Sunday, June 30, 2002

Ice cream parlors draw kids and families. It's a fact of life, and it's something I'm prepared to handle when I want ice cream. Particularly the really good variety of local stuff.
However, tonight when Boyfriend and I hit up the local ice cream parlor (me: GIVE ME ICE CREAM! *bite* him: OW! Okay! Okay! Let me get to a save point!) we were confronted by this one particular family that I literally could not tear my eyes away from. In the interests of amusing myself at the expense of no-doubt-very-nice and unsuspecting people, I hereby dub them the Pig Family. There was Disgruntled Dad Pig, Tired Mom Pig, and their three children: School Bully Piglet, Gotta Keep Movin' On Piglet, and The Most Unfortunate Piglet In The World.

Dad and Mom were both incredibly solid columns of fat and muscle. You know the ones. Mom has no curves whatsoever but she looks like she could dent a train; Dad has all the curve in the family, consisting of one very round beer belly. Both Dad and Mom had that unfortunate 'jowl' condition, making their cheeks very round and prominent, until their noses and mouths almost vanished in the folds.

But the kids! School Bully Piglet looked like Dad: crew cut, tiny mean piggy little eyes, stocky body that'll turn to fat in ten years, and those same fleshy jowls. School Bully Piglet spent most of the visit to the ice cream parlor wandering around kicking walls, kicking benches, kicking trash cans, and so on. I was silently hoping he'd go try and kick one of the geese by the lake and get the crap pecked out of him for it. Well, 'hoping' is too strong a word, really. But if it had happened, I can guarantee I wouldn't have felt too sorry for him.

Gotta Keep Movin' On Piglet was actually the most normal-looking of the bunch, stocky, but without those pudgy little jowls. And rather normal-looking Gotta Keep Movin' On knew it, because he spent the entire time trying to put as much distance between himself and his family as he possibly could before his mother snapped at him. Gotta Keep Movin' On would be fifty feet away playing with the geese, or thirty feet away in the parking lot, or ten feet away trying to blend in with another family; given headway, Gotta Keep Movin' On could have made Kentucky by nightfall. And there, perhaps, he could have been free! Free!

And then, there was The Most Unfortunate Piglet In The World. She was about four, I suppose. And she was stocky, oh yes, with arms and legs like overstuffed sausage casings, so pudgy that she had some trouble putting her arms down by her sides. Tired Mom Pig (or maybe Disgruntled Dad Pig, but I doubt it) had put her in a charming little sleeveless patchwork jumper to highlight these tubesteaks of flesh.
And Unfortunate Piglet had Mom and Dad's jowls, yes she did, but hers were like a football cut in half and glued to her already perfectly round face, making her head of a size that threatened to pitch her over on her face at any moment. To make it worse, from somewhere she'd managed to pick up a startling case of rosacea (or something like it), because said football halves were dyed a brilliant, startling, unfading red. Between her reddened jowls she had no nose that I could discern, just two little pig-like nostrils gaping like black holes in a turned-up bit of flesh that might have been a pug nose. And to top it all off she had a head of Shirley Temple curls in an astonishing butterscotch yellow.
The Most Unfortunate Piglet In The World looked like nothing so much as an overgrown Cabbage Patch Kid, and let me tell you, that is a frightening thing to be faced with.

When Boyfriend and I first ran across the Pig Family, they were in line in front of us. Mom Pig was carefully cross-examining the hapless counter help about what kind of things her litter might like to eat, and finally decided that they should get the chocolate bundt cakes with ice cream on top of them. Meanwhile, School Bully Piglet was wandering around kicking the counter, Gotta Keep Movin' On Piglet was standing over on the far side of the parlor looking at the posters, and The Most Unfortunate Piglet In The World was clinging to Mommy's leg while she picked her nose and wiped the results on Mommy's pants.
Finally, after having acquired enough ice cream, cake, and assorted scoops of goopy stuff to kill a lesser family stone dead, the Pig Family relocated itself outside. While Mom and Dad poked tiredly at ice cream they didn't seem to be very interested in, School Bully Piglet wolfed his down and threw the empty bowl on the ground, Gotta Keep Movin' On Piglet grabbed his and scampered off to eat it next to a different family, and The Most Unfortunate Piglet In The World proceeded to attempt to eat hers via osmosis: smearing the ice cream on her face, hands, arms, hair, and cute little patchwork jumper, and occasionally being startled to find a dollop of it actually finding its way into her mouth.

Boyfriend and I quickly finished up our ice cream and wandered back to our car, leaving the Pig Family to their not-entirely-happy family outing. I don't know what he was thinking, but all the way there (accompanied for at least ten feet by Gotta Keep Movin' On) I was silently thinking, not me. Not me. As the gods are my witness, that will never be me. When I wish to have ice cream, I will have ice cream, and I will eat my ice cream in peace and quiet, with Boyfriend, and without a single child to my name. And we may be Pigs together, but I'll be Mama Pig to none.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 12:33 AM EST
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Friday, June 28, 2002

I am a child of suburbia.

Caught between city and country like the wall of a medieval city, suburbia makes its promises and keeps them:
I promise unto you that everything you need shall be close by, served to you by giant corporations.
I promise unto you that you shall be free of the urban blight and the country rot alike; neither panhandler nor coyote shall disrupt your musings, so help us.
I promise unto you that while nothing may be open past midnight, you shall be able to walk unconcerned in the darkness of two am, and not be set upon, so help us.
I promise unto you that your children shall grow up safe and deathly dull.
I promise unto you that your neighbors shall be kindly and concerned only with petty matters.
I promise unto you that the realities of life shall stay far away, boxed neatly on the newsprint thrown onto your lawn every morning.

Suburbia has something of the safety of the country and something of the convenience of the city, blended into something disarmingly homogeneous, willing to protect you in its gentle white wings as long as you are suitably quiet.
It is the primary irony of suburban life that you will be forever scorned for daring to live in the least challenging place on earth. City and country alike shall scorn you for daring to live someplace comfortable, safe, and convenient; real people enjoy their inconveniences and brag about them, after all. By choosing to live comfortably you take the path of least resistance.
Something about suburban life smooths you, blunts you, damps you, pads you; you move smiling through a friendly world and sleep unconcerned by noise and danger. The dangers of the 'real' world are far away, so much noise and thunder in the distance. full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

When one lives in the city, one pays through the nose for the privilege. Call it a twenty-four-hour entertainment tax, and rejoice.
When one lives in the country, one lives cheaply, graciously, at the beck and call of nature in all its wild glory. Call it a welcome tradeoff for the enforced solitude and the distant commute, and rejoice.
When one lives in suburbia, one subscribes to the soul-swaddling sameness of it, neither paying too much nor too little, neither too convenient nor too inconvenient. Suburbia is for those who cannot decide and must have a little of everything; suburbia is the Sunday afternoon buffet of property. Nothing tastes too strong or too weak, nothing tastes too bad or too good, and there is a wealth of mediocre choices open to one.

It is possible to be strong, intelligent, powerful, outspoken, involved, alive in suburbia. It simply takes more effort.
Fortunately, since it takes so little effort to live here, you also have the effort to spare. As long as you continue to rage against the pettiness, you will be fine. Nowhere else does being alive take such conscious thought; nowhere else shelters you so well when you are too tired to live further.

In suburbia, one drives safely in a well-maintained car. One says please and thank you. One smiles at one's neighbors. One participates in community get-togethers. One stops and stares in awe at the greenery. One rejoices in the man-made lake that draws geese, less than a hundred steps from one's door. One finds oneself awake at one-thirty, with nowhere to go. One wonders when one started starring in a fifties sitcom. One deals. Or one develops angst. One leaves, or worse: one does not leave.

Welcome to suburbia. Don't mind the smell of plastic; you'll get used to it in time.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 02:05 AM EST
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Wednesday, June 26, 2002

You know, a single disembodied boob looks like nothing so much as a fried egg gone wrong.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 02:50 AM EST
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Tuesday, June 25, 2002

WARNING: Pointless rant.

Ahem.

I am fat.
I am not a fucking vacuum cleaner.

Just because my ass is, yes, wide does not mean that I never met a Twinkie I didn't like. Just because I wear a size 24 does not mean that I will bankrupt all-you-can-eat restaurants. Just because I wear extra flesh on my body does not mean that I happily snorfle down four entire fried chickens at a meal and then do it again five hours later.
You know what? I eat one meal a day. One normal-sized meal a day, which I hardly ever finish. Sometimes I have a snack eight hours later, but not always. I rarely get dessert. I don't eat fried stuff very often. I have maybe two alcoholic drinks a year. I eat fast food twice a month, if that, and only because fast food places are open later.

For god's sake, I don't even like cheesecake.

I am fat not because I drown in fast food, processed food, and sugar, but because I lead an entirely too sedentary life. And yes, this is something I'm trying to change. But for crying out fucking loud, I did not become fat and I do not remain fat by eating everything in sight!
Get over it.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 01:01 AM EST
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Monday, June 24, 2002

More proof that I am a hopeless dork with no life to speak of:

A while back, a friend and I were pretending to be Ashton Anchors and Ernest Raviede at each other (yes, I know they can't meet in the game, shush). And at one point, she, as the three-eyed Tetragenian Ernest, used the following emoticon at me:
^^^

Well! I, as the dragon-enhanced Ashton, came right back with:
^^ ^^ ^^

And I was so enamored of her little invention that I kept thinking about it. Ashton emoticons. Ashton emoticons! As if this didn't make me enough of a giant dork, I then made the leap to thinking 'hey! I could make a whole set of Ashton Anchors emoticons and use them as LiveJournal mood icons! I'm so smart!'

And so I happily went into Photoshop and started tricking up the little GIFs. But, as we all know, I'm frightfully lazy. So after doing the fifteen 'base' emotions, I quit, and I never bothered to pick the project back up.
So, in lieu of doing anything useful with the Ashton emoticons, I'm just going to blog 'em.. Or, more properly, blog a snapshot of the Photoshop document I'll probably never go back to, because actually typing said emoticons out would probably freak out half the browsers in existence.

Picture will open in a new window. If you like the emoticons, feel free to use 'em or type 'em into your blog sidebar or whatever the heck you want.

I'm a dooooooooooork!

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 12:10 AM EST
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Friday, June 21, 2002

Randomly thought to myself in the car on the way home from dinner-and-bookstore run:

Someone said, "The truly rich are not like you and me."

The truly poor are not like you and me, either.

Come to think of it, a lot of the middle class aren't like you and me.

Heck, you're not all that much like me.

When you come right down to it, half the time I'm not like me.

In other words, duh.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 07:39 PM EST
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Thursday, June 20, 2002

The mall closest to my house has a 'play area' for children that's actually, in my opinion, pretty neat. The floor is soft and padded, so that they can run and fall without hurting themselves; strewn around on said floor are huge, huge soft-foam sculptures of... breakfast food.
That's right, soft squishy pieces of bacon that are eight feet long, a pair of sunny-side-up fried eggs big enough to be trampolined on, two giant chunks of shredded wheat, a whole bunch of banana slices, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
The play area is ringed with comfortable benches so that the parents can sit and watch their children play and catch their breaths. (Doubtless there are moronic parents who ditch the child in the Breakfast Area and blithely abandon them to go shopping, but that's not really my lookout.)

I know I would have loved the Breakfast Area when I was a kid, and even now, when I'm almost thirty, I have to stop myself from running out to jump around on the eggs myself. But I digress.

See, this particular mall is two stories high. And there's a big atrium space just above the Breakfast Area, so if you're so inclined you can stop and lean on the railing and look down and get a bird's eye view of the children playing.
Now, think about this for a second. Food, lots of very realistic-looking food, looking almost realistically sized from this vantage point, and a whole bunch of tiny shapes swarming all over it.
That's right. All those precious children, those beloved infants, those adorable sperm'n'egg omelets... look exactly like a swarm of ants attacking the food at a picnic.

And that is how I feel about children in my life: ants destroying my picnic.
Thank you, and good night.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 05:18 AM EST
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Tuesday, June 18, 2002

One morning I went outside and discovered that a wild rabbit had taken up residence under the bushes in our front yard. And I thought, "Eeeee a bunny!" and gawked at it and made Boyfriend come gawk at it and it really made my day.

Then, about a week later, I went outside and discovered two wild rabbits grazing on the grass outside my front door. And I thought, "... oh dear."

Today, I saw a teeny-tiny little baby wild rabbit grazing on the grass. And I thought, "Oh shit."

Not because I don't like rabbits. I love rabbits. But because if there's a reproducing pair of rabbits living on the apartment complex's property, in a year there'll be twelve, fifteen, twenty of them, and how long can they go on before the complex starts trapping and killing them?
I'm going to clip the local wildlife rescue number to my rent check this upcoming month. I hope -- I hope -- that the complex will take the hint and have the bunnies resettled now rather than killed later.

In other news, I've seen the blue heron twice more! It's such a pretty bird. If terrified of humans.

And all the geese that are in the 'adolescent' stage of their lives (starting to develop their final plumage but still furred with down) have lost all sense entirely. Baby geese will stay way the hell away from me. Adult geese will give me a wide berth but flash me condescending looks that say "I could kill you, if I felt like it. But I don't. You're not worth my time."
Adolescent geese hiss and charge me. I, of course, being forty thousand times their size, just stand my ground and give them the "I will give you such a smacking" look, and they eventually veer off and try to pretend they weren't attacking me. (For the record, I have never hit a goose, and I hope I never will. I have, however, picked up a pigeon that was standing on my foot. Don't worry. I put it back down.)
And, you know, having thirty geese all lower their heads and stalk directly at you is kind of an unnerving experience.

And, finally: ducklings! Eight little tiny mallard ducklings!
... what does it say about me that I accidentally typed 'fucklings' on my first attempt?

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 07:27 PM EST
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Saturday, June 15, 2002

I am amused.

As most of you know, I have an account on the pit of voles. One of the stories I have up on said account is 'Wrongest Love And Blood Most Dank', which long-time readers may remember originating as a blog entry.

'Wrongest Love' is a joke. It always was. It says so very, very clearly in the introduction. One of the sentences I used to describe said fic, in its own introduction, is: 'In other words, this fic is crap.' I mince no words about the crappiness of this fic.

The voles have left nine reviews on 'Wrongest Love' over the months, all more or less positive. I say 'more or less' because a lot of the reviews say things like 'god, this does suck, but it's really funny'.

Two of said reviews, however, give me glowing gushing compliments on the 'sophisticated' and 'descriptive' language, and call the fic 'great'. And you know, I don't think they're being ironic.
Now, seven people who get it vs. two people who don't is actually not a bad ratio, for the pit of voles. And I suppose that even that horrible overripe vomitus has its good points: most if not all of the words contained therein are spelled and used properly, and the grammar is... well. While I hesitate to say that those convoluted choking sentences are 'grammatically correct', they are an unreasonable facsimile thereof.
So in comparison to some -- most -- of the other offerings on the volepit...

Bah, I digress. My point being: some people cannot see a joke even when labeled clearly.
Or, possibly, I don't know a great fic when I write one.
Your choice.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:26 PM EST
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So, here's the deal.

I'm going through a bit of a slump recently. Maybe you've noticed. At any rate, said mental slump is making it harder to write coherent blog entries (and fanfics, original stuff, etc.).

So, while I'll continue to blog as often as I can, I'll probably be writing more what-I-did-today entries and go-check-out-this-link entries, interspersed with my usual perky hate-mongering lunacy whenever I can get my brain out of first gear. Since said throwaway entries are easier to write, well, I'll probably be blogging more often.

In other words, like those fast food restaurants that made the country great and overweight, I'll be weighing quantity over quality until I can get back on track.

And without further ado, below this entry lies the hate you're looking for.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 05:09 AM EST
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Friday, June 14, 2002

In the beginning, it was just that I hated kids.

Kids. Shit. Little screaming tribal horrors that they are, destroyers of property and personality and intellect, ravening beasts of endless selfishness and greed. I would rather raise a wolverine than a child, and if you ever hear that I've squatted out a mini-me, hit me with a shovel, for I have been replaced with a pod person.
It may strike you that I might not make the best mother, and you'd be right. I have to forcibly restrain myself from punching total strangers who annoy me for five minutes in a restaurant; what terrors would I visit on a little helpless wailing banshee-thing that was attached to my tit or my leg or my wallet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for eighteen years and up?

But then it occurred to me. I hate the elderly, too.

And I don't really know why. Something about the way they look and move just sends primal terror screaming down my spine, as if once the human race was hunted nearly to extinction by slow-moving wrinkled predators and the atavistic terror that was instilled in my forebears came to the forefront in me a hundred thousand years later.
Maybe it's a revulsion beaten into me by the youth-loving culture of America. Maybe it's just me being a raving bigot. Maybe it's because, like with children, I've never been sure of how to handle the elderly, and usually end up nervous and silent. The elderly, like children, can smell fear.

And on further thought, I came to the conclusion that I hate teenagers, too.

Because once I was one, and what a total fucking moron I was. What total fucking morons we all were, every conformist sheep-like one of us terrified of ostracism, every non-conformist surly one of us proud of the fact that 'no one understands me'...
They want to be adults and children at once, have the perks of both states and the drawbacks of neither. Those few of them that can see past their own needs and wants are stifled and ostracized by the others, until the sheer pressure of it causes this 'fault' to correct itself. The rallying cry of the teenager is "But it's not fair!" Or perhaps it's "It's not my fault!"

Furthermore, I discovered, I hated most people of childbearing age.

Parents. Gods above, those parents who want the entire world to be sterilized and G-rated for their little cublings, who let said cublings run riot and do whatever the hell they please, who pump out one squalling resource hog after another. Parents who sacrifice everything that they own, and earn, and are, simply for the dubious pleasure of raising their precious sperm'n'egg omelets, and then can't understand why the rest of the world doesn't fall at their children's feet...
How many more pleasures must I lose to their insane drive to clean up the dirty world, just so their offspring can run around wild and free and barefoot unattended? How many more hours must I work to cover for them while they tend their children's sniffles? How much more money must I be taxed to pay for schools that I will never use?

And finally, curiously, I turned to the one group left, the twentysomethings, my own age group. And I found that I hated them as well.

Must we all be lost in nostalgia and pathos? Must all our bonding be over this antique video game or that old TV show or these old toys or those old cartoons? How much more whining must I hear about our generation being the first to do worse than our parents'? Do I have to live in a twisting spiral of need for the eighties for the rest of my life?
And we are so fucking self-centered! The first generation to suffer by being born under the seventies' relentless "I'm Okay - You're Okay" bullshit, the first generation to have it hammered into our little heads that every single one of us is special! Guess what? We're not! We're all a bunch of self-satisfied sheep, indistinguishable from each other at ten paces!

And having completed this exercise, I stood back and I gazed upon what I had wrought, and I realized that I hated them all, every human being that exists; I had consigned them all equally to the pit of my despair. And, seeing this, I wept.

And eventually, there in the darkness of my pit, there shone a ray of hope that dried my tears.
And that ray of hope was this: I was full of shit.

Oh, it's certainly easy to hate a stereotype, isn't it? Look at the above! Loaded words and hyperbole, slanted viewpoints and careful omission, incendiary and biased and wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
And I reassessed my stance. I stepped back and looked at it from another angle. And I came up with another thesis:
I hate the stupid, the short-sighted, and the snotty. I hate the self-righteous, the self-centered, and the snippy. In short, I hate the stereotypes, and they must go away.
And, save for that small circle of people that I actually like, everyone else can go to hell for all I care. Or go to heaven, for all I care. Or, heck, go to Baskin-Robbins, for all I care.

I'm still a terrible beast, of course. But now I'm more uncaring than hateful, and I can deal with that.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 04:59 AM EST
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Wednesday, June 12, 2002

You know what's really good, especially in the summer?

Get some seedless green grapes (big and sweet), break them up into little clumps, put the clumps in Ziploc bags, and freeze 'em.

Frozen grapes take on this wonderfully slushy texture like a granita and get sweeter in the bargain; you can eat 'em like candy and they won't ever melt all over you and drip sticky 'grape'-flavored fluid down your sleeves like certain other frozen things not that I'm biased.

Trust me on this one!

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 12:40 AM EST
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Monday, June 10, 2002

There's a man-made 'lake' hidden away in the back of our apartment complex. It's about, oh, a hundred feet from the front door of the Geekery to the lake.

So I went out there at about 6:15 this morning, to stretch my legs a little before I went to bed. (What? Shut up.) It's not unusual to see flocks of cranky Canada geese out there, with goslings in the spring; sometimes we get mallards too.

This morning, when I went out there, there was a female blue heron wading around in the shallows. I was able to get pretty close and gawk at it before it flew away.

Sometimes I love New Stepford, Ohio and how close to rural it still is. We have groundhogs and rabbits instead of squirrels! There are deer and raccoons and possums and great horned owls all living around here!... and probably the occasional mountain lion and coyote, too, but, uh.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 06:52 PM EST
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Saturday, June 8, 2002

I may not be blogging quite as much in the next few weeks.

Or I might be blogging more. Go figure.

Anyway, a bit of an explanation is in order.
Basically, I'm tired. I've spread myself a little too thin recently, and I've been pushing myself too hard. So for the next couple of weeks I'll be retreating a little and rethinking my priorities a bit. The blog will continue, as will the fansite, I promise, although updates may not come along as often in the future.

Anyway, we'll see. I'll still be here, and I'll still blog when the urge strikes me, and I'll answer email and stuff.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:57 PM EST
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Thursday, June 6, 2002

Have I mentioned that I have a LiveJournal? I have a LiveJournal. There's no reason to go look at it, though. I barely post anything there, except occasional blatherings about food to make sure the account doesn't vanish from inactivity. The LiveJournal exists so that I can maintain a big ol' friends list and read everyone else's LiveJournals in one sweep. Which means that I in my turn happen to be on several people's friends lists.

Which, in a roundabout fashion, brings me to the topic of this post, which is, of course, sex.

A Friend Who Shall Remain Nameless For His Own Good Unless He Cares To Own Up made a lengthy viewable-by-certain-friends-only LJ post about sexual fantasies. Namely, the fact that the women he ran across didn't seem to ever have any. And the poor unsuspecting dear made the mistake of a) including me on said viewable-by-certain-friends-only list and b) asking, publicly, why this was so, that the women he ran across didn't seem to have sexual fantasies.

The following blog is a serious retooling and expansion of the answer I gave him, which was probably a lot longer and more in-depth than he was looking for. But hey, if I'm really lucky maybe that's one of his fantasies.

Of course, most of this is sheer opinion, and anecdotal to boot. If I had hard numbers for this sort of thing, I'd be selling articles about it to major publications instead of just writing a little blog. But you knew all that.

It's not that women in general don't have sexual fantasies. It can't be. What else are romance novels but sexual fantasy catering to women? I suppose it's possible that by depending on fantasies created by writers they lose their ability to create their own, but you'd think they would at least be able to call up a particularly evocative scene to recreate.
Sexual fantasies for women, even quote-normal-unquote women, are everywhere. Romance novels, certain parts of mainstream movies, strutting boybands, pretty-boy actors... and this, of course, only covers the heterosexual end of the spectrum. So, for the moment, let's assume that women do, indeed, have sexual fantasies. (Fair enough, judging from personal experience. Ahem.) Therefore, the question becomes not 'why don't women have sexual fantasies?' but 'why won't they share their fantasies with me when I'm willing to share mine with them?'.

What I'm thinking is this: either the depth of your fantasy and the obvious amount of time you'd spent refining it was intimidating (possible) or they were too shy to actually share their own fantasies (also possible).

I am most definitely not going to get off on a tangent about women's sexuality being repressed in our current culture here. Boring (if quite possibly true). So, let's examine these possibilities.

1). The possibility of intimidation. You, being the generous sensitive new-age male that you are, volunteer to go first. You then share your fantasy, and it's so detailed and well-thought-out that her more nebulous fantasies don't seem like much. And she, therefore, wimps out and tell you she doesn't have any fantasies. I'm not so inclined to accept this one, except possibly on a case-by-case basis.
I would, however, be willing to believe that her fantasies were less detailed and more generally sensory in nature. In other words, her fantasies aren't a scripted play-by-play, but more of a certain sustained mood, leaving her with less in the way of concrete words to share with you and more in the way of a combination of emotions and mood that is hard to express properly in speech. It seems consistant with my own experience.
Anecdotal. Anecdotal! Moving on.

2). The possibility of shyness. Actually, this one ties into repression just a bit. It's not unusual (for me, at least) to speak to heterosexual women who believe that their sexuality is, quite plainly, embarrassing. And you know, the younger they are, the more this is likely to be true. In that case, it would probably embarrass them too much to actually share their fantasies, no matter how well they knew you; but somewhere, they would have some. So, they'd probably just weasel out of answering the question by saying 'I don't have any'.

She might be afraid that you'll laugh at something she holds dear, or think she's depraved, or not love her as much once you've seen the 'real' her, or something. That, uh, that's a big problem right there. To go off on a tangent:
Women do, in general, mature a lot faster than men, and are ready to think about love and relationships earlier as well. I spent years and years and years of my adolescent life being told to be careful how I acted around boys, not because I might get in trouble, but because I might scare them off if I was too plain about how I was feeling and what I was thinking. And it turned out to be true, over and over again; at that age, boys were really nervous about such things, and being anything but coy and girlish would make them scatter like panicked sheep.
And I've internalized that message: boys are skittish. Be very careful, you might scare them off. If you're too honest, too open, too blunt about your needs, they'll run away. Not that this is quite as true now that we're all nearly thirty, but it's still an idea that's been ingrained into my mind. I can't get over it. Maybe they can't, either. If she loves you -- or even likes you an awful lot -- she's probably willing to subvert parts of herself to make sure she keeps you. No matter how counterproductive it actually turns out to be, locking away her fantasies for fear they're inadequate or shameful.
Also, think of how furiously embarrassing she might find it if she did take that chance and open up to you and then you somehow didn't understand, or missed the point. I've noticed that some men -- okay, a lot of men -- just don't have a clue about women's sexuality. For example: go to a truck stop somewhere in rural Texas. Find some man with at least three prison tattoos and a belt buckle the size of your head and a big chaw under his lower lip. Buy him a cup of coffee. Then try and explain the concept of slash fanfiction to him.
... okay, that was way over the top, but I think you get my point. Which is: Mooncalf loves to go off on stupid tangents. But frankly, if you don't understand that men and women are capable of having radically different sexualities, you haven't been paying attention in class; if you think that women are going to get off on much the same things you do, ninety-five women out of a hundred you'll be wrong. Unfortunately, this includes fantasies and the sharing of fantasies.
If you want to relate to a woman's sexuality, you have to learn to think like a woman... or at least fake it very, very well. But don't try to fake it. Women can smell fakery. It smells like fear but oilier.

3). And of course it's always also possible that these particular women just don't fantasize very much. Some women don't. Not that I've ever understood that, but.

And be aware that a typical woman who has a sexual fantasy ready and waiting for you may only be saying what she thinks you want to hear. That, or she's one hell of a libertine. If she tells you her fantasy, and it's exactly like one of yours, she's probably faking it. God knows what else she fakes.
Alternately, this might mean that she's already been asked this question before, by someone else, and therefore she's already gone through the awkward bits before you even got there. Heh. Heh heh heh.

Sheer opinion, of course, but: for most American women, learning to be open and honest about their sexual fantasies takes practice, as well as plenty of patience and loving tolerance on the part of their partners. Women's sexual honesty is not something that our culture seems to encourage.
Furthermore, it's not unusual for guys to be a little nervous about this. God knows it's been hard enough for me to get guys to open up about it. It's not simply 'getting your partner to be open with you', it's 'finding someone who enjoys the same level of openness that I do'.

What I'd recommend you do is not just flat-out ask 'what are your fantasies?' but ask specific questions. Specific questions that can generally be answered with 'yes' or 'no'. Lots of them. 'Do you like this?' is more likely to get a real answer than 'so what are your fantasies?', especially if she can hide her face against your shoulder and blush herself stupid. And keep at it; don't get discouraged. If she gets mad at you for pushing, well, now you know to treat her a little more gently, or go find yourself a more open playmate if it really bothers you.
And, you know, be sure the mood is right for this sort of thing; don't ask her over breakfast, ask her in bed when she's relaxed. Maybe even just after having sex. Bonus points if it's dark. Darkness helps. So does a soft voice. Be gentle with her, sir.
(Suddenly, I have an urge to write smut based around this premise. Um.)
Alternately, watch romantic movies with her and watch to see when her mouth falls open. Not porn, you insensitive boob. Romantic movies. Chick flicks. Pick up the books she reads and flip through them. Or just spring surprises on her and see how she reacts; be careful with that one, though. Really careful.

Boy, have I ever overanalyzed this question; at the same time, I've left a lot out. And I know that a lot of my female friends have read all this and are now ready to call me an idiot over it; this is because I have excellent taste in friends and most of them are not sexually repressed at all!

No, I won't be giving you their numbers.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 05:11 AM EST
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Wednesday, June 5, 2002

I'm usually not much for 'link-and-comment' entries, but:

This is the most charming and wonderful news report I have seen in a long, long, long time.

Dear god, I hope it's true.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:23 PM EST
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Tuesday, June 4, 2002

... okay, this promises to be a totally random entry.

Have you ever noticed how cheap and/or poorly-made desserts taste more like sugar than anything else?

I first noticed this at a local dessert cafe' in Indianapolis, land of the Indy 500, the pointless dessert cafe' and the occasional raccoon. You would think that this cafe', being so upscale and specializing in five kabillion kinds of dessert items, would have rich desserts, but it didn't. They were... well, poor. The chocolate cake tasted like sugar first and chocolate second, a pale pitiful weak version of chocolate lost in all that bland sweet, instead of having a rich powerful chocolate taste. Every dessert I ever tried there was the same -- lemon, strawberry, caramel, vanilla, all imprisoned behind that vague white sugar wall like political dissidents. Political dissidents of taste.
I wonder if that particular failing had anything to do with the fact that said dessert cafe' changed hands three times while we were living there and ended up having to put in a dinner menu to survive? No one ever learned. Nothing ever changed. Maybe they thought Midwesterners weren't sophisticated enough to know the difference. Maybe they themselves didn't actually know the difference, figuring that sweet=desserty and desserty=sweet, QED, end of equation. Sad, sad thought.

I suppose that refined sugar is cheaper and easier to get and store than chocolate or the best vanilla or fresh seasonal fruit. I suppose that a lot of Americans would be fooled by it, or would at the very least never think there was anything different to try. We're raised eating 'chocolate' bars that are closer to wax than chocolate and cookies that contain more chemicals than taste, after all. But that, my friends, is a rant for a different time.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 01:54 AM EST
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Saturday, June 1, 2002

So.

I have this collection of tiny animals, carved from stone. They're all about the size of the pad of my thumb, carved from various semiprecious stones and polished until shiny; they feel a lot like those little tiny plastic dinosaurs I loved as a kid, but even better, because my other collectible fetish is shiny rocks, so these little stone animals satisfy both my nostalgia and my fetish in one swell foop.

Anyway.

These animals -- twenty or so -- all stand on the little Chinese hardwood chest that I keep my art supplies in, on the big L-shaped desk I'm sitting at now. Unfortunately, since I live down here and work on this desk for twelve hours a day, the little stone animals get jostled around a lot, and tend to fall over.

I looked up just now and the giraffe was snuggling the whale. I mean, really obviously snuggling the whale, with its head resting peaceably on the whale's head and everything. They made a really cute if improbable and noncanonical couple, poster animals for miscegenation.

Boy.

And some people complain about slash being improbable fangirlish wish-fulfillment.

Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:29 PM EST
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