It's Friday, and the new column and calendar is up. What else? Well, it's been busy around here. Max is leaving today to go on one of his road trips. He'll be gone about a week, and of course I'll miss him terribly, but I do enjoy having some time alone.

Not that I'll be alone all that much. Mom returns Saturday and then she and I are going up to the Salish Lodge for some mother-and-daughter spa time. Two days of massages, facials, and various other pleasurable things - I can't wait. (Clients, please note: I will not be available Monday or Tuesday of next week.)

And I'll be spending some extra time with Roman this coming week as well, although he's in a frenzy of preparation for Folsom Street Fair. Max and I are looking forward to FSF as well - we're teaching some rope classes at the Folsom Fringe Fest this year.

Seattle theatre fans: Max and I went to see "Vincent in Brixton" at the The Act last night. It's a good show, intense and well-acted. Seeing a play based on Vincent Van Gogh's young life intrigued me, so I think I'll click over to Powells and see if they have a good biography of him. Any suggestions?

Questions

Sometimes, I admit, blogging is a difficult task. I sit down in front of the computer and think, “What the hell am I going to write about?”

Today I came across a little book I’d forgotten I had. It’s called, The Book of Questions: Love and Sex. It's a spin-off from the conversation-starting series by Gregory Stock, The Book Of Questions. I now realize it’s a good blog-prompter as well. So I opened it at random, and here are some questions I found.

When you look back on past romances, do you ever wonder what you saw in a former lover? If so, it is because you have changed or because you have grown to see the person more clearly?

Good lord, yes. When I think about some of my old lovers, I wish I could say I was on drugs at the time, because there is no other good reason for me to have dated them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.

I’m willing to give myself a pass on lovers I had before I was, say, 22. And it’s not that all my exes are terrible people. (Although, a few of them.... ) But a lot of them were just horrifyingly wrong for me.

Sometimes it was that I wanted them to be something they weren’t, sometimes it was that I was sexually attracted to someone I had nothing intellectually or emotionally in common with, and sometimes I was intellectually/emotionally attracted to someone who was wrong for me sexually.

As for the second question: yes, I have changed, and as part of changing, I see the person – and my reasons for dating them - more clearly.

In the early phases of a romance, how much do you tend to be influenced by friends and family’s opinions of your potential partner?

Not very much. (Which may have led to some of my bad choices.) Not at all by my genetic family, since they know so little about my sexuality. In terms of friends, Miss K probably would have the most influence on me, because she knows me well and she has no axe to grind in terms of my having or not having a particular partner.

But because of the way I do poly, I would definitely listen to what Max had to say about someone I was thinking of getting involved with. But Max and I both know that there’s a difference between “I myself don’t find that person attractive,” and “You shouldn’t go there.” We don’t insist on close relationships with each other’s secondaries, although it’s fine if it happens.

I’d listen to Roman as well, particularly since it would be important to me that anyone I got involved with was respectful to him as well as to Max.

If you had to make love in either total darkness or where background noise would prevent speech, which would you prefer?

The noise. (Especially if it was, say, Rammstein, NIN, and Ministry.) Total – I mean, total! – darkness would be not be a turn-on for me. I have to be able to see a little bit, even if it’s very dim. Although - I have been blindfolded for sex, and while I wouldn’t want it all the time, it can certainly be erotic. For some reason, that seems different than being a pitch-black room. I have no idea why.

Some light relief from disaster news…

Article about poly in the NYT. It’s interesting to see the word and the concept make its way into the mainstream.

And another one in the Baltimore Sun (BugMeNot access: Username: bugmenot90@mailinator.com, password: bugmenot)

Paging Barbara Eden: “Genie Grants Scalia Strict Constructionist Interpretation Of Wish”.

Some Days My Government Really Frightens Me…

I’ve been reading about Katrina all weekend. What a shameful debacle. Local, state and federal government sure fucked up on this one, and a lot of people really suffered because of it. I predict some officials will be paying the price in the next elections, which is much less of a penalty than some of them deserve. The unmitigated stupidity of the President saying, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees”, when it’s been predicted for years is just unforgivable.

And Condoleeza Rice taking in Broadway musicals while people in her home state go without clean water? Badly done, Condi, badly done. But why should we expect you to be any better than your bosses?

And now that Monkey-Boy gets to select another Supreme Court Justice. Shit! Given the anti-sex agenda of the Shrub’s administration, one shudders to think who he’ll choose. Roberts isn’t my dream date, but he’s amazingly sort of, almost, kinda rational, when you compare him to some of the other people Bush could have chosen. Now those far-right whackos have another shot at it. I'm thinking Bush will be catering to the hardest core of his crumbling base on this one, given that he's lost a lot of political goodwill over Katrina. It won't be pretty.

The greed and the misdirected energy of this administration disgusts me. I think of myself a political moderate, but the callousness and the rank inefficiency of much of the current Republican party leadership leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. I don’t need far-left liberals to create a nanny-state to protect me from myself, but good Christ, at least they wouldn’t leave the poor, the sick, the old, and the babies to die in a ruined city.