I want to paint you with glitter and with dirt/Picture you with innocence and hurt/The shutter closes/Exposes the shot/

She says, "Are you looking up my skirt?"/When you say "No"/She says "Why not?"

Or: Part One of How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Getting Off Online

I think I've previously established that I have become, hmmmmm, preoccupied with sex lately. I've wondered if this is what it's like to be a teenaged boy -- they supposedly think of sex, what, every 20 seconds or something? I don't know that I'm there, but I'm close. Hell, during parts of the day that's all I'm thinking about. It's not an unpleasant turn of events, by any means, but it can get a little, um, frustrating. And a little mystifying.

Having exhausted my patience with one-handed reading with some, ahem, literature around the house, and having the luxury of my laptop I started thinking about the possibilities online. I’m not completely naïve about porn on the internet – I’ve seen a fair amount of stuff, so I did a little Googling and found some vaguely interesting photos. They worked. A couple of times. But it just felt…blah bleh and kind of icky and empty. Just not my thing.

Next on my quest: slash. A definition of slash, according to Wikipedia.org:

"Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction. It focuses on the depiction of romantic, and sometimes sexual, relationships between two or more male characters, who are not necessarily engaged in relationships in the canon universe. While the term originally was restricted to fan fiction in which one or more male media characters were involved in an explicit adult relationship as a primary plot element, it is currently more generally used to refer to any pairing between male characters."

That definition aside, I was looking for the depiction of fairly graphic (who am I kidding – very graphic) sexual encounters between fictional characters I know and love. I mean, pictures of airbrushed porn stars meant absolutely nothing to me. Stories about favorite characters having beautifully explicit sex together? Now that I could consider. I went searching. It felt more than a little dirty to start my search with characters from Harry Potter, but alas, I’m weak and I love me some Weasley’s. I actually ended up settling on a story depicting a threesome between Harry, Ron and Draco that was surprisingly tender and, yes, hot. It worked. Twice. What can I say? Having only found that one satisfactory story in the Harry Potter genre, I needed to move on. Plus, it didn’t feel quite right to be getting off to stories of teenaged boys and I just couldn’t find anything decent involving Snape. Even a perv like me in search of fast kicks has some limits.

Then I had an a-ha moment: Battlestar Galatica! My favorite TV show in the world populated with characters I adore. I Googled, I found a site, I searched. There is indeed a lot of BSG slash fiction. Unfortunately, most of it was about character pairings I really didn’t find particularly arousing. Apparently very many people fantasize about Felix Gaeta and Gaius Baltar getting freaking. Sadly, I don’t. Let’s face it, I’m a Lee Adama gal all the way. Lee doesn’t see a lot of action in the slash world, but I finally found a story pairing Lee up with Rolo Lampkin, the lawyer who defended Baltar, with Lee’s assistance, at the big Season Three ending trial. The story took up mid-trial and was just okay. No go. I found another right away, hooking Lee up with Sam Anders, husband to Lee’s semi-secret love Kara Thrace (who was thought to be dead at this point). Now this was looking more hopeful. The story was quite sweet, with Lee and Anders commiserating over Kara’s death, culminating in them comforting each other in a very, very hot way. And oh, how that one worked. And worked. And then it didn’t anymore.

Let’s keep in mind that I’m talking about weeks passing with all this activity; not just a couple days or anything. Weeks and weeks previous I had happened across an adult chatroom website and had bookmarked it. Obviously I had an interest since I bothered to search for and find it, but I had not dared do anything else. I knew next to nothing about chatrooms, adult or otherwise, except that they tend to have fairly established cultures and newbies tend to stand out like sore thumbs. But still, every day I saw that bookmark on my list, taunting me and daring me to click on it.

In the meantime, I was exhausting Steve, making demands that he wasn’t always interested in meeting. I believe he actually said to me once, while I was crawling over him trying to interest him in some action, “I’m not a machine.” Ouch. I was pissed the whole next day about that, though I completely understand his point, now. But I knew I had to do something to blow off all this extra steam. On top of everything else, I was stressed, on and off, about work, and my body had begun betraying me with all kinds of chronic aches and pains, to which I’ve alluded before. I began to see an obvious correlation between sex (whether the self kind or the other) and feeling better. Physically and mentally. Now that’s medicine I can get behind, yeah? There was one 24 hour period where I, well, healed myself five times. Five times. I’m quite sure that entire years of my life had passed where I didn’t heal myself five times. Putting aside the fact that I had the desire to heal myself five times in a 24 hour period, I could heal myself five times in a 24 hour period. What the fuck? This was the greatest thing ever. But I did need more fuel for my inner fires.

Because I Love Battlestar Galactica

Huh?

Today we ponder the craziness of a certain plot point on Battlestar Galactica. Kara Thrace ("Starbuck") was apparently killed in her viper whilst in a sort of religious hallucination state. What the frak? I was happy to see Dorothy Lyman's name come up in the credits; I just knew she'd be playing Kara's mom in flashbacks. I loved Dorothy back in the day when she played trailer trash Opal on "All My Children" and heck, I'll even confess to enjoying her as Naomi (I did have to look up her character's name -- I'm not that sick) on more than a few episodes of "Mama's Family." I liked the idea of her playing a tough as nails ex-military woman and a pretty terrible mom, to boot.

On another BSG front, I watched a bit of "Bridget Jones' Diary" yesterday and noted that James Callis (Gaius Baltar) plays one of Bridget's best friends. Who knew?

Today I did nothing productive. I woke up with a sore throat and a feeling of impending flu. Ugh. Apart from a nice walk with Foxy Brown and Steve, I've done little other than lie around on the couch and poke around on the computer. Ah well. Tomorrow I have big plans for sewing some new handbags. We'll see what happens.

The Winter of My Discontent

This has been a rather glum winter for me. After my frenzied preparation for the arts and craft fairs of November and December, I found myself with no specific goal in sight. With nothing really demanding my attention, I settled into idleness and broken attempts at introspection, resulting in a general malaise that has left me dodging phone calls, lunch dates, family gatherings and even the occasional email, not to mention my radio show and the creation of anything for my crafty business. I don't suppose this is particularly unusual behavior for those of us in the colder climates during the winter months, but now I'm not sure how to get back to a more, shall we say, productive life. During this time I've overloaded myself with book after book of various craft techniques, projects, and ideas, not to mention hours and hours of the "hip" crafty shows on HGTV. Unfortunately, rather than inspiring me, all of this information has pretty much stymied my creative efforts. Instead of just diving into new endeavors as I have in the past, I now find myself frozen because I don't have the "perfect" tools I saw on TV or the "appropriate" materials mentioned in a book. I think there's a specific phrase for this phenomenon, but I can't think of it. Anyway, I'm hoping that the [slightly] longer days and higher temperatures will do their magic.

However, if you consider watching TV productive, then things haven't been so dire. In this time period Steve and I watched (amongst other things) the entire two seasons of Veronica Mars on DVD, and every single minute of the new Battlestar Galactica on DVD and on broadcast TV. I'm going to say it: Battlestar Galactica is the overall best television show I've ever seen (and let me tell you, mister, I've watched a lot of TV). One caveat: you have to start at the beginning if you want to watch. If you try to catch an episode of the current season, you will be missing way too much for it to make much sense. There are the occasional standalone episodes, but you need the context of the whole series to get the full effect. I swear it's worth it. Do what I did -- join Netflix (you get two weeks free!) and get all the BSGs in your queue. Don't forget to start with the miniseries. We managed to blow through the miniseries, season 1, season 2 and season 2.5 in a little more than two weeks. We were dreaming Battlestar Galactica, yeah, but that was okay.

Now I have a craft fair, run by my friend Allison, coming up (Chilicraft, at Brittany Woods Middle School - UCity district - March 24) and I'm considering a booth at Earth Day, and I haven't knuckled down to get new stuff made yet. Perhaps a deadline will get me going. And, sigh, someday soon I have to get some kind of a job.