out from the first day I met her.

“You’re going to have to choose between me and her,” she said to Allan.

Allan smiled. “What’s going on? Kit you want to play again?”

“You told me that you weren’t talking to her anymore. You’re going to have to choose,” RJ continued.

Allan was still smiling. “What’s going on?” he mumbled.

I giggled.

“What are you laughing about?”RJ asked.

“Honey, he married you. He’s already chosen you. Why isn’t that enough? He's your husband. He's my friend. There's no competition,”

“I know all about you and your friends,” she said.

“I’m not your enemy RJ. You’re fighting a battle that doesn’t exist,”

I walked away.

I dislike the woman.

But I still feel sorry for her. Her marriage was about to crumble. I know the script as if I’d written it.

I know Allan.

Imagine for the sake of argument that you live across the street from a large apartment building which for the past (let’s just say) six years or so has been afflicted with an extraordinary number of fires.

Luckily, the scope of the fires is small, or at least as small as can be expected from something as inherently dangerous as flames and burning wood. In no small part the damage has been kept to a minimum because of the efforts of the neighbors, who have rushed in time and again at the first sign of smoke. “Let us call the fire department,” they murmur to each other, and within moments uniformed defenders do what they can to bring people and property to safety.

There’s no one single action that even if palatable enough to be embraced by all in the building would guarantee that the fires would stop. None of the fires are anyone’s fault; or perhaps they are everyone’s fault. But fault or no, so many fires eventually wear everyone down. The firefighters get antsy and wonder how much of their time can or should be spent on only one building. The neighbors tire of too-frequent wakings. Compassion, in short, begins to run thin.

I try studiously to live in the realm of what is, not what should be or what I wish could be. While I have no plans to change my stance on reproductive freedom (in all its forms), lately I’m having a hard time not wishing that things would have gone very differently for my children’s mother.

Because these constant fires? They are wearing me out. They are wearing everybody out.

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This post, What Is, originally appeared on aag on Tuesday, March 2, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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My eldest is a bit too young to have reached this phase yet, so would anyone else care to provide words of wisdom for the parent who last week sent me this missive:

I have an adolescent daughter – precocious, cute, and too smart for her own good. She’s been taught the mechanics of sexuality and was even in the delivery room watching her little brother being born. She’s been given a primer on masturbation by her mother. Boys have discovered her; she knows why, and has kept most of them at arms length.

But she is the exact demographic for every teen vampire novel. While I have no hope of derailing her notions of true love that lasts for eternity (literally) I have a small issue with her awareness of the connection between vampirism and sex (and her own sexuality). In and of itself, I get the fetish – but I just don’t want that being the original one shaping her own understanding of mature coupling.

I would rather she be reading something more explicit but more honest about the emotions and interactions of the characters. I worry that this new version of Harlequin Romance for teens creates an expectation that reality just can’t meet.

Thoughts? Advice? Suggestions for alternative reading material?

Leave them in the comments below.

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This post, On Teenagers and Vampire Novels, originally appeared on aag on Monday, March 1, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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Allan stopped by to see me. He’s been calling me and I haven’t returned his calls. I've been in one of my moods.

I poured him a mimosa and one for myself. Mine was mostly orange juice. "To us,” I said.

He chuckled. “Do you remember when we were young and didn’t know what the fuck was going on?
One moment you were married, the next moment you were getting divorced, and I was going to kill myself over a whore,”

I giggled. “We still don't know what's going on?" I said.

I was quiet for a moment, thinking about the places that I’ve been, the woman I was, the woman I am now. The kids, the men. The magic. The adventures, the sordid love affairs, the travels, the nine-to- five jobs I got fired from, the ones I walked away from. I stand now a mother, a lover, a friend, a partner, a student...always a student of life.

I looked at Allan sitting beside me staring in his almost empty glass. “This is great. What is it?”

“Champagne and orange juice,” I said.

He chugged downed what was left in the glass. “I love this stuff, can I have
another one?”

I poured him another.

“Thanks for stopping by," I said tapping his knee.

“Someone have to take care of you,"

"You've been my constant," I said.

"And you’ve been mine. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you all these years,”

“You were never supposed to find out. That’s why I’m here. So what’s going on,” I said. He stopped by to cheer me up but I knew from the moment he walked in that he needed me more.

“Do you remember Pepper?”

“The stripper?” I asked.

“Yes,”

“What about her?”

“I think I love her. I can’t stop thinking about her. She makes me feel like a new man. She’s so beautiful to me. I can’t get enough of her. I know it’s wrong. But I just can’t get enough of her. I think that she’s my soul-mate. What do you do when you find your soul-mate and you’re married to someone else?”

Is fate ever so unkind that we meet our soul-mate when we’re committed to someone else?

Is fate ever so unkind?

I don’t know. I don't think so, but here's what I do know...

Odds are, this isn’t love at all.

What I do know is that for the last sixteen years Allan have fallen head over heels with every woman he’s ever dated. And this woman like all the others, and like his wife will soon become yesterday's news.

When he told me that he was going to get married after dating his now wife for three months, I asked him to give it time. Time would tell like all the others before. He said that he was certain that she was his soul-mate.

Now here we are.

“What else do you love about this woman except the fact that she’s beautiful and can stand on her head while gyrating in your face? What are her values and goals? Is she kind and thoughtful? Is she caring of your wants and needs? Is she supportive of you and your dreams? Is she trustworthy? Honorable? Loyal?

What do you love about her Allan, beside the physical stuff?

“I don’t know. We’ve never really talked about that stuff?”

“Who she is is not in the way she looks or how skillful she is standing on her head. Who she is is in all the stuff you haven't talked about. And if you don’t know who she is, how do you know that she’s your soul-mate?”

“I feel it,”

“You said the same thing about your now wife,”

"So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that love is only one ingredient. If what you love is her beauty, what happens when she’s no longer beautiful? If you don’t know why you love her, how do you know that you love her? I don’t have answers, Allan, only questions that you may want to ask yourself,”

“May I have another mamosa?” He asked.

I poured him another and beat a drunken man at chess.

I should know better than to look at anything categorized so, especially during a time when I’m struggling to understand how yet another unplanned baby will fit into my family and the lives of those I love.

But it was hard to avoid. Discussions of #LiveTweetingAbortion took over my Twitterstream; some spirit of punishment gluttony made me look at the responses flagged #prochoice. I shouldn’t have looked, not only because of the raw hatred and ignorance (masquerading as concern, of course) directed toward @antitheistangie but because one voice from the pro-choice side in particular caught my eye.

I shouldn’t have read his tweets. I shouldn’t have looked at his blog. But I did, and what I saw made me sicker and sadder than anything goatse-esque, tub-tacular or two-girls-one-cup-arific:

What pro-choice people don’t understand is the concept of self-sacrifice: subjugating one’s own wants for the needs of another.
–from Not All Women’s Rights Are Right

It’s a lovely straw-man argument, Mr. Schlenker, but I can assure you that many of us pro-choice people understand self-sacrifice very well indeed.

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This post, Straw Woman, originally appeared on aag on Friday, February 26, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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I’ve been going through some things with T.

I know that a lot of teenagers are combative. I’ve been going to counseling with him. I have cried with other parents of out-of-control teenage children.
Some like myself have had to make tough decisions. Sending T to military school was my attempt to protect him from himself.

But as I listened to him explaining his actions that may likely get him kicked out of school, I wondered where I went wrong.

With everything I’ve done, all the sacrifices I’ve made, all the years I’ve invested in him, all the values I’ve taught him, all the life knowledge I’ve tried to pass on, how is it that he’s forgotten all of it?

I realized also that as good as I am at leaving situations that are not conducive to my well being, with him I’m on a different play ground.

I know that I’m not powerless, yet at times I feel completely powerless.
This parental bond that we share is clouding my senses. No matter how angry he makes me, my anger and frustration is overpowered by love. I look at him and I see my face. My blood runs through his veins. And my heart is all wrapped up in him.

I am not a fearful person but he fills me with fear.
I can walk away from anything and anyone, but I can’t walk away from him.
I want him to suffer the consequences of his actions.
I know that he must so that he can remember all that I’ve taught him.
Yet my instinct is to protect him at all times.

I know that I can’t. Still, I try.
That is the struggle.

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Written by Kahlil Gibran in "The Prophet"

Bear in mind that this is the child who, at the age of four, refused to believe my assertion that letters came in both capital and lowercase varieties. “You’re making that up, mommy!” she said, and would hear no more talk of such foolishness. It took the pressure of an entire class of Kindergartners to convince her.

Suffice it to say that the intervening years have taught me to hang quietly back and allow her to think she’s much smarter than her old mom. So it was with only the slightest degree of surprise that I registered her jacked-up eyebrows and expression of shock during this brief exchange:

Her: And then in my book? This guy? He was the god of dreams? But I don’t remember his name?

Me: Morpheus, honey.

Her, suspiciously: How did you know that? Have you read it?

Me: No sugar, I haven’t read it.

Her: Then how did you know?

I figure at some point she’ll discover that I’m no slouch in the brains department. Perhaps within the next twenty years.

If I’m lucky.

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This post, And This Is Why We Don’t Homeschool, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, February 25, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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Have you noticed this?

My lovely boss, Jane, has been super-busy lately writing sexy reviews (and posting them too–mine included), blogging and twittering her sweet lil heart out.

Readers, this is awesome. You might not realize that Jane has been at this whole porn-site review thing for over twelve years now. Twelve years! Can you imagine the perseverance it takes to keep producing valuable content on the ‘net for over a decade?

Can you think of many others who have done the same? Especially in the area of sex? I’ll wait while you think.

:: waiting ::

Right, there aren’t many.

I’d love it if you’d give Jane’s Guide a little love today. How, you ask? How can I, the humble aag reader, offer support to Jane’s Guide? Let me show you the ways:

1. Bookmark the site.
2. Follow her on Twitter.
3. Add Jane’s Guide to your feed reader.
4. Put an icon on your site. If you use WordPress, there’s a plugin for it.
5. Leave a comment on her blog (she just wrote about the removal of sexy iPhone apps).
6. Link her in your blogroll: <a href=”http://janesguide.com/”>Jane’s Guide</a> Lookit how easy it is! I’ve given you the code!

Thanks all!

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This post, Jane’s Guide, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, February 24, 2010. If you are viewing it anywhere other than in a feed reader or email, it was scraped illegally and without my permission. Please email aagblog at gmail dot com and let me know.
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