TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘escapism’ Category

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.

Tonight I’m taking the small stack of books I bought second-hand today and taking them to the sleeping bag installed on the couch. Alone, off cam. Two Octavia Butlers, some Marion Zimmer Bradley, Bee Season, and a couple of other titles. I haven’t decided which one will be my date tonight. Maybe all night. Or maybe just for an hour . . . we’ll see.

I need a massage, a spirit guide and emotional healing. Or maybe just to go back on the pill, but in lieu of that the others would do. Or maybe just the massage, fresh air, vigorous exercise and clean food (only one of which I have the discipline to choose regularly, and that one requires money).

I could have blogged all night . . . I could have blogged all night . . . but instead I’ll read a book. Maybe I’ll find a good cry. In lieu of a massage?

I almost did something crazy just now . . . I started filling out an application to work in a grocery store.

Oh my god! Is money REALLY that tight for Trixie? Or is she quitting webwhoring? Errr . . . what the fuck?

It’s nothing like that. It’s actually more embarrassing than that; I don’t NEED another job, I just really like cashiering. Sometimes when I go to the store I am jealous, and I just think it would be fun to pick up a Saturday or holiday shift or a busy dinner rush now and again. Sometimes I just want to get out of the house and do something regular, normal . . . something with a rhythm and set of rules. Something with clearly defined boundaries. Something where I pick things up, move them only a couple feet, then set them down in a bag. Something that doesn’t require a lot of complex thought. Something that doesn’t involve planning for the future. Someplace where I’m never asked to make big decisions.

Sometimes I’m just tired of being in our house, and I don’t want to socialize exactly, but I want to interact (in very predictable, regimented ways) with people. I guess normal people would go out and have a drink with friends in my situation, but that is SO INTENSELY BORING AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO ME. The thought of sitting in a bar drinking to relax just bores me STIFF. But the thought of having a mundane, repetitive job sounds relaxing and wonderful to me. I like counting money and typing on little keypads and scanning things. I would be standing up and lifting things! I would feel so efficient and pleasantly robotic.

I know I have a college education and I don’t *have* to get a job like “that”, but how can I explain how much I want one sometimes? Sometimes I just want things to be simple, rote. Cashiering is like a video game job.

I can’t really afford to take time off from our sites to have a smiling robot job, though. Part of me seductively whispers that maybe it would REFRESH me for my real job here in internet porn. If I knew I wouldn’t be pressured to work when I couldn’t and I knew I wouldn’t have to wash toilets or face product or, god forbid, MOP anything, and I could just work at a checkstand, like, once a week or something . . . I would totally do it.

I feel like I shouldn’t be admitting this.

I feel embarrassed about this desire, but today isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way. Lately I have been fantasizing about getting a temporary job doing data entry (there’s nothing like that available in our town so it really is just a fantasy). I enjoy the world of what-other-people-consider to-be menial labor. I enjoy the structure of it. And I really like typing. Do you know that? I REALLY LIKE TYPING. I like the sound of it, the feeling of it. I like the cadence of data entry. I like escaping into work that only requires lower-level thinking. I have told myself that I could pretend in my head that I’m only getting a job like that as research for a book, but that would be a lie. I just like learning the little subcultures of wage-earners.

People who’ve never had normal jobs like this, I’ll bet they don’t know how fascinating they can be and how interesting the people you work with are. There are the people who are surprisingly interesting, and there are the people who are predictably dull. And I usually like them all. I would never want to feel stuck in a job like that, but those kinds of jobs can be extremely SATISFYING. They’re mechanical, manageable, and fun to master.

My job(s) right now? I will never “master” any of them. Sometimes that’s really cool and exciting and sometimes it just makes me feel tired and want to cry.

Sometimes I just want to have a stack of work and see it visibly reduced as I complete each piece, one at a time. Sometimes I just want to know when my shift is over. Sometimes I just want to be faster than someone else. Sometimes I just want things to be simple, and to go home and spend the whole night reading a book or watching tv without feeling guilty about it because I should be doing something creative and productive and special. Sometimes I don’t feel like I can be productively creative and sometimes I don’t want to be special. Sometimes I just want to be a worker bee and enjoy being a well-oiled piece in a bigger machine. Sometimes I want to be able to blame corporate or upper management or just some dickwad above me for my problems and limited range of motion. Sometimes I am just so tired of not having anyone to blame but myself.

Sometimes I just want to know exactly what the people in charge of my paycheck want from me, and to be able to ask them that point blank if I don’t. What do you want from me? Sometimes I just want to know who those people are, and have there only be one or two of them. With my job(s) right now, it really is cool and almost divine to be able to make so many people happy in so many different ways, but it makes repeated success complicated and unpredictable. Everyone wants something different and everyone is so many people in so many different time zones. Who are they? What do they want from me NOW? This is not easy, and the only way to make it easy is to only care about yourself in a way that requires turning inward too far.

Sometimes I want to know that I can quit, but the problem is that I can’t. I can never and will never quit this job I have now. This is my work and it’s what I’m supposed to do with most of my life. Sometimes it’s boring to have found your life’s work and know that you’re never actually going to be GREAT at it. It (in all of the different forms it does and will take) will be special, but it won’t be GREAT. The best I can hope for and work towards is that someday it will be more profitable, but money is not as great a motivator as greatness, so these days I move forward very slowly.

Sometimes I’m depressed, and that sometime is now (especially without the wonderful, magical, mood-stabilizing happiness that is hormonal birth control). Sometimes I feel like a failure for being a regular person, and sometimes I feel like I’m about to really EMBRACE being average and become crazily happy with that. Sometimes I am.

FULL MOON

While Delia and the dog slept, I snuck outside at 2 am to shoot the moon:

She must be camera shy because she ducked behind some clouds as I set up the tripod.

*****

If I were to take up a useless hobby for the sole purpose of pleasuring myself, it would be night photography. Stuff lit by headlights, moonlight, flashlights. And by “stuff” I mean trees, lines painted on roads, and sinister figures under street lamps. It’s my impression that you really need to shoot with film to do night photography justice, so I doubt it’s something I could really get off on properly without spending a serious amount of time learning real equipment and techniques (which I’ve not really had to invest a ton of time or money in to shoot porn; we get by with very basic information and an amateur camera).

I have a fear that someday when I finally *do* take up this hobby, that all of the country roads that inspired me to love driving at night as a teenager will be gone. It’s a realistic fear.

WINTER READING

I lucked out with a couple of book choices perfect for cozy winter reading:

The Historian
Fun and readable without being insultingly stupid (ahem, Anne Rice); richly-detailed escapist fun for grown-ups. I enjoyed almost every bit of it.

The Crimson Petal and the White
Yes, I love reading books about smelly Victorian whores. While this one initially put me off with its contrived narrative style, by the time I got halfway through I elevated it to a position right next to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All for being too-damned-compelling-of-a-story-about-women-to-have-been-written-by-a-fucking-man.

*****

I also had to reread The Shipping News. Because reading about Really Cold Places is so so much fun when you’re tucked into bed with a hot water bottle on your feet and a steamy mug of tea in your hand. I might not read this book again, though, because it seemed almost too sappy this time around and I don’t want to totally suck all of the magic out of it.

*****

I’m getting bored with fiction but, for a good long while now, I’ve resisted reading most nonfiction that interests me. Why? Because the amount of reading time I have right now is meant to relax me and take my mind off work. If I read nonfiction I wind up working instead of escaping, and also feeling like I’m not doing enough; I should be taking notes! I should be writing! I should be remembering every detail! I should be making flash cards (seriously)! I should be smarter! I should read MORE! I should blah blah blah blah blah. When I read nonfiction it doesn’t help me fall asleep, it just sends my brain on hyperactive adventures following intriguingly twisted trains of thought. And I totally don’t have time for that. It’s like I have to save all of that for when I have more time/money, or I think that I do because I’m not able to read books straight through without feeling compelled to DO SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT I’M READING and remember way more than I inevitably do (which is not very much in terms of details; the ideas stick with me but most of the details — names especially — just don’t). I worry that if I don’t take notes I’ll forget where I learned these ideas and someday won’t give proper credit to their sources. Yes, I am totally anal and riddled with anxiety over silly things.

So. My plan is to find some nonfiction that doesn’t EXCITE me — subjects that don’t focus on things that totally fascinate me a whole lot or that I don’t find super-relevant to what I do now, what I might do in the future, or have done in the past. But I’ll try not to avoid those things like the plague, too. It’s very sad that I have so many books on my shelves that I’m “saving” because I don’t think I have time or energy or even just the brain-power to enjoy reading them. But you would be amazed at the way I can make virtually EVERYTHING seem super-relevant to things I care about.

The other problem is I really need to start learning new things again. Because I need to learn more useless trivia so I can perform better at solving crossword puzzles. Since I left college I have learned a lot, sure, but it’s been practical stuff, stuff about my body, stuff about how to be happier, stuff about people — on-the-job training type of stuff. I think I’m stagnating!!!

Tucker picked out a book for me last night that should hold my interest without riling me up: The Edge of the Sea.

Anyway — if you have any recs for intriguing (yet totally useless) nonfiction (especially if it could enhance crossword puzzle performance without keeping me up at night), make your suggestions in comments. I’m thinking more biographies are in order since they usually have a story about one person set against a backdrop of jolly historical details that I really don’t *need* to remember (but if I *do* those details could, you know, help me with crossword puzzles).