Five things for November 10th

1. Reading In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash is going slower that I would like, but the stories are good.

2. Been watching Doki Doki School Hours, which I like, but falls apart a bit in the OVA. The cartoon is silly and seriously light on plot, but I like it. In a shocking breach of protocol, the voice acting on the dub actually isn’t bad. In a proper anime, one that follows all the rules, the dub’s voice acting should be so horrifically annoying that you want to jam a steak knife in your ear. This one isn’t too bad though. Normally I wouldn’t bother with dubs, but I sort of wanted to do something while watching the cartoon and it was easier this way.

3. Syd is trying very hard not to get sick right now. She’s being a brave little soldier, but I’m worried it’s going to catch up with her anyway. It’s creeping up on me too, I’m afraid. We need to buy some orange juice or something. Problematic since we’re low on funds until payday.

4. Right now, I would be willing to burn down the house and fake my own death to avoid having to do anything even remotely connected to any holiday.

5. These last few months have sucked. Seriously sucked in so many ways. Personal shit that I’m not going into here have caused problems and tension. A lot of “I’m disagreeing with her but I’m going to argue with you” coming from both sides. Got it mostly worked out, sort of. It seems to be okay, but everyone is still tense. That is enough to make most people depressed, but let’s combine that with my family’s inability to stay alive because of FUCKING INSURANCE COMPANIES! Oooh, I do hope that socialist white-folk hating Kenyan destroys your fucking industry and you suffer just one tenth of what you’ve done to others. Put that up with the physical symptoms of the arthritis in my poor mitts is really, really bad. My left thumb can hardly have any pressure on it today, for example. It keeps moving around, today the thumb, tomorrow the elbow, yesterday it was one of my knees. Never boring. Then you’ve got the muscle thing. If you can imagine microscopic rats gnawing at the fibers of your muscles, you can get to the feelings I’m having in my legs and arms. Enough right? No! One thing after another has gone wrong, broken, misfired, or just plain failed in a way that just writing FAIL in big block letters can’t convey. As a result of these things, many of which would be small and manageable on their own but not all coming at once, I have not been feeling at my best. I can’t even get angry at the whole thing, I’m just too tired. I am completely worn out and only have an inch or two of rope left.

If I do manage to get energetic for long enough to sustain an unhealthy anger, I think I’ll go to the headquarters of every pantheon I can find and inform them that I am not pleased by the current distribution of bullshit.

The New People

Let’s talk a slightly more squishy (or squishier if you happen to be Word’s fucking grammar corrector) and difficult subject. Having covered… whatever it is we’ve already covered in my earlier Poly Postings let’s talk about one that I rarely hear about, but is often a difficult problem.

So you’ve met someone, right? And you’ve been through the crush stages and you like them and they like you and if the stars were to align then there will be snugglebunniness in your future, yeah?

Well… maybe. See, there is a problem that doesn’t exist in the normal world of mortals, you’ve already got someone. Now, sure, that’s not always a difficulty. It may not be a problem for you and your partner because you’re poly and thus already five stages above the rest of humanity, agreed? Good, I’m glad to see you’re going with me on this. So where is the problem? Why with the third person of course. Or fourth person, because having one and wanting another doesn’t seem to be a problem for most people, they only seem to object when there are already two girlfriends. As if three would just be greedy, but going for a fourth would indicate I was simply a collector of rare and wonderful beauties and that wanting another after that would cause no problem at all.

Where was I? Before the sidebar… oh yes. Thank you.

So, this new person, whatever number he or she happens to be, let’s say they aren’t a poly person. Not that they’re necessarily against it, per say, but that they’ve never tried it, been exposed to it, watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, whatever the reason is. How do you A) introduce the idea B) address any concerns, and of course C) convince them that you’re not a freak intending to make a skin suit? I have no answer for C, because I am intent on one day having a skin suit… maybe you should just forget I mentioned that bit. Look, just rub this lotion on your skin lest you get the hose again.

Now, introducing the idea carries a few questions with it. Questions like, “When and how do I broach the idea of poly?” and of course “When do I tell them I’d like them to be a part of my relationship?” as well as “How do I convince them that they don’t have to be with my other partners.” and of course “How do I look in this skin suit?”

There are several answers to the first question, and one of the most important things to understand before I start answering is that there is no right answer, or wrong answer. That’s probably the most important thing to understand about all of human relationships of all kinds. An answer that works is the right answer. However, if you’re reading this you’d either like a guide, are interested in poly, want to go out with me and think this will give you some key, or you just obsessively read anything that scrolls in front of you. Either way, you deserve to get some kind of answer.

Most the books, websites, people, magazine articles, voices in my head that may be from Irish and French fairies or possibly the result of heavy doses of Ritalin when I was at and early age say you should be up front and honest from the word go. Now obviously I’m a little with them, since I’ve told the entire internet, but not entirely. There is something to be said for telling people what’s going on and how you live, and honesty is easier then remembering what lie you’ve told. It also avoids stupid questions later.

That being said, there is a lot to be said for not wanting to be the subject of office gossip, looked at as filling some diversity quota either at work or in your circle of friends (no one wants to be the ‘interesting’ friend) or even just wanting people not to know about what you do at home even if it is just watching James Burke documentaries. No one ever deserves to know your private business so long as you behave within the law of the land. Even then, you need some pretty good reasons to invade someone’s privacy. Also, for all my perceived openness, there are a lot of things I don’t tell people because they don’t need to know those things. Even with my kindly manner, long noses have a way of getting slammed in doors when I’m in a mood.

Still though, at some point if you’re going to express interest in a person, you should mention what’s going on before you get to the whole asking them to be with you. You have to give them a fair idea of what to expect so they can come in with open eyes. Someone who has never been in a poly thing before needs a gentle explanation and a helping hand to get over a few of those mental bumps. I would tell them about being poly before asking them to be with you. Even if there is no one at home, if it’s part of who you are, you should probably mention it.

The time to tell them you want them to be part of the relationship is either when you’re ready to tell them or before you ask them out. DUH! Sorry, I’ll stop being flippant now* and get down to business. I would say you shouldn’t make a formal offer until your intended has met the other people in your relationship. Long distance relationships can make this difficult, and it’s something you’ll have to work out on your own, but there should be some information exchanged to all groups. Letters of introduction would be a wonderful way to do it, but those died out with Calling Cards when it comes to personal relationships. Sad really, I could use those from time to time…
*This is a blatant lie.

Now convincing someone that they don’t need to be with your other partners is easy. At least as far as I’m concerned. You just say “You don’t need to be with my other partners, it’s just between you and me.” or something like that. Will that convince them? Not at first. Particularly if you’re like me and have a flavor for group gropes. The convincing is something you’ll have to deal with on your own. That of course doesn’t cover the reverse, which is what if you want to keep people separate and they want to hang out, play together, talk about you behind your back, so on. I have no answer for that, because while I understand the wish, it seems sort of dishonest to try and keep people from talking to each other and having a relationship if they want one.

Now that leads to another question, “What if they can’t handle the whole poly thing?”

Well, that depends on what the term “can’t handle” actually means in this context. Do you mean they can’t handle the idea of you being in another person’s arms and heart? Do you mean they can’t deal with you paying that kind of attention to another person? Do you mean they can’t hack the idea of you loving them? Serious on that last one. It’s not TruFax that poly people and swingers don’t mix, but there are difficulties when they’re in it for the fun and recreation while you’ve got deeper feelings. I’m not going to go more into that, because there is a lot more to say on the subject and there probably needs to be a whole Swinger Vs. Poly deathmatch post somewhere in the future.

Now, some people think they can’t handle the idea of you being with more people than just them, and some people think they can’t deal with you caring in that way for more than one person. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, sometimes they’re fine with anyone who was in before them but don’t want anyone to get in after them. The thing is sometimes people think they can handle it and turn out to be wrong, right, worried about the next person on the horizon, and it’s very hard to tell which person is going to be what kind. Actually, sometimes you also get the person who wants to pretend to be poly, with the idea of kicking the established person out of the nest as it were, but that falls under the Chick’s Psycho rule. It can be the dude who is psycho, but we named the rule before sexual equality came along and we’re not renaming it, so deal.

There are more issues here, lots more in fact, but as usual I’m going to leave them for another day. Questions and comments to the usual address.

Poly Crush (first attempt)

People ask me from time to time, that is to say a near constant stream of inquiry, about crushes in a poly relationship. Right after “How do your sleeping arrangements work?” I’ve found the question “How do you handle crushes?” is the question I get asked the most. Then people want to know if and who I have a crush on and are old crushes still active and are there such things as group crushes and does the whole group have to have a crush for it to work and can a person have a crush on a group and would you do them really dirty, like up against the wall, would the whole group do them from behind, and then I have to slap the asker and tell them to get a hold of themselves.

Let’s agree what a crush is before we start. A crush is an attraction that isn’t really formed into a proper relationship yet. A person you have a crush on ceases to be a crush once you’re dating, even if you still feel all crushy for them from time to time. An internet crush stops being one if you’ve been sending relatively serious e-mails or IMs back and forth for a while and can claim more than a passing knowledge of them. Mostly a crush is a secret little admiration you hold in your heart (or other places) for someone and usually it’s kept to oneself. If we can agree to that, and I suspect we can’t because someone always want to be the contrarian, I think we’ll do just fine here.

I will admit that crushes are a unique issue for poly people. I’m not talking about any full blown panting “I must be with this person or my life is just pointless.” stuff, although that does sometimes happen. No, I mean simple little things. The sort of thing where I look at a cute girl and think ‘If I were ten years younger, available and a man…’ before moving on with my day. The point is that a simple crush is easy enough to deal with. Ninety percent of the time, you keep it to yourself and you deal with it. If it’s a mere physical attraction, that’s easy enough to allow to pass.

Sometimes the girl isn’t just cute, but actually has a brain. That causes trouble since as you know the nice pair on top I’m looking for are more of the frontal lobe variety, although I have been known to notice the attributes below her chin as well, from time to time. However, sometimes a person stimulates both ends of the spinal column and that, one would suppose, is an eventuality that would cause a normal person to pursue such an attraction.

Most times, when one is single, that’s not a problem. If there is mutual attraction, you get together, become a couple, and spiral downward into the dull predictability of a suffocatingly normal life with kids, a dog, a picket fence and all that shit. Ah, but the poly people aren’t mind crushingly dull, they live in the thrill a minute world of polyamory! Right? Well, no. Actually the main difference is that there is a third person to ask if they want to sit down and watch TV to alleviate the mind-numbing boredom that comes with suburban life. Seriously kids, had I known what this was leading to I would have joined the circus when I had the chance. Where was I?

Ah, yes!

If you’re with someone, you basically have to shut off the attracted part of your mind, stop hanging out with the person, or suffer in silence. Either that or you have to act on it and have an affair or leave one partner for the other. That’s for the mono people though, being poly leaves you in slightly murkier waters. There are several situations that go along with this and I’ll try to address all the ones I can think of. Most of them are like math, or one of those genetic pea diagrams that we drew in school. I forget what they’re called and it doesn’t matter because Hol will tell me as soon as she reads this and I won’t be interested in editing it at that point.
EDIT: Punnett Squares. XKCD has a comic using them as a punchline today.

But you’ve got the map of you’re attracted, but they aren’t, you aren’t and they aren’t (doesn’t count for a crush, but work with me here) you aren’t but they are and both of you are. I bring this up because there is a problem with the third option there and I want to address it and it’s my blog and you can’t type here and I want to so I will. There is a problem for poly people, particularly guys, when someone has a crush on you and you aren’t interested. See, women are used to guys being interested in them and wanting nothing to do with the guy. Women are supposed to be the selectors in our society, guys are used to being told ‘no thank you’ and in most cases can handle it. Being poly is just an added wheel in that cog system. Women aren’t used to being turned down though. If a woman becomes bold enough to let her attraction be articulated, she’s not going to take kindly to a polite ‘no thank you’ from a guy. It really can confound some women to be turned down, and a guy who is freer with his affections can accidentally stick his foot in all the way up to the knee. A real ‘why them and not me’ can fester in the mind. Now I’ll tell you, 98% of the time, the why not them is because of the oft cited ‘Chick’s Psycho’* law that all guys know. I have no solution to this, but it remains a problem.
*If you are unaware, the law goes like this…
Guy 1: Wow, she’s hot!
Guy 2: Dude, chick’s psycho.
Guy 1: Yeah, but you could have her for a night, right?
Guy 2: No man. That chick is psycho.
Guy 1: Yeeeah, but…
Guy 2: Dude, dude. Dude? You don’t stick your dick in the crazy. Chick’s psycho.
Guy 1: Psycho?
Guy 2: Norman Bates on acid.
Guy 1: Damn it. She’s hot too.
Guy 2: But psycho.

Now, we can dismiss the ‘you’re crushing but they aren’t’, because that’s just life. You deal with that like you would in the everyday gray boring predictable world. Sometimes you’re into someone and they’re not that into you. Buck up and deal. I will admit that your status as a poly person can put them off. It’s an issue that needs to be dealt with upfront if you want to have any kind of relationship with this person. Even if you’re pretty sure they’re not into you, but you want to be friends, you’ve got to put it out there and tell them everything. You don’t have to tell them you’re crushing on them, that’s probably evident anyway since you’re nowhere near as good at covering your emotions as you think you are. If they were sort of interested until they discovered the whole poly thing, don’t despair, they may become interested in the whole poly idea later. It has happened! Not to me, but it has.

Now here comes the actual issue I set out to talk about today. The old ‘you’re crushin’ they’re crushin’ we need to get these crazy kids together’ variety of crush. Except there’s a snag in that you have two people at home already. Let’s get rid of the concept of a group crush right now because groups don’t have crushes. It’s possible that all the people in a group will have a thing for a single person, but it’s not really the group as a whole having a crush. Not in my experience anyway. Mostly, not all the members of a group (or even couple) have a crush on one person. Funny thing individual tastes and preferences. That sounds like I’m being flippant, but I’m not. In my experience triangle shaped triads are rarer than multi-pronged groupings. All the members of a group being together isn’t like spotting a Pale-headed Brush Finch in the wild, but it’s probably no more than one out of five.

However, can a person have a crush on a group? Hmm, I’ve certainly had “You’re part of a group? That’s hot and I’d like to join” said on more than one occasion. Mostly the person was hitting on me, but the group dynamic was most certainly an attracting factor. However, there were issues why that could never be (see Chick’s Psycho law) and those applications had to be cast aside. However, it does seem a person can have a crush on a group, or at least the idea of a group since one of the people never met Syd or Holly at all and just wanted to jump my bones because she thought if I could keep up with two girls, I must be good in bed. As it turns out, I am, but for different reasons.

What happens when one of us has a crush independent of the group? Why doesn’t independent have an A in it? It totally sounds like it should. Anyway. Imagine for a moment that these aren’t lovers, but just friends. If you’re crushing on someone, and you think it’s more than just a little thing, you’d bring that person to meet your friends and get their approval, yeah? At some point, your friends have got to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to your new sweetheart. Well, it’s like that, only these are people who are even closer than your friends are. They don’t have to want to date the person, but they should at least agree that they’re good people and not want to shoot them in the head on sight.

“What about jealousy?” I hear you ask, because my ears are extremely acute and can pick up whispers from several miles away. Suddenly the fact that I can never fucking sleep makes sense doesn’t it? The constant din that is life on planet earth just WILL NOT STOP! Yeah, that comes into it, but that’s your personal look out. If you don’t want to risk jealousy, stay at home and die without ever having had an adventure. Each person, upon discovering their sweetie has a crush will react differently. Some will cry and sob, others will grit their teeth and still others will get a kitten to punish the wrong doer. There are even rumors of people who welcome the whole with with open arms and no jealousy at all. Me? I react with amused detachment, mixed with good-natured ribbing. That’s me though, you might react differently.

I have to say, I can feel the caffeine wearing off as I type this, and I’m getting a little tired. There is probably a lot I’m forgetting to put in here, and for that I apologize, but I’m crashing as we speak. If I haven’t answered all your questions, you can always ask more in the comments. Wait, there were more questions, weren’t there? What else was in that opening paragraph?

… hmmm

Old crushes are old crushes. Normally they cool off and go into the general affection sort of area. Sometimes they can be fanned into something more, sometimes not. It depends on the attention and proximity I suppose, I don’t know exactly. Some people have managed to keep a low burning crush going for year while others come and go in a flash.

Do I have a crush on anyone is a constant question to which I normally like to answer with a mixture of “Maaaaaybe” and “Mind your own damn business” because I carefully ration personal information out to you people no matter what it looks like. If I have a crush and on whom is really none of your concern anyway and most the time I don’t express that information to the people it pertains to so it would do you no good.

Would I do them dirty, like up against a wall is defiantly a wait and see question. We’d have to agree on what “doing them dirty” means and if that person wanted to be done up against a wall, and we can’t even agree on what we call a crush. So really, I’m not going to tell you if I’d do a person dirty, like up against a wall. I have done someone dirty, up against a wall, but you’re not going to get any more details than that my friends.

Conclusion

I have come to a conclusion.

After 15 years, I really don’t want to start counting again. I refuse to say things like “We’ve been married for two years, but we dated for 15 before that.”

Fuck that shit.

I’m really bad at math, like “let’s go shopping” bad, so I don’t want to have to do any more than I absolutely have to in order to get through my day.

Other factors come into it of course….

I’m not interested in whether or not other people think we have a “real relationship” or not. Beyond a comparatively small number of people, I’m really not interested in whether or not people approve of our lives. And in a nice Catch 22, if the people I want to approve of me didn’t approve, then they wouldn’t be the sort of people whose approval I’d seek. I know that makes sense to some of you and I’m pretty sure one or two will read that and scratch their heads. Put it this way, I seek their approval about other things.

If I was worried about people who aren’t one tenth as smart as me approving of what I did I would have stood stock still all my life. One of the nice things about being so much smarter than everyone, it brings this wonderful sense of arrogance and a feeling that you can pretty much do as you please.

Besides, I have a pond. I refuse to be judged by anyone who has less water and wildlife in their back yard than I do.

Then you’ve got the fact that it wouldn’t be fair to the other girlfriend if I married one or the other of them. Won’t even do it to get in on an insurance package. Let me tell you, that’s a strange thing to tell someone “Baby, I’d forgo medical insurance for your peace of mind.”

It’s going to be 15 years with Syd… sometime this week… I think. Okay, girls, boys are REALLY bad at anniversaries. Can we just get that straight right now? Not remembering goes with the penis and the whole finding The Three Stooges funny thing, kay? I’m never going to remember what day it was or when exactly it happened or anything like that. SRSLY!

I can’t have shrimp, but that’s a separate allergy thing.

One of the chief problems with trying to describe poly to people who are mono is that it’s like trying to describe paganism to someone who has been monotheistic all their lives. The difficulty lies not in explaining why you’d choose to live outside of their system, or even explaining how your system works, but rather in separating in their mind the difference between your system and everyone else’s system.

It can be hard for a Christian, who has only really lived around other Christians, to fully appreciate that people who follow Wicca have different values, ways of worship and meanings of symbols than those who follow Nordic traditions do. Since they share a lot of symbols and the values aren’t terribly alien to each other, the non-pagan has trouble remembering which one uses runes and which one uses scrying mirrors, which group screws in fields and which one puts a dagger in a cup*. It becomes even more difficult when you’ve got those pagans who look at the whole “Not-Abrahamic” thing like a Pick-N-Mix and take whatever bits and pieces they find useful.

Now compare that to someone trying to wrap their head around poly for the first time. You’ve got the swingers, the open marriages, the closed groups, the open groups, triangles, V shapes, and even more complicated interpersonal geometry. Now try to explain each and every one of those styles to a person whose relationship mathematics never got past one and one makes two.

While I find that just about anyone can grasp the multiplicity angle, they can quickly become confused when it comes to the specifics of each groupings particular means and ways. Again, they want to know which group screws in a field and which one uses mirrors. Then throw in the fact that the rules for a relationship can change for a single person depending on their partners needs and their little monastic heads** start to spin around.

At that point you start getting people questioning the very basic things about a person’s lifestyle. You start getting questions like “Do you eat eggs? I mean, because you’re poly you can’t eat eggs right? Or is it ham?” and you end up looking at them for about fifteen seconds before announcing, “I think you’re thinking of kosher rules there kiddo.” To which they will say, swear to god, “Right! You can’t eat beef then.”

And then I just put my head down and laugh until I cry.

Doesn’t take nearly as long as you’d think.

*I’ll let you work out the joke on your own.
**That started off as a typo, but I’m keeping it because I find it charming.

A Reputation

Reputations are a problem. There is a thing I’ve always wanted to do, because I want to see if I’ll get the expected result, but I have such a reputation that if I asked a waiter at a restaurant for a lightly grilled baby most people wouldn’t even blink. They’d just tell me it wasn’t on the menu and I should pick another option.

The thing I’ve always wanted to do was to offer to hook up two gays. Like, I would go up to a gay man and say “Oh, you’re gay? I know someone who is gay, you want me to fix you up? Because I think you’d make such a cute couple, you’re gay, she’s gay, and you’d look adorable.” And then just wait until someone noticed what I’d actually just suggested. I think it would be wonderful, particularly with the right person standing next to them because I’ve never quite gotten the exact look of “Wha-huh?” that I think that statement would create.

The problem is that almost all the non-straight people I know are bi-sexual, or have some level of bi in their orientation so it wouldn’t work with them. I know a fair few actually solid real live not interested in what the other side is offering gays, but like 90% of the “not rigidly boring”* people I know are omnivores at the great sex cook out. Why is it that? Do I just know a shockingly large number of switch hitters, do I just know more than is healthy about everyone else’s sex lives, or are there a lot more people taking the Pepsi Challenge these days?

*Not that there’s anything actually wrong with being straight. My own grandmother was probably straight. I know many very nice people who are straight, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed at life. I’m straight, but I did mention the N word and of the many things I am, nice ain’t one of them. Also I’m not rigidly boring because poly is a non-stop thrill ride.

Good thing I’m so calm and kind and don’t hit people just for annoying me

I really honestly don’t mind if some guy decides he would like to be my girlfriend’s new boyfriend. Scoff if you like, but it’s not a problem. I’m a hip, sensitive new age guy, I’m all poly and shit, I’m cool.

So long, that is, if he manages to come up to the required standard. There are certain requirements that need to be filled if he’s going to be accepted among the pack. Not least of which are that the girlfriend in question actually likes him and thinks kissing him on the mouth wouldn’t be the worst thing that ever happened to her. Once accepted by the girlfriend in question though, there are still some points that have to be achieved. Such as, I’ve got to not want to cut his guts out.

I’m not going to say that any guy Syd or Holly brought home would have to be at least as good, as cute, as sensitive, as smart and as good a listener as me, because such critters just don’t exist. That there is a snipe hunt of the first water. I speak from no ego, I only speak truth. However, he would have to at least be worth the effort of my not gutting him like a fish and using his organs to refit a snare drum. I don’t mean that any man who puts hands on my woman is looking to get gutted, my wish to gut my fellow human is pretty much a constant as you should well know by now. I dislike most of humanity, even the soft and squishy female variety, I just like women more.

I’m not sure exactly what qualities this mythical lad would have to possess, beyond the gut of steel so my knife would turn on the day I decided to gut him, but he’d have to be a pretty decent guy to get a pass from me. The reason is that we’ve never gotten past the first step of Syd or Holly wanting to bring a guy home and kiss him on the mouth.

OH but there are guys who want to! That is a fact and let no doubt hold fast in your mind my darlings. The problem is that these fellows rank between your ordinary Nice Guys and douchecanos so huge that the local villagers are considering throwing in a virgin in hopes of placating an eruption of douchiness that will create a veritable douche river (wider than a mile) that you could sail the Good Ship Lollidouche down.

Let us take the most recent example, a young lad who has annoyed me somewhat. This is the stereotypical Nice Guy, and has annoyed our household to such an extent that I feel compelled to discuss his failure at both picking up chicks and life. We’re talking a seriously irritating little weasel here kids, don’t feel sympathy.

This guy is someone who plays Final Fantasy Online with Syd, and if you want to know why the “gamers are social retards who live in their mother’s basements until the age of 30 and couldn’t get laid in a morgue” stereotype exists, I can direct you to him with a single sweep of my hand. You could get an idea about why he’s such an asshat by reading Syd’s posts on the subject, but I prefer to tell the story myself.

The problem isn’t that Syd was nice to him once and since no female had ever looked at him with anything beyond disgust he decided she was The One. That’s a simple crush and easy to get over for all involved. No, because she hadn’t quite gotten his personality down before trouble started she gave him her phone number once and he proceeded to call all the time when she wasn’t in the game. The last time he called during a meal she snatched the phone up before I could to inform him that we were eating dinner and he could stop bugging her. I haven’t spoken to him yet, but I think if he calls after this current kafuffle I will have to.

See, he made what he thinks of as a joke about her, a crude joke and not really acceptable, both for my own reasons and for hers. It’s not the first dickheaded thing he’s said, and not the first time she’s been annoyed. This combined with past crimes, which almost got him tossed from the group in the past, caused her to blacklist the prick and she is considering changing her cell phone number so he can no longer call. It’s not that the one comment did so much, it’s the last in a long line of total dick moves where he thinks he’s being clever or cool or whatever and he’s just annoying her. When you annoy Syd, you annoy me, when you annoy me, you annoy Fancy, and if Fancy is annoyed then some motherfucker needs to die.

See, there is an issue here, or there would be if this guy wasn’t such an obvious douche… actually it occurs to me that calling him a douche infers he could get into a pussy and squirt his juice, which isn’t looking terribly likely at the moment. There would be an issue is this guy wasn’t such a clear and obvious cockbite. I might feel bad about my decision to answer Syd’s phone next time he calls and inform him that if he doesn’t stop bothering her I will be coming for him, because you know… hip, sensitive new age guy, who is all poly and shit. Even if one his hip, sensitive new agey, and all poly and shit, one might feel a tinge of jealousy at the idea that another guy wants to put his mouth on your girlfriend.

There would be an issue on other days, the question of “am I judging this guy too harshly” would be at the back of my mind. However, since this little shitlette is such an annoyance I’m allowed to dislike him as much as I want and all those moral questions go away in a flash of fucktardishness.

Further Musings

Last week I put forth the idea that in a poly relationship, even people who aren’t officially dating are sort of dating. That unless you’re SO and OSO never ever talk there is going to be some sort of implied relationship between them even if no actual romantic connection exists. Now I mentioned at the time that I was missing a few pieces and I hadn’t fully formed the idea, but I’m coming back because I have a way to define part of what I meant better.

Let’s set up a situation, okay? A little example? A girl is dating two guys. The two guys are straight, and no question. Okay? Got that? Good. I pick on the two guys because guys are more rarely afflicted by the time on their watching showing that it’s bi-o’clock and they might as well grab the nearest same sex partner to get their actual intended object of bed bouncification going.

There is still an implied intimacy between these two guys though, because they’re both doing something deeply intimate with the same girl. It’s sort of like meeting the guy who used to be dating your girl, only he’s still dating her now. So it’s not just “He was once banging my girl,” or even “He was banging her last night,” but rather, “he was banging her last night and after I’m done banging her tonight he’s going to bang her tomorrow.” Assuming her libido keeps up and she’s into being treated like the ball in a game of sex pong.

The two guys are both intimate with the girl though, so they share an intimacy even if they don’t talk much. Let’s assume they don’t mind hanging out with each other though, we won’t assume they’re buddies or anything because then the non-sexual intimacy becomes too easy to point out. We’ve had enough Bro-mance movies in the last few years to see how that works. I’m talking about those days when everyone hangs out together, there has to be some moments where the two guys realize that they’re sharing an intimacy by proxy.

Again, as before, I’m sort of sticking my toe into theoretical waters, since I’ve always been either the center of the relationship or an equal partner. I’ve never been part of the outsider, but I’ve noticed that this particular dynamic has been ignored by most the literature I’ve read and the idea interests me strangely.

Random Mental Firings

I as reading this article, and taking a poll that a friend made (it’s locked so I can’t link it) and in the poll he made the comment that girls could take the poll too because girls date girls as well. That got me thinking about something though.

Okay, maybe some of you don’t know this and maybe some of you do, but I skipped college. Not ashamed of it, but whenever someone talks about “Just something I did in college” I have to just sort of nod and agree that I understand the process of being between 17 and 24 and doing things you might not do later in life. I get that part, but I missed the whole college thing.

HOWEVER! I have done the things you do in those days and I dated some variety of most the girls mentioned in the article, as well as a variety of others. But I did it while dating Syd and mostly it was FWB territory. The thing is, I caught myself thinking about that and thinking about girls and groups dating and a funny idea struck me.

In a poly relationship, unless things are kept completely chambered off, you are actually sort of dating your partner’s other partners aren’t you? Even if you’re not sleeping together or are romantically linked, there is more than just hanging out when you hang with them as a group isn’t there? I’d like to work this into a more definite post, but I can’t really because I’ve always been the central person in these situations. It seems like that should be written by someone who has been the one who has a partner dating someone they’re not with. Syd and Holly have never dated outside the group, as it were. There is likely more “are we dating too?” tension if the two unconnected people are bi or if it’s a gay relationship.

Annoying Intelligence

You know what the most annoying thing about being the smartest person in the room is? No, not that. Although that is a good guess.

No, the most annoying thing is explanations. When I have talked to some other people about this a few of them understood what I meant and I labeled them as “Smart as me” so I could say “People as smart as me have this problem” and get away with it. It’s a lame joke, but I like it, so it stays. That joke and the creeping kid, they stay in the picture. Explanations are very hard for me, because I quite regularly understand things on a level where talking about them sort of makes my head hurt.

You ever try to explain something very simple to a child or someone who, until you started trying to explain you hadn’t known was of diminished capacity? Like trying to tell one of your co-workers how to change the toner in the printer or how to reply an e-mail with out sending the reply to every single person that the first e-mail was sent to. You know, simple stuff. Do you ever find that you’re getting annoyed at them because they’re just not getting it? Do you ever get annoyed with yourself because you keep thinking if you said it another way maybe they’d get it but you don’t know how to explain it any simpler? Do you then wonder how this person got to the age of 35 without knowing how to double-click a mouse? Yeah, I’ve done my time in the down and dirty world of the cube farms. I know your pain.

Now imagine that instead of double clicking mice, you just plain GET particle physics. Quarks and the idea of spin one half have no fear for you. You understand the wave theory of harmonics* and the observer changing what is observed as well as changing themselves. BUT! You can’t do… you know… basic ninth grade algebra much less the complex mathematical formula that makes people understand the way the universe ticks. So when you try to express it, you have to turn yourself inside out to explain it without using math or graphs or anything else. You can only use the power of storytelling, which can be a fucked up way to try and explain the difference between spin one and spin one half let me tell you. Actually that wasn’t so hard because I had an egg cup and some jelly beans to help. Anyone who knows what the hell I’m talking about can probably work out how that explanation worked on their own, the rest of you can remain in the dark.
*Which I may have just made up.

The problem is that there are a lot of things like that in life. There are hundreds of things that I just understand but am ill equipped to explain. Worse yet, I feel like trying to explain it is trying to hammer something very simple into a very thick skull and that’s not fair. Most the time, the people asking aren’t stupid, they would understand if I had the patience to explain the minor details and go into the minutiae of the issue. This produces frustration for both parties, doubly frustrating because this can’t be put down to the second party is a moron. Seriously if you’re the person who has trouble double-clicking, you have no idea how much your office mates talk about you. They’re probably talking about you in relation to buggy whips and 2400 modems right now and DAMN do you have to be old to get that joke!

Let’s have a practical demonstration of what I’m talking about, shall we?

Poly, I get very annoyed with the terms and the books and the graphs and the day planners, mostly because it feels to me like needless complication and accessorizing. BUT WAIT! What if it isn’t? Okay, with a lot of people I’ve bumped into it is, but let’s ignore those assholes for a moment. Instead, lets compare to the people who aren’t total dickheads who heard their favorite band is into this hip thing they read about on the internet and focus on intelligent human beings. People who manage to make their poly situation work successfully. Not assholes, decent people. Even the intelligent human beings and I have problems though. It all falls very simply into my head, but as we’ve shown this week, my head is an odd and scary place to try and hang out for more than an hour at a time, and I have to live here. Still, the view is… interesting. Terrifying, but interesting.

Anyway, getting away from mental landscaping and back to mental geography. The problems I have with poly terms are, I’ve been thinking, because I feel disinclined to describe complex structures with simplistic sounding terms. I would never describe someone as a primary, a secondary, a tertiary, or even a quandary. They’re all primary to me, just in different ways. My mind works differently though, I have wheels inside wheels and other such things that don’t put up with pen & ink, 2 dimensional representations on a piece of graph paper. You’d need one of those fancy 5 dimensional computers graphic things they have in the high dimensions where they play Brockian Ultra-Cricket to come close. Boxes are confining, terms are restricting, they rarely really do what I want them to, and for that reason they bug the living shit out of me.

All the trappings bug me for that reason, it all feels like these people are trying to make something that is very simple inside my head into something far harder than it needs to be on the outside. Like the inherent complexity of smooching two (or more) people on a regular basis isn’t complicated enough, they’ve got to attach terms and theories and then whip out charts and theories about the charts and the terms and then terms to define the theories about the charts and then chart the terms so that we can all understand this gibberish, except none of us actually can. All the terms, graphs, theories, graphs about theories, terms for graphs and so on only seem to obscure the simple honest truth that we’re all sort of greedy people who like to kiss and have sex with lots of people at once.

Oh sure, you can talk about not limiting emotion, or freedom of movement, expansion of the human spirit and a greater understand of our fellow being and ourselves, but when it all comes down to it we’re just trying to score with someone. It’s just some of us think having a meaningful relationship with five different people is scoring and some of us want to ask anyone with a pulse that they can find if they want to come up for some “instant coffee” if you know what I mean, and I think ya do. I’m talking about fuckin’! Specifically I’m talking about banging someone you just met in a one night stand. That’s what instant coffee is code for. Instead of going up “for a cup of coffee” with someone you’ve been on a date or two with. Instant coffee, see? Yeah, I thought you’d get it.

See how needlessly complicated that made everything?

I suppose deep down I know all that is probably necessary to help some people understand it, but I can’t help but wanting to shout “IT’S FUCKIN’! You do it with more than one person at a time and it’s fun!” which I understand makes me “unhelpful” and something of a problem for the nice helpful folk. Pagan people cringe when I come around too. So don’t worry, I do it to everyone who I sort of agree with but I find to be a bit too fluffy in the head. The thing is, I know when I have my patience about me and I’m face to face with intelligent people, I can break the whole thing down for them in a delicate and elegant manner than either makes them understand everything in a few sentences or freaks them right the fuck out and they stop listening, but at least I don’t spend all day on it.

As I say, this causes me a great deal of annoyance, because I should be smart enough to break this shit down and use the terms or write it out without needing the terms. Problem has been that the last few times I’ve wanted to I just end up feeling like the guy who got asked how to double click. My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention and it makes coming down to human levels with words and things sort of annoying. It gives me a headache to try and think down to human levels on this subject this week.

Seriously, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.

The simple parts are still simple though, I probably just need to focus on that and do what I’m doing. Work out what I’m trying to say and say it later. Also, stop telling everyone what a genius I am, it’s getting sort of annoying. I mean seriously.