~Sunday~ The laziest day evah. I kept hitting the “virtual snooze button,” and by that I mean not waking up every nine minutes, but more like every 20 or 30, and going down for another count.
At around 4:00, I finally got my ass to the gym, where after stretching I did 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, which actually were a little bit excruciating by the 14th and 15th set. I followed that with 30 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine. There were no real characters there to speak of today, which is good, as I only talk about the ones who annoy me.
It’s been a while since I’ve published a Dear Prudence letter, but I had to include this one, because the response by Prudie to this letter is what makes me want to be her; it’s such eloquent writing:
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Dear Prudence, My husband has some kinky sexual desires that I don’t want to deal with—they just aren’t my thing. He’s proposed that he visit a dominatrix, and I’m half-inclined to consent. He insists that they wouldn’t be having sex, not even in the Bill Clinton sense, and that whatever happens, there would be no threat to our relationship. I suspect that both of those things are true, but I still wonder whether we should go down this road. Obviously, I don’t love the idea of my husband being involved in any kind of intimate acts with another woman, but I might prefer this to dominating him myself. He’s gone to therapy—it made no difference. Any thoughts? —Conflicted Wife Dear Conflicted, Having just read this interview with a former dominatrix, I can understand that even for the sake of marital harmony you’d rather not hog-tie your husband, put him in a cage with a bowl of dog food, or dress up as a cheerleader and kick schoolbooks out of his hands. I got in big trouble with the sexual fetish community a while back for suggesting that a teenage boy with an obsessive latex glove fetish get counseling to help keep the fetish from taking over his life—and I still think that having rubber gloves on your hands and on your mind during all your waking hours is a terrible way to live. I understand, however, as your husband has found out, that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish a fetish. Your letter also points out that even if you love someone with a fetish, that doesn’t mean you can happily participate in it. It sounds as if your husband’s desire for domination doesn’t dominate his life—it’s just an aspect of his sexuality he can’t squelch and that you don’t want to incorporate into your conjugal bag of tricks. It’s natural that you don’t love the idea of your husband finding a release for his desire to be tied up, or whatever, with another woman. But the dominatrix literature makes clear that while they deal with an aspect of their clients’ sexuality, it’s is not about sexual intercourse. Letting him go might make your marriage happier because he won’t be asking you to tell him how naughty he’s been. If you can trust that his visits are limited to playing out scenarios that make you gag, then just think of it as therapy with a whip. —Prudie |
The second letter in this week’s batch is also quite good, and again, the beginning of her response just slays me, “Your mother-in-law is a traveling morgue, and…” Click to read all the letters in this week’s batch.
I met Joe at The Borough at 8:00, where we had two drinks, and where I ate way, way, way too many calories worth of greasy, delicious food that I hope I won’t regret later in the night.
I stopped by my office on the way home, and as I suspected, everything is not where it needs to be after our support guy installed Windows 7 and changed my desktop to a new support environment.
Little problems, like the only browser choice I have is Internet Explorer (which brings up a little bit of vomit in the back of my throat to even to say, and not being able to install either Chrome or Firefox, because each require me to have administrator access to my computer, which within this new support environment, I no longer have. I also tried to open a PDF, didn’t have Adobe Reader, and couldn’t install it for the same reason. Those applications were supposed to be installed for me as part of this change.
At home, I did some work for a couple of hours, one of the items being pulling together my status report from last week and plans for next week, which needs to be on my boss’s desk first thing Monday morning.
I also spent more time than I wanted to on how to negotiate public transportation tomorrow to get to a 9:00 meeting on a remote part of Centennial Campus.
Today’s holiday favorite selection, Happy Holidays, comes with memories of the return from one of the three of my dad’s year-long deployments to Vietnam. One time, he brought back an elaborate sound system, which consisted of a reel-to-reel tape recorder unit and some awesome speakers, and he had one tape of holiday music, which is when I first heard this song, and in particular this version by Andy Williams, and we used to love listening to this as kids.
Note: I added the link above to another arrangement of this song after the video below got removed from YouTube. It’s an interesting version with the Osmond brothers as kids and with Andy Williams along with, evidently, his brothers.]