Interesting piece about writer-reader relationships over at Salon today. What’s funny is that I cannot relate at all to what the author claims is the old way of being a writer. I’m so community driven. Hence the forum. Hence the blogs. I could never do what I do without constant conversation with readers. Without the roles of writer and reader being fluid, traded back and forth seamlessly. Imagine reading Sex Drive without any sense of community or input! Imagine if I wrote Sex Drive as if I were some lofty academic or expert or smarter-than-thou journalist, with the relationship mostly one way, flowing from my brain to yours.

I’m definitely writing at the right time. Even as it gets harder to make a living writing, it is a wonderful time to be a professional writer.

The readers strike back | Salon.com
Until the Internet came along, actual readers barely dented a writer’s consciousness. Before the whole world got wired, the only way readers could respond to a piece was by writing a letter to the editor, or (much less frequently) to the author, putting it in a stamped envelope, and sticking it in a mailbox. As a result, the number of letters was a tiny fraction of what it is in the age of e-mail. And that number was further diminished by an editor who trimmed the few selected letters to meet space considerations and winnowed out the cranks. An article might have been read by 10,000 people, but the writer never knew it. A dozen letters constituted a deluge.

I’m sure I’m supposed to find this offensive, but actually, I think it’s playful and cute. I would have a lot more fun as a barrista doing it this way; I really love burlesque and intend to take a class to learn how to do it this year. Certainly adding the performance art aspect to serving milkshakes pretending to be coffee would keep my mind more engaged.

The only thing is we need to be more equal about it. Gimme hot straight guys, flirty gay guys, earthly, sultry lesbians. Straight men in trucks aren’t the only ones who want drive-through espresso.

The Seattle Times: Local News: Some coffee stands get steamier
In a short, sheer, baby-doll negligee and coordinated pink panties, Candice Law is dressed to work at a drive-through espresso stand in Tukwila, and she is working it.

Customers pull their trucks up to the window, where Law greets each with an affectionate nickname, blows kisses, and vamps about as she steams milk for a mocha. “You want whipped cream?” she asks, a sly smile playing on her pierced lip.

I heard a new pop-country song recently about a little boy who wants to grow up big and strong just like his dad. The song begins:

Driving through town just my boy and me
With a happy meal in his booster seat
Knowing that he couldn’t have the toy
Till his nuggets were gone

It reminds of overhearing a end-of-her-rope mom explaining to her kids at some park — zoo? Disneyland? can’t remember — that they won’t get their ice cream until after they finish their hot dogs.

Since when did chicken nuggets and hot dogs become the nutritious entrees we have to bribe kids with sweets to eat?

When did “eat your broccoli / why? / i’m the mom, that’s why” give way to “eat your mac n cheese”?

Dammit. Now I’m craving my junk-food weakness: fried calamari. But I’d rather have raw oysters.

(Sushi taste on a Taco Bell budget, that’s me … )

You mean all I have to do to get a free flight AND tickets for a future free flight is have a screaming child with me and create such an obnoxious situation that I get kicked off the flight? Rock on!

Airline defends removing family from flight - Travel News - MSNBC.com
ORLANDO, Fla. - AirTran Airways on Tuesday defended its decision to remove a Massachusetts couple from a flight after their crying 3-year-old daughter refused to take her seat before takeoff.

When I saw the story, 69 percent of the people who voted in the “was AirTran correct?” poll said “hell, yes.”

As for the father who said he would never fly AirTran again — I’ll take your free tickets off your hands, if you like.

Didn’t I just ask a few days ago “where are all the male courtesans?” Now look at what’s happening in Japan….

No sex please at this rent-a-gigolo service - MSN-Mainichi Daily News

Japanese women looking for a little bit on the side are shunning host clubs and instead partaking of “rent-a-fling” services during the day, according to Shukan Post (2/2).

Precious, an operator of a rent-a-fling service, claims to have about 1,500 male escorts registered on its books in the Kanto area.

“Our customers are mainly women working in the adult entertainment business, but following them are housewives and office ladies in their 30s. Recently, we’ve also noticed an increase in housewives in their 40s and 50s,” Haruki Kamisato, the head of Precious, tells Shukan Post.

If you’re going to provide a store locator on your website, make sure people can enter city and state. If you’re traveling you don’t always know the zip code where you’re staying. Why force a user to do a zip code lookup in order to find your stores? Yet I’ve seen a few store locators that only give users one search field: zip code. Bah, humbug.

When I finally turn in my column — and I have a hell of a time stopping myself from revising it Just One More Time — I always have this sense of relief mingled with anxiety. Relief that it’s done, for better or worse. Anxiety that in reading it so many times I didn’t notice that I’d accidentally left out a crucial explanation. A bit of “aaaahhh, now I can have a cup of coffee” and then the rest of my workload crashes down on me. (Day job, blog, podcast, book, anyone?)

And then the girding up because it’s already past time to start the next one.

I love it.

A paragraph I really wanted to work into the column this week but it just won’t fit:

We are already capable of using four of our six senses even when separated by thousands of miles: aural, visual, tactile and intuition (”sixth sense”). Taste and smell cannot be too far behind.

It’s a fine line between sharing and hurting. I’ve been wanting to write about the breakup, but I do not want to compromise anyone’s privacy. I’m willing to open myself up but do I get to drag anyone else out into the open? Modern relating requires us to think about these questions, to lighten up about what each other expresses and yet also to consider what we are expressing. Balancing the universal experience — we all hurt, we all sorrow, we all stumble– with the personal — here’s what I did, said, felt.

But I realized I needed to put yesterday’s post into context. I’m thinking of time with a courtesan as a healing experience, not just as a “wouldn’t it be cool if … ” And I also thought later that I should not have cited the sources of Namaah or Lady Sally. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you can Google. If you care.

For me, sex is very healing. I’ve been turning to sex at least twice a day since I got back from Las Vegas — with myself. (Well, and my little friend Mr. Hitachi.) I have a lot going on right now with work and it’s been difficult to keep the plates spinning with a broken heart, y’know? And yet it’s too soon to channel these thoughts and (hopefully) insights into columns. It’s too raw, and while I’m okay with raw, I think it will be better to take some time so I can make sure I don’t throw salt on anyone else’s raw spots.

And it’s strange, every time I go to write, thinking “but what if ____ sees it? how will ____ feel about this?” I’ve walked that tightrope for four years, but at times like this it wobbles quite a bit and I’ve dropped the pole and all I’ve got is my determination not to fall. And my compassion.

I hope it’s enough.

Why aren’t there male courtesans for women?

This is what I want.

I want to hire a funny, intelligent, nice, good-looking guy in his mid-40s who is trained in the arts of conversation, lovemaking, dance and massage. He must be widely read and engaging and sensual and genuinely develop affection for me without stepping beyond the bounds of the professional relationship.

Our time together might include oysters, champagne, live music, dancing, massage, and, if mutually decided upon by both of us although outside the bounds of our contract, sex. (You can’t include sex in a contract or it becomes prostitution.)

Or it might involve tequila and the grill. Or maybe floggers and nipple clamps. Whatever I, the client, am in the mood for — but created by him, so that all I have to do is call the service and give them my credit card number and then everything just happens without any project-management on my part. And everything of the highest quality achievable by humankind.

I’m talking an adept of Namaah (if you’ve read Jacqueline Carey, you know what I mean). An artist in Lady Sally’s house (if you’ve read Spider Robinson, you know what I mean).

Not a “male escort” or a guy picked up online or at a sports bar. A true courtesan, trained, certified, and professional. One you can schedule just like you would a massage at a day spa, a weekend getaway or a dental appointment; just another service you can take advantage of in order to promote your own good health.
And then when the appointment is over, we take our leave and get ourselves back to work, no hearts broken, no expectations dashed — professional through and through.

It’s possible that Heidi Fleiss’s Stud Farm will be a step in this direction, assuming it ever opens; I am interpreting “luxury brothel” to include things like massages and meals, if not full-on spa experience with “extra” options. (And at $250 an hour, I suppose I better open a dedicated savings account.)

I’m so SICK of spending so much time, energy and money to go to places to work and have the technology fail. I’m at Adult Entertainment Expo and the wifi in the press room is sporadic, the wifi in the hotel is almost nonexistent (”during CES everyone always is fighting for IP addresses/signal” — yeah that’s helpful, thanks, mr. hotel person), and there is no ethernet anywhere. When you have to pay for it, it should work, don’t you think?

And the techs are working so hard to make it all work, but they’re understaffed and have all those obstacles of no budget to build more infrastructure and no one above thinking it’s important enough to bother with. How these convention centers can keep attracting tech conventions and not provide reliable internet access WHICH DID I MENTION WE HAVE TO PAY FOR is beyond me.

So here I am covering tech for a tech publication and I can’t get online to file my stories.

On the other hand, really neat stuff to write about this year, so if I can actually stay online long enough to send anything to Wired, I’m jazzed to be here.

If you used to read my Sex Drive Daily blog at Wired, you know that I recently retired from it. I have public reasons for this and private ones.

But my heart aches whenever I read something like this, from About.com Sexuality guide Cory Silverberg, because I really had no idea that SDD much noticed out in the world:

Favorite Sex Blogs 2006

[lots of great blogs listed here, and then:]

Sex Drive Daily
Wired’s sex columnist Regina Lynn blogs here (among other places) and her blog is one stop shopping for sex items about technology, pop culture, health and much more.

I am trying to ramp up again and post as usual, but to Wired’s blog Bodyhack instead. But it’s been a tough few weeks and it might take me a while to regain my stride.

I heated up a leftover pancake in the microwave this morning.

While it was heating, I went into another room for something. When I cam back to the kitchen, Jedi was in a perfect Sit-Stay in front of the microwave. He glanced back at me as I entered the room but keep his snout pointed at the oven.

When it went beep-beep-beep, he stood up and got wiggly and looked at me with one message clear on his face: My pancake is ready, so can you reach it for me, mom?

You know that “rule” that you should never sleep with your friend’s ex-lovers?

I’ve never understood it. It seems to me that when people aren’t exclusively dating (or engaged to, or married to, or committed to, or whatever) each other, they don’t have any say in who a person sleeps with. Once the relationship is over (or at least no longer monogamous, or no longer sexual), how does it affect you if the person sleeps with your friend?

In my small high school, you almost couldn’t avoid dating someone one of your friends had dated, if you had a lot of friends.

I look around at my circle of friends and some of them are a lot like me, but different. If a man isn’t quite right for me, but he’s smart and funny and nice and cute, why wouldn’t I want one of my friends to take a chance with him? Maybe they’ll hit it off, maybe they won’t.

I don’t understand that possessiveness, that dog-in-the-manger attitude that has become one of the toss-off “rules” you read about in mainstream magazines.

Naturally there is a polite way to sleep with your friend’s ex and there is an impolite way. If your friend is fresh in the pain of heartbreak, it’s not nice to be floating around her all aglow because you’re sleeping with the person she’s still in love with.

There’s a practical side to it, too. Figure you have a circle of friends. Attractive, smart, funny. Friends hook up. Sometimes the partnerships end. Are you two now going to be off-limits to everyone else? The pool is going to get a lot smaller with every term partnership, which forces everyone to always be looking outside the group for sex … but then you bring that person into the group. And now if you stop seeing each other, that person and all the others in the group are off-limits?

Frankly, I’d be delighted for my friends and my lovers to enjoy one another. If they find pleasure, connection, playfulness, or even True Love with each other, I can only be happy for them.

For me, sex — and love — are not about ownership. (Even if they were, I don’t understand why I would have any say in what a person decides to do after I no longer own him.) And I can’t see any other justification for believing that your friends and ex-lovers should keep their hands off each other except that you think you own them.