August 5, 2011
Beauty, or something like it.
At the end of the day, I’ve come home with my calves feeling like the devil is tugging my legs by the ankles, blisters rising up on my toes and my skin all bumpy under my foundation like no-slip-grip rubber. It takes several swipes across my face with a white wash cloth before I stop taking off skin coloured pigment. It’s a sort of creepy effect, like melting or rubbing away like cheap paint on a well loved toy, and I keep expecting to see the actual colour in my skin is gone when I check the results in a mirror.
Today I paid $13 for a Greek woman with a sea star necklace to pull about 50% of my eyebrows out. She was relatively pleasant, but my masochism does not extend to having the needle like sensation of tweezers pulling out individual hairs after hot wax has done the heave lifting part of the clean up. I’ve been warned that repeated plucking kills the hairs so that they will not come back, but evidently my hair doesn’t take the hint.
It’s the middle of Montreal’s “fashion festival” and if you pop down to McGill College in the evening, you can hear loud cheerful strutting music and watch marionette like women bounce their way around the black circuit of the stage, showing off whatever is crammed into the local chain stores. Reitmans, for example. Lots of six foot tall models who look there abouts my age (but are probably younger) wearing middle aged lady clothing and flopping around on straight, stilt like legs. They don’t all look starving, just without muscle which adds to their bouncy appearance.
The freebies are less than worth it, a lot of spam address gathering competitions, give aways that ran out of loot and booze booths. I got my eyes done by the Lili Rouge booth, which was giving free makeup “touch ups”. I regret I was not particularly impressed. Lili Rouge has adorable branding and decorative doo-hickies and package art, but either my skin was not in the mood to co-operate, the makeup artist wasn’t having a good day or the products were really dismal. Mascara that turned my lashes into crusty spikes. A “magic liquid” that converted black eye shadow into a liner, which then had all the negative properties of both liquid and stick liner, and lastly a primer that did nothing to stop everything on my eyes from trying to escape onto my cheeks. Sorry ma’am, try again!
Speaking of things that annoy and are beauty related, I was wandering through the Eton Centre and allowed and aggressive sales agent to try this product on me. The version he used was identical, down to the sales pitch being ripped from the ad copy, except for a small colour difference. Oh, and a ten dollar mark up (before taxes) on the brush and a doubled price on their little hand care kits . Do they work? Yup, they put a slick finish on the surface of your nail. Do they work the way they’re advertised? No, despite claims of the magic oil wicking properties of the “diamond dust, cotton and silk” faces of the nail buffing brush, all there is going on is various grades of abrasive. No I will not pay $30 for a block of foam and fine grit sandpaper with a good story.
June 12, 2011
Dear Reader:
F1 race cars are zipping around the track, filling the city with sounds of their rip-roaring circulation and their unmuffled engines race around and around. Every so often the sky gets jealous of the ground and tries to join it, via great big torrents of rain the flood the parking lot behind my apartment until you expect to see a small ark and animals float past.
I’m busy with french homework (self assigned) working my way through study books borrowed from the library. I’ve written a lot of emo stuff, but for the most part I have to remind myself I’ll probably have few other periods in my adulthood where I can just put my feet up and read a book at 10 in the morning. So, it’s honestly not -that- bad.
I finished the pencil for a french comic, which, if I can get it inked and scanned, I will post up here in another few days.
Love,
~Phalene
June 8, 2011
I’ve graduated, with not quite the results I was hoping for, and joined the swarm of job seekers, feeling all too much like a petitioner dogging the king’s footsteps and he meanders through Versailles. I have my next interview on Friday, and in the meantime I’m attempting to make ends meet (or at least get some meaty ends) on freelance writing, about the only thing I’m qualified to do.
Which is not what I wanted to do, since I’m both sloppy and poorly disciplined. For example today I knocked off only three articles and one re-write (which was rejected) and over the course of last month only desperate fear made me churn out some twenty articles. Basically I’m doing half days of work, when I really need to put in much, much more. as it stands I’m committed to write on Saturday too.
On the plus side, I’ve promised myself a trip to the library on Thursday, I have an interview on Friday and there’s a lovely thunderstorm crack-booming overhead.
April 17, 2011
Sorting Second Hand Books
“Book is badly smoke damaged, part of a huge heap dumped in a pile outside the First Reformed Baptist Church. A lot of the rest were too sooty to save. Title: Stories of Sodomy and Atheism for Little Children”
“Book missing some pages… Actually the entire middle of the book. There’s a space here with some bags of dried leaves, maybe oregano? Otherwise in excellent condition except for the smell of patchouli. Title: Opening the Inner Eye”
“Book has crayon markings on all the pages in pink, orange and burnt umber. Title: “Alternative Birth Control” evidently didn’t work.”
“Book is leather bound, appears to be a private family genealogy on cursory reading, probably not worth mainstream sale. Very fine paper, previous owner “Gideon” has name stamped in gold on the cover on the bottom left. Probably a collector’s item for Jews who care about their heritage, judging from names mentioned in the first few chapters.”
“19
March 25, 2011
Reviewing Jane Erye (2011)
Having been in the public domain so long that the copyright has expired, I won’t apologize for or avoid spoilers.
A frantic, flat push through the story, where the only good acting came out Dame Dench’s small part as Mrs. Fairfax, and the only good parts were what little of the original writing managed to squirm from beneath the crushing weight of the overwrought story. Two hours is not a lot of time to tell such a long tale, and pieces were understandably cut, but the break neck pace and removal of any side plots prevented a chance for the characters to gain enough momentum to sound other than silly- case in point, upon Jane fleeing Mr. Rochester upon discovering his attempted bigamy, we see her sobbing a lot and getting rained on, but way it was shot make it seem like she took a three mile walk before collapsing on the doorstep and claiming her life had been saved- all this mewling and carrying on on the grey horizon and it was evidently too much work to shoot night falling?
At least the actress was deliberately styled as plain, but they went so far into the direction of reserved that they blasted out the other side and into a sort of numbness. Mr. Rochester was nicely loopy and mean, but his manic intensity and sarcasm appeared to merely make Jane very uncomfortable, making the idea of her having romantic longings, or anything really, absent. And when she is quieted that makes Mr. Rochester seem a great deal like a man trying to build a relationship with a department store mannequin. It makes him seem sad and silly and suffering from poor boundaries, not magnetically drawn to a plain little sparrow with quick wisdom and control. Gone was all the warmth of their flirting and they leaped from first meeting to sucking face without hardly touching the space between. Bronte’s text comes with Jane conveying emotion in narration, not action, so I can see where a lack of description of how she felt might have cued the actress to embrace bleakness- but really! Rather than seeming deep beyond compare she comes across as empty, but the sort of emptiness where the bottom appears to be made of pure boredom.
Similarly the trio who rescues her get hardly enough time to make them worth giving parts to actors. The story requires their presence as a backdrop, since this time the events of Jane Eyre up until she flees Mr. Rochester, but we are told (not shown) in one short scene that Jane perceives St. John as fearsome, and beyond that, the low key nature of every interaction makes her refusal of St. John’s proposal as puzzling as her acceptance of Mr. Rochester- all her talk of St. John knowing nothing of love and only knowing duty comes across as a non sequitur since neither pairing seems to have the energy to muster more than a polite discussion of the weather.
You cannot have everything, and this muted voiced and muted coloured attempt is a cautionary tale of favouring events over emotion- this is Jane Eyre as a rapidly spoken monotone.
March 16, 2011
Kink: The Dangers of Reliance on the Idea of a Good Dom
One of the hardest things to swallow about my sub(dom?)-category in kink is that people expect me to be good at it. There’s both a certain expectation for natural talent and years of practice and a whole bunch of baggage controlling expected conduct. Doms don’t cry, they can use a single tail without putting someone’s eye out, if they have a relationship problem it’s -always- a failure of training methods, they can tie up anyone in perfect, no loss of circulation restraints in under a minute, they always win arguments … the list of expectations goes on to the point that it starts sounding like something I need to take night classes and go to boot camp for.
This is not a good thing. It’s one of the things that I think repulses women from wanting to try the role as an identity (because a lot of the ideal dom traits are also idealized male traits) and it perpetuates an uncomfortable amount of non-consensual straitjacketing while taking a big piss onto the capacity and personal autonomy of subs. It’s also really unhealthy.
The corollary of the idea that being a dominant takes training is the idea that dom is an aspirational role not a sexual orientation. People explicitly say this shit is so hard that you need to practice for a decade or so, or that a novice dom in their twenties can’t really have a D/s relationship until their thirties. As well as allowing a bunch of much older busybodies to hold court about the importance of finding a mentor (by this, they mean themselves as teachers, of course) or understanding the gravitas of the role they hold as oldbies (and thus respecting them more), you have a huge gap of sexual activity where it’s as if you weren’t allowed to call yourself gay until middle age.
*I am not allowed to be a bad dom.* Seriously, the idea is occasionally taken to the extreme that I can’t have sex in this fashion without someone holding my hand. It is simply too dangerous- the bottoms kidneys will explode if the flogger misses or the slave is too psychologically fragile to handle inconsistent and sloppy. Sometimes the advice is basically just to stick to topping and not try to take it out of that rigid framework and sometimes, and this is one of the most offensive pieces of drivel ever, you need to offer yourself in service to someone to learn. The idea of simply being comfortable with sucking at it and doing it a lot anyway is liable to make small armies of people foam at the mouth and call you a menace to society.
(more…)
March 9, 2011
Unexpectedly Kinky
Sometimes the weirdest things hit my buttons
1) Jane Eyre: The novel about the hard minded, independent orphan has unexpected little glimmers of kink, as her object of affection Mr. Rochester is held at arms length and threatened with bondage, physically punished with slaps and pinches for trying to kiss her and squelched whenever he starts waxing too lyrical. Only after he’s been thoroughly humbled with the loss of his sight and implied submission to her caretaking is he allowed back into the comfort of of her open expression of her affection. She might call Mr. Rochester “Master”, but nobody masters her, not poverty, abuse, other people’s drama or her own heart wrenching affection for her employer. I’m actually looking forward to the new movie, which looks very true to the book from the trailer.
2) The movie “Gamer“: An otherwise trashy little piece of sci-fi interested in people’s desire to give up or get control to live out their fantasies culminate in this scene where the arch villain is so power drunk in his ability to turn people into puppets that he’s doing a dance number while trying to kill the hero. Grab your popcorn and don’t expect more than trite pandering and nineties style cyberpunk, but enjoy the potential of a silly, but fun concept.
3) Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty”: Forget the dopey, dreamy princess, as much as I enjoyed the scene with the domestic magic, for me the most interesting character was smart mouth Maleficent. Wickedness never looked so much fun when you get to capture the prince, and in this version, hold him for a full century. I wasn’t ready to extrapolate to potential of having the hottest catch in fairyland locked up in your basement, but his beautifully animated defiant struggles made this a childhood repeat out of all the films I could choose. I know she was supposed to be held up as a scary
4) Good Dick: The name, the posters and the trailers make it sound like a quirky romantic comedy, but it’s anything but on the contrary wise it’s people with demons making the best they can. While the initial stalking behaviour of the male lead is slightly worrisome, the mid point of the film shows care taking and service-y behaviour with violent tease and denial, verbal abuse and basically all the stuff so often fetishized when people talk about submitting to a cruel woman just to make her smile. I’d never advise to base a real relationship off this sort of non-consent, nor would I want to be anywhere near a drama storm, but the non-sex sex scenes are frankly some of the hottest things I’ve seen in film.
5) Queen of the Tournament: Possibly my earliest memory of something illicitly pleasing, I was deeply entranced by the captive brother, illustrated as wan and pale in a dark dungeon, and the power of life and death that the brunette “Queen of the Tournament” had over the situation. I had to wonder what the consequences were for helping free him, and how familiar she was with the prisoner, to the point where I feel tempted to write fan fiction to give it a better ending. This wasn’t the only case- my favourite parts of all the “Castle Life” and medieval history books I had was (asides from the the bountiful storerooms) the inevitable sad little prisoner squirrelled away while they explained the concept of ransom after capture in battle. Always a footnote, always the best part.
March 1, 2011
Kinky Sex Rage- Because Midori asked…
Recently, the kink writer, educator and poster child Midori asked female dominants to cite their top five concerns as fem-doms. He article is here.
My rage list was probably what you’re familiar with… the usual tired old groans I sputter out in this blog when I mumble about my sex life: The lack of porn, the horrid sexism, the abuse of sub men in all the wrong ways (ie in the no-consenting social construction kind), and the ageism. What was interesting was how similar and how different the other women were.
Everyone had their personal bete noires particular to their experience- race, culture, anti-onlineism, the . Most of us had something foul to say when it came to the do-me subs and unsolicited advances or the painful and argument fraught subject of the pros. It wasn’t the content that I noticed though it was that you had a (virtual) room full of people royally pissed off.
It makes me wonder, why are we so angry? Some of it seems to be sexual frustration- not that we want or need to get laid, but that the sexual fantasy and the real world don’t match up. But so much of it came boiling out as a feeling of being discounted, of outrage on the behalf of others and on. How many people hold rage in their breasts because of their sexual orientation? How many of us are really that pissed? I’m a naturally grumpy soul (I think it’s the only way I can stop my perfectionism and anxiety from eating me alive) but are fem doms really as angry as you can get us display? And are we alone in this anger or do fem-subs, man-subs and man-doms all have this readiness to spew forth torrents of hurt, hot words as soon as you turn the spigot?
I’m not being critical, it just makes me wonder how wide spread dissatisfaction is.
February 25, 2011
Florida 2011, part II
Oh Mr. Rochester, you crazy capering romantic, you! I had to take a break from reading, for of all the characters he can only be taken in small doses and it’s pages yet before he gets the humbling he needs.
I’m doing homework on the “linea”, a word I can’t actually spell but refers to the screened in area around the small swimming pool and paved outdoor patio my grandparents have attached to the back of their house (pronounced “Lynn-Ae”). actually I’m procrastinating with a friend, while taking occasional looks at my stats notes to ascertain what does what, but I’m still way more ahead for a midterm than I’ve been in months.
Which says that I suck at adulthood and still prosper when someone else is cleaning and feeding me dinner. But also that I need a comfier study space. I swear I’m going to take one of these chairs home. Pillows, cool breeze and the scent of hyacinthe = awesome.
On less exciting news, my crazy meds got forgotten in Montreal. As such I’m coming off my citalopram. I’m fine (it was making no mood difference) except for the brain zaps. These come and go in frequency, not helped by tree pollen induced allergies. If you’ve never had brain zaps I can’t really describe them, other than a weird shiver effect when you move your eyes quickly. It’ll probably be a week of this, but I don’t drive and I can still function, so other than feeling mildly sea sick on dry land I’m okay.
Otherwise I’ve been out on various mundane errands with grandparents 1 and 2, ate very well at dinner or at the numerous casual eating establishments they drag you to (my grandparents favour the more upscale lunch places, but it’s Florida and here the waiters call you “honey” even at the country club.
Comfortable and casual suits my grandparents, who manage to be completely self assured about their wealth (earned, first generation), missing a lot of the vulgarity and need to prove themselves I associate with poor people who get money in the neighbourhoods I grew up in.