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Archive for the ‘escapism’ Category

We got back home around dinnertime tonight after Delia took us to a little cottage by the seashore to shoot pictures for our sites. It was magnificent! Except for this (boring) stuff:

Many things conspired against us getting much done or even going at all; our last running vehicle broke down in the middle of a downpour Saturday night, for example. Rather than get charged for the rental cottage and not even go, Delia decided to rent a car (harder than you might think when you live at least an hour away from “everything”; she had to take a long walk and get on an early bus to go pick it up the day we were to leave, then wait for pick-up time and make the trek back to our house, then drive to the coast).

When we finally got to the beach it was 8pm. Then when we started shooting the next day I realized I forgot to bring the usb cable for our camera OR the card reader and we don’t have enough compact flash cards to hold all of the content we planned to shoot. So another long drive to my favorite depressing coastal town (Aberdeen) and back, cutting into shooting time some more.

You’re going to hate me for complaining about this, but it was also TOO SUNNY at the beach for us to shoot as much as we wanted to outside; the forecast had been for more cloud cover so I thought we could count on some fog and grey skies to even things out. Then shooting time inside the cottage with natural light was limited by the loud-ass landscaping/yard dudes hanging out right in front of our windows.

So.

We actually had a wonderful time, but I feel like I can’t just say that because people already seem to think our jobs are way too easy or something. Like I can’t tell you we took long walks on the beach and stretched standing in the sand. Like I can’t tell you I read a whole book! Like I can’t tell you I WAS GLAD we had no phone reception and only spotty internet connectivity when an unsecured neighborhood network  opened up. Like I can’t tell you we didn’t turn on the tv even once while we were there, because when I’m away from working-at-home I don’t feel so much like I need my escapist drugs of food-and-boob-tube. Like I can’t tell you I enjoyed myself. Like I can’t tell you about this morning’s Belgian waffle with huckleberries and maple mascarpone. Like I can’t tell you that almost as soon as we got home and I read some stupid emails I felt like crying and have been picking a hole into my head ever since.

Because somehow I have to make sure to convey that I love my work while having to remind people that is what it is: WORK.

*****

Delia said the whole trip and all the expenses were worth it even if we had only gotten her beach shoot done. The pictures are BEAUTIFUL! And when most people look at them they won’t even realize she was inching into hypothermia.

She did a good job so people will think the weather was tropical with a pleasant sunset breeze. They will wish they were with her in that look-so-warm water so they could suck her and suck her and suck her some more. They will imagine going on these “vacations” with us. They will say we should shoot on the beach all the time, but to have better lighting (insert know-nothing photographic advice here) and get wetter, please.

Right now I’m not even bitching about what I *want* to be bitching about . . . or about how miserable I feel about being such a bitch and Delia having to be near it when she deserves much much better.

Being cold made her eyes sparkle and her nipples hard. Her eyes are brown so sunset shining on them looks like flecks of warm honey in dark melted caramel.

Did I mention her nipples were hard?

*****

When we pulled back into town tonight, our vehicle was fixed (for a little less than $500). Tomorrow we have to take the rental car back sooooooooo there’s some more time and money we’ll be frittering away. The good news is we’ll have an excuse to go to one of our favorite Vietnamese joints when we do. The bad news is we’ve already spent way too much money this week on food. BUT FUCK IT ANYWAY I NEED MY GREASY PORK DONG.

Another week come and nearly-gone with poor sales.

I should start telling happy, good-feeling lies and not care when people act entitled and think stupid things.

No no no . . . I should just work harder at focusing on the bright spots. And forgive myself when coming home to work is hard. And work harder! And care less. Let it just be what it is: work.

This is the first month of the tenth year. It would be shinier if I had cared less, I think. I am tired of showing people how much I care. It has gotten me nothing but respect. The kind that vanishes as soon as you “get lazy”. I am tired of paying with my freedom and getting nowhere.

Don’t worry guys . . . I’m just being an asshole. Tomorrow I’ll be all smiles!!

What could possibly be more entertaining and pathetic than a moody, emotionally-unpredictable webwhore? I’ll tell you what: a “MATURE” moody, emotionally-unpredictable webwhore!!

I totally have a grey hair in my pubes. No joke!

I look totally gross from the side, but from the front and the back I sometimes look STUNNING. <<<This should be my new slogan.

Here’s a super-belated birthday post I wrote last year but never posted until now. As of March 17th, 2011 I’m back to an even number age:

*****

I turned thirty-seven years old last week and am SO glad to be back on an odd number.

Some people have “issues” with numbers, often with a serious preference for even or odd numbers (and a lot of these people are OCD and/or autistic or Aspies). I’ve always preferred odd numbers which is unusual since most people with this obsession prefer evens, but I’m adamant that odd numbers are more “perfect” with more symmetry.

I know, I know, most people think an even number is more beautiful because when you split it in half, it’s balanced with equal amounts on both sides. These people will do anything to avoid odd numbers, but I myself am uncomfortable with EVEN numbers and feel like something’s missing. Aside from just finding odd  numbers more aesthetically pleasing (the way they look, the way they sound, the way they are in all of my important dates and numbers) I figured it out that for me I always need one left over in the middle to be the anchor. Think of an old-fashioned scale: there has to be a lever in between the two pans. There always has to be that one left over in the middle for me to see/feel everything in balance.

I’m not totally OCD about it . . . I have forced myself to accept even-numbered things and results and times and dollar amounts and can tolerate them without pain (and am often not even aware of whether a number is odd or even), but I always feel a bigger relief and sense of rightness when things come out odd.

*****

Another OCD symptom I was wrapped up in as a pre-teen was weird sympathy for inanimate objects. The biggest daily issue concerned the dishes and how I placed them in the dish-drainer after washing them; I avoided letting any of one type of dishware be “lonely” or forced into a group/family of dishes it didn’t belong to.

We had a lot of tupperware cups. Some had flared rims and cool colors, some were newer/smoother and made in warm colors. I tried very hard to group the new warm ones together and the older, more-sensitive cups with each other. I would feel sad and guilty if one of the old ones had to be lumped up against a gang of stiff new ones all by itself. In that situation it would be better to find the old cup a place apart where it would be safe even if lonely.

From one of my fave funny blogs, UnhappyHipsters.com

This wasn’t a game I played with myself to make doing the dishes more interesting, it was just an uncomfortable given. As I got older I tried to reason with myself, and there have been times in my life where I don’t pay attention to the dishes’ feelings and identities at all, but sometimes I do still find myself wanting to put them in the “right” places and giving myself permission to arrange them in a way that feels good to me. I remind myself that these problems are all in my head, but I will still rearrange the dishes sometimes if things aren’t right. It’s not always about the dishes feelings, but just about building the perfect pile.

*****

One of the presents I gave to myself was time to play with my Magic: The Gathering cards. Not to play the game or really “play” in any sense that most other people have of playing, but to organize and sort parts of my collection. Like arranging rocks and colors on my altar. That is often how I find peace/bliss/relaxation. I sat on the floor surrounded by my cards and enjoyed putting them into stacks by expansion, by colors, by rarity; who would want a birthday party when she could be alone sorting uniformly-sized small cards with artwork and a bunch of special designations indicated by symbols and special text on said cards? Not I!!

*****

There’s a three and there’s a seven.

January thru March 16th of 2011 will be (oddly) even better!

*****

It wasn’t, but I know you can’t win at life through lucky numbers and proper sorting alone . . .

While we drove towards the woods along the water, that song came into my head and I started singing it:

Know Where to Run To, Baby

Know Where to Hide . . . .

It’s not a favorite song of mine and nobody I grew up around was “into” that sixties Motown girl group music. I don’t know any of the rest of the words . . . none of them. Even though I’m sure I’ve heard that song all the way through a bunch of times. And my whole life until three days ago I completely mistook the meaning of the words I thought I heard. It was just on that drive, randomly singing it to myself, that I realized she’s saying “NOWHERE to run to, baby . . . NOWHERE to hide.”

All of this time I thought she was a very savvy woman, entreating me and other girls to always know how to get away from someone, to always have a secret place to lay low the way she does. I thought she was smugly proclaiming her wily escape artistry. Like, “you should know where to run to, baby . . . I sure as fuck do.”

I feel depressed now. Oh well. I guess the snow chain percussion threw me . . .

The curious part to me is why all of a sudden I should be able to hear the difference between “know where” and NOWHERE. Why did it dawn on me now? And the amazing/hopeful part to me is that it can take years, but people really can learn things you thought they were incapable of understanding.

Now if someone would just write and sing the song I thought I was hearing all along . . .

9/3/2010 Cabin Day #1: 0 (zero) words

Loading stuff up in the van to take to the cabin I worried that the neighbors would think I was moving out and leaving Delia. Maybe that worry was just a projection of my own discomfort over making time alone/away a priority. Because there aren’t good models affirming pursuing time alone away from home unless it’s to do regular work that regular people do in the midst of whole bunches of other regular people. People who desire as much time alone as I do are widely regarded as unhealthy freaks or suspected of having other motives besides a simple need for solitude. Whatever the reason, I wanted to keep running back inside to hug Delia and get reassurance that whatever I‘m doing it‘s not what it might look like to the neighbors.

*****

At the cabin the wind blew and I wondered how come the skinny tall trees here don’t fall down. I amazed myself by not being annoyed that there’s a daycare with kid sounds a block away. I felt the sun on the back of my neck. I gazed at the crescent moon with breakfast around noon. I scratched up my arm and the back of my thigh on blackberry bush thorns. I figured out where I can stand and lie in the cabin with the blinds open without being seen by the girl in the big house or the people next door. I made a note to buy a couple of curtains to further hide myself when desired in those couple of places where I can be seen. I caught up on all of the pooping I didn’t get done while we were away from home for three nights.

I started to stop thinking about how to get down the ladder from the loft  (how do I mount it under the slant of roof? Do I turn around and climb it back down or just walk straight forward like I’m going down stairs?). I lit a candle. Then I blew it out when we left to get gas, but only $15 worth because we’re almost out of money until Tuesday so we didn’t reset the mileage on the odometer because our fuel gauge is broken/stuck on full.

*****

Things didn’t go exactly as planned, meaning I didn’t have time to plan to make things perfectly prepared.

Want to read more about Day One at The Cabin? I’m hiding the minute details after a break so as not to bore or overwhelm folks who don’t want to read about my zero word count day:

Read the rest of this entry »

I often fantasize about having a windowless closet with a narrow cozy built-in bunk to sleep and daydream on. Where nobody can see me, cut off and curtained-in by dark, heavy layers of hanging clothes. Or of being in a fantasy sleeper-car on a train on a comfortably narrow berth, dark wood paneling all around with chugging train sounds and gentle rocking. Or of being in an even-smaller, quieter version of this cabin, this time with a built-in little bed. No electricity, no webcams. Or of having my bookwormhole.

Sometimes I close my eyes in bed and time-travel back to the best drugless, not-sick sleep I ever had. I went on a women’s retreat with a bunch of gals I really didn’t know. Upon arrival I half-assedly engaged in the crafts they’d set out, then went to the cabin. There were a handful of these cabins on the lake, a BIG lake with no motorized boats allowed. QUIET. The other women complained about the cabins – the uncomfortable bunks something they were only tolerating for the coolness of the Retreat. In the middle of the day while the cabins were completely deserted I climbed onto my little wooden shelf, nestled down into Delia’s perfectly awesome sleeping bag, faced the wall, and fell asleep for hours. Undisturbed, unseen, far removed, not missed. I absented myself from everywhere else except my private cocoon.

I got up for a late dinner, and that night slept again in a completely heavy, renewing, needy, guiltless way. Even with the women sharing the cabin with me, I felt alone with my earplugs in and my lack of intimacy with them. There was a woman on the shelf above me, two shelves holding a woman-each perpendicular to my head, and two shelves parallel to me across a tiny open space. I was the first person to go to bed, and the last one to wake up. I liked having the shelves of women around me, being in a small hibernating hive, quietly together without any of them knowing me. Not talking.

I was reading Strangers on a Train that trip. I accidentally left it at the lodge so I never finished it, but it was good to have it when I did. A sugar daddy sent it to me off my wishlist so I feel a little guilty over losing it, but my possession of the memories of that trip are so clear the book is still one of my treasures even though I don’t have it anymore.

*****

The opportunity to rent a small cabin/shed space came up this week, synchronous to a handful of needs/desires/opportunities converging on me/us. It’s the kind of thing I would never seek out because I don’t think I deserve it, but under the circumstances and upon careful thought and discussion we both recognize we’re way overdue for what it will offer. It is just THE THING. It’s not in a remote location — in fact it’s on very shared space minutes away — but because we’ve been there and know the person really well who’s renting it I’m familiar with the setting, comfortable with the people who might be around, and aware of the benefits of its location. I haven’t actually been inside this cabin on the property, but I’m going to check it out soon.

Yes, I’m worried about how we’re going to afford it, but the with the house and the cabin/shed we’ll be paying the same amount we were paying for rent on individual houses before we moved into this place with its cheaper rent. I’m pretty sure it will be worth the relatively small investment in terms of providing space and opportunity for more creative content creation for our porn sites, too.

It’s not a done deal but if it works out I will be healthier with a space to be solitary and invisible, to write without obligation or interruption (I know, we don’t have kids and we work at home, but there are SO MANY INTERRUPTIONS mostly named THE INTERNET and webcams and too much space with all of it messy with cables and overwhelming work things everywhere), to sleep with complete cozy abandon, and most excitingly for our fans this might give us the kind of space and convenience we need to have more sexual adventures with other people. I will have someplace to go if Delia wants someone over for fooling around, and vice versa (though I mainly anticipate fooling around with mySELF, dreams, and pages and pages of watery blue words). We’ll have a convenient place to go away together, away from work. Because working at home with 24/7 voyeur cams on you means never getting a break unless you leave, and when we leave work I want to relax, not wander around a mall or drive hours to see a movie, or blow money to sit on uncomfortable chairs in a restaurant, or wander around in the woods being scared of cougars wondering how we’ll get home when our car breaks down (I still need to blog about that).

I’m also really excited about sharing the dreaminess of a little place like that and the things I do in it. But not having to share it WHILE I’m there.

I’m grateful to a number of people and strangely-timed messages for helping me decide to seize this opportunity. Two of those people are Heather and Libby, so thanks for the inspirations.

I just used some of my webcam money to subscribe to one of my favorite radio programs ever, Hearts of Space. Nevermind the ill-advised acronym (so typical of nerds to make a hilarious mistake like that, god love ‘em).

Since our porn business operates on a subscription basis, it’s interesting to research other subscription-based internet products, their price points, and comparing the offerings. I loved reading the HOS: WHY PAY? page. Like porn, music is something you can get free online in a million places. Even when people don’t ask you to justify charging for it, many of us feel we MUST explain it (I’ve been criticized by adult webmasters for the times when I’ve disclosed similar information and confronted those questions when maybe I should leave them alone). It’s inspiring to read the way Hearts of Space explains some of their business approach (and costs outsiders don’t comprehend without being taught) because it’s so firmly rooted in a clear vision, one that I know DELIVERS an experience I’ve never gotten from any other radio programming. There is a certain personality, there are seductive, hypnotic voices I’m attached to, and there is a well-planned journey offered by HOS.

HEARTS of SPACE PRODUCER STEPHEN HILL’s CAREER seemed to take a sharp detour in the early 70’s when he abandoned his architectural career and opened a recording studio. . . . In retrospect, Hill realizes he never really left architecture. He simply became a sound architect who learned to build his castles on the air. “Architects create environments with physical materials.
I do it with sound.” - Stephen Hill

It’s also interesting to observe my own thought process in deciding what kind of subscription to get: I chose the $13 a month all-access plan because I don’t feel like I can shell out the money for a year even though I know it would save me money in the long run. Also, The internet radio channel only (no archives or playlists) probably would’ve been good enough for me, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to try to figure out how to upgrade mid-month. Out of laziness/a desire to be efficient with my time and not necessarily need or probable usage, I chose the more comprehensive membership. I know people go through similar though processes when deciding which membership plan to get for our sites.

Hearts of Space is an inspiring model of how to create and sustain and love a “product” that’s not personalized for each individual listener but still manages to feel intimate even though it’s mass-delivered and not even live (except maybe one hour a week, I think).  It speaks of a void and manages to fill it –inside of me and outside of me — at the same time. I’m fascinated by people and groups who design and deliver stimuli producing what appears to be a relatively mundane experience (compared to, say, a roller coaster ride in a theme park or a provocative theatre piece, etc.) that manages to infiltrate people’s lives by being constantly accessible in private, demanding little of them but providing addictive stimulation. A little like a favorite diner or coffee shop. Something offering sustenance you could get elsewhere, but elsewhere just wouldn’t be QUITE right. I believe there’s something about the earnestness of the proprietors to deliver an actual EXPERIENCE they’ve envisioned in rich detail and feel in their own bones that makes Hearts of Space , some bookstores, a couple of Indian and Thai restaurants in Tacoma, and some porn sites exceptional.

I love music and I love feeling distant connections to people, but it’s impossible for me to listen to voices or most music and WORK at the same time. “Space music” offers me the kind of escape and transcendence I long for. It’s a spiritual salve for me that allows me to imagine journeying into a meaningful peaceful nothingness of wind and colors and stars and the smell of ozone. It gives me a lot of the feeling I get from imagining my ideal forms of church or prayer or sanctuary or space travel. It’s like having a lucid flying dream. That’s totally worth $13 a month to me. “Greetings, space fans . . . “

There’s a vibe on Hearts of Space that I’d like to infuse my own site with – that I’ve always wanted to be there and have maybe succeeded in transmitting some of the time (not the SAME vibe, but a quality or peculiarity of vibe). I think it will be helpful to listen to HOS on a daily basis to remind myself of the possibilities and how personality and vision and voices (even in very limited doses, more often without words) can combine in powerful, seductive, and soothing ways. How to make transportation out of your aesthetics and values to take people to a place they recognize as one where their belief systems make perfect sense. Or freewheeling careless nonsense. Where you look around and feel yourself and even though nothing has changed, you’re like, “THIS is it, what I was trying to remember that was bothering the tip of my tongue.”

Like, fucking psychic alignment, man!

Click here for an older post about new age music, porn and more.

*****

I know, you’re all like . . . post some porn, woman!! Are you losing your mind?

I can only answer in a predictably crazy way by insisting that no, I’m totally on the verge of genuine SANITY, motherfuckers!! Seriously, like, all is about to be REVEALED!!

I’ll try to post something porny and down-to-earth for you soon, mkay? I’ll TRY.

I am always trying. I don’t know if that’s apparent or not, but it’s true.

An affirming read (one of many lately) on recognizing that trying to do it all is TOO MUCH, and making a goal of doing less:

. . . they have decided to not work at the limit of their ability. they are not interested in finding the line that is their maximum output except to be sure that they are much below it. they have decided not to do everything that they could.

“and so” she said “we’re going to see what comes out of the space we’re allowing for”.

this has sat well with me. it is a breath before i eat. it is the light splayed across my wood walls in the morning. it is not trying to do everything i can. even though i’m excited by all the permutations, it’s about looking inside myself to decide the next movement rather than thinking about every possible way i could do everything all the time.

i think i have probably let people down. i still struggle with guilt. i freak out and bolt for maximization at least once a day.

but i’m trying to give my life wiggle room. just barely.

Last night we stayed up until four watched the last four available episodes of Mad Men and today I am reading for pleasure and having my period and thinking inspired thoughts about videos I could make but probably won’t. My hands smell like sweet and salty foods and stiff girly hair products and thick royal jelly eye cream. This feels a lot better than a week ago when I was wound up (again) thinking I had to do everything and all of it had to be perfect.

Every so often (but not today) I get a whiff of a cosmetic scent that reminds me of some little-girl-science-meets-makeup product where you “mixed” your own lip gloss, creme blush, etc. with tiny white spatulas. It reminds me of how exciting it was to go to World of Toys in Bellevue (where rich people lived!) in the seventies and how much crap Daddy compulsively bought us.

I simultaneously long for my childhood sense of entitlement when it came to pressuring him to buy us stuff and am HORRIFIED by the memory of it. It was pretty cool to actually believe that I could have anything I wanted as long as I could convince him to buy it for me and that everything else could be checked out at the library. I’ll bet if I could put my finger on the smell of that toy-makeup stuff or just remember the name of it I might be one step closer to dominating the world, or at least feeling like all of my time belongs entirely to my own pleasure.

Sooner or later I am going to have to detach from the things I want to do a lot, but less than the things I want to do most and am made to be better at than the rest of it. Sooner or later I’m going to have to recognize the futility of guilt. But today I am still just pretending I don’t feel like a failure because I’m enjoying myself.

Tomorrow I should go on a walk by myself and take pictures of apple blossoms on old trees planted by the wives of dead soldiers.

After having family stay with us for a few days, I usually feel like I need a day off to myself to recover from the energy kicked up from so many people around me. During this visit, however, I kept retreating to WebWhore Headquarters (that’s what I call my home office) for a couple hours here and there, allowing myself to WORK to relax.

Instead of picking work that I really *need* to do that’s high priority for making money, I allowed myself to work on low-priority stuff that’s fun and not complex or stressful (except for feeling guilty for not doing more important things) and requires no interaction with other people. Stuff that’s compact, like blogging and posting one-pagers on domains I’ve had for a long time that have been sitting, completely BLANK. My thought is that anything I accomplish is a bonus since I should be taking time off from work while family is here for our late-Thanksgiving so I should do something totally relaxing instead of tangling with bigger projects.

Here are some of the one-pagers I’ve made over the past week or two:

Worse Than Porn
TrixieDoll
Borg Porn
DeliaTS
Give Me Sugar

It’s soothing to play with fonts and colors and inspiring to remind myself of concepts and ideas that interest me. Only a couple of those were frivolous, actually, with no immediate application, but I still feel conflicted all the time and defensive about the choices I make with my time. Like if I enjoy it and other people might not understand where it fits in the puzzle, then I should feel badly about it. There are a lot of things I’m choosing to NOT do, and I constantly imagine a crowd of people criticizing my choices, saying “what, she’s not doing X so she can do Y and Z?? THAT is stupid! She hasn’t earned the right to waste time doing that — I want X! I want X! Y and Z are useless! She would be so much better off doing X; a bigger commitment to doing X would solve all of her problems, can’t she see that?”

One of my goals is to stop worrying so much about the critics, both external critics and my own internal asshole voices who can ALWAYS find some way to make me feel like I’m not doing good enough. I need to focus on what I’m doing right (and right NOW), not what I’m doing wrong (or not doing at the moment). Unfortunately I’m often painfully aware that every choice I make to do one thing means not doing ten billion others. It’s depressing and I have to knock that shit off. Being on Ritalin does help a lot because I can sit down and focus on something without intrusive thoughts and ideas continually popping into my head of all the other things I can/should be doing which then make me totally anxious, overwhelmed, afraid to proceed with the task at hand, and hopeless because of my limitations and lack of giant progress.

I know a lot of people struggle with similar feelings, so I share this for a couple reasons: because I know other people can relate and it always feels good to know you’re not the only one with these kinds of challenges, and because it helps ME to type out my fears and remind myself I don’t want to carry them around. I want to be happy with what I *can* do and what I *want* to do right now at this moment. I want to look at what I’ve done and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride, not guilt and maudlin hyper-criticism.

*****

Anyway, the family is gone now, our spycams are back up, and Delia’s warming up some of her delicious turkey & stuffing leftovers. Life is good.

Just in case you didn’t believe that my weight gain is a real thing with an impact on my health, here’s a photo of my face last month telling the tale:

I do not even look like myself in that picture. I actually think I look cute in it, but like someone else. Oh yeah, I *recognize* that it *is* me, but she’s like an alter ego of some sort, like I was transformed overnight (which of course is ridiculous since it’s taken me awhile to get there) or am experiencing a Freaky Friday scenario where I’m magically switching places with my chubby twin sister.

That is the biggest and SOFTEST I’ve been in my entire life and the second time I’ve weighed that much (around 130, 132 pounds). I am back to 125 and those five pounds make an enormous difference in the number of chins I have (and if I lost only ten pounds now I’d be at a very good place). At the time of that photo my period was severely overdue, not because of pregnancy but because I didn’t ovulate which I’m certain is because of how overweight I was. I know 130 pounds doesn’t sound enormous considering how much fatter people are capable of getting, but for my frame that is just really WAY too much. With my hormones totally out of wack and the stress and pressure of our plans to get pregnant being delayed and feeling out of control, all I wanted to do was eat. Carbs. Lots of them. It’s a vicious circle.

Once my period finally started last month I stopped having my usual two teaspoons of sugar in my morning tea, stopped eating candy (except some dark chocolate here and there), and have been exercising more. I feel better, but still have a major energy dive in the afternoon/early evening and have been napping almost every day; it’s only 30-60 minutes, but I feel enormously guilty about it for some reason. I don’t know if I’m just stressed out, tired from exercising, fat and lazy, or have some internal voice ordering me to focus on a very few things. It is (and has been for the past nine months or so) very difficult for me to focus on anything besides our conception attempts. It sounds stupid, since if I were really focusing I should have been exercising more and eating better, but my main priority has been to try not to stress out my mind or body. All I have wanted to do was try to be patient, calm, and relaxed and honestly? Accomplishing that takes all of my energy, I think. And lots of food and lazing around.

It should come as no surprise that I have not felt great about shooting photos and videos of myself. Part of it is self-consciousness about my weight, but another part might also be me feeling a need to keep some of me to myself. Trying and failing to get pregnant over and over makes me feel like there’s a demand being placed on my body that I keep failing to meet in spite of the many different adjustments and approaches and changes we make to get it done. I already feel like I’m asking enough of my body, forcing it to get fucked on a schedule, to tell me what it’s thinking, to subject it to tests, to tell it to work harder and be “healthy”. Other than that, I really just want to put it in a cocoon of blankets and comfortable clothes and to try to let my mind escape. I want to protect myself, my mind AND body, from more opportunities for failure.

There are a few other factors contributing to my state of mind, including missing my girly birth control hormones, my ADD and hypersensitivity to stimuli (I am fucking exhausted from processing so much information and trying to tune things out; I have not been able to concentrate at all on blogging or anything), stress/guilt over an argument I had with my mom in March, MISSING my nephew and longing to live closer to my family, and the way all these things work together to make me feel, I suppose, a little depressed. I’m not particularly worried about it in the short term, but if I allow myself to fret about how long this trying-to-conceive business could go on I do get anxious and concerned about, ummm, my mental and emotional health.

I guess my main priorities right now are making my body healthier and focusing on transcending daily worries to get to a place where it’s all good, whether it’s in a nap, brushing the dog, dancing, reading a book, writing for myself, daydreaming about things that make me happy, visualizing the positive possibilities, drowning myself in mindless entertainment, researching stuff I want to know for future and current projects, listening to cheesy new age music, smelling good things and enjoying sensual (but nonsexual) pleasures like massage, or processing these thoughts and reflecting on my needs the way I am right now by writing this. I feel better having done it.

But I still don’t feel like shooting porn. Not today, anyway. And of course this makes me feel slack and guilty which only deepens my mini-depression. I would like to be more productive and intellectually have a hard time allowing myself a break; part of me says if I were a better person I would just WORK HARDER. Still, I know that once we do get pregnant, if we do, there will be a whole new set of demands on my body so maybe it’s okay for me to just SURVIVE right now.

NOTE TO MEMBERS: I’m not saying that I’m ceasing shooting, just that updates are coming a little slower than I’d like and don’t have as much tastiness as usual. I’m sure we will shoot soon, especially since I’m no longer quite as pudgy as in the above photo. Oh, and another uninspiring factor in all of this is that we really need a better camera; I bought this one in 2002 and it’s really not up to par anymore and has some problems. Not so fun to shoot with and the results are less than stellar.