(So sorry I haven’t kept up with the photo blogging or, in absence of such, any writing here over the last couple of weeks. The short answer — which is also the long answer — is that I am simply working too many jobs. That’s not going to change any time even remotely soon, nor is my workload going to decrease anywhere, but I am hoping at my body and mind will at least start adjusting better soon so I have some time and brainpower back to get back here. As it stands now, on clinic days I come home, shove food in my face, stare at a wall or a screen for just a little bit and pass out. When it’s not a clinic day, I either work in a frenzy on everything known to man until I just can’t stay awake anymore, or, I zone out for hours processing something tough that happened at the clinic.

I did spend the whole of last week and every minute of Friday — after I got back from some extra training at the clinic for something else — through Monday night finishing this monstrously large piece, which was one thing keeping me way too overcommitted, but it is off my desk now. I also put a call out on Scarleteen’s facebook for more volunteers, and am saying a little prayer that will be in some way fruitful. The way things have been going there, there has been more work to do since I started the other job with even less time to do it in, which is not manageable. And don’t even get me started on my photo backlog.

But did just want y’all to know I am alive. Barely, but sometimes life is like that. This, too, shall pass.  And with that, I’m off to the clinic commute.)

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (4) »

Mark and I watched Once the other night, and it was all kinds of brilliant. Possibly my favorite film of the last year, for a whole lot of reasons I won’t spoil the film for you by listing.

It reminded me that I’ve been struggling for some time to figure out a piece for Scarleteen addressing the fact that relationships can have great importance even when they don’t go on for years or even months, and when they’re not sexual or even romantic. Obviously, this is super-pertinent for young people who are often having watershed relationships that also don’t tend to last long periods of time. During them, they’re hyper-aware that they’re important, but there are so many messages that pivotal = long-term that often when they end — or even throughout them — they discount something so huge, or diminish it, and all just because of that misconception. As well, we also have this funny cultural idea about romance that says that anyone who doesn’t stay with you is rejecting you, or feeling you weren’t worth their time, and it’s an idea that discounts the complexity and multifaceted nature of our lives and the value of every single moment.

It’s a big deal for me, too. Even when Mark and I were watching that film, the two main characters have, on the day they first meet, one of those first-meeting-days that turns into this long day and then a long night, mostly of talking, sharing common interests, and suchlike. I was telling him that I just LOVED days like that — we had one when we first met, too: those meetings that just stretch on and on, and there is a certain energy to them that’s all about meeting anew. I’ve had a bunch of those in my life, and sometimes you do continue seeing the other person, and sometimes you don’t, but the import of what happens on those days just isn’t determined by anything BUT that one day.

In college, for instance, on a flight to Oxford-via-Amsterdam in 1990 — back in those halcyon days when there was a smoking section on international flights, and that section was often like a cocktail party — I wound up sitting beside this poetry professor from Iraq. This was a double boon, since previously, I was sitting next to a male schoolmate who had teased me all the way to the airport about the fact that I was a nervous flyer, only to immediately vomit on my feet twice during take-off. So, being able to move at all was a lifesaver. But there I was reading my Blake, preparing for my Big Blake Immersion, and there was this professor reading over my shoulder and sighing blissfully. We wound up in this amazing 7-hour-long conversation, punctuated by an awful lot of wine and the distribution of many cigarettes; about poetry, art, death, poverty, racism, world peace, love, longing, the whole enchilada. We laughed, we cried, we even yelled once or twice, we held hands. When we parted ways, we exchanged things of great value to each of us, so thankful to have made that connection: I gave him a bunch of stones and crystals I always kept with me for my back (I used a cane for walking for six months in college due to an injury), and he gave me this heavy, woven gold ring. I still have and cherish it: I call it the world peace ring because not shortly thereafter, the first (though technically the second- we’re really in the third now) gulf “war” started and it struck me as so tragically silly that if two strangers, from the U.S. and Iraq, could get along so quickly and easily and talk about difficult subjects so freely and openly, surely world leaders apparently schooled in diplomacy could freaking work it out.

I don’t even remember his name. He wrote it in one of the many books I had with me, but I haven’t yet run into which book that was again yet. It’ll be a fun day when that happens. But it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter that I don’t remember his name, it doesn’t matter that that was our only exchange, and likely the only one we will ever have. It is the connection and the moment itself that matters. We both left different than we came. (And after I left him, I had a long layover between flights, so I took this great solitary walk through the city, hit a couple bars, ate half a gingerbread house by myself in a park, and, having my dulcimer with me, played street musician in my traveling pajamas for an hour or two. I was so dazzled — and okay, a bit dazed, too — by the time I got to Oxford, and so high on the conversation, sleep deprivation and alright, the hash, that I slept for nearly three days solid when I arrived.)

The point is, you have that meeting, however short, something happens, you leave it transformed. It is incredibly important, and it’s import is in no way determined by time. I’ve had an awful lot of instances like this in my life, romantic, sexual (one of the many reasons I have always very much enjoyed one-to-two-night stands) or otherwise, and I consider myself blessed in that. As a Buddhist, there’s also an extra-special sweetness to things like that, which is that without any attachment, even the hint of possible attachment, there’s a certain magic that can happen that isn’t the same as in exchanges which you think or know are not temporary.

I’m always torn dealing one aspect of with young adults and relationships, and this is part of why. I never want to keep them from enjoying that feeling that strong feelings and relationships are eternal. It’s a beautiful thing, and I think it’s very developmentally valuable and poignant. I also think it’s okay to think that and find out otherwise. It hurts like hell when it happens, sure, but I often say that I’m much more worried about young people who never get their hearts broken than those who do. I think we all need some heartbreak to grow. But at the same time, they can get in some weird emotional spaces where I feel the need to explain that realistically, their teen relationships will likely NOT last forever, and even when they do, will rarely be the same relationship later that they are now; that it’s far more likely if they sustain a YA romantic relationship it will become a platonic friendship, for instance, than it will stay a romance. That that love and mad like does feel eternal, and it’s even possible those feelings may be eternal in some respect, but that isn’t the same thing as spending your whole life in a romance with the person you’re dating at 15. And part of me thinks that some of why those relationships are so watershed is expressly because they are fleeting: two people will meet, connect, share something unique, then take it with them as they move on to the next place. Clearly, you gotta walk a fine line to explain things like that without raining on their parade. For as long as I’ve done this work, I’m still not sure I get it right with them when it comes to this.

But again, some of that is this issue of time, and battling what they’re told about what makes interpersonal connections and relationships important — an issue of quantity over quality, really — out and about. Adults will often make clear, overtly or covertly, that young people don’t understand love or that their relationships aren’t meaningful because they won’t be marriages of lifelong romances, and it’s bollocks. Or projection. Or both. (Maybe wishful thinking? I seem to see a lot of parents telling their kids that it’s what lasts over time that is the biggest deal, of the most emotional import, but whose long-term relationships are clearly substandard at best.) I tend to think that there are aspects of love which we probably understand best as children or adolescents which we either forget as we grow older, or which our disillusionment — particularly if we have been given the idea that the shorter a relationship is, the less worthwhile it is — poisons. If we’re lucky, we get the chance to relearn it.

Anyway, food for thought for me over the next few days, that. Mark just spun off to Austin for a couple of days for his day job, which gives me two days and nights completely to myself that I hope to use working on things here like a maniac. Because of the holiday, I’m not back at the clinic until Wednesday, so I have some time to play catch-up, per usual, here at the home office and at the house in general.

(Perhaps hilariously, we realized last night that one issue for us in our sex lives is that because we started out long-distance, we’re both most amped up when one of us is leaving or coming back home. We never fail to have the best sex then, and sometimes struggle to have sex outside of that context as amped as it is within it. I guess we need to go away more often. Heck, maybe we’re grooving on the exact kind of thing I was just looking at: the feeling — even though in our case it’s not a reality anymore — of what is fleeting and potentially temporary.)

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

I started today with the best of intentions, doing a bunch of Scarleteen grunt work and then answering some posts. But within a few hours, I got whacked upside the head with a migraine, then also realized I was just flat-out wiped.

Taking a glance at the calendar, the why of that became obvious. Not counting the span of time I had bronchitis — because being horribly ill really doesn’t count as time off — it’s been around 20 days since I have been able to take a whole day off. A whole day off, all by myself, without having to take care of anyone? Over a month. Criminy.

I suppose today doesn’t really count either, but at least I got 3/4s of a day to just tidy up the living room, lay on the couch, read a bit, watch a movie, steam my face and cuddle with the dog. I also got to sleep in until 8, I’m heading for a bath shortly, and Mark is going to swing by the market for me on his way home and pick me up the goods to make myself a well-deserved (if I do say so myself) hot fudge undae. I have to run some errands on Friday, but I think it’s pretty imperative that after work tomorrow, I get everything set for those errands so that I can do them in the midst of a nice walk and give myself that whole day to really mentally vacate. Maybe I’ll get lucky and catch some weather just warm and dry enough to fit in a bike ride, too.

I did know that it wasn’t going to be super-easy to add another job in, but I wasn’t prepared for how tired it’d all make me. Sometimes I manage to forget that I’m nothing close to 21 anymore, when it was easy as pie for me to work a zillion jobs, get home and take care of other business, grab a couple hours of sleep, and still be full of energy. I don’t need my 21-year-old ass back, but bloody hell, it’d sure be nice to have that stamina again.

Tomorrow I do some more observations in the morning, but I finished the last of my reading and competency tools earlier this week, so by afternoon, I get started with doing the actual counseling myself. It’d hard not to be nervous. One thing I’m lucky with when it comes to Scarleteen is that if I forget something, I can always go right back and add it in, and the chances of a user returning to read more are very high. Too, even when I’m talking someone through a crisis or a difficult time , they’re rarely RIGHT in the middle of that crisis, literally. Mind, it is a comfort to be able to actually see the person I’m counseling, get a read for their body language, and even hold their hand when that’s what they need. The other day, there was a woman who was in desperate need of a freaking hug. We gets users like that at Scarleteen, too, obviously, but all I can do is advise them to go find someone to hug, I can’t just say that it’s okay to blow snot in my hair and give them the hug myself.

But it’s just one of those things you want to be sure you do right as rain. I clearly remember the support staff I had for my abortion way back when, and while I was not in any way conflicted about my choice, and in fact felt very good about it, the way they did their jobs turned a good thing for me into something even better, and in many ways, very watershed. Obviously, I want to do the same for everyone I counsel, and obviously, I’m worried about the times that I can’t help as much as I’d like to, or just don’t do my best.

Mind, this is me we’re talking about, and I do hold myself to very high — often impossibly high, I know — standards. I know in my guts that I’ll do just fine when I’m completely on my own. I also know that I have the benefit of a really amazing staff around me who I can ask for any extra help I need: I remain just so impressed and awed by the other women there. I was also a bit worried at first that I would have a hard time not being distracted about other work while I was there, but that’s not been an issue at all. In fact, it’s been really quite nice to have a few days a week without even having any access to Scarleteen, even though it does mean that that on the other days I do that work, there’s a bigger backup to deal with. I tried to do a little work on the boards when I came home from the clinic Monday, but since the first thread I opened was some creep talking about how his 14-year-old daughter was filling out and how he had to get into her pants and the next was a rape survivor I have counseled on and off for some time who just cannot seem to move forward, and who tends to direct her anger about her rape unto me? Had to just lock the creep’s thread and then just back the hell away from the computer, verifying that as I suspected, two venues in a day for counseling work is one venue way too many.

And I just heard Mark’s car door slam, which means that we need not ask for whom the Tofutti tolls: it tolls for me!  If you can’t get a whole day off, you can certainly make up for lost time with chocolaty goodness, and I intend to do so immediately.
P.S. The Storm are staying here. YIPPEE! This makes me very, very happy. My apologies to the five lesbians who live in Oklahoma (for so very many reasons), but really, y’all, not only was that location just not going to work, this is one of the few big perks I’ve found of living here, and taking them away from me would have broken my wee little heart.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, yummy, workworkwork | permalink | comments (1) »

So, pretty clearly from the vibe and the lingo, a pro-lifer (and what sounds like an adult) just posted this question in the Sexpert Advice queue at Scarleteen.

Which is fine: I have a bit in my book on this, and have been meaning to have a piece up on CPCs at Scarleteen for a while now. I appreciated the reminder and the opportunity.

But I just have to wonder: what response did they expect from me? I kinda doubt they wanted to invite me to do an in-depth shakedown of the whole deal, but I can’t imagine, for the life of me, what else they thought I’d do, or how they thought any answer I’d give would someone send more women to them or be of any benefit to them. Did someone earnestly think I’d be all, “Oh, right! I totally forgot to include a link for pregnant women — especially poor women, teen women, and women of color who those orgs love extra-super-much — who want to be manipulated and lied to! After all, that’s a reproductive choice, too, right? Silly me, let me go fix that right now. Thanks for the tip!”

People are so freaking weird, man. Or stupid. Or both.

In other news, I am slowly on the mend. These antibiotics are hell on my guts, but finally, last night, my ears started going back to normal, I was able to stand (heck, even sit) for a while without wanting a five-day nap after, have the appetite for a real meal, take in a nice, deep breath without hacking up a lung, and not have to second guess that I’m semi-coherent, as I have been for days now.

In the ER the other night, when I got put in the room, I got told to take my top stuff off and put on a gown. So, I took it all off, knowing that if they were going to do a chest X-ray, I’d need to do that. When the X-ray tech came in, I asked if I should bring my pile of stuff, and to my ears, this was the conversation we had:

Him: Oh, good, your brassiere is off.
Me: Yeah, I figured it should be. So, can I leave my stuff here or should I bring it?
Him: It’s good you took it off, you can’t have one on for the X-ray. And you’ll want to have that for the holidays.

Which a) didn’t answer the question of if I needed to bring it, b) didn’t seem to acknowledge I said or asked anything at all, and c) made me arrive at the conclusion that I was either having some serious auditory hallucinations or this guy just was far more focused on the grave impropriety a bra-less holiday would be (maybe he had some kind of traumatic experience getting whacked with a merry, unrestrained boob one Christmas or something) than on anything else. However, I was left thinking that if the latter were true, and I really heard what I did, I don’t know why he wasn’t concerned about leaving said brassiere and it being stolen.

I was going to say “What?!?” but I thought it best I just let it go. I was either going to be told I was hallucinating or I’d have to hear about this holiday bra issue, and I wasn’t up to either possibility.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (3) »

Greetings from the Planet Codeine!

So, I’ve been given the marvelous gift of some serious bronchitis and a bacterial infection from The Baby Liam, and the extra bonus of two totally busted up ear canals from my fever. The sick was not going away, even standing for a bit was exhausting, some of what was coming out of my throat was pretty creepy, and it’s ungodly how long it took my fever to break. Then Bri called late Friday after seeing the pediatrician again to tell me the word was that given what he had, I probably had bronchitis or pneumonia. Beyond feeling awful as it was, as one of those folks who tends to, if she picks up a bad virus, wind up with all the worst complications possible, that was scary news.

Got to spend yesterday going nuts trying to find anyone left in town for the holidays to give me a ride to the clinic. Finally, after nearly a whole day of hunting — always fun when you’re sick as a dog — 1happygirl was a shero of the revolution, and raced from an appointment to help me out. We tried to get up to the Minute Clinic in the hopes of my not having to pay out the wazoo for care, but not only did mumblegrumbleoverconsuminggreedymaterialistbullshit festive holiday shopping traffic keep us from getting there before close, I did grab the nurse leaving when we got there and she told me I needed chest x-rays they couldn’t do anyway, so they couldn’t have helped me even had we gotten there in time.

So, back we go to my neighborhood and the ER (which is a mere three blocks from my place, so I was pissed at having worked so hard to avoid the inevitable which would have involved no ride at all). I’m of course apologizing left and right to everyone on call there because growing up in hospitals, I know full well that people going into the ER when they haven’t, like, lost an eye in a car wreck or been shot in the guts is often really maddening for ER staff, but there weren’t any other options. There also wasn’t anyone else in, so I felt less guilty than I might have once I saw the ghost town it was inside. I expressed my amazement to the staff: given how freaking loony people get with this holiday, I fully expected to see the chairs full of people with head injuries from clocking some kind of relative in the head with the universal remote, post-Hanukkah latke-bloat, maybe faces scarred from acrylic nails due to a tussle over the last remaining Nintendo game that if little Timmy didn’t get this year, would end the whole damn world.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but public healthcare here in Seattle is beyond dismal. The few clinics there are tend to have intense waitlists due to the homeless population: save that it leaves me without healthcare, I’m fine with that: someone on-street is way more likely to croak from what I’ve got than I am. The one or two that don’t have atrocious reputations for charging serious sums and sometimes not even seeing patients or giving any care at all. Honestly, healthcare here (and most insurance companies in WA won’t even cover self-employeds, even if you have the cash to pay for it, no less) makes public health in Chicago look like a freaking mecca, which is just nuts since this city has so much damn money. But I can bitch more about that later.

I get my x-rays, the whole works. Let me just tell you that as a smoker of 25 years on now, having those x-rays done was scary as hell. I have had a zillion medical tests done in my life, but usually on my brain or in my guts: I don’t recall ever having a chest x-ray. So, it was all moment-of-truthy. But I was basically told that teeming bacteria from this toddler-based infection aside, my lungs are apparently something of a medical miracle and look just swell. Well, that’s something.

Two honking prescriptions, a trip to the market for more soup and such (including a pile of soy yogurt to avoid the hell big antibiotics wreak on one’s girly bits), and a call to poor Bri who feels terrible about all this later, I was back out on the couch in a codeine-robitussin induced stupor. I half-watched North Country for the gazillionth time because home alone, I could shamelessly weep like a baby during the last few minutes of the film where everyone finally stands (including two women as extras who were part of the real-life case, which is where I tend to really lose it) up for Josey and against sexual harassment. I watched that scene three times on a loop. It’s hokey, I know, but I was too ill to feel like an idiot about it, so it was very pleasant. If I hadn’t passed out right after, I would have watched the last five minutes of the season seven finale of Buffy to get the same buzz, too.

Anyway, I’m told not to expect to earnestly feel better for a couple of weeks. Wonderful.

I’m so frustrated right now: this week and some to myself was going to be exactly what I needed to get so much done, and so far, I can barely do a damn thing or stay up later than nine. Of course, it’s all doubly maddening when you already feel like shit on a stick and then not only have to deal with a couple of friends who you’ve dropped everything for more than once just not stepping up, but with the whole wonderful reminder of how much it really freaking sucks when it comes to healthcare in this country. Most of my life has been spent in the public health system, sans insurance, and the girl gets bitter sometimes. Now and then, I’ll listen to someone insured kvetch about how they’re sick and they have to get into the doctor, and what a pain that is, but that usually involves them dialing a number they already know, making an appointment, and driving a car they own to get there. Still a bitch to go anywhere when you’re sick, for sure, but that process is not a day or more of endless research, calling clinic after clinic, waiting for buses to get there or begging for rides, having to fill out piles of forms every time, sending in all your income information, being seen by seriously overworked clinic staff, and knowing the whole time that the chances of having to go to more than one clinic, paying out the wazoo every time, are high. Tack unto that, of course, the knowledge that whatever the bill is may potentially screw you for months — or when the worst happens, years and years — and leave you even poorer than you were already… just ugh. Do we have a single person working in U.S. Government who is actually, or who at least has been, for any substantial period of time, uninsured? I’m thinking not, because if we did, there’s just no way in hell our healthcare system would still be like this.

Suffice it to say, it’s doubly frustrating since chances are, the additional job I took in order to help with the existing financial badness will now likely be covering ER bills for at least a few months. Oy, that thing where when you finally think you can get even a little ahead and then get whacked with something that sets you even further back. It never freaking fails.

Eh, enough of my whinging. I’m going back to the couch. You know, the real one.

P.S. My horrendous headache just would not go the hell away, so I figured that some masturbation sure couldn’t hurt and might help. Holy mother of…something. All those women taking Robitussin to thin their cervical mucus for fertility purposes? Umm, is there a reason we can’t just use this stuff all the time as a lubricant, because I tend to be a pretty juicy gal most of the time already but that was pretty outer limits.

P.P.S. I just finished watching and what an awesome film that was.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, wah | permalink | comments (7) »

I’m on my second day of a high fever, joints so messed up from it that my legs feel like logs and my hips like pins and needles, ears completely congested and a migraine on top of everything due to the sick and the endless screaming of The Baby Liam who brought me the sick as a holiday gift. Grrr.

On top of that, Briana and I both were stupid and understood her red eye flight to be going out last night that actually went the night before: thus, she missed her flight without either of us knowing until I nearly had her packed up to go catch a plane in the middle of the night. Thank christ I had gone to check her in online, or they’d have been stuck all night in the airport. We had to wrestle with Northwest agents to cut us a break and not charge us $800 for a new ticket so she and Liam could get back home. Even after several phone calls, the best break we got was for an additional $300 which neither one of us has to spare, to say the least. She just called to let me know her cabbie to the airport also totally overcharged her. Great.

I just finished a third overfull load of dishes. All the traffic through here from a bunch of folks over the last week left every single dish in the place dirty, and many not even rinsed. Gross.

At least I’m not back to work at the clinic until the day after Christmas: I was scheduled to work Monday, but apparently Christmas Eve isn’t a day anyone wants to schedule a pap smear or an abortion, so I got moved to working the last three days of next week. Ah, bus at 6:10 in the morning, how I look forward to you.

I’m home by myself here now through New Year’s Eve, which is something of a drag (it sucks to be sick as a dog alone, and a week and some is a long time even for me to go without any human contact), but so long as my senile cat stops yowling sometime in the next decade, at least I can crawl back up to bed and pass out without anyone needing anything from me.

I am officially a total crabass at the moment.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (5) »

I know I’m supposed to feel ashamed about all the 70’s pop music we so often listen to around here, but I just don’t. It’s the music of my childhood, dude and it’s not tacky, it’s vintage: 10CC and The Doobie Brothers are the original Diane Von Fursternberg wrap dress of music. I know I should only admit that I really like P!nk (and enough to care about that little exclamation point) grudgingly and with some apology. But I think the girls a total badass, and see no need to apologize. In plenty of circles — and according to my sweetheart’s ears — the times that I feel the need to sing along tearfully with Kate Wolf, Janis Ian or Holly Near with absolute sincerity should possibly cause me great embarrassment, but I tend to be all “Whatever, man: I can be as crunchy, potluck and lavender as I wanna sometimes, just like you can air-saxophone in the dining room, wearing nothing but your socks, while blaring 25 or 6 to 4.”

But when I find myself raucously headbanging to Avril Lavigne — on repeat ALL DAY, no less — and belting out “You make me so hot/ Make me wanna drop/ You’re so ridiculous/ I can barely stop…You’re so fabulous/ You’re so good to me Baby/ Baby, Baby / BabeeEEEeeee…” I feel like I need more than a few moments of complete and utter disgust with myself. I need a cold bath in holy water, a hairshirt and some professional help.

posted in Heather Corinna, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

I have that first day of school thing going on, big time.

Going to sleep last night, I told myself that I would wake up in six and a half hours (the alarm was set, too, but only as a backup: I tend to be more likely to wake up on time when I just tell myself when to wake than with an alarm, believe it or not — when I sleep, I sleep like the dead), and yet, I kept waking up thinking it was time to wake up at 3:00, then at 4:00, then at 5:30, when the aim was to get up at 6. When I did finally get up, my stomach was all seasick-wacky from nervousness and excitement, and I’m hoping it’ll calm down in the next hour.

I’ve been going back and forth alternately reminding myself that it’s okay to walk into something not knowing how to do everything involved and it’s all good, and then moments where I not only know it’s okay, I’m really stoked to start learning some new things. Isn’t that crazy?

And I feel totally ripped off: if I had known I was going to have that first day of school (always my favorite day of the year as a kid) energy going on, I SO would have bought shiny new school supplies! That’s always the best part!

Addendum: You KNOW — well, when you’re me, anyway — that you have just taken a job in the rightest place in the world when arseloads of airtime are given in your training to the fact that feminist healthcare always needs to put extra-special focus on serving poor women and women of color. And in case that wasn’t enough for you to know, when you’re sitting in a training room, watching a video as part of your training, and Florynce Kennedy comes unto part of the video and every woman in the room sighs “Oh, Flo,” in the exact same way a lot of ‘lil schoolgirls used to sigh over Menudo or Shawn Cassidy? When that happens? You really know you’re in the right place.

Me = very, very happy today.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (3) »

Phew! It took me months, and a whole weekend spent doing nothing (save one book promo event down the street) but this including pulling most of my hair out to edit it down to something resembling a manageable length, but sparing a graphic for it and maybe a few more final adjustments, it is finally freaking done. Writing that piece was harder for me in many ways than writing my whole book: it’s just such a broad topic, and it is so, so hard to approach men with it and walk the fine line between accountability and nonproductive blaming. I also went back and forth a thousand times about detailing my own rapes, but it just felt like disclosing them was important (even if it means, as it usually does when I disclose without being a weepy mess, that I’m likely to get at least a few emails telling me I deserved to be assaulted) when it comes to making readers who might feel vulnerable know that I’m vulnerable, too.

We do have substantial male traffic, so I’m hoping it does some good, and to boot, I can at the very least know plenty of female readers will see it and will get to have the rare experience of reading rape prevention materials that are about someone besides rape victims.

(FYI, I had a sidebar in there originally explaining that some couples like and both consent to dominance and submission play and that doesn’t mean we’re talking about rape since that activity is wanted and negotiated, and then gave a little airtime to talking about that it needs to be negotiated like anything else, not assumed, etc. I took it out just because it seemed obvious given the talk about consent before it, but for any peeking over at it who do D/S, can you let me know if you think it really needs be mentioned? Thanks!)

Hell, even if it does no good whatsoever, I am pleased as punch to have that stinker OFF of my to-do list at long last. Know how it is when any given thing just goes on and on, never finished, and how it becomes the most important thing to do in the whole world — even if it really isn’t — just because it’s so hard to finish or get started on anything else with whatever albatross it is putting it’s butt in the way of your brain fully focusing on anything else? That’s what I’m talking about. Now, would that it were the ONLY thing on my to-do, or rather to-finish list like that, but it was certainly the biggest and least pleasant, so that’s something.

Tomorrow — hooray! — I start two days of training and orientation for my new second (third? I have so many jobs, I don’t know which it is) job, which will likely also include a new Hep B vaccination, redoing/updating my very antiquated first aid/CPR and HIPAA schtuff, and, given what it’s like here right now, being very wet and cold coming and going. I also need to not make my workwear my pajamas, which means I must, as ever, face the terrifying laundry piles which I’ve become convinced must somehow be viral. I did give myself a splurge last week as a reward for getting this gig, and grabbed a new kata as well as this awesomely wonderful, toasty sweater (in black) here which just came today, so that at least covers the top of me. It’s the “no jeans” bit that’s going to be a tough order, as that’d be 95% of the pants I own and live in which are not pajamas. I’ll work it out, but the spoiled work-at-homer in me is a wee pissy at the moment, especially since there’s laundry involved.

I also had the first day with my new, fantastic weekly in-house volunteer last week, who got started on a Facebook page for Scarleteen (I can live with Facebook: I cannot and will not have anything to do with myspace) as well as a new call for writers. It’s so nice to have someone to help a little bit sometimes right here in the home office, who I can talk things out with rather than just typing them out, and cooler still, she was a once-upon-a-time Scarleteen user when she was younger, so she gets all of the import of what we do, which is a very happymaking thing.

Oh, and my editor wrote last week to let me know that the book is going into it’s second printing. Yay! But… she only got told after the fact, which means that it’s going into that second printing with the two very irksome art department typos. Boo.

Maybe I’ll name my next pet “Urethea” in honor of those typos, and with the wishful thinking that someday I won’t have to see them anymore save on met vet bills.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (3) »

Got an interview for the job scheduled for early next week! Think good thoughts.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (5) »

You know, now and then I forget how glad I am to have grown up in immigrant culture (given, second gen on my part) and in a city of immigrants.

I’m reminded of this at this moment in the way I’m often reminded: I just got out of a cab, post-cocktails with Cheryl downtown (and earnestly, craving a few more, being in something of a lushtastic mood, and right now trying to figure if I should walk myself over to the Copper Gate or not for some Jesus-sighting-Aquavit). I swear to gawd, I can easily say that 90% or more of the most productive, useful and insightful conversations I’ve had about this nation I inhabit have not only been with immigrants, but with immigrants driving a cab. Really, even if you’re not a regular cab-taker, I’d say that for $10 or so, it’s a sort of therapy — though possibly EST therapy if you read as too American — that’s more than worthwhile, particularly if you don’t get exposed to immigrant perspectives every day or didn’t grow up around them.

I had a moment tonight, too, in the midst of an immediately quick and bustling conversation with my African cab driver, of wondering why it is that I always seem to get the talkative cabbies, and why I pretty much need to say all of nothing to get an energetic conversation started. This particular driver, pretty much at the mere instant I was having that moment, made some comment about how amazing he thought my smile was. Aw, shucks, for sure — it’s one of my favorite compliments, and something people do tend to remark on often, likely because we big-lipped, big-toothed women do tend to have smiles that take up the whole of our faces — but that likely does have plenty to do with it. Someone smiles warmly at you from the get-go, you’re going to get gabbing.

Bar or no bar. Hmm.

* * *
Mr. Price and I went to a Halloween party Saturday night festooned as boy scouts. Given, he looked far more authentic than I having been a boy scout in earnest — and I merely a jealous girl scout — and in hardcore earnest, well through his senior year of high school. But I had a mighty hard time chilling out at the party, even given that any costume that allows me to wear sneakers and cargos is about the most relaxing thing a girl could ask for.

As Mark was far too inclined to share with anyone even remotely within earshot on Saturday, that boy scout uniform drives me freaking insane. I had ripped the buttons off the top of the one I wound up wearing when Mark wore it for me on my last birthday. That kind of insane. Mark has a couple of photos of Chicago he took around 1986, in a trip from Cincy to Chicago his troupe took, and there are photos taken a mere block away from my high school (They were at the Sears Tower and then in Greek Town). The sadness that came over me in knowing that I hadn’t managed to be glancing out the window during class when a troupe full of boy scouts from Ohio passed by, all ooh-the-big-big-city lights a’dazzle in their eyes, was unbearable. Had I noticed this at the age of 16, sitting in my barely-formed classroom with a bunch of other queer art geeks, I absolutely would have rushed everyone to the window to point the scouts out and yell “Hey! Lunch!” I’ve had a weakness for corruptible boys since about the age of 13, and it’s never worn off, even given that the age of said boys has advanced with my own.

Once, likely with the intent to seduce, Mark came out of his office wearing his scout shirt and sash. Alas, he also came out totally pantsless. This, in my occasionally very demented brain, registered a zero on the libido scale because he looked like a scout someone else had clearly gotten to already.

Yeah, I’ve got it bad. But it sure was fun to get home, and boy of boy, did our couch look bizarre the next morning.

* * *

Still on the fence about the bar. Ah, those big life decisions.

I spent basically all weekend doing nothing but very hardcore cleaning, including steaming the stupid carpets (our rental has wall-to-wall carpet in three rooms, which offends my personal aesthetics more than I can say), and doing some things to better insulate the house so that I don’t have the heart attack I did last year with the heating bill. I just finally got a basic abortion walk-through posted at Scarleteen today, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and which we really needed. I suppose I figured that I’ve had so much invective in my mailbox over the last week or two that I may as well put abortion on the front page, since I was taking crap already anyway. Over the next week, on top of editing the monumental-and-still-growing photo backlog, I’m hoping to get one new article up a day or so, from a whole slew of pieces that have been about 3/4’s finished for some time. I’m earnestly trying to be sure I cover any bases in terms of stuff I’ve been meaning to do that are the kind of thing I’ll take shit for (always from adults, mind: go figure that the pieces that seem to freak adults out the most are usually the ones the teenagers are the most thankful for), because it really is easier to bear during times when I already wake up every day to a pile of steaming e-poop.

Yeah, I’m thinking I’m go for that walk to the bar.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (1) »

Meanwhile, back at the ranch….

Despite coming home and finding a mailbox with a pile of reactionary wait-until-marriage stuff inside, our weekend away in Port Townsend was scrumdiddlyumptious. Photos forthcoming, but for the most part, our exciting locales were the big, fluffy bed, two overstuffed chairs beside a gas fireplace, and a large, jetted tub. I was able to get out early Sunday morning for a seated meditation on a cliff with a moldy bench overlooking the water and then take a brisk walk across the beach. Mark literally took five baths in less than 48 hours: I expected to feel his developing gills as we slept. Sofia clearly also needed a little vacation — all that itching and your people endlessly traveling is stressful for but a small pug! — as was apparent given that save maybe one hour of the whole weekend, she found herself a cozy spot amidst the pillows on one of those chairs and refused to leave.

Saturday was a sweet, all-day mix of various sorts of debauchery — including MST3K fore-and-after-play, which should be a suggestion for the teens I work with, really — and even just by mid-morning, I was relaxed enough to enjoy a very, very nice batch of big, wavy orgasms. Funny how it’s so easy to forget — even given my job and the fact that I remind people of this daily — that the more stressed out you are, the milder your sexual response tends to be. Even the really good ones aren’t as good as they could be if you could just freaking relax; really relax, about everything. Between the stress of all the travel and having to be on so much, the perpetual struggles to keep everything I do afloat and the stress of just doing my work, not having felt well for quite some time, the works, I knew I was tense as hell, but until a day when by where nothing felt at all stressful, I wasn’t aware of how tense.

At the cabin this weekend, I was also reminded that I’m never quite sure what sound sex toy etiquette is. In other words, if you’re in a place where they will or may show up while you’re out to tidy things up, do you have to care about toys and lube and gloves being strewn all over the place? Is putting them in one pile on the nightstand good enough, or are you really supposed to hide them, even when you’re paying to stay where you are? I get the feeling you are supposed to, but the minute I even start to do it, I so deeply resent feeling like I should that I never bother.

It’s really swell to be able to look ahead over the next few weeks — heck, the next few months — and know that I don’t have to go anywhere. That doesn’t come close to fixing all of my troubles, but it sure helps out an awful lot. I’m a homebody by nature: I ground at home. When I don’t really get to do that, and am in and out a lot, it makes everything feel even more unmanageable than it is. Seattle winters aren’t exactly fabulous (but thank christ, they are NOT Minnesota or Chicago winters), but I’m glad as hell that I can be home for the whole of winter and spring. Once I really get at least somehat caught up with my backlog of every kind of work, I’m hoping I can spend it catching up on the mountain of books I have half-read, do the last of the housepainting I still haven’t finished, and have the time to do some damn art. And sleep. Get lots and lots of sleep.

So long as we can swing it, I’m going to try and use my accumulated miles for Briana so that she and The Baby Liam can come up for a couple weeks around the holidays. Her living situation is scary right now, even to someone like me who knows from hardscrabble living, and she’s got a pretty substantial break from her culinary school, so not only being able to see them, but just being able to give them a break at no cost would be great. But even that doesn’t involve me having to go anywhere. I get to bring my family to my own front door.

The Babeland event, by the way, was crazy-packed, so I had to do more lecture than Q&A, which is very much not my preference. But it was still a good thing, despite the fact that almost half the place was full with community college students from a human sexuality class, some of whom informed me later that their prof was a pretty creepy bigot who clearly hasn’t read a single study ON sexuality that was published later than 1965, and who routinely lectures even his knowingly lesbian college students about abstaining until marriage. Apparently, this was the only decent part of the class so far according to them, and also according to them and the Babeland staff, the guy nodded off through half of it. I got to walk away with a new toy for my troubles, and I resisted the urge to be greedy, since I’ve been aching for this for an age (I know, I know, it’s leather, but it has laces and a STAR on it!), and also had more than one set of youth educators wanting to talk to me about what the right way is to kindly ask your students not to masturbate publicly. I had no good answers (besides my usual suggestion to just redirect them to something else, giving them the look that says you know what they’re doing, and it’s okay, but not okay HERE) for the couple who worked in a pool with jets: you can’t keep kids off of water jets, man.

My enthusiasm for my to-do list this week tells me all I need to know about how frazzled and overextended I’ve been. When I am earnestly excited to better insulate the house here (it’s a rental, yes, but if we get the heating bills this winter we got last winter we’re in serious trouble), clean the refrigerator (and only a little depressed at how empty it is), when I wake up in the morning elated that the day will be about cleaning my disaster of an office, when doing tax paperwork seems like a break, I’ve clearly been living in Stressville. Besides finishing a couple articles that have been taking way too long (in my defense, figuring out the best way to do an article about how not to be a rapist isn’t exactly a cakewalk), and answering some advice questions, I’m going to be mostly away from Scarleteen over the next week or two. I forget, sometimes, that I’m allowed to do that, and that when it’s not coming even close to making ends meet, it only makes sense TO do that. A cleaner, more organized office, for instance, equals a clearer mind to better figure out how to deal with all the challenges right now. More to the point, now and then, during the times when I’m really not being paid at all or barely getting paid, it’s sage to do other work that needs doing which I also don’t get paid for, and is far less stressful.

Plus, there was that one time where I decided to ditch everything else to clean out my closet and found $300, effectively getting paid more for cleaning than for working. I don’t exactly expect that to happen again, but I’m not going to rule it out, either. Really, given what a slob I am, I’d not be surprised if Mark started secretly stuffing bills into hidden places just so I’d clean up my crap. I DID find a mix tape yesterday from 1988, and nearly wept with the sweetness. Labeled “Obnoxiousness Found Us in Gillson Park, Illinois,” jointly by both myself and my best friend at the time, who always went nuts with the mix tapes for the long trips we’d take — in both senses of the word — I am greatly looking forward to popping it into the tape deck in Mr. Price’s office to see what’s on it. I predict plenty of Beatles, Jazz Butcher (and I also just organized a huge pile of JB CDs a friend and rare fellow fan of them made for me a couple years back, which are a major coup since most of their stuff wasn’t even on CD), Elvis Costello, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, ska and 60’s surf rock.

I’m electing not to talk about the moment a hidden camera would have found me in this morning, belting out “Angel of the Morning” at the top of my lungs while organizing my studio shelves. because, you know, we really shouldn’t document these sorts of things if we want to be taken at all seriously.

(Though as an aside, a reader here gave a very generous donation this week, and I thank you soundly. That not only helps me to be able to toss some change at my developer so we can get some more of the upgrade finished, it also means I can finally go get new glasses, and thus end the nonstop tension headache I’ve had for two months because my prescription changed. You’re a goddess!)

P.S. In trying to finish that article on how not to rape and enable rape, I’m troubled that while we have one word, a very powerful word, at that, for a rapist, we don’t seen to have an equally powerful — and ideally MORE powerful word — for someone who is not just not a rapist, but the antithesis of a rapist. So, what’s the word for a caring, reciprocal sexual person or partner? It’s pretty darn tough to sell a concept when we don’t even have a word for it. “Lover,” alas, is terribly outdated and not something young people are even remotely likely to use. “Partner” isn’t just about sex, and as I was informed a couple years back when I accidentally outed myself to some of Mark’s film crew at 5 AM, it still primarily belongs to us queers. We could make “mutual” an honorific, but it doesn’t feel right. Might be some mileage in “accord” or “harmony,” but I can’t seem to land on it.

P.P.S. The mailbag still is out of control this week. My favorite this morning?

I was so sad when I was told about your website. Teenagers go to your site and find permission to have sex in any way they want. I am a chastity speaker and talk to teens a lot about the risks of STD’s. I know how faulty condoms are and even though people are using them STD’s are still out of control. I was so sad to read a lot of wrong information on your site. Condoms will not protect again many STD’s including HPV the most common STD today and one that can cause cervical cancer and possibly lead to death. You suggest that waiting until marriage to have sex is just not possible. It most certainly is and I hope that you will start giving teens more credit for having self control. We need to encourage then to aim for the healthiest life possible. Many people are dying because of sex but no one has died because they abstained until marriage. Please carefully consider the info you share and make sure it is accurate because so far a lot of what I have read on your site is horribly wrong especially as related to STD’s and condoms.

I really love it when people tell me what I do. (As well as the idea that it’s up to me or any other adult to give teens “permission” to have sex, while at the same time telling me I don’t give teens enough credit for making their own sound choices, while they’re asking them to sign a very binding legal contract to another person in order to even CONSIDER that choice.) It’s so helpful: how would I know otherwise? I’m the idiot savant of sex ed, see. I have no idea what I do or say: all these words and statistics and sources just come pouring out of me when I consult my Ouija board every time I answer a question. A few days later, I go look at what I have written and it’s an absolute mystery to me.

I figured the best I could do with that one was to very calmly just primarily direct her to actual, international sources of sexual health information. Probably she won’t use them, or even look, or will find some way to discredit them — even though the CDC is almost entirely in the administration’s pocket these days, so you’d think these kinds of folks wouldn’t write them off anymore. But she is an educator, and I suppose you do never know when you’ve gotten one who earnestly has their heart in the right place, but just has never been informed.

And to think, some folks call me a pessimist.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, Mr. Price, home, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (6) »

Just flying through here while racing to get ready for an early morning trip to Victoria tomorrow.

(Again, for those of you nearby, I have two events up there, and the 411 — does anyone really say that anymore? — on them can be found here.)

Per usual, everything feels last minute even when it isn’t at all, I am navigating through endless piles of laundry, rushing to get other work done before I go, taking notes in the middle of everything for the workshops, and doing everything I can to be sure I remember all but the one Very Important Thing I will inevitably forget.

Seriously, this much travel was SO much easier back in the day when I had a van that was basically my home on wheels. I miss that stupid metal box more and more as this year wears on. Plus, I am at a point where I expect the teenagers of the world I’ve been flitting all over the place to advocate for to send me a thank you card as big as the Empire State Building.

Or a giant, fluffy Mighty-O donut I can lay my weary head on, munching while I snooze. Whichever.

This frazzled gal is much better speaking with images at the moment than words. See y’all later in the week.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (1) »

I am at the point where I am accepting that it is time to start saying goodbye to my red hair.

The fact that there are moments in which this is earnestly sniffle-worthy — hell, the fact that this is something I even feel a need to publicly mention and invest any emotional energy in whatsoever — is freaking ridiculous.

Ah, vanity: you heartless bastard, you maker of small minds and distractor from far greater things.

I can justify this preoccupation ever-so-slightly by saying that those of us with any brand of red hair are often defined by it, even if we don’t self-define by it. I was born, oddly enough, with nearly gray hair, to the point that my mother had a moment of fear thinking I wasn’t actually alive. In early childhood, I was one of those very light blondes, which soon turned to a dark strawberry. In juniour high, I tried to be blonder, but that soon made way for being pink, burgundy, black (alas, I didn’t look like Siouxsie Sioux as I’d hoped, but rather like Snow White gone terribly wrong), until we came back to just making the red brighter and brighter. So, sparing summers when I was just out in the sun so much, the stuff went almost white, I’ve claimed and amplified my copper for a good twenty years now, and if my appearance is mentioned by anyone, even in press pieces, it’s usually been mentioned that I’m a redhead above all else.

When you’re red, you can do nothing else to yourself, and people seem to think that you invested as much effort as they did in sprucing yourself up: it’s a great cheat for the lazy primper. When you’re brave and your red, it often feels as if your hair advertises that bravery; if you’re bold and you’re red, it seems to prepare people in advance for your assertiveness, which can be a real blessing.

But it’s going away. My father’s side of the family has a history of going grey incredibly early: his mother was nearly full-on white by her mid-twenties, as I understand it, and my father’s went that way by the time I was in high school. Who knows whather it’s the premature grey that’s hereditary or simply the legacy of trauma and stress. My mother had that hair everyone wants, that gorgeous deep russet stuff, but she’s bleached it for so long that even she doesn’t know when hers went grey. I started seeing white hairs in my twenties as well, but it’s been a slower process for me than I anticipated, which perhaps gave me some false hope.

I say that, but really, I’ve always looked forward to going grey, but in part I realize that’s because I had the silly idea that I’d go to sleep looking like me one night, and wake up the next looking like Emmylou Harris. Hope springs eternal, eh? When it became clear that wasn’t exactly the most realistic expectation, I just figured that the streak of white that had started growing on my crown would get bigger and bigger, until you’d have a hard time distinguishing me from Bonnie Raitt: in fact, when I’ve had my hair highlighted over the last handful of years, I’ve always had Sy just throw more bleach there to make it bigger artifically.

A couple years back, I stopped having any sort of allover color done, primarily because a) I got tired of it ruining my hair, b) red has always been easy for my hair to hold since there’s so much red already in it, but as the red has started to go and the greys began to take over, it would fade out very fast, and thus be a total waste of cash and c) I began to get visible roots (yuck!) because what was growing back in was so ashy. So, I’d only gotten some foils put in twice a year or so, and mixed some henna into my conditioner every now and then: I’m generally thrifty both of out habit and necessity, as well as the fact that I’ve appreciated my decreasing care in what I look like over the years. But even then, the foils with the red have started to look more and more odd to me, sitting next to a weird mix of fading copper that’s now looking more and more gold and the encroaching silvers. In some ways, it looks more like I’m going blonde than grey, which is a strange disappointment.

Yesterday, I came in from gardening and passed a mirror where the light was just hitting that certain way, and my hair was up just-so, in which I was able to see that not only are my temples now filled with white and ashy hairs — which I hadn’t noticed, having been distracted by the greys in my crown — but that it’s clearly all growing in…well, not red, and not even all that reddish. I’ve heard runours before that red-types don’t often go grey so nicely, that we do get this weird ashy stuff, and the color just starts to look more and more muted and strange, but now the proof has begun to find itself in the proverbial pudding. I remember this older woman I taught with who was a red going grey, clearly desperately clinging to her old hair, with her rinses whose color always seemed off and the whole works looking a bit like the red version of those clothes we all tried to dye black with Rit dye in high school, all spotty and mushy and nothing close to black.

I’ve had folks tell me that no, absolutely, it’s not going as much as I think it is, but I think that’s what you’re supposed to say (and I confess that I also bring to this the eagle-eyes of a photographer: we’re obsessed with tonal values). And that’s not what my hairdresser says. When leafing through my hair, and mention is made of the color and the grey, she — and I expect they teach you this etiquette in beauty school — lets out a small sigh and a simple “Hmm, well, okay.” (And as Becca could back me up with, that near-silence is quite the statement: Sy talks more than I do, which is really saying something — I write like this because I talk like this, but if my mouth is usually doing 80 in a 50MPH zone, Sy’s is careening off the highway with screeching tires and a bloody mess in her wake.)

Ladies and germs, this copper-top is going down, and I intend to go down gracefully.

I’ll be in Minneapolis very briefly next week to photograph a friend’s wedding, and because I gave up on trying to find someone here who could cut my crazy hair decently, I’ll be engaging in what has become a very silly habit (that feels very bougie, even though it’s not like I only go there to get my haircut, and it also costs me less to get a good cut there than it does to get a crap one here) of still getting my hair cut by my hairdresser who is now over 1600 miles away. She, too, has loved my hair over the years; I know that she’ll want to toss some red foils into it, but I feel it’s time to decline, and say farewell fuschia, sayonara scarlet, and cheerio copper.

(And heck, I won’t be the first person in this house to lose their red hair: Mark was even more red — by a serious longshot, he had that brillo-pad copper — than me before he lost his.)

I can’t promise, mind, that I won’t backpedal at some point (nor that I’ll win this battle this time with Madame Sy). While it’s silly as fuck to invest identity in one’s hair, or any aspect of one’s appearance or body, given how much flux we’re always in, really, my unruly red mane has been part of me for a long, long time. I’ll likely keep my red ends around for as long as they’ll have me, and if Sy argues that she wants to do something so it’s a more gradual transition, I probably won’t put up that much of a fight. Honestly, I might tell her to hack the whole works off at this point, save that for the first time since maybe the seventh grade, I have a partner who is so in love with my hair — even though he’s usually been a short-hair fan with other partners of his — that his little face crumples at the mere mention of hacking it off. Since I figure I’d react similarly if, say, he wanted to change the canvas of his perfect bottom with a giant tattoo, I get it. I’m not ready to cut it all off again anyway, if for no other reason than the fact that the upkeep sucks with short hair.

Anyway, I’m going to start adjusting my brain, and looking for some good symbolism in silver and gold to get attached to.

…and keep hoping that I’ll wake up one day looking like Emmylou Harris. A girl can dream, after all.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, body image, vanity | permalink | comments (5) »

1.) I realized I forgot a couple of good things from the trip. (Yep, still putting off talking about the bad stuff. I reserve the right not to be bitter today.) Like being able to take Mark to Wrigley Field for his first time EVAH with my Dad. After the chamoole finally stopped calling it a stadium, he confessed to having profound penis envy over my hometown ball park. Unfortunately, it appears that for the same reason that Mark’s family asks him not to attend Bengals games because they lose when he’s present, it seems Mark’s visit to our fair Cubbies, beginning with the game we took him to in which Soriano injured himself, had similar results.

Of course, this is the Cubs. Love them as I always will, the only people who need to be in attendance to assure they lose is…the Cubs.

(For the record, it looks as if Mark and I can finally stop saying we’ll do X if he comes home, and go back to when. They were doing the final checks on the car repairs today, so chances are very good that he can get on the road in the next two days so that he can be home by the end of next weekend. Jeez. I told him today that it was getting to the point where I felt this idea we had that the fates wanted us to be together was perhaps backwards: given we started long distance, and by the time he gets home now, will have gone a whole month without being together in the place where we live, it’s possible the fates instead wanted us to be together apart.)

I got to go to the library branch where I spent many a childhood afternoon and hand-deliver my book. Whether they’ll shelve it or not remains to be seen, however, not only did I get a rockin’ Library Journal review which in a couple weeks alone seemed to land it in three times as many libraries as before, my editor today said it looked like we even had backorders for libraries. This makes this girl from the wrong side of the stacks very happy indeed.

2.) For the last two days, I have inexplicably been unable to get the word dirigibles out of my head. Or my mouth: I just had to say it out loud when I typed it, and was glad for the excuse. Thankfully, I remain home alone with my dog, who, while perplexed by my shouting it out at her every few hours, is at least without the power to institutionalize me for it.

While in Cincy, I found Pez Dispensers of both Sully and Mike from Monsters, Inc., which resulted in me pulling out the Mikedispenser and shouting “Mike Wazowski!” Dirigibles seem to have wiped me clean of that, but I’m uncertain it’s an improvement. Can you develop Tourette’s with corprolalia later in life? I know, it doesn’t seem like this is Tourette’s, given that I am not shouting out obscenities, but bearing in mind what exactly I do for my living, and all I hear in a given day, I think we can agree that even determining what obscenities would even BE for me proves a challenge.

3.) I was looking over some photos of friends from Shambala today, and I found myself feeling monstrously old. By this, I don’t mean feeling old in a way that I have changed due to age, but feeling old in a way where I missed a boat that friends not that much younger than me didn’t seem to, which is a big part of why I have zero desire to ever go to Burning Man.

To whit: while I appreciate and dig how glorious those folks look out in the great outdoors with kooky fur and shiny duds and crazy shoes, for the life of me, I can’t dig up even the slightest desire to go camping and have to give half a thought to what I’d wear, what it looks like, or even if I smell, sparing smelling so much I’d be chased by wild animals. Camping to me has always been a wonderful escape from presentation and appearance — even the kind that’s not oppressive in the least, but creative and fun. My joy of camping is really meditative, more about paring life down to the absolute minimum and delighting in simple tasks. I can do it socially and enjoy that, but I often enjoy it even more when it’s largely antisocial: when I’m either alone, or with someone or someones where a minimum of noise and conversation or even interaction is the order of the day. If camping felt like a fashion show — not saying it does for my pals, just that it would for me if everyone wasn’t wearing cut-offs and flannel shirts — I’d feel robbed of camping.

So, yeah: I don’t get it, and not getting it makes me feel crusty. And not in the good, I’ve-been-camping-in-this-gross-but-cozy-salt-stained-t-shirt-for-a-week way.

(Edit: I feel like this may have been/might be read as a jab or a judgment, but that’s not at all what I intended it to be. In fact, I’m envious, and sort of wondering if this isn’t yet one more way I just can’t have a good time where others so clearly can, which has been a bit of a running theme with me lately I’m less than thrilled about. I’d also hope folks — especially my friends — would know me well enough by now to know I’m not one for hidden strikes, but just in case, there ya go.)

4.) When I go to San Francisco for the sexual literacy awards ceremony, I not only get to finally meet my wonderful editor, and not only get to go to the ceremony with her, but we’re also taking a road trip up north a couple days later to spend some time in my favorite area of this whole country with Anne. Renee and I are strongly considering picking up a different bottle of wine for glugging when we get there every winery or so.

We may need to rent a larger car than usual.

5.) As it turns out, Toni Weschler is practically my neighbor, living just a couple of miles away. We had the most wonderful long morning coffee yesterday, and it was just what the doctor ordered; we talked everything from how we feel about giving the youngest women information on charting to book-writing trials and tribulations to birth control to how so many people don’t seem to get that Judaism is often more about heritage and race than it is about religion. It’s just so freaking swell to spend time with other dedicated people in my arena who not only get it, but who got it before I did, and who are also just great to gab with. After all, I learned how to chart with Toni’s first book when it first came out (and as it turns out, at the same age she learned herself: very odd). Suffice it to say, I’m seriously elated we connected and greatly looking forward to doing it again.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (8) »

I am finally on my way home at the moment, which is a very good thing because I desperately need a vacation from my vacation.

Lest I give the wrong impression, the trip wasn’t really intended to be a vacation, so it’s fair to say that it was unrealistic on my part to expect one. It was intended to be a trip primarily for book promotion, but with places chosen for that promotion where I could spend time with friends and family and — I’d hoped — I could also get a little R&R.

About that.

I can’t even figure out where to start with this one.

Do I start with the honor killing drama — nope, not kidding — that ensued in Chicago on the one day I’d decided to schedule nothing at all and just have some downtime with my mother and her partner via her college friend, and how our day turned into the three of us scrambling to help this woman? Or, perhaps, with the two men who came to the feminist bookstore event, one with enough of an agenda that he actually had notes prepared, and another whose spittle I watched accumulate in the corners of his mouth, while he raised his voice, clenched his fists, barked at me relentlessly about why I blame him for everything (this nonsequitur in the midst of my merely trying to answer some poor 21-year-old kid’s practical question about confusion on what STI vaccinations he may have had) and refused to sit down? The Minneapolis bridge collapse on the second day of my trip? Maybe I start by explaining that one peril of doing what I do is that even when not at promotional events, nearly everyone will drag you aside to make their sexual confessions to you, including your family members? On the other hand, it’d be a highly dramatic entrance to instead start with the car accident Mark and I got into when a woman ran a red light and flung our car (Mark’s new car, I should add, the one he was supposed to be driving home on Monday, so now lord knows when he can come back or how) across a few lanes as we were on our way to the airport, where I was no less than completely elated — and obviously, rather delusional in thinking the state of Ohio would let me leave — to finally be going back home?

I’m far too sleep-deprived to figure this out right now. I’m okay — and Mark is okay — but I’m sore, pissed and very, very sleepy. So much went on, and my head is so foggy, that it’s looking like the only thing to do is to divide the (mis)adventure into parts once I get home. Or a couple days later, after some therapy (AKA, cupcakes, pug-hugs, a glass of wine and a date with my vibrator). And sleep: precious, precious sleep. I can at least be sure that for the next few days, it is highly unlikely I will have any insomnia to deal with: it’s hypersomnia I expect to battle, and I intend to wave my white blankie flag gladly at the first sign of its troops.

Ideally, I’d start by sleeping on this first flight, since we woke up at 2:30 this morning eastern time, after a luxurious three hours of snoozing, for the two-hour drive to the Lexington airport to catch this 6:30 flight. Alas, the way the flights worked out, I’m on this puppy for only an hour and a half, then to Detroit, then — and I expect all my fellow smoking readers to gasp in horror alongside me — unto a nearly five-hour flight to Seattle.

Suffice it to say, I’m trying to save my sleepiness up so that I can use it for as much of that flight as humanly possible because if I’m not unconscious on that flight, I may well chew my way through the seat in front of me.

Or maybe not. I am so beyond ecstatic to be heading towards my own bed, my dog, my garden and some seriously being-left-the-hell-alone (though given how things have been going, I’m trying to maintain a certain nonattachment to ever actually getting back there). That isn’t to say that amidst all the mania, there wasn’t some good stuff in there too, there was. I’d just really, really and truly, had loved to have one single day over the last eleven that was a) anything even slightly resembling relaxing, and b) without even the vaguest whiff, let alone the ripe stench, of any sort of drama whatsoever.

Thank christ that I had some very key boons throughout:
1) I had a housesitter who went SO far beyond the call of duty — including staying on extra with no notice whatsoever — and who I trusted so implicitly that I didn’t have to worry a single minute about the dog, cat, garden or anything else that lives in our place.

2) Within a mere 24 hours of leaving, it appears a bunch of misogynist assholes felt the profound need, as usual, to plaster the Scarleteen boards with spew at myself, the female volunteers and the female users there. I only found this out via a Google alert to a user’s blog, took the most cursory glance at the disaster before I shut my laptop, and decided that for the whole rest of the trip, I was simply going to let my volunteers do their job, hope the site didn’t implode, and walk the fuck away from the thing full-stop for the whole of my trip. Which I did.

3) My two book events were actually the best/busiest events I have had so far. Both sold out of all the books, to the point that the WCF event bought three extra copies from me I had in my bag to sell more, both packed the places, and despite the bitter men who decided to try and make me their personal whipping boy, both were really solid events that I deeply enjoyed most of, even though by the second one, I’d broken my voice and sounded like Tom Waits as an adolescent boy for the remainder of the trip.

4) The Detroit airport has a bar: a bar where one can smoke. There’s not a whole helluva lot of good things I can ever think of to say about Detroit. Now I’ve got one.

And they’ve just announced that we are now getting ready to land so that I can put my bottom in that bar, where I fully intend to have a very large cocktail at an hour of the morning where I’d otherwise only be drinking if I had gotten started doing do the evening before. Then again, in Seattle time, I woke up when it still was the evening before. Bottoms up.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, events | permalink | comments (3) »

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.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (1) »

There has been some continued suckitude lately, but also some good stuff.

I’m starting with the yuck so I can end with the yay: better for me, better for you.

For a while there (like, the two years kind of while) the Scarleteen email just was NOT working. Basically, you get a site with THAT much traffic, you get so much spam every day that even a great email server gets jammed up every day. Given the content of a lot of spam is just stuff that really messes me up to read, I had to mass delete a LOT. This wasn’t a big deal: after all, I still had many ways for people to contact me otherwise, and the boards are always open. And me missing a lot of hate-mail (especially since, as I was just telling someone today, the big haters aren’t the fundamentalists: more often they’re the pissed-off hetero college boys who feel that the information we provide is going to make their dating pool less pliable: would that I were kidding)? Not exactly a bummer.

One boon of that was that I got a lot less personal emails from users. I’m not talking about hate mail, I’m talking about advice stuff. I always make clear that I do not do advice via email (I used to, years and years back, but I stopped). There are a couple reasons why. The biggest one is that given I’m often serving minors, I want everything I do and say to be up front and center so that it’s all out in the open; I don’t wind up with anyone thinking I’m soliciting their child in any way, or having an inappropriate relationship, and I also just feel like this is often such delicate work that I really prefer a sort of public monitoring. People have insinuated about what goes on “behind the scenes” in some pretty crappy ways in the past, but since I know full well that there usually IS no behind-the-scenes at all, it’s pretty easy to shrug off and just let people be the idiots they wanna be.

Another biggie is that there just isn’t time in a day, and while in many respects, working Scarleteen is often working for free, it at least has the possibility of paying me and the org sometimes. Not so with email: while I’ve accepted a deal to do some interfamilial email or phone counseling/mediation before, for a reasonable fee, there’s no way to do emails from minors that way, and I’d feel really weird about it.

The other reason, though, is that it shelters me from some of the truly awful stuff: I have enough of that to deal with in a day, and one person really can only take so much. Often, people (for obvious reasons) do not want to publicly post the worst of the worst — or even what they think is normal, but you feel is nightmare — so even if you say you don’t do email, they’ll try, in the hope that you’ll be sympathetic, which, of course, I often am. But since the redesign where we now have contact forms up, I’ve started to get more and more of those again, despite setting clear limits where I ask people not to email me personally for advice.

Like the woman yesterday who asked me to give her “proof” to give to her boyfriend who left her because she had such terrible bleeding from rough vaginal and anal sex that he’d come to the bizarre conclusion she could only be bleeding like that because she’d been cheating on him. But that’s not it: she also made clear to me that he had masculinity issues which involved him needing to have rough sex to prove something, and to keep him, she needed me to explain all this blood was okay and he could still keep doing that. It didn’t matter to her that she might well be sustaining injuries and seriously opening herself up to infections: the concern was keeping the guy. Then there was the other one, on the boards, a new poster who posted to ask if her boyfriend continuing with anal sex (she was the receptive partner) until he reached orgasm, despite the fact that she told him at the start it was hurting her and asked him to stop throughout. I explained that yes, that was rape, and not only did she tell me she’d thought it was “just” an abuse, but she also was exceptionally confused because “he deserved to feel good,” and doing what he did was “just being a guy,” wasn’t it?

No, I don’t have thimngs like these every single day. But it’s awfully close. The night before last, when I couldn’t sleep, I was up half the night on the boards counseling a 14-year-old incest and physical abuse survivior (from her brother and father, respectively) whose main concern was that she HAD to be on the pill. Why? Because — she wouldn’t give me details, and I didn’t press because I could counsel her without them — the situation she was in (now at least out of that home with the incest, thank christ) was “complicated” and sex was “going to keep happening whether she liked it or not.” I talked to her as best I could, but you know, she hasn’t had any real support or counseling, and it can be mighty hard to get a big sexual abuse survivor to understand that she really does have a right to say no to whomever. And ultimately, you have to just tell her how to get the birth control, knowing that if there isn’t anything you can do to help her to be better cared for (and to better self-care) that’s at least one way you can mitigate the bad outcomes that she’s willing to pursue. But when you go to bed after that, you don’t sleep well.

Tangentially, I was trying to explain to Mark last night that counseling for abuse amoung teens that age can get really tricky — and serious props to those who do nothing BIUT that, full-time for that age group — because they’re not just abuse survivors, they’re also normal 14-year-olds who behave and talk like normal 14-year-olds. I had to ask that one to please stop saying “My mother will KILL me if…” because in context, it was making it nigh unto impossible for me to figure out what her mother would ACTUALLY do, and if there was any abuse there with Mom, too, or not.

I do get things like this almost everyday, and sometimes several times in a day. Every now and then, they’re some creep wanting to just get his rocks off by pretending to be a rape survivor asking for help (and in those cases, whereas most survivors don’t usually want to start a conversation with a straner by detailing every minute of their rapes, with those posts, it is always written in explicit detail, that I get to read, lucky me, from the start). But from what I can tell, that’s the rarity, not the norm. (And every now and then, I have a wonderful, blissful day where absolutely not a single post makes me want to cry at all: they are infrequent, especially during the summer months, but they are WONDERFUL days.)

Needless to say, this stuff is stressful as hell, and not something you can often just call up any old friend and recount: more times than not, on days like these, I’ve started to learn to just talk to no one at all about them. It’s so damn isolating to do this kind of work, and even more so when so much of the world around you is bound and determined to say these things never, ever happen, or only happen very rarely. This stuff isn’t rare: it is, literally, an everyday occurrence. And fuck, does it suck.

What else sucks?

Still no end in sight to my financial nightmares. But I don’t want to talk about that.

Speaking of nightmares, last night, likely as a result of the overwhelming yuck of the last day or so, I had a really awful dream, starring no less that four bloated, drowned corpses being pulled out of the water right in front of my face, and a Montessori classroom that was bigger and messier than I’d ever seen, and which I was responsible for cleaning up — a Sisyphysian task, in part because it was also full of people, and every time I’d go in a different corner, I’d find myself without my clothes. Also in this classroom I found my old bunny is his cage, which I had forgotten to ask anyone to care for over the summer. He should have just been dead, that given, but instead, he had turned into this yellowed, vile and shriveled mass with bright yellow eyes that was still barely alive. Those were the highlights.

Well, I was supposed to go over to Cheryl’s land Saturday, but alas, my dog got sick AGAIN. This is the second time in two months, from a dog who has never gotten sick before, and who is also the baby to both Mark and myself here (in fact, he gets way more freaked than I when she’s not right). He was still out of town, so I didn’t feel okay leaving her scratching herself silly and vomiting and having all kinds of big bowel yuck, so I had to reschedule, even though we both really, really needed that day.

(As of right now, the vet opinion is that the fleas of last time had their revenge: apparently my dog is also massively allergic to fleas — or that’s their best guess now — and apparently when that’s the case, your dog can be not-right for even a month or two after you treat the damn things. Ain’t nothin’ like being a pet owner when you’re broke, as you may know: it never fails that just when you’re scrambling for cash to pay the usual bills, they have to get sick and you have to get stuck with vet bills on top of everything else. Argh! The antihistimanes they gave me for her were supposed to do the trick, but alas, they don’t seem to have, so I’ll likely be back at the vet AGAIN today or tomorrow.)

Know how women who are pregnant get baby weight? I have book-weight. You have to spend nearly a year with insanely long days strapped to your chair writing, under a fierce deadline…well, some things are fairly inevitable. I don’t really care all that much from a body image perspective, but I don’t dig it from the perspective of my body feeling out of whack — I’ve noticed over the years that I seem to be really sensitive about my own equilibrium — and the bigger issue is that I have to go do book promo back home in a couple of weeks and my favorite stuff to do things in and travel in isn’t feeling very comfortable right now, and I’m hardly in a spot to go buy new stuff to tide me over until moving around a lot again sets me back right.

Lastly, it sucks when you have this flood of brilliant ideas right as you’re falling asleep. I had this happen the other night, but as an insomniac, I know better than to get up and jot them down: I may be up a whole night if I do. If I go to bed at all tipsy or the like, I just accept they’re gone, but the other might I went to bed clean as a whistle, so fully expected to remember them all, and lo: not a single one remained in the morning, only the memory of brilliance long lost to me.

One forgets that as the years creep up, even though you’re totally supposed to be too young to be going senile, age itself is then only toxin required to blitz your memory.

* * *

Enough with the bad stuff.

Know what does NOT suck?

What does NOT suck is your partner coming home from a day-job biz trip to Lincoln, Nebraska (I keep telling him I feel like he’s a vacuum cleaner salesman or something, since he gets shipped to the oddest places) and having a perfecty-perfect stay at home date where you walk to the market to get what you want to cook, make a beautiful dinner together, mix up some experimental cocktails (more on that in a minute) and laze about utterly until the wee hours blabbing away. Well, mostly laze about except for the hour you get weird and have to hula-hoop in your dining room to bad 70’s pop just ’cause. But who doesn’t?

It also doesn’t suck to stretch out the anticipation with snuggles-only that night so you can have phenomenal welcome-back sex the next day.

So, here’s my fave cocktail of the evening, which currently remains nameless: icy-cold vodka (about a third of the glass) and a glass chilled after lining it and the rim with fresh orange and orange zest. Then fill with limeade and some lime pulp, and stick a big sprig of peppermint in there, and muddle it the TEENIEST bit. Yum. Free book to anyone who wants to give me the best name for it.

It also doesn’t suck to have a really good book-sales week, and last week was phenomenal. It’s pretty cool when you see your YA sex guide outsell the book that was your own YA sex guide way back when (yes, there was one day in that good last week where my numbers eclipsed Our Bodies, Ourselves: talk about an ego-boost). Rachel: I think I’ve got you to thank for that, gal.

It’s not at all sucky when one of your favoritest friends gets the hang of your “just drop by” mentality and does, and you get to head over to your neighborhood Sunday farmer’s market, and eat peaches so ripe there’s a flood of juice at your feet, and drink lemonade so tart and fresh it makes the sides of your mouth stick together. Actually, over the last couple of weeks nearly all of my fave buds up here have just dropped by, including two women who just dropped by from Tacoma — an hour away.

It’s really not sucky to have one of your favorite feminist orgs who you didn’t even know knew you existed not only interview you — and acknowledge the work you do as feminist work, because it’s about freaking time someone from something cornerstone did — but ask really amazing questions that bust your brain (an extended version — we got pretty deep into it — lives here). And Chris? We don’t even know each other — well, rather, I didn’t know you until now — but finding this this morning seriously made my day: that’s easily one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, and you couldn’t have said it at a better time. I may need to steal that first sentence for my press package.

It doesn’t suck that when I go back home to Chicago, I’m definately going to be seeing one old friend I’ve missed, one old friend I have never even met offline, one of my best friends from elementary school who, oddly, found me because she’s gone into YA sex education and nursing herself (was there something in the water?), my two favorite aunts (one of whom is so close in age to me she’s more like a sister: my mother comes from big Irish family, another of whom I really need to tell stories about sometime), my Dad, my Mom, my favorite ex of all time (and his partner, whom I adore), one of my favorite living contemporary artists (who I’ll also get to take to my faveorite art museum anywhere: how cool is that?) and also very probably one of the teachers who saved my life, one of my best friends from high school and another from college. It also looks like (details forthcoming) despite my favorite feminist — really, just my fave bookstore, period — bookstore being in some crisis right now, likely get to do an event there. I even get to catch a Cubs game in bleacher seats, and take my sweetie to Wrigley for his first time.

(I also will likely be going on Fox News while I am there, but that’s more terrifying than it is not-sucking.)

I also pitched a book idea to my editor I really, really, really hope will fly. Not only do I just not want to pitch books to other pubs right now because I so badly want to work with my same editor again, I also really don’t want to do anything super-heavy or as provocative as what I’d usually do or be asked to do just this one time around. It’d be really nice to do work at least once in my life which half the populace or more soesn’t think is shameful and needs to be ferreted away somewhere. And I need a break from the heavy. I lit on something that is far lighter, but also still incredibly important — I don’t do fluff, just not my thing: don’t want to, and I suck at it, besides — and still young adult, which I’d like to stay in for a while. And not primarily about sex, thank freaking christ. Think good thoughts.

And today, I’m not doing any advice, I’m not reading any advice letters, I’m not even looking at the boards. Too. Much. I have other work I need to get caught up on, I have books I need to ship out, I need to do some boxing, some laundry and given last night’s nightmares and endless dog-scratching, I should even try to just take a freaking nap.

P.S. I’ve been noticing that in the last year, when I write here, I’ve been seriously overusing parentheses, and I have absolutely no idea what that is all about (really: none whatsoever).

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (2) »

All I’ve got for you today are some book-related quickies, in passing.

When Mark goes out of town for work, I never can get to sleep until dawn. Being so used to living in apartment buildings, houses feel unsafe to me, especially when I’m the only one in them. In apartments or rowhouses, you’ve got people on every side of you, who you know full well can hear even feet in your place, because they’re probably complained about it at least once. I’m a loud yeller, so if anything ever happened here, I’d probably get heard, but at the same time, this is Seattle, and the passivity of people here hardly inspires confidence.

I’m not afraid of the dark, but for whatever reason, when I’m here on my own I feel far more secure sleeping once the night sky starts flirting with dawn. However, since I’m also someone who naturally wakes when the light completely comes up, this means I get little to no sleep, and thus, am without proper brain function today.

Chicagoans: Still firming up some other dates and times, but on Tuesday, July 31st, at Early to Bed at 7:30 PM (North side: 5232 N. Sheridan Rd., right off Lake Shore Drive at Foster), I’ll be having an informal evening salon all about talking to kids and teens about sex and sexuality. Wine and munchies will be there, as well as the fantastic environ of a very fabulous women’s sex shop. (Thai, Sean and Erica: I’d better see you both there. Or else!) I’d also be up for an evening meet-and-greet somewhere that week if anyone wants to dish about it.

Two new press pieces on the book this week, one at Wiretap (Alternet’s Teen channel — it was also reprinted at The Nation and Alternet — whoohoo!), by the always-wonderful Rachel, and another at the Minnesota Women’s Press, by — which just rocked — a very cool high school intern.

I’m finishing an interview for the Center for New Words today, finally. It’s taken me an age because the questions they asked were so insightful and so huge, it’s earnestly broken my brain. But I was pleased as punch to be asked — it seriously made my month. For the most part, one of the toughest things I’ve dealt with in my writing and arts career is getting the perpetual cold shoulder from most feminist press: it’s taken a long time, for whatever reason, for a lot of feminist orgs to find the feminism in what I do, which has always flummoxed me utterly, since it’s not like you’ve got to dig for it. But, that’s looking up, which makes me very happy.

No joy yet on the financial front per all my work, I’m sorry to say. But I’m still over here trying to do everything I can to get that to turn around. Well, not yesterday. Yesterday the weather was so wonderful that I hooped in the back yard, played with the dog, viciously attacked the weeds that keep trying to take over my garden, made myself a fresh, simple dinner and whacked off before staying up all freaking night.

(I actually think I inadvertently did the equivalent of pissing on another dog’s territory in my masturbatory endeavors. Because I was feeling so ooky about being alone, I felt better masturbating in Mark’s office — which is HIS usual spot for that — than in the bedroom, which is my usual spot, and only occasionally his. I swear, I wasn’t trying to mark territory, but in hindsight I’m feeling a bit like a bad little puppy.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, s.e.x., apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (2) »

I’d like to think that when Dorothy was in the middle of that tornado, that if when the wicked witch biked by, her skirt happened to fly up over her head, revealing a bright red baboon butt, she’d have to have laughed, even while her house, her dog and that poor old Auntie Em were floating away and her life hung precariously in the balance.

Because, you know: you just gotta crack up sometimes. Long before any sort of work strife, political struggle, flirtation-with-previous-states-of-poverty, breakup, illness or whatever will do you in, if you stopped being able to laugh and have some joy somewhere in there, you will have gone down way earlier and far more painfully than you would otherwise.

I’ve been the warrior I’m reputed to be this last week, and I have been busting my rump to think even outside of MY box (which usually isn’t much like a box at all: it’s more like one of those inflatable rumpus rooms you rent for some kid’s birthday party or a street fair — and yes, I mean outside that OTHER “my box,” too), and step outside my comfort zones to do my damndest to make this all better in a way where it’s hopefully better from here on out. No progress to speak of in terms of the results of my efforts yet, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t want to talk about that stuff today, anyway.

(And seriously? You can only answer “How are you?” with “I still suck,” so many times before you just want to respond by begging people to just put your mopey ass DOWN, for fuck’s sake, you know?)

Instead, I’d like to have a giggle at that witch of the west with her crimson baboon butt, or, in my case, over the needed eviction of Philip Glass.

* * *
As far as the rest of my life goes, it’s been a pretty okay week. A handful of nights back, for instance, I was workingworkingworkingworking, as I’m prone to do, and Mark kept coming downstairs — with less and less clothing on — trying to get me to go upstairs with him.

You know how it is when you’re depressed: even though you know sex is a nice balm, it does a number on one’s libido. And in my case, that’s usually just about me: in other words, I’m down with getting my other person off, but I know myself well enough to know that when I’m seriously down, orgasms for me just are not going to happen and I don’t want to trouble myself or anyone else with trying. Thankfully, even though my sweetie is a bio-boy, our sexlife is blissfully free of most hetero dynamics. For instance, I’ve never had to let go of the very nice queer thing where you sometimes will have a few sessions where you just take turns getting each other off, at different (and extended) times the same night, or on different nights altogether. In fact, in some of my life when I’ve partnered with men, one of my biggest bitches has been that bizarre heteronormative idea where folks seem to think that people are supposed to come from the same thing — especially when it’s the stuff women don’t usually come from in the first place, and men often don’t even find that interesting — or at the same time, or even on the same night (you have no idea how many times in a day when answering advice questions, for various reasons, I find myself sighing and saying out loud “Oh, poor straight people.” For real, and yes, I know that’s patronizing and I’m terribly sorry). While that’s all groovy when it happens, and plenty of times I do want to get off when my partner has or will, too, there are also plenty of times where I just don’t want to be distracted by my own desires for orgasm (or vice-versa), and I’d rather focus all my attention on my partner or have them focus all of theirs on me.

Plus, being naked is my happy space. In other words, part of the reason I’m so damn naked all the time is because I’m generally feeling pretty groovy so I want to run around without underpants like a hyperactive four-year-old. But when I’m feeling crappy or hyper-vulnerable, clothing is an armour for me, and I like to keep it on.

So, eventually, I headed upstairs, clearly getting the more-than-subtle hint that Mark wanted to get it on, with the hope that he was cool with a for-him-only turn.

Mr. Price is not a light the candles, put out the flowers, cover the bed in rosepetals for sex kind of guy — neither am I. We’re more usually the kick the laundry aside and hope you land somewhere near the bed for sex kind of people. I’d made clear the day before, however, that the bedroom was SUCH a freaking disaster that I couldn’t even think about sex in there: I could only wonder when the hell someone was going to call the health department and hope Sofia didn’t get forever lost in the piles while we were sleeping at night. So, I got led by the hand into his office — we both have our own rooms/offices here: it’s a strong cohabitation rule of mine — and there were blankets and pillows on the floor, a clear space around them, incense burning and lo, little flickering candles.

You know, for whatever reason, if that had been about seducing ME to be the receptive partner it would not have been half as darling and cool (it probably would have felt like guys way too old for you when you were in high school offering you a backrub): but since knowingly or unknowingly, it was about seducing me to seduce HIM, it made it not only really charming and sweet, but also very nicely genderblurry-scrumptious hot. So, by all means, that night was all about him, but there were a few days there where the very pleasant image of my naked boyfriend and his candles and pillows and not-naked me was the gift that kept on giving for this girl. MeOW.

And the wonderful afternoon-that-turned-into-evening picnic my friends Ben and Joriel hosted for a handful of us; vegan lunchies, plenty of hula hoops, sneaky liquor and all yesterday were just completely brilliant. The weather was to die for, and a whole day out in the sun, hooping and hollering with friends was just the thing.

But the best giggle I have had in a while was because I found the notes I took after my dentist’s visit in Minneapolis over my last visit.

Allow me a little backstory and an admission of the type I don’t like to make often, because it always feels like setting myself up for more hell than I have to deal with already in terms of some folks ideas about my suitibility as an educator for young people. But it’s essential to get the beauty of this.

When I was in my teens and early-to-mid-twenties, I very much liked me some hallucinogens. Very. Much. For an ungodly number of times I dropped them, I only had one bad trip, ever, and a WHOLE lot of exceptionally nice ones. (Go on now: tell me how women “aren’t visual,” I dare ya.) There was a while there…well, let’s just say the primary reason that I said toodle-oo to LSD and her chums was because I very easily could have blissfully drifted into a shiny, sparkly acid oblivion quite gladly for the rest of my life. Lucky for me I don’t still do them and haven’t for an absolute age (sigh!) or else I couldn’t really talk about this stuff here at all.

So, you can imagine my surprise and delight when, while in my dentists chair, settling in under the gas mask, it became clear from the taste in my throat, the fog in my head and the auditory and visual hallucinations that my hygenist perhaps took my talk of my high tolerance for chemicals a bit TOO seriously and dosed me GOOD.

Mind you, they’re pretty liberal with the gas over at my dentist’s, to the degree that the first time I visited just to have them look at my teeth, as I set in the chair, I was asked if I wanted gas and replied, “Umm, for a consultation? I mean, sure, but I think I’ll be okay without it, too.” They said they didn’t know I was there for that, butcha know, I don’t believe them. It’s been very apparent that they love their nitrous there to me, every time I’ve gone in. I should also note that before the mask went on, she and I were telling some mighty funny shared stories about my high tolerance in being a McDego compared to hers as a Native American, and determined we wound up with the same blessing and curse: we bonded, man. I also know for a fact that she knew what went down with me with that gas, because the next day, she greeted me the way people greet do when you had a good one-night stand with the night before. When I came in that next day for more work (not with her, alas), she — who I had never met until our lil’ trip together — rubbed my arm, winked and said, “Hey, I know you….”

(I tried not to think about why she was THAT familiar with me, since heaven freaking knows what I might have said or done while under all that gas. But what happens at the dentist stays at the dentist, right? Well, unless you put it on the Internet, that is. Ah, well.)

Once I started to get the feeling that I was somehow (legally!) tripping in my dentists office, I first had a moment where I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating, or if I was hallucinating that I was hallucinating. When I figured out it was bonafide, I then had a few moments of extreme paranoia realizing I was going to lalaland, but thought it through: in a safe place, with a medical staff, everything is legal, I have a drug buddy sitting right next to me. Okay! Let’s go! So, float away I did, and an hour turned into a couple of days, and I walked out of there feeling as well rested as I would have with a full month of sleep, and as centered as the Dalai Lama.

I left there (gawd bless the rapid come-down powers of nitrous), took a long walk to the cafe where I was meeting a friend for lunch, and immediately 1) Googled the hell out of this to verify that it was even possible (and yes, it is, it’s just pretty uncommon), then 2) typed out copious notes in the hopes of making something profound out of the experience. I pulled up the notes today thinking maybe there would be something inspiring in them to jettison me this week.

And those notes net me something about as profound as the scribbles and cartoons I’d make while dosing in high school, hoping to later express my profundity, did.

(Italics are my additions from today. That’d be why they actualy make some sort of sense.)

* * *
Squares of ceiling, squares of ceiling, dots inside the squares make other squares, make other dots. Mmmm, negative space. Need more negative space.

Did Dr. Tye (my very odd, but very nice Hawaiian dentist for a few years before my teens) use gas on us? Is that why dropping acid felt so homey? Is THAT why he was always playing the Cocteau Twins when no one even knew who they were and most of his clients were little kids — Cocteau Twins are very nice when floaty. Was very nice dentist: maybe he hit the gas, too.

She was saying “close” and “open” but they sounded exactly the same. Why?
(That poor woman trying to clean my teeth and me likely looking at her like she was speaking another language while I drooled all over her. Ugh.)

Paranoia first/inner peace/deep acceptance/sense of balance — teeth in better shape than one thinks, even before work? More important to mental health?
(I sat thinking about that one for a while after making that note before my friend came, convinced that having perfectly clean teeth was this totally undiscovered path to perfect health and happiness. Then I sat thinking that maybe this is why people went into dentistry in the first place, having that insight themselves, and thinking they needed to be some sort of spiritual teeth gatekeepers. Then I had a cup of coffee and found my sanity again.)

SUNNY!

Need to defrag brain or nervous system? (Shit, apparently.)

Nerve endings in teeth and mouth: link to spinal nerves, brain? Changes feeling of temperature? Did not feel warm or cool - like sitting in bathwater where temp. is same as body temp. Limbo-zone between chakras? Why?

Do same things tomorrow: breathe deep, maybe pant, let go earlier, don’t worry (be happy!): find way to say thank you.
(I was SO hoping to be able to have the same sort of experience the next day when I went in for fillings, rather than just a cleaning, but alas, it was pretty obvious once I started the gas that I wasn’t inhaling anything close to the amount I was the day before. On top of that, idiot-me had decided that given how great gas could really be, I’d try and get filled without any novocaine. Not only did that immediately conjure up very vivid memories of having had that done nonelectively when I was little, it also hurt like a MOTHER. So, if I was even going to get a mini-buzz from the gas that second time, I pretty much killed that outright. Bummer.)

* * *

Anyway, ummm…yeah. Some seriously profound stuff in there, as always with post-drug-induced notetaking. Some things never change, including how utterly silly they remain.

posted in Heather Corinna, my fine romance, subconscious life, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (5) »

Sorry, more questions, still no answers!

(I’ll get back to actual entries any time now, really, I promise, including the magic carpet ride my dental hygenist in Minneapolis sent me on. But until then…)

• When I was in Minneapolis, doing my event for the GLBT youth center, I got a handful of questions about sexuality pertaining to infibulated women. This isn’t a shocker: Minneapolis has, for some time, had a substantial Somali and Ethiopian refugee program, resulting in a substantial Somali and Ethipian population there. I did know the basic answers to the questions, but I’d very much like to do an FAQ piece for Scarleteen answering questions not about the issue of FGM, but specifically address practical issues (orgasm and sexual response, healing from genital trauma, ways to respond to long-term health problems, etc.) for women and partners of women who have been genitally mutilated. However, I don’t feel right as a white woman who not only has not survived FGM, but who doesn’t live in/come from a culture or community in which FGM is prevalent. Might any of you know a woman who might be up to collaborating on this with me who does come from one of those perspectives?

• Over the last few years, I’ve noticed at Scarleteen that an awful lot of the worst (as if there were anything less than worst, but you get me) of our incest and friend-of-family rape cases arise from Austrailia and New Zealand. Are any of you better versed than I — and know decent sources I could look at — in terms of incest and friend-of-family rapes in those countries? More specifically, I’d like to have more than the basics I do on the justice system and incest, et al, on how social services generally responds (and what victim rights are), on basic cultural dynamics in terms of social and familial attitudes around incest and rape. (Stephen? Beppie? Kat?)

• Book events! I need to do them! Much to my dismay, I’ve started to discover that Seattleites are big, stuffy prudes, unless you’re approaching sex in a way that’s funny-ha-ha, all about the surfacey bullshit, or are a pro-domme. One big bookstore here even had the stones to tell my publicist that they “didn’t have an area private enough” to do an event with me. Did they think I was going to take my pants off and SHOW everyone sexual anatomy? I mean, I can see that Ann Rule has an event there (who, by the way, I’ve been known to read for a guilty pleasure; I’m a criminiology geek when I have three seconds of free time to read something besides work books, so I’m not dissing Ms. Rule). Is she going to be reading? Does she not need a more private arena to read about serial killing? Aren’t they worried she might give a demonstration? Ugh. So, save one event I got started cultivating yetsterday with a local book store (gods bless Ballard), I’m up empty. Suffice it to say, most of the rest of the world is pretty closed-mouthed, too. We knew full well from the start — it was glaringly obvious during the years of publisher-hunting — that a lot of people would be bloody terrified of this book, but it’s no fun to have it hammered home these days.

I’ll be taking some time over the next week to get this stuff together in a more formalized way, but really, I can be creative about this. For instance, if you’re in WA, Portland, Victoria or Vancouver, it’s easy for me to get to: want to link up a group of parents informally for some gabbing on how to deal with parenting and approaching sexuality with kids and teens? Want to have a sex educator over for a group of teen girls in your community to have an accurate gab-session? Heck, have a table for sex Q&A at your next office party? I’ll do it, man, just give me a shout. Very little is too weird for this gal, as is likely obvious by now.

• I also know I asked this before around a year ago or so, but I only got a response from one person, who never connected with me via email. I really, really, REALLY need to get connected with at least a couple other people who have to rape or abuse counsel, and do the sort of highly emotionally difficult work every day I do — it’s not every single day that things are so loaded, thank christ, but it’s close. And it’s getting more so: Scarleteen and myself have been around solidly long enough, and have established a certain feeling of safety for users long enough, that over the last few years, I wind up dealing with rape and abuse more and more often. Certainly, I’ll do it — I always move first to get survivors to seek out good hotlines and in-person counseling, but they usually stick around for support with me and our volunteers — it’s needed, but it also certainly isn’t what I’d choose to do or what I was prepared to do so much of. Some days, it completely wrecks me emotionally: it’s always particularly tough with hotline or ‘net hotline work because there’s only so much you can do.

(Over the last two months, we’ve also had a couple of abusers post, looking for sympathy. Poor them, they didn’t KNOW their silent, prone, half-asleep girlfriend didn’t want sex or poor them, their girlfriend DESERVES to be hit in the face, so it isn’t really abuse, you see. Don’t even get me started on what it was like to be around me on those days, and how frustrating it is that an IP address and email isn’t enough to file a report on these assholes.)

So, readers: do you do any work like this? Do you know anyone else who does who could also use an extra person to sit and unload it with? I don’t need the connection to be one way, or all about MY stress, I just need some like-minded (or rather, like-worked, if that’s even a real phrase, and I suspect it is not) people to chat with about this stuff.

And those’d be my shout-outs for right now: my apologies for them being so all about me. Also in the all-about-me category, beyond really great reviews in Bust and Bitch, there have been some really nice blog mentions/reviews of the book this week. C.K. made my day, and then a day later, Laurie Toby Edison made it even better, especially since she and Debbie paired my review with a review of one of my best friend’s books — a real perk, since Hanne and I miss working together (though each of us had a lot of back-and-forth while we were each working on these books, and each star in our dedications and acknowledgments), so it’s uber-cool when our stuff gets put in the same pile so we can kinda feel like we are again.

(P.S. thanks to my eBay tutorial volunteers: I’ll be pinging you today.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, activism, surviving abuse, seattle, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (10) »

This is not only not one of the many highly entertaining or enlightening journal entries you, reader, truly deserve, it’s a seriously boring request. My apologies.

But who I’m fishing for is someone well-versed in eBaying, because this girl has got to raise some cash this month, big time, and not coincidentally, has some stuff it’s really time to let go of which is of likely value to others holding the cash I so need. In short, I’m looking for someone available to give me a decent tutorial in relatively short order, and for this, I will gladly exchange either a fair commission or some other gift-in-kind of said person’s choosing.

And yes, I’m aware I’m a smart cookie who could probably figure it out for herself, but I’ve just no room to make some foolish mistake, and really need to hop on this pronto, with — preferably — a minimum of extra stress. I need an eBay Yoda, in a word, I do.

Any volunteers?

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (5) »

You know you’re a workaholic when it’s NOT working that has become an achievement.

But I am still in the midst of taking some real time off. Sure, I haven’t been able to quit working cold turkey. The first few “days off” I basically worked the same number of hours a non-self-employed person does. But for each day after, I’ve done work-work less and less: yesterday I only did about two hours of work, at a maximum, which is no mean feat for me, and today, I fielded just a couple Scarleteen questions and but one press inquiry.

What exciting, exhilirating things have I been doing?

Cleaning my house.

I know, I know, I know: a couple of friends have also mentioned that that doesn’t exactly sound like a luxury vacaction. Thing is, I can’t have a luxury vacation, period. Beyond that, this house has been VILE, victimized by both mark and I myself being riddled with deadlines over the last year, deadlines overlapping deadlines, leaving a wake of dirt, dust, pet hair and piles of paper behind us as we leap from one frenzied project to the next. I couldn’t relax in here lately if I wanted to, and I really, really want to right now.

My father, too, was — well, utterly mortified by the fact that this is what I’m doing with my time off. Now, in part, this is because my slobbery was learned behaviour from that man, a rather schizoid rearing, no less, since my mother — from what I can gather — is largely drawn to work in infectious disease to justify her extreme germophobia, and growing up in her household was like living inside a Q-tip box doused in Lysol (if I never smell amonia again, it’ll be too soon). This confusing polarization may well explain why it is that I cannot manage clutter to save my life (and make more than my share), but will find great delight in scrubbing room from floor to ceiling like a Marine until I can let out a well-deserved and blissful, “So SHINY.”

(There does, however, have to be zero pressure to do so. If I feel pressured to clean, I tend to react defensively — often unaware I’m doing so — by only making a bigger mess. I also grew up having to wipe up more male urine than I should ever have had to, being not-male myself, so when there’s a man in the house, much as I love a shiny bathroom, when I tend to scrub them, I often uncover a world of hidden resentment that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. That’s my latest rationaliztion for avoiding it, anyway, and I think it’s a winner.)

At this point, I’ve tackled both bathrooms, the kitchen, the living room and the dining room. At the moment, I’m procrastinating doing the office because the office is SCARY. Generally, I can deal with clutter, so long as it’s clean underneath it, but the office is both cluttered and completely filthy, to the point that I consider anything closer than twenty feet to it a distance unsafe for anyone.

Once upon a time, I had one of those hyper-realistic dreams, that may well have been more oracle than dream, in which I was a very old woman, living in a dusty house with too many pets, where the entrire floor was covered in books and papers. The piles went to the roof, and I had clearly constructed them around myself, as trails went through them. The only unrealistic part of my subconscious projection involved me racing — dirty bare feet fumbling, skirts flying, pencils stuck in my white hair, but those bits are perfectly realistic — across the house to grab someone a book, and knowing exactly where to find that book amidst all the piles. That doesn’t happen now and I’m quite sure it won’t ever.

But that, dear friends, is the state of my office (and my hair) at the moment — plus piles of laundry, piles of bills, a trail of coffee cups, an unpacked bag from Minneapolis, photo equipment, hula hoops: you name it, it’s in a pile in there. (Have you lost something recently? It’s probably in my office.) And fuck all if I know where a given book is, or even where the books in the office ARE right now.

I need to at least give a try in finding out, though, because I have got to make some headway with this puppy today before I head out to meet Ben, my much-beloved ACLU lawyer, who is in town on business and greatly in need of a Ballard drink-a-thon, which I am more than glad to do my level best to provide. I’m a sweetie like that, enabling alcoholics everywhere, to the point that I’ve moved into what is perhaps one of the booziest neighborhoods in the entire country.

But no more talk of booze until I can at least find the floor to crash on afterwards if need be.

posted in Heather Corinna, home, Ballard, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (7) »

It’s a… well. Hmm.

Not a girl. Not a boy. I guess it’s just a website, even though it feels like I just gave a breech birth to a velociraptor.

But it’s freaking well done.

In case it’s not beyond obvious? Upgrading a site built many years ago, and trafficked by millions of people really kind of sucks. Thank christ that the boards only needed to be spruced, not gone through page by page, redesigned and rebuilt from the backend, like we had to do with the 250+ pages of the main site, because having to do what we did — which has taken months of many no-break, 14 hour + workdays from two of us — with an extra 51,000 pages (no, I’m not kidding, and I’ve read nearly every one of those pages over the years, and answered or contributed to over 25,000 of those questions myself, in case you wonder where all these greys and wrinkles are coming from)?

That would have flat out broken this chick. As it is, I am toast. If I have to do this anytime again within the next five years — especially when I can’t even pause from doing everything else I already do — I will sell my hair, limbs and anything else anyone’ll pay me a dollar for so I can just pay someone else to do all of this, because if I so much have to think about another upgrade of this size, I can guarantee I’ll wind up wearing one of those fancy white garments with the arm restraints for the rest of my natural born life.

(Which — natrual-born — is a phrase I’m not even sure I can validly use, given I was induced so we could get the hell out of dodge before my Dad got sent to jail. Again with the hmm.)

We went live last night pretty much all of five whole minutes before we had to run over to SIFF for Mark’s debut as a director of a festival film (which was all proud-making, and all the better because one of The Brothers Price flew in from Cincy to be here), stayed out late, then I woke up on the early this morning to fix a ton of little buggies. I have been a complete crabass for weeks, I only dimly recall what the outside world even looks like, sex is a dusty — albeit pleasant — memory, and I am beyond burnout.

So, I’m taking a week off from big work. Starting right now, as I lace my coffee with Wild Turkey and try to remember where I left my life last.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, Happy!, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (5) »

Back home, at last, and I have been for a handful of days at this point.

First day back was an oh-so fine welcome with an inexplicably super-itchy dog and a double-whammy of menstrual cramps, mind, but it’s still very good to be back, and it’s pretty clear that I’ve now adopted my new locale here as home, because I wanted to be back here, bad, more than once while I was away.

I apologize for the delay of the post-trip storyhour here, but Garrett and I are in the final, final pushes of getting the Scarleteen upgrade finished, and we both need some freaking downtime so badly — and time is of the essence, given we’ve been getting some nice press of late — that I just have to continue to spend every waking minute of the day on this possible.

If we’re lucky, and there’s enough coffee for a small country, we’ll have a finish on Saturday sometime.

And then I’ll be passing out for a full day.

And then I’ll tell stories.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (3) »

Greetings from sunny Minnesota!

(I’m not being ironic: it’s freaking gorgeous here right now. I heart midwestern summer more than more.)

Just a quick hello, as I’m between gigs, currently hanging out on Becca’s deck, enjoying a beer and a lot of sunshine. I’m off in a little bit to the middle-of-nowhere, to celebrate The Baby Liam’s first birthday party w/Briana’s family, in the land of zero wireless and lots of cheese product on hot dishes.

I saw Liam yesterday, and he isn’t a baby anymore, he’s a very little toddler boy. Full head of hair, moving around, making a ton of noise, and reveling in his own chaos, just as he should be. I confess, I often feel a bit like an alien when I’m around babies and kids, and when I feel giant surges of love for them, I never find myself thinking, “Oh, I wish I had one of my own,” but instead, simply, “I wish I could see that kid more often.” I’m not sure if that’s really unusual — given the former reaction seems to be more common — or just whether the culture of women presented as needing to be maternal (and thus, women learning to present themselves that way) is just so huge that everyone has internalized that message, and thus, can often react differently. Of course, too, I have spent more time in the muck and the mire with other people’s children than most. In any event, I wish I could see that kid more often. We had a fantastic time yesterdat evening, and I expect that we’ll have some more before I leave.

Speaking of kids, my red-eye flight was from hell. It’s not just about getting exactly no sleep, even after taking a sleeping pill. I was seated in one of the most claustropobic seats possible, and in my row and the row behind, was surrounded by Amish family, who I haven’t been that near since I was a kid. The window was to my right, and at left, a 12 or 13-year-old boy. Not only did he snore like a mother (and here I thought, not sleeping at home for once, where Mark and Sofia are a veritable symphony of snores, that I’d get a break from snoring), but anytime I almost fell asleep, or looked asleep, he’d touch me with his fingers on my arm or my face, my guess is, out of simple curiousity. If I shifted in my seat, he’d harumph loudly, despite the fact that because I’m small and he was 12, we had plenty of room between us. The lone time I went to go to the bathroom, he was so freaking beligerent, he wouldn’t even stand up so I could get out, so I nearly had to give the kid a lap dance in having to crawl over him.

Suffice it to say, given it was Amish family, I didn’t exactly fell able to say, “Hey, sod the hell off, kid! While you’re at it, quit with the freaking snoring, wouldya?” Becca’s husband suggested I should have given him a copy of my book to read, since he was clearly so bored. Pity I didn’t think of that myself.

That child made me neither wish to have any myself NOR to be able to see him more often. And I have no doubt that that reaction on my part is exceptionally normal.

So, yesterday, I managed to nab three whole hours of sleep during the day, after which I had to do a Chicago Tribune phone interview, hoping to christ I didn’t sound as incomprehensible as I felt, but did have a fine afternoon and evening with Becca, Briana and lil’ Mr. Liam. I got to see Heather today, and expect Bri and I to make a long hangout of it tomorrow night. Sunday is the book release party, the first of the three events I’m doing while I’m here.

I’ve gotten more and more acclamated to Seattle, but not enough that the first thing I did when I got here was to call my hairstylist and my dentist and make appointments. I intend on going by the eye doctors while I’m here, as well, despite the fact that my cash flow for these things is not exactly generous at the moment. Alas.

Did have another book benchmark for me today, which is finding some libraries that ordered and are carrying the book, which in many ways, is far more important to me and of more value than bookstores carrying it. I was one of those kids for whom the public library was a second home: iwas latchkey, so it was normal for me to spend a lot of time at the library after school. In addition, when the shit really started to get super-bad at my house, one benefit of still managing to be a dedicated student is that when you won’t be allowed out of the house for anything else, you are often still allowed to get out of the house if you’re at the library. I need to make a point while I’m here in Minneapolis of heading to a couple branches with books to donate. I know I sat with my first copies of more than one vital sex book in the stacks, and it pleases me to no ned to think I can be providing the same experience for other young adults.

P.S. Just because it seems it needs to be said lately in more venues than I can shake a stick at: the feminist blogosphere is not feminism. The feminist blogosphere is not the feminist community. The feminist blogosphere is just that: the feminist blogosphere, and supposing it to be, or presenting it as, a good representation of the whole of feminism, the whole of theory, the whole of feminist activism or community is foolish. To be honest, I don’t even involve myself much at all with the feminist blogosphere or all its dramas in large part because it is so incredibly discordant to my experiences with feminism and community amoung women otherwise.

I mean, certainly, still in our culture, women as a class are in very big trouble. And still as ever, feminism is in big trouble. But in my estimation, neither are in the kind of trouble we’d think they were if we presumed the virtual community to be represnentative of the whole. And that’s the case with the blogosphere, period. It has it’s value, for sure, but an accurate representation of life and community as a whole it is not.

So, if you’re a person who feels strongly about feminism, but the blogosphere is bumming you out, I’d really encourage you to turn off the computer and go find some real-life community. Join up with your local NOW chapter, volunteer at a women’s crisis line or shelter or with a more ad-hoc feminist or women’s community, or just make your own. Names that go with faces that go with voices that go with a more visceral connection really do make a world of difference.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, family, feminism, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (6) »

More on the release party tomorrow — it was awesome, in short, and seriously packed — but for now, I’m pleased as punch to note that it’s just been reported to me that one of my secret goals for the book has already been met.

A parent in Texas who bought two copies — one for her daughter, and another for the school nurse’s office — has just reported that the nurse told her that the book lasted a whole two, madly thumbed-through days in her office before some kid swiped it.

Sure, it seems a bit off to have a benchmark for the book’s success based on theft, but it really does tell me all I need to know.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (8) »

Random question of the day: when doing book signing events, and you have a disability which results in your hand cramping up into a ball with not-even-extensive bouts of handwriting — and special pens don’t help, it’s the issue of holding a pen or pencil, period — what’s a good solution?

(We’ve already tossed out getting a stamp made with my signature, because that just seemed really tacky.)

P.S. I had the most enjoyable, babbly, sex-geekery coffee with David on Friday. Y’all should read him: good man, that.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (17) »

Know when you feel seriously stupid?

When you nag the publicity person at your publishing house to get all your books out to this endlessly growing list of reviewers — spacing that like near everything else you do, this isn’t DIY, and she also has her own list, dingbat — and then you get an email from her with this HUGE honking list of places your book has been sent.

And you look at it. As your jaw hits the space bar on your keyboard. You see certain publications, places and names which strike absolute terror into your little heart, and you feel yourself start to hyperventilate as you slowly crawl under your desk, clutching your palm-sweaty pack of smokes as if they were your teddy bear.

Thankfully, you feel LESS stupid than you might because you do NOT send her the email that says nothing but, “Ohmygawd NO: I don’t want all those people seeing the book! I take it back! Go get those books BACK right NOW!”

I swear, it feels infinately less vulnerable to have the whole world see you naked.

Just a few moments of extreme stage fright, brought to you by the dork who writes here.

P.S. To the construction workers on the place behind my house? Entiendo español. I’m usually very rusty in my speaking, but my understanding doesn’t tend to lapse. And just because I can’t think of how to translate, “It is deeply invasive for you to endlessly and loudly yell at me about my tits and my ass, with the charming, accompanying smoochy noises, while I’m trying to find just fifteen minutes of peace by spending time in my garden,” doesn’t mean I don’t understand you.

P.P.S. Longer entries en route, I promise. Been crazy-busy over here lately, and today’s a real doozy.

Mr. Price’s most recent short film just got into SIFF! Whoohoo!

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, s.e.x., apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (8) »

How is it that that scads of people who salivate daily at pieces of gnarled, bloody-but-bleached cow cadaver and think “Mmmm-mmm, tasty!” can look at living, breathing and very-much-alive bodies and genitals and think “Ewwww, gross?”

Just curious. And procrastinating.

posted in Heather Corinna, sexuality, apropos of nothing, body image | permalink | comments (1) »