The Thirtieth Knife.
Hello there LiveJournal, old buddy.
You've had a shitty year, haven't you? Poor friend. It's been a withering death for you out here in the English speaking world. I'm noticing a little flicker of new life, as if your brief absence really did make the heart grow fonder. I've missed you, I know that much. I have maybe three or four people who post with any regularity. I miss the higher degree of thoughtfulness that one sees in a LiveJournal entry, rather than the 420 characters of Facebook and the 140 of Twitter.
So let us get re-aquainted, a little. I don't think we'll quite be lovers as we were before, but at least let us be friends.
The last few months have been interesting. The Man was finally awarded his Ph. D, and has spent the last eight weeks or so slowly squishing that beautiful brain of his back into his head. It's like living with a different person, sometimes - he seems so much more relaxed and happy about the state of the world than he did this time last year, and it rubs off on me in no small amount. It's a big deal all round - he can start looking for a new job, and by the nature of things this means a relocation and a new job for me, too. I'm looking forward to the change of scenery. I'm hoping to take a few months off once we are settled again, as I have basically worked non-stop for oh, the last five or six years. The first half was my fault, and the second was in order to keep the two of us fed. Casual retail employment is not kind to people who just want to piss off for a month. I've also been demoted, promoted, relocated, shifted sideways and spun about in my workplace since my last major work related post. All in all it's been exhausting, and I'm just done with it. My health is suffering a bit - I've been sick with one thing or another since January, with only a few days here and there of health in between - and I'm mentally drained. We've had one staff crisis after another, and being the manager means you have to cop it when everything hits the fan. Weekends off area rarity and I have to book them weeks in advance, then turn my damn phone off to keep it. The later hours have not been my friend either. When I started we closed at seven through the week and five at the weekends; now I rarely get home before 11. As my pool of friends have gotten older and found sensible jobs and largely stopped such antics as wandering around the carparks of 7-11s at three in the morning dressed as leopards, I find myself increasingly without social contact beyond my flatmates and the internets.
I'm becoming disheartened around the industry, too. Not the Sex Industry part - by and large I've always been pleased with the level of professionalism in my interactions with my colleagues, and with people more deeply down in the trenches, as it were - but by the great wall of sexist, racist bullshit I spend my days bashing against. The way the market shapes the material. The way the bigotry of the general public sculpts the images in pornography to reflect this insane ideal. And when you do find people who want something more authentic, you crash headlong into the restrictions on adult media in this country. The interference of the OFLC, now called the Australian Classification Board, which gets more and more heavy-handed every year. We recently had pretty much all our magazines locked up in customs for two months due to an increasingly broad idea of what a woman under 18 looks like. The much touted "small breast ban" may not be hard legislation, but it has in the last few months resulted in nothing but magazines with titles like Juggz or Over 40 making it past the censors. Gay mags have been particularly targeted, and I haven't had a new issue of any of the all boy publications all year. I am faced with this frustrating situation where I tell customers who ask me where their preferred magazine that ACB has seized it, and a general blether about how stupid it is commences, and just when I think we are seeing eye to eye, I'll say something ridiculous like, "maybe you should rip off a letter to your MP about how stupid this is," and suddenly the look of their faces tell me completely that they'd rather take a band-saw to their crotches that admit to an MP they like a bit of titty mag now and then. It's stupid and dangerous, because it drives people online, and while I know every single girl in a copy of Penthouse is over 18 because the magazine is required to keep a copy of her birth certificate on file in perpetuity, and that she's been paid and paid well, I have no such assurance of some random image from the web. I don't know if she consented, I don't know if she got paid, I don't know if she's 16 and making the most money the quickest way she can think of. I know the Internet is for Porn, but there is a place in this world for a DVD that you know full well has been produced ethically, with consenting players, who are regularly tested for STIs and who receive adequate compensation for their work. But the people I am paid to help are happy to lie back and let it all roll over them rather than be forced to admit that they have sexy thoughts sometimes and like to find pictures that back that up.
It's all through the business. I have women who think so little of their bodies that they will buy the cheapest toy they can find, made out of a rubber that will leak acetone into their bodies, rather than admit that their cunt is a beautiful thing and needs to be treated with the same regard as the rest of their bodies. Who buy something tiny so they don't frighten their boyfriends.
The men who buy pornography for their heterosexual wives, and who with little variation start with lesbian movies, "because it's gentler." Never mind that two girls is not likely to be a strong turn on for a woman heterosexual enough to marry, and then be too shamed out to tell him what she wants to see in a movie, let alone come pick her own porn; somewhere in his head it's less confronting - for him, who deep in his soul can't imagine his little woman wanting to ogle good looking men the way he ogles good looking women. I won't start with the disbelief when I suggest gently that maybe his het wife would like some strapping lads to look at.
I guess what's killing is the general all pervasive attitude that Sex is a Bad Thing. I am so very glad that I spend most of my time in the Valley store, because despite having to shoo heroin dealers out of my car-park and the occasional drunken turd in the driveway it is easily the most body positive of all the chain. I talk to a lot of queer folk, and the whole process of coming out does tend to make one think long and damn hard about sex in general, and while there are a lot of queer people of all stripes who are going to be fucked up about sex it's this odd thing I've noticed where being made to question the dominant narrative about the birds and the bees makes one more prone to questioning the other stuff, too. So I get to talk to queer girls about their strap-ons, and it's a sensible conversation about a tool for a job, not a Dirty Little Secret that I'm contaminating them with. More people buying for themselves, not "for a friend" or for a partner too shamed to come in for themselves. Go to Taringa, say, and it's all coy straight uni students who want vibrators smaller than their boyfriends' cocks so he doesn't get frightened and things to make her come easier so he has to do less work. Pale condom buyers and old men from out Chelmer way who talk to my tits and call me "love" and treat me like an idiot.
It's wearing me down. I'm in about the best place I can be in this business and still there are days when I want to phone in dead. Compound that sex-neg rubbish with the rest of the horror that comes from working retail and it's a lesser miracle that I'm coherent at all. I just need to get. Out.
And then I have to try not to strangle the chirpy folk who assure me that man, I must have a great job, talking about sex all day, wow! Must be fun to work in a place like this.
Anyway. All things in time. One day I will look back in bewilderment at the things I got up to in my twenties, warts and all.
I'm writing sporadically, but it's tough thing to relax enough to hear my muse when there's so much quotidian bullshit to wade through. I have a few well developed little characters niggling at me now, whispering in my ear and demanding attention. This is a great motivator. The Angel has been following me again, a mixed blessing because she's a character who was once described to me as "a being made out of sadness", and her voice is tinged with my own resigned discontent at the way of the world. I identify with her the most when I am most displeased with the universe, and if you've made it this far you'll have picked up I'm rather displeased indeed. But she has interesting friends, and young Judith has been wandering along in her shadow, making interesting shapes in fabric of that particular reality. I'm still working it out somewhat, because it's got a strong Judeo-Christian flavour to it and most of my universes are powerfully and decidedly polytheistic. In the words of the master, it’s one thing saying you’ve got the best god, but saying it’s the only real one is a bit of a cheek. So nutting out how it all works is a delightful distraction, and even as I type this I can feel her shifting disapprovinglyy in her seat back there in the galleries of my mind, half a frown on her face - a sort of pre-Babel 'bish please' moment.
Most will think it's a bit mental to talk of her moving like that, as if she were a real person or a voice in my head. The authors in the room know what I'm talking about.
I've got a couple of good game groups going on, mostly olde skool Vampire: the Masquerade and Warhammer 40K, with the odd bit of GURPS thrown in for variety. I'm still playing Rachael, for all your HoD refugees out there, and she's if anything become more herself. Take that as you will, though she has developed an odd fondness for tiny dogs and big cigars. My 40K characters are at either ends of the spectrum - a sanctioned Imperial Psyker working in the demon-smashing chapter and an exiled Rogue Trader noblewoman fiercely trying to rebuild her father's crumbled empire. They would hate one another's guts if they ever met.
I've been sewing a lot too, and have big plans for the Bloodlust Ball coming up at the end of the month. I just have to find time to do it all. Something red. I think. I have a mountain of scrap from my various projects that I am looking forward to smashing together in pleasing ways.
My thirtieth birthday is in February, roughly the same time the lease runs up here. It's going to be an interesting six months. I'm going to complicate them further by running a club night instead of throwing a thirtieth birthday party. I'm yet to finalize anything but I should really get my arse into gear and book a venue. No clue where yet. My heart wants the Alliance but it's just not on the cards. Probably somewhere suitably divey in the Val I can go to town on. Apparently they're applying for a new liquor license for the downstairs bar at Rockerfellers and I have been pleasingly hammered enough times down there for it to appeal by I'm hardly sold. That's a rough stretch of road these days after 2am or so. I've been consistently impressed by the service at the Trans, though I'd rather it not be "just another goth night at the Trans", likewise St Paul's which is another lovely venue that has become something of the default. I don't know. Really it would be most sensible to go somewhere with a proven record but my recalcitrant desire to be different always kicks in and I wind up wondering what the deposit would be to get Cloudland.
I have to be awake in four and a half hours, so I think that will have to do.
You've had a shitty year, haven't you? Poor friend. It's been a withering death for you out here in the English speaking world. I'm noticing a little flicker of new life, as if your brief absence really did make the heart grow fonder. I've missed you, I know that much. I have maybe three or four people who post with any regularity. I miss the higher degree of thoughtfulness that one sees in a LiveJournal entry, rather than the 420 characters of Facebook and the 140 of Twitter.
So let us get re-aquainted, a little. I don't think we'll quite be lovers as we were before, but at least let us be friends.
The last few months have been interesting. The Man was finally awarded his Ph. D, and has spent the last eight weeks or so slowly squishing that beautiful brain of his back into his head. It's like living with a different person, sometimes - he seems so much more relaxed and happy about the state of the world than he did this time last year, and it rubs off on me in no small amount. It's a big deal all round - he can start looking for a new job, and by the nature of things this means a relocation and a new job for me, too. I'm looking forward to the change of scenery. I'm hoping to take a few months off once we are settled again, as I have basically worked non-stop for oh, the last five or six years. The first half was my fault, and the second was in order to keep the two of us fed. Casual retail employment is not kind to people who just want to piss off for a month. I've also been demoted, promoted, relocated, shifted sideways and spun about in my workplace since my last major work related post. All in all it's been exhausting, and I'm just done with it. My health is suffering a bit - I've been sick with one thing or another since January, with only a few days here and there of health in between - and I'm mentally drained. We've had one staff crisis after another, and being the manager means you have to cop it when everything hits the fan. Weekends off area rarity and I have to book them weeks in advance, then turn my damn phone off to keep it. The later hours have not been my friend either. When I started we closed at seven through the week and five at the weekends; now I rarely get home before 11. As my pool of friends have gotten older and found sensible jobs and largely stopped such antics as wandering around the carparks of 7-11s at three in the morning dressed as leopards, I find myself increasingly without social contact beyond my flatmates and the internets.
I'm becoming disheartened around the industry, too. Not the Sex Industry part - by and large I've always been pleased with the level of professionalism in my interactions with my colleagues, and with people more deeply down in the trenches, as it were - but by the great wall of sexist, racist bullshit I spend my days bashing against. The way the market shapes the material. The way the bigotry of the general public sculpts the images in pornography to reflect this insane ideal. And when you do find people who want something more authentic, you crash headlong into the restrictions on adult media in this country. The interference of the OFLC, now called the Australian Classification Board, which gets more and more heavy-handed every year. We recently had pretty much all our magazines locked up in customs for two months due to an increasingly broad idea of what a woman under 18 looks like. The much touted "small breast ban" may not be hard legislation, but it has in the last few months resulted in nothing but magazines with titles like Juggz or Over 40 making it past the censors. Gay mags have been particularly targeted, and I haven't had a new issue of any of the all boy publications all year. I am faced with this frustrating situation where I tell customers who ask me where their preferred magazine that ACB has seized it, and a general blether about how stupid it is commences, and just when I think we are seeing eye to eye, I'll say something ridiculous like, "maybe you should rip off a letter to your MP about how stupid this is," and suddenly the look of their faces tell me completely that they'd rather take a band-saw to their crotches that admit to an MP they like a bit of titty mag now and then. It's stupid and dangerous, because it drives people online, and while I know every single girl in a copy of Penthouse is over 18 because the magazine is required to keep a copy of her birth certificate on file in perpetuity, and that she's been paid and paid well, I have no such assurance of some random image from the web. I don't know if she consented, I don't know if she got paid, I don't know if she's 16 and making the most money the quickest way she can think of. I know the Internet is for Porn, but there is a place in this world for a DVD that you know full well has been produced ethically, with consenting players, who are regularly tested for STIs and who receive adequate compensation for their work. But the people I am paid to help are happy to lie back and let it all roll over them rather than be forced to admit that they have sexy thoughts sometimes and like to find pictures that back that up.
It's all through the business. I have women who think so little of their bodies that they will buy the cheapest toy they can find, made out of a rubber that will leak acetone into their bodies, rather than admit that their cunt is a beautiful thing and needs to be treated with the same regard as the rest of their bodies. Who buy something tiny so they don't frighten their boyfriends.
The men who buy pornography for their heterosexual wives, and who with little variation start with lesbian movies, "because it's gentler." Never mind that two girls is not likely to be a strong turn on for a woman heterosexual enough to marry, and then be too shamed out to tell him what she wants to see in a movie, let alone come pick her own porn; somewhere in his head it's less confronting - for him, who deep in his soul can't imagine his little woman wanting to ogle good looking men the way he ogles good looking women. I won't start with the disbelief when I suggest gently that maybe his het wife would like some strapping lads to look at.
I guess what's killing is the general all pervasive attitude that Sex is a Bad Thing. I am so very glad that I spend most of my time in the Valley store, because despite having to shoo heroin dealers out of my car-park and the occasional drunken turd in the driveway it is easily the most body positive of all the chain. I talk to a lot of queer folk, and the whole process of coming out does tend to make one think long and damn hard about sex in general, and while there are a lot of queer people of all stripes who are going to be fucked up about sex it's this odd thing I've noticed where being made to question the dominant narrative about the birds and the bees makes one more prone to questioning the other stuff, too. So I get to talk to queer girls about their strap-ons, and it's a sensible conversation about a tool for a job, not a Dirty Little Secret that I'm contaminating them with. More people buying for themselves, not "for a friend" or for a partner too shamed to come in for themselves. Go to Taringa, say, and it's all coy straight uni students who want vibrators smaller than their boyfriends' cocks so he doesn't get frightened and things to make her come easier so he has to do less work. Pale condom buyers and old men from out Chelmer way who talk to my tits and call me "love" and treat me like an idiot.
It's wearing me down. I'm in about the best place I can be in this business and still there are days when I want to phone in dead. Compound that sex-neg rubbish with the rest of the horror that comes from working retail and it's a lesser miracle that I'm coherent at all. I just need to get. Out.
And then I have to try not to strangle the chirpy folk who assure me that man, I must have a great job, talking about sex all day, wow! Must be fun to work in a place like this.
Anyway. All things in time. One day I will look back in bewilderment at the things I got up to in my twenties, warts and all.
I'm writing sporadically, but it's tough thing to relax enough to hear my muse when there's so much quotidian bullshit to wade through. I have a few well developed little characters niggling at me now, whispering in my ear and demanding attention. This is a great motivator. The Angel has been following me again, a mixed blessing because she's a character who was once described to me as "a being made out of sadness", and her voice is tinged with my own resigned discontent at the way of the world. I identify with her the most when I am most displeased with the universe, and if you've made it this far you'll have picked up I'm rather displeased indeed. But she has interesting friends, and young Judith has been wandering along in her shadow, making interesting shapes in fabric of that particular reality. I'm still working it out somewhat, because it's got a strong Judeo-Christian flavour to it and most of my universes are powerfully and decidedly polytheistic. In the words of the master, it’s one thing saying you’ve got the best god, but saying it’s the only real one is a bit of a cheek. So nutting out how it all works is a delightful distraction, and even as I type this I can feel her shifting disapprovinglyy in her seat back there in the galleries of my mind, half a frown on her face - a sort of pre-Babel 'bish please' moment.
Most will think it's a bit mental to talk of her moving like that, as if she were a real person or a voice in my head. The authors in the room know what I'm talking about.
I've got a couple of good game groups going on, mostly olde skool Vampire: the Masquerade and Warhammer 40K, with the odd bit of GURPS thrown in for variety. I'm still playing Rachael, for all your HoD refugees out there, and she's if anything become more herself. Take that as you will, though she has developed an odd fondness for tiny dogs and big cigars. My 40K characters are at either ends of the spectrum - a sanctioned Imperial Psyker working in the demon-smashing chapter and an exiled Rogue Trader noblewoman fiercely trying to rebuild her father's crumbled empire. They would hate one another's guts if they ever met.
I've been sewing a lot too, and have big plans for the Bloodlust Ball coming up at the end of the month. I just have to find time to do it all. Something red. I think. I have a mountain of scrap from my various projects that I am looking forward to smashing together in pleasing ways.
My thirtieth birthday is in February, roughly the same time the lease runs up here. It's going to be an interesting six months. I'm going to complicate them further by running a club night instead of throwing a thirtieth birthday party. I'm yet to finalize anything but I should really get my arse into gear and book a venue. No clue where yet. My heart wants the Alliance but it's just not on the cards. Probably somewhere suitably divey in the Val I can go to town on. Apparently they're applying for a new liquor license for the downstairs bar at Rockerfellers and I have been pleasingly hammered enough times down there for it to appeal by I'm hardly sold. That's a rough stretch of road these days after 2am or so. I've been consistently impressed by the service at the Trans, though I'd rather it not be "just another goth night at the Trans", likewise St Paul's which is another lovely venue that has become something of the default. I don't know. Really it would be most sensible to go somewhere with a proven record but my recalcitrant desire to be different always kicks in and I wind up wondering what the deposit would be to get Cloudland.
I have to be awake in four and a half hours, so I think that will have to do.