The story of Spork.

Thanks, Spork, that is very nice of you to say! I loved your pix too!

About that tooth... it's good you were able to drain it, but your dentist may not want to pull it when it's so infected. I think maybe he will want you to do a course of antibiotics first! Maybe you could go to a walk-in clinic and explain the situation and get a prescription and start it tomorrow?
 
The Urgent Care here charges $40 just to get seen, and I ain't got it, beyond which I keep running into doctors (not dentists) who seem EXTREMELY reluctant to prescribe antibiotics. Even when there is very clearly an infection going on. I could very well go in, and pay them, only to be told to just wait until I see my dentist.

It's just a few days. I can hang. If he gives me antibiotics and has me come back, well, I'll just take them...and go back. I've waited this long. And since I occasionally am able to get in there and drain it, the discomfort has been far less.
 
Hanging in there with the stupid tooth.

Dentist had talked to me about replacement options. I don't like the idea of a bridge. They have to basically grind the two teeth on either side down to "posts" to attach a fake set to. I do NOT want the destruction of two perfectly healthy teeth just to stick a fakey apparatus in there to fill that hole. Implants are a better option in my opinion, and they do put pressure on the bone which helps to maintain the bone density and prevent "bone loss" (according to my research) which is the main problem with a missing tooth, from a structural and medical standpoint. I would do something to prevent further damage, but I will not do something just for cosmetics. And I think I'll be able to chew alright even with the hole there, once it's healed up. I have, on that side from back to front, a healthy wisdom tooth, the back molar that is next to it, then the zombie tooth...it is the "first molar" on the right side. It's not visible when I smile. I have the odd feeling that wisdom tooth is like a spare tooth, conveniently the only one I haven't had removed, is in the quadrant where I'll be losing a molar. Nice.

I'm leaning very heavily towards not doing anything at all right now, and one of these days if/when I have the money and if/when I feel I've got a reason to do it, maybe I'll get an implant there. Right now I just want this tooth OUT and all of the infection and crud clean and healed up.

So I was feeling well enough to do my social activities this weekend. Zen and I had some time for private fun. I swear I am ~this~ close to making "John Denver" my safe word. It's become a means by which he torments me. Tie her up and make her listen to John Denver. But I love how playful we are in acts of love and sex though. Even when we are doing the most vanilla kind of sex act imaginable, it feels kinky and exciting to me. But actually though, I love missionary position anyways, it puts pressure on areas that feel good plain and simple. Of all possible positions, it feels best for me by far. I hate being on top, unless I have a partner who will grasp my hips hard and really do a lot of the thrusting. I need to feel like I have their rhythm, not just grinding out my own. I like the man to set the pace, and to generally be in control. So I don't think of missionary as a boring position. At all. And I cannot think of sex with Zen as vanilla even if we don't do anything particularly kinktastic, 'cause it just feels so much better than anything I've had in my past.

I really enjoy him.

And I got to see Hefe and Reecy play music for a bit on Saturday before they got rained out (it was out on the patio of a restaurant)...and I spent some time with Fire, we sat in my van for a couple of hours I think and just talked. It was so wonderful to have that time with her. I have missed her, even though I've seen her at parties and stuff it isn't the same. I've missed our time together and the sharing and bonding we used to do more of. I never meant to withdraw as much as I have, from the people who used to be my quad. I meant at the time to mostly change the label we were applying to what we were, just so I did not feel stressed about "doing enough"...but I didn't mean to stop putting my time and energy into them to this extent. Time management is a serious problem for me lately in so many aspects.

Argh speaking of which...I need to get back in touch with her. I told her I was free Tuesday through Thursday, and I forgot all about the holiday, and my tooth extraction, this week when I said that. I was just looking at kink community events. I can't seem to remember what day is what half the time here. Well hopefully I will see her this evening, the lady who used to run the club has her "Leather philosophy discussion group" meeting tonight. Fire usually goes to those. If not, I'll message her. I'm so dumb sometimes I swear...I hope she is available on Thursday. That would be a good day for me to get together with her, I think. I might take that day off, in recovery from the extraction on Wednesday.

So...discussion in the park tonight, the 4th BBQ at a friend's house tomorrow, tooth extraction Wednesday, possible day off, maybe hang with Fire on Thursday, and First Fridays jam night thing Friday night, then hopefully overnight and Saturday with Zen. I think I'll skip the party at Voodoo on Saturday (it's this whole Roman toga nonsense, not really my deal)...Sunday I may march with Voodoo's group in the Pride Parade. It just never stops. "Why do I never have time to do art, to work on other projects, to spend dedicated time with friends? Why is it such a struggle?" Uh... Yeah. In between, I'm trying to keep my apartment from filth and chaos with both of my boys there using every dish in the place every 2 days and generally making a mess of things, and I'm watching my son's summer school stuff (still doing alright) and fielding phone calls from the ex, and occasionally other family, staying on top of my financial records and planning, and trying to give my cat some attention and even occasionally sleep.

That's why I can't seem to get to things I really want to, I guess. Just have a lot I'm trying to squeeze into my life...
 
Spork said:
So...discussion in the park tonight, the 4th BBQ at a friend's house tomorrow, tooth extraction Wednesday, possible day off, maybe hang with Fire on Thursday, and First Fridays jam night thing Friday night, then hopefully overnight and Saturday with Zen. I think I'll skip the party at Voodoo on Saturday (it's this whole Roman toga nonsense, not really my deal)...Sunday I may march with Voodoo's group in the Pride Parade. It just never stops. "Why do I never have time to do art, to work on other projects, to spend dedicated time with friends? Why is it such a struggle?" Uh... Yeah. In between, I'm trying to keep my apartment from filth and chaos with both of my boys there using every dish in the place every 2 days and generally making a mess of things, and I'm watching my son's summer school stuff (still doing alright) and fielding phone calls from the ex, and occasionally other family, staying on top of my financial records and planning, and trying to give my cat some attention and even occasionally sleep.

That's why I can't seem to get to things I really want to, I guess. Just have a lot I'm trying to squeeze into my life...
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Haha, your life sounds a lot like mine, except replace the kids with an extra cat and some rabbits!
 
Reverie, can I just say that I am excited for you about Dustin. I really enjoy that feeling, those initial sparky stuff and all, it's a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing that with us.

I kinda feel like I get a little fix of that intense flirting when I get a chance to hang with Supernova. I mean, I'm not gonna have sex with him and he knows it, I have told him enough. But he still is very forward with me and very flirty most of the times we see one another. And I can't lie...it is fun. I like the attention. It doesn't make me want to change my mind, but it makes me want to hang out with him. It's a sort of fencing of flirtation. I go along with it to a point and then (metaphorically) parry his strikes enough to keep my boundaries clear. Like I read about your opening moves in the sexual chess game that is Dustin right now, and I'm like "hell yeah that's fun stuff" but then when I contemplate the actual act with another man I'm like, "Nah, don't need it." I have a hard time imagining better compatibility with anybody than what I have with Zen, he is so good it would be almost unfair to compare any other man to him...the others, they would fall very short, almost universally. As I've said, Worm King had his own appeal in that regard, but he was flake-o-rama. So no to him, too.

Oh, speaking of which, he has been in touch again. Indicated that he'd be down for some coffee and conversation sometime. I know he won't follow through with that. I find myself almost glad with the feeling that he won't follow through with that. I'm not really sure if I want to meet with him one-on-one. I still kind of wish that he and I and Fire could meet up, as I'd be interested in her perspective on him if they met in person, and I wish he'd come out to Voodoo as it would intrigue me to see what he'd make of it, and what the community would make of him. But none of that is likely.

I know that he and Fire talk sometimes in messages. I have felt in the past, a twinge of paranoid ouch in my chest that it's possible they might have met in person and she chose not to tell me about it. I don't know why, but that would bother me. Not that they met, but if she kept hush about the fact. I think I told her that if she did meet him, to be aware that he would try to get her back to his place, and he could be persuasive, and that he prefers not to use protection which violates her agreements with Hefe, so to be wary of all that.

I have a hard time letting go of people.

Switching channels, there is a thought that has been nibbling the edges of my mind.

So in the way I have, of talking to people about all sorts of things, I have talked to a couple of my female friends about the fact that I'd love to have another woman in a sexual play situation where Zen could watch, though it would be even better if he could join, even if only to interact with me, but I have concerns about the overall viability of that idea on several levels (which I have talked about here.) And I hope that these friends did not take this as me suggesting I wanted them to be part of that specifically, as this was not my intent in bringing it up. I just like to kick around my thoughts and see what the take of others is, especially a couple people I know are more experienced in the scene than I am.

Then I spread that idea to other interactions. Zen's annoying friend Tantrum Man seemed to think that my desire to talk about kink meant I wanted him or his wife or his friend or whatever, to get into it...maybe they thought that talking about it meant that I was keen to proposition them specifically? Oh hoho no. Nope.

But I got to thinking though, how many times has mere discussion of sexual proclivities, especially among the "muggles" who don't really talk about sex that much, actually led to sexual activity? Oh yeah that has definitely played a role in those opening moves in the game, in the past.

Like maybe people assume that intent to talk about these things is actually some kind of flirtation, when it totally is not? Like it's got me wondering if I have come across completely wrong with certain people. And here I am all proud of my ability to "read" people and get them...but I can also sometimes be way off base, and I have to be humble enough to know that.

Hm. A thought deserving further contemplation. Awareness perhaps.
 
Spork said:
Reverie, can I just say that I am excited for you about Dustin. I really enjoy that feeling, those initial sparky stuff and all, it's a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing that with us.
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You're welcome. Thanks for reading! :D I'm dying of anticipation to find out what I'm doing with him tomorrow. Also to kiss him again. Aaaaaaahhhhhh! LOL
 
The 4th was fun! Zen and I took my 15 year old, Q, to a cookout and fireworks gathering down in the area south of town where I used to live with Old Wolf. It's all technically outside of city limits, it's "county" so the laws are more relaxed about consumer-grade fireworks. In the city you can do sparklers and snakes, that's about it. Out there, the fountains and screamers that you do on the ground are legal, but in the entire state, anything that "leaves the ground, or explodes" is illegal (I question the "explodes" part like...don't they all sort of explode? Isn't that kind of the point? But they mean things like M-80's, I guess.) Well tons...and I mean, TONS...of people have illegal airbursting fireworks, so we had piles of the legal kind that the kids did in the street in front of the house, and then we got to watch loads of the illegal ones in the nearby skies. And the cookout, and the hanging with friends, was all wonderful. This friend is from the kink scene but she has her kink friends come and mingle with her 'nilla friends, we just have to tell them we met at Comic Con or an art gallery or something else. And we are used to the discretion protocol, so we know how to keep it chill.

Well a guy showed up in a GWAR shirt, not someone I know well, just someone I possibly have met once, and that was cool. I got to nerd out on GWAR for quite a while. Zen said, at one point, "GWAR or ICP...Kirk or Picard..." Actually it would be more accurate to say, "Oderus or Blothar, Kirk or Picard" perhaps...but no one would put the new singer of GWAR over the old one who died. Not even the man himself. But yeah it's fun when someone unexpectedly shows up basically flagging something you're passionate about and you get to geek out about it. Q even got out his phone and showed them the point in the 2014 GWARBQ event commercial where I'm walking by holding a blow up doll.

Ninja did not join us for the festivities, as he had plans to hang out with his on-again, off-again, ex girlfriend friend girl person. He was her boyfriend in middle school when they were like 12, and they dated through high school with the occasional breakup disruption here and there, I'm pretty sure they are not "together" now but they are still good friends. Which means in my book, my son is doing this right...she is valued as a friend even if the romantic component gets switched off. I've always thought that was a more mature way to be, than to require an explosion of drama and angst and "I'll never speak to you again!" under those circumstances. No need to cut someone out of your life, unless you get to the point where you don't LIKE each other anymore, or you never did.

So today is the day. I will be going in a few hours to see about getting the Zombie Tooth evicted. I haven't been in pain in the last couple of days and even the pressure is much reduced. It feels almost like normal. Except when I press gently, my face beneath my cheekbone and then, yeah still something about that area. Not a pain, or a tenderness, it's not even very sensitive, it's just "something there" feeling. Something not right. Still no fever, or swollen lymph nodes or other signs of greater problems. As I said, I've been monitoring the situation pretty closely. I do not want this to pose a greater danger to my life or health. Zen is worried about me. I am dreading the Novocaine injections. Gblarghhleghhh....needles...*shudder* Nyeh!! It's one of the few things I am kind of nearly phobic about. Not tattoo needles, but piercy needles, long and penetrative needles... Just thinking about it makes me want to pick up a chair and defend myself. I also wig out a bit about yellowjackets, wasps, and swarming insects in general. That's pretty much it, I don't have too much of an issue with other things that bother people like spiders, snakes, bats, or the like. So I count myself lucky, my fears are relatively few I think.

And I am looking forward with curiosity to what my weird dentist might have to say today. And I am hoping I won't be in a world of severe pain, maybe I can get some stuff done this evening, work on my art project at least. That is a fairly chill activity.

The art project by the way, is another 3D relief sculpt-on-canvas mixed media. It's a unicorn this time, just the head and neck like a cameo. And I am doing dots dots dots dots of every color of paint I have or can mix up. Dot dot dot. It's got a real ice-cream-sprinkles or crazy confetti thing going on right now. That is the background. There will also be metallic and glitter involved in that. The unicorn itself is being done in primarily white with some shading gradients of browns and tans. Unicorns aren't really my thing at this point in life, though I loved them when I was a kid. But I'm taking the piece to Voodoo and there are several people who love unicorns there. And I'll be able to price it more reasonably than I could Kupro the copper dragon, who has to have a $300 price tag to even justify the time I put into him. But the more often I see him there, the more I think, I cannot wait to get him back into my own home and on my own wall. He is tricky to light optimally, and the light in my household tends to bring out his best colors. Like the best is a room saturated with warm light. Voodoo is never saturated with warm light, it's either saturated with cool light from the florescent bulbs, or it's got small wall sconces of warm light that don't adequately illuminate the piece. So there is a lot of surface reflection from the gloss sealant, and the colors are lost in darkness. Had I not blackwashed them, had I let the colors be as bright as they initially were, or had I not used a gloss on the surface, the colors would show better in that light. Which is good information to have, because if I'm going to create and display stuff at Voodoo, then I need to be aware of how it will look THERE, not necessarily in my apartment, if I want to sell anything.

Additionally, I have two more pieces lined up immediately after this unicorn, one friend wants a smaller dragon in black and red that she can afford (easy) and the club owner likes the idea of me doing the club logo in 3D relief. And I need to experiment with more possible techniques to account for the sculpting medium's shrinkage and warping the surface it's on...I have some ideas about how to solve that problem, hopefully I am able to work that out in the next piece I do. And then I need to do some stuff that involves eyeballs, and some that make use of the leather-looking technique I came up with. Yeah, I have tons of plans...I need to have at least one art project in progress at all times, from now on.
 
Tooth extraction went fairly well. The tooth did not break. I was pretty impressed with that, and surprised, and my dentist was happy and surprised as well. He said, "Well, I expected it to break, and I know all the tricks and I could have handled it, but I am so glad it didn't. Sometimes we get lucky."

Just the fact that not only was it a molar, but it was brittle from having been root canal'ed made breakage likely.

My dentist disappointed me in that he didn't say anything provocative or questionable or interesting. I observed that he had a different assistant. I wonder if what I have been observing is a running joke between him and the other assistant, and he behaves more professionally around this one. Or perhaps he just wasn't in the mood to make strange jokes or comments.

I suppose I COULD have gone in to work today. It does not feel that bad, and Ibuprofen is enough to control any pain now, but I'm still in that first 24 hours and it could ooze and I'm limiting my food to soft things...I just don't feel like dealing with this and dealing with work at the same time today. I'll be ready to go back tomorrow. Beyond that, I am TIRED. I'm tired of living with the stress of worrying about the stupid tooth, I'm tired from my body fighting infection, I am relieved it's out, and I just want to take it easy right now. I guess it's a very American attitude for me to have, that I feel guilty for not going to work when I am physically capable, even though I just had a procedure that most would think justifies a day off, heck I've had people expect me to take today AND tomorrow, and make a long weekend of it. I am not doing that.

I am going to stay home, and do some light housework, and finish this art piece. I really hope that one of the "littles" in the scene might want to buy it. Unlike the dragon, I do NOT want this one hanging in my house. Unicorns and rainbows just are not me.
 
Spork said:
Well, we had another birthday this last weekend to celebrate. This time it was my Zen Sadist, and he and I are apart in our own little satellite relationship thing, so it was the two of us. Unfortunately we both are just recovering from a cold...in my case it wasn't much of anything but he was pretty sick early last week. So we kind of took it easy. Friday night I treated him to a bison steak dinner, and we watched some movies at his place. Saturday, a party at the BDSM club, where I brought cake and gelato...and last night we saw Deadpool and then went up to Denver for a pyro meeting (fire play.) The pyro class was actually pretty lowkey compared to usual, two of the people (the owner of the space and the guy who teaches the class) who are usually real funny characters, were also feeling a little under the weather. And the class was on all things safety...which, while necessary and important, isn't really one of the flashier or more fun topics. Still though. I dressed up in pretty girl clothes, which isn't typical of me, but appreciated by my lover, and we did have a very nice weekend!

Hefe and Fire should be home from Acapulco today or tomorrow. I'm looking forward to stories!! :)

On the home front, the ex is still a nasty piece of work, the housemates are working on getting charitable assistance and getting out on their own. My older son is doing his best ninja impersonation and being quietly absent from the house whenever possible (at the library or with his girlfriend)...and my younger son continues to hide out in his room. Everyone is holding their breath and hoping it all works out in the next few weeks for most of us to move out without too much drama.

It is horrible really, dealing with my ex, much as I try to keep my chin up and my head and heart in the right place. I felt very used during our marriage. His understanding of love is to need and want someone. Mine is to give care and feel obligated. This is what we know how to give, and this is what we need to receive, in order to feel loved. I want someone to think of me, occasionally do nice things for me, and enjoy spending time with me and having meaningful conversations. He wants to be needed, as he himself is so needy, which is why he's tried with addicts and desperate women, I think, to form a relationship. Maybe why he was so into me in the first place since I was just an 18 year old kid then, I don't know. But his kind of love just left me feeling used. Drained and used up. And the moment I withdrew my love and physical affection from him, and gave it to people who appreciate and reciprocate, his "love" has turned to hate. He's apparently been calling me "that whore" to pretty much anyone who will listen, now. While I don't care what he thinks, it hurts to realize that feeling used all of those years he said he loved me, was right...the moment I "took" the "thing" he "had" away from him, he hated me and would just as soon see me suffer and die. He did not love me. He loved having possession and access to me. If I'm not his "thing" then I am nothing of value at all, to him.

It makes me terribly sad. Mostly because I feel like I did so much for him and wasted half of my life on him. And he didn't even care to know me.

And it makes me terribly angry. Because apparently no matter how kind, patient, nurturing or generous you are, no matter the sacrifices you make, to some men, a woman's morality and worth as a person has only to do with her sexual choices and nothing else.

Nevermind the fact that my sex life is nowhere near as wild and happenin' as my ex thinks it is. I really don't think I get laid more often now than I did when I was married, despite having four partners. We're all busy and older adults and often enough we're content to relax together. It's no nonstop orgy, that's for sure.

I know that the man who calls a woman names is probably the bitter one who isn't getting any love from her. It just still sucks. Half my damn life, you know? *sigh*
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You and I have had nearly identical experiences. That's crazy.
 
I am back to work today, not feeling exactly 100% but close enough!

Exciting things that are afoot... My older son, Ninja, has finished one of the two classes he is doing to graduate. American Government. He got a C, but at this point, "just pass the damn classes and graduate" is where we are at. The other one, British Literature, is at 71% complete and a C grade right now, but the term isn't officially over until the 28th and (in the interest of giving kids time to re-do things and turn in late work if necessary) the last due date for anything is 7/14.

And looking out into the future here, I've got First Fridays Jam Night at the club tonight, and I want to bring a piece of art that is substantially finished and show it off, gauge if anyone might want to give me money for it...

I am tempted to do a little something like a wreath effect around the edges, sort of like a frame...it would really work nicely with the piece and might make it worth what I want to ask for it. So I might do that. I need to get some photos to share. It does look cool! The piece has a total of 42 colors in it. I did that on purpose. It was 41, so I mixed a different shade of lavender to sign my name with to make it 42.

Saturday is a Zen day, I don't plan to go to the party at Voodoo that night. I do however need to do laundry, so I'm hoping maybe he will come with me back to my place, we could swim in the pool or something while my laundry is running. Watch a movie perhaps. Sunday is the Pride Parade, there is a discussion group I may or may not go to on Monday, a midweek party on Wednesday next week...a group I always attend on Thursday, Game Night on Friday, a party on Saturday, and SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY Ladies and Gentlemen, is the GAME OF THRONES PREMIER!!! Yay!! Then the weekend after that, the 21st-24th is Thunder in the Mountains! A super awesome kink con I look forward to all year. So this is a fun month with a lot on the calendar!

Next month I'm looking into storage units, to start the process of packing and moving for Zen and me. My thinking is to get as much as possible of our "stuff"...starting with things we don't mind storing for some time, and then things we just don't need out like decorative items and collectibles and such, and get them boxed up and stashed away. I don't really want to put furniture in there, I'll wait until we are actually doing the move and get the furniture moved. But getting all of the clutter out of the way, and all of the stuff cleared off the furniture as much as possible, really makes things so much easier. And you don't have to pack or unpack furniture. The storage unit lets us get a jump on the packing, and unpack boxes at our leisure later on. It gives us more time to work with overall.

So switching gears a bit, to revisit one of those topics "Things that Annoy Spork"...

I've talked about having some issues with the concept of feminism. And on Facebook, there is a person I really like a lot, but she is up to her eyeballs in the whole social justice thing. Very much about measuring people's privilege and saying that if you are white you're racist, if you're a man you're sexist, and so forth. She said yesterday that if you're "one of those people" who think that one can be racist against white people or sexist against men, or even if you silently let others say such things in your hearing without throwing the appropriate amount of outraged fit, then you're enabling everything that is wrong with society and she just can't even and so forth. And one of her white male friends commented that he was hurt by what she was saying, and said "It's hot in here because I can't afford A/C and my teeth are in a glass by the sink because I couldn't afford dental insurance my entire life, but it feels like suddenly you don't know me from Jared Kushner." And she scolded him that of course he should know it isn't meant as an attack against him as a white man...but how would he know that and why? If every statement against women is an attack on all of us as individuals, as I know she would have it, then why does the reverse not apply? I commented that the problem I've got with this, and I think I'm not alone, is that there is a struggle to reconcile these bigger arcs of social injustice that happen in groupthink and cultural programming, with wanting to be a compassionate soul who cares about individual people. The humanity gets lost somewhere. I said that I absolutely have compassion and sympathy for any human being who struggles, and if that is a white male, then so be it. Individual human beings have individual problems.

One of her friends came along and bombarded the thread with videos explaining the concept of privilege, and then as a flourish, told "All cishetwhitemen and their sympathizers" to go away and stop upsetting people.

Fucking serious. Just saying that I want to be a caring person and want people to just be nice to each other, is now being taken as...I don't even know what they're taking it as...sympathizing with the enemy?

You know, I think there is one kind of privilege that trumps (ha! pun!) all the others. Wealth. Socioeconomic privilege, if you will. Michelle Obama, a black woman, has got it better than most white guys I know. Hasn't got anything to do with race or gender. I am betting she wasn't born in the hood. I'm not going to go look up her bio right now, but I'm betting her family sent her to college. If you're born into a family that has some wealth and ability to support you in your development, you have better odds with those resources than somebody who was NOT born with them. Period. The rest...warring and fighting and fussing among the races and genders and religions and all...it's almost just a distraction to keep people divided and distracted, in my opinion. If all the have-nots turned their eyes upon all of the haves, and organized against them, they wouldn't stand a chance. But by making people "a la the American Dream" imagine themselves as more closely aligned with the Haves, even if we aren't, and divided from other kinds of Have-Nots...they effectively prevent that from ever happening. They can do anything they want. They can prey on children, and they do. Make their enemies disappear. Manipulate our government. Take our money. Eat well done steak with ketchup. Anything.

So then after that, I came across another thing on Facebook. Just some meme about sapiosexuals. And a commentor, the very first comment, was a woman complaining that sapiosexual is just a label that ableist neurotypical people use to discriminate against people with mental disorders and disabilities, and she is angry because people have discriminated against her for being autistic her entire life. When someone says they are sapiosexual, they really mean they only date upper middle class, educated, neurotypical white people. It's discriminatory.

Now after dealing with my feminist friend less than an hour ago, and then seeing this... I didn't respond, I just turned off my phone with a huffy "Bitch, PLEASE." A couple of people including yes, a white man, had asked her to clarify what she meant or explain a point, and they asked in a very gentle and respectful way, and she came back yelling at them for demanding that she do emotional labor for them and ended it with "I am so done. I'm out. I can't."

Now since I am leftish in many of my political beliefs, and I know many are here, too...and since I also support some of the concepts of feminism even if I refuse the label and do what I can to be more fair in my compassion for everyone over here...and I know there are feminists here as well... I ask you to contemplate this ridiculous shit, and try to see why so many who are center or right of center can't even listen to us lefties.

I say I can be compassionate to anyone I damn well please and if that is a white guy, then so be it. My compassion is mine to give. And people freak out that I am a "sympathizer." I would insist that under no circumstances is a person's preference in who they want to date or love or have sex with EVER to be seen as a form of discrimination. I will argue that all day. That woman was goddamn perilously close to saying she was ENTITLED to date anyone SHE wanted, and if they turned her down due to autism or due to ANYTHING (because I'm betting no one ever said, "I don't date autistic people" to her, she is just assuming that's a reason)...and if anybody ever turned her down, well how dare they, clearly it's discrimination. Bullcrap! With stupid shit like this floating around, it is no wonder you can't get a conservative to listen and we can't find a reasonable place to converse like civilized people.

I know too many "feminists" whose position seems to be that if you're a white guy, you need to sit down and shut up because you have so much privilege and your voice has dominated the conversation long enough. How does anyone expect to reach people and connect and influence thinking with that attitude? No one likes being told to sit down and shut up because of what they were born. And sure, women got that end of things forever and often still do, but that if anything should give us a good idea of how it feels. Being smug in one's revenge, if that is "social justice" then I want nothing to do with it.

/end rant. :)
 
Funny conversations I need to document before I forget them:

Ninja: I have decided I do plan to go to college.
Me: What are you going to study?
Ninja: I don't want to tell you.
Me: Why? Do you know?
Ninja: I know. I just don't want to talk about it right now.
Me (giving him a hard time): Do you want to join the BALLET...? (Said in a silly voice)
Q: You can't go to school to be a pimp, you know.
Ninja: Well, YOU can't go to school to be an asshole.
Q: Sure you can. Enroll in Asshole University. I'm pretty sure Dad has a degree from there.
Ninja: That's just the military.
Q: Same thing. Potato, po-tah-to.

...

Talking to people I don't really know out at the smoking area today on break...

Conversations about crazy Florida people and meth and weird crimes.

Me: You guys remember when we heard story after story about people on bath salts? And they all were not only being crazy violent but always naked. Why naked? Like there's a drug that makes you take off your clothes and act like a cannibal. Great.
Them: Yeah. Let's do THAT. I don't know, like why people do hard drugs. Meth? Heroin? Like how many times have you been to jail? How's that working out for you? Why are you doing it again?
Me: Well. I can't be to harsh on addicts, seeing as I'm addicted to cigarettes.
Them: Yeah, but cigarettes don't make you...
Me: ...Take off your clothes and act like a cannibal. Yeah. I gotta draw the line somewhere.
 
I'm so relieved about that tooth! Did you tell your dentist you were manually draining it? What did he think of that?
 
Magdlyn said:
I'm so relieved about that tooth! Did you tell your dentist you were manually draining it? What did he think of that?
Click to expand...

He said, "You know what, it's just like a splinter. Or any foreign object. We're gonna take it out, and all that infection will just drain right out of there."

Guess he is right so far, since it feels an awful lot better now!

No antibiotics.

I really think the whole medical community is really shy about antibiotics now, what with MRSA and stuff like that, the resistant buggos killing people in hospitals and stuff.
 
Spork said:
He said, "You know what, it's just like a splinter. Or any foreign object. We're gonna take it out, and all that infection will just drain right out of there."

Guess he is right so far, since it feels an awful lot better now!

No antibiotics.

I really think the whole medical community is really shy about antibiotics now, what with MRSA and stuff like that, the resistant buggos killing people in hospitals and stuff.
Click to expand...

That's good to know. I was really into alternative health care when I was raising my kids. Back then everyone was getting antibiotics for everything!

I guess I am thinking of when I was in my late teens/early 20s, and people would get an impacted wisdom tooth, and the dentist would make them do a course of antibiotics before they'd pull the tooth. There seemed to be some idea the bacteria would infect the bloodstream once the tooth was pulled.
 
Spork said:
He said, "You know what, it's just like a splinter. Or any foreign object. We're gonna take it out, and all that infection will just drain right out of there."

Guess he is right so far, since it feels an awful lot better now!

No antibiotics.

I really think the whole medical community is really shy about antibiotics now, what with MRSA and stuff like that, the resistant buggos killing people in hospitals and stuff.
Click to expand...

That's interesting. I got a lot of dental work done and the dentist prescribed antibiotics every time. The best part was they were free from Publix.
 
Spork said:
So switching gears a bit, to revisit one of those topics "Things that Annoy Spork"...

I've talked about having some issues with the concept of feminism. And on Facebook, there is a person I really like a lot, but she is up to her eyeballs in the whole social justice thing. Very much about measuring people's privilege and saying that if you are white you're racist, if you're a man you're sexist, and so forth. She said yesterday that if you're "one of those people" who think that one can be racist against white people or sexist against men, or even if you silently let others say such things in your hearing without throwing the appropriate amount of outraged fit, then you're enabling everything that is wrong with society and she just can't even and so forth. And one of her white male friends commented that he was hurt by what she was saying, and said "It's hot in here because I can't afford A/C and my teeth are in a glass by the sink because I couldn't afford dental insurance my entire life, but it feels like suddenly you don't know me from Jared Kushner." And she scolded him that of course he should know it isn't meant as an attack against him as a white man...but how would he know that and why? If every statement against women is an attack on all of us as individuals, as I know she would have it, then why does the reverse not apply? I commented that the problem I've got with this, and I think I'm not alone, is that there is a struggle to reconcile these bigger arcs of social injustice that happen in groupthink and cultural programming, with wanting to be a compassionate soul who cares about individual people. The humanity gets lost somewhere. I said that I absolutely have compassion and sympathy for any human being who struggles, and if that is a white male, then so be it. Individual human beings have individual problems.

One of her friends came along and bombarded the thread with videos explaining the concept of privilege, and then as a flourish, told "All cishetwhitemen and their sympathizers" to go away and stop upsetting people.

Fucking serious. Just saying that I want to be a caring person and want people to just be nice to each other, is now being taken as...I don't even know what they're taking it as...sympathizing with the enemy?

You know, I think there is one kind of privilege that trumps (ha! pun!) all the others. Wealth. Socioeconomic privilege, if you will. Michelle Obama, a black woman, has got it better than most white guys I know. Hasn't got anything to do with race or gender. I am betting she wasn't born in the hood. I'm not going to go look up her bio right now, but I'm betting her family sent her to college. If you're born into a family that has some wealth and ability to support you in your development, you have better odds with those resources than somebody who was NOT born with them. Period. The rest...warring and fighting and fussing among the races and genders and religions and all...it's almost just a distraction to keep people divided and distracted, in my opinion. If all the have-nots turned their eyes upon all of the haves, and organized against them, they wouldn't stand a chance. But by making people "a la the American Dream" imagine themselves as more closely aligned with the Haves, even if we aren't, and divided from other kinds of Have-Nots...they effectively prevent that from ever happening. They can do anything they want. They can prey on children, and they do. Make their enemies disappear. Manipulate our government. Take our money. Eat well done steak with ketchup. Anything.

So then after that, I came across another thing on Facebook. Just some meme about sapiosexuals. And a commentor, the very first comment, was a woman complaining that sapiosexual is just a label that ableist neurotypical people use to discriminate against people with mental disorders and disabilities, and she is angry because people have discriminated against her for being autistic her entire life. When someone says they are sapiosexual, they really mean they only date upper middle class, educated, neurotypical white people. It's discriminatory.

Now after dealing with my feminist friend less than an hour ago, and then seeing this... I didn't respond, I just turned off my phone with a huffy "Bitch, PLEASE." A couple of people including yes, a white man, had asked her to clarify what she meant or explain a point, and they asked in a very gentle and respectful way, and she came back yelling at them for demanding that she do emotional labor for them and ended it with "I am so done. I'm out. I can't."

Now since I am leftish in many of my political beliefs, and I know many are here, too...and since I also support some of the concepts of feminism even if I refuse the label and do what I can to be more fair in my compassion for everyone over here...and I know there are feminists here as well... I ask you to contemplate this ridiculous shit, and try to see why so many who are center or right of center can't even listen to us lefties.

I say I can be compassionate to anyone I damn well please and if that is a white guy, then so be it. My compassion is mine to give. And people freak out that I am a "sympathizer." I would insist that under no circumstances is a person's preference in who they want to date or love or have sex with EVER to be seen as a form of discrimination. I will argue that all day. That woman was goddamn perilously close to saying she was ENTITLED to date anyone SHE wanted, and if they turned her down due to autism or due to ANYTHING (because I'm betting no one ever said, "I don't date autistic people" to her, she is just assuming that's a reason)...and if anybody ever turned her down, well how dare they, clearly it's discrimination. Bullcrap! With stupid shit like this floating around, it is no wonder you can't get a conservative to listen and we can't find a reasonable place to converse like civilized people.

I know too many "feminists" whose position seems to be that if you're a white guy, you need to sit down and shut up because you have so much privilege and your voice has dominated the conversation long enough. How does anyone expect to reach people and connect and influence thinking with that attitude? No one likes being told to sit down and shut up because of what they were born. And sure, women got that end of things forever and often still do, but that if anything should give us a good idea of how it feels. Being smug in one's revenge, if that is "social justice" then I want nothing to do with it.

/end rant. :)
Click to expand...

Thank you thank you thank you! I recently left the super secret Seattle poly facebook group because of this very thing. As a white cis guy I couldn't even ask a question without it being viewed as an attack. Then it was I was invalidating their experience. If I denied that I was just being dismissive. Christ, it was the freakin' Twilight Zone in there. I've taken to viewing them as "neo-progressives". Their goals aren't really progressive. In fact, I was called delusional for thinking that we should all treat each other as fellow human beings.
 
Spork said:
.... If every statement against women is an attack on all of us as individuals, as I know she would have it, then why does the reverse not apply? ....

....

You know, I think there is one kind of privilege that trumps (ha! pun!) all the others. Wealth. Socioeconomic privilege, if you will. Michelle Obama, a black woman, has got it better than most white guys I know. Hasn't got anything to do with race or gender. I am betting she wasn't born in the hood. I'm not going to go look up her bio right now, but I'm betting her family sent her to college. ..... If all the have-nots turned their eyes upon all of the haves, and organized against them, they wouldn't stand a chance.

... I ask you to contemplate this ridiculous shit, and try to see why so many who are center or right of center can't even listen to us lefties.

I say I can be compassionate to anyone I damn well please and if that is a white guy, then so be it. My compassion is mine to give. And people freak out that I am a "sympathizer." I would insist that under no circumstances is a person's preference in who they want to date or love or have sex with EVER to be seen as a form of discrimination. I will argue that all day. That woman was goddamn perilously close to saying she was ENTITLED to date anyone SHE wanted.... it is no wonder you can't get a conservative to listen and we can't find a reasonable place to converse like civilized people.
Click to expand...

Many great thoughts in here. I noticed yesterday that some celebrity has been called sexist for saying something negative about a single individual woman...and then was called sexist for saying something positive about another woman! Sexism is about thinking X of all people of a certain gender. If I say one particular man is a jerk, it's a reflection him, not on all men.

I've seen the same 'I have a right to date' elsewhere. In fact, I've been called racist by a man for not wanting to go out with him a second time. It had nothing to do with his race. It had to do with him misrepresenting himself greatly in his profile and being a boor who talked about himself the entire night.

I personally have no desire to organize against any Haves. Or anyone who has more than me. And I hope no one who has less than me plans to organize against me, either. The thing is, to someone on welfare, I might be a Have. To me, some of the people on this board are Haves. To them, they may feel like they're struggling to pay the bills and view Soros and Gates and Zuckerberg as the Haves.
 
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