Sex Talk (the good kind)

In June I’m going to an awesome reunion with friends from Chicago. Four of us ended up in the LA area and the rest are flying in, some of them with new babies in tow, from the Windy City and Seattle. The idea was inspired.

Krista is organizing everything (with a little help from her friends) and sent out an e-mail asking for a list of favorite foods. The responses have range: ice cream sandwiches, ice cream cakes, and whip cream… lots of veggies and tofu products… major protein, but no stomach for soy so lots of lean meat… But the most interesting response came from Kristina who works at a women’s clinic in Seattle:

Hey Krista et all,
My food choices would be: something sweet (besides the babies)
Something salty (besides you gals)
Bottled water
Guacamole

OK, on to more serious business... As some of you may know, my goal in life is to have a sex talk show- a cross between Dan Savage and Ellen Degeneres where you learn something between the laughter. Krista and I have been talking about doing something on her Podcast show, kind of like a commentary on some sex topic. I'm looking for topic ideas to get me started. Here's where you come in- please send me a questions(s) about any sex topic you have been wondering about: How does an orgasm work? Where's the poop in anal sex? What are the details of a sex change operation? My BF's uncircumcised- will I get an STD? Or whatever is burning on your mind (or burning somewhere else...) You may not care about these topics, which is why I want you to write it- what do you wonder about late at night??? Thanks, I appreciate it!

Can't wait to see you guys!
Kristina


So, if anyone has any ideas, post a note and I’ll pass them on. I’m also going to ask around at work next week. I have no idea how it’s going to go over but I’m kind of excited to find out.

Plans for the Holiday Weekend

This is my to-do list from this morning copied and pasted from Word:

To Do:
Plan Knitting:
MC Beanie
Lindsay’s Square
Cat
My Sweater
Summer Halter
Mark’s Sweater
Red Scarf
Termite
Something for Mom for Christmas
Scarf for John for Christmas out of Blue Sky Bulky
Something for Jen

Update Blog
Post on Blog
Call AAA
Call Dept of Ed

Turn in Gear
Update GMT Tracker


Today is 44 minutes from being over and I successfully:
Posted on Blog
Turned in FEX Gear
Cast on for Summer Halter with Blue Sky Organic Cotton
Figured Out My Own Pattern for a Stuffed Termite
Finished about 1/3 of Lindsay's Square
Found Yarn for MC's Beanie

Additionally I:
seriously considered a tattoo on my wrist - I predict ink at 60%
drank twp cups of Aged Sumatran coffee that caused a mild anxiety attack
met a woman whose husband died six weeks ago from kidney failure - tonight she was knitting for someone on dialysis
bought the new Dixie Chicks CD at Target (cheaper than iTunes)

It Comes Down to This

I want to:

Knit
Sew
Cook
Eat
Drink
Read
Write

Communicate
Plan
Observe
Connect
Create
Love
Think


I’d rather not:

Polish Boots
Stand or Run in Formation
Proofread Spread Sheets
Turn In my FEX Gear
Listen to Unimaginative Conversations about Butt Sex

Bread in the Oven

When my husband left for Lake Clark National Park a week or so ago I received custody of three ripe bananas that have, as bananas are wont to do, continued to ripen. Yesterday I realized that I had ignored the fruits longer than contemporary standards of freshness would dictate and that something had to be done so I took a stick of butter out of the freezer to soften. Today when I came home for lunch I preheated the oven, mixed up a recipe of banana bread, and now I'm waiting for the timer to sound. The bread will still be warm when I bring it to my AutoCAD class this afternoon.

The schoolhouse secured funding to spend tens of thousands of dollars on 13 licenses of the new AutoCAD 2006. But because the registration needs to be done online, and because the schoolhouse doesn’t have a network connection, all we can do is give a quick glance to the 2006 icon mocking us from the desktop and then do our work with the old version.

Most of the twelve surveyors in the class are already pretty comfortable with AutoCAD 2004 and so we spend class talking trash and spreading gossip. It’s a round table format with the instructor taking his place as our King Arthur on a tall swivel chair in the back of the class with students fanned around him. The EA3 who sits next to me is the sort who, as he tells it, always works for incompetent superiors and is forced to assert his surveying prowess in order to save the project: a project always balanced precariously on the brink of ruin. In the event of catastrophe the problem is simple; the incompetent superior refused to listen to his sage counsel. It gets old fast.

Two days after coming home from FEX EA3 was dumped unexpectedly by his fiancé. The next night he went to a party, met a girl, and now claims her as his own. She’s deaf. She’s been deaf since birth. And while I hope very much that being deaf is akin to having red hair – slightly unusual but really no different in the long run – I have this feeling that in this case, that’s not the case. As EA3 told his story our King Arthur, a man who values women as accessories not partners, deemed EA3 accepting and almost virtuous for his new choice and EA3 has taken to the label. Now we get lectures on the deaf community and are pounded with facts like the preferred phone for text messaging among the deaf, and the importance of non-verbal communication with the deaf. They’ve been dating two weeks. It’s a bit much. This isn’t a girl that he’s been friends with since childhood or someone on his community soccer team. This is the dependent of a Chief on a nearby base that he met at a party the night after having a ring thrust back in his face.

I don't think it's love.

The banana bread has ten minutes left in the oven. I can’t wait to hear about the role of baked goods in the deaf community.

Oh Fidel... Where did our love go?

Columbus sailed the ocean blue
In 1492
And on October 28
He landed on Cuba

I was pulled from the main body deployment to Kuwait and instead put on a detachment to Cuba to build a pier. The word on the street is that there isn’t any surveying to be done and so in lieu of my regularly scheduled activities I’ll function as quality control and safety for the project: that’s about as unglamorous as it gets. But I feel really lucky, mostly because I'm not going to the desert (tax-free income and hazard pay just aren't enough to seduce this girl) but also because I'll be with a small group of people and away from all the tiresome rules that larger groups tend to enforce. I'm lucky, excited and relieved.

The bum deal is that I’ll be so close to Havana with all of it’s music and food and steam engine trains (they never upgraded like the rest of the world), but not be able to swing by for a visit. Buena Vista Social Club is going to have to take up space in my memory as a movie with great music instead of the live soundtrack for my weekend carousing. Of course, Fidel has to die sometime. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll kick the bucket in the next month or two.

Despite the fact that my mother asks me, about once every two weeks, if I know where I'm going for deployment, I never told her that I was slated for Kuwait. I didn’t want to deal with the guilt of worrying her. But when we spoke on the phone yesterday I didn’t tell her about Cuba, either and I’m not sure why. Instead we talked about my dad’s radiation treatments and the unsettling fact that when the minister for my brother’s wedding told the happy couple that they would have to go to one day of secular marriage counseling before she would agree to perform the ceremony, my brother’s fiancé refused and found someone else in the phone book to get the job done. My mother suspects, and she’s usually right about these things, that the blushing bride knows just how high-maintenance she is, thinks that my brother hasn’t figured it out yet, and doesn’t want to run the risk of anyone cluing him in. After my mom finished spilling the gossip all she could say was, “I thought I raised him better than that. I guess not.”

It could be worse. My mom could think I was the disappointment.

Gin

I have this idea for a book. I don’t want to get into the specifics because it’s really good and I don’t want anyone to steal it, but I will say that it would be non-fiction and emphasize literary cocktails. It’s been my frequent observation that many successful writers, and the characters they create, have a special relationship with drink. I suspect this is also the case with unsuccessful writers but by definition I’m not so familiar with either their biographies or their work so I couldn’t say for sure. I have gone so far as to make a mental catalog of literary cocktails I’ve stumbled on to date: drinks that I read in novels or know were favorites of one author or another. If my list was organized alphabetically, and really it’s not organized at all, the first entry would be Absinth, the elusive and illegal drink of Hemingway and many other intensely creative and crazy men. There would be a few hands full of cocktails and liquors in the middle and then at the end would be Zubrowka, a Russian potato vodka bottled with a blade of buffalo grass, and the downfall of an unfortunate in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

I have a new favorite literary cocktail from a British novel that I barely cracked and have put on hold for the time being. The drink is called a White Lady and is a combination of equal parts gin, Grand Marnier, and lemon juice mixed in a shaker, strained into a chilled glass, and served without adornment. It’s a taste sensation and every person who finds it mildly appealing should give it a try.

It’s true that I’m not much of a writer, but I am a sailor, so I feel like I’ve earned the right to drink gin and orange liquor and wax poetic about it on a Sunday evening.

But it is Sunday, and I don’t like thinking about work on the weekends, so I’ll sign off and chime in again tomorrow when I’m required by law to think about my job.