Odd dream: A watch.

My dream the other week:

I look at my left wrist, and I have a sleek new hip new Rolex on, made of high quality rubber or plastic, with bright yellow around the dial and then mixed into a light gray that goes extends throughout the wristband.

I'm satisfied, since I know that bright yellow is a daring color choice for me, and yet I can pull it off.

I need to detach from material possessions!: Whiskey, nice-looking polyester slacks.

When I was in the lobby having a beer before the BDSMer wedding as my friend was getting his ushering duties straight, my one hippie friend from Michigan texted me from my apartment saying that she was hanging out with my roommate and that she hoped it was okay that she was drinking my whiskey, which she had found under the sink.

I texted back that that was fine – she’s had some before when we’ve done crosswords together at my place – and I joked that it went well with the leftover Hamburger Helper in the fridge (=stuff of my roommate’s).

Anyways, the next morning, I go to get some cleaning stuff out from under the sink, and the entire bottle of whiskey is *gone*.  Then, when I texted my one hippie friend from Michigan, she apologized profusely and said she honestly didn’t know what happened to it, and she said she’d get me some more since she accidentally went on a bender the previous night.

I was a bit ticked since I got that liquor for a third of retail price thanks to a fire sale at the art school (they changed caterers and had to sell off their old stock for rock-bottom prices!), but what can you do, and I said a couple of cheap bottles of wine would be fine since it'd cost her more than I spent if she went to replace the whiskey.

There was probably $20 worth of booze left in the bottle, and that’d be equivalent, I thought; I wouldn’t want my to make my friend pay $60 for a new bottle when what she drank didn’t cost me nearly that much.

Also, I had been upset at the wedding since right before I got out the door I accidentally burned a line on the right knee of my nice-looking polyester slacks, since I accidentally had the iron on too hot.

The recommended solution of vinegar didn’t work, though I’m trying sandpaper now and that seems to do the trick since the fabric underneath the glossy part is intact, you just need to get the burned glossy part off.

In any case, I should be less attached to material possessions and not care if anything happens to them, which is irrational.

It’s like, do I really expect a piece of cloth to last forever?

Wedding for some BDSMers!

So the other weekend my one (straight) BDSM friend came back into town for a wedding and was scheduling all his friends in to hang out, and since we were going to hang out the day of the wedding, he asked me to me to be his Platonic date for it, which I of course did.

There, my schtick was, when the other guests asked me how I knew the bride and groom, I’d be like, “I don’t, I’m just [my (straight) BDSM friend’s first and last name]’s arm candy.”

Even before that, in the lead-up to the wedding once I knew I was going, I just couldn’t stop thinking about jokes.

Like, they cut the cake, and then they cut the bride.

Or wedding party favors are engraved handcuffs.

Or, as my one friend texted, they use the garter to tie people up – to which I replied that whichever guy catches it, the maid-of-honor uses it on him for cock-and-ball-torture!

(“That’d be perfect for that,” my one [straight] BDSM friend actually was like, when I told him that when we met up to take the subway out to the hotel where the wedding was at.)

Overall, I was hoping too that people would ask me how the BDSM wedding was, so I could just say, “Oddly restrained.”

Anyhow, before the ceremony started, I ran into the one BDSM guy who was guest speaker at my sex class and his wife.

He totally had a fun time speaking to my class and would do it again, and his wife had recently started a feminism group at the dungeon where they have chats and guest speakers and read books and stuff.

“No shit,” I was like

“That’s right,” she was like, “It is a no-shitting event.”

The ceremony was cute, and since the bride and groom were both nerds, at the pre-dinner cocktails then dinner they had lots of “props” set out like you’d see at a Fantasy Fan Convention.

The Captain America mask was oddly comfortable, and it was pretty easy to have the shield on your arm and still hold a drink at the same time, unlike the Sonic Screwdriver, which looked nice, but you always had to hold on to.

They also had a gigantic very distinctive looking sword, and when I asked someone which character’s it was, they were like, “It’s Cloud’s.”

“Isn’t that Final Fantasy?”, I was like.

“Yes,” the woman replied.  “Seven.”

Each table had a fantasy or sci-fi theme too with magnets as take-home favors for guests, and so I made sure to try to get a few Dr. Who magnets for a friend who’s a big fan.  Only, since I don’t know Dr. Who all that well and neither did the people at the table, I selected a few magnets with people who the wedding guests at that table thought were Dr. Who and then had to go find people in the know who could verify.

“Hey, is this Dr. Who?”, I asked the one BDSM guy who spoke at my class.

“Yes,” he was like.  “Number Four.”

He then verified that the other magnet was Dr. Who Number Eleven.

Interestingly, some of the people you could pick out as kinksters from them having dyed hair and from them being body non-normative and whatnot, but others weren’t so clear, and then there were a lot of relatives too.

Because of that, pretty much every time you asked a somewhat (young) person how they knew the bride or groom, you’d get bland and somewhat evasively vanilla answers like I heard my one (straight) BDSM friend give, like, “We met through mutual friends and stayed in touch since we’re both in the same line of work.”

Later, as I was chit-chatting with someone by the dance floor and my one (straight) BDSM friend kept drinking and drinking, he stumbled up and joined the convo.  

Shortly after the woman I was talking to left, he was like, “See [guy’s first name] over there,” and tipped his head across the room at this short lawyer guy in his early 40s, who was laughing and chatting with his slightly younger wife, a thin (white) thing in a pseudo-Victorian black dress with a little too much lace around the collar

“It’s just great to see a submissive male end up in a long-term relationship like that, that almost never happens.”

Then, after a pause, he was like, “You know, it gives you hope!”.

Later, he dropped that of the bride and groom, the groom was dominant, and he also clarified that the BDSM guy who spoke in my class wasn’t *really* a submissive even though he has led a support group for submissive males, since he would top his wife on occasion and “they really switch it up a lot.”

Later, I chatted with his wife out in the hallway.

She has been to a legendary women-only festival a few states over, and though she found it very powerful to get into the wilderness and menstruate with thousands upon thousands of women at once, she felt very strongly that trans*women should be allowed in, and that people can work around issues like seeing an occasional penis in the group showers.

She also thought that people at the women’s only festival were “soft” on women’s violent behavior directed towards men.

She then told the story of how since there weren’t enough women workers available to pump the portapotties, the festival organizers arranged to have male workers come in in the middle of the night to do that.  Although a cadre of women surrounded them and shouted “Men on the grounds!  Men on the grounds!” to warn away any women who might not want to see them, even then a lot of people threw wet toilet paper at them, and sometimes even bottles.

“And they were just there to help them and pump out their shit from the ground,” she was like.  “That is just an awful way to treat someone.  I'm sorry if that makes me less of a feminist somehow, but I see that as just wrong.”

Roomate’s story: Party at her poly friends.

My one roommate knows a lot of people in the poly scene, and was recently at a party where she got drunk and ended up somehow lightly spanking her (female) friend in the middle of the room as a bunch of guys stood in a semi-circle and watched.

It’s awkward now, she says, though not as awkward as the one guy who always wears a red clown nose and a big hairy dildo sticking out of his pants and goes around asking everyone to have sex with him.

“Which is really funny by the way,” she was like, “Though it can get awkward.”

“But is he hot?”, I was like.

“He’s short and hairy,” she was like.

An okay night barhopping downtown (2 of 2): Young (Mexican-American) bartender.

At a restaurant bar tucked away off the main shopping strip, I did some reading for school and ended up talking with this young (Mexican-American) bartender, who had been born in Mexico City but came to the city when he was one-and-a-half and had otherwise grown up here.

He was very laid-back and fresh-faced and positive.

He said he wanted to be a genetic engineer, and his girlfriend wanted to be a botanist who worked part-time in the fashion industry.

He also said that the older he got, the more he didn’t want to go out, but rather to stay in and use that money for other stuff, like how he and his girlfriend converted the chimney in their apartment to an indoor garden.

He now lives near the regional airport – “You know the southwest,” he said, when I spoke to him knowledgeably about the area – but he had grown up in this heavy Mexican area north of there and named the cross streets.

“You mean near [the Latina tranny bar]?”, I was like.

“Yeah!”, he was like, “Just a few blocks from there!”.

He then told me that a lot of (young) (Mexican) guys do bachelor parties there, since there’s always someone who isn’t in the know and talks about how hot the ladies are and sometimes even ends up going further with one.

He also said that the bakery next door can get pretty happening since it opens just as the bar closes, and since even the 24-hour McDonald’s in the area has the dining room locked at that time, that that place gets nuts since all the drunks flood in there from next door and get pastries and coffee.

He then said to try the apple turnovers, which they don’t make very often, but are really good.

He also said his mom runs a lunchtruck company and has a $1200 monthly contract with that company for bread.

An okay night barhopping downtown (1 of 2): Putting on the Ritz.

So one night a few weeks ago when I was downtown I went to a number of downtown bars, to hit my weekly new bar quota.

The first one was the inside bar at the Ritz (I had already been to their patio bar this summer), and as I sat down to read, there was this older (white) couple to my right, a guy in a business suit and a woman with short dyed blonde hair and a cigarette voice who looked like nothing so much as an aging lesbian who’d seen some hard living.

“Time to go,” she said 2 seconds after I sat down, "I’ve eaten and drinken way too much” - which immediately made me recognize that she formed her past participles kind of like I do (I think I say "drunken").

Later, the (Filipino) bartender was saying the people were Panera franchise owners and 1 of the 2 owned like 16 franchises, there was a conference in town.

“Stay another twenty minutes and you can see everyone coming back from dinner.”

“Why?”, I was like, “So I can vomit?”

Then, I explained to him that I found it sickening how much people like that lived off the labor of other people, esp. people who had low-to-minimum wage jobs and were trying to raise families.

“Really,” I was like, “Do they really do all that much?  They're not the ones going in to work every day and bringing in all the money.”

He giggled nervously but gleefully.

Then, I added, “Three words," and with each word I defiantly stuck out a finger:  Tax - those - assholes.”

Then, I left.

Subway experience of my one Greek student.

The other week my one Greek student was going in to work in the morning on the subway, and this one guy in sloppy clothes holding a garment bag got a cell call and began speaking loudly on the phone and was like, “What?! You mean the meeting’s happening earlier?”.

Then, as soon as he got off the phone, he started opening the garment bag to get his dress shirt out, then he began taking off his shirt and put on his dress shirt and laced up his tie.

As soon as he was going to go unzip his pants, though, this guy standing next to him pulls out a badge and is like, “Stop!  I work with the transit authority.”

At that point, the guy breaks character and said he was doing a sociological experiment, and this girl a few seats down stood up and said she had been taking notes as part of a group project for class, to see how people reacted when group norms were violated.

After those two got off the train, my one Greek student talked with the transit cop, and it turns out that he wasn’t involved with the experiment, he was just going to a dentist’s appointment and happened to be there and have his badge on him.

“You know,” my one Greek student was like, “I don’t think it’s about group norms so much, it’s about how much you’re worried that someone who’s doing something crazy could do something crazy to you if you try to intervene.”

He then told me about this (young) (black) guy who looked like he was on drugs who once came on the train with a boombox turned on full blast, and he kept looking around like he wanted someone to ask him to go turn it down so he could go off on them.