the Last 4 Impertinent Questions

Filed under:Uncategorized — posted by the Yearning Heart on August 8, 2006 @ 4:28 am

This is a continuation of this post, in which I answer some impertinent but important questions. I answered #1 here. I am actually just getting to this. Such is my life.

  1. What’s your number one sexual turn off?
    2. There are so many – but most are simply personal turn-offs. I really believe that the way someone treats peripheral people can be a turn-off or a turn-on. For example, the way a guy treats a wait person or some other sort of servant is a big window into his personality. If he’s rude, peremptory, or condescending to the waitress, he’s not going to get anywhere with me.
    Another of my turnoffs is bad hygiene. I can’t stand the smell of old body odor. Fresh body odor isn’t so bad, but that old-dog smell is awful – the smell of someone who hasn’t bathed in days.
    Smoking is another. I can’t tell you how many times I would see a really cute, sexy -looking guy (or girl) hanging out somewhere and think, what a cutie! only to have the cutie light up and start smoking. It totally ruins it for me, and I just keep going. The smell of tobacco makes me want to throw up. I worked in cocktail bars where it was permitted, and I would go home and wash my hair in shampoo, lemon juice, and then conditioner just to get the smell out. For some reason, the smell of pot doesn’t make me so nauseated.
    Another turn-off in the past was someone who would rush things. I was with a guy once, on a blind date. It was my first semester away from home, and I was trying to be sophisticated and cool. I was with this guy at a pretty nice place, and it was all going well, and then he mentioned his parents’ lake house on the Lake of the Ozarks. “It’s quiet in the winter there,” he said. “A great place to be alone, and an even better place for a naughty weekend.” Well, that shut it down for me. I didn’t need to hear that from him at that moment. It made me wonder how many other freshman girls he lured to his parents’ lake house.
  2. Number one arousal trigger?
    3. Gosh, it’s not so much a trigger as it is a fuse that will eventually burn down and explode. If I’m in a relationship and if it’s going well, then I will want it within 3 days.
    I used to think just paying attention to me, being funny, and having a nice smile was all I needed. Then I met Monsieur, and then I realized that I really like grown-up men. When Maggie and Monsieur and her whole brood visited me, the contrast between Monsieur and my then-boyfriend SH was really remarkable. Monsieur was a grown-up, and he didn’t really look that much older that SH – in fact he was 8 years older. But such a contrast!
    SH is a guy who never wants more than to work in a bar, have season KU basketball tickets, have a hot girlfriend, and chase women on the side.
    Everything Monsieur wants is tied up in his children. He has turned down work in Europe and elsewhere in the United States because Texas is one of the few places that he can run his children’s school. He doesn’t have to send his kids to the mediocre school systems and their filthy, dangerous campuses, and he doesn’t have to pay some church or private school a ridiculous amount of money to offer his children something better. He and Maggie decided to do it themselves, and to do it better. Every decision he has made from where we live to where he works, all the way down to what kind of lawn mower to buy is hinged on how it will affect his family. But when he turns his attention towards me, I get every fiber of his being focused on me. That turns me on.
  3. Define sexy?
    4. It’s easier to say what it isn’t than what it is – at least when I talk about men. I used to think it was all body and pretty eyes, but it isn’t. Monsieur has gorgeous eyes, and a very nice body, but that’s not what attracted me to him. I think at first it was his voice, and then it was his love for Maggie that I liked. I think I fell for them first when they were playing music in Mademoiselle’s living room. Maggie was on the piano and Monsieur was on guitar, and he sang some song, I don’t know what, but it sounded so smooth, so confident, and so polished that I was hooked immediately. Monsieur would play off of Maggie, with only a nod or a gesture to point the music in the direction it needed to go. It melded so perfectly, so smoothly, that I wondered why they weren’t doing this act on Jay Leno or something. Monsieur had finished his guitar part, and nodded to Maggie, who was looking over her shoulder. He must have made some musical joke or something, because she smiled and bit her lip, and then he winked at her, and she winked back at him, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and went into her solo part. I blushed. I sneezed. I was hooked. It was sexy.
  4. Celebrity you would love to shag right now?
    5. With no strings, no recriminations and no lingering side effects? H’m.

    Can I bring a celebrity back from the grave? If so:

    I can’t think of any more right now.

Literary Devices

Filed under:Uncategorized — posted by the Yearning Heart on August 4, 2006 @ 3:56 am
I’d been having two problems with the Two Bigglest Boys lately. I don’t like to complain here about them but it sort of relates, as this is a story of my journey from point A to … well, wherever this torpedo takes me, I’m hanging on and I’ll blog it, regardless.
The first problem is that Middlest Boy is becoming a whiny little grumpypants. He’s five and a half. I hope to nip that bud. Lately I’m ignoring it, trying to keep from choosing sides and not allowing any bullying by anybody. Bigglest Boy uses his superior intellect a lot, and not always for the forces of good, and Middlest Boy adores him and idolizes him, so it crushes him emotionally when Bigglest Boy won’t ply with him and is feeling antisocial in general.
The Two Bigglest Boys have not been minding me. That has started with the Bigglest Boy being openly disrespectful, a trend whose bud his father thought nipped but still comes back from time to time. Lately he’s been bad, and Middlest Boy has picked up on it.
When Bigglest Boy was doing it at home it wasn’t so disruptive but when he does it in school I have to come down on him so I did.
He’s been resisting me in very subtle, sly ways. He’s been throwing his socks and underwear on the floor right next to the clothing hamper. He’s been waking up at 2 in the morning to “check the hen yard” as he says, but that gets him in trouble with his daddy who tells him to let the cat out. It’s the cat’s job to deal with front-line chicken security.
Bigglest Boy is 8 years old, very knowledgeable about science and a real challenge. He has been diagnosed with a behavioral and learning disorder that gives him some cognitive awareness issues. He’s also incredibly good looking, which is hard because those issues leave him awkward and shy and not very outgoing. He doesn’t warm up to people immediately and so when people are drawn to him because of his beautiful eyes with thick lashes, he tends to be rather blunt. We’ve been trying to work on that, and he has made great strides but lately it seems as though he’s much nicer to perfect strangers than he is to me.
Lately we had an exchange that sort of cleared some air, We were reading something in school and a character said something that used the expression “You’ll be the death of me.” Bigglest Boy asked why he said that, and I said, “He’s using hyperbole. You know – exaggerating for emphasis or dramatic effect.”
He was quiet while the discussion went on between Show-Off Girl and Boy Cool about the Greek root words ὑπερ- and βαλλειν (hyper- bollein etc. “throwing too far,” correct my elementary Greek in your comments and don’t start laughing at me when this school takes on Russian, Hebrew and Arabic – help.) while Bigglest Boy was brooding away.
Later that night after I finally won the argument about turning off the light, he asked me, “When that guy said, ‘he’ll be the death of me,’ did he know that the other guy was going to end up making the ship sink and killing the first guy?”
“Well,” I explained “That’s an example of foreshadowing, and writers use that to build theme (θέμα: théma) and make the story exciting.
“Mama said that to me.”
“Your mama said you’d be the death of her?” I asked. Thinking back, I said, “She said the same thing to me, a few times. When people say it to each other it’s an expression.”
“I know,” he said.
“They don’t mean anything by it,” I said. “What killed your mama is something that just happens, not very often, and when it does happen it’s terrible.”
“You don’t think she got mad at me for something and it made that blood vessel explode?” he asked. “She got mad at me, the night before –” he began.
“Nope,” I said simply. “Didn’t happen that way. I remember. She came home with a headache. She was already sick. You were being noisy and jumping on the furniture. She got mad at you for that and she was especially sharp with you, probably because she was having a very bad headache. But her getting mad at you didn’t kill your mama. She already had that thing before she came home.”
“What about when she said that you made her crazy?” he asked.
“She said that?” I asked.
He nodded. “You called and she talked to you and then she told daddy it was you and she said, ‘I don’t know, she makes me crazy.’”
I laughed. “Just another expression.”
He was sketching in his sketchbook, and it was way after “lights out”. I was indulging him these minutes while we talked.
“What are you drawing?” I asked him.
“Solid-fuel booster assembly,” he said, the way I would have said, “space ship” as a kid.
“Cool,” I said. “Lights out, Rocket Scientist. We lift off at zero seven thirty.”

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image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace