sundries

There is very little doubt I am depressed. This is not the end of the world and purely situational. ( I'm fine, but I process a little below the cut tag )

All of this is the long way of saying, I owed people a ton of stuff yesterday and just couldn't make myself do it. Today I'm settling in to do it (right after this and Wicked Wednesdays).

Things that are good about Switzerland: the salmon. The smoked salmon is really, really good. Also good? The whipped cream on the hot chocolate at Starbucks. So much better. I also damage the environment less just by being here -- less paper, less plastic.

Dogboy & Justine is up to $3,165 in pledges with 62 backers. I'm going to write a love letter to the backers collectively soon here, but I have to wait until the words are with me, 'cause it's gotta be good. I'm not quite there today, although the gratitude is as immense.

So the election. About what we expected, ne? Could have been a lot worse. And I think it changes the stakes for the next to years in a way that I hope will engender greater bravery from the left.

Esther Vergeer is a tennis star who uses a wheelchair. It took posing nude in a major sports magazine for me, and probably you, to have heard of her.

You Will Regret Reading This: The New York Times posted a blog entry asking readers to talk about regrets they've had about financial decisions. After they posted some of the responses, a new series of responses started, this time where people started discussing regrets beyond the financial sphere. Years ago, in this journal, I turned off IP-logging and told people to tell me a secret. It was beautiful, powerful, and horrifying. After several confessions to violent acts that may or may not have actually transpired, I turned the exercise off, and it is not one I will repeat. It was too much to hold.

Fandom, WHUT? The Organization for Transformative Works would be one thing, but WHUT?

More on Merlin -- I really thought I was going to be able to commit to watching this third season, in spite of all the problems, because of those occasional eerie moments I've previously mentioned. Additionally, I'm increasingly liking Merlin the character this season, as he is starting to strike me as a young man who might very well grow into someone much like an original character of mine, and so I am fascinated to watch him. The appearance is not an exact match, but some of the physicality is and the eyes are.

And then I tried to watch the goblin episode. I'm ten minutes in, and I hate myself. Is there any way in which it redeems itself, or should I just skip? Also has anyone written fic for this show that is as dark and sophisticated and the show pretends to be for about 23 seconds an episode?

I've had dreams about Cleopatra two nights in a row. I have no idea why. They feel like very cold, elegant fanfiction about why you should never be in love with Galadriel. It's entirely odd.

Wicked Wednesdays: the nature of naming

I suppose, since we're having this little chat on the Internet, there's no one here who isn't close to someone whose off-line, whose real, name they don't know. But that phenomena, of being close to the pseudonymous is really only recently a common experience. Even in a world of nicknames, sweet names, performance personas, doing-business-as, and name changes, generally, when we meet someone who we keep interacting with, we know what they are called in the wider world.

But in the house of domination, everybody lies. And you'd think maybe backstage, in the dressing room, where you wait for work you'd tell the other girls your real name? But yeah, mostly you don't. You might make that mistake your first day, trying to be friendly, trying to make nice with the competition, and someone will pull you aside -- the girl that's the prettiest or the girl who makes the most (often not the same, but both have status) and say, "You don't know who these people are, and you shouldn't trust them. Don't do that; it makes you look like an amateur."

And so you stop, even if it makes you feel stupid to be someone you're not even off-stage. Even if you didn't choose your new name, and are inheriting it from a previous girl or just doing as your boss says. Even if you think, I'm not a spy or even an actual whore. This isn't even technically illegal! Why am I lying?

My name was Paige. It was given to me because I didn't want to look like an amateur by suggesting a name for myself that wasn't right. I wore a long black wig with bangs sometimes and that was that, even if Paige never fit me, and reminded me less of Betty and more of a girl who was the CIT for my bunk the one year I went to sleepover camp.

Being Paige and having a name that was out of a piece of kink history is how Justine got her name in Dogboy & Justine. It's a famous kink name too, and blatantly showcases the ways names are chosen hastily and are exhausting and can often speak of amateurism in the industry. A girl named Justine -- she could be the avenging angel of her namesake. Or she could just be in the wrong job.

In writing Dogboy & Justine the matter of naming has been central, even if it did not explicitly begin as a plot-point. But the fact is the names we meet each character with may or may not be their own. For the women, we meet them with their working names, and we only discover their public-world names in some of their cases. We even close the first act with a piece that takes one of the most famous nasty threats of New York City living (and of being a working performer), "Do you know who I am?" and make it into a song about identity lost and found.

It should be noted that the girls who work in a house aren't the only people who lie about their names. Clients often do as well, and it's a bit of a hobby for the women backstage to speculate about name trends (this, the subject of a joke early in the show). It's not just the commonality of certain already common names (Michael is popular, while John is assiduously avoided), but about what kinks men who choose certain names like.

One of the reasons I make little secret of my real name here is that I made something of a secret of my real name there, and I didn't like it. It was an an act of disappearance. And a dominatrix's job may be to disappear into a role, but it's certainly not to disappear. But Paige was too ephemeral -- I was still finding my power and my gender then and there -- and to divide that up amongst disconnected selves aided no one -- my me, not my clients, and not my employers.

While I often muse on how fun it would be to have some ordinary name lingering in my past or some transformation of such lying in wait in my future, the fact is that wasn't what I was dealt. I was born with something practically meant to be a brand name. Which is, I suspect one of the reasons I'm so gifted at spinning history and persona, but am also so poor at things like silence, secrets and discarded selves. The only me's I've left behind are the ones I never was.

I was called Paige. But that was never my name. Promise.


[ Dogboy & Justine is a story about identity and performance and the sex work theme is just one of the ways we get to that aspect of the characters' journeys.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider contributing to Dogboy & Justine's fundraising drive on Kickstart.com. We need to receive at least $6,000 in pledges by December 21st in order to receive funding. As of this writing, we're 52% of the way there. You can help by contributing money, boosting the signal, or just hanging out here and joining the conversation. Thanks for reading! ]