TastyTrixie.com

Archive for February, 2009

I want to pay more attention to seasonal holidays, the weather, rituals and nature so for the past six months or so a lot of our shoots have reflected my focus on integrating those things into our lives. Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday, a day I would never have had any awareness of if it weren’t for having a magnificent pen pal from Baton Rouge when I was a teenager (if he sees this link and then these pictures I’m sure his eyes will melt in their sockets and dribble down his face in tears of horror — I don’t want to do this to you, really I don’t — I only want your Daily Preciousness to get the attention it deserves!) so here are some of my Mardi Gra-tesque pictures from a set I posted for my members today:

It’s hard to procure a lot of beads when you’re already totally naked:

I think I bear a striking resemblance to the superhero version of myself I patched together here.

*****

The photo set might not win any prizes for creativity or eroticism, but for me it was a major achievement — couldn’t have been better. We shot them last night and I edited and uploaded them within two hours and actually HAD FUN doing it. My mind is still blown by how awesome life is when you don’t feel like crap from fucked-up hormone imbalances. I’m not sure how apparent it is in pictures or on cam, but I feel 500% better than I did a couple months ago when getting ready for a shoot was TORTURE, to say nothing of actually doing the shooting itself. My face and neck were all bizarrely fat (even more than is normal for me — seriously, ONE double chin is cute . . . six rolls are not), my lips were thin, there were terrifying dark puffy circles under my eyes . . . it was sheer fucking painful hell. All I can say is THREE CHEERS FOR ESTROGEN!

When I have a few more shoots I like posted, I will post a putrid gallery I’ve been sitting on that epitomizes how wretched and disgusting I felt. Sort of a before and after kind of thing.

*****

Last night after we did all of that, Delia was “in the mood”. After I spent about ten minutes rambling about my curiosity regarding hemorrhoids and whether or not I have one, she politely asked if I would like to engage in sexual intercourse (probably as a counter to my repeated invitations to her to inspect my anus). I clapped my hands together and cried, “get the lube!”

After that it was actually sexy. You might not be able to imagine how, but you don’t have to. That’s our private joy . . . just between the two of us. And our voyeur cams, of course.

Here’s the “Twin Peaks Sign Spot” where we hoped to get some flashing pictures:

Unfortunately a variety of circumstances conspired against us. Like how I forgot that things have changed a lot since I was a teenager from two towns over driving around the area; now there are thousands of yuppies crawling around in and out of their weird, flimsy, housing development hives. There was TRAFFIC and stuff, even before school/work got out during the middle of the day in the middle of the week. Like how the sun was shining so it sort of ruined the mood, as far as I’m concerned, of capturing the Twin Peaks feeling of that particular shot – I think we’d have had to wake up really early and get out there right when everyone would have been driving to work to have gotten the right light.

There were also work crews out in a lot of places tending to damage done by the flooding. We wound up shooting on the riverbank further down the road and getting there was like walking through the sand into a weird post-war scene sort of like after Mount St. Helens exploded and covered everything in grey ash.

In the winter when there are already bare branches and less green, when the floodwaters recede they leave behind extra greyness and washed-out debris on all of the low branches and trunk-bottoms.

A fifteen year old girl was brought up on first degree murder charges around the same time as the most recent flooding here in Washington. Apparently she gave birth to a baby (fathered by a man in his thirties) at home in the bathroom where she let it drown in the toilet, and with (at the very least) the knowledge of her meth-head dad she’d only been living with for a few weeks, placed the body inside the rest of their garbage on the curb.

This news broke at the same time I was looking at pictures of the valley where I grew up with most of it covered by floodwater. I remembered the times we’d be trying to come home from somewhere, caught by rising water, and my stepdad would drive through standing water on flooded-out roads even after my mom begged him not to. I especially remember one of those times being at night. Pitch dark except for headlights shining out over water in places it shouldn’t be, all of us screaming for him not to do it. Alone in the night surrounded by black water at the mercy of a motherfucking man behind a steering wheel.

Many people do this. Many people die when people do this. Kids and spouses and girlfriends, powerless in cars controlled by someone who assesses the risk as worth taking and makes the decision for everyone to plunge ahead. These deaths are almost always called “accidents”. Tragic accidents. Even if the people were screaming and crying and begging the person not to do it. People who have names and can talk and the person didn’t just go through physical trauma to give birth to in the bathroom of a house with a drug-dealing dad with a gun. Driven by people old enough to have a driver’s license as opposed to someone who isn’t allowed to drive a car by herself but was fucked without a rubber by some guy over thirty.

First. Degree. Murder.

Do you know the sound of a car driving through deep water in the dark with your little sister sitting beside you in the back seat? And you can’t do anything to stop it or create any kind of safety? It’s a scary fucking sound. My stepdad never even got a ticket for any of the times he did that.

The River. “River” is a scary, dark, dangerous word in my memory. It was a place my mom was afraid we would drown. A place where men dumped women’s bodies. A swift swelling uncontainable body that could rise up and burst out of its banks in a matter of hours just because the sun did too much shining too early in the spring. The river is a fucking menace and I can never understand it when real estate brochures list “riverfront” in the words to lure prospective buyers. But I still miss living by those rivers, even though I hate the nightmares I still have about them. They are never not flooding in my dreams.

*****

On a lighter note, here are a few of my favorite pictures we *did* manage to shoot (you can see all of them in Delia’s members-only area or a few more samples on her blog):

We actually only shot two sets of pictures and a video (all of Delia) but it was worth it not just for the content but to seize the moment and enjoy a few hours away off cam to visit my mom on one day and just do NOTHING some of the rest of the time. Seriously, we played a silly computer game called Peggle Nights for hours one night, and it was totally cool because we NEVER do things like that. It was so cold outside, and there was so much junk food to be eaten, and we were away from home for the first time since I started feeling human again . . . I wish we could have spent a WEEK not shooting or doing anything work-related.

It seems like that happens a lot when we leave home for shoots; we realize OH MY GOD WE HAVE NOT TAKEN ANY TIME OFF FOR OURSELVES OR SCHEDULED ANY VACATIONS AWAY THAT WERE NOT WORK IN FOREVER/NEVER AND NO ONE IS WATCHING US ON CAM IT’S LIKE OUR PARENTS LEFT US AT HOME ALONE!! Let’s discover all of the microwavable instant noodles for sale at QFC and slum around doing absolutely nothing productive! LET’S HAVE A PEGGLE NIGHT EXTRAVAGANZA!!!

Seriously — it was bitterly cold outside. I don’t know how Delia managed to achieve an erection out there. I would have cried my titties off. Next time I *will* shoot something on Ronette’s bridge, though — I promise! Unless a new Peggle comes out . . . (fyi: we downloaded Peggle Nights from Big Fish Games)

In the meantime I have no idea what to post for my members-only update since I *thought* I was going to have Twin Peaksy pics to post. I mean, I have many IDEAS, I’m just not sure what we can pull off quickly. Like, tonight. We’ll see what happens.

I wish I had more time and brain power to consume other people’s blogs because when I do, I come across provocative and revealing entries like these two about class:

Keeping San Francisco Safe From Prostitutes?
Melissa wrote this back when SF voters had the chance to decriminalize prostitution. They didn’t, of course, and her post explains a lot of reasons why even a supposedly-progressive, liberal, educated population is ignorant and afraid of sex workers running amok:

“The biggest opposition to Prop K isn’t anti-prostitution feminist groups. It’s ‘neighborhood associations.’ Unlike even the most socially conservative feminists, they never say, I don’t want sex workers to be raped. They say, I don’t want to see sex workers. Don’t want to see them on their front steps. Don’t want to see their clients or ‘pimps’. Don’t want to see condoms, or syringes. In short: don’t want to see poverty, don’t want to see poor people. . . . What K opponents will never say in public, is that it’s not prostitutes that are hard to live next to — it’s poverty.“

On a more personal note, Amber Rhea posted an extremely intimate entry yesterday sharing her memories of class-consciousness developing in childhood and young adulthood and reflections on all of that jazz (like how attending private school probably saved her life).

“My mom was a bartender until I was 7 or 8 years old. When I’d go spend the night at friends’ houses, I’d take my toiletries in a purple Crown Royal bag (we always had tons of them around the house). We also had a lot of extra beer/liquor T-shirts that I used as nightshirts . . . . it wasn’t until I was in my teens that it dawned on me why [my friends'] parents might think it’s weird for a 7-year-old to carry a Crown Royal bag and sleep in a Finlandia T-shirt.”

Without going into a lot of detail (just because I don’t have time to write that book right now), I can’t overemphasize how much my socioeconomic background shaped my identity and values. More than being female. More than being white. Even though both of those things are a big huge intrinsic part of it, the money stuff and place my family occupied (pretty low down) in the hierarchy colors the way I see and respond to pretty much everything, I think, and in such insidious ways that I’m constantly chipping away at my lack of awareness at how deep it goes and how far back and how much it continues to effect my options and choices today.

Sometimes I feel like discussions about race and gender are just big polarizing distractions to keep us from addressing the BIGGER, all-encompassing issue of class. They’re not, but sometimes I feel that way (and I know some other people do, too).

*****

A related note: right now I resent the way blame is laid for the recession. Instead of saying that banks ass-raped tons of people who probably COULD have made their mortgage payments if not for the usury/deception/inflated interest rates and doubled/trebled payments, every comment seems designed to tell us that banks simply LENT MONEY TO POOR PEOPLE. Like, THAT was the big mistake. As though those borrowers could never have made FAIR payments on mortgages with FAIR terms. As though people wouldn’t have felt the need to take out second and third mortgages to be able to pay credit cards with ludicrous, unjustifiably-high, ass-raping interest rates.

The mainstream discussion about it and language referring to sub-prime mortgages, etc. is all backwards; it *pretends* to call the lending institutions and big mucky-mucks greedy while using language that continues to make it sound like the banks’ problems were making bad bets on bad people, when really they fucked vulnerable people dry, butt-ramming them straight into the ground. Let’s just bleed these people dry. When you make financially troubled people pay exorbitantly high interest rates and double their minimum payments, etc. what the fuck do you THINK will happen? Unless they win the lottery, they’ll never be able to keep up or dig themselves out of the deep grave the lenders dug for them.

I’m not making these comments as someone who thinks she has all the answers or understands the complexity of all of it or is well-read on the subject. I’m making them as an average joe butt plumber based on her own experiences with banks and mainstream exposure to superficial news with a little bit of deeper reading here and there. My intention isn’t to spark a big-ass discussion about it, just web-log some stuff. The above paragraphs are only a small chunk of reflection, not a complete or coherent argument. I won’t publish comments from people assuming I’m claiming to be an expert or assuming that because I haven’t written this or that or included another bit or piece, that I must not agree with this or that bit or piece, nor will I publish comments demonstrating a lack of comprehension regarding what I already wrote. HATE that.

For the record, my interest isn’t really in “punishing” rich people (even when they DO *deserve* to be hung from the highest tree) or placing limits on how much money people can make, it’s on making fair regulations and restrictions on how deeply people can be abused. It’s on little things that would change a lot. LIKE NOT LETTING CREDIT CARD COMPANIES MAKE YOUR PAYMENT DUE ON A WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY, THEN CHARGING YOU A LATE FEE AND RAISING YOUR INTEREST RATE BECAUSE YOU FAILED TO PAY ON TIME WHEN YOUR PAYMENT ARRIVES ON THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY FOLLOWING THE DAY THEY DEMANDED YOUR PAYMENT, BUT CAN’T EVEN RECEIVE IT/WON’T EVEN PROCESS IT. It’s a pretty fucking simple matter — we have the technology at this point to automatically reject a date that is a holiday or weekend and chose either an earlier or a later date, or to have a FAIR regulation that doesn’t even ALLOW lending institutions to punish you for not delivering a payment on a day when delivery of said payment IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Seriously. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t talking about things like this. Everyone. All day. Until something happens.

Just one example. I know *some* people are talking about it some of the time, but it’s not on headline news, etc. every five seconds the way Chris Brown is. Instead everyone just ignores and skirts around these tangible, obvious bits of fuckery. It just keeps adding up, but I don’t hear anything except “bail out”. If anyone has links to proposed regulations tightening this shit up, I’d love to read it because as it is right now I’m too busy bitching about it to look the shit up (I know! I’m an ass!). I know awhile back congress was talking about putting an end to the credit card companies burying high interest rate balances under the lower interest rate balances, but I don’t know whatever became of that/if they are in fact now forced to automatically apply payments to the balances with the highest interest rates first.

Why am I still sitting here blogging about this? Seriously, all I was going to do was post two links. Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh . . . hate myself for not keeping up with the news on this stuff better.

Yesterday we did a bunch of housecleaning with special attention on two of our most important rooms: our bedroom and the parlor where we do all of our indoor-exercising and sun-catching. After a week of smelling not-so-fresh places (the thrift stores, our van, the smokey-smelling motel room with the “no smoking” sign) it feels so good to be able to walk through our house and have it smell like lavender and other fresh things.

All I want to do is walk around in our house, picking stuff up, folding laundry, stretching, lighting candles, and daydreaming. That’s not all I *have* done, but that’s how I feel. Like right now I want to take a small container of polished rocks into bed and just pass them back and forth with Delia, inspecting their colors and feeling their contours, holding them up to lamplight, listening to dorky new age music.

I feel great. Maybe it’s the four anti-inflammatories I took for my period cramps today. I don’t know. But it’s pretty fucking rad. Maybe it was the sunshine we had the past couple of days and the exercise we got with it shining on us. Maybe it was being able to get work done even while I had to spend time on hold with the phone company. Maybe it’s all of the clarifying and focusing I’ve been doing lately.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think maybe I’d been hitting one of these sweet pussy pipes too hard. Or not. Since 40% of the few times I’ve smoked it’s given me major anxiety attacks. Yes, few enough that I could count each of them and calculate the percentage. And right now I feel nothing but peace.

You notice certain physical changes when your hormone balance shifts. Like I knew my boobs would get bigger & more sensitive getting back on the pill and all the other stuff I’m taking/doing.

I’m noticing physical changes this time around in my cunt. Aside from the usual increased lubrication extra estrogen gives you, it *looks* really puffy and fat and smooth and pink. I hesitate to say this, but it looks younger.

The really awesome part is I think it’s making my g-spot and perineum spongier, more sensitive and erotically charged. During my shows today and yesterday my orgasms were really thick, rocking cunt-focused things instead of little pointy tip-of-the-clit climaxes. I love all kinds of orgasms, but it’s always thrilling to experience a variety of them or notice a recognizable shift in sensation.

One of the downsides is the visible part of my clit is shrinking. I was really disappointed to look down last week and notice how much smaller it is than a month ago in spite of having so much less hair. I really like it when it sticks out more and am intrigued, shall we say, by women who have large knuckle-like clits.

Delia’s therapist isn’t a fan of hormonal birth control and the way it can flatline some women’s sex drives, but the benefits of having more chick hormones is such a huge relief to me on so many levels I can only look at the bright sides and wonder how many of them there are. Like, has anyone done any research into the hormone balances of women who squirt versus those of us who don’t or rarely do? I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that squirters are more estrogen dominant.

A few samples from my Friday the 13th / Valentine’s Day gallery:

Am I superstitious about black cats and Friday the 13th and all of that? No. If I am, it’s in the opposite way — my rational mind rejects those superstitions and my personality seems to overcompensate by becoming GIDDY over the prospect of walking under ladders and attaching positive meaning to supposedly unlucky days/events/portents of doom. So yeah . . . I’m irrationally attached to those things that superstitious people consider unlucky.

I’m happy to be home again after being gone for four. We didn’t get much shooting done, but the trip and time we took was worth it not just for the pictures, but the time to ourselves, off cam. We haven’t spent a night away from work (aka home) together since . . . well, since well before September. I don’t think this trip totally counted as a vacation, but it was a reminder that we should try taking one every so often (I know, it seems like I’m always saying that and never fully committing to doing it).

We also spent a few hours on Friday visiting my mom including eating at Ken’s Truck Town (yes, we like eating at truck stops; why did they take the Monte Cristo off the menu?) and visiting the new casino. I was surprised she wanted to check it out since my stepdad had a serious gambling problem and my mom was initially vehemently opposed to that casino opening (not because she’s still with him — she’s not — but having lived with someone with a gambling addiction she’s not into casinos at all). We all stood around like we were in a foreign country trying to decide what to do with the $3.75 I’d split between the three of us to put in the slot machines. I’d have blown more money there (I consider it a donation/reparations . . . AND mindless fun) but neither my mom nor Delia were interested once we lost the $21 we won.

*****

We don’t have any special plans for tonight. Tomorrow and Monday (President’s Day) we’ve got webcam shows and chat scheduled so I think we’ll just do a little work and relax this evening. Delia picked up a chile-flavored dark chocolate bar for us to share.

From our motel room:

You always hope for good weather when you’re shooting outside. Actually, you basically COUNT on having PERFECT weather. “Good” weather doesn’t always cut it. Like today, when I wanted it to be gloomy, but not actually rain or snow. Instead it’s sunny. Bright blue. Too loud.

Delia’s getting ready for me to shoot her but the light is just not right at all.

I could have a spycam on me right now in our motel room while I blog this but I don’t want to.

*****

Sometimes it makes me nervous when I communicate shoot ideas/plans to people because I’m afraid they’ll get their hopes up for something really creative and amazing based on how much work and planning we seem to be putting in it. And of course it never winds up being THAT great / is still pretty generic. At best everything is still sort of a rough draft of a good idea. Shows potential. Meets or exceeds a sort of bland standard of certain amateur porn things. We’d have to shoot a lot less to do a lot better or have a lot more resources and people working for us or stay up all day and night. People sweetly encourage me, “just shoot less! Shoot what *you* want!” but I don’t think you can make money that way. The better and higher quality your work is, the less there is of it and the easier it is for people to “steal” and pass around. Have you noticed that on the internet? The more beautiful something is, the more people feel they have a collective right to enjoy it for free and share it with each other. This is great! Everyone should know about it! It’s an extremely flattering compliment that can wind up starving you to death.

I could pull out a lot of things we do and present them in a different way to make them seem better than they are, but I can’t seem to find time for that. And again, I’m still proud of mediocrity and just having potential. It’s a very good thing to make pictures that make people happy every week, are genuine, straightforward, show promise, suggest a certain mood. I think I’m good at that: being suggestive.

*****

I have a hard time accepting compliments that make our work seem better than it is. I also can’t help feeling defensive towards people who think what we do is easy or that they have solutions to challenges I complain about, solutions they are sure would work and certain have never crossed my mind or been attempted or dismissed because they wouldn’t work for a variety of reasons.

I remember standing outside our local movie theater listening to some blow-hards talking about what THEY would do if THEY owned the local theaters. Why don’t they do X and Y? It would be simple . . . if I owned it, X would be the first thing I’d do. I hate those people even though I do exactly the same thing. Maybe that’s why I hate those people; because I can’t resist being a stupid know-it-all either, even when I know I don’t. It’s people’s way of being part of the conversation when they really are in no position to comment at all. I just really hate being the subject of other people’s imaginary business-plan hobby-thoughts myself, but I guess I encourage it to a certain extent. Love it up to a certain point. I want people to think of the growth of our business as a serial novel, something they want to keep reading about and hope will end well and spawn many sequels. I just don’t want them to tell me how to write it. But with some people you can’t have one without the other. I don’t blame them since I can’t resist doing the same thing sometimes. And some of them really mean well. They really do.

Have you ever thought about X? I would totally read that! I’m sure it would make you rich! You know, I saw you on cam for ten minutes last week and I really think what your problem is . . . Hey, I’ll bet if you did more of Z a lot more people would jack off to you! Z is totally where it’s at.

*****

Every time we go away from home to shoot I go through a little process. First I’m anxious that we’ll forget to pack something, that things won’t go as planned, that we won’t get enough work done. Then I realize everything is going to be fine, and if it isn’t, I might as well enjoy the time away as time off, well-deserved. Then I get a fresh perspective since I’m away from home/work and a million distractions and have a little flexibility to think clearly. About what I want. About what I REALLY WANT TO DO. If I could only do one thing.

I’m at the point where I know what that one thing is, even when I’m at home and not away. But I’m not at the point of wanting or being able to give all my other work up in favor of that one thing and don’t know if I ever will be. I still cling to the notion that it might be possible to do it all. Or that I should do other things first in order to make doing the one thing easier, foremost and full-time, without having to give a fuck what anybody else thinks of it.

If I could be good at any one thing — if I were to invest 10,000 hours of practice in attempting to master it — I know exactly what the one thing would be. I used to think forty-five would be too old to start being good at something, but now I think it would be perfect. Even fifty would be fine. Which means I don’t really need to start practicing right now to be completely satisfied with myself in fifteen years. I’m comforted by this thought.

Just a quick entry to say we’re busy getting ready to be gone for a few days trying to shoot something specific. Outside. And it’s WINTER. But that’s when it needs to be shot. Mostly we’re just trying to get ready (much more complicated than you might imagine unless you’ve done our kind of work and the same way we do it) and it’s been snowing (again).

I anticipate having cold fingers, legs, buttocks, etc. a lot on Thursday and Friday. And then we’re going to celebrate a late Christmas/early Valentine’s day/Friday the 13th dinner with my mom. I’m looking forward to it, but also dreading certain things and am practicing stress management techniques while I’m not actively working.

Yesterday we went shopping for additional costuming for aforementioned shoot and after hours of sifting through second-hand clothing my nasal passages, throat and head already felt invaded by that weird, unsettling thrift-store smell that makes you feel like you’re coming down with some old-lady sickness. Then we went to the drugstore where a lady was coughing. AND COUGHING. And hacking.

I’m not the type who’s EASILY grossed out by random germs, sneezing or coughing people in public, but my mucous membranes were already feeling vulnerable after searching through three thrift stores and this woman was really projecting her spittle. She made half-assed attempts to cover her mouth with her hand by holding it up six inches from her face and coughing TOWARDS it, not into it, and then she walked around briskly touching every single thing in the store with that hand. On top of that there’s something unsettling about this woman; I’ve seen her around town before and she’s like a fascinating fifty-seven year old dolly with long, youthful dark-blonde hair in waves worn in a loose asymmetrical ponytail. Her face is powdered porcelain with spots of rouge on her cheeks. Her lips and eyes are lined and her features are girlish except for the wrinkles around her mouth. Nothing about her says middle-aged, which is probably what she is; instead she’s a duality of eleven-year old girl and seventy-nine year old woman. I’d totally follow her around the store to stare if she didn’t give off such an aura of contagion.

When we got to the checkstand she got in line behind us and it suddenly started pouring down snow outside. The cashier kept interrupting our transaction to answer the phone and I felt totally hemmed in by winter, like she wasn’t going to give up until she infected us with post-nasal slush.

Because I DO NOT want to get sick right when we’ve got time and money invested in shooting, I came home and started swilling down emergen-c until I was totally high (see this tweet followed by this). I rarely get colds (I think I’ve averaged maybe one cold or flu every other year, if that, in the past fifteen years) but I’m still paranoid enough to often feel like I’m coming down with one.

So. The goal today is to get a million things done, not get sick, stay calm, and leave as early as possible tomorrow so we can arrive at our destination safely while there’s still daylight so we can plot our shooting locations for Thursday and Friday.

I won’t be checking email while we’re gone, we have webcam shows and chat scheduled when we get back (on Sunday and Monday), and I’ve only responded to maybe 3% of my email over the past year, so . . . yeah — if you want to talk to me any time soon you’ll probably need to be a member who shows up to one of those live cam events next week. Wish us a productive trip!

*****

Speaking of my limits, two seconds before I hit “publish” on this post, I got a comment on my last blog entry from a guy who has a problem. Here’s the comment:

I hope someday that you will reply to my comments. Forever seeking your feedback, Furry Freak Bro, aka4JerryGarcia, Merry Pranksters, etc.

He might be a nice guy (if memory serves he acts normal during camshows), but he is one persistently demanding motherfucker who cannot take a hint. Facebook, twitter, email, blog comments — they all say basically the same thing: Hi there – respond to me PLEASE; I await your response. Please write back to me. If you commented back it would make my day. Your fan, xoxo blah blah blah
WHAT. THE. FUCK!?!?!

First of all, you’ve said nothing to me that warrants a response. Second, if you’re a fan of mine you’ll see that I don’t engage in a lot of idle chit-chat, particularly the hi/good morning/waving/hugging/emoticons variety and if you have any reading comprehension you can see that I’m KIND OF overwhelmed, constantly talk about not having the time or energy for email, trying to keep my hours at the computer limited to a healthy number and use that time productively, etc. How long would it take if I said “hi” or “good morning” or “YES! I fucking SEE you!!” to every single person I encountered online? I would have no fucking life and no time to respond to people who actually put a lot of thought and effort into writing to me.

So I blocked him on Twitter so I wouldn’t be bombarded by his pleas for attention, but now he has the balls to make that comment on a blog entry that essentially says I’ve been feeling like shit and have barely had the energy to drag myself out of bed and now that I’m feeling better it will take awhile to catch up on everything. But listen; even if I were all caught up and had ample time on my hands, the last thing I would feel like doing is encouraging these incessant, self-absorbed, petulant guilt-trips seeking acknowledgment.

I really try to not be mean and to consider that even wonderful people have blind spots, bad habits, etc. Before I ream someone’s ass I sometimes try to imagine the person might be borderline retarded or otherwise lack the skills or comprehension to function at a higher level; maybe all they know is that the internet is a friendly place where you can look at pretty girls and get them to say ‘hi’ to you. And seriously? There are a lot of pretty girls online who make that their sole job/function in life; collecting myspace friends, saying ‘hi’ and ‘hugs’ to everyone, making a name for themselves that way. BUT I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE GIRLS. Get it?

Honestly I try to just ignore this person and others like him (ex. No one’s responded to my messages — I guess no one loves me) because I don’t have the time or mental capacity myself to discover a nice way to tell them to STOP ACTING LIKE CREEPY STALKERS (when they’re not really even BEING particularly creepy or stalkerish, just obnoxious) and understand that from my perspective I just feel bombarded by people who want think they deserve to have me interrupt my life to instant message them. I don’t care if it’s only two letters. H. I. Obviously it won’t stop there. Next it will be “what’s up? Do you like me? How’s the weather?”

You wanted my feedback? You’ve got it, fucker. Try to see things from other people’s perspectives. I don’t *expect* people to waste their personal time empathizing with me or reading my long-ass blog posts, but if you send me hundreds of messages asking ME to waste my time on YOU, especially by begging for warm fucking fuzzies in the comments on a post where I admitted I felt like I was losing my fucking mind, you’ve got another thing coming.

An appropriate comment from him would have been, “wow — I’m so sorry I’ve been sending you guilt-riddled whiny-posts on virtually every social networking site where you appear asking you to respond to NOTHING when you obviously have a lot of other things going on. What was I thinking?” Or, “man, I know what mental illness is like because I am compelled to pester women online; now we finally have something in common we can talk about if you ever have time; ’til then I totally un
derstand if you don’t want respond to me. I mean, sheesh — if you did that to everyone your whole twitter feed would be, @wanker hi!, @dipshit hi! @asshat I see you there, bugging me! Boy, that would be silly! I’m so sorry for thinking only of myself.”

If you’re a true fan of mine it should be obvious that my JOB is not to sit around sending individuals empty messages of bullshit for free to verify to you that you exist. Find another way to add meaning and affirmation to your life because your current method is insulting and dehumanizing; I’m not a fucking robot or video game where you press buttons on your keyboards and I do a little puppet dance or a doll with a string on her back that you pull to get her to say one of eight pre-determined messages. I like you! Thanks for being my fan! You’re number one! Good morning, sunshine!

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarf!! Seriously, I do not want to insult everyone who sends me thoughtful messages, shares themselves with me, wants me to know they appreciate what I do, etc. What I’m complaining about is a very particular brand of bullshit that fuels the empty “interaction” passing for “socialization” online. It’s gross. A total waste of time. Say hi once or twice to me this way if you want, but don’t incessantly needle me to respond. I was going to say, “don’t needle me to reciprocate” but if reciprocity is what you want, THIS IS IT. Complete and utter selfishness. My little wants and desires trumping yours. I would send virtually the same message every day: Send me ten dollars, please? Hi it’s me, Trixie — still awaiting your dollars. I found you again! When WILL you join my site? It’s Friday. Write back with the dollars. Even five would be nice. Say good morning to a good girl with seven dollars? Hello. Do you get these? If so respond with fifteen dollars. Your friend online, needing your dollars. Actually, that would make a billion times better sense than what he’s doing, but it would still be way too boring and time-consuming for me to enjoy. I don’t want to do data entry, I want to do MY. WORK.

And tweet about picking my nose and pooping. These witticisms don’t grow on trees, so don’t interrupt me! I’m trying to fucking THINK.

After the gloomy pictures and tone of this post I’m overdue posting something cheerful that reflects how I’m feeling A BILLION TIMES BETTER, so here are some happy pictures from a recent members-only gallery and an update on what’s going on in my body and head.

It’s hard for me to describe how profoundly different/healed I felt within a week of starting to treat my hormone problems. I can only compare it to what born again Christians feel like. Seriously. Only I feel like I just established a close personal relationship with NORMALCY rather than with Jesus. And now I am wondering how the fuck I was even getting out of bed at all, because I was really REALLY sick.

A lot of stuff that I was experiencing I couldn’t even verbalize without sounding totally crazy and was effecting me on every level you can possibly think of: mentally, spiritually, physically, socially, sexually, etc. My muscles, joints, head, eyes, guts, boobs, feet, jaw, ears HURT and weren’t working right. Pretty much everything was causing me pain and fatigue, from the sound of people’s voices to the loud conversations being held in my head to the TORTURE of dropping something and having to go through the agonizing, soul-sucking motion of bending over to pick it up. I thought I was being a hypochondriac to worry that I had lupus or something horrifying going on. All I wanted to do was work and be happy and do the millions of things I want to do, so I tried to exercise more, to cut back on things that were especially tiring (which got to the point of being EVERYTHING except the bare minimum — I haven’t been seeing my family, friends, or doing anything except trying to survive). The slightest annoyances were sending me into paroxysms of mean-spirited anguish. If you think I was complaining a lot about headaches and stuff, you don’t know the tenth of it. I actually didn’t even want to recognize how incredibly bad it was.

But then last week I started to feel INCREDIBLY GOOD. Like I looked in the mirror and didn’t see death warmed over staring back at me — oh yeah, THAT’S what I look like without a sickly pallor and giant, deep, dark circles rimming my eyes! Like, getting out of bed in the morning IS EASY and something to celebrate instead of something that caused me physical pain. I’m not exaggerating, I had been feeling PAIN reverberating through every fiber of my being. I thought it was just me being not-a-morning-person, “sensitive”, etc. but as it turns out? FUCK NO. The first three days of feeling awesome last week are my new standard for how I should feel 99% of the time and I’m not going to accept anything less ever again.

Here are the supplements I started taking:

*Evening Primrose Oil
*iodine
*birth control (chick hormones)
*omega oils
*potassium (in grapefruit juice, etc.)
*awesome Vitamin B complex
*digestive enzymes

and changes I made:

*maintaining a stable blood sugar level (not letting myself get hungry, eating way less simple carbs/sugars)
*continuing to use tools & learn more for anger management, concentration, calm, etc.
*exercising consistently
*continuing to make 8-9 hours of sleep per night my goal

——–

A lot of these are things I’ve done before that yielded positive results, but I never did them consistently or all at the same time or appreciated the importance of spending the money to stay stocked up on all of the vitamins or understood the big picture of how they were helping me. I still don’t have a thorough grasp of that, but getting as totally fucked up as I was forced me to do a lot of research and over the years a lot of people and circumstances have handed me clues. Like not being able to get pregnant and slowly finding out a whole bunch of possible reasons why not. Like having people tell me over and over and over again to have my thyroid tested. Like having almost no stressors in my life and often doing everything right and trying my fucking hardest and still feeling WORSE instead of better. Like having some really great health care providers in my life and then having to deal with one who was really bad. Like THE INTERNET being an imperfect but still fucking fabulous resources. Like having a trans partner and thinking more about hormones, identity, and the nuances of gender. Like having people tell me I have too much testosterone. Like having my hair stylist tell me I had an unnatural amount of HAIR FALLING OUT OF MY HEAD (ahhh, so it WASN’T my imagination that was noticing my part widening in pictures and on the webcam I have staring down at the top of my head).

I really am sorry for how impatient I’ve been, how easily agitated I’ve been, and for how little time I’ve had for people and issues and projects I care about. Mostly I’m sad that Delia had to live with someone so unpredictable and “touchy”. But I’m really happy for us now that we are both getting ourselves sorted out.

I think this year (or at least the next six months) are going to be a time of simply catching up on time I/we’ve lost personally and financially/professionally. I know I’ve made a lot of posts in the past couple of years about ways I was reorganizing and reprioritizing things, and while many of them were necessary, very few of them were productive or successful because of what I now realize was a significant health problem. I am going to be patient with myself and try to enjoy simply feel good. REALLY good.

I’m not saying my life has been nonstop misery because that’s not true at all — hormones are shifty fuckers so there’ve been lots of highs and lows and near-normalcy, but I’ve likely been suffering from this for most of my post-adolescent life to one degree or another judging from how rarely I ovulated on time or at all; most people would say “judging from how rarely my period was on time”, but I now refuse to refer to on-time periods as the sensible indicator of health when it totally ignores that timely menstruation is reliant on timely ovulation. It’s not that I think ovulation is some holy fucking grail or that every woman should strive for FERTILITY, I just think there’s so much MISSING from (and deceptive about) our language for talking about how our bodies function and how to identify problems and heal them. And you know how women who understand their clits and their g-spots and the rest of their bodies and how they work and where those parts live CAN MAKE THEM OPERATE BETTER and experience more pleasure? I don’t think the rest of our anatomy and functionality is any different. If I understand that high blood sugar and cortisol and stress and testosterone and estrogen suppression and ovulation and concentration and happiness are all linked up and I can visualize those things and better know how to achieve stability there, then I am going to be a happier, better-functioning person.

Personally I’m excited about the discoveries I’m making about myself and feel so fired up about so many things I’m back to my ”
normal” scatterbrained whirlwind of divided attention (and haven’t been taking Ritalin since I started my little regimen above). I’m also really angry and thinking a lot about how most health care providers are totally incompetent and uncaring when it comes to endocrinology (unless it has to do with diabetes) and SUPER COMMON hormone problems. I believe to my core that misogyny is the root of the ignorance and lack of care; people believe and want women to age a certain way, to become dried-up shrews. They believe we’ll complain about anything and are still mostly just hysterical, crazy bitches and that our problems are all psychological. Everyone thinks it’s so “advanced” to treat depression and anxiety as real stand-alone illnesses now that we can throw fucked-up, addictive drugs at when so much depression and anxiety and other mental illness are probably caused by hormonal problems that don’t always originate with (or aren’t limited to) poor brain chemistry or treated best just by addressing them. I’m certainly not suggesting we all go Tom-Cruise-Vitamin-Crazy, I’m just saying that health care professionals aren’t even bothering to test for or treat underlying hormone imbalances, and most people like it that way. It makes a lot of women sicker, not healthier. Just to give you an example, this doctor I went to was ready to put me on anti-depressants, didn’t believe me when I told her I knew the birth control itself would help a lot, and refused to test my thyroid (the most common “thyroid” test done is for TSH — thyroid stimulating hormone — and it doesn’t really test your thyroid gland, it tests your pituitary gland AND the results are months old by the time it reaches your blood). You have to wonder how this woman thinks that anti-depressants are going to cure me of hair loss, weight gain, constipation, lethargy, etc. when you know it will make most of those symptoms WORSE. To her I was just a crazy, miserable bitch demanding a “complicated” explanation for what seemed obvious to her: THAT I’M SIMPLY A CRAZY MISERABLE BITCH.

If we removed the stigma and value judgment from the statement “she’s got hormone problems” we’d lose one of our most precious and reliable punch lines. So many women would feel so much better the world would be turned upside-fucking down. It probably wouldn’t be very good for the sex industry, I imagine, if more middle-aged women felt like a million bucks. Or maybe it would . . . . My sister, a nurse, said she thinks endocrinology is too nuanced for traditional western medicine to deal with and that it’s not a “sexy” field like surgery. I think it’s the opposite. It’s the sexiest field of all. It IS the source of what we think of as sex and gender and for us to really understand it and the role it plays in our lives and how it is the foundation for so much of our identities would pose such a threat to the status quo and to the people we rely upon to make the rest of us feel normal by comparison that it’s just a giant taboo. In generations to come I think it’s transgender and people who defy gender stereotypes and limitations who will force the medical community and other people to understand endocrinology a whole lot better and how hormones can be manipulated to help us lead our best, most authentic and healthiest lives.

Anyway, long post short, I was feeling pretty bad. And now I feel really great. And that makes me really happy. I’m fueling up now for good things to come.