(no subject)

Goddamn, two weeks away from his place of employment has does wonders for my Big Ol' Bear. He's always in a good mood, frisky, outgoing, spendy (he just coughed up several hundred for air filters to spare my little lungs), cooking yummy Asian meals for fun, and seemingly never tires of having me around. All I need to do now is earn enough to support him so he can retire early.

Anybody out there want to pay me three times what I'm making to do the same work?

A Room of My Own

I left out an important reason for my largely unairconditioned life-style in my mini-essay some weeks ago: I am just not there often enough. AC makes the most sense in a space which is more-or-less constantly used; the only advantage to running it in an empty room is not walking into heat bath and then waiting impatiently for it to cool down.

Most of you probably think I have the causal connexion reversed. The most I'm willing to admit is that it's a vicious circle. I tell myself things would be different if I hosted more guests, but I'm too embarrassed about the state of things to do that. (I made the GWO agree to dine at my place once a week in order to force me to maintain a minimum standard of housekeeping. However, when the hot weather made me choose between having either happy GWO or GWO chez moi--but not both--I went with the former. Call me merciful or weak--or self-serving.) Plus, I've cleverly moved to a neighbourhood where I have no friends and one must kill for parking, so it's not like anyone is going to drop by.

When I moved in, I had grand plans about hosting dinners, but I've never done it. I don't mind cooking at home, but I'm seldom there for dinner two nights in a row. No one wants to go shopping every time they fix a meal, but any remotely fresh groceries (and I do not what to eat out of cans) generally go bad before I cook again--as do the leftovers. For instance, the pork I bought last week. I fried up half of it for dinner Tuesday, planning to eat the rest of it the next night. But I was feeling all bummed out on Wednesday and couldn't face eating alone, so instead I visited a friend on the North Side and we went out for Guatemalan. It was Sunday before I needed to cook a meal at home again and, by then, it was fermented pork.

And that, I think, is the core of my problem: I just get lonely by myself. The longer I stay in my apartment without company, the moodier I get. Perhaps this is a function of my surroundings, which have not always been optimal, but, again, I doubt it. This seems to hold true for every place I've lived--good, bad, and ugly. Everything unpleasant gets on my nerves more quickly when I don't have someone to distract me from it.

Fundamentally, I really hate living alone. I wish I didn't have to do it. I've thought about going back to having roommates, but it's difficult to find the right match. Plus, there's always the problem of scrambling to find replacements for the ones that move out. GWO has been very, very cautious about moving in together. It's taken him years to get his existence to a point where he's very comfortable and he's loath to disturb it. I've seen incremental change in his position since we've been dating, but, at best, living together is still years off.

So, in the meantime, I spend most of my free time hanging around his place and neglecting my own. I think about improvements I could make and then say, What's the point? I tell myself this will be different with my next place, since it will be nicer and I'll own it, which should encourage me to keep better care of it. But I wonder; will it just end up a more attractive hotel room, someplace I go to sleep and shower and leave whenever I actually want to have fun?

(no subject)

I recently wrote in a reply to another LiveJournal entry:

Anyone who wants to talk about how Internet porn has altered their outlook on nudity is welcome to do so in my LiveJournal.

Here's how this came about.

Many moons ago, a friend of mine whose writing career brings him into contact with some truly odd sorts was invited to view mountains of books comprising part of a deceased collector's estate. Apparently, the man had more cheap sci-fi paperbacks than the Skiffy God-Emperor. But what truly overwhelmed Our Writer Friend was the MASSES of PORN. It was the kind of mind-blowing collection geeky Christian kids from the Midwest weren't even allowed to dream about.

However, the ecstatic sense of discovery only flickered for a moment before OWF realised that he could access a roughly equivalent collection any time from the networked PC where he did most of his work.

He said, "You kids don't know what things were like before the Internet." But I'm not a kid, and I do. I remember getting my jollies wherever I could find them, from clothing catalogs to National Geographic. I remember the thunderous beating of my heart as I brought home my first gay pornography (which my father eventually found, but that's a story for another time). I remember going overboard when we finally got a slip connexion at home and, suddenly, a whole galaxy of free digital erotica was at my beck and call.

The question I've found myself asking is, How has this changed me? How does it affect one's perceptions to have been exposed to images of thousands of naked bodies as opposed to the handful most of us see IRL? And I honestly don't know. Doubtless, I'm less likely to be shocked by nudity, but am I more or less tolerant of physical imperfections or even just physical traits which don't meet my narrow standards of beauty? Does it make me more content with monogamy, since a lot of curiosity about other people's bodies can be satisfied without any need for contact, or does seeing the grand glorious panoply that I'm foregoing stoke my wanderlust? I don't know, and I'm not sure how to go about finding out.