Lying's the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off...

[open mic] Finding your bliss...

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:02:26 GMT

I've skipped out for a few weeks, but it's time for another Open Mic Friday.

Tell me something happy. Tell me a secret. Tell me something you wish you could tell the whole world.

Anonymous comments enabled. All comments screened. IPs logged by default, but girl scout's honor I won't check.

Tell me something.

[open mic] We all need a friend some time...

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:25:33 GMT

It's Friday. Time for another open mic. So, lay it on me kids, tell me something true.

Or lie to me.

It's a beautiful day, and I'm in the mood.

[As usual, all comments screened.]

Secrets and truths...

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:46:58 GMT

There's a secret I'm sitting on. It's not my secret. I can't tell it. So, I'm sitting on it.

But this brings me to what seems to have (maybe is) become a Friday ritual for me.

Anonymous posting is enabled. Comments are screened.

Tell me something.

[not at all cryptic] Yeah, that's right, I'm calling you out...

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:39:33 GMT

He doesn't read my journal, and I should be above this petty bullshit, but I'm not, so let's go ten rounds, and see who drops.

eladria:

You want to call me the fuck out, then do it. Don't hide behind your petty attention grabbing trying to diss me in the open channel ways, and then wonder why my friends stick the fuck up for me. They're not a goon squad, they're my friends, and when you say stupid bullshit like "I'm Scottish because my grandfather emmigrated," you can damn well expect the Scot in the channel to tell you you're full of shit. That wasn't even about me.

Stop making your drama public, if you don't want to get told off. People who don't even KNOW me are tired of your fucking whining.

No love, not ever,
aberrantvirtue

PS - High School called, and they'd like their tired emo self-centered bullshit back please.

Outrage, public and un-silent...

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:08:09 GMT

I want to be a woman in tech. I have dreams of getting a CS degree, doing something brilliant with it, and making my mark. I am satisfied by programming, even if I haven't done much of it.

So Kathy Sierra's post about the Cyber-bullying (and that term doesn't even BEGIN to cover what's happened here) she's undergone distresses me so amazingly much. [Warning: The post may contain pretty bad triggers...there's death threats and a pretty disturbing graphic.]

In a world where we're going for equity between the sexes, where men complain that they don't want to hold doors, what the fuck is this bullshit? This is not okay by any stretch of the imagination, and to imagine that becoming successful in a field which has traditionally been the domain of men will lead to threats, harrassment, and worse makes me sick.

I have no words.

So. Let's discuss how we can make this better.

Open Mike...

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:02:53 GMT

(Anon commenting on, all comments screened...)

I'm feeling the urge for another open mike. Tell me something. A story. A secret. A fantasy (of any sort).

I need a human connection.

I'm in a mood today...

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:57:49 GMT

So I'm hosting a bit of an open mike. Comments screened, anonymous commenting allowed. (I'm not turning off IP logging, but I promise not to look up who you are unless you perpetrate a hate crime, or something similar.)

Tell me something. Dirty if you've got it in you, it's that kind of day.

BPAL Sale, also listed on bpalmarketplace and sinandsalvation

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:45:51 GMT

Due to low fundage, and a changing of body chemestry stuff, I am clearing out some BPAL. I'm asking for $20 each, which will include shipping. I ship from work, using either UPS or FedEx. Unless otherwise marked, each has been tested cleanly with a plastic toothpick 1-3x. I take all flavors of paypal, and ship only within the US. I have feedback here.

On to the smellies!

At Shoulder:
Chrysanthemum Moon - Was bought fresh from lab in a swap, never opened as it was my spare.
Berenice

Above Label:
None at this time.

Just Below Label:
Smut '06 - Applied cleanly with fresh toothpick each time.

Sold:
~~Lucretia~~ chelleann77
~~Candy Butcher~~ krchicken
~~Samhain~~ shiny_sara
~~Gluttony~~ shibakiei
~~Sugar Skull~~ himeykitty
~~Samhainophobia~~ cyranocyrano
~~Stardust '05~~ shibakiei

Hitsory, remembering, and where I was...

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 16:21:43 GMT

12:01a 09/11/2001 - Sitting in a car, discussing life, the universe, and everything. It's late, and cold, but I don't care. Anywhere is better than being home alone, and jmarquiso is good company. We're driving around town in a blue VW. Not this town, a different town, a fairy tale town, everything closed, and we're the only people awake.

I spent that morning with a New Yorker. Not a native of New York, but one of her sons all the same. Watched the color drain from his face as I can only assume it drained from mine. Laughed, with him, nervously as we turned to each other and asked if Orson Welles had been raised from the dead. If this was all some sick news caster's joke.

He hadn't, it wasn't, and we both realized that and sat in cold shock. The coffee tasted burnt, the tears neither of us had to shed then in it.

"Where were you," we thought our children would ask. We would tell them we were sitting at a table with a friend, our eyes glued to the televisions, our hearts and minds a thousand miles away. We would tell them that things never turned out quite the way you thought. We would tell them that we hadn't wanted to be alone.

But we were. In the way that every man is ultimately alone, the sole dweller in his own skin.

04:30a 09/11/2001 - Driving to the diner, a greasy spoon. Falling asleep in the passenger seat, but something compels me to stay in the car. Something drives me to go and drink coffee and eat burned hash browns rather than go home. Alone. Again. I want to be anywhere but in that darkness.

There have been news spreadfs for days, pictures of "Ground Zero". Rubble. New Yorkers on the television telling us how their city and their lives have changed. Psychologists exhorting us to heal, and politicians begging us to remember and feel afraid. "It could happen again," they repeat like a zen mantra, drilling it into our minds and hearts that we are never safe.

But growing up a white woman in the ghetto, I didn't feel safe to begin with.

While a talking head repeats the names and times of the towers falling, I think of the gunshot warzone only a few thousand (to be honest) feet from where I live now. I remember what it was like in my childhood. When BushCo. says "terr-ist", I hear the sights and sounds of crack deals at 3am. When I am told to feel fear, I do. But not of nameless brown-skinned people killing me for the glory of Allah.

And maybe that's the problem.

I don't fear suicide bombers. Statistically speaking, I'm still more likely in this country to die in a car accident than to ever even meet a suicide bomber. I don't fear liquids on planes, and I'm starting to wonder if an armed populace isn't a safer populace. We've spent so much time trying to hunt down a box-cutter or a gelatin based bomb, that we've lost sight of the truth. We're safer, statistically speaking, than we ever have been before. (And I don't mean by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I mean generationally.)

05:45a 09/11/2006 - We walk into the diner, and hear the story. We pale, we sit, I tap a plate with a butter knife accidentally. We order coffee, and food. We eat as if eating will banish the images in our head. My coffee is too sweet, and it still tastes bitter.

And Bush would like us to believe that things like this have never happened to anyone, anywhere. That we were picked on because we're special. That we should live in fear that our economic successes and social "reforms" have made us targets.

And Michael Moor would like us to believe that such things are a drop in the bucket. That our government is using them in malicious ways to control us. He'd like us to take the whispers from his words, the implications that maybe the government set this up, and if they didn't they've been using us all along since then.

And the Left points fingers at the Right, and the Right points fingers at the Left, and everyone blames someone else for something that no one had any control over.

And essential Liberty is sacrificed for temporary (and not particularly successful) Safety.

And the world keeps turning.

When they say "remember", I want to ask how anyone thinks I could forget. When the news reveals another terrorist plot, or transportation bombing (anyone remember London? Or is it only American tragedy you feed on?) some tiny part of my heart flip-flops in anguish.

But I refuse to shut myself into my house and think only approved thoughts. I refuse to shut myself in out of fear.

11:30a 09/11/2001 - We're in a park, the sky is silent. Nothing flies overhead, and the shadow of a bird passes on the grass. It startles me. We sit, swinging together, watching the few cars passing on the road, discussing the fact that everything is closed today. Work, school, life. I don't want to think about the fact that I work in the downtown of one of the most significant cities on the west coast. I have called my family, they're all alive, that's all I can ask. It is the only time I have ever felt nationalistic when passing the American flag on the street.

In the end, we are not so different from any other people who have tasted terrorist actions. The change came because we thought we were invincable. We thought America was different. A promise of Freedom, and Liberty. Hell, our nation got started with a good terrorist act (Boston Tea Party anyone?). For the longest time the only thing we had to worry about as a nation was people within our borders who didn't like what they saw.

Life never stops moving. We're not alone in our suffering, or our rememberance. Let us learn from the maturity of other nations and people, that you can remember and you can sorrow, but that you do not have to live in the memory and the sorrow. Let us learn that it is true, the only thing we must fear is fear. Let us learn that in five years, in ten years, in fifty years, what we will tell our children is not that we were afraid, but that we survived.

And let us, now, be survivors. Let us give up fear, and find strength in the remaining void.

10:45p 09/11/2001 - As I talk with the Canadian, and he reassures me that everything will be fine, I relax. The knot in my stomach loosens a little, and I find I can give myself over to the deep blackness of sleep. Another day ended, the sun will rise again in the morning. Life continues, as it always does.

MEME me!

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:41:45 GMT

Okay, okay. This could be a really bad idea, who knows!

Anonymous comments are enabled (always have been). I IP log, but I promise not to look at the IPs to try to figure out who you are. All comments will be screened, unless you specifically tell me to unscreen yours.

Tell me something. Ask me something. I want communication.

AT&T New Privacy Policy Ensures a Great Lack of Privacy...

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:23:04 GMT

AT&T has a new privacy policy, and it's madatory to agree if you wish to keep your service. The problems?

a) This policy allows them to give your data to any government office they feel like because they, and not you, own your confidential data.

b) If you use their video service, they reserve the right to track your usage and viewing statistics, something actual cable companies are prohibited from doing.

Tomorrow we can drive around this town...

Mon, 08 May 2006 20:56:28 GMT

I've just stripped some people off my friendslist, and I have a feeling I'm about to shake a few more loose. To this end, let me just say that I don't particularly see anything significant about the "friends list" except that it's a bunch of people whose journals I read. I'm keeping people who have content, people whose lives I'm interested in, and people who I regularly speak with either on AIM or LJ. There are a few random others staying who don't meet this criteria...

But if I've taken you off, it doesn't mean I don't like you, or don't want to talk to you. It's just that with school and work, I've realized that even if you only posted 1 post each every week, 225 posts would be a lot to read, and I just don't have that kind of time.

Please stay in touch, and feel free to use the contact info you have for me if you have it.

Porn Protest, beginning logistics!

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 20:02:26 GMT

So, I'm really really mad about this SCOTUS thing in Nitke v. Ashcroft. I'm mad that the government decided her disclaimer wasn't enough. I'm mad that the internet is apparently not actually for porn. I'm spitting angry about censorship. And I've decided to do something about it.

I will be erecting a website to protest this decision. I am going to write a piece of outrageous porn. Something totally wild. And I'm going to post it. But my voice alone isn't enough. Protests work better when people speak together. So I'm inviting you to participate as well. While I don't have the logistics fully pinned down yet, here's my outline:

I'm looking for written pornographic or erotic works. Whatever you want to write in the category is fine by me. I will post each story to it's own page, with a creative commons license. (I ask when you send me the story, you designate the kind of license you'd prefer. You can check them out by going to http://creativecommons.org.) I will have a mass index page/table of contents which lists each story, and its author however they wish to be credited. Above the index will be a paragraph or three talking about why we're doing this, and inviting people to participate. To access this page, you will have to click through a disclaimer, just like Barbara Nitke and Red Rose Stories (both sued for obscenity) possessed. It will affirm that you are over 18, etc.

I'm intending to do the basic work, and get the first version of the site up no later than tomorrow evening. Further revisions will take place as stories come in. I don't intend for this to be a temporary artwork, but rather a long standing page of protest. For more information, or to get involved, e-mail me at nihilism at digitalfreaks dot org.

It's a sad sad day.

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 17:27:28 GMT

Yes, Virginia, Obscenity is a valid legal argument.

That's right, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the decision of the lower courts in regard to Barbara Nitke, that the Communications Decency Act is a viable piece of law.

Obscenity squads with their terribly hypocritically sexy jackboots coming to a venue near you soon.

I think in defiance of this decision I am going to write a graphic piece of porn this evening, possibly leaving it public on my LJ. Anyone with me?

I can only hope this asshole's daughter is never raped...

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:28:24 GMT

Bill Napoli (SD State Sen, R) describes what he would find to be a rape that would justify considering an abortion.

Let us read his own words as to the sort of action which he thinks justifies an abortion.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls "convenience." He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother's life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Right. It's only rape if I was a virgin, and saving myself for marriage. It's only rape if I believe that some Old White Dude in the sky laid out how my life should be lived and I follow it to the letter until some monster brutally takes my virginity away from me.

Because having an abortion is such a walk in the park. Because unwanted sexual contact of any kind is what makes my day...you know, because I said yes to someone, I'm saying yes to everyone.

I don't even have words.

Bill Napoli. What more can I say?

Because I can do better than black humor...

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:32:57 GMT

A manual on how to perform a D&C.

If you don't know what that is, you've probably never before had a reason to know. But now you do. A D&C is the traditional method of aborting a fetus. (Yes. I said fetus. I'm doing my best to point out that if you can cut it off and it will die, it is not alive yet.)

The reason I am posting this link is because, like searching for information on Democracy in China, this is information that people don't want us to have. This is information that they want to keep out of the hands of laypeople. This is part of why they are making it criminal to assist or provide an abortion. South Dakota was first, Mississippi is on their heels, and soon will come Missouri if the article I was linked to this morning is any sign.

This information is not provided so you can judge me. This information is not provided so you can argue how it's okay for some women to have an abortion, but you never would have done so. I don't care if you would have an abortion or not. I feel it is a choice that needs to be made available to any woman in the world who might need to know that it's there. Whether or not she chooses to have an abortion is not my concern...I want her to be able to choose.

To mangle a quote, "In a world where choice is outlawed, only outlaws will have choices."

Disgusting and outrageous. I think everyone can agree on that...

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 22:35:32 GMT

Yet another public post. Be warned, I'm going to post a link to a news story, and then I am going to excerpt parts of that news story, in this entry, and write about them.

This is unacceptable behavior, and anyone (and I do mean anyone) who tries to justify it to me will find themselves very, very quickly removed from my f-list, with nary a backwards glance.

Why I'm glad I get my dose of desert in Black Rock City, and not Iraq. Yes, you read the article right...women soldiers are not hydrating so that they can avoid being RAPED in the dark of the night.

Let me repeat that. In statistical terms.

Black Rock City, where I seem to be headed towards every summer these days, had a high of 110 that I've experienced. In BRC, you will get yelled at (at least I get yelled at ;) ) for not carrying with you a hydration pack, bottle of water, canteen, or other hydration device. The number of people who suffer dehydration and go to the med tent to be "bagged" (that's getting an IV of hydration) is at least in the tens, and probably in the hundreds every year. I personally camped with someone who had multiple bags in a day, as well as over the course of the event.

In Iraq, temperatures regularly reach into the hundreds, and even more than the 110 I experience in BRC. Hydration in that environment is mandatory. Not peeing clear, or really not drinking enough to pee every couple of hours, is very likely to lead to injury and death.

Now, for some choice quotes...

**

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

"And rather than make everybody aware of that -- because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you, then you're not much of a leader -- what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report, but don't brief it in the open anymore."

and

Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said.

"It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

"There were countless such situations all over the theater of operations -- Iraq and Kuwait -- because female soldiers didn't have a voice, individually or collectively," Karpinski told Hackworth. "Even as a general, I didn't have a voice with Sanchez, so I know what the soldiers were facing. Sanchez did not want to hear about female soldier requirements and/or issues."
**

The military is supposed to be one of our most honorable institutions. Bush played on that last night in his SotU speech, saying these words, "There is no honor in retreat." How is it honorable to lie in wait for your fellow soldier, to rape them? How is it honorable to have to fear to go to the bathroom in friendly territory? How is it honorable to lie about the causes of death? How is it honorable to put people in a situation where they feel this is their only option for sexual expression?

The military, for all they agitated not to allow women to serve, does allow women to serve. And our government has taken on the responsibility for these men and women. It is responsible for providing them as safe a place to live as is possible in time of war. It is responsible for feeding, clothing, and sheltering them. It is responsible for providing health and psychological care. And yes, if that means procuring some fucking prostitutes so the soldiers have an outlet for their sexual urges, then I believe that it is the government's responsibility to mail home to Nevada, and make a USO tour out of it. (I exaggerate for effect.)

I find it reprehensible that I live in a country that has an answering machine to handle rape allegations, and that removes the cause of death from medical documents to cover up for the "good ole boys". I find it morally repugnant that every soldier I know, who is an upstanding member of society, is being used as cover for one who isn't. I find it heart breaking that when I look at the faces they show us on the news, I am going to wonder how many of them harbored these thoughts...and how many acted on them.

I have said before, and I will say it again I'm sure, that I do not believe in this war. That I believe in America, and I believe in Democracy, and I support every member of the armed services who has given his or her life over to the cause of defending my right to be outraged at this situation. I do. I believe very strongly that the men and women of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines, are by and large good people with good intentions.

But reading articles like this makes me sick. Sick and broken hearted.

I am disgusted...

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:04:10 GMT

So it's time for another public news post.

Fringe group plans Sago protest.

I can't even begin to discuss the level of sheer hatred articles like this cause me to feel.

For anyone wondering, the Fred Phelps group is planning on picketing the service for the Sago miners on Wednesday. They have been circulating flyers that read "Thank God for His Outpoured Wrath and for Twelve Dead Miners!"

Let's fucking stop for a minute here. These are the "every sperm is sacred" people. These are the people who tell me that I'm not allowed to have an abortion because GOD CONSIDERS KILLING TO BE AN ABOMINATION. They have shown me pictures of aborted fetuses. They have picketed my clinics. They have done their damndest to pray that I will see the light.

And they are now thanking their image of God for killing miners in Sago, because it will help show the people of West Virginia that teaching their children that it's okay to be gay is wrong. This is fucked up. People in West Virginia are their last fucking constituency.

I have not enough bile for how this makes me feel.

Thoughts, controversial.

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 18:44:42 GMT

(This entry intentionally left public.)

Proposition 73, California's new "Parental Consent" statute adds language to our state constitution, defining abortion as the killing of "a child conceived but not yet born".

Think about that for a minute.

Legislators are getting ready to ascribe life to a fetus.

Now, it may sound terribly cold of me, I admit. But a fetus. Not a thinking, living being. Technically a parasite (no matter how much I love babies, fetuses could NOT survive without their hosts).

**

I had an abortion, and I'm not going into all the details here. It was a difficult choice, and one I will live with for the rest of my life. It's not like I woke up one morning and said, "Oops, I'm preggies, gotta void the system." I made a choice which has had psychological imapct on me in many ways for years now. It probably always will.

In the same situation now, I'd make the same choice.

But the new constitutional language, in combination with "Laci's Law" (which makes it a seperate criminal act to kill the "unborn child" of a murder victim) is speeding ever closer the days in The Handmaid's Tale.

I've had an abortion, which means there's a record somewhere that I'm fertile.

**

People ask "what about adoption?"

My heart aches for those families unable to have children. It truly, truly does. But there are enough unloved, unwanted babies in the world that I don't think it is my place to bring another to term. If more families who wanted children opened their hearts to those that were not babies, who were not perfect little angels, and adopted those who need homes, it might be different.

But I'm not a breeder.

**

Alito ruled that it is alright to endanger the few who may be beaten or worse for contemplating adoption, rather than excluding the husband from the decision process.

What if the husband has abandoned me?

When do I get to have sole rights and control over my body?

If he wants to carry the fetus, let him. Otherwise get the hell out of my way.

**

I think you all know how I'll vote on Tuesday. I only ask you to consult your conscience before you do the same.

CENSORSHIP AND YOUR RIGHT TO PORN!

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:29:35 GMT

This article ganked from the_dean. Seriously people, it's time to start fighting back.

(This article intentionally left public.)

October 20, 2005 - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has announced that his office will specifically target "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior" in pursuing new obscenity prosecutions. The Department of Justice began recruiting in late July for a new anti-obscenity squad to pursue obscenity prosecutions, and the FBI announced in September that it was forming an anti-obscenity task force to crack down on
pornography.

Any website that has content containing "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior" should be forewarned that prosecution is possible. Additionally, Federal sentencing guidelines state that any obscenity-related punishment should be "enhanced for sadomasochistic material."

Forty people and businesses have been convicted of obscenity since 2001, and 20 additional indictments are pending according to Andrew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department's child exploitation and obscenity section. There were only four obscenity prosecutions during the eight years of the Clinton administration.

Though adult content is, in theory, protected by the First Amendment, only a jury can determine if a work is obscene or not under the subjective set of standards that vary from one community to the next established in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, Miller v. California.

Text is not inherently more protected than images when it comes to obscenity charges. The erotic fiction website Red Rose Stories is facing obscenity charges after federal agents raided the owner's home on October 3rd, taking computer equipment and diskettes that contained all of their files and site information.

The Department of Justice is clearly hoping that websites will self-censor or remove their content entirely. Midori, a fetish model and SM educator who teaches classes on bondage, has removed her website, BeautyBound.com, citing fear of obscenity prosecution. The owner of three SM websites, known as GrandPa DeSade, removed his websites from the Internet. SuicideGirls.com also announced they are self-censoring
their materials over concerns about a possible obscenity crackdown.

Recent prosecutions of obscenity on websites include: A former police officer in Lakeland, Florida, was arrested on October 7th on over 300 obscenity-related charges for the sexual content posted on his website. The same day, webmaster Chris Wilson, owner of amateur website NowThatsFuckedUp.com, was raided on charges of obscenity by a local Sheriffs office.

"I think it's crucial for us to stand up for consensual sadomasochism and other alternative sexual practices," says Barbara Nitke, fetish photographer. "This is a battle worth fighting, and I hope everyone who can will just censor out the most provocative material from their websites, but keep them up. I also appeal to the lawyers in our community to help us find ways to keep people's websites up."

Barbara Nitke and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) have proactively challenged federal obscenity laws as applied to the Internet, arguing that obscenity laws based on "local community standards" are too vague and their existence burdens protected speech, resulting in self-censorship due to the fear of prosecution. A district court three-judge panel in New York ruled that while Nitke and the NCSF members were at risk, more proof was needed that obscenity laws cause otherwise protected speech to be restrained through acts of self-censorship. The case is currently on appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

"The effect of silencing alternative lifestyle speech was exactly why we brought the lawsuit," says attorney John Wirenius, lead counsel for NCSF. "The self-censorship we are seeing underscores the importance of supporting our ongoing obscenity challenge."

To contribute to the appeal of the CDA lawsuit, go to:
www.ncsfreedom.org/donations.htm

National Coalition for Sexual Freedom - www.ncsfreedom.org
Barbara Nitke - www.barbaranitke.com

###

A project of NCSF

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom is a national organization committed to creating a political, legal, and social environment in the United States that advances equal rights of consenting adults who practice forms of alternative sexual expression. NCSF is primarily focused on the rights of consenting adults in the SM-leather-fetish, swing, and polyamory communities, who often face discrimination
because of their sexual expression.

National Coalition for Sexual Freedom
822 Guilford Avenue, Box 127
Baltimore, MD 21202-3707
410-539-4824
media@ncsfreedom.org
www.ncsfreedom.org

My work foo, if you're interested! (The rare public post!)

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 18:59:49 GMT

I work for TICAS Inc. (The Institute for College Access and Success). Today our new project website went live, and you can now discuss to your heart's content the issue of student debt. This includes loans, saving, etc.

We have a forum on student debt, and a section where you can submit your story about student debt.

Check it out, and please feel free to participate. :)

Open Letter

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 21:13:28 GMT

Dear George W. Bush:

Today is September the eighth, 2005. Sunday will be September the eleventh, yet another of the dates that will live in infamy. You may wonder why I am writing, I will admit, it is a shock to me that I have managed to address this letter to you. You will probably never even read it, which is a sadness to me, because I am going to put my best in it.

Obviously, this is about Katrina.

I was out of touch for ten days. In ten days I missed the reprehensible things which your government has done, I missed all the footage of the storm, I missed Oprah's visit to the dome, etc.. If I hadn't, it's not like there would be anything I could have done.

Now, in the "aftermath", while you pat your friends and collegues on the back...while politicians try to save face, and retain votes, I am reading account after account of horror and atrocity. I am terrified for the people of America, the people of the Gulf Coast. I am terrified for my very own life. Congratulations. You have suceeded where even Al Quaeda could not. You have made me fear that living in the United States of America is a bad idea, a poorly informed idea, and the antithesis of what I believed in.

While I donate the few paltry dollars I have to spare, you joke about sitting in a better house built for Trent Lott. While I work, anxiously trying to think of what I can do to help the survivors, you spend another million dollars on your "war" in Iraq. You wonder why your approval ratings are so low, and you try to make yourself personable, but you have not suceeded. You will not succeed. Not as long as the money you are spending to kill people in foreign nations bleeds the aid budgets here at home.

Your administration is building bridges in Alaska...instead of levees in Louisiana.

Today I am ashamed. I am ashamed that the Department of Homeland Security could not make my homeland secure. I am ashamed that for all the Republican party has espoused that it wants equality, that a "big tent" is needed, the National Guard and the Police in New Orleans kept the poor and ethnically diverse trapped in a place where their very lives were and still are at stake. I have never been as ashamed as I am today.

I wish I could say that I would not buy anything that would support the government, but I pay my taxes. I'd like to say that I will organize people to vote for better people next time, but I think we all know at this point that there are people more qualified to do so.

Instead I will say this:

I believe in the American ideals of freedom, liberty, justice. I believe that human nature will triumph over adversity, and I believe in the end that Louisiana, that Mississipi, that all the devastated lives can be repaired. I believe that those who do not die will be stronger, and better equipped to handle the next thing that comes down the road. And I believe this...

I believe it's time for you to get the hell out of dodge.

Rowan G. Cota
United States Citizen

Blog activism...or "Jew is not a dirty word!"

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 22:37:50 GMT

Doing my bit to counteract a nasty googlebomb...

I am a Jew.

Trust me, it makes sense once you read up on googlebombing. Apparently some nasty little hate group hijacked the word, and there's a meme-ish movement underway to counteract it.

This is one of my rare public entries, so google can index it, and count me amongst those standing up and yelling at the world. (And for future reference, I thikn the people who organized this hijacking are assholes!)

Get me Neil on the line...

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 23:38:41 GMT

I: Shiseido Red

"And on the fateful day
When she was crucified
She wore shiseido red
And we drank tea by her side..."
--Tori Amos, "Muhammad, My Friend"

Eli had skin. No, he didn't. He had velvet stretched over his bones. Thick, cream colored velvet. Not that weird yellowed antique color they try to sell you in the store, that they call cream, that color that looks like some smoker tried to scrub their walls and failed. No real, white, but thicker than the white that redheads are. White that would have made a mouthful.

I thought about that while I painted my lips with the tube that he had bought me in Germany. A color you can't even get in the states, a thick red created by some makeup artist for a singer, bright, like blood from a fresh wound. I thought about it while I looked at the roses he sent me, little mirror reflections of my mouth, too bright, too wet, too...too red. Roses like he sent to his girls.

That was what he called them, his girls. Like he'd given birth to them, or dated them, or loved them. Maybe he did. He would give them his blessing to stop working for him if they wanted a family, if they found love. He would have a meal with them, something simple, with bread and red wine, and he would kiss their foreheads, and then they would be free. But those that left and went into business for themselves would find that they'd have hard tricks, men who beat them, who cut them. If they went to work for another manager it was worse. They would find themselves, often, working for crazy men, men who would show no shame at making them work at the end of a gun.

I stared at myself in the mirror, unrecognizing, at the me in the leather pants, the expensive heels. I couldn't believe he liked me like this, I'd lost another five pounds, and my hips stuck out, my collarbone, like tiny bird skeletons. I knew that he licked the wound after he stuck the needle in my arm, I imagined that he liked the taste of the blood, that it was sweet after the needle, the way the air smelled if I smoked it instead. Sticky, cloyingly sweet, too many candies, all rolled into one.

He was the only man who ever fucked me. Once we started dating, he wouldn't let others touch me. He never put me out to work.

I remember the only time I said "god" while we were having sex, he slapped me, across the face. I could taste the blood and saliva in my mouth, sour and angry, and he told me not to ever say that word again. I never did.

I still remember the day we met. The sky was a strange shade of blue, almost tinged with green, and the air smelled wrong somehow. The middle of summer, and the only thing I could smell was something burning. My hair stuck to the back of my neck, I almost cut it, as I had some many times in the past. I couldn't imagine keeping it any longer, when it was sweaty, and stuck to me like that. I still had some baby fat then, I was ashamed of it, and wore clothes a size too big that hung off my frame.

It was that night, in a club...one of those shitty ones that plays music you've never heard and wouldn't listen to if they paid you. I was sitting in a corner, nursing a drink, and wondering if I cared that I'd spent five bucks and was already on my way out the door, when he looked at me. Even though he was surrounded by girls, he made me feel like I was the only woman in the room. Maybe that was it. He made me feel like a woman in comparison to the painted peacocks, in their bright blues and purples, that fawned over him and preened for his entertainment.

I remember setting my martini glass down on the table, and leaving the club, lighting a cigarette in front of the door, and leaning against the wall. The air had been too stuffy, but now I was afraid to breathe. Afriad the freedom in my lungs was an illusion, and that he would pull me back. His skin had a faint luminosity to it, he glowed, if that's possible, in the dim lights of the club. Lights that flatter even a murderer by hiding his visage, softening the angles of his body, smoothing the tension of his hands into the eased poise of a lover... The darkness in those places is meant to conceal, to ease the conscience by hiding what you've recieved in the grab bag until you're too drunk to care, and he was glowing. He revealed.

That is why we love him. Because we think that he lies to us to show us beauty and truth, but he does not. He reveals us...to himself, to ourselves, to others. When we have been touched by Eli Sands then we know who we are and where we belong.

I remember hailing a cab, and going home, feeling empty. Feeling the night turn cold and hard around me, the sky orange with the glare of the sulfur based streetlights. I remember sitting on my windowsill and drinking glass after glass of cabernet, trying to fill the empty feeling in my stomach, trying, desperately, to cling to some semblance of okay, and then I started crying. On my windowsill, looking out at the street, in the middle of summer, and from my eyes are rolling these big fat tears, that taste vaguely like the ocean. And he's in my mind the whole time.

That was the first night I came thiking about him, but it wouldn't be the last.

I saw him a few weeks later. He came into the record store where I worked, a stack of cd's on the counter, and pulled out a platinum card. And I admit, I thought, for a moment, what it would be like, to belong to him, and I smiled, and I don't even know what he bought to this day. I was too busy observing the curve of his scrawl as he signed his name to the sales slip. He handed back my pen with his card, and left without another word.

I toyed with that card for days, staring at it in the 60 watt light of my bedroom lamp. Eli Sands, XXX-XXXX, in 12 point courier. Every time I looked at the thick heavy cardstock, I was brought in mind again of his skin, the weird light refracting qualities it had.

It was later I quit my job, though I kept the apartment. I let him start paying my rent, I gave in to his demands that I be available whenever he desired. I started dressing in the things he bought me, and accepting the gifts from his travels. One day I asked him why, and he laughed.

"Because I love you baby, isn't that enough?" He always seemed as if he were half teasing, and especially that night I needed him to be serious.

I prodded again, but why, and he sighed. Took my face in his hands, and looked at me, in the eye. "Because I don't like the idea of anyone else with such a treasure...with such a posession as you." It didn't occur to me then that these are the things that men say when they want to own you, heart, soul and blood. When they consider you bought and paid for already, and if they break the merchandise after, well, they'd already gotten it home. So I didn't hear the warning bells, and I continued to let him stroke me.

To hand me the pipe, and to hold the lighter to it for me, as I filled the air with the suffocatingly thick smoke. I watched it, as it spelled itself in the air, twisting itself around words I cannot name. I choked on it, I swallowed it down, and I let him hold me when I lay in its grip afterward. I shared with him the things I saw in the half light my subconscious. I told him about the blonde girls, and the nightmare monsters. I told him about the pain, and how I'd finally pushed it far away from me, and then I slept, there, held by him.

And when we fucked it was like the world was falling down around us. I can't explain, but we were the only ones, and it was like no one else could be born or breathe but that we would know about it. It was like drowning, or dying, and he was always there, and he would catch me.

Except for the god incident, Eli was a gentle lover. Afterwards we would lay there and talk, and he would tell me things.

"You're the most beautiful person I know," he would say in the drunk - spent - what have you state we would be in. "You're beautiful, and full of talent and promise, and I love that you love me. That you love laying in this bed with me, day after day. That you let me touch that in you. It's the most amazing thing I've seen, inside you, and I wish you could see how brightly your fire burns."

And then he would hold my hands between his, and we would laugh like children drunk on ourselves, on the air. I didn't regret then the feel of his sheets on my skin, the touch of the silk duvet cover, the smell of the streets, of the house, how everything always smelled a little like winter with smoke and cinnamon and burnt sugar. I never thought about how his eyes followed me to my car, or caught sight of me when I enetered a room. I never thought about the fact that he didn't use a condom, refused to.

And then I met the girls.

That was an event that has earned itself a mention. They'd heard of me, you see, when they came, to talk to him about whatever, to get supplies or payments. One of them, a pretty thing, who I think was called Nora, ventured, "How'd you get to be his princess? It's not like you're that pretty, you're fat for one..." She felt him looking at her, and stopped. I noted to her rant that I'd lost ten pounds and a couple of sizes since he and I'd met. I had stopped eating, unless Eli reminded me, or forced it.

"Nora," his voice was quiet, I'd only heard that tone once, when he told me not to mention god's name in his house, "Nora, I think that is quite enough. Unless you purport to understand my reasoning you will shut your fucking mouth. Am I clear?"

Insolently, she pouted, "Crystal."

I wondered if she'd been his favorite before me. If I had displaced her in the order of the harem that he seemed to run. I sucked my breath through my teeth as she stalked off, and went to sit by him, watching as he leafed her money between his fingers, counting it to make sure it was all there. "After a display like that, I'm not sure I can trust her." I then realized it was the first time I'd ever heard him use profanity.

The next night there was a satin gown laid out for me on his bed. I put it on, blindly, trustingly, and joined him on his balcony, where he stared at the light of the city. "Beloved...you know you are, don't you?" I looked up, trying to read his eyes, trying to discern truth from fiction and lost myself again as always in the dark mirror he presented. "You are my beloved," and if I heard a stress on the possesive pronoun, I was the only one.

Days melted into weeks, and I seemed to melt into something new. Something more fluid and feline, something with grace and style, and that was his work too. He started me first with the smoking, and then we would go out, and it got to the point where I couldn't function without the sticky sweet smell in my hair and my lungs and my mouth, and he would kiss me, and kissing felt so good, like something created by him just to please me.

And I wore satin, and leather, and though I kept the apartment, I moved into his place as well, and languished in his giant bath tub for hours a day, lifting my foot from the bath water and studying the perfect glassine ovals of my toenails before sinking my leg back down and sighing. I thought then that the entire world rested there, in his bathroom, perhaps between the perfect transparent bar of soap which never had the weird melty bits in the dish that mine at home seemed to get, and the slightly tarnished silver toothbrush cup. That was my entire life, bathwater scented like roses, and thick candles, and sleeping till noon, and I wasted away there, little by little, forsaking food for the taste of air and water.

And sometimes he would rub my shoulders. That was amazing, his hands kneading my skin, easing tensions I didn't know I had, from walking around a city I'd never before seen. He allowed me the use of his credit cards and car, but more often than not I would end up in the park, sitting on the grass by the pond, examining the veiny backs of leaves that had fallen from trees before their time, shaken by children and their shrill screams. I'd put a cigarette to my lips and glare defiantely at the mothers in their pressed perfect khaki and angry pastels who would stare at me disapprovingly. In them I saw reflections of my own mother, shades of pink and lavander that defied description, defied seeing really, as she would tell me that my loftiest goal was to meet a man and get married and have his babies. I couldn't do it, any more than I could stop wearing the indigos and violets that made up my wardrobe, any more than I could bleed myself of desire, any more than I could rid myself of Eli.

Everywhere he went out, I went too. He dressed me as his pretty plaything, and he took me on his arm, quiet and docile. I was the perfect pet, sanguine as a panther, but gentle as a kitten, twisted in his hands, in his arms, in clubs and the dark cavernous bathrooms behind the dance floors. He flew to Germany, to Russia, to places with names I couldn't pronounce...called from phones with static, with the sounds of guns and bombs behind him, and each time he came home, I would have a new toy. Makeup. Or clothes. A car or a pet, and I still didn't see that I was being paid for, that somewhere a contract was being fulfilled.

And then came the night of the needle.

I lay in his bed, in flannel pajamas, and he proposed it, and I didn't say no, which to Eli was as good as saying yes. So he tied the rubber around my arm, and in went the needle, like a lover, prick of pain and then the release, and I sighed and gasped and then lay back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. And dreamt.

"Beloved, oh my beloved, how you are loved. I will build for you the altar of my love, and upon it I will lay roses and rushes and the sweet herbs, and I will never let you taste the bitterness that taints the world around us. Never will you know the ruin that has been given to us, to your kind and to my lot, instead I will build for you a palace of stars and light and blood and bone, and never will your feet touch the dirt..." Sweet and low his voice was the only thing that even tried to keep me tethered to earth, and I turned to him with a slow smile, and the fire inside me that burned flared, and I kissed him slow and deep like never before.

Our tongues met then for minutes, a wet, fleshy dance that took hours for consumation, teeth for biting and lips for pressure, and saliva mixed back and forth between the two, and I sealed his strange benediction then, and thought nothing of it, and then lay there as his lips burned warm scars around my nipples, as he traveled the length of my skin kissing every exposed bone protrusion, every hollow in my skin. I counted them, while I lay there drifting on the sea, and heard him whisper things in English and in other languages, "...and my beloved is mine..." I faded in and out, and then his fingers found my cunt and slipped inside the wetness there and I think I gasped.

And he fucked me then, senselessly, his cock shoved inside me, and I came just from thinking about his cock, and thinking about him inside me, and he moved infintismally slowly, and I felt him hard as stone or harder still, and I was close to breaking as he moved, as he pulled my hips toward him, and he pleaded with something greater than either of us and his eyes turned dark as storms, and violent, and he pulled me his precious doll to his chest and he came, and I felt him inside.

And then he started moving again, tearing gasps from my lips, and I wept his name then, tears like the first night we had seen each other, hot and fat and full of salt. He licked them off my cheeks, tasting my salt in his mouth, and he whispered that he tasted the ocean, and then he slid a finger along my clit, hard and strong, and licked it too. That was also the ocean, and my blood was the ocean, and I hurt with the thought of him inside me then, but I could not say stop, so I let it keep going, and I let him keep going, and I lost myself there on his flesh and in his house, which had many rooms.

Eventually the dream wore on, as dreams do. I woke next to him the following morning, and saw him in the half light of dawn, saw the shadow which always envelopped him was back, but I had no will to grab my shoes and head for the door, nestling against him instead to fall asleep.

I'd started to fade already. Dressed in more vibrant colors to keep myself around, whites and blues and teals, the colors of a woman mad, and afraid of losing her grip. Painted my eyes and cheeks and lips like his girls, but I never said no to the needle, to the pipe, to the dream or the fucking. It all gave our life a steady beat by which to live, a beat more certain than my heart.

Days turned into weeks turned into months where I played this butterfly camoflage game, hiding in colors that didn't become me any longer, avoiding looking at him in mirrors or myself even. The baths became a refuge where I meditated on molecules of skin or atmosphere rather than on the truth, and I lied, and told myself everything was fine. I hadn't called my mother in over a year, she'd stopped leaving messages. Slowly I let the other things go, eventually even the apartment, moving in the last few token items to his house.

Sometimes, to feel, I would trace razor blades over my skin in abstract patterns, unforgiving to myself as the blood seeped out, brightly, I pressing a washcloth to it until it scabbed. When he saw these things he would just sigh and whisper softly, "Pleasure without pain, without sacrifice is hollow. You are not in vain," and then turn from me and sit moddily at his window until I brought him his coffee or his slippers like a well trained dog.

The sanginuinity became brittleness, I felt as if I was covered in hairline cracks, and all it would take was a single push to send me over the edge, towards breakage. That was when he began to hold me close again, as if he sensed I needed him. Wrapped me up in his blankets, in his arms. He hesitantly offered that maybe I should give up the seas and the dreaming for a while, try to put on some weight and fill out like I used to be, and I laughed at him. But his sadness would not relent, and I could not soothe him, so I told him I'd think about it.

He knew I was lying, but he just lay in bed next to me, every night, trying to warm me though it seemed my blood now ran like glaciers in my veins. I heard one night when he thought I wasn't listening, "I can't believe I've done this to you...mired you in this that I pormised would never touch you..." I sat up, petted his head, tried to reassure him.

All of which led to my standing in front of the mirror, staring at my broken self, applying lipstick and thinking about our relationship. He'd promised me something special at dinner tonight, so I took extra care with my makeup. I'd finally given in to wearing black, and I realized that when he wasn't next to me my skin too had that glow.

But nothing compared to his, which shone even in the pitch black of a bathroom at midnight.

So Eli and I went to dinner, and sat through some shitty music, and then we stood on the roof deck of some club, and with his arms around me from behind, he whispered in my ear, "I don't know how to say this gently. SO I guess I just have to do it."

I looked at him, eyes wide, silent.

"I'm going to have to leave you," he seemed sad, not his usual joking self, and I stared up, disbelieving.

"Not like the trips out of town, this one is for good. The apartment is yours, as is the car. There's money in the account for you. I can't explain it to you now, but...some day you'll understand. I don't deserve it, but I hope someday you'll be able to forgive me." He leaned down and kissed me on the forehead, and as my eyes blurred with tears for the third time, he turned from me and walked away.

These days, when I close my eyes, I hear the sound of wings.