Things that constantly amaze me

• Rain. I know the sciencey blah behind it. But seriously, it just falls from the sky. Then it doesn't. Then it does. Then it sniffs out public holidays and stays! Brilliant!
  
• The abilty of cats to sense when you wake up and appear just in time to wind themselves in between your legs on the way to the kitchen.
  
• My continuing fascination with Matt Preston
  
• Auto Electricians. *Snip *Snip *Snip *Twist *Key-click *VROOM. There you go, done. They make a spidery mess make sense in ten secons flat.
  
• How I can use a packet mix to make muffins yet still feel like a masterchef at 6am when those little bliss bombs roll out of the oven.
  
• The addictive properties of the Zelda series of games.
  
• Tourism-driven art vendors.
  
• That practising scales to a metronome is the best form of relaxation I know.
  
• How much Jonah continues to amuse me. I just watched him bury his nose into the bristle end of an oversize paintbrush and waited for the inevitable sneeze. Cracks me up every time.
  
• Touch phones
  
• The undiminishing libido of my partner... *grin*
  

Gender and the Bathroom

I've started wearing ties again. Oh Fuck, it's been about two years since I felt comfortable enough in one. Let's just say that the elements I surrounded myself with in the time in between were rather quick to judge and I fell for it, slowly but surely cutting out the little masculine things I enjoyed. At the time I was kidding myself that I was fitting in. Now I see it as a major setback in my personal gender explorations.

Anyways, tonight I stepped out in a dress shirt and a tie. Apart from the fact that my chest still sticks out far more than I'd like it to, I looked good. I was happy. All I needed to do was to avoid checking myself out in side profile and I'd be fine and confident in my manufactured masculinity. Happy and fine as a non-gender-specific polymorphous individual.

I'm lucky to be sharing a very supportive environment now. The people around me are not just okay with me expressing who I am, they are encouraging me to explore it more, even. It feels great to be filling out my own skin again.

The fact that there are differences between my reality and that of other people became apperent when I went to the bathroom at the club we were having dinner at just this evening. I went to the bathroom for obvious reasons, and also to tidy up my apperance. I adjusted my tie in the mirror as I was turning to leave. At the same time, a poor older lady was walking in. She looked at me and I could see the embarrassment in her eyes. Panic that she'd walked into the wrong bathrooms. She walked backwards out the door and checked the sign.

Shit.

First thought: I don't want a scene here at all.

Second thought: Fuck you, lady. I wear who I am on the outside. I'm sure you piss in the same bathroom as your husband at home anyway.

Such a dilemma. I felt for her confusion, yet was angered by her narrow-mindedness.

Perhaps I just need to remind myself that other people's thoughts and reactions are their own, and not mine?

Night Out

An hour of preparation shared between the shower, razor and the bedroom mirror.
An hour of self-admonishment for forgetting how to let loose with my style.
Five cans of Rum & Dry.
Half a dozen cigarettes and a couple of slices of cold pizza.

Smash the last can of rum down on the half-dozen block walk to the train station and there’s no turning back.

We’re going out on the town.

More specifically, I’m going out on the town to the only local gay bar I know in existence. That was another point of self-admonishment. I’ve forgotten my dyke style. I haven’t been around my kindred spirits for so long I’ve forgotten how to make my statement among them.

Twenty minutes of train journey.
Twenty minutes of enduring some snotty little teenage girls talking about how many guys they got onto and how so-and-so is so disgusting for getting onto so-and-so.
Get me another fucking drink.

I turn on the music player on my phone as I get off the train. Let’s have some pump-up music, in the form of Big and Rich’s party track Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy:
Well I saddle up my horse and I ride into the city
I make a lot of noise ‘cause the girls they are so pretty

Yep, yes, and hell yeah. I’m hoping to see me quite a few of those pretty girls, bust a few beers down and perhaps make a few friends. Then I plan on getting my merry arse on to the dance floor and working off all the pies I shouldn’t have had on the way to work. Then, hopefully, I’ll make it home without sleeping past my stop on the train.

It worked out, sort of. I listened to bad karaoke run by a fantastically camp tranny. I watched two absolutely gorgeous women play some great pool. I was hanging out in the smokers’ section chatting to the occasional random person when…
I got picked up on.
You’re joking. I think to myself.
I haven’t hit my peak with the style. I’m wearing sneakers for fuck’s sake. I’m carrying ten kilos more fat than I want to, and in all the wrong places.
Surely this is a joke.

I bailed to the dancefloor because I wasn’t actually there to pick up. I just wanted a night out.

She continued to seek me out, cornering me in the smoker’s section.

No joke. She definitely wanted me. Wow! Holyshit and whatthefuck all in one big swirly mix. I ended up trying to go home because I wasn’t exactly that interested in her. She was sexy all right, but I was tired and she was extremely forward. She asked if she could kiss me before I left. Sure, I say. Why the fuck not then?

It was nice, although it felt as though she was trying to rape me in the middle of the courtyard after a while. I broke it off, kind of embarrassed to be virtually fucking in front of everyone, and also not wanting to have her think I was going to take her home. Another day, maybe I would have. Not this time. I had only just started coaxing my dykeness back out of the closet and there was no way sex was going to come easily to me. I thought it best to head home. That’s where things turned nasty.

I was a fucking tease
A mole.
Apparently I knew that she’d had her eyes on me from the second I walked in the door.
An arsehole.

So maybe it’s going to take a while to get my mojo back in full swing. Certainly it’s going to take a while to deal with being hit on. That normally doesn’t happen to me and was a daunting surprise to say the least.

But the mojo, my inner dyke style?
It’s coming. It’s coming back with a vengeance.

Project Texture

Kat has come up with the challenge this time - to photograph texture. It seems like such a broad context, but to take it out of the realm of the obvious is proving quite a challenge to think about.

My starting point is at the local wetland centre - just around the corner from home. Bush, and plenty of interest in it. I've always liked the texture of barks from different trees. At the moment the scarring within the bark textures is captivating. Little bits of scars from the story of the life of that particular tree. A history in a sense. A little inner glimpse.

I guess this one could be like one of those psychologist dot pictures...



See in it what you will!

Evolutionary dead ends

I read this morning that there has been a new jellyfish discovered. It's been described as an "evolutionary dead end" - no ability to sting and no ability to swim. It moves by gliding along the seagrass. What captured my interest about it? The thing has its mouth on the underside and its anus wrapped around its brain.

Bingo!

I once had a girlfriend like that. She was a starfish in bed. And she's this jellyfish in every other way.

What is it with dykes and sea creatures?

Dyke with back pain

I couldn't sleep. I tried the side, the stomach, the other side. I tried curled up with my legs crossed in the air. I crawled half off the bed and lay my poor screaming back on the cold hard floor.

Painkillers? Nope, they didn't help either.

So what is this dyke supposed to do?

Well of course. Grab that dildo out of the drawer, shove it right under the offending vertebrae and give it some relief.

Obviously I'm in the wrong profession.

Powered By Rabbit Vibrators


I am contemplating sending my ex-girlfriends a bill.

McSeediness revisited

Way way back in the beginning of the year...

It was a seedy friday night at the main drinking sludgefest pub of the time. I was picked up by a girl and went home with her. I'm pretty backward when it comes to these sort of things - it was the first and only time I've ever gone home with somebody to their place before on the first meeting. When I got there I thought, Vic, is this really what you want to do? Shag a random person you don't know? In their house? So I said sorry, I don't want to do this. And went to sleep.

Only now do I hear rumour that people were told that I passed out. Not that I said no thankyou.

Is this the lesbian equivalent to girls saying that the guy they picked up couldn't get it up?

Do you need 237 reasons?

This morning I read an article about a study that found there were 237 reasons that people have sex.

Here's the first little snippet:

Many scientists assume people have sex for simple and straightforward reasons such as to experience sexual pleasure or to reproduce, but new research at The University of Texas at Austin reveals hundreds of varied and complex motivations that range from the spiritual to the vengeful.

After conducting one of the most comprehensive studies on why people have sex, psychology researchers David Buss and Cindy Meston uncovered 237 motivations, which appear in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior.

People’s motivations ranged from the mundane (“I was bored”) to...

Well. A while back I did the 8 things meme. And my number eight thing that I revealed about myself is that when I get bored, I get horny*. It's just interesting that the first reason quoted in the article is the same.

*[And the disclaimer: Being bored is not my primary reason for sex. However it is the primary thing I choose to occupy my thoughts with when bored.]

I'm in!

The sensationally suave and sexy Sinclair of Sugarbutch Chronicles is running a competition of sorts, where readers submit a scenario for an erotic piece. There will be five finalists, and Sinclair will write those scenarios.

Check it out here.

Road trips, dilemmas, misconceptions

Blogger Vic is hitting the road this weekend. I need no persuading to leave the cold and drudgery of this particular part of the countryside. Even though I've been living here for the past (shit is it really that long?) eleven years I am still a coastal child at heart. Give me sun, bare feet and the beach and I'm happy. This town is absolutely beautiful in autumn and winter, and I could photograph it all day. But there lies the problem... I could photograph it all day if I wanted to remove myself from the heater and step outside. While wearing five layers, a beanie that makes me look like a cartoon condom ad and a pair of fingerless hobo gloves. Yeah right.

I've been looking forward to this trip so much that I have a mental list of things to do before going, which includes packing, cleaning out the car, making sure I've got camera batteries. All the usual stuff. But yesterday afternoon something occurs to me. What is one thing I really don't want to have to deal with this weekend? A quick mental count and I start to get paranoid. Sadly, I had to check my Monday Melee posts to be sure...

My period is due soon. Fuck. I don't want to have to deal with that for my weekend away.

When I left my boyfriend for a girl I threw out my contraceptive pill packet with the relieved thought of well, won't need those again will we? and I've been living a relaxed schedule of taking it as it comes for years now. But this weekend? No way do I want that to happen.

So Blogger Vic goes into damage control mode. Can I stop this thing in time? Who do I know that I can snavel some pills out of, if only to get me through the weekend and deal with the rest later on? I look through my phone book. Mostly I know gay women. Not much love there - they're in the same boat as me. So I end up calling my friend who also happens to my boss at work. Oh shameful. This has the potential to make me the laughing point for weeks to come, but I'm determined.

Um... I know you're gonna laugh. But... are you on the pill?...
Okay, you are. Cool. Can you... hmmm. Sell me some?

Turns out she's on her last lot. Shit.

So Blogger Vic heads off to a rehearsal with calming thoughts of it's okay. Your weekend is not ruined. Just a little inconvenient. It's not the end of the world. And at the rehearsal, like a shining light, there happens to be a doctor. With a book of scripts. My saviour. Hopefully I've caught it in time to stop any annoying occurences...

But the story does not end there.

I turn up to work this morning to face my boss grinning at me. 7am in a freezing and deserted veggie shop, just the two of us. She says to me Vic, it's not going to work.

Don't tell me that. I've got to try. She says You know Vic, you're better off with the morning after pill.

Why? I look at her blankly. Gently she says well... you just... take it after.

And that's where I get what totally different trains of thought we're on. Oh hell, she thinks I've decided to jump the fence and go away on a cock hunt! Standing in a freezing deserted veggie shop laughing at each other like total idiots, we got that one cleared up.

Walking past her office later, I poke my head in, looking at her very seriously.
Mate, if I was going to jump the fence what makes you think I wouldn't just use a condom? Then I laughed and went back to work.

Well tie me down and paint daisies on my toenails.

My masculinity has been threatened lately. By others, by my own thoughts. I'm in a spin of self-confusion regarding my own identity. What's interesting, though, is that I'm recognising my own confusion and not allowing it to take me over entirely.

It's always been there a little, but over the last six or eight months I've desperately wanted a penis. To become something else. To express these traits so deeply a part of my interior workings on the exterior. I've actually felt like a part of me has been missing.

But I wanted the right one. Lack of sex shops in the area (actually there's none in town) means I have to travel to look. Which requires time. Online is a possibility, but I'd rather see the product in the flesh. Funnily, also... The dick that I have in mind as mine is a relatively small one. And do you think you can find anything small easily in a sex shop?

So I left it. And what's happening to me now is that the desperate obsession is subsiding. Don't get me wrong, it's still there a little. I think that I pushed my own thinking and feelings to an extreme, and now I'm settling back into a more balanced mix of gender ideals. Rather than just wanting to be male. I am non gender specific. It works for me, but not having an existing gender role to identify with leaves me a little lost. But that's okay. At the core of it all I am Vic.

I grow, I evolve, I am Vic.

At the local art gallery I found what I once thought I needed.



And I walked away.

Dear Vic,

Ten points on your decision to just be single and not spend at least the rest of this year looking for a partner. You’ll get more done that way.

It shows that you want to learn your drum parts for brass band state championships this year. It shows that you know you’re spending far too little time playing guitar. It shows that you value yourself. It shows that you’re embracing the idea that love will happen when you least expect it. It shows that you couln’t give a rats if you found the right person tomorrow, as long as you got your space.

Hopefully it does not show you to be full of shit.

Cheers,
Vic

Warning: asshole ideals ahead

I just want some one who gets me. Eventually.

My ideal – call me shallow if you will, I’m in the mood at the moment to be shallow and an asshole - my ideal partner, friend, whatever…. Anyone I want to spend quality time with has:

Consideration to others around them, people skills. Care for the well being of the people around them. People in the street. People they’ve never met. Just a good sense of nice.

Ability to read maps. I like driving. I need a navigator. Or at least the willingness to learn to read a map. I love navigation and I honestly find it hard to understand anyone who doesn’t have a sense of direction. This is anal but who cares – I’m an asshole, right?

Respect for my property and personal space. Actually for anyone’s property and personal space. And time. I don’t have much of it spare but I give it freely when I do. I don’t want to feel like I’m being waited around for constantly. Maybe I need to find someone as busy as I am so that we cross paths every now and then and that’s it.

Culture. Appreciation of art and the world around them. Open eyes for possibility. Appreciation of music, but not along the lines of snobbery. Just an open mind and an awe of the world.

Someone with get up and go. Someone with a job who doesn’t sit around all day watching the time go by. Or worse, stay up all night and then sleep through the day just because they think there’s nothing better to do than waste time.

Someone who likes to stuff about playing frisbee or racing down the isles of the supermarket. Or to go for road trips when the time is there just because life is too short to play house.

Maybe I should just appreciate being alone.

It's all about the music, take three

First I wrote a post aboutMadame xPod. Then I followed it up posting about the vibrating iPod accessory, the OhMiBod. And now...

A couple of steps further we go WIRELESS. Meet the Talk2Me.

'Talk2Me is a wireless audio reactive rabbit-style vibrator. Audio is modulated for tactile feel and transmitted wirelessly! That’s right- no wires.

Bass and treble are divided so you can feel the difference between the strong pumping bass and the tickle of the treble. Use it as a standard vibe or with your favorite song, your lover’s voice, a podcast, or your boyfriend’s video game.

Talk2Me comes with a standard audio cable to plug the small transmitter into any audio source.

It even has an EQ control. Visit the website just to see the flash pic of how the bass and treble vibrations are split.

Two text messages and half a day later

Recieved 4am this morning:

I am really sorry. sorry for expecting u to be there no matter what. i have been such an ass. and it makes me sad to think that this is the first time i've realised it. i hope ur not to mad at me.

Recieved at 11:30am this morning, same author:

Sorry bout that. u know how i get when in drunk. i fully intend to stop harassing u. i would delete ur number so i couldn't send anymore random msg but i know it so that wouldn't work. anyways have a good weekend and yeah. good times.

Bugger it. No, don't delete my number. Don't tell me you didn't mean the first message because that was so nice to hear.

Valentine's

Did I have some secret lover reveal themselves to me?
No.

Did I have some secret lover alert me their presence but not reveal themselves to me?
No again.

Did anyone say any thing about it at all, apart from "Oh yeah, it's Valentine's Day"?
No, frickin' hell no, and no again.

Did I wake up with a girl beside me who I had the chance to shag and decided not to?
Yes.


I believe that I might have induced some bad karma for the rest of the day with that one.

Another damn quiz.

via Hedonistic Pleasureseeker I took this test to see if I could pick the difference between baby toys and sex toys.

9 out of 15.

My 'first' was

Just because Ms. Viragobrat from The Dyke Dispatch asked, or politely gave "the opportunity to be forthcoming"...

Okay, a girl from the all-girl boarding school I went to.

Online dating

I just joined Lesbotronic and after a thousand drop-down menu questions, I had to fill in the 'bit about yourself' box. I hate them. What do you say? So I decided to cut and paste this one because I actually thought I did a good job [for once].

"I like playing pool in small pubs. I teach music and play in bands - guitar, bass and percussion depending on the situation. I have cat who plays fetch and is very protective of me, while seeming to view me with utter contempt. She is a legend! Eventually I would like to find someone I can feel complete with at the end of the day - not totally reliant upon, but secure in the knowledge that she is there. If you can't spell and don't know about the use of the apostrophe, I'll try to be patient, but it won't be easy."