The Corner Behind the Sofa

on wednesday night i put up an ad in craigslist which was responded to by about two dozen people by the next morning. one of them, mike, was cute- well, lots of them were cute, but he's my kind of cute. big, dark hair and eyes, a sweet italian face. the ad was for NSA oral- i'm a big slut. it's something i've always wanted to do, just 'pick up a guy'. the internet is my bar. so thursday night we met at Panera bread, had sandwiches. he made me laugh. he smelled good. i went back to his place and came three times with his hand on my throat.

i feel better about going to china now, because i have something to run away from.

tangerinecupcake: last tuesday (Fat Tuesday of all days) i had phone sex with two different men
tangerinecupcake: the first was standard and vanilla. he uses the word 'clitty' and i find that irritating
tangerinecupcake: i actually had to hold the phone away from my ear just to be able to get off, because his vocabulary was so strange
tangerinecupcake: the second guy was tough.
tangerinecupcake: he was alive and electric and dirty in all different ways
tangerinecupcake: he wanted me to say 'i'm a worthless pig'
tangerinecupcake: and when i refused he went through this ritual of breaking it down so i wasn't afraid to say it
tangerinecupcake: i loved that he wasn't afraid of my saying no, he didn't back down
tangerinecupcake: he was very tough
tangerinecupcake: so i sent him pictures the next morning and didn't hear from him for a week
tangerinecupcake: until after i said i thought his manners were abhorrent
tangerinecupcake: he said, "we're not very compatible"
tangerinecupcake: and i told him if he thinks i'm not pretty it's one thing, but we were clearly very compatible indeed.
tangerinecupcake: so unfortunate. i never should have sent him the photos, because he was a great dom.
tangerinecupcake: meanwhile the other guy, he's flying here from california just to fuck me.
tangerinecupcake: i don't really want to
tangerinecupcake: i want to know him but not fuck him

Right now I want my ass rubbed raw, and stretched and fingered and fucked.

I have finally met a man and a woman who I would like to take to bed at the same time.
The man is Tony, who used to be my boss. The woman is Tiffany, a girl I work with.
I love Tiffany's thick, blatant body. I love her bright yellow hair. I love her eager smile. That smile like mine.
I see why Tony flirted with both of us. Why, after beginning with Tiffany, he moved on to me. I love her morality. How she, like me, is uninhibited while remaining moral.
Tony and Tiffany both have pointed, crooked teeth.

in love with Frank from Fishkill, who is short and wide of skeleton, who has a mustache and opaque brown eyes. i love new york men, who are so into their masculinity, so eager to flirt.

funny how some days you're not thinking about sex at all, and then the next day you've got a callous on your index finger from thrusting your dildo into yourself for 20 minutes at high speed.

+Tony rolling his sleeve up and saying, "you see those? can you tell what shape that is?"
"they're burn marks." not wanting to say it.
"they're all in the same area so it would look like something else."
then, after the thirty seconds of apology and my scared face, "can you tell i have a scar on my mouth?"
looking at me. those dark brown eyes looking at me. "no, no i can't. oh, there it is." one finger pointing, reaching, then retreating. no, better you don't give me a reason to put your finger in my mouth.

+Me squatting next to his chair, Tony shoving me once to try to knock me over.

+Tony hugging me tight and grumbling or sighing. right around my middle, hugging me sincerely.

+Tony whacking me on the bottom with a thick wooden stick. "i knew that would get you excited."

the short-haired Chinese businesswoman wearing the Burberry wool minidress. with black high heels and muscular, unshaved legs.

Bird had puffy Japanese-boy hair. he was so thin.

we met late at night after evan and i watched the awful play in Chinese about communism (yeah, that one play) and I snuck off from dinner to try to meet my brazilian man. but the brazilian man (Turtle Eyes, a short man of about 50) was already gone home for the night. so, walking to my dorm from the taxi i passed by the Statue of Mao, under which was a group of chinese students having English Night, where they all agree to speak English.

i listened to a chinese boy tell me about christianity, then another chinese boy tell me about his white cat. when everyone had left i started to walk home. but there was this boy sitting on the mantlepiece of the statue smoking a cigarette. and he said hello. i was afraid that he just wanted to ask me to go to bed with him. like the 30-something chinese businessman who looked like Gary Shandling and asked me if i would marry him. but he just started to talk to me. he said, "I have had a lot of beer tonight. I don't want to embarrass myself."

the kind of boy you know will smell good just by looking at him. wearing a washed-out white cotton t-shirt and messy pants.

he walked me back to my dorm and we exchanged phone numbers. affectionate until we got to the door, when he promptly said, "okay, goodbye!" and turned around. i called after him and hugged him. he smiled. this is a very chinese thing.

then the next day i spent in Pudong. when i got home i was very tired. Bird and I went to the quad to watch the drunken graduate students have their pre-final harrah. shirtless boys doing martial arts fighting while a girl in red overalls called out who would be the next to fight with whom. while girls in flowered shirts sat in a circle singing chinese versions of christian hymns.

Bird said, "you know, a Bird and an Iris would make a beautiful painting."

i had bought Panda Sex, a book by a wonderful chinese writer named Mian Mian. the book hasn't been translated to English yet. Bird read the first page in Chinese, then translated it slowly.

we talked about Lake Nyos belching up carbon dioxide and killing every living thing. about death by tsunami. I told Bird that being in China had woken up my sense of smell, that it taught me to see pain and sadness as experiences rather than tragedies.

Bird said, "I think people our age are lost. We've left our parents, but we haven't had children. We have no money and no job. We are the saddest people."

His cheeks were almost perfectly flat. When I kissed his face it was like kissing a painting, like kissing the surface of a lake. we traded glasses and he said, "why did God give me weak eyes?"

I said, "so you would spent more time looking."

alone in wet grass at four in the morning. and the following day, awake, feet on the floor to see my two legs covered knuckle to knee with hundreds of bug bites. i scratched until they bled clear through my pants and had to walk around with my legs uncovered to keep the fabric from irritating them.

he went to Hangzhou to study the lake, and didn't come back until I was long gone.

i have been reluctant to update this journal for fear of hurting my friend Robert's feeling.

but i can't keep doing that. if he doesn't know how much i love him and will always love him, that's his loss.

on with the updates.

who bought me the special edition Sin City DVD??


...

oh, right. me. i bought it for me.
because i have no boyfriend, no girlfriend, no lovers and no pals.


whine, whine, whine

i watch baseball now.
*whispers*
hideki matsui is a god.

We left the car in a gravel depression along the side of the road, loaded our arms with a sleeping back and a cooler, and found a level patch among the ferns and dead trees and baby pines.
it was wonderful. i kept looking up from our bodies and staring at the sky and the dirt and thinking, this is how people are meant to fuck. this is how every other animal does it. no pretention, no fancy add-ons.

1. Sebastian would occasionally brush my hair into my face and then go into something akin to a rapture, cryng, "you're so beautiful i can't even look at you!"

2. he would say with complete honesty and innocence, "you should be a model" or "you have a body like a mermaid"

i have some black hairs on my neck, and they make me feel like i'm not really a woman.

i choose not to throw away terrible things that i don't want anymore. mostly ugly gifts given to me by my parents. if i throw them out, surely they'll notice and think i don't love them anymore.

if i throw them out, surely when they die i'll be steeped in guilt.

when i listen to the french CD that robert made me or the german cd that sebastian made me i start sobbing because i think the only thing left i have of their love is the music.

everything profound i figured out about my sexuality while i was talking to elizabeth last night has been forgotten.

- we haven't made stepstones yet

- i want to throw books out so i have room

- i want to buy things and declutter at the same time

- the sheets keep slipping off my mattress and i can't fix it.

- i am ugly

- the milk i drank this morning tasted vaguely of mold or excrement. i wrote the company a letter.

- are my parents trying to poison me?

- i am happy but humiliated at work, because i am not in china. but i'm still happy. that's what's humiliating.

- i want to go to graduate school without having to apply.

- i am ugly.

books i want. badly.


Skeptics and True Believers by Chet Raymo

The Path : A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe by Chet Raymo

The Virgin and the Mousetrap by Chet Raymo

Every Day Is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel

A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel

Going Down: A Novel by David Markson

Vanishing Point by David Markson

Collected Poems by David Markson

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Nowegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

After the Quake: Stories by Haruki Murakami

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

Black Snow by Mikahul Bulgakov

Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch

The Fatal Eggs: A Story by Mikhail Bulgakov