Finding ways to make it sweeter

Lemon Meringue – Poe

Hold on you’ve gotta wait just a minute.
See the cookie jar,
I’ve got my hand caught in it.
Just let me try and explain.
You know I’ve been a good girl
but I hit a limit
I know there’s not a lot of logic in it
But my life’s been feeling to me
(Like lemon)

It’s been rough for the Sascha as of late. Minor universe implosion issues.

I was hurt very badly by some people I care about and then lost my job a few days later. I was utterly devastated. Within the span of a few days, the foundation I stood on had dissolved into ash.

It took some time for the shock to wear off, and I spent a few days a non-sexy sniveling wreck, but now I’m ready to process.

What do I do to keep the ashes and bitterness from consuming me?

Stop right there before I get bitter.
There’s got to be a better way.
Got to be a way to make it sweeter.
A little more like lemon meringue.

I’m taking my cue from the phoenix and letting the ashes ignite. My job was sucking the life out of me anyway. Parting ways with it was like breaking up with an abusive primary – it stings something awful, but it’s ultimately for the best. This layoff has given me more space than I’ve had in a while to do the work on myself that I’d been neglecting. I’m now open to opportunities to explore my passions, and give me the space to find that whole balance thing I’d been whining about.

Right now, my path seems to lead me back to school – to get an MSW, more specifically. I’ve been inspired by Audacia Ray’s projects dedicated to sex worker awareness, and my own desire to become a teacher and presenter. I want to help people in the scene and sex worker communities, and I seem to have a natural proclivity towards helping people and lending an ear. So, going the social work/therapy route seems to be a good way to integrate my love and interest in the scene with an actual career path. I know this in no way makes me a beautiful and unique snowflake, but I’m still excited about the prospect, gorramit.

This shift has given me the kick in the ass I needed to make the changes and do the work that my work schedule didn’t allow me to do, not only in terms of finding my life path, but in terms of getting my emotional state back together.

Live, from New York, it’s Kink For All!

I’m writing this blog post from Kink For All, a new unconference put together by Eileen and Maymay.

Because of vanilla obligations, I’ve been… Well… Not off the grid, but definitely on the periphery. So until I got here, I had no idea about the amount of flack that this event and unconferences in general have been getting. And this kind of baffles me. Maybe the old institutions feel threatened? Maybe there’s a kneejerk resistance to change? I can’t conceive of other reasons why these events have been met with such resistance.

I, for one, see nothing but positivity in the whole unconference trend.

This is the second unconference I’ve been to, the first, of course, being Graydancer’s GRUE.

Since that first unconference, I’ve been enamored with the concept. The creation of a space for the open sharing of ideas and experience is an exciting and much needed phenomenon.

This event is a little bit more structured than the GRUE, since there are set 20 minute time slots instead of the more open ended classes that Gray facilitates. And I think both formats definitely have their merits. This format gives people a chance to give snapshots of much longer conversations. And it gave me a chance to lead a short discussion where I can drum up ideas for a class I’m thinking of developing.

But more importantly, I think that the unconference trend signifies something greater – an evolution in the sex and kink positive communities in how we come together and how we exchange information. Don’t get me wrong, I think that more structured events such as TESFest and Dark Odyssey still have their place. But these spaces provide a new, less intimidating platform for new generations of sex geeks, kinksters, actvists, educators, and aspiring educators.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Past and present (and placeholder)

I went to see Graphic Sexual Horror, the documentary about Insex, last weekend at Cinekink. I have a good two pages of notes that I am currently condensing into a post, so stay tuned for that. Or whatever the Internet equivalent of staying tuned is.

And now… Substance!

I found your blog.

An IM comment from a former boyfriend. (Not ex. Ex has negative implications. I see him rarely, but that’s solely by virtue of geography.)

and your fetlife profile.

That threw me a second, not because I was embarrassed that he’d found it, but because that’s not really his world. I mean, he comes to visit every now and again, but doesn’t live here.

I guess I don’t really live here either, I feel like I keep a summer home here. Kink is something I do. It does not define the entirety of my being.

It’s very personal.
umm… Thanks.
I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?

He hadn’t. At all. One of the things I’ve been foolish enough to learn the hard way is just how much meaning can get lost over IM conversations. The lack of context can be killer.

I wasn’t embarassed or scared that he had found this blog. I mean, when you post about your sex life on the Internet, that’s a risk you consent to take.

My reaction to this news was more one of curiosity. I was a very different person when he was a part of my world. Still brand new to a lot of things, and much less secure in my skin. It feels like eons ago when we were together. I was living in New England at the time. Then I moved back to NYC and became the Sascha you all know and indulge your voyeurism with today.

My past got to have a filtered snapshot of my present.

He commented on how personal my writing was. How it took a lot of guts to share that much of myself.

I sure couldn’t do it. He said.

Funny thing is, when I write, I don’t perceive my audience. I have a blank screen and a story to tell. And though it may not seem like it, there is an awful lot that I do filter. Writing sections of my story with the emotional candor I do never really registered as something gutsy. Naiive, maybe.

But then, I think back to the person I was when he and were together. I won’t go into the details about my sex lives past, not without his consent, at any rate. Though I can speak to my own attitudes and behaviors. I certainly was not in a place, back then, to even vocalize my desires, let alone write about them publicly. So maybe the very existence of this blog is a testament to how far I’ve come in these last few years.

It’s almost 2 a.m. as I type this. I’m running on fumes right now, so I should probably stop blogging before I start babbling in Swahili or some other language I don’t actually speak. I hope I don’t read this post tomorrow and find gibberish staring back at me.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]