Sneezy
I went to bed with the tree bukkake problems and woke up with same. It was only after I rinsed out my nose with the bottle of nose-spray saline-type crap that I could breathe again.

Ouchy
After the nose was no longer a problem, I went to share my plasma. Still with the steady decrease in general mass. I am pleased. I was bored by the movies, and it took longer than usual because the phlebotomist who stuck the needle in stuck it a little too far in, and there were problems with the red cell return cycle. So that got really slowed down, even after they fixed the problem, because they turned the pump speed down to about half even after the problem got fixed. And it felt funny, too.

Schedule-breaky
The slow plasma thing together with the slow start in the morning meant that I was not on hand to pick up the Little Fayoumis when needed. Happy I am for the cellphones! Marx picked up the LF with no problems.

Work?
marxdarx is now also working at Hell: he starts Saturday. My roommatesister will be working there too (assuming she is hired). As the commute & so forth were killing the budget what with the price of gas these days, there will be a lot of walking. *nods*

I've got my mind, I've got my orange crush.
Last night there was an expedition out to get some more of the Mountain Dew Livewire. There was one bottle left at the local grocery store. Today, there were none of the large bottles. My roommatesister and I had to stray two miles or more out of our way in order to get some. I went a little psychotic, and got 20 liters (10 two-liter bottles).

Hamsters, weddings, poets, Stalin
digitalambience is getting married on the 15th of May. He is telling everyone he knows, more or less smugly. My roommatesister had to ask him, when he initially said he would be getting married in May, "Getting married on Beltane?" "Valentine's?" he asked, Beltane not being in his lexicon. "That was in February. May 15th." (Recounting the incident to marxdarx just now, he suggested that butane would be another close match for those without the pagan holiday dictionary expansion pack. "This is my Beltane lighter!" "Shaped like a penis!" I giggled. Marx fled.) I filled Sis in on the incident with the fiancee over Y! IM. (The fiancee had signed in on the man's IM account and sent me a message posing as him wanting to talk over old times. The Lunatic was ... amused ... (for certain very liberal values of "amused") ... but not deceived. ) Conclusion? Perfect couple.

Snot
I got myself some Claritin for the allergy issue. So far it's doing a decent job. We'll see how it holds up overnight. If it really does work for me, I'm possibly so switching to it. I'll be due my next dose at 5 tomorrow when I'm at work. I've got it in my purse. I shouldn't forget it. I got the 5-dose box so I wouldn't be wasting much money if it didn't work, but this seems to be doing a good job against industrial-strength tree bukkake. My body started warning me the other day that it was just as well that Sis had not gotten the allergy meds that I'd been using, because those are about to lose their effectiveness on me. I trust my body when it tells me these things.

Writing
After I came back home from seeing my roommatesister off to her application meeting for the job, I zoomed out to freshstartwrite. I got there early. It didn't really go live until 6:30 or 6:45, when more people than just three (me, the Pirate Queen, and one of the newer women) showed. Various people shared various things. I got some writing in.

Spotted Dick
At the writing group, I told the tale of the April Fool's Day Spotted Dick, and there were howls of laughter. Inordinate howls of laughter, in fact. It's possible to make so much innuendo out of one innocent pudding (with custard).... We determined that we would like at some point to take a field trip.

Love Poems
I slipped nicely from the Spotted Dick into the introduction to my actual written piece, which was a vague recap of theferrett's assertion that those writing love songs tend to mention very much far less the amount of work that goes into maintaining a close relationship than it actually takes. I had written a sort of love poem thing based on that. I'd copied down the original post into my paper journal, and as people had been trickling in, I'd been working on expanding and re-phrasing it. I'd been working out of the bond, so it was intense stuff to my eyes and ears, and judging by the reaction of the group, a general round of *stunned* and *wow*, it came out that way as well. It didn't hurt that I was sort of purring it, like I did when reading "To his Coy Mistress" on the phone post the other day.

More Writing Group
It was nice to hang out with the people. There was a new person this time, and she had an excellent bit of poetry. Some of the other newer usual suspects were there. The usual group leader wasn't there, but her deputy was, despite the new job. All was quite happy. There was a reprise of "the tampon-swinging story", where a mother reviewed some of the silliest moments in the upbringing of her boy. I drew a cartoon of same, and she's going to take it home and put it up and see what he says about it.

Bus
I have had an interesting relationship with buses today. The first bus in the morning was great. It was the nice long kind of bus, with the articulated middle. I wound up sitting way back in the back. I like doing that with the long buses. It makes me feel almost as if I'm on an airplane. I like airplanes. I like large forms of mass transit. Not sure why. The second bus, coming back from the plasma place, was crowded with schoolchildren from Dragonflye, all in school uniform. I got off that bus at the nearest connection, because it was jammed and I was not up for standing. I wound up having a conversation with a co-worker who skeeved me only mildly, given that I'm not particularly accustomed to giving out even the general area where I live on first contact with a stranger. "Near my school" was as much as I was willing to say. I'm a bit private in person. Furthermore, the bus that both of us then got on smelled strongly of none-too-fresh boiled eggs, which is one of my least favorite smells. (I can't abide Easter for this reason alone.) Heading out to writing group, the Red Line bus I was on kept stalling, much to the disconcertion of the people onboard, and I had to scurry to make it to the McDowell line. Coming back, however, all the stars and buses were aligned just right so that I only had to wait a few minutes at either stop, and I wasn't particularly crowded with the weirdest of the weird on the bus.

Cats
My meep is curled up in my bed. The Mosh is curled up on the back of the couch in my room. All is therefore good.

Work
I have my schedule re-arranged to account for Marx's new schedule. I work tomorrow, but not Saturday, and though I theoretically do work Sunday, the office is closed for Easter.

Relations
For Easter, the household is visiting my roommatesister's great-aunt's annual Easter bash. I hope there's something the household can eat there, as one of the traditional Easter main dishes is ham, and this household shows solidarity with my roommatesister's complete inability to digest pork when visiting her biological relations.

So Ashcroft wants to crack down on porn, huh? (not work-safe)

Via vidicon


If you don't want porn in your household, that's your own business. Amazingly enough, there are people on my friends list who do not want porn in their households, and that's their decision to make, and I can almost understand where they're coming from. (They don't grok my position very well either, so we can at least agree on that.) But, you see, there's no problem with consenting adults getting their hands on adult materials, as long as all the adults are adult and consenting. (This is leaving, for the minute, the problem of what you do when the person is under the legal age, over the physical/hormonal maturity level to appreciate same, and getting to insane tension levels, completely out of it.)

I want my porn, and I want my porn, and I want my porn. I suspect that this sentiment is echoed by many other people. I would like it to be that people would never get unwanted porn. Do I like porn spam in my inbox? Of course not. Do I like porn pop-up ads when I'm just trying to read a goddamn website? No! Especially because unsolicited/free porn and adware/spyware/malware go hand-in-...um...hand.

It would be so easy if all people who wanted porn could say that they were open to the possibility of porn, but only when they sought it out, or seek their own level of control, and people who wanted to avoid it could choose their own level of exposure.

The problems, of course, start coming in when you have different members of a household who have different wishes on porn. Household Member A may find it revolting and disgusting and degrading; Household Member B may actually enjoy it. Household Member A may put their foot down, or assume that Household Member B will agree, because no self-respecting person could/should like porn. When Household Member B does not agree, perhaps there is a bad communications misfire, and Household Member A will blame it on the corrupting influence of the porn.

It is at this time that I'd like to say that I think that the US in general has a huge problem with its attitudes toward sex and relationships. It is my firm belief that couples who do get in relationship-damaging fights about porn would, and probably do, get in fights just as bad about other things if there is a basic disagreement on the underlying principle of the thing and the thing was also one of those unquestioned bone-deep assumptions. Religion, for example. Who should get married. How to raise a child. Every time you've got a close relationship and an unchecked assumption that goes "All right-thinking people X", you've got the start of a very lovely potential time bomb that has more or less explosive power based on how very wrong you think that the (obviously) wrong-thinking people who don't think the same way you do on the topic are. The more wrong you are certain they are, the worse the explosion's going to be when you find out that your partner is actually secretly wrong-thinking.

And Person A will have innumerable proofs that Person B's way of thinking is really wrong-thinking. And Person B won't be amused.

I really do hate the way that sex is treated in this country with the madonna/whore stereotype, or the madonna/whore/marriage thing. No sex is the only good sex. All sex is equally good for everyone. All sex is acceptable, but only when the only parties participating in any way are in a long-term committed relationship to each other. Kids should be exposed to everything from infancy so they learn. Kids should not learn about sex other than not having it until they are old enough to be married. Sheesh.

How did I learn about sex? I got the basic "where babies come from" lecture when I was around two, because I was having a baby sister, and I was aware that my parents had mixed their genetic material, and now there was a baby growing inside Mama, and I would have a red, wrinkly, crying baby in the household to deal with. (My father believes in truth in advertising. And sure enough, it was a red, wrinkly, crying baby.) When we got chickens, we learned about mating and courtship. The rooster trips over his wing to court the hen, who hunches down so he can hop on top, and if she sits on her eggs, there could be baby chicks! But there aren't baby chicks every time the rooster hops on top. Grown-ups sleep in the same bed together all snuggly. I wanted a husband so that I wouldn't be sleeping by myself, and I could sleep together all snuggly with him. Roosters keep their testicles inside their bodies. The bigger and meaner the rooster and the bigger and redder his comb, the more likely that when we butcher him, that his testicles are larger than the testicles of the more-pecked roosters. (We did have a few powerful but diplomatic roosters, like Xiao Ji.) I learned about human biological details more in depth in school, that this was how the insides of the anatomy looked. Due to the casual household dress code in private as well as anatomically correct babydolls we'd had when younger, THIS IS WHAT A PENIS LOOKS LIKE, AND THOSE FUNKY THINGS ARE TESTICLES, AND THAT'S THE SCROTUM HOLDING THE TESTES THERE was not news to me.

So, when my mind finally put together "This is the anatomy, and oh! it is fun to do things with the reproductive equipment!" it was not a shocker. I wasn't traumatically introduced to it by someone who was far more experienced. I was a little amazed at the ... creative variety ... but on the whole I was intrigued rather than repulsed.

I seriously think that any household-internal disagreements about the proper place of pornography (accepted or not in that household) would be best carried out in an individual household counseling/mediation situation, where a solution uniquely suited to the beliefs, needs, and individual backgrounds of all concerned could be worked out. (If it couldn't be in that sort of situation, then there are probably other underlying problems between the individuals, or the mediator is not doing their job properly.) I do not think that pornography rulings are something that can be carried out on a level more broad than by household, or perhaps even by neighborhood or city (can any of these stores open up business based here, for neighborhood or city rulings). I think that having national law restricting the ability of a consenting adult to obtain pornography for personal use is insane. I think that money spent on enforcing anti-pornography laws would be far better spent on supporting counseling for those who have a household/relationship difference of opinion on pornography, and those who have suffered sexual abuse.