Contentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 49 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Action (2014)

  • Put on an outfit that’s been recently laundered and is easy to take off. No weirdo zippers or buttons, please! Who’s ever trying to make/hear the “joke” that goes, “Ha-ha, I’m out of practice, I guess,” as a maker-out fumbles with inexplicable chest snaps? Not you, not me, not anyone. • If your hair is dirty, sprinkle the smallest amount of baby powder in your hands and run them all up throughout that grease trap. If it’s long and a mess, tie it back. • Brush your chops, put on makeup if you like it, and curl your lip at the bathroom mirror: You look eminently bangable. SETTING A MOOD [image file=image_485.jpg] Let’s say you have plenty of time and don’t have to invent a panicked game show to calm yourself down. Let’s say you aren’t even a messy person, and instead have a non-figurative carpet that matches your non-figurative drapes. (And prefab bad, smutty jokes at the ready to go with them.) There are plenty of accents to help elevate that already-august sense of home decor to one that is tastefully nasty! Okay, let’s do it, here is the list: • Grapeseed oil • Now! That’s What I Call Music 14 • An indoor hammock • An assortment of personalized Christmas stockings (year-round; none bearing your own name) • A prominently displayed collection of Happy Meal Beanie Babies • A miniature gong, or, even better, two Combine and delight, my profligate sex fiends. For real: You don’t need any material goods to leave an indelible impression. There are, however, certain considerations about what’s worth having on hand, and I promise they have nothing to do with the holiday season or a compilation including the works of Aaron Carter. In addition to the regular safe-sex necessities you do (and you DO) have close at hand, there are a handful of practical objects you should consider, if you’re not too busy trying not to lose miserably at Hide! That! Garbage! Chief among these are the provisions based in the kind of foresight that further verifies you as a suave person who knows their every movement twelve steps before it happens. The beauty of providing this kind of toolkit is that it makes you look so put-together because it’s solely about anticipating the needs and comfort of your guest, which is pretty easy, seeing as they’re baseline the same as your own. The basics you should have readily at hand: • A clean towel, should your person want to rinse or otherwise blot themselves off after consummating • Water (or, preferably, seltzer), because sex requires exertion, and if you’re incorporating oral, making sure no one gets cotton mouth will make it more enjoyable • A tissue box or paper towels, for everything

• From Action (2014)

  To make it easier in my conversations and writing, “queer” is vague enough to wrap me up loosely, like a one-size-fits-all floral caftan (told you I was all about that Love Boat lifestyle). For the most part, I say, “I sleep with people of all genders.” It does not make me feel like I’m obscuring my heart’s actual shape with a free ’n’ breezy muumuu-word. It does not put off someone who was trying to put it on me. “Queer” may not be “cruiser,” but it is sufficient. And succinct enough to preserve the amount of time I would have taken explaining all of this in person, freeing me to spend it starfucking instead. While being a dilettante in terms of what gender your partners are doesn’t have to dictate the way you identify—you can be a heterosexual man, make out with a guy, and have the first part of that status remain firmly true—I don’t really care about any of it. I cruise forth. Oh, please leave me aside, I want to be a… I want to be… I want to live in… There’s more than you can hope for in this world. Alone in the Bone Zone [image file=image_204.jpg] Feeling sexy mostly has to do with YOU YOURSELF—with your inner foundation, regardless of whether another person’s opinion of/attraction to that self sweeps through it. According to Dr. David Schnarch’s book Intimacy and Desire: “A person’s relationship to their self-worth likely informs their relationship to sex more so than lust, romantic love, and attachment. How you see yourself [… ] profoundly shape[s] your sexual desire.” So if you see yourself as an animate slime-filled trash bag, that correlates to the mucked-upness of the sex you’re having (if you’re even having it). Even though I am not always a prime-feeling or -looking person, I try my best to conduct myself majestically, regardless of the times when I’ve been (or at least felt) overworked, poor, lonesome, ugly, anxious, depressed, and so forth. Shove yourself in front of the world, and become near-to-deranged with goodwill and hard work, and I promise: Gilding the kingdom of your brain will help you establish a “sex life” by building, first, a multilayered “life,” no modifiers necessary. Allow yourself to become flooded by your own personality, and make a concerted effort to get rid of the shame that allows you to muffle it for other people’s “comfort.” Most of the time, you’re not comforting anyone by editing yourself; you’re reinforcing that there is one right picture of how to be in the world, and that it likely does not resemble the one that comes to others naturally, too.

• From Action (2014)

  It doesn’t mean I don’t like them, or that I didn’t have a great time. I find that sleeping next to someone, and then waking up all blearified the next morning and continuing to hang, is more intimate than I usually like to get with casual partners. Seeing me naked is one thing—bodies are bodies, and mine hasn’t altered that fact in either direction—but seeing me with my mascara smeared out to both of my temples, making jovial chatter at my favorite diner for reading or sharing an appetizer sampler among friends? WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, LET’S KEEP THIS LIGHT. I’m an insomniac who worries over disturbing another person, but even if I am tired, I can be funny about the marital-feeling arrangement of snoozing side by side. I get all like, “DON’T YOU KNOW I PREFER ONION RINGS TO ENGAGEMENT ONES, YOU INTERLOPER? I did not know you murmured in your sleep, which is cute, but very intimate.” I say it way more politely, and with plenty more omissions, than that. My manners are unerring when it comes to all my partners, even the lackluster ones. Wanting to be considerate is why I ask them to leave—I don’t want to end up resenting them for fulfilling what is maybe the very most basic and blameless human need after we involve ourselves in another less-essential but still-really-essential one. There are extenuating considerations here, so a good rule of thumb if you’re as hard-lined about these things as I tend to be: Try not to have sex with anyone you wouldn’t also be amenable to waking up near, and don’t have sex with someone in a place, physical or emotional, that would cause you to be hurt if you were asked to leave it. I would MUCH rather that most of my paramours hit the road after we get together, but I compromise if it’s egregiously late at night, if they’re inebriated, if I can tell they’ll feel totally uncomfortable or wounded if I ask them to scram (it’s not that I’m advocating for placing someone’s needs above your own ALL the time—it’s just that, in this instance, I don’t care that much), or if I anticipate the sunny-side-up sex with the good egg beside me will be just the thing. In those cases, they are free to come chomp fried foods at the diner with me come sunrise (well, more like high noon, if it’s a weekend), despite all that that is bound to reveal about the interiors of my deepest heart. (I never said I was not a steadfast lunatic.) If these concerns are not in play, I’m very delicate about how to withhold an extended invitation minus any perceived rancor toward my guest. Odds are, I had a lovely time and would be mortified to communicate anything to the contrary. When I have cause to believe someone might take my real feelings poorly, I pull out a true excuse.

• From Action (2014)

  The best ways to jazz up your sexual fitness, which is incontestable and inborn, is to be, in some way of your personal choosing, distinctive in your sartorial/outwardly formations. Go ahead and rise to Tha Krazy Ol’ Media’s expectations about what you should slather and drape on yourself if you genuinely get a kick out of that, as I often do. There’s no joy in conforming to gendered stereotypes of appearance because you’re suffering under the misconception that following those tiresome codes to the letter is the only way you’ll ever turn a partner on. Decorate yourself in modes super-feminine or -masculine if you like to do that, or you’re probably better off not doing it at all. Your date is, let’s hope, not judging you via a rubric that looks suspiciously like the “Fitness” section of a magazine display rack, but asserting that they are right to be doing that. Be complicit in someone essentializing you only if you’re aware of and okay with/have your own reasons for that. Stay conscious of it either way.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Devotio flowed together. The Devotio became the dominant outlet for pious expression in the fifteenth-century West: it was an intense and creatively imaginative mode of reaching out to God. It also tended to introspection, aided by that crucial contemporary technological advance in the spread of texts, printing. Printed texts made far more easily available to an increasingly literate public the writings of the mystics, or works which meditated as John de Caulibus had done (see pp. 417–18) on aspects of the life of Jesus. For someone who really delighted in reading, religion might retreat out of the sphere of public ritual into the world of the mind and the imagination. Reading privileges sight among the other human senses, and it further privileges reading text among other uses of the eye; it relies not at all on gesture, which is so important a part of communicating in liturgy or in preaching. So without any hint of doctrinal deviation, a new style of piety arose in that increasingly large section of society which valued book-learning for both profit and pleasure; the Netherlands, which had a level of urban life more concentrated than in any other part of Europe and high levels of literacy, were particularly prominent in this development. Even if such people were in the crowd at the parish Mass, they were likely to be absorbed in their layfolk’s companion to the Mass, or a Book of Hours – books commonly known as primers. These primers had already been mass-produced in the days of manuscript book production, but printing made them far cheaper and more widely available, and there quickly developed an eager market for primers in the major European languages. The wealthier folk in such congregations increasingly built themselves an enclosed private pew in their church to cut themselves off from the distractions provided by their fellow worshippers.25 One should not overemphasize this exclusive characteristic of the Devotio. It also had the capacity to offer laity as well as clergy, women as well as men, the chance of achieving the heights and depths of religious experience in their everyday lives and occupations, just as if they had set out on pilgrimage. The earliest great name in the movement, the fourteenth-century Dutch theologian Geert Groote, was never ordained beyond the order of deacon; after spending some time in a Carthusian monastery near Arnhem, he went on to conduct a roving ministry of preaching in the Netherlands and to found his own informal community of friends in his native Deventer. After Groote’s death in 1384, this group did take on the character of a formal religious order, the Brethren of the Common Life, which spread widely through central Europe and enrolled clergy of the calibre of the mystical writer Thomas à Kempis, the philosopher- theologian Gabriel Biel and the future Pope Adrian VI. Despite this, the Devotio Moderna was never a purely clerical movement.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I took a head of garlic out from the garlic bottle in the icebox, and breaking off ten or twelve cloves from the head, I carefully peeled away the tissue lavender skin, slicing each stripped peg in half lengthwise. I dropped them piece by piece into the capacious waiting bowl of the mortar. Taking a slice from a small onion, I put the rest aside to be used later over the meat, and cutting the slice into quarters, I tossed it into the mortar also. Next came the coarsely ground fresh black pepper, and then a lavish blanketing cover of salt over the whole. Last, if we had any, a few leaves from the top of a head of celery. My mother sometimes added a slice of green pepper, but I did not like the texture of the pepper-skin under the pestle, and preferred to add it along with the sliced onion later on, leaving it all to sit over the seasoned and resting meat. After all the ingredients were in the bowl of the mortar, I fetched the pestle and placing it into the bowl, slowly rotated the shaft a few times, working it gently down through all the ingredients to mix them. Only then would I lift the pestle, and with one hand firmly pressed around the carved side of the mortar caressing the wooden fruit with my aromatic fingers, I thrust sharply downward, feeling the shifting salt and the hard little pellets of garlic right up through the shaft of the wooden pestle. Up again, down, around, and up—so the rhythm began. The thud push rub rotate up repeated over and over. The muted thump of the pestle on the bed of grinding spice as the salt and pepper absorbed the slowly yielding juices of the garlic and celery leaves. Thud push rub rotate up . The mingling fragrances rising from the bowl of the mortar. Thud push rub rotate up . The feeling of the pestle held between my curving fingers, and the mortar’s outside rounding like fruit into my palm as I steadied it against my body. All these transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound that grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied. Sometimes my mother would look over at me with that amused annoyance which passed for tenderness. “What you think you making there, garlic soup? Enough, go get the meat now.” And I would fetch the lamb hearts, for instance, from the icebox and begin to prepare them. Cutting away the hardened veins at the top of the smooth firm muscles, I divided each oval heart into four wedge-shaped pieces, and taking a bit of the spicy mash from the mortar with my fingertips, I rubbed each piece with the savory mix, the pungent smell of garlic and onion and celery enveloping the kitchen.

• From Action (2014)

  In the case of a person’s new partner with whom you’re social: Take heart. I had sex with a friend of mine for a summer. His current long-term girlfriend was pretty out on me at first, as I think they started seeing each other right at the tail end of the sexual part of my friendship with him. I was disappointed by that, but I understood. I had been curt to women who made me feel weird about the people I loved before, and so I also knew how they made me feel better, which was treating me like any other regular stiff whom they were happy to be pleasant to and bro down with. They made themselves people to me instead of sex avatars that were undermining my relationship, and so I follow that same method. As far as your friends are concerned: Why is it that you’re so much more willing to take their version of THE RIGHT THING TO DO seriously than you are your own? You’ve got more self-possession than that, I hope, whether you’re having an orgy with your whole apartment building or zero people at all. If your friends scoff or condescend to you re: your sex life, either stop talking to them about it or stop talking to them full-stop. There’s a reason Blanche is the best Golden Girl (and if you try to contest that a priori fact, there’s no talking to you in the first place). The only potential difficulty here is based in how “sluttiness” is gendered—there CAN be real-life consequences, and more harrowing ones at that, for women and queer people to a greater degree than for men (although men are not totally exempt). But that doesn’t have to stop anyone. If it did, we’d be missing out on so much. As I noted earlier, the best sex I’ve ever had was with a (sort of) one-night stand—Brafe, the longhair I plucked off the sidewalk. We had sex in the darkness of his apartment without talking. As I leaned back into the quiet island of his bed and he fucked me with his feet on the floor and his knees on the sheets, the silence and skill of it redefined what sex was, and could be, in my life. It exemplified another funny and perfect element of sex: Once the cosign has been given, consent-wise, talking can feel like you’re interrupting a conversation in which you’re saying what you intended to speak aloud, but get across more cogently with your body. There are some things you can only learn through touching another person. If I weren’t willing to sleep around, I wouldn’t know that.

• From Action (2014)

  Have your partner lie comfortably facedown on the bed. A from-the-back approach is the most intuitive at first. Spread their legs with your hands so that you can see. With your whole tongue, lick slowly up and down, then back and forth, and keep it light when you start so that it’s kind of a tease and they find themselves wanting you to do more. Pretend you’re giving highly concentrated head: Instead of a whole genital area, you’ve just got this one quarter-sized circumference to deal with. Ease your tongue in and see what happens. As you’re touching them, be sure to also work some area of their body that you know makes them feel good in any other sexual configuration. If you’re inserting a finger (or anything else), make certain you’ve got plenty of lube close at hand (and all over your hands). Drench your person’s orifice and whatever’s going in it before penetrating them with a single finger. Rub your partner’s asshole and slowly insert one. Lead with more fingers, then whatever else you have in mind. If you don’t have a penis, you don’t necessarily need a sex toy—it’s up to you and your partner how much is enough. Whether you use a synthetic appendage or just your hands, pay attention to pain—your partner will help you. Start slow for the first few times, at least. Let’s (Not) Spend the Night Together The main thing to keep in mind about choosing to spend the night at someone else’s, or having them board at yours for the evening, is that it shouldn’t connote any extra affection—or any lack thereof. If someone asks you to big-spoon them for the evening, it doesn’t mean that they foresee your being part of the same place setting in the future. They might just be trying to be considerate, or angling for morning sex when you’re both actually sober and at the height of your powers again, or maybe they just want to be ladle-cradled for a few hours. So don’t go registering for a towel set embroidered with your two sets of initials in preparation for your imminent marriage after you split the next morning. I am of the opposite school: In most cases, unless I DO want to date someone (and still even then), I am apt to split—or, if I’m at my place, say, “Can I walk you out? Do you need me to call you a car?” to the would-be spooner whom I’d rather have not occupy my bedspread. This is not always the case, but it is most of the time: I want to snooze by myself.

• From Action (2014)

  This is all highly subjective. You can obviously fuck, or not, any of these people at will, and you don’t even have to like them to do that. I often hear arguments that hate-sex is some of the best sex out there, but I prefer to put on a one-act with someone of whom I am actually fond, in which we get vicious and violent while we’re being physical, then are able to good-naturedly kid and kiss about it instead of parting ways in silent fury and derision. (Let me reiterate: Fucking DJs is a doomed way to spend your time.) Some Notes on Grooming [image file=image_412.jpg] You are under no obligation to present your body in any standardized model for sexiness. However: This is not a call to action against Big Soap. As a demonstration of respect toward your partners/insurance you’ll have them to begin with, you DO have to make sure your zones are clean and smell at least neutral. What will improve your and a partner’s time together is making sure you look hot in as close to the way you do inside your own head—on your best days—as you can muster. When my mettle is up, my lipstick is shadowy velvet, and my hair doesn’t look like a post-pillow-friction tumbleweed before I get in bed, I’m liable to relax and mentally dedicate myself to what I’m doing with my body and how that feels, not how it looks. Conversely, if you could grease a baking sheet on my forehead and my teeth smell, you can bet that I’m fretting, which detracts from my ability to keep my mind on how my and my co-person’s bodies feel. (Morning sex = not my favorite.) My self-styled grossness is never as bad as I think it is, even when I’m SURE it is. If a person is having sex with you, it’s probable that they do not share in your perception of yourself as half-beast-at-least. The trick to avoiding that head-trap: Making sure you’re aesthetically comfortable, whatever that means for you… but not stressing out over every! Last! Detail! Follow this rule: You are allowed to look in the mirror exactly twice, maximum, even in private, on a date.

• From Action (2014)

  • Restraints. You can get cuffs made of fabric or sturdier materials for wrists, ankles, or a person’s entire body. These include handcuffs, elaborate bondage systems that render a person motionless, and chains, and can be used by themselves or to bind a person to a bed or other area. Anything that restricts a person’s motion counts. • Bondage tape. After you’re done in the rope aisle of your local home improvement emporium, pick a wide roll made of PVC so that it doesn’t run the risk of tugging at your skin or hair—it should adhere mostly to itself. • Blindfolds. Unless you specifically like a certain shape or material for these: You can use the one you got on your last flight, or underwear, or a scarf, or basically any cloth you want. But use underwear. ELECTRIC LADY [image file=image_1009.jpg] My first vibrator came from that most ennobled of mall smut-gateways, the crass chain-emporium of trucker hats and dreadful novelty shot glasses known as Spencer’s Gifts. Spencer’s gift to teenage-me was my first assured source for regular orgasms, after my first girlfriend and I picked up matching dough-colored six-inchers on a lark. They ran on two AAs and pluck, and I burned mine out within three months. I worked through several more cylindrical cheapos, all battery-operated and built to crash, in the next seven months before deciding to pick a more sustainable option because I adore the environment and care deeply about climate change (read: yes, those things, but also my access to quick, low-effort climaxin’). The first contender was, as recommended by the guttural titterings of my collegiate dining-hall companions, the luckless Rabbit model. I hit up Babeland, one of my favorite sex stores exactly because it’s so unsexy, to try it out—when I say it leaves me cold, imagine a benevolent-looking person with a calm demeanor and asymmetrical haircut pressing a writhing bit of silicone against your palm and saying, as though prescribing you medicine, “The level of pressure is perfect for the average G-spot.” The warty-surfaced Rabbit was not for me, and not just because of the way it was pitched—it just didn’t feel right. Vibrator preferences vary from person to person. Some aspects of a vibrator you might prioritize: speed, intensity of vibration, sound level, texture, waterproofness, length, width, and/or the availability of compatible attachments. I like earthquake-grade tremors, and I like them fast. Concentrated vibrations are like the “tight pussy” of the clitoral stimulation world: Unless a person specifically does NOT like it, it’s customarily a crowd favorite.

• From Action (2014)

  I consider, too, that more casual flings, as far as they know, volunteered themselves for straightforward sex. While there’s a chance that they’d be down to try other things, there’s no guarantee they wouldn’t feel cornered by my asking for them. I prefer to steadily hint my way in the door by testing out the tamest aspects of my fetishes. When I’m ready, I then say, “You know how we sometimes do [X THING] when we’re fucking? I like that a lot, and I’m wondering if you’d be into doing more—like [X OTHER THING].” As a consummate layabout (one of my many bona fides in this capacity: I am typing this to you facedown on an N’SYNC blanket with mysterious hot sauce stains giving Justin inflamed-looking psoriasis), I’m super amenable to fetishes that handily take a looming task off my Sriracha-laden plate. I was once in a relationship with a man who liked to depilate me. Joe explained his hobbyist aesthetician career thusly: “I’m obsessed with vaginas because they’re so beautiful, so I like to see them as closely as I can. Tending to them makes me feel like I’m at the service of the thing I love most in the world.” I was like, Oh, word? Hold on while I grab the shaving cream for you real quick, because I hate doing it myself! We’re adults, you know? The whole point of being an adult is discovering the weirdnesses of others with love instead of fear. There are so many favorite fixations of regular, hot people: humiliation, forced orgasms, voyeurism and exhibitionism, feet, and choking/erotic asphyxiation. And those are all pretty basic! THREE EXTRA-SPECIAL FETISHISTIC FIREBRANDS [image file=image_940.jpg] • Gender-tangling. One of my favorite gambits with male partners who are down is that they’re my girlfriend—and this doesn’t apply to all the dudes I’ve been with; just the handful of ones who’ve gregariously indicated they like it. It’s always the most traditionally masculine guys who like this, I think because it’s such a reversal of what they’re expected or think they’re allowed to do in reality, which always makes for sex. I tell them I’m going to give them head like I would to a girl—and I do it. Usually, gender-flipping is as much about the sexualized “shame” that guys are supposed to feel about being feminine or what have you; so, if they’re into it, comment and capitalize on that as you go.

• From Action (2014)

  If you can’t find a partner to share your fetish with, pay someone for that. There are many discreet, professional sex workers who bring home the bacon by meeting this need, and some of them work in dungeons that won’t require hotel-room sneakery or the fear of someone invading your privacy at home. There is NOTHING wrong with hiring a sex worker as long as you treat the person in question with respect, and that you fully understand that they are on the job, same as if they worked at a bank. If you choose to hire a sex worker, understand the limitations of this arrangement! Escorts and other sex workers are usually paid by time, although some might have a flat rate per act. This does not mean you are purchasing them, the person, so be courteous and conscious of what they’ve specified the deal is. Handle the money upfront—count it in front of them and give it to them before you do anything else, and follow their boundaries and instructions to the letter. Tipping is recommended—20 percent, or $20 for every hour, at least. ACCESSORIES TO A GREAT TIME [image file=image_953.jpg] You don’t ever “need” anything more than the corporeality you were born with to have fun sex—but you can want to use sex toys, or, in some people’s cases, be able to orgasm only with their deft aid. Some of us might have personal tastes or physical makeups that respond to equipment-based stimulation more than skin-on-skin contact—and that’s not only fine, but great to know about yourself. Equipped with that knowledge (and actual equipment), you and your partner won’t be left wringing your hands in the buff, disappointed and confused as to why you just can’t come. Opting to add sex toys to an already hot and lovely practice is usually even more of a good thing. How to Be Suave in a Sex Store Go to a sex store. Shop. Make a purchase or, if nothing strikes your fancy, leave. Done! Seriously, dudes: No one is judging you. The clerk is being paid by the hour and wants to go home and see what non-adult movies look good tonight—maybe order a little ltalian or something. The other patrons are also in a sex store. You’re good. WOULDN’T IT BE FUNNY IF WE HAD THE BEST ORGASMS OF OUR LIVES?

• From Action (2014)

  The first was Ahmed, whose bed was puffed, perfectly white, and unfamiliar, like one at a slightly upscale chain hotel—maybe a Hilton Garden Inn? I woke, turned to kiss him, and then rotated him on top of me as he whispered kind things about my body. We had been seeing each other for a few weeks. I felt like he was impermanent—like a person-shaped continental getaway, just as I did the rest of the cabal of people I had been dating and sleeping with following my first real trial of a breakup, with Chris. Ahmed liked to go to raves, which augmented this feeling. So did the fact that he was a breed of babe with an unclassifiable eye color—Pantone would drool over the challenge. His physicality was all-over compact, save for his aquiline nose, which jutted from him in the way that gorgeous natural landmarks invade their surroundings: a mountain on a plain; that one tree in the neighborhood with the knothole you hold weirdly dear. I ran one hand along his chest and trailed the other across his neck as he came. I didn’t, but I would later. Exchanging the courtesies expected of us in this generic-hospitality setting, I affirmed that we’d had a blast, rescued my T-shirt from where I’d flung it into a corner, and dipped into the June air, feeling mad good. My own bed belonged more in a dorm room than a Hilton, which was appropriate, as it was, in fact, college-housing-issued. Will didn’t mind since he shared my age and unfamiliarity with upper-middle bedding—the first time we had sex was in his basement room at his parents’ house in Park Slope, just after he cooked me a steak with a cherry-balsamic reduction, counted the swans that still lived in Prospect Park’s gummy waters before the city’s animal control murked them out two years later, and showed me his handgun. Besides owning an automatic weapon, another of his flavored boasts was that his grandfather was a famous American poet, whose writing I found bland in a patriotic O-the-snow-and-water-fowl-of-this-nation way. Outside of noting the seabirds, Will hadn’t taken up the family trade, preferring instead to pursue the bifurcated career of model/Golden Gloves boxing champion/preschool teacher. He sang me Johnny Cash songs, described me as “a piece of candy” (I found this somehow charming?), and daydreamed about chartering a helicopter to show off Manhattan to me from where we could see it all at once. Unfortunately, he was also chokingly vain and sometimes used baby talk, which, against all likelihood, did not dissuade me.

• From Action (2014)

  My greatest jobs, before I landed a dreamy one as a writer/editor for a publication I love, have been the ones that had nil to do with my intended area of employment: Being a telemarketing-center stooge, EDM rave hostess, pizza-pushing cashier, coat salesgirl, hookah bar waitress, library page, garden-supply-store plant-hoser, events planner, et cetera, edified me as comprehensively as CREATIVE meandering-around ever has. Each position expedited my already-gnawing motivation to do something else, necessitated that I interact with people I wouldn’t have chosen to hang with independently, and kept me (mostly) out of hock while I was at it. And they gave me things to write about, when it came time to write! Take work. Whatever you can wrangle. Not to sound TOO grandfatherly, but: It builds character. [wheezes and asks you whatever happened to “good” music like the ol’ Beatle Boys] Masturbate. Onanism (the sophist’s preferred term for whackin’ it) ensures that when you do get laid, you’ll know how you like to be touched and so can more readily communicate those tastes. Masturbation is not just a means to that end, but a sheer pleasure in and of itself! (As if you didn’t know this already, ya perv-ass!) It diminishes stress by releasing endorphins, aka relaxation-inducing brain chemicals, in your mind-piece (this can also help with insomnia), alleviates sexual frustration and physical tension, and is otherwise good for your health: Recent scientific studies by the University of Sydney have suggested that regular masturbation can reduce the risks of conditions like cystitis, some forms of cancer, diabetes, and certain sexual infections.* But you don’t have to justify self-conducted handjobs by rationalizing that it’s all for the sake of your precious medical wellness! (Although, as we have discussed: Your health is mad important.) Masturbating helps sex with people other than yourself feel like less of a looming physical obligation that isn’t being met, since you’re self-sufficient, pleasure-wise. Also, it feels mad good. (Again: As you know, pervadocious!!!)

• From Action (2014)

  So, since you’re going to be giving a LOT of it, it’s time we delve into some specific ideas about how to grant someone consent—and how to decisively withhold it. The ideal time to talk about what your sexual limitations are: prior to becoming embroiled in a physical situation where someone might be straining them. If you’re able to have a conversation with the person you’re potentially going to be intimate with before acting on whatever that means for you, you can tell them exactly what you do/don’t want to do. When I started seeing one long-term boyfriend, we spent a lot of time talking before anything beyond entry-level kissing took place between us, and while most of that conversation probably concerned our differences of opinion about what the best episode of The Simpsons was, we also asked each other plenty of questions about where to pause and check our sexual mile-marking systems to see if we were on the right track. Our answers were given candidly: I told him that at the time, I was inclined to wait a bit longer before having sex, among some other things that seemed intense to me. In turn, he told me about his history with sexual trauma, which made me rethink being too rough with him in ways I would have otherwise thought were playful when we actually started going far together. We knew each other’s deals, and we didn’t try to abruptly broker new ones mid-hookup without first considering them aloud while wearing clothing. Learning to ask and respond honestly to the question, “Do you want to try [whatever new thing]?” then actually taking heed of what was said, was probably what made the sex we had after a few months so brain-dominatingly incredible—we were both stoked and comfortable—and faithfully aware that the other person was, too. We still had our Milhouse–based differences, but all the other important approaches to compatibility, we agreed on. Not every sexual situation is going to come out of a relationship. Though that one was awesome while it lasted, I also find that, Whoa, so is attaching my face to people whose middle, or even last, names I don’t know! Those experiences proved the plentitude of frank, direct, flirtatious, and gentle ways to make consent a part of every hookup, regardless of how well you might (not) be acquainted. How you decide to approach the babes of your consensual and highly sexy future is up to you, but here are some pointers on how to score and feel great about it, how to make sure dreamboats-to-come are equally jazzed about what’s going on, and what to do if things take a too-intense turn and you want to set them back on track.

• From Action (2014)

  You don’t have to be so healthy that you ooze green-Gaia-vegetable-smoothie juice if you get a paper cut, but you have to care about your bodily well-being at least somewhat. Everyone has their own metric for what makes them feel physically and mentally sound, whether or not it includes the regular ingestion of pulverized salad-liquid. Those considerations are even less universally prescriptive if a person has a long-standing or chronic medical condition—these can include physical diagnoses like fibromyalgia, or mental ones like depression. Whatever you need to do to make yourself feel stable, and maybe even strong: Your first and most pressing responsibility in life, and sex, is to make sure you’re doing those things. I have to pester myself to drink enough water; try not to smoke; take supplements, even though the jury’s out as to whether they do anything besides make me feel falsely virtuous about my commitment to glowing, palpable immortality; chomp my ADHD and anxiety medications because, otherwise, my brain coughs bacterially all over my happiness; get enough protein and maybe lay off the SUGARSUGARSUGAR I mainline if left to my own breakfast devices (today’s morning aliments were a chocolate-chip cookie and a buttercream cupcake—I need a fucking warden). Outside of your regular routine, undertake to get yourself access to mental and/or medical help if and when you need it—in both instances, there are more options than ever out there for low-income and uninsured people now, even if they take a little research. Illness is an insistent and recurring piece of life, no matter how fastidiously we wash the grime from our paws, take our brain-leveling psych-vitamins, or all the other millions of practices by which we try to stave off sickness. That is okay, and none of it discounts us from putting it to a healthy body when we ourselves have one again! But you have to administer to yourself, as you would any other ailing person you love, in order for that to be true. When I choose to neglect my health, others are likely to pick up on that, too. A mess, itself, is not unattractive. But a willful lack of self-regard—the nonverbal demonstration that pantomimes the thought I don’t deserve health—is palpable and troubling. How can a person confidently expect me to provide them physical kindness if I’m unwilling to do that for myself? Don’t beat yourself up if you slip, because that does nothing but make you feel even worse than the condition that cookie-cupcake breakfast combo is tormenting me with at current. If you compound sickness or discomfort with self-loathing, that’s when you’re sunk, and shame doesn’t even come with the consolation of tasting amazing, rendering it entirely useless. Plus, it’s understandable: Cigarettes and candy and being so drunk that you’re pretending to give a presidential address in character as Ronald McDonald are all the absolute best; you were up against Goliath here! Make a different choice next time, and keep shredding along your merry path.

• From Action (2014)

  Treat life’s quotidian-seeming offerings and tasks like parties, or at least non-annoyances. This concept is similar to macking on every single piece of your encountered universe. If you dress for errands, greet your commute with a rapacious sense of… if not avidity, at least tolerant acceptance (and hand sanitizer), and clean your room with as close to zeal as you can muster, you triangulate your proficiency in meeting real-McCoy celebrations and social gatherings with ease and grace. Plus, take it from the don himself, the writer David Foster Wallace, whose “This Is Water” speech-turned-book included this bulletproof aphorism: “If you’ve really learned how to think [… ] it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.” Imagine meeting a person who comported themselves this way—what could prove their sexiness more convincingly than the assured belief that everything is divine, even if it blows tuna chunks? I have a wonderful bulletin for you: You don’t have to meet that person to experience the gratification that comes with translating “consumer hell” into “star-arson” when you can just choose to be that person instead. Also, complaining is off-putting unless you’re already in love, in which case you’ve both made a compact that you get to bitch to each other; opt for perceiving annoyances as meaningful/sacred instead whenever you can. At the risk of sounding like a warm slice of cornbread, I present the final and most crucial of all these sexiness-inducing life rules: LIFE RULES. You don’t have to convey that by trying to morph into some sunny, uncritical goon who is NEVER in a bad mood, 100 percent into their surroundings, or best friends with each and every conscious being they encounter. But you can use whatever pieces of the above strategies to identify, chase after, and highlight the parts of yourself and your life to which you grant the most merit. Prioritize them, and you’re bound to cross bods with plenty of salacious compatriots who find them worth responding to in sexual overtures, too. From the Inside Out

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Occasionally we found something that needed no repair (my bed-lamp still sits on a Victorian lampstool that we dug out of a junkheap in Chelsea on our way home from the Grapevine one Sunday morning). Ordering and re-ordering our world, Muriel and I sat up into the small hours reading the books I would sneak out of the cataloguing bins at the library, and eating pasta with margarine and oregano when we were poor. Other times we had wondrous meals concocted from our adventurous buys in Chinatown, together with a scrap of meat or a few chicken feet or a piece of fish or whatever we could afford and took a fancy to in the First Avenue Public Market. Around the corner from us, we did most of our food shopping there in the many stalls of busy hawkers. I met the few of Muriel’s friends that she could remember from the old days, and she met mine. There were Mick and Cordelia whom I had met in high school. Nicky and Joan, friends of Suzy, Muriel’s old lover. We were poor and always hungry, and always being invited to dinner. Going to Suzy’s house for dinner was always chancy. Suzy had once heard that pork fat was nutritious, so she kept a skillet of bacon drippings permanently on the back of her stove and cooked everything in it. There were Dottie and Pauli, two skinny blonde artists from our neighborhood whom we met at Laurel’s; Bea and Lynn, her new girl; Phyllis, who wanted to be an architect, but only talked about it when she was drunk; and, of course, there was Felicia, my adopted little sister, as I called her, and the only other Black woman in our group. Together, we formed a loosely knit, emotionally and socially interdependent set, sharing many different interests, some overlapping. On the periphery there existed another larger group of downtown gay-girls, made up of congenial acquaintances and drinking buddies and other people’s past lovers, known by sight and friendly enough, but not to be called upon except in emergencies, when of course everybody knew everybody else’s business anyway. But the fact of our Blackness was an issue that Felicia and I talked about only between ourselves. Even Muriel seemed to believe that as lesbians, we were all outsiders and all equal in our outsiderhood. “We’re all niggers,” she used to say, and I hated to hear her say it. It was wishful thinking based on little fact; the ways in which it was true languished in the shadow of those many ways in which it would always be false.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Pacific. Missions drew on the highly developed skills of Pacific peoples in seamanship, sending out local converts along old sea routes to other island groups. Rather than a detailed grasp of Christian theology, they brought charisma, a shrewd sense of what might appeal to local leaders in the Christian package and a determination to destroy the power of traditional cults. As the social disruption provoked by European contacts repeated itself across the Pacific, these were a winning combination. Various political leaders realized just how much advantage they might gain against rivals from missionary backing – often, as large-scale conversions took place, combatants in murderous wars would ally with missionaries of rival denominations, who frequently did not quite grasp how they were being used in local politics. When the Wesleyan Methodists and the LMS, in a laudable attempt to end their own rivalries, agreed in the 1830s to allot Samoa to the LMS and Tonga and Fiji to the Wesleyans, local Wesleyans on Samoa were furious. They would not compromise their Wesleyan purity even by using the same Bibles and hymn books as the LMS folk, and after twenty years of ill-will and agitation, European and Australian Wesleyan missionaries returned in some embarrassment to Samoa.33 The Maori in Aotearoa (the pair of major islands which Europeans have known as New Zealand) were part of the same oceanic culture. They had both a lively curiosity about European culture and an exceptional ability to exploit it: they learned the hard way that not all innovation was beneficial, when their acquisition of large quantities of muskets horrifically escalated casualties in their habitual and hitherto partly ritual warfare. Christianity in its various missionary forms offered more promising paths into adjusting to the European presence: by 1845, in under fifty years, at least half the Maori population was worshipping in Christian churches, far outnumbering European churchgoers on the two islands.34 Maoris found much to interest them in the Bible. When, with the help of missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, they negotiated a treaty with the British Crown at Waitangi in 1840, the Maori leadership regarded it as a covenant on a biblical model, and, despite many subsequent colonial betrayals of the treaty’s spirit, it endured as the basis of a more just settlement for the Maori people in recent years. One of the most creative leaders in the generation after the treaty signatories was a devout Anglican, a chief’s son baptized William Thompson (Wiremu Tamihana in Maori). Tamihana had initially followed his European missionary mentors in their hostility to traditional Maori tattooing, but by the 1850s he was pleased to proclaim to his people after his own more careful scrutiny of the biblical text that nothing in scripture forbade it. This was an important element in Maori self-assertion at that time, and formed part of Tamihana’s greater

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  With her mouth half open, it occurred to me that she must already be drunk as I noticed the far-off look in her eyes. The thousand-yard stare of intoxication, I thought, and as I watched her with an idle fascination, it occurred to me that, yeah, I was a little drunk, too. “Fun! What are the rules?” Lara asked. “Everybody tells the story of their best day. The best storyteller doesn’t have to drink. Then everybody tells the story of their worst day, and the best storyteller doesn’t have to drink. Then we keep going, second best day, second worst day, until one of y’all quits.” “How do you know it’ll be one of us?” Takumi asked. “’Cause I’m the best drinker and the best storyteller,” she answered. Hard to disagree with that logic. “You start, Pudge. Best day of your life.” “Um. Can I take a minute to think of one?” “Couldn’ta been that good if you have to think about it,” the Colonel said. “Fuck you, dude.” “Touchy.” “Best day of my life was today,” I said. “And the story is that I woke up next to a very pretty Hungarian girl and it was cold but not too cold and I had a cup of lukewarm instant coffee and ate Cheerios without milk and then walked through the woods with Alaska and Takumi. We skipped stones across the creek, which sounds dumb but it wasn’t. I don’t know. Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows and that kind of bright, soft light you get when the sun isn’t quite setting? That’s the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seemed to be in that light. I mean, I didn’t do anything. But just sitting here, even if I’m watching the Colonel whittle, or whatever. Whatever. Great day. Today. Best day of my life.” “You think I’m pretty?” Lara said, and laughed, bashful. I thought, It’d be good to make eye contact with her now, but I couldn’t. “And I’m Romaneean!” “That story ended up being a hell of a lot better than I thought it would be,” Alaska said, “but I’ve still got you beat.” “Bring it on, baby,” I said. A breeze picked up, the tall grass outside the barn tilting away from it, and I pulled my sleeping bag over my shoulders to stay warm. “Best day of my life was January 9, 1997. I was eight years old, and my mom and I went to the zoo on a class trip. I liked the bears. She liked the monkeys. Best day ever.