Month: February 2009

The river flooded and I forgot to put my gangplank out!

Like I’ve mentioned before (though I suspect nobody believes it) my life functions largely at the mercy of a rickety barter system. This week, that has meant that I’m reading research statements in exchange for some tech work.

To call the task tedious would be the understatement of the decade. Though I do get to issue dire warnings against excessive use of e.g. and similar poor grammar choices!

I’ve continued to ponder where to spend my precious few weeks in the states, while evaluating salacious stories that have been trickling in.

What a conundrum; I really can’t decide who to visit. Several people I would have once thought fun have turned their attention to sabotaging marriages (their own or others). Why, I do not know, though I suppose it might be a developmental plateau of some sort. Like turning five, or thirteen.

These antics baffle me on a fundamental level, though I’ve been rifling through my mental files and cross-referencing with old stories in an effort to understand.

For instance: once, years ago, I was casually chatting with one of my rock star friends at some bar and his girlfriend turned up and was so visibly enraged I thought she was going to leap across the table and attack me.

What was I talking to her partner about? Grotesque abdominal surgeries. Even a backwards person like yours truly can assert that does not count as flirting. No matter how much cleavage I had on display.

Though I just shrugged and wandered off – thinking weird, but whatever. I wouldn’t have even remembered the incident except, within the next twenty-four hours, she tried to seduce my husband.

I was puzzled, and that has remained my dominant reaction to similar situations. Why are some people so possessive, if they also engage in poaching? If you are capable of having one thought (this person is my possession) then how is the other (I will now steal the possession of another person) tenable?

I don’t understand either belief, let alone how people maintain both at once. I have many faults, but I am not a hypocrite.

It would take several more years before I went on the Hunt for Bad Boys and Lumberjacks with Ana Erotica, who announced the explicit operating principle Straight Girls Have No Solidarity.

Oh. Really? I never knew.

While it would be foolish to make generalizations about such a large slice of humanity, this was an illuminating instruction – it had seriously never occurred to me that anyone would think like that.

When I was seventeen I was quite shocked to find my best friend (since kindergarten) making out with my boyfriend in the laundry room. Not because I felt betrayed by him, oh no. What I failed to grasp then or ever was why she made that choice.

I still don’t really understand why she would have picked a few seconds of reckless affection in a dank basement over the entire lifetime of experience we had enjoyed. Even if he was one of maybe two heterosexual males in our scene.

Wandering along behind Ana Erotica as she rampaged across the Hill that week I watched with amazement as she racked up conquests and made enemies. Along the way I took lots of notes and made several enduring friendships with people she rejected as Not Dirty Enough. Heck, I even seem to be stuck forever dealing with the truly heinous boys who caused all the trouble that inspired the campaign – and I dislike them both.

You have to remember that the majority of my early social life was conducted amongst activists and children, two social groups notorious for highly calibrated ethics. Like them, I am a purist, completely loyal to first principles even at my most wicked.

It was clear to me at a very young age that antics like fucking your way through the housemates and/or their loved ones made it very difficult to split up the monthly phone bill. This lesson can be extrapolated to fit almost any other scenario where you might need to choose between having a family, community, job, or …. a quickie.

I know lots of people who competently practice non-monogamy. That is not what I am talking about – there is a big gap between consensual ‘open’ relationships and the active, deliberate destruction of emotional and practical resources some of my friends are engaging in at the moment.

I may be hedonistic, but I understand and respect boundaries. This is, I think, a reasonable way to view the world.