Babysitting Manchildren

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John School 101: How to Email a Ho

I get a lot of poorly written emails from potential clients.  Just this morning this was in my inbox: “hey baby, ur hot. Let’s skype.”  This is baffling to me.  I know the internet is the wild west of the sex industry but on the offchance that I’m a real human and that those pictures are really pictures of me wouldn’t you want to not blow that chance?  

It doesn’t even take that long to write a decent intro email and those extra three minutes of effort might just mean the difference between getting laid and getting blocked.  I looked for pre-existing resources but Emily Post is of no help on this subject, so in an effort to help the would-be-clients of the world get laid and pros not want to gouge their eyes out I've prepared a brief outline for writing a respectful, succinct, pertinent email to a ho.  It's based on the outline of a childs letter to a new penpal.

Really people, if this kid can do it, so can you. (and you don't even have to worry about breaking the pencil lead or referring back to a poster of the alphabet to make sure your Ns aren't backwards). 

Your initial email to a ho/pro should include:

-Name

-Location

-A bit about you and what you're into:

  I like nylons, sports cars, the color blue

-Fun facts!: 

  I love cockrings, I have herpes, I just made a sand castle

-Relevant questions for the ho/penpal:

  Do you do incall?  Do you do CBT?  Do you like the color blue?

-A nice sign off:

  I hope you’re doing well, I look forward to hearing from you, Hugs and Hi-C,

It should not include:

-Emoticons

-Internet abbreviations

-Confetti

-Your autobiography

-Dickpics

See?  Easy.  You're welcome.

*image from the North American Montessori Center

Ho Down

I thought this entry was gonna be about the many spectacular people and events in my generally joyful life.  I thought I was gonna publish the lengthy and surprisingly well-received letter I wrote to my family outing myself as a sex worker and maybe talk about the process of turning the spare bedroom into a sewing room and attempting to teach my pup the second half of fetch.  These things are all still very real and relevant and I’ll write those entries soon. 

But some days are hard.  Some days are 97% douchebaggery and you don’t want to talk about it and you don’t want to hear about it.  All you want is to come home to your lover, make midnight pancakes then kitchen slow dance to Leonard Cohen in your underwear with your warm, grateful, pancakeful bellies touching and your sleepy head resting on their strong shoulders while you silently run your fingernails through their hair and kiss their neck and mean it with all your heart.  

Lots of love to all the kick-ass folks out there who do this difficult and important work.  I'll be thinking of you as I curl up with my pup and fall asleep to the sound of her puppy sighs.

Lawn Bowling Anyone?

Laying in bed this morning, this was my thought process: I have the day off and I kinda wanna get out and see people.  But I also really don’t wanna get into an overwhelming social situation full of well-meaning extroverts that will leave me drained and vaguely irritated.  What I’d really like is to host a read-in and serve ice cream to a select few of my lovely friends. 

Then the mail came and there was my AARP card, again.  I’ve been getting AARP cards in the mail since high school despite being about 30 years too young and living in half a dozen different places since then.  As I tossed the red and white envelope into the trash I finally realized what the universe has been trying to tell me for the last decade.  I'm not young at heart, I'm old at heart!  And that is the perfect introvert-friendly party theme.  

Ideas for your next "Old at Heart" party:

Invite a few close friends, read large print mystery novels, do crossword puzzles, listen to opera, knit, wear comfortable shoes, write letters to your elected officials and overshare about your bodies.  (queers do the last two on their own anyway)  Serve soft foods, an assortment of teas as well as stevia-sweetened biscuits for the diabetic party-goers.  The party should start at 7 am, or 3 pm if you're up for making it a  dinner party, in which case you may need one of these:

You could even provide optional earplugs for guests seeking a more authentic experience.  Yes.  If people my age behaved more like the elderly I’d be a much more social human.   

So, where can I get a croquette set?  And if I make jello in a bundt cake pan do I hafta grease it first?  That sounds nasty but how else do you get it to come out so perfectly?  I clearly have a lot to learn about elderlydom before I can do this party theme justice.  I think I’ll start by repairing that old quilt my dog chewed up while listening to Betty Whites audiobooks.

*image 1 from futureofthecookbook.com (did anyone catch the "jello relish"?)

*image 2 from thekitschbitsch.blogspot.com

*image 3 from inmagine.com

From the Archives: A Letter to the Gorilla

I haven’t liked anything I’ve written lately (some of you readerfolk may have noticed that I've posted a couple times and then immediately taken the posts down)  But I want to post something so I unearthed a letter from the archives.  In the summer of 2010, after about 6 months of on again off again dating Inmate 12004 and I had stopped talking for about a month.  In that time he decided he was going to move back home to the East Coast.  We reconciled before he left and I wrote him this letter shortly after he moved:

                                                                                   

August 19^th 2010

Dear Gorilla,

             It was very nice to chat with you today.  I’m glad things are looking up and that NY feels right.  I have to say though that the idea of you living there worries me.  When I asked about your moat [the Gorilla says he likes to have some kind of buffer to help him stay away from alcohol and partying] you said you don’t know anyone but I suspect that you will meet people.  There are lots of people to meet in that gigantic city.  So, I’ve been giving this some thought and I think I may have come up with a solution. 

            There is a lake in Central Park.  Go there in the dark, or ‘under the cover of night’ if you’re feeling poetic.  This way everyone will be sleeping except maybe the meth people and boy people having sex in the bushes.  But they probably won’t care what you’re doing.  They probably won’t even introduce themselves.

            So, you bring your friends and their dumptrucks.  Boypeople have friends with dumptrucks, yes?  K.  The dumptrucks should be full of sand, gravel, jellybeans, or whatever you have lying around.  I’ll leave that bit to you, you know much more about these things than I do. 

            Then you dump the sand/gravel/jellybeans in the middle of the lake to make a small island.  I’m not sure how big this lake is so you might need a giant crane or two to lift the dumptrucks so they can reach the center of the lake to dump their loads.  Again, these details are your responsibility.

            Next step, build stuff on the pile of sand/gravel/jellybeans.  And Voie La!  You have a cozy home with a moat.  You’re welcome.  Oh, you should probably bring a very large sheet (parachute?) to drape over the giant brass toadstool Alice in Wonderland statue.  That shits creepy.  I know I couldn’t sleep with that little lady staring at me.

            Then in the morning when you emerge from your new home there will be lots of people around but they will be happy because they are in a park and not a skyscraper.  So you will be centrally located (I’m assuming, since its called Central Park) but you will have a nice buffer of water and happy park goers between you and the big scary city.  Otherwise, there are lakes and dumptrucks in Oregon as well.  Just sayin. 

Oh!  And I’ve finally found a ridiculously hardcore nailpolish that I suspect could hold up to that irritating thing you like to do to my nails.  So if you come back, I’m ready.

In other news, Bootface [a lady the Gorilla was seeing briefly] and I are Facebook friends.  She’s a strange bird.  She sat down inches from me on a crowded couch at Penguin’s party and didn’t acknowledge me at all so I asked her how she was healing from her bike accident and then over the course of the afternoon we would drift into other conversations and other rooms and then she would silently appear beside me again and I would feel awkward for a second and then try to talk to her again.  This happened several times.  She never actually engaged me directly but she Facebook friended me the next day so I guess it’s official.  And we never talked about you.  I’m not sure if that raises or lowers the weirdness quotient.  

The other night Cosette, my Co-Puppy*, Co-Puppy’s Boyfriend and I went out to the Boyfriend’s family’s amazing home out in the middle of nowhere.  It’s so far out the mosquitoes haven’t even found it yet.  We sang, drank rye whiskey and fell asleep in the woods under the stars.  It was very nice.  But the best part really (aside from the stars and tent-less-ness) was the 2 wonderful dogs.  You would have loved them.  The first was a small brindle boxer with a grumpy old-manish underbite and jowls named Willie.  And the other was a caramel colored dog named Janey who looks like a pitbull/lab mix.  I remembered their names by calling them Janey sadface and Willie madface.  Janey sadface was very sweet and mellow and cuddly.  She was my favorite and should make babies with Rusty.  Says I.  Then in the morning I went to work and altered a suit

v---e---r---y------s---l---o---w---l---y. 

On NPR the other day there was a story called “From Grunting to Gabbing: Why Humans Can Talk” on All Things Considered.  It focused on the physical reasons humans can talk and other primates can’t.  They said that being able to control the air pressure in you lungs as you speak or sing is uniquely human and that if we didn’t have this ability we would explode our vocal chords.  That’s why chimps can only take shallow breaths and can’t make sustained sounds.  And that same change in the shape and length of our airway which allows us to speak and sing also makes it easier for us to choke to death.  I just had to share that because I think it’s cool that (in this case at least) it seems that we adapted to create art and communicate rather than survive.  Woah.  Though I suppose communication is related to survival.  Anyway, it’s an interesting factoid. 

That’s all the news from my side of the country!  I hope you’re safe and well.

Love,

Bunny

*Co-Puppy (noun): A close friend you love and respect and can be brutally honest with.  You both sometimes do dumb shit and you trust them to let you know when you've mucked up and to help you fix it and vice versa.  This very special person is called a co-puppy because two friends navigating their 20's together is like the blind leading the blind or two puppies trying to raise each other.   

Parental Prejudices (and puppies!)

I haven’t told my parents that I’ve started stripping but I have hinted. Heavily. So I figure they’ll figure it out when their brains let them piece it together.  This is what our conversations sound like now:

Mom: So what are you up to this weekend?
Me: I'm doing my first intermediate pole class Friday, Saturday I go on a date with a lovely lady and Sunday I’m getting my bikini line lasered.
Mom: Oh, how did you two meet?
Me: At a strip club.
Mom: Oh Ladyface.
Me: Mom there’s nothing wrong with dancing.
Mom: But it’s so gross, all those dirty old men.
Me: When was the last time you went to a strip club?
Mom: Never!
Me: Well I’ve been to about 20 and there are some I’d never go back to but there are several in town that are actually pretty great. Safe, fun, sex positive.
Mom: Eww. Just promise me you’ll never take your clothes off.
Me: [silence]
Mom: Ladyface! You’d never do that. Right?!
Me: I’m still gonna shower.
Mom: [laughing] Oh my god, you scared me.

Maybe she never has to know. But she’s already pestering me about finding a job in SF. And she’s concerned that I can’t afford to move. Really, I could move today if I wanted to but I’m committed to my day job through May. Ironically the club I work at is a hell of a lot safer than the dive bar I bartended at and she was thrilled when I started there.

So…I dunno. Is coming out necessary? Who does it serve? Is it selfish to come out if the alternative is just enduring a bit more well-meaning nagging than usual? My mum is a CPA and does my taxes so I suppose she’ll find out next year when I’ll have tax documents from the club I’m working at and clips4sale.  Unless I can come up with a good excuse to take care of that stuff myself.

On a lighter note, we talked about the Favorite Child: 

Mom: The Doodle doesn’t like other dogs very much. He’s more of a people person.
Me: Mom, your dog isn’t a person.
Mom: Oh, yes. Well, you know what I mean. 

Later in the same call:

Me: Dad, I’m hungry, what should I eat?
Dad: Peanut butter! Doodle and I really like peanut butter.
Me: I was thinking more like a meal.
Dad: ...peanut butter and jelly?

Oh parents. I love how much you love that pretty pup.  =3 

And if there were a backwards three on the keyboard that would look more like a dog bone.

*image from labradoodleoftheday.com

Oblivi-cis

In my limited time at the strip club I’ve been amazed at how many men inform me that I look like a 50’s pin-up and expect this to be new information, as if my very carefully designed and executed hair, makeup and outfit are all just a happy coincidence.

I don’t just wake up like this boys. No, it takes a whole team of singing birds and field mice an hour and a half to create this look. Okay, maybe not. But it really does take about an hour and a half to get ready before each shift (since there isn’t a femmification iPhone app yet.)  Come on apple, get on it! I would buy that app in a heartbeat. Or a robot. Yes, a robot would be very nice. But it has to have joint-free hands or fancy silky gloves so our pretty femmey hairs won’t get tangled while they style our elegant updos. Thanks. But back to Ava, I suppose I might get sick of the commitment and simplify my look to reduce that time but for now the slow, deliberate self care feels pretty great.

If you follow me on twitter (@1ladyface) you may have seen my tweet about my new favorite book:

It is pretty amazing. There’s even a handy quiz to determine your “true” hair color which apparently is directly linked to personality traits and has nothing to do with the actual color of your roots. I had no idea. Apparently I'm really a "brownette" not to be confused with "brunettes" who are more sexually aggressive and wear heavier eyeliner. Clearly. But back to the topic at hand, I can’t imagine trying to write a whole book based on cisdudes’ understandings of femininity as Ms. Dahl claims to have done.

My recent strip club experiences have only reinforced my view that men, with the exception of some transguys and foot fetishists who know beautiful words like D’Orsay and Cole Haan, are opinionated but lack the vocabulary to communicate their testosterone muddled thoughts. Though most men do at least have a yes grunt and a no grunt, except for married ones who have a yes grunt and an uncomfortable “meh” sound.

“Always Ask a Man…” must have taken ages to write! I’m imagining a Diving Bell and the Butterfly type scenario.

Cheers to Arlene, wherever you are! You are clearly the most patient woman in the world.

p.s. I am aware that some cisdudes are awesome, well-spoken, self aware and appreciative of high femmeness but in my experience they are in the minority. Sorry boys. Also, I respect my clients and I realize that they don’t need to know what goes into the Ava look anymore than I need to know about their pipe welding or data entry or bull fighting. Though if I met a bullfighter I would have a bajillion questions for them, like wtf? And why?

Then I’d ask to borrow their cute little embroidered jacket.