Five Days: Or, The List Cometh, 2.0

I haven't been posting as much as I'd like, mostly because there's not that much to post. Spending the holidays with my folks means that I haven't seen Tim in way long, which means that my sex life is pretty much imaginary. The List, epic work that it is, continues to quietly grow in a document named 2010 Classwork. And I'm getting ready to see Tim in five days. My folks are dropping me off in my City, and I'm going to straighten out my apartment, see a few friends, and get started checking off the List items.

It's been a rougher month than I expected it to be, and I find myself getting pretty cranky over missing Tim--something which never really happened in other relationships. Over at Sugarbutch Chronicles (), Mr. Sinclair Sexsmith is giving his (her? hir?) girlfriend "homework", an interesting concept to me, especially since this summer, Tim and I might end up at opposite ends of the planet for a month or so.I hate the idea of us coming together only briefly during the summer, and finding in late August that we have no idea where we are sexually anymore. Being able to assign each other sexual tasks might make it easier to keep us on the same page, connecting our two (currently separate) sex lives in the same way that talking runs a thread between our daily lives.

None of this is stuff I've had to worry about in previous relationships, even long-distance ones, because they were held together mostly with old chewing gum anyway. Unhappiness was a standard feature. My past relationships were like rental cars; I just sort of assumed they could drive over anything. But with Tim, even scratching the metaphorical paint worries me--enough that I, incorrigible pedestrian, have resorted to car metaphors. The problem with having nice things is having to worry about them, which I hate, and take care of them--which, it turns out, is more pleasurable than I ever thought it would be.

So that's my state of mind. The List may be spiraling a little, as my fevered imagination throws things onto it that I'm not sure are possible. For example, getting fucked in the ass with a vibrator, which sounds fantastic in theory but which in real life may end in "ow, ow, no, ow..." But it's never hurt me before to set my sights a little high. Every time I've been a little ambitious--in my writing, in my classes, in my dating--it's been greatly rewarded.

Christmas a la My Family

So yesterday morning I woke up to the cats fighting and my brother yelling at me that it was Christmas, and it was time to get up. I'd stayed up until four in the morning, so I was pretty groggy, but I gamely stumbled down the stairs, expecting to see my whole family downstairs already. Nope. My brother just woke me up half an hour before anyone else was awake.

When everyone else eventually got downstairs, we unwrapped our stacks of stuff. I got a whole ton of knee socks, the plaid ones of which immediately made me think of schoolgirl roleplay (so cute!), as well as a spindle for making my own yarn and a whole slew of little gizmos that I never knew I needed but are bound to be a big part of my life. Oh, and the quintessential chocolate orange.

My brother put on his Christmas CD of Metal Ballads, and we ate our breakfast sausage rolls to the sounds of Kiss singing about eternal love--no Bing Crosby in this house. After a while we went to my uncle's house, where we ate dinner and watched my cousins hit each other with their body pillows from the Costco. This raises an interesting question: why did these kids want body pillows? Is this some trend that I'm not aware of? After dinner, I lounged around on the couch reading Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs while my dad napped. Limited "family time"? Check. Relaxing? Check. I don't know why anyone would do Christmas any other way.

Although the highlight of the evening definitely came after we got home. My dad and brother and I were all downstairs in the living room when we heard a thud from upstairs. I'm used to thuds because my downstairs neighbor has a drinking problem and falls down a lot, but my dad was immediately alert.

There was a long silence, and then: "Honeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

He was up on his feet before the call even stopped. He hopped over the coffee table and ran up the stairs, leaving behind a small Road-Runner style dust cloud.

My mom had fallen off a stool while doing leg stretches. When my dad took her to the emergency room this morning, it turned out that she'd broken her foot.

Baby Jesus? We're sorry we didn't celebrate your birthday to your liking. But this is just a little vindictive.

The List Cometh

I love lists. For all things. Last spring I realized that my list-making had gotten out of hand when I put "break up with boyfriend" on my schedule for the day and happily checked it off when I stopped crying. After that I backed off on lists for a while.

But now it's time for a kinder, although probably not gentler, list--things that my boy and I plan to do in bed for the next year. Of course, a good half of the list doesn't actually take place in a bed. I proposed the idea to him a few nights ago and he surprised me with a deluge of requests. I was going to keep the list to ten items, but it's grown way beyond that.

The list is going to keep growing until New Year's Day, when I'll post it and get started fulfilling its naughty demands. Thus far, most of the suggestions are things that don't really push our limits, just things that we haven't gotten around to yet. I think this may need to change. I think that part of the fun of doing exotic things in bed is pushing your partner's limits and your own, seeing if you can be just a little braver. I'm going to try to get him to have some sex out in the fresh air, or at least the semi-fresh air of my city. And I'm definitely going to start encouraging his dominant side. Although by the sound of some of the items on his list, he's already ahead of me on that.

In semi-related news, I found out from a friend that a friend of his, a charming dominant woman, is out looking for new submissives. I asked my friend if he'd make a recommendation that she play with me so that Tim could observe and pick some stuff up, and we're now awaiting a reply. I hope she says yes. This could be the hottest learning experience I've had since--well, since my Lit class last semester.

Tis the season...

It's been a pretty busy few days. Yesterday my dashing man Tim came to visit and we roamed the Smithsonian museums. We never did find a quiet place to fork, or whatever the young kids are calling it, but we did see bones and fossils of astounding variety. At one point we wandered into an abandoned museum of Asian things and he kissed the back of my neck and made my knees quake. I realized how much I miss privacy, being able to just take his clothes off at will. I wouldn't want to be my roommates on my first day back in town.

Today I woke up to my father nudging me with his foot and telling me that I should wake up and go downstairs, because my grandmother was coming to bake cookies. For six hours I mixed, molded, rolled, squished, floured, filled, and sprinkled all manner of cookies, including some old-fashioned ones made with cottage cheese in the dough and prunes in the center (who eats these horrendous things? My family. By the truckload.) We made cookies that are extruded through a machine to make simple shapes, one of which is supposed to be a wreath but which my aunt calls "the cervix dentata." In short, we now have four boxes of cookies, which will hopefully tide us over through the crazy snowstorm we're getting tonight.

This snowstorm is going to be a doozy, or so they tell us. My father is bracing himself for a long day on the snowplow. My houseguest and I are planning to do some serious damage to the snowdrifts in order to build one of those giant ice-forts that every kid wanted but never had the hand-eye coordination to build. We may also shoot for some Calvin and Hobbes-style snowmen. What better way to take out my sexual frustration than by building epic works of snow and then coming inside and eating myself into a prune cookie-based stupor?

On Christmas Knitting

On a jarring note, I'm a knitter. And for the past three years, around Christmas I've suddenly found myself backed up with projects for other people.

On my list for the next week or so: a felted bowl/basket for my mother, a dog sweater for my aunt's favorite blind incontinent terrier, and some woolly slippers for my dad, who's looking more and more like an old wizard/librarian every time I come home. As these things get done, there may or may not be pictures.

Knitting things that people will actually want and use is hard in my family. My father and brother already have more hats than they can handle and my mother doesn't wear hats. Ever. I think her ears are made of cast iron. My aunt can always be counted on to parade around in whatever I make, but she's got quite a bit of my stuff already. The trick, it seems, is to constantly branch out so that they never end up with a backlog of unwearable socks.

My father is unbearably depressed by Christmas gifts, but I think he finally came around a little today. At the yarn store we saw a beautiful basket, and figured that my mother, who loves beautiful baskets, couldn't possibly turn up her nose. If we fill it with delicious things to eat, cute whatnots, and some home-grown knitting, how could she refuse it?

This is quite enough of this chipper holiday stuff, though. I'll conclude by saying that my lovely man Tim is coming up to visit, and I'm trying to figure out if it's at all possible for us to have sex in a museum. Imaginary readers: any suggestions for where on the Mall to get it on in relative safety?

A Trip to the Mall--or, the Pervertible Gift Guide

So maybe it's just me, but after a day trip to the IKEA and the giant mall adjoining, I've realized that I now see things through different eyes. Or at least on different levels. On one level, I was a girl looking for Christmas presents. On the other, everything I saw looked like something useful for a scene.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but the Swedish Modern wicker lounge chairs? So easy to tie someone to, and the angle is perfect for that semi-sitting sex with the girl on top. All IKEA furniture is kind of like this: it's sturdy yet portable, and each piece has a cutout, or a nook, or a post, that would be perfect for stringing or tying. If that's not badass enough, downstairs in the random stuff section, they have all kinds of ropes and springy nylon cords.

In the kitchen section, they have these things that I think are whisks, but the handles are plastic and the whisk wires are made out of rubber and all lie along one flat plane. When my friend and shopping companion turned around, I did an experimental slap on the inside of my forearm and left a pretty impressive stinging red mark that vanished a few minutes later. Nice. And that's not even mentioning the strings of pinching clothespins in the home office section: perfect for organization, or possibly torture.



Lots of the other knickknacks I couldn't put a purpose to, but I had the feeling that in exactly the right scene they'd be perfect. Examples: these cute little potato peelers and bottle openers with sleek laquered handles; some tiny desk lamps with super-long, super flexible necks; and of course, the charming ceiling-hung inflatable chair/nest/pod in the children's section.

After eating some Swedish meatballs and buying a few tchotchkes, my companion and I went to the mall. After some unsuccessful clothes-shopping, we wandered into the Spencer's, mostly because I'd never been in one. I was kind of in awe: there were lots of strobe lights and black t-shirts, like a Hot Topic only with more sex. I headed straight to the back, figuring that was where they'd keep the good stuff, the kinky stuff.

It was, and the stuff was okay, I suppose. I've been spoiled by the sex shop in my Big City, so the little poorly-lit corner looked kind of bland. There were a few things I coveted: the under-the-bed bondage system, for example, which is cheaper there than I've seen online. But the floggers, the restraints, the goofy plastic handcuffs--it was all lacking something. Bright colors, maybe, or minimalist Swedish craftsmanship, or cute names like LÄROSTOL. Or a reasonable price of $3.99.

Book Learnin'

So it's winter break, that wonderful time of the year when I get to lounge around my parents' house as a rent-free boarder. In exchange for baking things and vacuuming, I get pretty much as much time to myself as I want. And I'm filling that time largely with reading and writing.

Right now I'm reading Beloved by Toni Morrison, a story about a woman living in Ohio after the Civil War with her daughter, a friend of her husband's, and the ghost of the baby she murdered, who has now taken the form of a young woman who calls herself Beloved. It's delightfully creepy and it's got me constantly on edge. The book was a recommendation from my English professor from last semester, whose opinion I grow more and more certain of all the time.

Hopefully soon I'll have it finished and be able to say something meaningful about it, but right now I'm just immersed in the pleasure of reading for no reason. It's not easy reading; it's what The Professor calls "sitting-up, pen-in-hand reading"--and yet, hunched at it over the kitchen table, chewing on a piece of stale gum and honing in on the words, I feel more relaxed than I have all semester.

My friend Daniel tells me that reading for pleasure stimulates a part of the brain that reading for an assignment doesn't--and that it causes mad awesome brain growth. So presumably I should be getting smarter soon. Although I worry that the other reading I've been doing--back issues of fashion magazines, a book of spooky stories for kids--may cancel it all out.

My First Successful Scene, Part II: or, We Can Do Better (and that's a good thing)

Thirty minutes into our scene, I had him shivering, covered in his own come, begging me to leave him alone. I was halfway through my scornful retort when my alarm clock's cheerful bugle setting went off. I threw my hands in the air and backed off a few steps, like I expected Tim to explode or something. As soon as I did it, I felt silly.

"You want out?" I asked.

"Nah," he said. "I want to see if I can escape."

I sat at the edge of the bed, still holding my (messy) hands in the air, while he reached down with his bound hands. After a few tries he managed to hook the ties on his legs and undo them, so that he was just wearing the two belts on his wrists. It took him less than a minute to undo ten minutes' worth of tying and taping.

"Well, that was pretty pathetic bondage," I said.

"You had me convinced," he said.

We washed up and then went back to our default state (spooning). And because both of us are pretty Spocklike about everything, the first thing we did was analyze.

"Okay," I said. "What'd you like?"

It turns out that we both like it when I slap him for no reason. And the period of silence at the beginning? Well appreciated on both ends. And apparently (although I don't remember this), shortly after he mentioned that he 'had a girlfriend', I made him watch me work on him--a good move, and it's a shame it wasn't intentional.

But this bondage stuff is harder than I ever thought it'd be. I'm way too much of an amateur to say that I have a "style", but in order to pull off what I love doing--humiliation and pain, on a guy who can pick me up with one arm--I need to find a way to do bondage, which I have no experience or talent for. Presumably there's a book. I should probably read it. Imaginary readers: any suggestions?

My First Successful Scene, Part I: or, in praise of duct tape

Last night my boyfriend Tim came over, and I tied him up and raped him.

Well, sort of.

First we cuddled, and then we ate some pasta and some tuna salad, and cuddled a little more--no sense in rushing things--and then at about seven-thirty, we started trying to tie him up.

This turns out to be way harder than it sounds, and it pretty much required Tim's full participation plus suggestions. This is at least partially because our bondage materials consisted of the following:

-Two belts with regularly spaced holes along the entire length (I highly recommend these; apparently they come from Wal Mart);
-One regular ol' belt;
-One hand-knit bondage rope (very good for restraining small people, such as me;
-An old TV cable; and
-Lots and lots of duct tape.

Using all of these materials, I eventually managed to bind Tim's hands to his legs and get his legs tied together. He thought he might still be able to get out, so he suggested I string the TV cable under the mattress and tie it across his body. So of course I had to get him out of his restraints so he could get off the mattress. But once we got the cable across him, we were, as they say, in business.

"You ready?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Hey," he said. "I'm gonna use the safeword if I need you to stop, okay? If I beg you to stop...that's good."

I nodded. And then I blindfolded him.

The first thing I did as soon as the blindfold was on was to take off my shoes. I kicked them off as quietly as I could (giant stilettos are sexy but useless) and then I started pondering.

I didn't come up with a plan before I started, and I'd been nervous about that, but it's amazing how easily that dissipated when I was faced with a naked man to play with. I started by not touching him at all, just walking around the bed looking at him from different angles. I leaned down so that my hair trailed over him and blew a little air over his skin. He flinched. Beautiful.

I grabbed my hairbrush off the bed beside him and trailed the bristles down his body, and then slid it around and slapped the exposed underside of his thigh. He pushed both legs flat against the bed and whimpered a little.

I crawled up onto the bed beside him and lifted the corner of the blindfold to whisper in his ear. Just one word. "Hello." I said it softly, cheerfully, maybe with a hint of seduction.

"Who are you?" he asked, a tremor in his voice.

I lifted his blindfold.

"No one you know," I said.

And then I slapped him hard across the face.

Face-slapping is usually off-limits for him, but he said it was okay in this scene, and I went to town. It's something I love, that and hair-pulling, and since I was in charge, I took full advantage. At one point I was stroking his cock with one hand and raking red marks across his chest with the fingernails of the other, and I thought I saw him smile.

"Are you LAUGHING at me?" I asked. He shook his head. I backhanded him anyway, hard enough that his cheek went red. He shuddered from head to toe and began to whimper.

"Please," he said softly. "Please stop."

I didn't.

[To be continued...]

On New Beginnings

Last night, two things happened that caught me by surprise. The first was that I was reading the blog Sexual Intelligence (http://sexualintelligence.wordpress.com/) and my boyfriend, frying pancakes in the kitchen, asked me what I was up to.

"Sex blogs," I said. "I read them all the time."

"You should write one."

"Eh, I've considered it," I said. "Not enough experience."

"That's a new angle."

We have a lot of conversations like this, like a recent one where I talked him into starting a religion. And so I figured that it wasn't a bad idea, and I'd start it with the new year. Until later that evening he asked me if I'd please do a scene with him later this week. And English major that I am, my first thought was "boy, I wish I had a forum to write about this analytically."

Now, we've both been playing around with various BDSM things for a while. There's been some giggly spankings, light bondage, anal play, and a whole lot of dirty talk. But the last time we tried to do anything like a formal scene was a while ago, and--to put it frankly--he got freaked out and basically curled up in the fetal position. We've been easing our way back into things ever since, and pretty recently we had a semi-serious attempt at a scene that he got through okay.

But this is going to be pretty hardcore. He knows what he wants, this boy: he wants to have his hands tied behind his back and his legs strapped together, and then he wants me to torture and eventually "rape" him. And while I'm absolutely excited, I'm terrified that I'm going to push him over the edge. Of course, we've got a safeword (and we tend to respect the "argh! Stop that!" rule--i.e., if someone's clearly irritated and not into it, you stop.) But he tends to be a pleaser and I'm worried he'll let things get further than he'd like if he thinks it'd spoil my fun to stop.

I got him to give me a clear list of things that are too much, and he rattled off some things I'd never have thought of--messing with his personal possessions, knife play--and I started to feel a little better, since his limits are things that didn't even occur to me, as well as some things that I thought about but figured were pretty much out of the question. It's good to know that we're pretty much on the same page about what's okay.

And so here I am, anxious but on the edge of my seat. And that's not even counting the fact that it's finals week. I'm torn between my desire to ace my exams in the morning and my urge to spend the whole night plotting.

I wonder if I can get ahold of some mini clothespins.