It only took me forever, but I’ve finally joined Facebook. I was avoiding it. MySpace sucks, imho, but I finally thought I’d give Facebook a go after I read a couple interesting news stories on it. Me likey.

But it’s kind of troubling. So troubling I’m having trouble popping a good metaphor. Ooh, troubling. You don’t know the half of it.

It’s the gelcap equivalent of a time capsule or something. See? Bad metaphors. Nonetheless, you get the gist. Or you likely don’t.

It’s like high school, man. You know what high school was for me? I’ll tell ya: It was a Jesus & The Mary Chain song. Ever heard “I’m in With the Out Crowd”? Okay, well, absolutely none of the lyrics apply to me ‘cept the title. [One of those, “Dude, you faked me out with the title!” tracks you totally thought was about something else, so what the fuck, songs.]

It’s as if you spend your life trying to change who you are, only to find out that who you were wasn’t such a bad person in the first place… but what the hell was that in the water anyhow?

So I’ve joined Facebook.

Many years have passed since The Time Back Then, back when I was one of those kids that everyone knew for one reason or the other. I had a lot of friends. I sometimes wonder how I managed it, too, given the mountain of insecurities and fears I lived under. Somehow I projected something better than that, but I just never recognized my own appeal. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, ‘cos I know how much I lack appeal to some folks. But if you like people who are completely blunt yet possessing of social graces, who are honest to a fault, well, that’s the breed I am. This persona comes with reality Steff, too, and it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. But those whose tea I ain’t, they tend to come around after a while. 😉 Or they stay the path. Whatever gets yer rocks off.

And I guess I was the live-out-loud type that some kids tend to gravitate towards.

Then I dropped out of life when things got tough for a while. I spent the majority of my 20s in a pretty deep depression. Being anti-social was a whole lot easier than trying to fake a mask for public consumption, y’know?

One day the fog cleared and I really started to notice the difference in my social horizons from way back when and now. It’s like I forgot how to be natural for a crowd in all that absence. My new job puts me front and center, and I’m getting my gift of the gab back again after many a hiatus from schmoozing. I used to be the kid who always knew someone at the party, and now I need introducing (then I’m off and running, right, but geez… ). Ain’t like it was.

Until suddenly it is again, thanks to getting a public-oriented job where I have to be the strong, confident chick I always was, and also to the magic of these virtual connections like Facebook. You plug yourself in and suddenly the board lights up. I found out a little late, but it turns out that much of my old crowd from “the golden days” — aka the time before the fall — got together yesterday for the first time in more than a decade. Curiouser and curiouser, to be sure.

Now I’m listening to one of the soundtrack-type albums from that era of my life, that time when music was Never Gonna Get Better Than This (’92-94) and life was the road in front of me, The Black Crowes’ Shake Your Moneymaker. I remember hearing this album for the first time when an ex-lover was driving me and a friend of his home sometime well after midnight and I was pretending to be asleep in the backseat as I listened to them talking, and heard the quiet but good things he’d said about me. I fell in love with the album as the car rumbled on old side roads. It was a good night.

I’m trying to remember why I walked away from everyone and everything, but the opportunity to change things came up and I suddenly found myself living in the Yukon and chasing that dream instead. Came back a year later and everything changed. I felt like the cog left out of a fast-travelling wheel, but the truth now probably is it’s when my depression truly began.

This past winter, the depression’s finally lifted, and it’s funny to see just how far from my past I feel I am and now I see that I’ve never really gone that far away after all.

How weird it all is.

‘Cause, you know what? I’d like another chance to be that girl, the one who existed before all the “real life” came and bit her in the ass. The one with a little innocence and a little mischief and a little zest for anything that’d come her way. I’ve been working towards being that again and I’m just a little baffled to be happening on such timing as I am with the whole Facebook thing. That part I’m having trouble putting words to, so just know that I’m feeling a little discombobulated about it all, and kind of in a good way, too, ‘cos I know the progress I’d been making on coming back to myself long before this came about.

It’s cool, it’s all good. And now I have a house to clean and a lazy afternoon (a Sopranos marathon; you know my thing for mafioso) to atone for. Happy Memorial Day, yanks, and a good morrow to everyone else.

PS: I bought my first-ever pair of plaid panties today. Cute! I’m Scottish, too, y’know, so what better to cover the tush in?

I updated my oneline dating profile. As almost a wilfull act of defiance a couple months back, I stripped it to one of those basic “I Like Stuff, Do You Like Stuff?” just-the-facts type profiles. But writing profiles is something I do very well, so to pull the plug and take a bore myself down approach is bizarre, to say the least.

But this morning I revisited it. It’s all new, all good. My sense of humour shows, as does my big fat brain. I’m pretty amused with it. We’ll see what happens.

Updating the profile is kind of like the new tattoo, don’t you think? Either you’re drunk, stupid, and ready to go, so you update it as some kinda “lookit me, ma” tough-guy thing, or you’re lonely, bored, and need to do something to pretend you have a life, so you update it, or you’re really quite happy with the way things are going but it occurs to you that the only thing more kick-ass than the sweet way things are going right now would be to have that warm body lying all cat-like stretched out beside you in bed as an errant morning sunbeam peeks in from the blinds, showing the soft underbelly of trust and romance, just before a big-ass breakfast with an endless pot of coffee. Yeah, THAT would hit the spot.

(I’m the kind of person who’s keeping an eye out on the horizon for That Perfect Time In My Life to commemorate it with a tattoo. I have no tattoo. I want one and think this birthday might be a great time to begin it — commemorate this part of my life. I have a particular goal I need to achieve before I will allow myself to besmirch myself with a pictorial tribute to That Perfect Time In My Life. I was thinking the perfect tattoo would be one of Edvard Munsch’s Scream on my inner thigh but I doubt anyone else would get the joke, so we’ll see.)

Nonetheless, for now I’ll settle for updating my profile. It’s a sign of optimism. A sign that it’s time to take a chance and let someone in again. It’s like we have to heal to a certain point sometimes before we’re willing to take a risk of getting hurt again. I thought I was ready for a relationship last fall, but then life threw some doozies my way. Dad almost had a date with death, I lost my job, and other fun all came down the pipes.

I found myself looking to love in the hopes that a relationship could play the role of Spackle and fix me in all my cracked, broken glory. That struck me as a bad thing because I knew that if it all went south, I’d have to replace the whole damn compass again. I just wasn’t ready to be resilient in love because I had to be resilient in so many other places in my life.

We have to make choices sometimes about where we’re willing to be vulnerable, just like we have to know when vulnerability is a luxury we can’t afford when getting by’s a fight every day. For me, life in the past year has been a lot about The Daily Fight. Sharing that? I don’t think so.

The trouble I have, and so many others have had, is that it’s so hard to continue believing that being alone and liking solace isn’t some kind of character flaw. It can be, however, an excuse. It can be a way you excuse yourself from the challenge of living a social life. It’s easy to convince oneself that silence is a great companion. After all, who’s around to argue? Being with people can be hard, sometimes, and balance must be found.

I’m a Libra. Balance is my quest in life. The trouble is, every time I find it, I have to rock the boat. It’s like discovering that a) it’s great floating in a dinghy on a little lake in bliss-like sunshine, but b) it sure gets fun when a gust of wind blows up and everything’s up for grabs again.

There was a time when I was loaded with friends. I got into a bad relationship in which I became isolated from others (the early route towards an abusive relationship) and started drifting away from people. Then I moved a few thousand kilometres away, to the Yukon and Canada’s far north, for a little over a year. Came back for the same bad relationship. Got out of it, and then my mother died on me. Taking myself out of the social equation was a safety mechanism back then. From time to time, I get back out in the social world, but once you adopt an anti-social lifestyle, it’s hard to break the habit. Plus, there’s the writing thing. Writing doesn’t happen in crowds, man.

I found myself thinking of that other self of mine, though, the other day. I remembered back when I was The Organizer and The Buck Stopped Here, in my late teens and early 20s. I always had crowds of 15 or 20 people coming out to a flick, going to a club, having a bonfire on a beach. I was the one who said when to jump and just how high, and I loved it. Somewhere along the line, I started believing that selfishness was self-preservation, and I closed the door. One hurt too many. A Krazy-Glued heart tends to beat a little weaker.

I’m remembering the kind of personality I used to life with — a larger-than-life, live-before-you-now, uber-electric presence. I used to be somewhat magnetic, but I never really believed that I was what people perceived me to be. Even today I have a note on my bulletin board: “I must see myself as I am seen.”

After all, isn’t that the big challenge we all face? Coming to terms with the disparity between how others see us and how we really see ourselves?

I’m sort of pulling back right this weekend because I feel like today, for some weird reason, is the last of my anti-social tendencies for a long time. Things are starting to bubble up a bit, and I have faith that the girl I used to be is beginning to mix with the woman I have deserved to become, and I think the mix is going to be pretty kinetic.

Part of it is pretty simple: That’s what I want to have happen, and what I intend to make happen. We’re masters of our fate, aren’t we?

After all, the secret to online dating is the same as that of life… and of under-arm anti-perspirant, too: never let them see you sweat. Let’em only see what you choose to have them see. Any person who walks into your life knows only what you want them to. Show them your best qualities, be the best person you know, and treat them the way you’d like the be treated. How hard is that? Project confidence and charisma. Sell yourself. Be positive.

We forget how easy it is to be a likeable person. We forget how simple the mantra “be yourself” really is. It’s not “be your worries” and it’s not “be your complaints”. It’s be who you are when you’re comfortable, when you’re happy, when there’s nothing clouding your day. It’s listening as much as it is communicating. It’s remembering that “live” is a verb, and so’s “love”.

I talk a good game, and I know it, but right now the thought of going boldly out into the world to try and make the same amount of friends I once had is about as freaky a thought as any. But let’s give it the old college try anyhow. Whew.

Happy long weekend. I should get 12 hours sleep more often!

Okay, I’m not a TOTAL pussy, all right? So I’m a fairweather cyclist. So what? I like sunshine and bliss. Sue me.

I will have you know that had I not already ridden my bicycle to work this morning, there’s no fucking WAY I would’ve gone for a leisurely ride in this evening’s fare — and certainly not for 14 kilometres headlong into it!

MOTHERFUCKING WIND. That shit’s bad enough without throwing long certainly-not-designed-with-crosswinds-in-mind BRIDGES into the motherfucking equation, man! Out of all the bridges in this city, that one sucks the mostest in the wind, on scooter or bike.

What normally takes me about 40 minutes to ride home took me nearly 60 today, and I fought for every damned inch. I get home and my guestimation proved right: 70-kilometre-an-hour winds steadily gusting sayeth the Weather Network’s gurus.

It kept moving me six inches over. I was tacking like a sailboat. Zig-zagging like the amateur cycling pussy I am.

It’s that rare kind of day where cyclists stop to talk and comiserate about what a cunt Mother Nature’s being. Today a guy stopped to tell me he’d been coming over Granville Bridge when a crosswind whipped his glasses off (scratching his face, too) and blew them into oncoming traffic, which then crunched ’em. I took the hint and put my fancy cats-eye spectacles away under zipper. “Sail on!” I commented, and took off.

But, whew! Our trusty blogger lives to tell the tale of jumpingjesusonapogostick wasthatahairyride! Thank god for karma and perseverence. That bridge was one fucking nasty experience. I’m not used to that shit!

Reminds me of the baptism-by-fire first big windstorm I had to ride home from work in on my scooter, Back In The Day. I brazenly came over the bridge because I didn’t know any better. Later I’d find a long, landlocked passage, but back then I just took the regular bridge… which just happened to be the tallest of the bridges across a windy inlet. Holy crosswinds, Batman. Naturally the only way to control a crosswind’s damage is to slow down. To 30 klicks. Cars = Pissed Right Off. Whatever.

Then I brilliantly took the cyclist route up the hill to home, about eight klicks yonder… under heavy tree canopy.

My thinking: Canopy = Shield from wind!

My reality: Canopy = Endless source of big painful branch-like things and other flying projeciles aiming to take me the fuck OUT.

So let this be a lesson to all ‘o you boyz’n’girlz out there: Do dumb shit, then LEARN from it. That minimizes the death-from-dumb-shit probability stat, y’know. Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve stopped mid-thing and thought “What the fuck was I thinking?” But then I realize the important thing: Aha! Another tale to tell!

Today was a bitch. Next time I rethink the bridge. Buses might cost $3.25 but furthering my bid for immortality? Priceless.

Yeah, okay. If you want to hear the whole sordid tale, I told it on my other blog. Click here.

No, really, read it! It’s pretty good.

And I shit you not, even my little finger hurts. Owie.

I’ll write later this week. I mean, geez, my finger hurts! Never mind my boobs! Holy shit, who knew breasts could hurt this bad? If I was to jog right now, I’d die in agony, screaming “My jugs are murdering me!” Thank GOD I don’t jog! One bounce and I’d have to bitch-slap some sense into me. I’m loathing tomorrow and the sheer horror of pain I know I’ll be in after the 24-hour waiting period for AGONY has expired. The second day is always the worst, eh?*

And tomorrow my team needs to fight for its life as they’re down 3 games to 1 in the best-of-seven against Those Disney Bitches.

(Yes, I know the Ducks were sold by Disney years ago. But, still, once a bitch always a bitch, no? Don’t rain on my humour parade, man. Go Canucks, Go! I MUST BUY BEER! That’s what’s been wrong. I’ve jinxed the entire city by failing to drink during the last two games. What in the hell was I thinking? So, beer, then, or wine? Oh, the dilemma… Curse you, cosmos! And I must respect the 1994 Stanley Cup Playoff Towel and put it in a place of honour. No fucking with the juju!)

*But I secretly love knowing I pushed my body this hard and have lived to tell about it. My pinkie’s future is questionable, but I know I’ll survive. Gloria Gaynor tells me so.

It’s a lowkey Saturday night in, and I’m thinking about getting an early night. I flipped my mattress and changed my sheets earlier (to the jersey-knit t-shirt sheets, mm), so it should be a wonderful sleep once I crawl under my covers. It’s barely 9 and I’m already looking forwards to bed.

I’m torn between sleeping late and getting up before sunrise to do some photography. A late sleep would really hit the spot, but so would some photography. I suppose I’ll figure it out around 5am.

Tonight I’m watching a really good indie flick from 2000, GirlFight. It’s about an angry, disenfranchised teen girl who happens upon boxing and her love affair with the sport.

I’m watching it to psych myself up a little bit. I’m starting boxing myself this Tuesday. It’s part of my new fitness kick. I’ve been cycling and last week I added swimming to my repetoire, and this week I take it up a few notches to build in the boxing to my regimen. I’ll be training at a gym owned by a former pro-UFC fighter, who will be my trainer, and I’m getting warned that I’ll be in a whole world of pain when morning strikes on Wednesday. Oddly, I’m not feeling deterred.

Boxing’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a few years now. I once worked with a woman who took it up at my age (33) and found herself going to the national amateur championships one day down the road. I don’t know if I want to go full-on to the world of boxing, or if circuit training and sparring’s all I care to do, but I’m keeping an open mind, and I do love a challenge.

I always sort of figured I was too fat, too slow, whatever, to properly box, and now I figure I’m just angry enough, getting quick enough, and have just enough to prove to make it worth my while.

This fitness thing isn’t about becoming a size 6. It’s not about looking the right way in a micro-skirt. It’s not about being fuckworthy. It’s about owning my body and feeling like the strong, proud woman I think I am. It’s about having my disposition match inside and out.

Inside, I’d actually rather never be thin. I wanna have my ghetto booty. I want those thick, broad shoulders of a swimmer, and the whole-body insulation that’ll keep me warm as I ride my scooter through 365 days worth of elements. But I’m tired of looking doughy and soft, ‘cos I’m one strong, tough chick, and I guess I’m simply trying to prove that to myself these days. Fuck anyone else’s perception, but it’d be nice if they shared mine, y’know?

The new kick I’m on is hard on me right now. I’m tired a lot in the evenings (but have more energy during the days) and thankfully I sleep very, very well as a result. This week I’ll be expending even more energy, and I bet it’ll be a hell of a trial for me, but I’m going to be very proud of myself. I already am.

I don’t know how just yet, but something tells me this boxing thing’s going to be great for my sexuality. I’m dying to find out how that plays, but methinks something about the raw physicality of it all is really going to compute for me. I’m that kind of girl, so it’ll be nice to finally be playing that role somewhere other than just the bedroom. Things are about to get fun, man. I promised myself before 2007 kicked in that this would be a year to remember. So far, I’m doing everything right. Gotta love prescience, baby.

My team was smoked the other night. Smoked hardcore, like Bob Marley on a fattie, man. The game’s going well thus far tonight, but I’m still all jittery, like a whipped fan in a seven-game series is liable to be.

So, I’m taking a minute to write.

I had a letter from a youngin’ nearly a month ago, and because I suck, I’ve not responded until now. Bad, bad blogger. Somebody oughta spank me, but I should only be so lucky. Sigh.

But let’s answer her now, shall we? The letter, short and sweet:

My boyfriend and I have been having sex for the past 6 months. We were both each others’ first. We’ve done tons of positions in tons of places, sometimes we have a lot of foreplay and sometimes we go straight to the sex. Sometimes it’s soft and gentle, sometimes it’s rough and fiesty. And it always feels great! The only problem, however, is that I have never had an orgasm. If he’s on top and I really like it and he continues, after a while it just stops as it’s getting pleasurable. And if I’m on top and I really like what I’m doing, I go for it too hard and suddenly I can’t handle it and I have to stop. We haven’t started using any toys because my boyfriend wants to give me my first orgasm purely by himself, with no “outside help”. Any advice?

There’s such a double-standard sexually. It’s bad form to pressure a guy who’s impotent and unable to deliver, but somehow it’s fine to pressure women to orgasm. “Well, if I can’t make you come, then I must be damaged goods! YOU WILL COME, dammit!”

And I know he’s probably never made such comments, but when you’re the female at the receiving end sexually, and you’re unable to orgasm in the 17.6 minutes that he’s able to perform in, somehow it means a) he’s a loser, and b) you’re frigid.

It doesn’t help matters. Not at all.

So, the question is, do you masturbate, girlie? If not, then you should. If you can’t make yourself orgasm, no one else will be able to do so — guaranteed. You absolutely must play with yourself if your sex life is ever going to be any good. No, you won’t ‘waste’ your orgasms on yourself. You’ll make yourself better able to relax and orgasm under others.

And when you “can’t handle it”, maybe you should make a mental note: that means you’re about to orgasm and you need to ride it out — literally. Back when I was 13 or so and enjoying my first masturbatory experiences — dry-humping pillows underneath my posters of George Michael — I kept thinking I needed to pee uncontrollably and was scared of making a mess. I kept running down the hall to go to the washroom. I swear, I flushed the toilet 10 times in the morning, confused why I was all wet and unable to pee.

An orgasm feels like a bolt of electricity coursing through your body. It’s electrifying. All your nerves come alive at once and then, whammo, it releases simultaneously. It’s different for everyone. But when you “can’t handle it”, don’t kid yourself — you CAN.

But him insisting on being the vehicle that delivers your orgasm is unfair. He doesn’t realize it, but he’s being domineering and controlling. I understand why he would want to be the deliveryman, but the reality is, it hasn’t been working thus far, and it may not any time soon.

The reality is, some 40% of chicks won’t orgasm until their 20s, if not later. It’s not something that has a shelf-life. It’s not something that comes easily for most women. It takes patience on both your end and theirs.

If your man wants to be the deliveryman, and will hear nothing else but, then he needs to start doing Yoga and Kegel exercises (particularly the latter) so that he can last longer and hold out long enough for you to lose your inhibitions every time and help you get to the promised land. You need to tell him to continue even when your body’s screaming no, because that’s the threshold for an orgasm. It’s a strange and difficult point to pass as a female — you think your body can’t handle it, but all it is is the Early Warning System for “good times ahead! brace thyself!”

And, hey, orgasms rock. They really do. But sex is awesome by itself, with or without results. If you can’t orgasm by way of his entering you, then maybe you can at least learn to masturbate yourself to orgasm after he’s finished. Maybe it’ll hurt his ego, but when he gets over that, he’ll fuckin’ love watching you get yourself off, especially if you’re able to lock onto his eyes with a hungry gaze as you deliver yourself to ecstasy.

Good luck, kiddo. Remember, it’s like Mark Twain says. It’s not the destination that’s important, but rather, the journey. Enjoy the trip, savour the experience, and forget about the end result, and you might find yourself happening upon the Big O after all.

And read books about sex — books like The Guide to Getting it On, Sex Tips for Straight Ladies from a Gay Man, or The Sex Bible. Education is the key to power in all avenues of life, including sex.

But y’all have what to add to this? Any insights? Personal experiences? Support? Empathy? 1-800 numbers?

I’m a Godfather addict. I love all three volumes of that brilliant cinematic series.

I was a mafia-mad kid from a young, young age, and I loved the romance of storied criminals from the early 20th century. I was so obsessed I even dressed up as John Dillinger and later Al Capone for Halloween in my teen years. (I broke the years up by being Charlie Chaplin one year.)

I was “unique” then. Few of the kids at school knew who Dillinger or Chaplin were, so standing up to announce to the class who my costume represented turned into a five-minute affair each year with a Wiki-style truncated historical account of each character. I wasn’t just into the flash, I knew the substance of those baddies.

I obsessed then over the golden age of La Cosa Nostra in New York and Chicago. Still do! Hell, we even have the mob here in Vancouver. A friend told me a few years ago of entering “the wrong door” in a café on Commercial Drive’s Little Italy, and instead of going into a washroom, emerged into an illegal backroom gambling operation. Guns sat on the table next to chips and cards, and surly Italian men in suits glared angrily at her mistaken entrance. She flustered her way out of the room and never again walked through an unmarked door on the Drive. Oh, the writer in me would’ve been in her glory!

My mobbed-up love affair continues, and watching The Godfather I, II or III sends me reeling towards that girl of my youth, the one who didn’t grasp the immensity of murder and the magnitude of their corruption. There’s something oddly honourable in the love of tradition and hierarchy held by the old-school Mafioso that today’s Tony Soprano weeps for the loss of.

The Godfather series is highly romantic, bloody heads of horses under bedcovers aside and all. Don Michael Corleone is a tragic figure torn between his love of aesthete, art, and intellect, and his pained duty to his family and his heritage. He chooses wrongly, deciding to err on the side of familial/historical love and loyalty, and ironically loses all he values as the price for his choice.

I’m minutes from the conclusion of the under-appreciated Oscar-winning third installment of the series, in which Michael and Kay revi sit the demise of their relationship. I know the ending is overwrought and somewhat cheapened with a quickie fast-forward of 30 years, but in that moment of reckoning the past with the present, there’s a lot of earnest pain* over love lost and prices paid. Michael the Former is juxtaposed against Michael the Present, a man riddled with remorse for the life he chose and the cost thereof, but given the chance to do it all again, you know without question he’d make the same decisions… Yet his love for her continues through it all. Decades later he’s still felled by the same passions he felt long before, and the pain of permanence in love is told all too easily by that look in his eyes. A man undone by love and honour is who Michael Corleone is.

But it left me pondering just how long our loves can linger. Through all the turmoil of our lives, memories of loves can last the longest of any we might have. God knows how plentiful are the ones that haunt me still.

I’ve chosen poorly in love. I’ve often chosen the wrong man for the wrong reason. I’m smart, and seek men who are smarter than I, but in so doing I get caught in this web of men who are unable to detach from logic long enough to let the heart rule the mind, and in so doing, are far too easily equipped to hurt.

I can’t help it, though. It’s who I am. I’m readily felled by intellectual bad boys. Always have been, probably always will be. I’m too given to logic to be able to be acquiesced by artsy boys, as much as I love arts. I despise the wishy-washy fluttery ways of artists, and given the choice between them and the more stoic smart guys, I know I’ll always choose the latter, and I presume they’ll continue to be undone by my ability to straddle both worlds without much effort at all, ‘cause lord knows the hurts go both ways.

But love knows no reason, try as it might. All of us are forced to choose between the worlds we wished we were in and the worlds that hold us captive. Just ask Michael Corleone. In love, despite all urges to go to the otherwise, we far too often go to the mattresses.

*It certainly helped in the acting that Pacino and Keaton had a true life on-again off-again relationship that spanned decades and ended badly, if one’s to believe all they read.

Creativity is a fickle mistress, and right now my mistress is screwing someone else.

It’s not like this is some Seussian endeavour of creativity. It’s a blog. It’s not even a fiction-oriented blog. It’s non-fiction. Easy-peasy, really. It’s almost like a formula of sorts.

(My Day + Some Thoughts) ÷ Logic x Reason = Nifty Blog

But aside from the fact that mathematics sucks ass and I failed in my quest for the Ultimate Geekette Award, creativity and inspiration have just not been striking many of my chords of late.

I did, however, minor in Geekology back in school, so I’ll have you know that I’ve been attacking this lack of creativity with a logic as fierce as a cat on a fat mouse. I keep tripping over myself and blaming myself six ways to Sunday for all different reasons about why I feel like some impotent version of myself, but it’s really not that complicated.

There’s the new job thing, for starters. Complex learning curve, but the plus side of that coin is that I’m clearly a driven, hard-working person with extremely high efficiency and a great way with the people, so the Powers That Be have deemed it time to make my lowly part-time office assistant into a full-time one. (I’m the office manager. Yes, I have peons. It was alluded today that I even have a whip to crack. C-r-a-c-k!)

Add to that the rather questionable decision weeks ago to do what might be the worst thing I can do for my creativity but the best thing I can do for my health (quit smoking dope, which had been largely chronic for much of the last eight years), and, yeah, it’s proving to be a humdinger. I’m more foggy straight than I ever was stoned. Jesus, where’s my dealer’s number?

Then there’s the other thing. Money was a big stressor for the last several months. All of a sudden, just as of last Saturday, that’s beginning to ebb away. Jesus, where’s my dealer’s number?

So there’s hope. Really. There’s only one thing I do know. The creativity will surge again. I know it will. My ethic for writing and its importance to me ensures that.

This happens to us all — times fall upon us when we somehow find ourselves just a little less of who we are than we wish we were. It’s deceptive. The proverbial catch-22. When you know you’re not really being yourself, you often are closer to being who you are simply because you know you’re missing the mark.

Times like these are like falling down a big ol’ hill: just because you know how you got to where you are doesn’t mean you can make your way back. Sometimes you need a new way home, and most of the time you’re gonna see some good sights along the way. It’s not a bad thing, just different.

And it’s weird. I feel myself changing. I’m this malleable work in progress and some kind of shape is finally emerging, but I’m so close to it that it’s almost too hard to see. I need to get a little distance, but being so caught up in the frenzy, distance is something I won’t have until I have it. Like driving, the objects whizzing by us suddenly relocate and end up in our rearview mirrors. Perspective’s a funny thing that way.

Y’know, a part of me craves contributing to this blog and another part loathes it — mostly because the act of writing forces me to look inward, and being the logician I tend to be, I’m just constantly at a loss right now as to where my journey’s headed. I suspect, though, that buying a postcard’s in the plans because I think this is one trip I really, really want to remember.

What I’m trying to say is, bear with me. I’m caught in an intergalactic swirlie, and it’s hard to stop the flush. When I come out the other side, though, I know I’m going to marvel over just how far I’ve come. Trouble is, I don’t know how far I’m going, so “the other side” sounds like a fabled Tolkien landscape kids tell each other of in hushed voices as they gesture to a horizon the eye can’t even see.

Some days, though, I can close my eyes and almost touch it. I’m hoping I’ll soon open them and find it all around me. In the meantime, I’m just trying to enjoy the ride, bumpy though it may be.

(If you’re like me, pictureless posts look boring. So, I thought I’d post one of my own for the hell of it. This was taken at the beginning of the month, along the river, not too far from my home. A hundred years or so ago, there were a lot of shipyards and fisheries and such along the banks. Now most of those are gone in these parts, and the occasional bit like that still stands as a throwback to an age gone by. It somehow seemed fitting for this topic.)

A reader sent me some links on incest and asked for my take. There are two cases she indicated that are presently making waves, one in Ohio and the other in Germany.

In Germany, a brother & sister are married with four children (two were born with handicaps) and the law is cracking down on them. Now, they didn’t grow up together. He was an adopted child who finally decided to find his birth mother when he was 23, in year 2000. He then met his birth sister, who was then 15. The particulars of their relationship weren’t disclosed in the story I read, save to say they had the four kids after he began caring for her when their mother passed away and she became an orphan. The guy’s now been found guilty of incest and a 25-month jail term has been doled out to him.

Some are calling the laws against incest legal relics and say this is a new age needing a new perspective on the engaging of sexual relations between siblings.

Then there’s the Ohio case. In that one, a 44-year-old guy’s trying to win the right to continue the sexual relationship that has begun with his 22-year-old stepdaugher.

So, the reader wants my two cents on the whole realm of incestuous relationships.

Uh, they’re wrong?

Sure, it gets complicated when the involved parties pass the age of consent. Or does it? Does the law have the right to get involved? That’s the original sticky wicket, really. Consent is consent is consent, isn’t it? See, in the scenario where “the couple” are married, you might think, “Well, they’re over 18 and kids are involved, so…” But when did it begin?

Same with the step-father/daughter relationship. Who’s to say it didn’t begin with him sneaking into the bedroom when she was 11, whispering sweet-nothings and spending the next decade of his life trying to convince her she couldn’t live without him, as some pedophiles are so slick are doing?

Bear with me on a tangent here. In the Virginia Massacre last week, there was a lot of controversy regarding the discovery that the shooter had been off his rocker for a number of years, yet no authorities had been able to successfully commit him long-term because the right of the individual was being protected instead of the rights of the many. Meaning they followed the letter of the law instead of following the essence of the law — which is that laws exist to protect the many, not just the individual, and sometimes difficult choices must be made. If you bend the laws to commit one guy who really does seem off his rocker, you make it easier to wrongly commit someone else down the road. At what point does lowering the bar leave the masses at risk? It would seem you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

This is somewhat on the same wavelength. The trouble with giving in to a few incestuous relationships because the situations are seemingly working and consensual means that the many will be left more vulnerable in the wake of a more lenient approach to those certain individuals. This is probably why nutbags like last week’s shooter fall through the cracks, because bending the law for one case would leave the average person more vulnerable to a system that’s overexerting its reach in the claim that they’re pursuing the “greater good”. Kantism is a great theory but could lead to some very questionable legal tactics in our society.

I’m sure there must be the occasional incident where it would make sense to allow incest to occur. Maybe it’s sometimes a beautiful thing. But if bending the laws and ignoring the social morals that deem it so unforgiveable means more youths will be at risk of being sexually preyed upon by family members than are at present, then I think we need to stay the course.

I’ve known far too many women and men left fragmented by their family members who thought it their right to force them into sexual unions through simple manipulation or more overt means. They’ve then spent their lives licking their wounds and trying to figure out what they did wrong to bring that abuse upon themselves.

It’s hard enough to win those battles without having the law soften its approach just because a few people have reached an agreement to engage in incest. The scars of love run deep in all of us, and family’s hard enough without throwing more sex, mindgames, and legal conundrums into the mix.

What can I say? I’m an old-fashioned gal.

But how about YOUR two cents, eh?

This Don Imus debate is raging longer than I thought it would. It’s a catalyst for something bigger, or so I’m hoping. It’s interesting, because, being the whore that I am for Oprah’s more insightful shows (not the lame celebrity crap), she’s been tackling the drama from the perspective of just how denigrating (African-American) culture is towards African-American women. The spin is more or less that if they can’t respect themselves within their culture, then how can they ever expect others to respect them?

It’s really the age-old cultural chicken-or-the-egg scenario: What comes first, self-respect or respect from others? Can you respect yourself if no one else respects you? Or can you cause others to respect you by setting the benchmark for them in having respect for yourself, no matter what others say or do?

The thing is, this isn’t an African-American phenomena. Today’s young women in all cultures are regressing to a dumber-than sex-comes-first mentality of “if you’ve got it, flaunt it, ‘cos that’s all you got”. I’ve tackled this topic before in one of my personal favourite (and one of my most-commented & quoted) columns, and it’s an issue close to my heart. I hate knowing that a growing number of young women (but not all, thank god) seem to be of the belief that the only way to get ahead is through tight skirts, tight asses, and bursting bra cups filled with bouncy boobs.

Unfortunately, because they believe that, the reality is shifting, and it is starting to become more necessary for women to have that element of sexuality in order to get anywhere – or, if they’re to really get taken seriously, they have to do the complete opposite and abdicate their sexuality, which is also very unsettling. The trouble with each of these approaches is, if you build it, they will come, y’know? By giving in to the mentality of sexy substituting for smart, or sexy being eliminated in favour of smarts, they’re empowering this perception that women cannot be both. A lie if ever there was one.

There’s nothing wrong with letting your physicality speak volumes, but intellect should not be a mere footnote; it should be the spine, the binding, and the cataloguing in the library of your life. Intellect is everything. Knowledge is power. Articulation and debate can solve all the world’s problems, and women have the insight, the power, and the emotional capacity to contribute in far greater ways than we have ever allowed them to before now.

It’s no surprise that the most powerful women on the world stage – those like Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher before her, and others – have had to almost entirely veto their sexuality in order to have any credibility. It’s because those women who use their sexuality for their success have failed to do so in a way that embraces their mental prowess.

Things aren’t improving. It’s not just a “Black” problem. It’s a “Woman” problem. I am a feminist. I don’t give a fuck that “feminist” has a negative perception to it. Wake up, world. That was then, this is now. Germaine Greer’s dead, people, and there are new voices rising in the dark that speak loudly in real terms applicable to today’s women without disempowering today’s man. There are women like Pink, India Aire, Salma Hayek, Oprah, and others who have found a way to celebrate their beauty while showcasing their minds.

I do not like this old-fashioned trend of women abdicating their sexuality in order to be taken seriously on the world stage, a la Hillary Clinton in her dark business suits and stern facade. I do not like the obsolete notion that a woman must be masculine in order to be strong. I do not believe women must belittle men in order to be card-carrying feminists.

There is a new feminism that embraces the greatness each sex has to offer. Women can offer softness and beauty and sensuality while contributing strength and wisdom and articulation to the world debate.

In this age where violence seems to speak louder than ever, sexuality is being reduced to crassness, and media swims only in the shallow end of the pool, the female soul has so much to offer, so much insight to give, yet it’s being drowned out by more of the cliché stereotyping we’ve seen so much of in all the ages before us.

Men have run the show for long enough, and look at what we have to show for it – shootings in schools, divorce at an all-time high, teenage pregnancy an epidemic, poverty growing by the day. Can women fix everything? Fuck, no. But we can help offer a different point of view, a new spin on things, a new set of values. Men and women truly working together, each showcasing their strength of character, we might just have a chance of turning things around.

But it all has to start with today’s young women believing they have more to contribute to the world around them than just tits and ass. They need to believe that their paths to success don’t lie only in auditioning for The Pussycat Dolls or in being the next 15-minute celebrity bimbo clad scantily with her glitter makeup being the only way she’s able to shine. Like Pink says, sexy and smart don’t need to be oil and water. It’s time to be more.