I’ve been aided over the last week by some really excellent conversation. It certainly doesn’t fix anything in any practical way, but it does help my general mood.
For starters, Chris and I have been passing some emails back and forth I’ve really enjoyed. While much of the conversation has very much been The Big Conversation, we’ve also been dishing nostalgia for 80’s punk culture and have had a bit of an ongoing fracas about which of us, exactly, deserves the love of Patti Smith.
Honestly, I think I can keep my hat outside that ring, and leave Chris to fight it out amongst all the other ardent Patti-lovers of the world. As I often tell Mr. Price, while I’ve done open relationships before, I just can’t hack poly, simply because I don’t have the bleeding attention span, the time or the patience for the regular dramas which so often ensue. As it is, I’ve already long been in the situation where my primary partner is actually my work, and making the time and emotional room for just one partner is hard enough. An affair with Patti couldn’t ever be casual or occasional, but rather, would necessarily be all-encompassing. If I can’t manage to even work out an occasional one-night-stand anymore on top of everything else, there’s no way in hell I could manage a love relationship with a goddess.
Speaking of Patti, Fish came over with her cousin the other day for a wonderful evening of wine-guzzling and cupcake-nibbling –as well as lawnmower-donation, thank christ — and what did she have in her hot little hands? Two tickets for us to see Patti at the Showbox when I get back from Chicago. Talk about a good friend. I fully expect us to squeal like Beatlemaniacs throughout, before, and for many days after.
My Aussie friend Stephen and I also got to have some great conversation this week, time differences and my being seriously over-caffeinated that day notwithstanding (poor guy).
Over the last month or so, I’ve also lucked out in netting a few phenomenal sex educators as volunteers for the advice column section at Scarleteen. It’s always been very hard to get and keep adult volunteers — I don’t really blame anyone, it’s not easy work, nor is it work you’re going to have universal love showered on you for doing. So, having Sarah and David on board now, and Jhames back, as well as a longtime youth volunteer who is now an adult public health expert, Susie, is brilliant. We also have Paul Joannides on board, too.
Getting and keeping adult male volunteers is even harder then netting adult women for help, which always bites. I could go into why I think that often is, but it’s involved and I’m in no mood for a diatribe (and after my earlier one, you’re probably not, either) about the crappy way men are so often socially conditioned when it comes to sex and sexual philanthropy, as well as the valid fears adult men now have to have about being engaged in any way with teen sexuality, even in a context like this. It’s not that it’s somehow essential that teens with questions have same-sex people answering them, but often enough, many of them prefer that. Sure, I can answer the questions for the guys, but they also have a special appreciation when adult men just demonstrate that they understand and they care, so having a couple solid male volunteers is a big blessing.
In walking Paul through some of the backend stuff the other day, on the phone we ended up in a conversation that spanned nearly two hours, and was just fantastic. It’s a rarity for me to be able to have good opportunities to just sit and share notes with other sex educators and researchers: that’s always so productive and important for any of us. Given how widely sexuality, sex lives and sexual attitudes vary, and how different the populations/generations any of us works with can be, sharing shop talk is divine. It also makes me feel less isolated in what I do, which is a pretty big deal right now. I’m thinking that if things somehow manage to look up for me and the sites over the next couple of months (the maybe lifesaver I mentioned in passing a couple weeks ago didn’t pan out: not surprised, but still a bummer), that it might be high time to try and organize some sort of regular regional roundtable of folks working in sex education and sexual health so that we can just sit around and compare notes.
But well before that, there will be Patti. And me. And not you, Chris.
August 13th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.