I’ll cut this time cause there are multiple sets.

Poly: As with most everything, I have some major mixed feelings about poly. On one hand, depending on your definitions, I’ve only been monogamous for more than nine months of my life once (and that period just ended thanks to an awesome chica) so it’s not like I can claim that I’m monogamous. But I rarely tend to be seriously emotionally involved with multiple people. In the past I was a fantastic sport-fucking person. I liked sex and I liked it with a wide variety of people and that was YAY! There have been a few times where I was seriously emotionally involved with more than one person and I tend to feel a lot of guilt and conflict when I do this. At this point I’m not up for much casual play so if I’m going to be doing much with anyone but Noah I think I would have to develop a relationship first to feel safe. That said, I have an easier time doing casual play with women than men at this point. There is something about the invasion of my body with a penis that feels much much scarier right now than everything I can do with a woman. It’s weird. It’s hard to know what I want exactly because there is so much baggage around everything. I think I would cheerfully continue to be monogamous for a long time to come but it’s not where Noah is at right now so I’m trying to figure out how to make poly work for us. It may be that I am mostly monogamous but he dates even though that is harder for me than both of us dating. This is all complicated by the fact that my relationship to my body has changed and sex is hard and I’m honestly kind of afraid of being with other people. I can certainly get into the mode where I am ‘on’ and I’m getting someone else off but it is hard to let go and be really emotionally present during sex right now. It’s more intimate and vulnerable than it has ever been for me. I really wish I knew what I want.

TNG: I really don’t give a shit about the TNG crap despite the fact that I helped run the con. I’ve never been all that involved with the TNG movement. When I was asked to start a SiG for Janus years ago I told them that I thought most people my age were twats so why would I want to increase the time I spent with them? I have always preferred people who were older than me as friends so I didn’t have much of a problem in the scene when I was young. If I’m honest I’ve always felt pretty scathing for the people who need a “safe place” to come into the scene away from all those “icki old people”. My feeling is that if you are too fucking immature to say no when someone hits on you then you need to get back in the god damn playpen. So yeah. That said, I have learned to appreciate the value of talking to people who are in the same stage of life as me but I find that is less age dependent than circumstance dependent. I like talking to other new parents but I don’t need them to be my age.

marriage: Well, I’m married. I think that anyone who wants to get married should be allowed to, duh. The part that may be kind of odd/interesting is that I didn’t marry Noah because I loved him. I mean, I did and do love him and all–but that’s not why I married him. I married Noah because I have a boatload of respect for him, I wanted to have kids with him, and I was very confident that we could always work through shit enough to be happy living together. I think that the ‘love’ part will come and go over the decades. I think that the western obsession with romantic love is pretty foolish. What most people think of as ‘love’ is a chemical reaction that lasts a pretty short time. I make a choice to stay with Noah and to ‘love’ him because he is someone I respect and like. I absolutely believe that marriage is a good idea if you are going to have kids because there are legal benefits to marriage that you cannot get any other way that benefit children. I think that marriage is a legal contract and not some sort of spiritual union which is why I very carefully chose what I wanted to agree to when I married him. 🙂

California: Home. I’m a native. I am an 8th generation Californian. I really feel like I belong here. I periodically think about moving and it would probably work out if I put my mind to it but I think this would always feel like home still.

pregnancy: I’m kind of obsessed with it, really. Pregnancy is transformative in a way that nothing else in the whole world is. Despite the fact that I had a not-so-easy pregnancy I think I would go through it like six times if I could. I have previously considered surrogacy and depending on how it goes with Little TBD I may consider it again. If I have another really rough pregnancy I don’t think it would be fair to Noah and Shanna and Little TBD to do it recreationally if it would be a miserable experience. I am amazed at how strong and powerful I felt knowing that I was creating a human being. And the experience of watching my body change was something that dwarfed all other life experiences for me. And I think I looked f’in hot pregnant. 🙂

Cute: I am less obsessed with cute than many I know. I’m not interested in sitting around looking at cute baby animals. I’m not into diminutive things. I bloody hate tchotchke. If you are talking about humans it changes a bit. The things I perceive as cute are different from the things I perceive as attractive. I think of cute as being non sexual and honestly slightly off putting. Cute requires a delicacy I’m just not into.

Passion: I tend to feel things more strongly than most from what I can tell. I tend to feel passionately about something or I don’t care at all. As one might guess this has made my life more difficult. I overreact to things just as a matter of course because my feelings are so intense. I’ve had a lot of trouble with feeling passion during sex since I got pregnant really. Although just lately my biological clock turned back on and that’s been rather nice. I have enjoyed sex more in the last month than I have in a very long time. I’m jumping Noah and feeling aggressive and that’s nice. 🙂

Truth: Oh I’m big on telling the truth. Even if the truth hurts and really kind of sucks I’m going to tell it anyway. The truth will set you free and all that. My family is big on lying, still. I was taught to lie the way other people are taught to have table manners. Lying almost killed me though and I won’t have any part of it in my life now. I will say that there is a difference between lying and having tact and that one was really really hard for me to learn. For quite some time there I was brutally meanly honest and that’s not helpful either. There is a happy medium. People don’t want to be told when they are fucking things up. People don’t want to be told their flaws in clear, concise language. That’s all part of offering up unsolicited opinions. I would rather be told the absolute brutal truth (even if it makes me cry) than be told a nice little white lie.

Shanna: I have wanted Shanna for so long. There is a small part of me that believes she is so happy because I can’t imagine a child being more wanted than she is. (A bigger part of me knows that personality is luck of the draw and it’s really not about me.) Shanna allows me to look at the world and see all the awesome I usually ignore. Shanna gives me reason to not be such a self-absorbed fuck. 🙂 I think she is turning into a neat person and I really like seeing her personality emerge from the blob that is babyhood.

Hugs: I have mixed feelings about them. Like most human beings I need physical contact with others but periodically over time I have gone through stages where I needed an unusual amount of control over being touched. Luckily I know some extremely respectful people who became really awesome about asking me before touching me at all in any way. Yay! That has relaxed a lot over the years so most people don’t ask me any more and it’s ok. I think people are still probably more physically reserved with me than they otherwise might be and I think that is for the best. I get twitchy if people are too aggressive about touching me.

Intelligence: Dead sexy. I think that intelligence is my primary turn on, thus marrying one of the few people I have ever met where I know hands down that he is so much smarter than me that I look stupid next to him. That’s saying a lot because I’m pretty fucking smart. Being intelligent is a double edged sword though because it often causes people to be restless and to want things. This is a lot of what has driven my inability to relate to my family and that’s hard for me. My mother’s family is in all honesty not real smart. They don’t understand me and they frequently resent me because things are easy for me that are basically impossible for them. How do you have a relationship with that basis? I tend to seek out intelligence as often as possible in the people around me. That said people who are too full of themselves because they are smart really piss me off. Being smart does *not* make you freakin better than anyone else and get over yourself.

Books: Enh, I guess they are ok. 🙂 When I was a kid books gave me a way to escape my life. My life sucked so I could go immerse myself in someone else’s world and just ignore reality. I still mainly use books that way. I absolutely am an escapist reader and that is one of the biggest motivators behind my love of historical romance. I became an English teacher because I wanted to help other people learn how to approach books in a way that would work for them and it sorta kinda worked. Mostly I just ended up teaching people how to think and that was absolutely for the best-not everyone is going to be a reader but everyone has to think. I’m less interested in nonfiction these days and I think I am done with the classics for this decade. I’m not sure when I will get over my bitterness about all the books I read for the masters given that I still failed out. I’m starting to try a bit more sci-fi mostly because it’s in the house and why not? Something that very few people know is that the biggest motivator behind me avoiding sci-fi like the plague is that my father was an avid sci-fi reader. He read three or four sci-fi books a week and I’ve always tried to avoid everything I associate with him.

Kindness: I have such a mixed relationship with kindness. On one hand I struggle to be kind, on the other people often don’t recognize my kindness so I feel taken for granted. Verbally I am sharp and difficult but if you pay attention to what I am physically doing I am generally endeavoring to make other peoples lives better in some way. I cook, I clean, I fix things, I try to make things go more smoothly–but all of these things are easy to ignore. I do them in my house and when I go to out as well. I try very hard to never leave a big mess when I am at a restaurant because I believe it is unkind to the waitstaff even though it is their job. I think that talk is cheap and actions are what matter but no one seems to look at my actions when they describe me less than positively. It’s hard. I find that most of the people who are commonly seen as ‘kind’ are just as snarky or caustic as everyone else they just are more sly about it and that bugs me. Why does a person need to be disingenuous to be kind? Why is that kindness?

Communication: I try so hard. I still fail at being good at communication in a lot of ways and with a lot of people. The funny thing is that a lot of my reputation for being good at communication is because I am good at analyzing my fuck ups after the fact and I’m really good at taking things apart in writing and I then put stuff on livejournal. I actually kind of suck in person in the moment. I don’t tell people in the moment when I’m having an issue, often because I have a weird feeling but I don’t know how to take it apart under pressure. I tend to shut down when I feel like someone doesn’t like me/is mad at me and that’s not real helpful. I’m better than I used to be but that isn’t saying all that much. I get mad that other people don’t seem to work as hard at communication as I do. It feels like people are dumping an unfair portion of the hard shit on me and that’s frustrating.

Sex: It used to be so easy and now it isn’t. I used to know what worked for me and how and when and now… not as much. Fertility has helped enormously but it’s still harder than it used to be. Now I want sex for bonding and for feeling intimacy and less for just getting my rocks off. I need foreplay in a way I never have. I need to be touched softly and gently and told good things about myself. WHERE THE HELL DID THIS BUNNY SEX SHIT COME FROM?! It’s weird but we are trying to make it work. It means that all of my previous assumptions about how sex works for me are no longer true. I don’t like it very rough. I need a lot more stimulation to orgasm. I miss easy orgasms.

Breastfeeding: I believe that this is a basic right for all babies. I know people who have a lot of trouble with nursing and who need to supplement with formula and I see that as being a reasonable compromise for a really sucky situation. I think that a lot of the reason people have so much trouble nursing is because we do not have a culture that promotes and teaches nursing as the biological norm. I don’t think that an individual who does not nurse is a terrible person but I do believe they are shortchanging their kid. There are huge benefits that you simply cannot get any other way and why give up on those? I think that two years is full term nursing and anything shorter than that is premature weaning. There are studies showing cumulative benefits up to when a child is three and I suspect that there would be benefits to going longer but there have not been studies done. Ideally I believe that children should be allowed to nurse until they no longer need to nurse; in practice most children wean themselves sometime between four and seven with it being somewhat unusual for kids to need to nurse much past five. I think that the sexualization of nursing is disgusting. I think that just like people know that it is healthier to eat whole grains, vegetables, and food without chemicals they should just know that it is what you should be doing to breastfeed. Does that mean that people can’t choose to eat McDonald’s? No. But it means you should bloody well be honest about what you are choosing to do.

Canes: They hurt and that can be a good thing. I haven’t played with them much in a long time. Once upon a time they were my second favorite thing to be hit with after single tails. I think of them quite fondly and would kind of like to do an intense caning again at some point. Who knows when it will happen.

Elimination Communication: I’m actually kind of sucking about this lately. Shanna started resisting going potty during the day (really common around when kids learn to walk) and I haven’t started up again with taking her. I’m being kind of lame. I think EC is awesome because it is so so so so much easier to take the baby to the potty than to deal with diaper changes. I have never been one of the people who did it ‘on cue’ so much as I just took her to the bathroom every so often and sometimes she went and sometimes she didn’t. I’ll get started again pretty soon because I hear there is a big window around fifteen months where kids often get potty independent a lot faster than they will later.

Entitlement: This is so incredibly hard for me. I think I have a lower than average sense of entitlement to the point where I don’t feel like I deserve things that I do deserve. So I’m super sensitive to other people acting like things are just their due. It drives me up a wall and makes me really angry. And any attempt to justify it makes me go ballistic. I think there is a big difference between wanting the moon and thinking you are entitled to having the moon handed to you on a silver platter. It’s always ok to want things, but check your attitude about whether or not you treat it as something you ‘should’ get. I do my best in this arena and I’m somewhat confident that I’m pretty good about it.

Duality: I suck at duality. I’m a very black and white person still in many crucial ways even though I strive for finding happy mediums. I feel overwhelmingly bad when I have internal conflict and that is what duality feels like to me–internal conflict. I explained to my sister that in many ways I am ‘lawful good’ and I generally believe there is a right and a wrong. So when I see that there are two rights or two wrongs and I have to choose between them I have a hell of a time. I think life would be easier if there were fewer choices. Except for when I don’t think that. ACK!