Iām not really the bar-pickup sort, either on the giving or receiving end. The number of times Iāve been alone in a bar and said more than a few words to a stranger probably fits on one hand.
My social life has been substantially digital, and going to a loud, crowded, public space to spend inordinate sums of money on intoxicating liquids seemed relatively pointless.
But, dissatisfied by being a B- student in nearly anything relevant and novel, I could finally tolerate the taste of wine by my late twenties, and quickly discovered that the craftiest of craft cocktails andā¦
I was trapped. How else to combat a big lie but with another one?
āā¦noooā¦ā I retorted, with audaciously feigned surprise and instant heat to my face.
Reality, laid down as only a newly-minted teenager can do.
Cue: laugh coyly and change the subject.
We are all constantly reinventing ourselves. Mundanely, we shape our bodies of nature, casually eroded by our turns of phrase, our footwear selections, and our choice of employer. Sometimes we make hard pivots, with the escape velocity necessary to escape prisons we find ourselves in.
Thereās not much worse than being caught in a conscious effortā¦
[CW: descriptions of sex, sexual assault]
The first (decent) song I wrote: Fear Into Faith.
Itās mostly about a classmate I dated when I was young, who is fortuitously the only one in my entire dating career thus far to get a nickname like āAsshole Boyfriendā.
Like all my songs, it is made up of snapshots from different areas of life. ā¦
[CW: child pornography, child sexual abuse]
Published as shared with Stephanie Pakrul, November 2018
I don't feel this way today.
I cannot write this without prefacing it with that sentence. The shameĀ stillĀ gripsĀ myĀ throat.
I used to look at child pornography. I fantasized about your daughters and nieces and their friends in hotel hot tubs, while we made polite conversation about the wedding you were in town for. I made up stories in my head about what I would do to the young actresses I saw in movies if I only could. ā¦
[CW: sex work, some explicit discussion of sex]
Published from an interview with Stephanie Pakrul, November 2018.
Stephanie: Thank you for talking to me today! You once told me about your first sex date as a āSugar Babyā and Iāve asked if you would share your story here. What was your motivation for agreeing to do this?
#338: I believe that living without self-deception is the essence of bravery. ā¦
I was deeply resistant to both purchasing and laying under twenty pounds of tiny glass beads.
Some part of me didnāt want to be okay on my own. I clung to wanting someone beside me to sleep. It became clear this resistance had something to teach me and I certainly needed to sleep better, so I forked out $120š.
Hereās what I learned.
- If you enjoy solo duvet cover wrangling, youāll absolutely adore the additional challenge of an insert with the dead weight and agility of a 5'Ć7' sleeping cat
- Just lay under it. Do it and breathe. Itās meaningless until you feel it.
- ā¦
All stories on this site are the truth.
I have had the privilege and burden of carrying stories of considerable shame in my nearly two decades as a camgirl-slash-confidant and member of the human race. Itās time for our shared pain to come into the light, so we can help each other heal. We cannot grow as islands.
Nothing is hearsay. Everyone is real. Itās understandable if some of these accounts make you feel deeply uncomfortable. There are Content Warnings (please let me know if Iāve missed anything) on any stories likely to be triggering.
Some stories are anonymous. Someā¦
While curating a list of influential books, I looked back through my late 2012 purchase history
They corrected a few facts in my memory timeline and tell a story of the power of curiosity and human potential.
The moment is indelibly stamped, sitting in Dr. Mās office, gazing around for clinical tidbits to replicate in my doll hospital at home. I wasnāt sure what to make of the number of pothos vines she had draped around the packed bookshelves of her tiny windowless back office. This was a different kind of doctor than all the ones before.
They were discussing some particulars of my case. ā¦
So far weāve covered AIML template/pattern syntax, sets, basic variables, wildcards, and simple recursion. Now letās look at implementing a map of interests and opinions.
Iām choosing to do some of my interests as a map rather than written out in AIML because there will be many topics that I donāt really need to expand upon or perform any kinds of actions on, so a simple key-value pair for the text response is adequate. Theyāll be easier to update and manipulate in the future as a map file rather than in markup.
Game, Set, and Map
First weāre going to create a set withā¦
Stephanie Pakrul šš¤š¦¢
Talk to me about mental health, nerdy things, entrepreneurship, sex work, polyamory, web dev, & life in a hippie hacker dorm in San Francisco. https://vct.im/LI
