Self Disclosure
Jul. 11th, 2006 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trooper6Deep thoughts and less deep thoughts.
Less deep thoughts first:
Today I went back to the gym for the first time in...as it turns out...a smidge over a year. When they told me that I thought back to what has been going on in the last year to keep me away from my physical fitness? It was about this time that I started teaching my summer course...then it was all work, all hectic for the last 376 days. I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of gymnasium things. Now what happens when I arrive? I get there late in the afternoon...I probably put off going in the morning because I wasn't ready to face my trainer...whom I haven't seen in a year...and who is generally not in the gym in the afternoon. Well right when I pull up I see my trainer pull up in his yellow HUM-V (that's a Hummer for you civilians). We chat, he was happy to see me...and yup...I will soon be under his tutelage again. So back I am. This is all part of my campaign of taking care of myself this summer. Now I just have to get to the dentist.
Okay, now on to deep thoughts.
I'm going to talk a little about who I am as a person. I've been watching Season 2 of Deadwood and many things resonate with who I am as a person...not the characters who are cursing and less washed...but the characters who are exceptionally polite.
I stand on ceremony. What tends to motivate my behavior? Propriety. Honor. Compassion.
Most of my behavior comes out of my personal sense of propriety. That I am generally motivated by propriety I think is one of the Victorian things about me. I think what is less Victorian about me is what comprises my sense of propriety...I mean, all sorts of loose sexuality and live and let live falls within my sense of propriety. What might for others be a contradiction lives calmly in my world view. For example--if I am dressed in a suit, I would feel a bit funny taking off my jacket, tie and unbuttoning my shirt in company...it seems to me inappropriate...and I'd have to ask permission before I so scandalously disrobed--yet, I've also been a lot more disrobed than that in sex clubs.
Sometimes my propriety (which I do not extend to anyone else besides myself), says the most appropriate action in this moment would be a threesome...other times propriety dictates that I offer someone a ride, or the offer of crashing on my couch.
What I think is very interesting for me, is a shift in my motivations. When I was younger, I did a lot of things always mindful of what others would think of me (it wasn't really all that healthy)...and now my propriety is mine. It is not for others...though it often is about interacting with others. For example, I don't curse...and if a curse word utters my lips, I will apologize...even though all the people I hang with tend to curse themselves and really none of them have delicate ears.
But I don't feel hung up...I feel...settled. I feel well. I feel like I have my quirky little code and it is comfortable and comforting...it is like...like when I was in kid and I'd hear the Rosenfeld sisters play Ragtime on the piano next door as I walked home from school. I always loved Ragtime and it always spoke to me. But I wouldn't really want to live in the teens...because boy would it have sucked to be me in the teens...but there is something from there I want to take here and make it mine...something that resonates with me. A way of moving through the world. A smell of Old Spice. A straight razor. A waltz. Calling on someone at their parlor. Tattoos and a critique of the white supremacist heteropatriarchy. And I want to have all of my detachable collars and antiquatedness while I hang out with radical freaks and geeks.
Less deep thoughts first:
Today I went back to the gym for the first time in...as it turns out...a smidge over a year. When they told me that I thought back to what has been going on in the last year to keep me away from my physical fitness? It was about this time that I started teaching my summer course...then it was all work, all hectic for the last 376 days. I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of gymnasium things. Now what happens when I arrive? I get there late in the afternoon...I probably put off going in the morning because I wasn't ready to face my trainer...whom I haven't seen in a year...and who is generally not in the gym in the afternoon. Well right when I pull up I see my trainer pull up in his yellow HUM-V (that's a Hummer for you civilians). We chat, he was happy to see me...and yup...I will soon be under his tutelage again. So back I am. This is all part of my campaign of taking care of myself this summer. Now I just have to get to the dentist.
Okay, now on to deep thoughts.
I'm going to talk a little about who I am as a person. I've been watching Season 2 of Deadwood and many things resonate with who I am as a person...not the characters who are cursing and less washed...but the characters who are exceptionally polite.
I stand on ceremony. What tends to motivate my behavior? Propriety. Honor. Compassion.
Most of my behavior comes out of my personal sense of propriety. That I am generally motivated by propriety I think is one of the Victorian things about me. I think what is less Victorian about me is what comprises my sense of propriety...I mean, all sorts of loose sexuality and live and let live falls within my sense of propriety. What might for others be a contradiction lives calmly in my world view. For example--if I am dressed in a suit, I would feel a bit funny taking off my jacket, tie and unbuttoning my shirt in company...it seems to me inappropriate...and I'd have to ask permission before I so scandalously disrobed--yet, I've also been a lot more disrobed than that in sex clubs.
Sometimes my propriety (which I do not extend to anyone else besides myself), says the most appropriate action in this moment would be a threesome...other times propriety dictates that I offer someone a ride, or the offer of crashing on my couch.
What I think is very interesting for me, is a shift in my motivations. When I was younger, I did a lot of things always mindful of what others would think of me (it wasn't really all that healthy)...and now my propriety is mine. It is not for others...though it often is about interacting with others. For example, I don't curse...and if a curse word utters my lips, I will apologize...even though all the people I hang with tend to curse themselves and really none of them have delicate ears.
But I don't feel hung up...I feel...settled. I feel well. I feel like I have my quirky little code and it is comfortable and comforting...it is like...like when I was in kid and I'd hear the Rosenfeld sisters play Ragtime on the piano next door as I walked home from school. I always loved Ragtime and it always spoke to me. But I wouldn't really want to live in the teens...because boy would it have sucked to be me in the teens...but there is something from there I want to take here and make it mine...something that resonates with me. A way of moving through the world. A smell of Old Spice. A straight razor. A waltz. Calling on someone at their parlor. Tattoos and a critique of the white supremacist heteropatriarchy. And I want to have all of my detachable collars and antiquatedness while I hang out with radical freaks and geeks.
