#365Gratitude Day 158: Finding myself (and Missy) in art

I stumbled across this interesting Tumblr blog the other day, http://submissiveguycomics.tumblr.com. (High chance of NSFW, you've been warned.)  I started following it with Flipboard, and even flipped a thing or two into a Flipboard magazine for myself. This morning, I had a good close look at one of the images, and had to do a double-take, because there was just SO MUCH THERE that spoke to me.

Here's the image.

A dominant woman plays video games on her couch, resting her feet on her mostly undressed submissive guy, who is playing the game with her.

OK, it's adorable.  But, let's do a little close analysis, shall we?

Five things really jumped out at me in this picture.

1. Submissive guy is sitting on the floor, and is in his underwear. This is something I do a lot.  At home, I vastly prefer to sit on the floor when I sit doing stuff with Missy, and I like being in a t-shirt and diaper or undies, sometimes without the t-shirt at all.  I think I've got a mild case of CFNM fetish (nudity behind the link, duh!).
2. Note that upon careful inspection you can see that our friend here has just recently got a spanking.  It might have been for fun, or punishment.  Both are great.
3. Submissive guy's mistress/mommy is sitting above him, and resting her feet and legs on him.  This is one of my major buttons.  I love being held down, love touch as a love-language of affection, too. I'm always laying all over Missy, and others I care for, and love when they do it to me, too.  Especially people I feel submissive to.  
4. This is not a sex scene.  It's aftercare, after the spanking.  They're playing video games.  (Which Missy and I LOVE TO DO.) BUT....the key thing in this particular interaction is that the fact she's resting on him/holding him down is not the primary focus of what they're doing, it's just part of the deal, organic, intrinsic to what they're doing.  That, for me, ratchets this up from mildly arousing to HOLY MOLEY I'M ON FIRE.  It smacks of authenticity, another big fetish of mine.
5. Check out what submissive guy is doing with his tongue.  He's got it poking out of the corner of his mouth, because he's focused, paying attention to the game.  This is something I do all the time when I'm little, and concentrating hard on something.  That's what caught my attention in the first place.

I'm just beside myself with glee at this picture.  I can't wait to go show it to Missy.

#365Gratitude Day 157: Getting A Reaction

So yesterday I spent a good chunk of the morning working on a new Concerning Littleton short story, called Gear Shift.  (I'm about 75% done with it, hoping to actually finish it today.)  I was sharing it with some test readers of mine, showing them chunks of it as I wrote, getting their responses, and editing-on-the-fly.  

I love doing that.  It's like taking a short vacation with a friend to a world to the world of my writing.  

So my friend Marie Furie was reading the latest section, and the two main characters Adam and Christina, get into a discussion about her new safe word.  We had a little discussion about what I thought would turn out to be a pretty powerful scene, if you've already read Concerning Littleton.

Here's how the conversation went.

Marie: "What is the word.  I need to know."

Me: ****REDACTED****

Marie: ***REPEATS WHAT I TOLD HER***

Marie: "Hmmm."

Me: "Think about Concerning Littleton."

Marie: "Oh god. Noooooooooooo. Noooooooooooooooooooooooo. OMG."

Me: "Heh. Yeah. I won't ever publicly say so, though." 

I want the reader to be able to figure it out from context and clues, and have a reaction.  I think that's the reaction I'm pretty much going for.

#365Gratitude Day 156: Cookie wave

In our shared chat with our friend Marie Furie, I found this cuteness from my brother today:

I'm just gonna leave this picture here for mako:

I love it, and him.  (The original picture, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is my favorite piece of art.)

Thanks brother!  I love you, too.

#365Gratitude Day 155: Room for mistakes

Yesterday my boss and I went into DC to get some particular paperwork we needed signed.  According to the information we had, we didn't particularly need an appointment, and someone would be available to help us all that day. 

I actually put aside some other tasks so we could go do this.  I drove us to the metro, we rode it, changed trains, and even had a nice 15 minute walk or so to the place we were supposed to go.

Only to find out that the particular office we were trying to go to was appointment-only that day, and we were told to come back next week.

So we walked back to the metro, rode it, changed trains, and drove back to the office.  

All told, it was maybe a 3 hour mistake.

Pretty frustrating.

But in retrospect, things could have been much worse.  We laughed it off, scouted out a parking space for next week (when we will drive there!), and had a good long talk about other stuff on our plates.  We strategized, and commiserated.  I was grousing about it a bit to a friend who pointed out to me that hey, it was still billable time, and I was getting paid, right?

Absolutely.

I make mistakes all the time.  Multiple times per day, it seems at times.  That's okay though - I've got the room in my life for them.  That's an enormous thing.  

I've been struggling lately to consistently work out, and to re-establish a writing schedule for myself.  One of the things I told my boss yesterday during what I called "our little sabbatical" was that I was going to be coming in to work later because I really needed to work out in the mornings.

He was totally cool with that.  Maybe it was the 15 minute walk in mid-afternoon heat endorphins.  Actually, he's just a really nice guy.  In that same conversation, he also told me that when I need to, it's totally cool for me to bug out of the office and work from home for an afternoon, too.  

Maybe that wasn't a wasted trip after all.

#365Gratitude Day 154: function() - no arguments

​Bear with me.  This is a longish entry, and kind of complicated.  So the past few days I've had this terrible thing on my mind.  

It's an argument I've been having, at a distance, with someone I love very much.  

I got a good sleepless night out of it Monday night, and then had a shoddy, not-really-spoonful workday out of it yesterday.  What the argument's about doesn't even matter.  Nor does who it's  with, nor my position on the issue, versus theirs.​  It's not worth rehashing even a little bit.

So why am I bringing it up?  Because I'm grateful for how I've managed to transcend it, this morning.  ​

My friend Shokolada and I often have fairly deep philosophical conversations.  He lamented to me once that ​one of the things that make the eastern philosophies I'm so enamored with kind of a drag is that ultimately, you have to rely upon yourself.  There's no other person, entity, resource, guidebook, scripture, guru, or even deity to turn to.  In the end, you have to do your own heavy lifting.  Shok thinks that's kind of blah.

He's not wrong, either.  

Mindfulness is a practice. Even when someone else teaches you about the practice, it's you who has to do it.  And, as work goes, the sort of chilly, bleak news about the work is once you begin it, you only have to do it until you're dead.  (Maybe after, I'm not sure yet.)

OK, so back to my issue at hand.  I got a good big case of the I'm-Very-Disappointed-In-This-Person's about the person in question, and proceeded to rant about it for about a day and a half to other folks I care about.  It's painful.  Although I didn't want to admit it to myself, the source of that pain is mostly the guy writing this blog entry.  I had an expectation that wasn't meeting with how things really are. It was my dissastifaction about that expectation that was hurtful to me.  I desperately wanted this person to see how wrong they were, and how right I was.  

That's really kind of silly.  It's human, but silly.  This morning I remembered why.   

Specifically, I remembered this telling of a zen story, "You Are Right."   Go ahead and read it, if you like. It sums up far more succinctly why I was being silly.

Today I feel light, easy.  I'm not worried about being right.  I don't need to be.  I realize that when I'm functioning well, I have no arguments.