Gloria's Oversexed Mind

Random Thoughts: Radio's Resident Evils

Just ran a few errands and turned the radio on while we drove. My mistake. The first problem with Georgia radio stations is that your choices are pretty much limited to wing-nut talk radio; gospel music; country music; and stations that play Elton John songs at least once an hour. But it's the ads that kill you. Three minutes of radio advertising = four stereotypes to make a person scream.

From two different food ads:

Stereotype #1: All women feel guilty when they eat tasty things.

Stereotype #2: Quote: "If you don't worry about your waistline, you aren't a woman!"

Stereotype #3: Mother-in-laws are, by nature, hateful bitches.

Stereotype #4: Only women cook for their families.

Another one bites the dust but I'm back

Miss me?  Sorry I haven't been around much but, yeah, well, I killed another laptop. La.  To its credit, the dearly departed model lasted longer than any other computer has, and endured more depredations than any other, mainly because the nifty Dell maintenance contract I signed allowed me to get it rebuilt a few times on their dime. But I've always been pretty merciless with my pcs and laptops and sooner or later they all collapse in a nervous tizzy, their motherboards scorched by my relentless appetite to use and abuse them beyond all reasonable limits.

I am speaking about how I treat machines, of course. I'm much harder on submissives.

On the upside, I'd backed up almost all my files, or at least most of the important things. The only big loss was a few days' worth of blog content. Not too bad. Learning to use my new laptop Dell (with new OS, Vista) has slowed down my pace a bit, and I need some new imaging software (PhotoShop for Vista? anyone want to recommend a program? freeware suggestions always appreciated).  But hope survives: I know that, one day, I SHALL remember where the delete key is located now. 

Meanwhile, it's jolly to have a sparkling new toy to play with and, yes, to ultimately devour and destroy, byte by byte, until it begins blue-screening and coding MOMMY.   My pudendal nerve flutters at the mere thought of it.

I'm working on rebuilding image archives, and have a bunch of finds to share today.   It's going to be another busy blur of a day but if I can find the time, I want to say a few more things about the raid on the Eagle too.

Kiss kiss darlings.  I'm glad to be home.  It's lonely out there in laptopless land.

No news isn't necessarily bad news

Looks like I'm going to have a day (or at least several long hours) off the blog. My ancient laptop has finally given up the ghost. Not unexpectedly, which is why I had everything important backed up and my new laptop ready to go. That said, the new laptop is not FULLY ready to go, and I did lose content I was planning to post today and tomorrow.

This day was inevitable and I was prepared for it, for a pleasant change. I literally squeezed the last drops of life out of a 5 year old plus laptop that I wore to death. Kind of a victory, actually. :) Now I just have to learn to use a new keyboard...and...oh, yeah, install stuff so I can read email! Right-o.

Please excuse the interruption. I'll be back to blogging asap.

Green Thoughts: The joys of rehomed furniture

What's the point of having a personal blog if you can't occasionally veer off in random directions? That's how I'm rationalizing this post, anyway.

Given the world of economic shit most of us are in now I thought I'd write a few words about one of my favorite fetishes:  used furniture. Call it "vintage" to make it sound chic, or go green and say it's recycled. Either way, in recent years I've become a convert to "rehoming" furniture, knick-knacks, and other household items rather than buying new.   Maybe it's my impoverished childhood, or my green sensibilities, but I can't stand the thought of great old stuff ending up in landfills. 

Lately I've been seriously redecorating and doing it all the rehoming plan.   Flea markets, garage sales, and craigslist are overflowing with people selling off excess to get extra money for the holidays; some people are downsizing just to make their mortgage payments. Vendors on eBay are increasingly willing to give you extra discounts.  In other words:  opportunities to pick up fabulous stuff on the cheap have never been better. 

Somewhere out there someone just got tired of a table you always wished you had, and they're going to try to sell it for peanuts and then send it to the landfill.   Last week, I scored a set of six truly gorgeous chairs from a local rich lady who just wanted to get rid of a deceased relative's "junk."  I'd been shopping for new dining room chairs for months.   We could never have afforded the same quality new from a store.  Meanwhile, she was so rich she didn't need the money and already had them loaded on a trailer whose next destination was the dump.  I could only hope that the other fine furniture she'd casually listed on craiglist would get snapped up: part of me was tempted to buy it all, it was that cheap and that beautiful. 

Recycling also means responsibly disposing of your stuff.   I always have a plan for disposing whatever I'm replacing. The curb is not an option. Some busted appliances we couldn't send to a landfill sat in our garage until the glorious day I found a local character who loves to tinker with them.  I ask friends if they want to salvage parts from busted laptops or see what artwork they can produce from a broken chair.  I try to keep a balance:  unless I'm buying something to fill an existing gap, if something comes in, something goes out. And it doesn't go to a landfill.  The old saying, "one woman's junk is another woman's treasure" applies. 

I use freecycle.org and craiglist.org to give away anything that still has enough life left in it to give someone else pleasure.

Reasons To Rehome

1. BETTER QUALITY FOR LESS MONEY: When I buy a mahogany end table made in the 1950s, it doesn't weigh 18 ounces and crack the first time I put a lamp on it like much of that laminated crap from China sold at WalMart.  It's made in the USA of solid hardwood, strong enough to last a lifetime -- and it beats WalMart prices hands down.

2. WAY LESS MONEY: I bought that set of gorgeous dining chairs for $65 last week.  It was better than an orgasm.  Remember that most antique dealers go to these same sources (flea markets, garage sales and craigslist). I don't condone exploiting someone's financial hardship to take advantage of them: however, at least around here, a lot of people sell stuff because they need cash for bills. If buying someone's dusty unused jewelry box means her kids get a better Christmas, I'm all for it. Plus, double cool: I get a jewelry box!  (As I did, just the other day.)

3. RESCUE BEAUTY! I love "rehoming" worthy furniture and especially worthy art/artifacts.  Retro pieces, carvings, masks, framed prints -- shop at the mall for them and spend huge for crappy reproductions....or recycle originals for a fraction of the cost.  Yesterday I scored a lovely little writing desk that cost three times as much at Ashley's.  The seller suddenly was being relocated by work:  if the piece hadn't sold it would've had to go to a dump by week's end.

4.  MAKE MONEY.    Throw a garage sale or bring your stuff to a flea market.  Post for free on Craigslist.  Whether it's a bag of old clothes or a table with only 3 legs, somewhere out there someone wants it if the price is right.  

5. PASS IT ON.  Go on. Give it up.  You'll feel good about yourself.  We needed to replace our beat-up sofas, and didn't think we could get much for them, but a local family in need were happy to haul them off for free and put covers on them.   Our old microwave currently heats lunch for a kindergarten class somewhere in town.  Even cracked dishes and broken crockery, torn-up jeans or left-over fabric might be just what someone needs for a crafting project.  Contact a shelter or church in your neighborhood, post it on freecycle or the free section of craigslist, and spread the wealth, literally. 

Kickin' it with Tantra Cafe tonight at 10

Get an hour of Gloria's sexual power tonight!

Listen to my interview by Laurie Handler, Tantra teacher, author, and radio-host of Tantra Cafe, tonight, October 21, at 10 pm. Laurie and I had a fascinating, fast-paced conversation about sex, spirituality and transformational aspects of BDSM that will give you brain candy you may savor for a nice long while.

How to listen to me on Tantra Café:

At 10 pm Eastern/7 pm Pacific tonight, Wednesday, October 21:
log on to: www.bbsradio.com/listen_now.php and click on Station 2.

---

Can't be there tonight?

The show will be rebroadcast:

Saturday, October 24: 11pm Eastern (8pm Pacific) on Station 2

Sunday, October 25: 3pm Eastern (noon Pacific) on Station 1

If you can't make any of the above date, search the archives of WebTalkRadio.net.

iTunes subscribers: search "Tantra Café."

The show will also be searchable on TantraCafe.com.

I refuse to explain this

via www.youtube.com

Meditations Upon Finding Electrema

My body lives on the East Coast but my spiritual clock is set to Pacific Time. It's only after midnight that the poetry comes out.  Very late at night I'm inclined to ponder all the imponderables, to fill my brain to overflowing with new ideas and epiphanies, to get so lost in a historical detail it comes to life for me. 

Found this very late the other night and want to ask Electrema a thousand things.

 

How did you pick your name, Electrema?  Are you singing the body electric? Or perhaps you see yourself as  Electra with an even more extreme Daddy fetish? Or did you see the word in an appliance ad, and adapt it to your use?

That hair. That profile.  Before you were Electrema dancing in the spotlight were you Bessie Schwartzman slicing cheese in the deli? Or perhaps you were a rich girl going through her Paris Hilton phase and doing whatever she can to make Daddy mad.

What is your art, Electrema? Interpretative modern dancing, a la Isadora Duncan, performed in the voluptuous salons of wealthy patrons of the arts? Or did that leotard get stripped off backstage at a 2nd Avenue burlesque hall for a few extra bucks?

Who are you, Electrema? What are your dreams?  Have you ever suspected that one day people will find you quaint and sweet in your leotard, and not the sexual radical you are to your contemporaries?

Random rule of Internet consciousness

If you log off the Internet in your mind when you shut your computer, you were never really on the Internet in the first place

Dominant and touching: random thought

To be completely honest about it, I think one reason I am only comfortable in the dominant role (I've tried bottoming/switching, but it never felt right for me) is that I need to be in control of who touches me, when they touch me, and how they touch me. That's what frees me to experience the greatest amount of sexual intensity. I was more willing to give others some of that power when I was younger, but even then with mixed emotions. Fortunately, I was blessed with mad hormones, so learned to adapt. I LOVE sex once it gets going. Still, I always preferred to be the initiator, the more aggressive one, always preferred to do the touching instead of being touched. It takes a lot for me to trust someone else with my body. I've long known it's the result of the damages of my childhood that sex only feels safe when I want it first. I could fight it and try to overcome it -- as I did until I was nearly 30. But the fact is, what feels sexually right to a person is far deeper than the conscious mind. SM was a blessed relief from the struggle. Dominants get to call the shots; they get to decide what kind of sexual contact they'll have, and when they'll have it, and with whom. I love being dominant. I love SM.

Brutality leads to stupidity: new study on spanking

My oh my Oh. I can just imagine the debates this new study will cause all over the known spank-o-verse. Scientists claim that spanking your kids dulls their ability to learn.

Spanking can get kids to behave in a hurry, but new research suggests it can do more harm than good to their noggins. The study, involving hundreds of U.S. children, showed the more a child was spanked the lower his or her IQ compared with others.

Straus and his colleague Mallie Paschall of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Maryland studied nationally representative samples of two age groups: 806 children ages 2 to 4, and 704 ages 5 to 9. The researchers tested the kids' IQs initially and then four years later.

Both groups of kids got smarter after four years. But the 2- to 4-year-olds who were spanked scored 5 points lower on the IQ test than those not spanked. For children ages 5 to 9, the spanked ones scored on average 2.8 points lower than their unspanked counterparts.

Spanking Leads to Lower IQs, Study Says

Couple of comments. First, I took the AOL poll that accompanied the story and was intrigued to see that while 80% + of people said they'd been spanked as children, over 40% were either ambivalent about it or against the practice. Which means that a good number of people who were spanked grew up with conflicted feelings about their own experiences.

Personally, I am 100% against spanking children. I don't believe that brutal force over a child (or adolescent, for that matter) is a good thing in the long run, even if it does intimidate a child into obedience in the moment. Now, in fairness, I'll say right up front I'm not a parent. However I once was a child, and was smacked and beaten a bit by my mother. Nothing so formal as a spanking, but lots and lots of hitting. What did physical discipline do for me?  For one, it made me feel like crap about myself.  Honestly, I think it kept me from being a sadomasochist and accepting my own sexual identity for years because it instilled in me a horror of hitting other people. I remembered how I felt when my parents raised their hands to me: if I wasn't shocked and stunned by the suddenness and unfairness of them using their superior size to hurt me, then I was completely PISSED OFF. Perhaps some people grow up in households where parents are able to manage to make you feel that you "deserved" a spanking but as far as I was concerned, the physical abuse I got at home only told me that my parents were sociopathic incompetents who should never have had me in the first place. Oops. I guess my emotions are showing. But there it is. See above: it pissed me off.

For me, the argument against using violence is a universal: it does no creature any "good" unless it is your intention to produce a fearful adult.  Violence may be an appropriate response to a direct threat to your life but violence-as-remedy-for-naughtiness is, IMHO, a pile of Victorian horseshit.

I've owned a lot of dogs. One of them was hell-on-a-biscuit and if ever a dog deserved to be thrashed it was him. None of us ever laid a hand on him. We worked the kindness angle. We punished with indifference, and sometimes we yelled (trust me, you couldn't refrain from yelling at this dog). But what would hitting teach him? To fear another human? To obey out of terror? To make him feel like a bad, unloved dog? He was a broken-down, miserable beast when we rescued him. As his guardians, it was our mission to show him a path to happiness and self-confidence, to teach him a new and better way to live, to let him know he was safe and protected in this cold world.

I think if the parents of human beings could maintain their focus on doing things that are REALLY in a child's best interest, if they could remember how much it upset them when their own parents expressed their disappointment or anger through violence, if they could stay PRESENT to their roles as teachers, guardians and protectors, not cops and prison guards, there might be a whole lot less spanking of children and a whole lot more functional a world.

As for spanking adults -- well, I hope everyone knows that I think any mutual consensual sex that makes you wetter or harder is a GREAT thing.