Monthly Archives: January 2010

Let’s Talk (Seriously) About Sex

As you may know, I like to talk about sex.  I like to joke about it, and I certainly like to do it.  I blog about it; I make innuendos about it; in general, I’m pretty much out there with it.  My FB wall is known as the smut wall, and people feel safe to post pretty much anything about sex on it.  Once, I had written as my status that I had given into temptation.  I went out to buy chocolate, and when I returned, there were many comments, increasingly ribald in nature, discussing exactly what to what temptation I had given.  It was fucking hilarious.

I grew up in a Christian household with many secrets and lies.  As I was told that sex was an evil, sinful, dirty thing–until you got married when it became beautiful and holy and all that–I was also being sexually molested by my father.  As I have said before, I do not know for certain that it happened, but I am pretty sure it did.  At the very least, there was emotional incest going on.  At the very worst, actual physical penetration.  In addition, it was a poorly-kept family secret that my father had affairs with the women of our church.  I always knew which woman was his special lady and when she was replaced by someone else.   So, hypocrisy would be the word in my household when I was a child.  In addition, I remember stumbling over my father’s stash of porn mags (magazines, so quaint!) and realizing that he wasn’t as upstanding as he pretended to be.  Do as I say and not as I do, indeed.  Granted, he was married, so that meant that sex was OK, I guess, but still, the porn stash was at direct odds with what the church preached every Sunday.

As I got older, I became disillusioned with the church.  Granted, I never really believed, but I at least gave lip service to being a Christian.  Once I stopped calling myself a Christian, however, it made it difficult for me to talk to the relatives on my mother’s side.  They are all devout Christians.   One of my cousins said to me, seriously, that he decided not to kiss a woman before marriage because kissing led to sex.  And, he said that sex outside marriage was a sin.  I said, “So, if I never get married, then I can’t ever have sex?”  He said, “Yes.”  Of course, this is the same cousin who proposed to his wife a few months after starting to date her and who now has four kids (she’s a practicing Catholic).

I was turned off by the church’s position on sex.  It seemed about control and negation and shaming of something that, quite frankly, is one of the few real pleasures in life.

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The Apple and the Tree, Part II

I am my mother’s daughter.

I’ve always known I had a great deal in common with my mother, but only recently have I acknowledged some of the less-attractive traits.  I have known for sometime that my CDO issues come from her.  When she bought her last new car, she dragged my brother and me to car dealers five days out of the week.  We went to three or four a time.  On the road, she would ask my brother the make of every car (he knows his cars).  She would talk incessantly about this car and that one until I wanted to scream.  This went on for three weeks.

When I was trying to decide whether to go to SF to get my MA in Writing & Consciousness (yes, it was a DFH program at a DFH school which has since lost its accreditation, damn it), I did the same thing.   I obsessed over what might or might not happen.  What if I couldn’t find the BART station?  What if I got mugged on the way home?  What if I didn’t like any of my cohorts?  What if they didn’t like me?  What if I found out that I couldn’t write after all?  What if I hated my housemates?

I was ruminating like this in my therapy session one time, and my therapist cut in gently and said, “Minna, half of the things you think will happen, won’t, and things will happen that you never dreamed could happen.”  I know, it sounds so simple, but it really cut through my stream of thought and got to the heart of the matter.  All that fulminating was a way to avoid making an actual decision.  I am very bad at making decisions, so I use ‘thinking about it’ as a way to put off making an actual decision.

My mother is the therapist to all her friends.  They tell her their problems, and she wisely counsels them.  However, I can’t think of anyone she talks with about her problems–except me.  She made me her confidante when I was eleven or so, and she hasn’t looked back.  I got to hear about her troubles with my father (NOT what I needed to hear) and to her complaints about life in general.

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The Apple and the Tree

I am my father’s daughter.

Part of my depression has been an attempt to squelch this knowledge, but now it’s time to openly talk about it.

I get my writing and performing talents from my father.  Early on, I can remember going to Taiwanese parties (many, many, many Taiwanese parties) and watching my dad perform on stage.  He can sing; he can do Taiwanese puppetry; he can act.   Now, while I don’t do puppetry, I can do the rest.  In fact, at one of the endless Taiwanese parties, I dressed up ‘punk’, was called Minna (said to rhyme with Tina) Turner, and I sang a Taiwanese song in a punkish-way.  It was a huge hit.

Every since I can remember, my dad has been fighting for the independence of Taiwan.  We marched in the streets of Minneapolis when I was a kid, and I remember my dad being interviewed by the local TV news during one such march.   In Taiwan, he is the president of Taiwan’s Institute of Economic Research, and one of the first things he did when he took over was convert half of the men’s bathrooms into women’s bathrooms because the company is three-fourths women.  He makes sure that bonuses are fair, and he refuses to live the ostentatious life that his predecessor had.

My father is a passionate believer is social justice.  I get that from him as well.  I see the inequalities in the world, and they drive me crazy.  The difference is that he is in a position to actually do something about it whereas I am not.

If you met my father, you would be dazzled.  You would not be able to help yourself because he is a charming and magnetic man.  I had a boss at the county who was definitely not one to be snowed by anyone, and she was damn near swooning after my father left from visiting the office (after killing my computer.  He affects electronics and other mechanical things negatively, but that’s another blog entry altogether), gushing about how handsome he was.  I swear she sounded like a schoolgirl with a crush on a rock star.

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A (Mostly) Silly Entry

So, my sleep has been fucked up since I returned from Taiwan.  I know, you’re saying, “How can you tell the difference?”, but I can.  I was slowly inching towards a semi-regular sleep schedule before I left, and now, it’s crashing down around me again.  I am taking more naps than anything else, to the delight of my cats.  I don’t allow them into the bedroom with me because I am allergic, and it’s hard enough for me to sleep as it is.  So, they love it when I take naps on the couch in the living room because then they can snooze with me.

However, I would like to tell one kitty, who shall remain nameless (cough, Shadow, cough), that his new habit of leaping off the arm of the couch onto the pillow on my face is NOT a soothing way to be woken up.  Then, when said kitty (Shadow) pauses to groom himself while bearing his full weight on the pillow smushed squarely into my nose, that just adds insult to injury.  And, no, it’s NOT funny to have the same kitty saunter down my neck, my boobs, my stomach, my lap, and my thighs before settling on my legs.  Apparently, I am now a ramp and a walkway for Shadow.

Anyway, I had a four hour nap from midnight to four in the morning last night.  Then I puttered around for a bit before deciding to do my exercise at around seven in the morning .

May I just say, I love my DVR.  I love it with a passion that is slightly unseemly and more than a bit creepy.  It’s the greatest invention since the dildo, and I mean that sincerely.  I can record two programs at the same time.  I record one program and watch another at the same time.  I can start recording something and then start watching it ten minutes later as it’s still recording.  I can watch a football game and then just rewind it (even if i’m not recording it) to review dubious calls.  I can record up to eleven-billionty hours (not really.  It just seems like it).  I can record for more than six hours in one shot if I wish.  In short, I love my DVR.  I love it so much, I don’t watch any shows live any more, except sports.

I have five shows I record.  Two of them are daily.  I recorded all my shows while I was in Taiwan, so I have a backlog.  I like to watch TV as I exercise, so it seemed like the perfect time to whittle away my saved recordings.

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I Don’t Pay Her Enough

I have been seeing my therapist for eleven-billionty years.  For the first few years, I talked about mostly-superficial things.  Let me back up.  I started seeing my current therapist the last time I decided to lose weight as I was well-aware of how fucked-up I am about my body, food, and weight loss in general.  I had been to a series of therapists over the past…twenty-four years, and they all sucked.  Well, except one.  But I had to stop seeing her in order to go back to college.  The rest of them were not as intelligent as I was, and they too often took what I said at face-value.   I began to see how I could manipulate them–which is not the way to do therapy, let me tell you.  My first therapist was a Christian man at a local uber-Christian college (I was fourteen, and it was my mother’s choice).  He was a nice man, but he didn’t do me any good.  Plus, a male therapist, at that time, was not what I needed.

I also found out I had hyperthyroidism at the time.  I had a shitty male doctor for that as well, which did not improve my outlook at all.  Fucker never told me not to take the pills with food.  I found that out from my current doctor–more than a decade after I started taking the thyroid meds daily.

Anyway, I had my appointment this morning.  I started out with a general comment on the Mass. election.  To my surprise, my therapist said, “Oh, Minna, I can’t talk about that yet.”  She was half-kidding, but I like it when she adds a personal comment from time to time.  I assured her I wasn’t going to talk about the election itself, but I needed to make a parallel to my life.

The Democrats have a majority in all branches of government right now.  Obama was elected by a healthy margin, which, except according to our ‘liberal’ media (nobody calls it that any more.  Funny, that) meant that he had a mandate to pass the core issues of the Democratic Party.  We had 60 Dems in the Senate.  60!  That was filibuster-proof.  Or, would have been if the Blue Dogs (conservative Dems) hadn’t decided they were going to oppose every goddamn core issue of the Democratic Party and side with the Republicans.

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Fuck You, World

I am thisclose to shutting down my blog and walking away.  Why?  Two political reasons and a host of personal ones.  As my faithful readers know, I read Balloon Juice on a daily basis.  There is a schism developing there that is pretty much par the course for the Democratic Party, and things really started boiling over during the Healthcare Reform, um, debates for lack of a better word.  The thing is, I can see the issues from more than one side, and I think many people are speaking to the truth.  However, as I have closely followed politics now for a year, I can say that I am turning out to be more pragmatic than I first thought.

Before the last election, I would have said that I was an idealist, a pretty far-left progressive.  Then, after Obama was elected, I realized that I am not as far-left as I thought.  However, I am not a centrist, either.  Which leaves me…exactly nowhere again.  Story of my fucking life that I can’t fit in anywhere.  All I know is that I’m not a batshitcrazy Republican rightwinger nor a Blue Dog Democrat.  Beyond that, I have no clue as to how to label myself.

It’s getting harder for me to follow politics because I feel that on a national level, my input really doesn’t matter.  Anyway, the two things politically that are fucking me up right now.  Number one, the special election in Mass.  Now, the Dems ran a horrible campaign, just horrible.  However, after reading up on both candidates, I don’t know how anyone who isn’t a rightwinger could vote for Brown.  I have a friend who lives in Mass (shout-out to Original Jim), and he said many of his female friends were voting for Brown because they didn’t like Coakley and because Brown was cute.  WTF?  I am sick and tired of strong-willed women dissing other strong-willed women, and voting for someone because he’s cute?  Ugh.

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For AWS & Yutsano (My Tats)

Here are pics of my tats for anyone not on Facebook, especially arguingwithsignposts and Yutsano from Balloon Juice.  Hey.  We have to amuse ourselves somehow when it’s late at night, don’t we?

lotus blossom

yin yang

ring of fire

kali

My Sexuality

I had another flashback during taiji today.  I tried to do the meditation to see what would happen, and yeah, won’t be doing that again any time soon.

Now, a little context.  I had three hours of sleep this morning before taiji.  My sleep, in general, has been even more fucked-up than usual since returning from Taiwan.  I hadn’t planned on going to taiji today when I went to bed at eight in the morning, but when I woke up at eleven and couldn’t go back to sleep, I decided to go to taiji.

Now, I have been in a deep funk since returning for many reasons, so I probably would have been wise to sit out meditation.  However, I was curious to see what would happen because it’d been two months or so since I meditated.  The second I shut my eyes, I was in trouble.

This time, my father held his hand out to me and told me to suck his thumb.  I did.  I had a nightgown on–a different one–and we were standing up.  After I suck my father’s thumb, he jams it into my pussy under my nightgown.  Yes, I was seven in the flashback, or a tad bit younger.  With his other hand, he pushed me against the wall–by my throat.

I had tears in my eyes as I meditated.  I tried (per Julie’s instructions) to push the images outside my circle of concentration, but I couldn’t.  They stubbornly refused to remain pushed.  The second meditation was over, I bolted for my bottle of water in order to clear my head.

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