On Sunday, this journal turned ten years old.

Here’s that first entry, just because:

I woke up this morning to the sound of thunder, echoing off of the window beside the bed.

From the breadth of the sound, I assumed there would be sheets of rain, pummeling the grasses and sidewalks. The sound of the thunder woke both B. and I, and I slunk into my jeans, through the glass doors to the wooden porch to ingest my morning take of nicotene and take in what I expected to be a strong storm.

Though it sounded like a storm, it was the gentlest rain I’d experienced in some time. The drops fell down so lightly; it was like the softest kisses one could imagine, fleeting and teasing in their lightness. Shy rain, I would call it, just a little warm and very timid. I sunk my bare feet into the puddles on the walk and stood outside for several minutes, kissed gently again and again by the tiny droplets, inhaling the scent of morning, and all things new.

With that feeling, I start yet another journal. I have journals as far back as 1976, when I had just begun to write; six years old at the time. They often dissapoint me. I am an impetuous person: I embrace new projects with all the vigor of war, but often, as soon as something which seems bigger looms it’s voracious head, I drop the former notion before cobwebs have had time to settle.

I have many times sat and read through the pile of journals, looking for inklings of myself - as I am now - hidden in the pages written when I was a child, an adolescent, a blossoming woman. Often, I find them, and it amazes me how little - on some level - we truly change from what we were born as.

It is with these things in my mind: the newness of things that are in truth not new at all, and the compulsion and determination to begin, always, again and again, knowing there will be some lapse, but hoping there will not be; knowing it is nearly futile. Though living may be a continuum, there are always lapses, and they come and vanish in an instant that can swallow years.

By way of introduction, I warn you now: a journal for me is not a confessional. I was not raised in that cultural sect which keeps secrets and then feels the need to purge them somewhere secretly. Instead, I was raised with the notion that a large part of being an artist is to bear witness: to record events through individual eyes for the purpose of marking personal history, and perhaps bringing the personal to history in a way that is unique and diverse. By virtue of what I am - an artist who has, since I was a child, been a sensate creature, engrossed with touching, tasting, feeling, and the union of body and soul - I expect, like any journal I have kept, this one will be a bit more salacious than another artists memoirs may be, though I similarly suspect what is sensual, sexual, and considered an event by myself may be those things considered less noteworthy by others.

Being kissed by the rain this morning was an event. It may or may not have been as noteworthy an event as the falling of the Berlin Wall, the day women gained the right to vote, as a death, or a birth, or the union of two souls, but from moment to moment - and in an individual life - those moments spent with our feet in the puddles, the rain kissing our cheeks, are those I never wish to forget.

(I cannot help but laugh out loud at the “not a confessional” monologue.  If a journal never was for me before, it most certainly has been one here far more than once over the years.  Oh, hindsight: you briny bastard.  It’s also a bit hilarious to read my little warning about the fact that I would likely talk about sex and sensuality here: the internet most certainly is not the place it once was.  There really was a need for that statement then, for serious.  There was not a need to be so pretentious about it.)

When I first started journaling online, very few others were doing it, and no one was blogging yet: we didn’t even have the word “blogging” yet.  I also had far fewer gray hairs.  And I think my bottom has started migrating south since, no less.  If it’s heading to South America, I hope it takes me with.

I was thinking I’d sum up everything that has happened in the last ten years, but I started to do that and became dizzy very quickly.  It’s been one hell of a decade, and I can’t fathom how very much I shoved into it.  Meetups, breakups and makeups, nearly the entire development of my career in sexuality with all the ups and downs that has entailed, the whole of my photographic work behind the camera, four moves (two to different states), struggling with money (there is a post back when where I was literally unable to get myself a warm coat in Minneapolis, and a very kind reader — thanks, Kat — sent me an old coat of hers), struggling with family, struggling with life as we know it.  I’ve been single in this journal –sometimes gladly, sometimes miserably — I’ve been with partners, I’ve been cohabiting.  I’ve been flush and in scarcity, high and low; there has been high comedy and high tragedy.  There have been trials (literally) and tribulations (and how). Writing here has at times made me feel very comforted and with community, and at other times very isolated and overexposed. In many ways the world has changed massively throughout this relatively short span of time.

The arrival of Sofia even happened during this journal’s tenure.  And no, I can never turn down the opportunity for a gratuitous shot of my dog, so here’s us when she was around six months old.

As insane as I kind of feel for doing this for so long and in this way, this has actually been the most consistently kept journal I have ever kept in my life.  By all means, it has its limitations, but it also has its boons.  While I’ve had to make some adjustments over the years due to the way life has changed, how journaling here does or doesn’t work for others in my life or for all aspects of my life, and it’s not the same journal it once was in many ways, I don’t see any good reason to stop writing here.  I like writing here, and I also feel really blessed by those of you who read here, some of whom have offered me generous feedback, solace, comfort, help, humor, love, compassion, understanding, counterpoint, friendship, lust, confusion, sadness, cheerleading and silliness. I’m even strangely grateful for the occasional vitriol and bullshit left in comments here over the years.

So, moving forward, here’s my right now.

There is a spirit of candor I’ve tried to keep over the years I have written here: most often, I think, I’ve managed it, though sometimes I’ve slid, particularly unsurprisingly, when things are tough, awkward or painful, or when I have been worried about invading someone else’s privacy or having such a lack of my own that I just wouldn’t be comfortable. Certainly, when I first started journaling online, the audience was much smaller, and I didn’t imagine I’d be read by as many people as I have been over the years, nor as visible with everything else I do: thinking maybe ten or twenty people are reading you and knowing thousands do is a pretty huge discrepancy.

But I’m going to try to write today with that same spirit, even though there have been some things that have been difficult to talk about, certainly personally, but particularly publicly.  I’ve been avoiding them with no small measure of intensity.

One is that I’ve not been well lately.  I’ve said a little about it, and over the last few years, have also made some mention of some things that have gone wrong with my health.  But in the few months, things have gotten pretty scary over here at times.  The long-story-short, sparing you my whole medical history ad nauseum and giving myself some semblance of privacy, is that I’ve had various neurological issues my whole life.  I was epileptic for years in high school have had heinous headaches off and on since I was a kid.  The deal in the last month and change is that…well, two fingers of my left hand have gone numb, and my left arm has periods of either numbness or pain. Needless to say, when I already have a disability in my right hand, this is even more scary.  (However, the weird part is that I’m so used to adapting for those two fingers on my right than shifting the same behaviors to my left at least isn’t something new I have to learn.)  I get some weird tremors, shakes and spasms these days, and every now and then, my speech also seems to simply run away with itself in a really disconcerting way.  I’m also just plain exhausted, despite getting way more sleep lately than usual.

So, what’s going on?  I don’t really know yet.  By virtue of not having healthcare for decades, and public health in Seattle being beyond heinous, I’m limited in this process, which blows in part because the not knowing bites, and also because I’ve no management for the pain this has involved yet, and am very tired of being in pain all the time.  I do, thankfully, have the benefit of the services of the Barstyr clinic here.  I prefer eastern  or holistic healthcare to western anyway, and I can both pay cash to go there and get a discount due to my income.  I don’t have a ton of dough to do this with, but for now, I’m managing.  As of this week, I’ve had a bunch of tests done, and just got the results of my bloodwork back yesterday.  So far, nothing terrifying, but I do have some low levels of a couple things which may be a cause of, a contributor to, or signals of something else, or the problem all by themselves. My care team has some theories, but they’re all still murky.

By the way, am I the only person who did not know — and being in any branch of healthcare, I feel like a particular dipshit about now knowing — that very LOW cholesterol is a problem?

I’m going to start some physical therapies this week, have been given some nutritional therapies, too, and then they’ll determine if we want to see about getting me an EEG and MRI, which will be a bit of a trial because they can’t do them there, and the one place we found I could pay cash for them did not exactly have a nice-looking price tag.    I’m also groaning at the prospect of those tests: been there, done that, more than once.  I swear, high school was a blur of having shit stuck in my hair.  If it wasn’t a whole can of aqua net from making it all stick up, it was the rice from Rocky Horror shows.  if it wasn’t the rice, it was someone’s beer or whatever from a mosh pit.  if it wasn’t beer, it was glue from some brain scan or another while they tried to figure out the seizures and the headaches.  Apparently, I have come full circle.  Maybe I need to go buy some Aqua Net.

What else?

Well, Mark and I have been in the process of shifting our relationship to a friendship and family relationship.  That perhaps has been obvious.

It wasn’t having the triad that got us here (yes, I say that defensively: I really hate that bullshit perception that when you go poly, some relationship will go to shit).  I do think it can be said that all the deep communication that went on in that process made us realize we already were or were heading here for the last year or more, maybe even for the last three, but I don’t think that’s a bad discovery or by-product.  The more we’ve talked it all through, the clearer it becomes that this has been the direction for more time than the both of us had a real, full awareness of or wanted to have an awareness of: we like and love each other a lot, and this isn’t the outcome either one of us really wanted when we first got together.

I write about that today in part because I’m reminded of how tough it has always been to write and publish here about these kinds of times and spaces.  Obviously, one of the big things to manage when you journal so personally and publicly is how you write about others in your life, especially those closest to you.  While certainly, everyone I’ve gotten intimately involved with over the last decade has known or been made aware that I publicly journal, that doesn’t mean anyone is automatically signing up for their every detail, shared moment or feeling to be shared here: that’s not my right.  I’ve often done negotiating around what I write, and my default setting with intimate relationships tends to have been that both for myself and for others involved, everyone is — unsurprisingly — a lot more comfortable with me going on about the good stuff or the easy stuff than the tough stuff.

I haven’t usually tended to write about arguments, about huge conflicts, about many incompatibilities, about some of the changes that have gone down.

Obviously, that’s a big flaw when it comes to the integrity of writing because of course, the way I present my relationships are often going to appear a bit fair-weather.  And I know more than once that readers have felt like a breakup or interpersonal change of mine has seemed like it came out of left field for that reason.  At the same time, I’m not quite sure how to remedy that, especially with such a public journal, especially with always having kept it under the same name I do rest of my work and personal life with.

I’m not going to go on and on about the deal with Mark and I right now, save to say a few things, both for clarity’s sake and because they’re so important.  We’re still living together.  We likely will be for at least a couple more months, and perhaps even a good deal longer than that.  It’s hard to say, finances, practicalities and the whole soup both either of us moving and no longer being housemates entails, emotionally and otherwise. Blue may also be moving out here in time, too, which is another complex ingredient to factor in. We are no less friends than we have ever been.  We also still very much feel like family, and both of us have a tough time envisioning that ever not being the case.  By all means, we’ve had some rough moments and have been very sad at times; hard truths on both sides have whacked both of us upside the head lately, but we love each other very much.

This is coming off like a parent talking to their kid about an impending divorce, no matter what words I use: sorry about that.  Mommy doesn’t mean to talk to you like you’re six.

In short, no one has done anything wrong here. There’s no bad guy in this.  Without unfairly disclosing someone’s feelings and experiences which aren’t mine, this feels primarily like both of us facing certain limitations we each have, and those of the situation we’re in.  This is about us figuring out the difference between things we want and things we need, dealing with the fact that the overall arc of our lives and our relationship history have always been incredibly different, and that in some ways, we each want to head in different directions, or have a different timetable for the directions we’re heading in.

I’m still involved with Blue, and while that has its own kinds of complexity, as well as its own brand of not knowing where anyone will land in many ways, it’s been a very good thing.  There are a lot of old fears involved, some new ones, and I really wish someone had written a guidebook for having a new relationship that is also one of the oldest ones you’ve got.  It’s also a relationship that for a big batch of reasons I’m not up to discussing over much here yet.  Too, Blue is far more of a private person than Mark is or I am, or than many other partners of mine have been for that matter, so we’re just going to have to feel this out as we go in terms of what I write here.

I’m still hoping to make a move to the island here in the future, but I just don’t know when I can make that happen.  Finances are a usual issue, and until I have the word on what the hell exactly is going on with my body, what I need to/can do about it, and have some idea of what to expect per getting better or getting worse, getting there soon isn’t exactly a doable plan.  Putting myself in a rural space alone when I’m having days where I can’t open a can or am feeling dizzy and disoriented all day long?  Not so smart.

From the Department of Things Far Less Heavy, the SSSS weekend at Monterey Bay was just lovely.  I got to have quality time to sit down and talk with some people I respect the hell out of (like Joani Blank and Susie Bright), catch up with some folks I haven’t seen in way too long (being able to sepnd the Aquarium afternoon with David Steinberg and gab for hours was a real treat: the last time we had a lunch was in 2000), meet some new people, see some excellent presentations (the Sex in the Sea lecture from Steven Webster at the aquarium and Gina Ogden’s and Remi Newman’s talks were big highlights), and also enjoy a breathtakingly beautiful place for two days.  I did a lot of solitary walking meditation, which I’ve very much needed.  I went to bed very early both nights and didn’t wake up at the crack of dawn, either.  Getting the award was really awesome and flattering (even though with the recent shakes and other unpredictable body stuff, I felt self-conscious about standing up in front of people), and it got all the more compounded by winding up getting two awards for my work in one week, which is seriously something else.

This last weekend, I was up on the island at Sacred Groves with my buddybro Ben, both looking at some places and options, and just chilling out.  We built a vulva out of branches and leaves, because we’re like that.  We made a nice communal dinner.  I got to sit in a meadow bathed in sunlight for a half hour Sunday morning.  We got to have the talks brothers and sisters who are close do.  Good stuff, all of that.

Work has been….worky.  Not a lot to write home about, since it’s the usual stuff, sparing a lot more travel in the last year than I’ve done before.  I’ve been doing more of that in order to get myself more comfortable with it.  I’ve gotten a lot better over the years at speaking publicly to bigger groups, but it still isn’t something I love to do or which I find fun, so more practice always helps, and it’s a smart thing for me to do more of career-wise.  I am also trying to create a plan so that, ideally, sometime in the very near future I am burning the candle at both ends a lot less, for both my mental and physical health as well as so I can be sure I’m doing the best job I can when I am working.  Perhaps off-topic, today I have been asked more times about this by press people than seems reasonable, and am apparently the Pulling Out Poster Girl even though I’ve never used withdrawal as a method myself, and I haven’t been asked about something like this with other methods of contraception before.  So, I don’t know what that’s all about.

And that’s really about that.  Or the best I can do with all of that for now, anyway.

Again, I want to express my love and affection for everyone who has been on any leg of this journey with me, and particularly to those who have been readers the whole damn time.  I think there may be something seriously wrong with you for reading me for this long here, but that doesn’t make me love you any less.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, home, family, online life, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (10) »

One thing I love about you journal readers is that I can vacate for a while without having to make any kind of big to-do about it.  I appreciate that kind of latitude.

I’ve been working a lot, and struggling to keep up with the mad pace of work a lot , which for this year includes a lot of planning for both Scarleteen and the FWHC job and dealing with a lot of adjustments and shifts.  I’m also adding a few things to my load for the year: I recently accepted a position on the editorial board for the American Journal of Sexuality Education, I’m soon starting a Teen Talking Circle through CONNECT, I’m doing a bunch of travel for work which I’m usually more apt to decline.  I’m also keeping up with the column over at RH Reality Check, and have a couple new pieces for various things I’m working on in fits and starts.

When it comes to my more personal stuff, I’ve been writing for myself or writing for, talking with — to a point of very intense immersion –  the people the most close to me and the people I want to be closer to.  I’ve been spending plenty of time with my piano and even the dulcimers now and then (ah, to have my hands work like they used to: it’s a pity fingerpicking hurts like a bitch so much anymore), reading, meditating, taking long walks.  I took a break from my camera for a bit there, and it’s time to pick it up again.  Just being able to write a snippet of this, a snippet of that, and know it doesn’t have to turn into anything else or more is golden: I haven’t given myself that permission in a long while.

None of my time away or to myself is because anything is wrong: despite things being challenging in my life on several levels at the moment, nothing feels at all wrong.  Quite the opposite. There’s just a lot of cross-roadsy stuff that’s been going on all over the place, and it’s been really nice to be very introspective about it — and private about it — and when I do share outwardly, to be making an extra effort to do so almost entirely intimately.

It’s not something I tend to be inclined to do much of the time: hermit that I can be in some ways, I also don’t tend to keep things very close to the chest.  I usually write about them or express them very outwardly in some way.  But every now and then, the time calls for it and it feels like just the right thing.  And this has.  Of course, this season always lends itself to that, it’s for that, really.  The time of year is not inconsequential.

I have a very expansive heart right now: it’s been stretching its legs exponentially of late.

There have been a lot of opportunities for me to water and grow my compassion over the last few months, my ability to love well and wholly.  I’ve felt it at work with the Scarleteen users and the FWHC clients, with my family, and even just out on the street as I walk the dog.  It’s been a marvel, especially with things with Mark and Blue where as all three of us have stuff to work through, inconnectedly and separately, when either of them apologizes for bringing heavy bags, and I say it’s all okay, I mean it so sincerely.  I also mean that it all feels okay: I’m feeling so freely able that sharing a tough load with either or both of them may have its moments, but can feel nearly effortless when it comes to the flow of my heart and what I want to offer.  I feel bigger of late, more mighty, I feel like I have a clarity in how I’m seeing people, experiencing people, what I have to offer — and want to offer — others that’s more attuned than it has been in a while, one that makes getting really close much less daunting.

There are a few strings of phrase from some private writing a month and a half back which does a very good job of expressing some of this:

This is not often a sanctuary
for small, broken-winged birds,
a Muzak-humming rest home for invalids.
It is where the giant-footed few
who have the seemingly strange inclination
go to toast marshmallows and sing campfire songs in the midst of an apocalypse;
it feels a temple for legend, not leisure.

We seem to tend to err most
when we underestimate the nature of who we are,
what our unique alchemy is,
and try and fit magnitudes into the tiniest of boxes.

I have to confess that I can sometimes have — have certainly had in the past on far more than one occasion — the tendency to give people I am close to a whole, big lot, but also to withhold just an eentsie-enough that I am still withholding.  I actually think it’s partly a writer thing: I seem to notice that many of we wordsmiths have this tendency. I’ve been a lot better about that lately, a lot more fearless with it.  I’ve been letting people really know me, which perhaps sounds very strange coming from a total oversharer in so many ways, but to anyone in my life who has come very close to me, I assure you, those kinds of barriers of mine are well known. Opening things up and being in both of these relationships has been so just right for me, and I feel so, so nourished by all of this.  Nourished in my own heart and head, nourished with what I give out interpersonally, in work, in everything.  I have had a very strong feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be.

Pema Chodron said some things I really like which relate to some of what has been going on with me:

There is a Tibetan teaching that is often translated as, “Self-cherishing is the root of all suffering.” It can be hard for a Western person to hear the term “self-cherishing” without misunderstanding what is being said. I would guess that 85% of us Westerners would interpret it as telling us that we shouldn’t care for ourselves—that there is something anti-wakeful about respecting ourselves. But that isn’t what it really means. What it is talking about is fixating. “Self-cherishing” refers to how we try to protect ourselves by fixating; how we put up walls so that we won’t have to feel discomfort or lack of resolution. That notion of self-cherishing refers to the erroneous belief that there could be only comfort and no discomfort, or the belief that there could be only happiness and no sadness, or the belief that there could be just good and no bad.

But what the Buddhist teachings point out is that we could take a much bigger perspective, one that is beyond good and evil. Classifications of good and bad come from lack of maitri. We say that something is good if it makes us feel secure and it’s bad if it makes us feel insecure. That way we get into hating people who make us feel insecure and hating all kinds of religions or nationalities that make us feel insecure. And we like those who give us ground under our feet.

When we are so involved with trying to protect ourselves, we are unable to see the pain in another person’s face. “Self-cherishing” is ego fixating and grasping: it ties our hearts, our shoulders, our head, our stomach, into knots. We can’t open. Everything is in a knot. When we begin to open we can see others and we can be there for them. But to the degree that we haven’t worked with our own fear, we are going to shut down when others trigger our fear.

So to know yourself is to forget yourself. This is to say that when we make friends with ourselves we no longer have to be so self-involved. It’s a curious twist: making friends with ourselves is a way of not being so self-involved anymore. Then Dogen Zen-ji goes on to say, “To forget yourself is to become enlightened by all things.” When we are not so self-involved, we begin to realize that the world is speaking to us all of the time. Every plant, every tree, every animal, every person, every car, every airplane is speaking to us, teaching us, awakening us. It’s a wonderful world, but we often miss it.

Of course, in all of this as well is the fact that for a very personal writer, I often find myself lately in the position of being the keeper of more than one very private vulnerability or big confidence which is okay, but it means that the gristle of a lot of my life at the moment is behind a closed door. It also means I’m being trusted to hold all of it, which is so small gesture, and these are trusts I’m grateful for.

I’m off for the most whirlwind of trips to Chicago on Monday for both love and for work — my apologies to all the Chicago people I just can’t see and who can’t (or don’t want to) catch up with me for a short bit at the workshop (by the way, I think we still need some more women on the younger end).  I get back Wednesday night, then head right into the clinic on Thursday morning, and if all goes well, on Friday, I have something to do with something that resembles rest.

posted in Heather Corinna, family, travel exhuasts me, workworkwork, heart work, a boy named Blue | permalink | comments (5) »

Here are the details, by the by, for my two public San Fran events next weekend. I cut and paste the blurbs that Carol wrote directly because…well, she always makes me sound better than I do myself.

The first is a more casual reception:
Friday, August 8, 5:30-8 pm — SCARLETEEN RECEPTION: MEET HEATHER CORINNA

Join us in welcoming Heather Corinna, sex educator and activist, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, and author of “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.” Heather, via her superb website Scarleteen, serves tens of thousands of teens and young adults internationally every day, making sure they have a trusted place to ask questions they can’t ask anyone else. Heather will catch us up on the history of Scarleteen and we’ll give her some much-deserved love! If you’ve ever thought about volunteering for the site, come meet Heather and talk to her about it.

No charge, but we will gladly accept donations and split them between the Center for Sex & Culture and Scarleteen! CSC now accepts Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, as well as personal checks. At the Center for Sex & Culture (room 1), 1519 Mission near 11th.

The second is more of a discussion and presentation:
Sunday, August 10, 2-4 pm — HEATHER CORINNA SPEAKS OUT! YOUTH, SEXUALITY, AND SEX ED

Join Heather Corinna, sex educator and activist, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, and author of “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College” for an afternoon discussing young adult sexuality and inclusive, feminist, comprehensive sex education for teens and young adults. Find out about the current state of YA sexuality and sexual health trends, needs and issues from someone who serves tens of thousands of teens internationally every day, and discuss your own needs and concerns in addressing, parenting, mentoring and supporting this important population.

$5-20 sliding scale, and we will gladly accept donations and split them between the Center for Sex & Culture and Scarleteen! CSC now accepts Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, as well as personal checks. At the Center for Sex & Culture (room 1), 1519 Mission near 11th.

posted in Heather Corinna, events, shameless self-promotion, travel exhuasts me, workworkwork | permalink | comments (1) »

Yesterday was my last official day counseling in the clinic.

I’ll be back once a week or so in around a month to do outreach work and sex education, so it’s not like I’m gone forever, but lordisa, it still was sad. When I got home from grabbing a few drinks with one of my work buds, I came home and mostly sat on the couch is a sort of a dull, heartsick malaise until I fell asleep. I’ll miss my team. I’ll miss my other co-workers. I’ll miss simply doing that work. And bloody hell, will I miss those women who came through my office every day, who for the brief time I had to listen to and speak with all of them, something magical and intimate in the best, most unexpected way happened and so often left me awestruck with a quiet but fiery admiration for all of them.

I think in the next few weeks, I need to carve out some time to bet back to my art and see if I can’t do a series of some sort for them, about them. Those clients have been my sheroes. I’ve kept trying to think of really how to leave the ones I will never meet some sort of gift in honor of those I did, and also better express what they gave to me, and also creatively work through my sense of loss, and I think that’s my best bet.

I will not miss catching my first bus of three before 6 in the morning in order to arrive at work at 8. It may well be that I’ll need to do that again sometimes should things turn around at some point, but I will enjoy the brief respite from it. Several times in that hellacious commute, I found myself feeling a sort of dignity in it, but in hindsight, I think I was just that desperate to find some good in it. I will not miss wearing scrubs. I remember as a child us often having some hospital castoffs from my mother as jammies, and they seemed very comfy then, but that was only because they were eight sizes too big for us, I think, and because we were wearing them to bed, not in the middle of downtown. There’s no stretch to the damn things, and if you’ve hips and breasts, you have to often buy them way larger than you’d like. I reminded myself of MC hammer a few times too many for comfort. It is a good thing not to be working over 60 hours a week during my favorite season, and instead, working only a little bit more each week than your average Jill. And financially, I really will be okay. The clinic manager yesterday also filled me in one a possible route for healthcare in the state I didn’t know about, so there may still be hope on that score. I will not miss….

…yeah, I’m out of items for that list. Ladies and germs, my feeble attempt at glass-half-full.

I am very much looking forward to the new teen outreach/education directorship, though. Doing in-person ed is a very nice bookend to all I do online, so doing more of it is a serious bonus. And I really am looking forward to bringing it into the clinic for our clients. I think too few people realize that information on birth control or getting clients BC methods just isn’t enough to keep women from unwanted pregnancy. If sex is an obligation or duty, if it isn’t really about you as an equal part, if you don’t know how to set limits and boundaries, don’t know where your clitoris is, don’t have a good sense of what a healthy sexual relationship looks like, don’t really feel some bonafide agency in your sexuality and sex life, then there are huge chunks missing which not only are going to be more helps to help limit how often that happens, they’re obviously also integral parts of having sex be a positive in your life, rather than something which, at best, just spares you a negative or unwanted consequence.

Mark has been away for the day job in Nebraska this week, and having one helluva week of his own, and comes back home this afternoon. I see extensive snuggle in our near future. We’re heading to Snoqualmie Falls early tomorrow morning, for a meeting I have for work, and then staying over with the pug so we can take a hike on Sunday. Big mountains, fresh air, green things, human sweetie, small-snorty-canine sweetie: just what the doctor ordered, I’d say.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, women, travel exhuasts me, heart work, abortion | permalink | comments (1) »

I leave today after an all-day clinic meeting, and this trip couldn’t be better timed. Several times this month — likely in part because sparing this weekend, we still have yet to see any real signs of summer here in the Pacific Northwest — I’ve kept finding myself thinking, “I really wish I was back in Minneapolis right now.” And lo, after clinic tomorrow, I will be, for a week. I have a photo gig to justify the trip’s expense — and thank christ, found yet another used model of my camera, since the repair on the one I had was explained to me as complicated and spendy — but mostly, I’m going to just rest, reconnect and regroup.

It’s still so strange to me that that place, which isn’t and never was my home city, remains the one that feels most like home. When I get homesick, it’s not usually for Chicago, but for freaking Minnesota. When I feel out of place, that’s the place I want to be, even though a lot of time time, I didn’t feel like I belonged there, either. But most of my self-made-family is still there. I know the weather is getting to be just like I like it there. I miss lunch at the Evergreen, not dogs, half-assed smoking lounges and tequila at the Bulldog, biking at twilight around the lakes, sitting on stoops, drag at the Bowl (which blissfully, I will be able to catch this time around). I miss my dentist and his staff, who I will see, and who are wonderfully with the laughing gas. I miss being hot at night, and look forward to Bri’s stuffy apartment, and Becca’s steamy attic room. I miss some freaking semblance of queer community, goddamit. I miss Hidden Beach. I miss Uptown. I miss my Minneapolis family.

Though I remain greatly displeased that our secret gem of a neighborhood is no longer anything close to a secret, and the Sunday market was packed to the gills yesterday, I had a good time doing a present run for the two babes — the Baby Liam (Briana’s kiddo) and Odin the Great (Becca’s newbie) — a culinary school grad gift for Bri, and Elvis the pug, who sadly, will be away on his own vacation the whole time I’m there. I love coming back there all stocked up with goodies for everyone. I got to spend some time last night with my piano and one of my dulcimers, since I will be without the comfort I take a few times a week in sitting alone with a glass of wine, playing and crooning into this echo-ey house. Mark and I got to have a lovely early evening dinner on the porch.

I’m also quite proud of myself. A few weeks ago, on my to-do list, I had all these work contacts I was telling myself to make: to call District 202 and tell them I could do another sex ed session there if they wanted, to grab a quick meeting with Midwest Women’s Health, talk to this bookstore or that one. Last week, I deleted every single one off the list. I don’t need to do more work right now. I do more than my share. What I need is downtime, and it’s really silly how hard it still is for me to give it to myself, even when I’m working more than one demanding job, around 60 hours a week, and know that the very day I get back home, things are about to get even more nuts when it comes to work from here on in. When slacking has become an achievement, something has gone seriously wrong.

posted in Heather Corinna, home, Happy!, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (2) »

I just got back from doing a morning birth control and safer sex presentation for the clinic at a temporary shelter for teen runaways down in Chinatown. It was all boys, which was unexpected, but I grooved with it and all went well. Still trying to figure out how one of the guys was earnestly convinced that his girlfriend hides needles in her hair in order to puncture his condoms — despite the fact that none of his condoms have ever failed to his knowledge, nor has he ever seen any of these aforementioned needles — and why he felt it was so reasonable to suggest that these are things all women do, but that’s beside the point. I’m exposed to so much paranoia, ignorance and just general weirdness in my line of work that often, what surprises me is the absence of it.

The real hilarity of my morning was that on the bus down there, I was a few rows behind a man who had some mix of OCD and Tourette’s going on. He would count all of us on the bus methodically and with his hands — “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, either, nine…” — getting more vexed the higher he got in his count, and when he got to the end of the list, he’d then shake his hands, and yell with no small measure of frustration, “Sex, sex, SEX!”

It took everything I had not to let him know that I heard him, and I was en route to do the best that I could to handle it, but he was going to have to be a little more patient, for crissakes.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, seattle, apropos of nothing, travel exhuasts me, workworkwork | permalink | comments (3) »

Not much to see here, but if you’re in Minneapolis, I’ll be back there for a photography project for Elise at Fourth Street between the 17th and 23rd of June.

Because I will have to have at least one of my cameras fixed for the event (and because Yelehneb was awesome enough to give me a coupon for a repair as a birthday present), even though I’m still behind on editing, if anyone local there wants a photo session, I can probably fit one or two in so long as they’re during one of those weekdays and clients have a space for us to work in, rather than something I need to arrange.  As well, while at 4th St. I can do author photos for anyone attending who needs something new, and I’m happy to be flexible with rates.

Suffice it to say, I’ll also email friends this week to set some time up.  I don’t know for the life of me how Minneapolis wound up feeling like home when I only lived there six years, but it did, and I still miss everyone there ferociously.  I am also very much looking forward to some swarthy, muggy Midwest summer.

Whoever said summer actually happens is Seattle was a big ‘ol liar.  Summer is when you SWEAT like nobody’s business, not when it’s okay to go without a sweater.

posted in Heather Corinna, photography & art, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (1) »

Tomorrow, right after clinic, I’m leaving on a jet plane. It is technically — as usual — a work trip, but very much out of the ordinary, I will only have to work for around two hours on Sunday. The rest of that time, we will simply be enjoying the sun and the sand on Shelter Island.

In other words, it really is, however brief, an actual, bonafide vacation — I think if it’s more than 36 hours it’s no longer just a getaway or a day trip — something I have not had in such a long time it’s scary. Something I have needed for years.

The timing is completely brilliant: there could not be a better time for me to be able to just get the hell out of dodge, grab a few books and my sweetheart, and decompress. Now that things are dying down a bit — knock on wood, but so far today I have not gotten even one piece of hate mail — I’m actually feeling pretty okay. Stronger, more resilient than I thought I was. Tired, and certainly a little world-weary, but I’m okay. Thanks to everyone who lent me some support over the last few days: I very much needed it, and it was absolute gold.

My Dad is here now (and we did have That Talk this morning, and it went very well), and will be taking care of my child, otherwise known as my dog. I’ll get to come back to see him for another five days, and while I have to do work from home in that time, I will only need to go to the clinic one day that week. He’ll also be here for my 38th — how do these things happen? — birthday next Friday, which is just awesome.

So, off with me. I still have taxes to try and finish, a Dad to hang out with, a pug to snuggle, a bag to pack and fifty gazillion more things to do. But after 5:00 tomorrow, until Monday morning, I’ll be exceptionally busy harvesting freckles, enjoying a cocktail or twelve, soaking my toes in the pool and thanking the powers that be for that much-needed respite.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, travel exhuasts me, simple joys | permalink | comments (7) »

…and nearly just as soon as I’m back, I’m off again.

Thanks to the National Sexuality Resource Center and SFSU, I’m heading to San Francisco tomorrow for a few days to accept my Champions of Sexual Literacy award, do a couple events including telling my (beyond undramatic) coming out story on stage and giving a talk at the Center for Sex and Culture on YA sexuality and sex education issues. As an extra bonus, I’ll be fitting in two photo sessions, one with a longtime reader and another with Melissa, catching up with Carol and Robert, who are two of my favorite people in the entire universe, and hopefully also getting a chance to see Anne and Cathy, because it’s been too long, dining at the Millennium, which is basically where vegans go to die when we have been VERY good, and my editor and I will finally get to have all those glasses of wine together that we wanted so badly throughout the process of producing the book.

Of course, I had the best of intentions in the days between coming back from Victoria and leaving for SF when it came to getting a ton of things done. Very, very few of those things are done. My primary interest while back home was staring at the wall, eating, and taking several hot baths.

But this is it, for the most part: after the San Fran trip, I won’t have to do any traveling for a while. The weekend after next, my sweetie was a total peach and arranged for a weekend away for us — and with the dog, no less! — in Port Townsend for us here.

The Victoria trip was fantastic. Sarah is the absolute best, even though I think we both needed ice for our jaws after yapping for three days solid. The events were both very packed and very awesome. And on the ferry home, as it turns out, I found myself seated next to an older couple, and in no time at all, we discovered that we had quite the thing in common: she was a member of the Planned Parenthood board in Long Island, and I do what I do. So, pencil in three more hours of breakneck gabbery.

I’ve made it no secret here that I’m not a fan of public speaking. Really, a big part of the reason why after many juvenile and adolescent years of hardcore musical training, I pretty much ditched it as something I was going to do as work, full-time, was because while I loved (and still do) making music, I never liked performing. It was never awful, but it wasn’t something I enjoyed, either. For a long time that was the same story with the public speaking, until a handful of years ago I became downright phobic about it, for no real rhyme or reason. The mere thought of it would make me nauseated and clammy, and in the actual doing, my voice would never stop shaking, my knees would feel like they were going to fall out from under me, and I was having to keep myself from puking or wetting my pants the whole time. The only thing I looked forward to with it was the talk being over.

It got so bad that a few years ago, I was invited to be featured in this amazingly high-profile feminist conference, and while I was so honored, and so badly wanted to do it, I ended up declining because I was relatively certain I’d just never come out of my hotel room to give the talk. Mind, it didn’t help that I was told half the university and organization REALLY wanted me to talk there and half REALLY did not, but still, my issue, and a really serious case of disappointment-in-self.

However tired I am, and however much I just want to sit in front of my fireplace for several months without leaving, one huge benefit of doing all these book events over the last six months has been that I feel okay about public speaking again. I mean, I’d still rather NOT be doing it, but once the first few minutes are over, I’m okay, and it’s no longer terrifying. That’s a pretty serious boon.

I am still nervous enough that I get babbly.

REALLY babbly.

I’ve come to the conclusion that since everyone listening always looks mighty entertained and very alert, that must be okay, but I still feel like a bit of a dolt about my mouth running five feet ahead of the rest of me most of the time, and seeming to have limited control of what comes out of my big yap. Am I an educator and an activist, or am I a clown? Dunno, but at least no one ever looks bored.

While I was in Victoria, Sarah and I filmed a segment for a documentary that is centered around a male photographer who does vulva photographs in the interest of improving female body image. While I’m not exactly the most excited ever about most projects that are male-led in order to help save us women from our own crappy self-image, the guy’s heart certainly seems to be in the right place, and the photo work is pretty decent.

We watched the current edit of the documentary before going to film, and both were commenting — in good spirits, but still — on some of the level of batty of some of the female experts on there. Betty (Dodson) is always batty, and in such a lovely way, but still, yanno… batty. There was some other woman whose batty was far less charming, and just plain kooky and counterproductive in my view, going on about how you could tell what the inside of a woman’s vagina was like by the appearance of her external vulva.

(Umm, yeah. She didn’t suggest that she made a habit or even an occasional practice of actually putting her hands into women’s vaginas for these theories, personally or professionally, but I was so wishing I had met her in person so I could drop my pants, ask her to take a look and make her prediction, then ask her to lube up, go on in there and find out if there was any truth in her vagina…psychicry? Psychicness? I don’t know what the term is for the act of being a psychic: whatever it is, that word. I also had a moment of feeling incredibly glad I wasn’t dating women at the moment, because I would SO have wanted to make a game out of this and see if I might become a vulva psychic myself. For all I know, that gig just might not leave me broke like this one does. Imagine how many parties you could book! It’s totally better than some guy pulling rabbits out of hats.)

So, we go to film, and one void we noticed in the edit we saw was that there was a lot of talk about poor body image coming from porn. That’s valid, and I certainly think it can be an issue, but if you start and stop there, I think you miss a LOT of other important issues and a big part of the picture. Women suffered with poor body image, and especially poor genital body image, well before mass-produced porn — and with the wide availability of amateur porn, and self-made porn, while I think porn can play a big hand in problems with sexual self-image, sexual gender roles, and with overall body image, I’m not so sure that it’s the right place to pin poor genital image for women on, since if they’re looking at more of the DIY or amateur stuff, most of those performers have not had labiaplasties. Many with breast implants, to be sure, nearly all very femme, and the endless lack of body hair, but to my understanding, labiaplasties? Not so much.

Anyway, we’re gabbing about this, together on screen, and discussing the fact that because the male genitals are so externally visible, that men have the benefit of being able to just walk into a group shower or locker room and see a wide array of penises. Without having a same-sex lover, or other opportunities to see real genitalia that require a lot more intimacy and another person’s permission, men often get to see a pretty wide range of penises and testicles. Because most of the female genitals are hidden, women don’t have that opportunity. Very few women who don’t have same-sex partners or become gynecologists and obstetricians will ever have ANY opportunity to see what a vulva besides theirs looks like in-person, and that lack of genital visibility (and scent, and taste, the works) is one very practical, and really, unfixable, reason why so many women have no idea if their vulvas are “normal,” and what the range of female genital appearance really is.

I’m a talker-with-hands. If my hands aren’t flying wildly everywhere, my mouth is probably shut. So, in discussing this, we both — unaware the other was about to do this — pantomimed what one must do to get a good look at a vulva by making a movement with our hands and fingers in front of our faces, as if we were doing the world’s smallest inverted breaststroke.

It was at that moment that it became quite undeniable that we, too, are those batty ladies.

That’s okay. I mean, I know I am already destined for extreme batty-old-ladyhood. I’m looking forward to it, and I may as well practice now and get good at it so that I can be an Olympic bat later. And when the subject is sex, if you can make people laugh, you can help people feel a lot more comfortable about everything, so it tends to be a help to be weird and goofy. It also makes me feel much better about my spaztastic mouth and my flying hands when I do public talks: if everyone else who does this kind of work for a while eventually becomes pretty loony, it therefore may well just be a job requirement.

See how that amazing logic works? I have just turned my lack of cool eloquence and controlled, professional speaking into a marker of acheivement! Go rationalizing, go!

And with that, I’m off to pack and prepare to go be batty for a few days, with the hope that at the very least, I can pony up and not be a complete loon while accepting my award. Doubtful, sure, but a girl can dream.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, women, sexuality, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (3) »

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) »