date machine : love

Date Machine: Moving to New York and Where It Got Me

amboabe — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:09:00 GMT

It was lucky that we met.

When I look back, it seems impossible that I ever would have met N. Of all the things that had to fall into place, all the plans I made that didn’t work out, all the unexpected offers that led me into places I never though I’d wanted to go; at every step, one little change would have meant none of this would have ever happened.

If I’d been accepted at conservatory when I was 18; if I’d skipped the poetry workshop my sophomore year of college where my friend H planted the idea of interning at a movie production company; if I’d been accepted in the trainee program at the management company instead of leaving for Peace Corps; if I’d been hired at one of the random office jobs in LA I’d tried so desperately to get when I came back; if I’d taken my prejudice against San Francisco seriously and never moved there; if I’d decided to stay home last Easter because I was tired and didn’t feel like socializing; there are so many little details that could have thrown it all off. It was luck.

Before I met N, I thought I knew myself well enough. I had been through a lot, had fended for myself, taken lots of risks without any clear payoffs waiting ahead. I knew what I wanted out of life and I had a clear understanding of what I was going to have to go through to get it. I knew what I had to share with a partner and I knew what I would expect in return.

One of the first things I learned about N when we met was that she was moving to New York in two months. When we went out on our first real date I knew there was another man waiting for her in New York.

After our first meeting, I spent two hours on the phone with my friend S. I was convinced that I had to send N a wedding proposal in a text message. I knew this would have been fantastically stupid and so I begged S to explain to me in detail why I should wait for at least a second meeting before thinking about marriage. The proposal would have been a joke, and I would have meant it as one. But not really. Impulses like that don’t materialize at random. I’d never felt it before.

A week later we made plans to go out again. I was scared. I called my friend C and told her what was happening. We were about to start something overwhelming and inarticulate. It was like watching a whale coming up from under the ocean. I saw the smooth, alien surface rising just above the water and had no idea what it was. But I knew that it was big. I had already decided to go with it, but I was afraid of that choice. I wanted C to make sense of it for me; to tell me why I was going to do what I was about to do.

As N’s departure drew closer I didn’t feel like I had any place to do anything other than loosen my fingers and watch her slide away. That end had been beside us during every second we were together, even when I consciously turned my back on it. And when she left I watched her go.

N is the love of my life. When I was finally able to say that out loud without feeling embarrassed about it, I decided to move to New York. Love isn’t something you find, it’s something you give, and, though I didn’t know how to say it for a while, I wanted to give her everything. That’s why I moved. This is all I have to give someone. And I brought it to her.

We haven’t gotten back together. We talk. We go out together sometimes. When we’re together it feels like it did. But that’s not enough.

I’ve been lying to myself about the move since I decided on it back in September. I’ve tried to describe it in pure rhetorical terms. “This is all I have to give someone.” That sentiment describes the amorphous emotion that’s propelled me all this way, but it’s an incomplete description. It’s a sentence fragment.

I didn’t just come to give her something. I came to take something, I came to ask her to give me something back. Like giving someone a birthday present and watching expectantly as they unwrap it, there was an unspoken expectation in my coming here. I didn’t want to acknowledge that part. I didn’t want to say that part out loud. I don’t want to be that needy one, that demanding one. But I am.

My friend C told me that I’m in love with my own ability to be in love. When I wrote about coming here last month I said N had black hair. It’s not true. She has brown hair. I was wrong. I moved across the country for a woman whose hair color I couldn’t even get right.

The other week we had a fight. We were supposed to meet for drinks but she was in the middle of a busy week and had been out late the night before. I felt wounded. “I can handle not being your boyfriend, not being your sweetheart,” I texted her. “But I can’t handle feeling like an albatross, an asterisk appending your real life.”

How is somebody supposed to make another person not feel like an asterisk? How can anyone ask another person to make them feel differently about themselves? For all my opaque rhetoric about wanting only to give to her, here I am wearing my wounded emotions on my sleeve and wondering why she won’t do more to fix them.

I’ve given up on every woman I’ve ever been in love with. I never fought for any of them, I never tried to make a case, never made a show of what I could give them besides a passive and easy-going friendship. When you fall in love with someone you ask them to sacrifice for you. You ask them to amend their own plans for the future to include you, to forgo all the new experiences they might have had with other romances, to never experience another person’s body after your own. It’s cruel. It’s a prison.

“I wish we understood each other better,” she told me a few days after I got here. “I am often surprised about it both ways, how we do and don’t.”

I don’t know how this is supposed to end. There isn’t an answer buried in any of this. There is no ending.

I remember looking at her in a bar the other week. We were talking about music. I had just finished tearing down The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips for being grating and overly saccharine. She told me it was about Wayne’s father dying of cancer, the adolescent dregs of super hero fantasy turned into a coping mechanism for the inevitable parting of everyone you’ll ever love. We went to see The Reader. I laughed the whole way through. I was filled with incredulity for the stodgy camera angles, the baroque dialogue, and the hackneyed soap opera plot. She liked the actor who played the young boy. She saw past the surface, the stupid superficial flaws, and found the pretty parts underneath. She left the theater with those. I left with my own stupid punchlines and in-jokes.

I admire her as much as anyone I’ve ever known. She’s strong in all the places where I would come apart. She listens where I’d jump in to filibuster and orate. She’s direct and unapologetic where I’d talk in circles and avoid having to answer.

It was lucky we met. I wish I had more to give to her than this, my wounded feelings and dusty luggage.

I remember one of the first nights we went out together. I invited her to come to a friend’s birthday party with me. We had seen each other twice before. I had been in her bed and we had kissed for almost two hours on her front step. Still, I was nervous when I went over to her apartment to pick her up. I didn’t know where we stood with each other yet. I was afraid I liked her too much.

We walked down the sidewalk towards my friend’s place. We stopped at the big intersection by Church and Market waiting for the signal. We were both looking straight ahead at the red circle shining in its black metal housing across the street.

I tried to look at her without turning my head. I could feel her body next to me in the cold night air. It was like a little ball of soft energy. It was good.

The light was getting ready to change. I could feel the seconds moving by. We would have to start walking forward again soon. I leaned down towards her without looking, then turned my head and kissed her on the cheek.

I stood back upright and looked straight ahead again, watching the stoplight. After a couple of seconds I looked at her again. She kept staring straight ahead, but a smile spread across her lips as she felt me looking at her. The light turned green. “Come on,” she said. I put my arm around her shoulders and we stepped into the crosswalk.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Who Am I and Why Am I Here? or Let's Keep in Touch

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

Date Machine: Women at 30, or the Scent of the Medicine Cabinet

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

amboabe — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:31:00 GMT

I fall in love quickly. How much do you have to know about someone before you know you love them? It’s a yes or no question, and when you know there’s no need to sally about and over-qualify things. Yes. Me. I do. But does the same apply to sex? How much do you have to know about somebody before you let them into your pants?

I don’t like having one-night stands but I’m a hypocritical opponent of the practice. I once slept with a woman before I’d even spoken to her. It was a New Year’s Eve party in Madagascar. I was drunk and with some friends in a small room we had convinced a local to convert into a makeshift disco for the night. The woman came in with her friends close to midnight. I thought she was a French tourist.

After an hour we wound up dancing close to each other and soon we were grinding. We started kissing without saying a word. After a few minutes of making out I picked her up and she wrapped her legs around my hips. I carried her down to the beach nearby and we had sex until the ocean water turned chilly in the pre-dawn air.

At one point I heard her moan my name and I stopped short. Not only did I not understand how she knew what my name was, but I was shocked to her speak with an American accent. It turns out she was another volunteer and we had friends in common who’d told her about me. I had no idea who she was.

When the air turned cold and the giddy booze high gave way to lethargy we decided to walk back to our hotel rooms. We hugged good night and went our separate ways.

Another night I went out with a friend who invited a girl he used to date out with us. We went to a bar and after a couple of hours, the girl pulled me outside to the back patio. She told me I was cute and said something nice about my hair (swoon). We started kissing and an hour later we were in a cab on the way back to my apartment.

We had athletic sex for a couple of hours and then I started to feel the onset awkwardness of being in bed with a relative stranger. Absent a deeper attraction, her body seemed like a foreign object in my arms, not something intimate that I wanted to get closer to.

After the second hour I tried to roll over on my side and pass out, but she was wide-awake and horny. She kept finding new ways to get me hard and I thought it would have been awkward to suggest we fall asleep with a bouncy erection. So we kept having sex until she was tired enough to fall asleep.

I was sullen and selfish the next morning. I had started wishing I was alone half-way through our night together. The sex was technically great, but I didn’t want to have great sex with someone I wasn’t that excited about. In the morning all the sex between us was gone and we were just left with the same two relative strangers who had jumped at the chance to sleep with each other the night before.

I offered to buy her breakfast but she had to be at work soon. I walked her down the street to her car. We hugged and exchanged numbers. We’d had sex and didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers.

Sex covers a much broader spectrum of people than love. There are people I immediately know I wouldn’t want to have sex with. But most people are question marks. All those strange new faces and bodies moving past each other on the sidewalk, in the subway, in the tight corridors of bars and restaurants, in between cubicles in offices. Sometimes the only way to find out whether or not you really want to have sex with someone is to jump in and try.

It’s easy to seduce someone with your clothes on, to draw another person’s imagination and sense of optimism. When you’re naked there aren’t any tricks of seduction left. There are always a million reasons why things can’t work, and only one reason why things do work; one opaque, immovable, physical gesture, an affirmation. Yes.

You never really know until you’re already there.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test

Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender

Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?

Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch

amboabe — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:24:00 GMT

My dad grew a beard when he was in his mid-twenties. I used to look at old pictures of him when I was growing up and imagine one day filling out a body that was similar to his. I expected a bushy mustache as if it were a birthright.

I waited patiently through college and into my early twenties, expecting an explosion of hair. I watched my older brother experiment with a pubic goatee and wondered if my facial hair would look similarly vulgar when it finally appeared. The hairs around my nipples grew longer and multiplied. I began to notice a long, slender nose hair emerge from my left nostril. The thick and burly hair I was waiting for never arrived.

I'm thirty-one now and I shave twice a week. My chest is a pale, barren plane. I want to imbue some kind of meaning into that, but since I stopped expecting my body to somehow change into something it won't ever be I don't see what meaning it could have. Body hair is another safe thing to fixate on when trying to articulate what you want. It's easiest to identify body parts that might be attached to any random person Chest hair doesn't have a face.

And still I wonder sometimes what my body might be like with more hair. The specter of a six o'clock shadow hangs over my entire wardrobe and some nights I'm a twinge disappointed to look in the mirror and see my flushed pink skin where coarse, manly texture should be. Waking up this morning, deciding to forgo a day of working out so I could wallow in sleep an extra half hour, I wondered what my chest would be like with hair. I wished for a few minutes that I could have given a lover the muskier version of my body, with a sultry matting of bed-warmed chest hair to nuzzle in.

Those are the kinds of thought experiments I would dismiss outright from a woman. I don't like hypothetical's about the bodies of people I'm sleeping with. I don't want to think of someone I care about in terms of physical aggregation. You don't fuck body parts.

With my own body, I have a double standard. It's ego. I want it to be everything, to be a vessel for every possible experience that my lover could want. Realizing it can't be, that I can't loosen out from the grip of that singular husk, is a concession to my own impermanence. I want to believe in a world where I could the giving center of everything for someone, but instead all I have is my hairless body. Elbows and shoulder blades, with some long nipple hair for irony's sake.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Date Machine: Sex in the Office

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

Love Machine: Can You Be Friends With an Ex?

Sex Machine: How Soon, Sex Toy?

Date Night: Kissing in the Rain

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs

Love Machine: The Three-Year Itch

Sex Machine: Show Me Your Penis

Date Machine: The Gun Show or Is That All You Got?

Love Machine: Morning Breath Kisses

Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile

Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds

Love Machine: Making A Scene

Nerve Confessions: Oh Hai, You're Pregnant

Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate

Love Machine: My Mother

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph

Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On

Date Machine: What if?

airheadgenius — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:13:00 GMT

This morning at my kid's school I ran into a man I haven't seen in at least a decade. It was a total surprise and strangely emotional.
He is the best friend of an ex of mine and now, by weird coincidence, his son is in the kindergarten class across the hall from my youngest son.

I have had two really major love relationships in my life. My kids dad and this guy.

It was an incredible love affair, but an emotionally devastating relationship and I am very much better off out of it, yet I think about him all the time. Yep, as often as that.

And so to have a tangible reminder of him this morning was unsettling to say the least.

He has a wife and child and now lives in Paris, I learned.

My immediate thought was that he must be doing great. A fashion design job in Paris? A wife and child! And it made me feel an inch tall. For no good reason, because it's not as if I am a crashing failure, but it did all the same.

I called my friend who helped me through that break up. He was actually the reason I managed to finally get out of it because "you don't need to be treated this way". At the time, I needed someone else to point that out to me.

The man had a rare, but no less significant for that, tendency to be violent. In real life, and in contrast to my blogging persona, I am a bleeding heart. I forgave him back then because he'd been an abused child and had more than his own share of pain. My friend said "call the fucking police".

I finally asked him to move out.

Today, as I spoke with my friend about the feelings that were stirred up I mentioned that he was doing well. Much better than he was back then with me. His response "We don't know that he isn't still fucked up. Being married and having children is hardly a reason to think someone is stable. I mean, look at you! You should hear the way I talk about you behind your back".

Ha ha. This is why I am friends with this guy.

He went on to say "I am so proud of you. Look at all the things you've achieved! You have two beautiful kids, a gorgeous house, a career. Yes you can choose to think that you're single and he isn't, but so what? Why are you even going there?"

Why am I going there?

Everyone has "that one" right? The one that just won't die in the imagination. In some cases the hurt is big and sometimes small or sometimes it's just an intangible wistfulness for how life might've been, if only things had been different.

And that man is mine.
My "what if?"

Jake Gyllenhaal

The obligatory back catalogue:
Have you ever been experienced?
Surprise! I'm Pregnant!
Dogs and Dating
Erectile Dysfunction
Daddy's Girl
I need a Frenchman
What I want
The Fart Edition
Fisting and small snatches
How bloggers date
Did he die?
Je t'adore
Zeitgeisty's Behaviour
Rate my Profile
My kink is better than your kink
The good the bad and the ugly
I am a whore
First Date sex?
Small Juicy Ones
The Perfect Blowjob
What is a boyfriend
Friends with Benefits
Real Women
Another quick pull out
Lesbian Lovers Come Out
Digits
Asymmetrical Knobbage
Cunning Linguist
Cunnilingus
Fabulous at 40
Winehouse Reveals
The Chick Facial File
Mirrors
Confession plus Daily Knob!
Abusive?
Celebrity Confessions: Boy George
Dick Trilogy Part 3
MORE dicks in my inbox
Dicks in your inbox
Read my Sodding Profile!
Nerve Confessions: Herpes
The Queen Confesses
The Arse Man Cometh
The Ass Play Chronicles
The Sandwich Blowjob Porn Connection
Bangin Ass
Deformed Dicks
Did I really dream that?
Why I don't date Celebrities
Fashionably late or just a slacker

Love Machine: I'm Not The Marrying Kind.....Or Am I?

spjv840 — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:12:00 GMT

I'm in this really weird state of mind. I spent the last couple weeks stressing over the fact that I might be pregnant. I've been pregnant before so I know what it feels like. Airheadgenius' post about pregnancy made me want to write a whole post about the subject but then I decided not to get into it. People would surely start spewing their political bullshit and quite frankly I have no interest in hearing it. But the last few weeks I felt that familiar pregnant feeling. My tits hurt just if you looked at them too long, I was eating non-stop and having weird bouts of nausea, weird crying jags followed by intense blow ups. I was getting ready to pee on a stick by the end of the week and have to face my boyfriend again with the bad news. If you know me, you know I'm as fertile as a goddamn flower bed, which is ironic because, for the most part, I don't want to become a mother. I love kids, don't get me wrong. I love when my nephew comes bouncing over and jumps on the couch and jumps on his uncle and begs for candy which I secretly give him and I love watching him torture the cat and playing with his uncles old Ninja Turtles toys from the 80's. But at the end of the day, I am glad when he goes back home and is someone else's responsibility. It has nothing to do with with maturity, selfishness or anything else. I just have zero interest in becoming a mother or having "a family" in the traditional sense of the word.

This morning I woke up in a strange mood. Relieved because my period had started, which also took a huge load off my shoulders. I don't think I could have gone through the pain and sadness that follows having to terminate a pregnancy.There was an other feeling on hand this morning, though. Marriage. Last night, while drinking many celebratory Obama beer and crying about this and that and freaking out at my boyfriend, we managed to have some kind of talk about the future without speaking directly about it. I'm one of those gals who doesn't really talk about feelings and other bullshit like that. I'm not going to try and get a guy to open up about his feelings or ask him what he's thinking every hour on the hour. That shit pisses me off. However, last night a lot of garbage flew out of my mouth. We'll blame the booze..it's always the best excuse.

My boyfriend and I already discussed the fact that we don't want to get married in a traditional way. We don't believe in church and have no wish to be married in one, behind one, or next to one. God will not be overlooking my wedding, should that day ever happen. But I want to marry him. I don't want to wear a white dress, have thousands of dollars spent on food, clothes, flowers, whatever the hell people spend money needlessly on for their wedding. I want to get married wearing a purple tube dress over my frayed jeans and beat up camouflaged Converse. I haven't told him about this. He doesn't know that I want to marry him. I've never wanted to marry before. I'm not even entirely sure I want to marry, honestly, but today, right now, I would love to say to him, "I love you, let's run off to Vegas and get married by Elvis and then have honeymoon sex in a big vibrating round bed"- this feeling might pass, just like heart burn after eating spicy chili (it does kind of feel like a bad case of indigestion), but maybe not. The morning after I had met him, I was completely enamored with him. I kept telling friends, "He's so perfect for me" and "He will be mine, you watch!" and I even blurted out "I'm going to marry him one day" - which was saying a whole lot becauseI don't think those words ever came out of my mouth before that, let alone after spending one night with someone. But I'm getting off track.

What makes someone the marrying kind? Is it a desire to have a family, a suburabn house with a goldren retriever and prescription meds for when your husband "works late" four nights out of five? Is it a desire to be with someone completely and utterly for the rest of your life? Is it a business deal like Lori Gottlieb wrote in The Atlantic back in January? Is it a need to be secure? Someone to look after you?

I don't think I'm the marrying kind.I don't know what kind I am, honestly.I don't particularly have a desire for anything mentioned above, except maybe wanting to be with someone completely and utterly. Maybe I'm just the kind that has finally realized that I can be secure in this relationship, that I don't need to worry about petty bullshit like I tend to do and that our little family with our cat, pit-bull puppy and all our plants is just what I want and need, and I don't need a ring to tell me that. Although, a cake right now with two little action figures on top would be pretty great.

So, are you the marrying kind?

Nerve Confessions: Analyzing "I Love You" and Other Recent Confessions

spjv840 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:56:00 GMT

DM has been pretty dead lately, so I decided to take a look at some recent confessions that you nerve daters have submitted. There's quite a few good confessions out there lately.

"When I called you just to tell you that I love you, it would have been nice if you had said you loved me too."

This first confession really made me feel for you. I've been on both sides of the 'I love you' non-return and it's a sticky game. If you're the one saying, "I love you" and you don't get a reply, to me, it's like being hit by a trainwreck and dragged for miles. But even worse than the no reply, is the automatic "I love you" in return. You know what I mean, you've been saying it so long to someone that they say it without thinking, because it's a habit, not because they're actually aware of what they're saying. I've been in that position and all it does it is make you feel worse about yourself.

Or there's the "Me too" reply - does that even count? If you can't be bothered to add another word to the sentence, don't bother saying anything at all. Lazy love is not any better than no love.

Of course, I'm not the biggest fan of those three words. I don't toss them around like I see some people do. I was once with a man for six months and never said I love you. If I take nothing else slow, that's one thing I do take slow. Those three words are some of the few that can invole fear in me. I was cautious saying it to my current boyfriend. He said it first. Thankfully, we're both not like those people who have to say it every day twice a day in order to know that we love each other. In a way, I almost think the more you say, the less it means.

"My boyfriend only fucks me once a month, if I'm lucky."

Do you love him? Does he make you happy? If you answered no to any of those quetions, seek new romance prospects ASAP.

"My ex's first hookup was with an "older gentleman".Should I be happier that it was him instead of some dude our own age from a bar.I think I am but, not being the first to score really bothers me because, I like sex way more.It's so much easier for you ladies."

This could almost be about me, but that's not likely. My first hook up after my first big break up was with an "older gentleman". Not 50+ older, but at least a good ten years older than I was. Personally, I don't see why it would make a difference to you if your ex hooked up with an older dude after breaking up with you. I think this is more about the shrinking of your penis and not being able to get laid even though your ex is out there having a good time. Check your ego at the door.

"i watch really nasty porn. it gets me off but i would never want to try any of that stuff myself."

This one kind of cracks me up for reasons unknown. I think it might be because of the number of people who can relate. 16 people (and counting) can relate to watching really nasty ass porn, while only one cannot. I don't know what "nasty porn" constitutes today. I'm assuming it's something that involves poop being smeared over tits while a fist is lodged into places and a woman in the background fits three massive black cocks into her mouth. I wouldn't know. I watch lesbian porn to get off and here I thought that was crazy enough.

Related posts: Nerve Confessions: I Know You Have A Girlfriend But You Feel SO Good In Me
Nerve Confessions: Letting Go and The Top 5 Movie Break Ups
Sex Machine: Oh Yeah, That I Did
Sex Machine: I've Never Done That
Sex Machine; Why Guys Sometimes Tend To SUck In Bed
Sex Machine: Please Slap My Ass
Nerve Confessions: I Fell In Love In A Week
Nerve Confessions: Datin' Daddy
Sex Machine: Are You A Frankfurter or A Mr. Pencil?
Nerve Confessions: Tattoos & Piercings - Plus The Top 5 Hottest Tattooed Men and Women
Nerve Confessions: Shut Up And F*ck Me
Celebrity Confession: Eva Mendes Had Sex in All 50 States
Nerve Confessions: Single and 30
Sex Machine: Toss My Salad
Nerve COnfessions: Should I Stay Or Should I Go
Personals Drama: I'm Not Cupid
Date Machine: You're Not My Type
Sex Machine: The Butt Sex Bandit
Sex Machine: Hot Sex Vs Bad Sex

Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends

amboabe — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:25:00 GMT

I was talking to my friend S last night who, after reading some of my posts here, wondered why I didn't talk more about some of my women friends who have been so ridiculously important to me. "Well," I thought, "what does friendship have to do with dating?" Then I remembered the two hours I had spent on the phone with S one afternoon, desperately begging for help because I was seconds from sending a woman I had just met a wedding proposal in a text message. I'm not normally prone to such desperate impulses, but without S's patient ear I might have engineered a small catastrophe, like a puppy dog run amok during high tea.

I don't know what separates an intimate friend from a lover. S has seen all of my nasty, ugly bits: the weakness, the pettiness, the callousness, the immaturity. With people I'm seeing there's always a pressure to keep myself together. I always feel particularly attenuated to how I'm being perceived by the other person. It's absurd, admittedly. I have no idea what I really look like and feel like to the person looking back at me, but I'm always conscious of their look and want to do what I can to impart it with attraction and affection. With S, I don't feel any pressure to be anything other than myself. I probably respond by over-compensating with my more crass and vulgar side (the number of times she must have heard the term "bukake" in our phone conversations, sigh).

S was recently married and told me something astounding about knowing she was ready to commit the rest of her life to her husband. "I've not wanted to have sex with that man," she sad. "If he were ever in a position where he became physically incapable, I would literally wipe his butt for him. I would be okay with that." I always tend to become fatalistic and irrationally swept away in romance. Hearing S talk about love in such blunt terms, acknowledging the transient nature of all of those cues of attraction and infatuation we so easily mistake for love was totally stunning to me. Perhaps those observations might be obvious to the average person, but to my self-involved ego, I was agog that the true measure of love might be fecal in some way.

I remember one Thanksgiving my father had to excuse himself from the dinner table because my grandmother had shit herself while we were eating. She was old and mostly senile, living in a nursing home. He took her to the bathroom and helped her clean herself and changed her into new underwear. I had never seen love in such a literal state before. When you love someone things shift. My grandfather was engaged to another woman when he met my grandmother. He had to break off the engagement and go against the wishes of his whole family and risk alienating most people in the tiny town where he lived to follow after the woman he loved.

Those two experiences have become the bookends of love for me. You begin with something so overwhelmingly life-affirming and beautiful that you risk everything you have to make it work. And in the end, you're left with someone who can't remember their name and shits their pants when there's too much butter in the gravy.

I love S, but I don't know if I would clean up her shit. I probably would, but I would be angry about it and I would hold it over her for the rest of her life. Maybe that's the difference, finally. We don't resent our friends for not being willing to wipe up our shit after we've lost control. But in love, there is an unspoken expectation that the other person be ready to put up with your everything, from the cute quips to the tragic incontinence, and still look you in the eye and say that you're charming and lovable. Love is cruel and unfair in that way. It's a harrowing thing, and would probably be fatal were it not for friendship.

Here’s to you S. I love you. May you never have to wipe my butt.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout

Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down

Date Night: Two Women in One Night

Nerve Confessions: Rate My Penis Size

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great in Bed

amboabe — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:55:00 GMT

I remember the first woman who ever swallowed my come. As I mentioned earlier, she was also the only woman who's ever been able to get me to come during a blowjob. I'm sure the blowjob itself was fantastically skillful and measured, but I don't remember anything in particular about it. What I do remember is she still had my penis in her mouth after I had finished, almost as if she wanted to make sure to get the most out of my fleshy little sprinkler head.

As she came back up and nestled into the crook of my armpit and ran her hands across my chest, I was stunned and completely swept away. I had only experienced swallowing in porn before and the context is always one of male domination and bukake-tinted victory over another cock-hungry slut. Experienced in reality, I suddenly felt the meaning was completely the opposite. My girlfriend had found a physical language to express how much she cared about me and how much she was attracted to me. It was direct and selfless. I want you this much, it said. I love you this much. Only a woman could be so comfortable with the language of intimacy. I never would have asked her to swallow my come, I would have thought it a demeaning sleight because that's the only way I could imagine it coming across beforehand. Swallowing was an invention of porn to me, not something that came from genuine affection between two people that cared about each other. Where I might have been busy worrying about technique or performance issues to validate myself, she was focused entirely on me.

Many of the women I've been with have been impulsive creatures whereas I'm always calculating and reserved. I think back on the modest list of public places that I've had sex (a park, the beach, a disco, stairwells…) and I realize that none of it would have happened without my partners instigating things. I've come to have a great taste for sex in public over the years, but it's something I would have never had the courage to do when I was younger, not without some prompting from my adventuresome girlfriend at the time. There's a latent timidity I have about any kind of sex act in public. This probably stems from some latent fear of showing my little wee wee to everyone and then being judged by it. Likewise, there's probably plenty of anxiety about having my tricks and techniques judged by random strangers; kind of a waking version of the naked in high school dream.

Every time I see people engaged in public sex it's always crude and garish, with sloppy groping and jaws looking as if they're trying to detach from the joint to wholly engorge the other person. I would have been mortified, as a young man, to let myself be so publicly vulnerable and oblivious to my own image. But then a soft-eyed woman with warm hands and a round belly pulled me into a booth in a disco and taught me how stupid it is to care. Sex is about you and me, she said with her mouth and hips and hands. It's not about how your sexual exploits make you seem to other people, it's about what you share with the person you're with at the time. Being impulsive is, among other things, a recognition that you don't have to apologize for who you are; it's the strength to be curious about what following through on those native impulses and seeing what kinds of adventures will come out of it. It's something I would never have understood without the sex of a woman.

Then there's the matter of anatomy. In my last post, some people seemed to object to my use of the phrase "mucus flaps" to describe the labia. It's a blunt phrase, I confess, but no less accurate or pejorative than the word "pussy," "beaver," or "nonny." What it lacks in round-edged kid-friendly vagueness, it makes up for in absurdity. I suppose it’s the "mucus" part which is most offensive, but I don't see how this is a pejorative at all. As I've written elsewhere, one of the surest indicators of how attracted I am to a woman is whether or not I start fantasizing about tasting her vaginal fluids. How many men haven't walked around the day after sex with the secret scent of vagina on their fingers, chin, or penis? To some the phrase "mucus flaps" might induce revolt or socio-sexual indignation. To me it induces hunger, lust. Mmmmmucus.

If sex is an action that requires honesty and shameless communication with your partner, than our bodily excretions during sex are the physical embodiment of all those embarrassing psychological ticks we harbor. There's nothing I like better than to have sex with a woman on her period. Our culture teaches us to fear vaginal odor (it smells like fish, don't you know?) and uterine sloughing (dude, there's blood everywhere!). I've never smelled a fish in a vagina (and I've lapped vaginosis), nor have I ever gotten squeamish about seeing blood and mucus during period sex. As a friend of mine put it, there's a beautiful fecundity to a vagina on its period. It's the scent of earth, and fertility, and the body calling out for sex. I've never felt fingers claw at my hair and back with the same urgency or need as when having sex with a woman on her period.

But for all the contraptions, acrobatics, geometry, and craven animal-sex of the most ambitious lovers I've ever had, the best sex I ever had remains the tamest. Laying in bed, holding her face between my hands, feeling every last ridge and flexing ripple of her mucus tunnel (is that any worse than "love canal?"), kissing softly, slowly lapping her saliva into my mouth, looking into her dilated pupils. I'd give you back every other woman I've ever had sex with, a hundred times over, for 12 hours of that straight, boring, vanilla sex. Because I don't give a shit about technique at the end of the day. Lovers aren't like cleaning ladies, who you hire and fire based on skill, proficiency, or recommendation. They're people you communicate with, someone that you have something to say to in a language that only your body can articulate. I never would have known that so immediately without the impulsive, fearless, and shamelessly fecund love of a woman.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout

Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down

Date Night: Two Women in One Night

Nerve Confessions: Rate My Penis Size

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

Nerve Confessions: I Fell In Love In A Week

spjv840 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Most of the Nerve Confessions have been a bit boring lately, and don't really inspire me to read them, let alone read and dissect them. I noticed these following ones, though, about falling in love in a week and the conversation that ensued.

"I found the perfect person for me, fell in love with her within a week. But, no surprise, I'm not her type. I'm pessimistic about my chances of finding my type who coincidentally finds me to be her type. God is dead and I still can't take advantage of the situation."

"How do you fall in love with someone in a week? That is ridiculous. You fall in lust- love is when they have stuck around for a while and actually bring somethin to the table......"

"12:59--I fell in love with her in a week and I knew it was love because I was so interested in listening to her talk that sex barely crossed my mind. Sex was there, sure, but I've never felt it sink so far into the background while being attracted to someone so enthralling. I understand that you don't understand, because I didn't buy that such a thing was possible either. But... "now I'm a believer" (and not just because I saw her [very pretty] face)."

"04:29PM- sorry- still not love. Fascination, infatuation, whatever- but perhsps I'm old fashioned- I think the word love should be reserved for those who love you back....."

"Re: Love in only a week. If love is only a feeling, then yeah, sure you're in love, that's fine. But if you only know someone a week there's an awful lot you /don't/ know about them, so that feeling is probably more likely to change than with someone you've known a long time."

"True love: someone who adores you for being exactly who you are and vice versa."

I think the second to last confession says it best. I certainly won't disagree with the fact that you can fall in love in a week's time, because I've been victim of saying pretty much the same thing myself. After a great week with someone new, you can't think anything could ever be bad or wrong in this relationship. The sex is great and daily, you have good conversation, you can do absolutely nothing and still have a great time with the person. You talk to your mother and she asks how it's going with so-and-so and you say "great!" and you think, "Wow, I'm definitely in love with him/her!" And I do think it is love, for the most part. And then the person that's so perfect becomes reality. You realize that he doesn't brush his teeth every day, that he beats his cat every time it pisses on the floor - in front of you, he insults all the women in his family but praise the men, and he's got a small problem with methamphetamines. But you overlook these things - you're in love after all! But then the small problem with methamphetamines turns out be a pretty big problem after all - the whole "love is blind" tends to fade after a while, don't you know. Then you realize, the animal abuse, the drug abuse - it really doesn't fit into your life and you the realization hits you that, maybe it wasn't love, maybe just infatuation.

Can love be short-lived? Can you be absolutely 100% head over heels in love with someone for a week or two and then realize, well...he's not really my type, after all? I'm not talking lust or infatuation here, I'm talking real, actual love. Like I said before, I definitely won't disagree with the fact that you can fall in love in a week because I've done that myself - but with one exception - all those kind of just drifted off until there wasn't the slightest spark of interest left - mostly because, as time went on, I got to know the person more and more and that person turned out to be completely opposite of what I thought he was.

Here's a little story for your amusement: Back when I was fifteen and in high school I was in love with a guy we'll name Cooper. We didn't date. We didn't declare love for one another or anything that teenagers today tend to do. We hung out a lot, partied together, hitchhiked to places together. I was madly in love with him. The kind of love where every day I said things like "I'd take a bullet for him" to myself. And I meant it. One day we were talking on the phone and he asked me if I was interested in maybe dating him, see how it goes. It took a while for me to respond, because my fifteen year old self was saying "OH MY GOD YES LET'S GET MARRIED AND RIDE OUR SKATEBOARDS TO THE CHAPEL" but my other self was saying, "I really appreciate this friendship - if we date and things go south, we'll risk losing the friendship and I don't want that". Long story short, I said we should stay friends - he took it to mean that I wasn't interested in him blah blah blah - we only talked a few times after that but I was still madly in love with him while we went on with our lives. Fast forward seven years - I just returned back to Canada after a seven year stay in the desert in a long term relationship. While I was in love while in Arizona, I still always wondered what happened to Cooper. Was he still alive? Did he ever wonder about me? What would have happened if we did go out? Would we still be together? These questions went unanswered for the moment. Anyways, back in Canada, freshly single and looking to party, I got in touch with a lot of old friends which of course led me to be in contact with Cooper again. I couldn't believe it. He was still alive, sexy as hell with perfect square shoulders and beautiful tattoos and he really hadn't changed much. Seeing him that first time after so long made me fall in love with him again in a second. To make a long, boring story short, he was my dream guy in every sense of the word: physically, mentally, emotionally - everything. We dated. The first time we had sex - and I'm hesitant to write "made love" because that's just not my style, but that's what it felt like - it was perfect. It was pouring rain outside and when we had finished we wrapped a blanket around ourselves and stood outside in the rain on the steps holding each other. THIS IS TRUE LOVE, I wanted to scream to everyone who passed by. It had only been about three weeks of actual dating.

If you've seen Lord of War, you know that quote that Nicholas Cage's character says: "The problem with dating dream girls is that they have a tendency to become real." Guess what - the same can be said of dream guys. The truth comes out when you're so deep inside that you want to ignore, but it's hard. Reality quickly set in and six months later things came to a drastic end. No friendship. No last hug. No nothing. Looking back I see now that it was a dream better left untouched. The idea of being in a relationship with Cooper was better than the actual thing. At least after those first three blissful weeks, anyway.

So, all this to say that, yes - you can fall in love in a week. Some people will disagree and say it's puppy love, lust, infatuation or just a simple crush. But I think it's safe to say that most people after a certain age have experienced all five of these feelings and they know the difference. They know when it's an infatuation that will pass after a few days or when it's love, even if it's a love that won't last.

What do you think, Nerve readers? Do you agree you can fall in love in a week? Have you? Does finding out the truth about someone as you date them make you fall out of love? Discuss!

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

amboabe — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:26:00 GMT

When I was 25 I left LA, dropped all the career momentum I had built up in the film industry and joined the Peace Corps. I had imagined of going to some sandy African coastal village and living beneath palm fronds for two years while digging latrines or building wells. Something romantic that would leave me with a perfect tan and well-developed forearms. Instead, I was sent to Western China. I spent a summer training in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province (which you might recognize in its more familiar western distortion as Szechuan). A lot of great things happened that summer. I had sex in public for the first time. I ate deep fried rabbit heads. I learned how to speak some Chinese. I taught a few eager college freshmen bits and pieces of English. And I also fell in love with a lesbian. Note to reader: if you fall in love with a lesbian your life will be beset on all sides with wondrous pain, heartache, and candy-colored daydreams.

After the summer was over, my newly sworn-in class of fellow volunteers was split up and sent out to work in sites all across Western China. I was sent into the southern-most part of Sichuan to a town called Panzhihua, a mining town that had grown exponentially since the 60's thanks to Mao's paranoid initiative to move all of China's main industries inland away from the coastal metropolises that were vulnerable to foreign invasion. One of the biggest steel companies in China set up shop over a speck on the map and, in a few decades, the city housed almost a million people and had an immaculate Kentucky Fried Chicken downtown. Peace Corps is a lovely establishment, but full of contradictions.

But back to lesbians. After a few months of being separated, working in cities 700 km apart, exchanging long circuitous emails and spending hours on meandering phone calls, I was reunited with C during a national holiday when we agreed to meet for a scamper around the tourist towns at the foot of the Tibetan plateau. We started at a place called Emei Shan, some famous mountain with a Buddhist monastery and which was renowned for having unfriendly monkeys on its summit. Then we bumbled around a small cowboy town called Kanding, which has a famous song written about it which none of you have heard but I can still sing by heart. We ended up back in Chengdu for a couple of days before having to part ways again. We had been drunk lots, and fooled around here and there. By the end of our week together I knew that there would never be anything between us romantically.

We were traveling with another volunteer for a good bit of the week, another woman, and one that irritated me immensely. She used NPR and the Utne Reader like a checklist for her personality. She was also exotic and attractive, and C was more interested in her by the end of our week together than she was in me. I spent our last night in Chengdu alone, while the two of them courted each other in a string of red light bars, walking by myself through the city. Chengdu is a giant cement maze, filled with more than fourteen million people (in 2002), and I walked through its rank corridors lined with incomprehensible symbology on either side, lit up in garish neon signs, wondering how I had gotten into the mess of being hopelessly in love with someone who wouldn't love me back.

That night, somewhere around 4AM, all three of us managed to come back to our shared hotel room at the same time. C and our travel companion drunk and giddy from trading teenage kisses in the night air of a foreign country, me brooding and exhausted, angry at both of them, wanting to be gone again.

The next day, I left on a night train back to Panzhihua. It would take fourteen hours, and would get me back by 7 the next morning, two hours before my first class of the week. I was out of money and bought a ticket in the hard seat section, the cheapest fare available. You don't buy actual seats when you travel hard seat in China, you buy entry into a car that is continually filled with more people at each and every stop. There is no maximum capacity. People sit on the floors, stand in the aisles, mash into the connector compartments between cars, and sometime after midnight the cars transform into human cattle transports.

As we pulled out of the station I felt hopeless and abandoned. There was no consolation in the rank night ahead, nor in the prospect of having to lead my students through the overwhelming labyrinth of verb conjugation the next morning. I didn't have any music to listen to, nor any books to read. I had nothing but a bag full of clothes, a lingering hangover, and a torn train ticket in my pocket. I pulled out a ratty notebook I still had tucked away in one of the compartments of my backpack and started writing a poem about my mother, wondering what it would be like to watch her age and die in slow motion before my eyes. I wondered how to say you love someone when you don't have any words left to use, when all you have left is the leaving. I wrote for an hour, and cried during most of it; surrounded by Chinese travelers, who stared but didn't speak because we didn't have any words in common just then. I kept writing while they stared.

Note to reader: if at all possible fall in love with a lesbian at least once in your life.

Previous Posts:

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Celebrity Confession: In Which Kevin Spacey Bangs Ass

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Intimacy; or A Trip To The Dentist

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

The McCain Date

Date Machine: You're Not My Type

spjv840 — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:29:00 GMT

Stepping away from the ass talk for a moment, I was reading an article recently which was talking about the type of guys we fall for and how to go about changing our routine of always falling for the same type of guy if it isn't working out for you.

When it comes to men, I know my type and I'm OK with it. They're usually emotionally detached, with a drug/alcohol problem, have spent time in jail and/or have a record, bar room brawls are the norm and generally, just don't give a shit. Basically, you wouldn't want them on your bad side. Physically, they're tall, slim, dark haired and have tattoos and really nice cocks. The kind you write home about. What can I say, I know how to pick them. They also usually leave me wondering if I should get a shrink or not.

For the most part, these guys are a lot of work, mainly because of the emotional damage that they can do on a gal's heart due to their hard ass aloofness and lack of any kind of sensitivity. Then again, I couldn't deal with an emotional, sensitive guy. This may piss some folks off, but I can't stand seeing a man cry (unless he's listening to Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson). But a man who cries over romantic-comedies or during fights or anything like that – oh hell no. That's what the cool kids call a deal breaker (see below for more deal breakers).

Perhaps my type isn't the ideal type out there for most women. There are usually consequences that come along with this type of man, dangerous situations, jail-time (in my case, spending Christmas night behind bars), etc. A lot of women would either run at the first sign of this kind of man, or try to change them. That whole thing about changing men being impossible is pretty much true. It won't happen, not permanently, anyway. I never really understood women who try to change men. What if it was the other way around and the man was trying to change the woman? Do you really think the woman would even change slightly? Again, I have to reference “Sex and the City” and that whole episode where Samantha tries to change that bald, short guy with bad breath they nick-named the Turtle. She cleaned him up and gave him some new, fancy clothes and dined at trendy restaurants. But in the end, he was the still the same Turtle, just slightly better dressed.

And because I've recently been asked a few times what my “dealbreakers” are, here you go:

Small dicks, mama's boys (the bad kind – you know, can't make a decision without asking mama first), the family man, anti-alcohol (supposedly, there are some out there), short men (anything below 5'6), metrosexuals (please don't wax/pluck your eyebrows, get facials, go for manicures/pedicures, go to tanning salons, worry about calories/working out, or other general girly man behavior), vegetarians (they taste funny..too green), men who wear pink or other “pastels”, the John Lennon type, overly sensitive, listens to Rhianna. That's just a few off the top of my head.

But what if you keep falling for the same type of guy and it's really not working for you? Is there anything you can do to change your predictable man routine? According to dating coach and founder of Cablight, Nancy Slotnick, there are five steps you can take to change your ways.

1.Go after qualities.
2.Don’t think you have to change yourself.
3.Get out of your head.
4.Have dealbreakers.
5.Last but not least, chemistry comes first.

Related posts:
Personals Drama: I'm Not Cupid
Sex Machine: The Butt Sex Bandit
Sex Machine: Hot Sex vs Bad Sex
Celebrity Confession: David Duchovny is a Sex Addict
Celebrity Confession: Jessica Simpson thinks she has the perfect guy
Of Bag, Baggage and Confessions

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

amboabe — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:43:00 GMT

I can't remember exactly how old I was the first time I put a finger into my own ass, but I remember liking it. I was probably 15 or 16. I was so guilt ridden about it after the fact that I walked around the house for hours torturing myself with the idea that I was probably gay as a result. What other implication could there be for a man to inserting something into his ass? As airheadedgenius pointed out, it's difficult to escape the power play implications with anything involving a man's behind. For a man, putting something into someone else's ass is macho; putting something into your own hindquarters is a lilting defeat. The alpha versus the limp-wristed beta.

It's the same idea that underscores our thinking about dick size and the entirety of sexual expression in a culture where sex is a commoditized lever to manipulate people's insecurities. Sex is a blunt instrument that you exercise, correctly or incorrectly, on your supine partner whose receipt of your unbridled sex thrust is an acknowledgement of his or her powerlessness before the mighty cock. The way zeitgeisty talks about anal is like the Patrick Bateman school of sex.

Stripped of all its macho connotations, though, the ass is just another collection of nerve endings that can be used to pleasure yourself or your partner. The presence of the prostate lying dormant a few inches inside is a double win for men ready to loosen up their instinctive recoil again letting themselves become the receiver for one mortifying moment. Ass play can be an incredibly gratifying sexual experience though, for either sex. It's a kind of sexual dissociative.

The sensory experience of sex for a man is so typically wound up in the act of penetrating, and the specific group of sensations that come along with it. Feeling yourself penetrated at the same time that you are enjoying the metaphysical whoosh of penetrating someone else is surreal. It's an out of body experience, like an alien abduction or astral projection. It's like being in two separate places at once, wholly conscious of everything around you.

One of the enduring mysteries of heterosexual sex is the fundamental divide that separates the penis and vagina. No matter how much rhetorical information we might pick up in afterglow confessions or coffee shop dishing, men will never really understand what it feels like to have a vagina nor will women ever understand the sensation of having a penis. I used to lament this fact when I was younger. Talking to some of my girlfriends about their orgasms I felt wholly jealous that a hummer and gradual build up to ejaculation were my only sexual prizes. It's nice but when there's talk of 20 minutes of roiling orgasm where the whole world turns a different color, it's hard not think of getting one's nut off as a milky consolation prize.

Is ass play the key to breaking into this orgasmic ether? Is "banging" an ass, or anything for that matter, really the key to convincing someone that they love something? Is it just another way of reestablishing the traditional power positions in a newer, hipper vernacular? There's something undeniably whole and complete about uniting the act of penetrating and being penetrated in one person. It also seems to be a particular pleasure that's unique to the male libido. What's the female analog for penetrating?

Ass play can certainly be a complicated affair; it often requires a good deal more attention to timing and logistics than most other sex acts. But in the end it's just another fundament in the language of sex. Avoiding it is sort of like dating someone who insists that you never bring up politics or religion with them. It's not like politics or religion are so inherently important to a relationship, but the focus on them as immutable taboos are surely an indicator of some lapse in communication or basic dysfunction. Likewise, banging someone's ass can be like filibustering a conversation. An empty bit of formalism that gives the appearance of function but whose primary purpose is to prevent progress and avoid confrontation with the other side.

Crying In Public: My Cubicle

amboabe — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:09:00 GMT

I don't cry all that easily. I remember being on a date with a girl in high school (we went to see My Life with Michael Keaton and Nichole Kidman) and trying really hard to make myself cry towards the end. I thought somehow it would complete the image of a sensitive guy that I was trying so hard to project. It didn’t work. I cried for an hour straight when that same girl left town a year later, but we've all been hit with that brick in one form or another. And that happened in the privacy of my own bedroom.

Over the years I've found myself crying in public more than in private. One such place was my cubicle at work a few months ago. I had to stay late playing Grand Theft Auto 4. I needed to finish the game in a short amount of time and explain to the masses why it wasn’t worth the time. I started playing the game the same day that the last woman I was seeing had officially moved out of the city for parts in the great American beyond. It was 8PM and I was alone, hungry, and just beginning to fully absorb what it would really mean for her to be gone, while trying to pay attention to some cutscene about Russians and Irishmen feuding over heroin or diamonds. Things were not going well.

Then I got to a segment where I drove around in a car whose radio stations I could change. One of the stations was playing "Flashing Lights."GTA is set in gritty, hyper-real version of New York. Driving through the polygon neighborhoods, draped in green-gray textures, broken by hopeless brownstones and grimy subway overpasses, listening to that song I realized that she had gone somewhere I couldn't follow. So I started crying.

The first time I ever heard "Flashing Lights" was with her and I remember not liking it very much. After a few more listens I recall going on an over-long diatribe about how lacking the rhymes were, pontificating for minutes on end about how West could have thought to connect Mona Lisa and Cesar. How clever! Then I started to hear the song everywhere, the way popular songs are prone to populating the background in the right seasons. I didn't like it until, one day, I decided I liked the song a lot, if only because it reminded me of her and the pleasure of orating in front of her patiently dead pan face.

It wasn't long before I had the whole album in heavy rotation on my iPod and I was googling lyrics from it and wondering if there were ways I could work Kanye West quotes into my articles for work. It was a standard musical dalliance and she left right in the middle of it. Songs can become little objects, bits of broken glass, that have some elliptical image or angle of the past in them. It's not the music, it's the way the music catches a glimpse of some place you used to be, some person you used to know. When I heard the opening violin trills of "Flashing Lights" come out of my TV speakers I realized how horribly sad I was about the whole thing. Horribly, awfully, irrevocably. And I started crying at work.

The pompetus of love...

zeitgeisty — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:21:00 GMT

After reading Amboabe's 'McCain' post, it got me to thinking about politics, specifically those of an inter-personal nature. I believe Steve Miller referred to it in his colossal song ‘The Joker’ as ‘the pompetus of love’. Funnily enough, as a child, I always thought he was singing, ‘the POLITICS of love’, which actually makes more sense when you think about it.

In my experience, women generally are attracted to two major things in a partner; physical beauty and/or power.

I’d venture to say this is not an original thought, in fact it’s more about an innate biological imperative than anything else. Starting back in caveman times, the guy with the bigger club nailed the hottest babe to produce the hardiest progeny. Nowadays, not much has really changed. As a man, if you’re not lucky enough to be born looking like Brad Pitt, you’d better have something going on in the ‘power’ department, or else you’re gonna have a tough row to hoe.

Now, the question is, what constitutes ‘power’?

Does it mean great wealth, an impressive job, high social status or a fancy car? In some cases yes, but most of the time it’s an illusion. Most of the time, all you need to do is trick your prospective partner into thinking that YOU hold all the cards. Now, as Amboabe touched on, pretending to be disinterested in someone many times has the opposite effect. However, I’d go one step further. In my personal experience what really works, is to be TRULY disinterested. You need to actually condition yourself not to care. Is she wanting you, are you wanting her? These thoughts need to be eradicated from your brain. Now you may ask, ‘what the hell is the point of that, if you’re truly disinterested in the person, then why waste your time at all, it makes no sense!?’ The simple reason why?

Sex.

Every day in the trenches, men and women are battling with each other in order to get what they need from each other. For women, it might be a stable relationship, for a man it’s probably to get laid. Unfortunately, we’re usually at odds with each other on an emotional level, so we set traps.

Women have their own tricks up their sleeves, don’t fool yourselves, they play on insecurities, use guilt, and sometimes come up with some wildly irrational act out of nowhere just to ‘get your attention’.

‘*sniff* I only slept with your boss to get you to NOTICE ME!!!’

When you think about all the things we do to one another, sometimes a life of monasticism seems as refreshing as a nice cold seven-up.

It’s all just the ‘pompetus of love’.

Unfortunately there's one major drawback to all this game playing and machination - it never works out in the end. If you go on long enough not caring, you may get a lot of sex, but you’ll wind up a bitter hollow shell and if you sleep with the boss of your boyfriend, chances are you’re going to get dumped. The thing is, everyone out there is searching for something that doesn't exist, it's just this bill of goods that's been force-fed to us from childhood about what constitutes the 'ideal' when it comes to sex and love. Movie bullshit, tv commercials, sitcoms where the fat guy that works in some dead blue collar job is married to some improbably hot wife, poetry, love songs, fairytales…

Fairy tales all.

It’s funny, as the truth in things rarely disappoints. In fact it’s far more surprising and empowering than any cliché you can hang your hat on. Politics in any form are just plain unrewarding.