December talking meme

Aaaaaah! simplybeing picked December 1, and wanted to know: What are your top five addictions? *coughGAYPORNCOUNTScough*

(Hops in Wayback Machine. Dials back 24 hours)

Okay, for one, we'll def go with gay porn! But not just any porn, mind you. I actually don't get into mechanics. I know that's some people's cake, and yay, more for them. I'm more concerned with mental processes and emotional repurcussions and reactions. So porn, yes, but "porn of the miiinndd!" if you will. Intellectually, I grasp that sex for most people is about letting go of the intellect, of being mindlessly hedonistic and sensualistic. I get it, I do. But I'm ace--well, demi--and if my mind's not there, we might as well put our clothes on and go home. Painfully honestly, I mostly skip mechanics in fic and in fiction--sorry to not pay proper homage to people's well-crafted porn. But if the emotional/intellectual stuff is working along with the sex? Then ohbaby, yes, I'm there, and I'm yours. I'm also still pretty oldskool, in that gay male characters are enough of a step away from my own sexual experience to provide some perspective. I'm, for the most part, disinterested in reading, and certainly in writing, het porn. And because femslash, while I heartily approve of it, doesn't provide that distance and perspective, I'm not drawn to it, either.

Two: animal behavior. In another life I would come back as Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey. Failing that, find another species that has a social structure, fly me in supplies every two months, and give me a notebook and a dictating device, and go away. From apes to cats to canines to dolphins, orcas, and whales, from bees to prairie dogs to hyenas, I find animals endlessly intriguing and fascinating in their behaviors and tribal interactions, despite having to fight my innate tendency to anthropomorphize animal behaviors. I find so many anthropological clues in mammalian behaviors (its how I survived the challenges of two teenaged boys against their father, the herd bull, and was able to help the three of them navigate without Actual Bloodshed), and truth be told, I'd rather animal watch than people watch, any day. I've studied cat behavior and the manipulation of cohabitating species (us), and learned a lot. I've read extensively, and have actually successfully applied some instinctive mammalian behavior study to making humans--from small preverbal children to stressed adults unable to articulate--feel more comfortable. We're not as evolved as we like to think we are, and certain rules still apply, and can be used to benefit us.

Three: cats. Just...cats. Of all sizes, breeds (except the smushfaced ones, poor lambs), temperaments and personalities, domestic (ha!) and wild.

Four: reading. As a child with undiagnosed ADD and borderline autism, I had enormous difficulty relating to other humans of any size or age. My refuge was books. I lived in my head for probably the first twelve years of my life, managing to mimic the behavior of classmates enough to, basically, be left mostly alone. Reading was a refuge, a reward, a safe haven, a place to let my dreams expand and grow layers and permutations, to be shot down by a developing sense of logic (while helping develop that ability of logic), and rebuild with more and more relation to reality. Reading gave me pictures and examples, not only of fantasy and possibility, but of reality, and how characters (people) actually managed to cope in the real world. Reading was (and is) a door into reality for me, as well as a gateway to fantasy. Because apparently my starting point, even now, is basically "marooned among alien lifeforms."

Five: Cirque du Soleil. No, really. If I won a trip to Vegas (which is basically one of my top ten nightmares), I'd spend the entire time going from Cirque show to Cirque show. I spent my childhood yearning and planning to be in the theater, to get to live out other lives (because my own was...not painful, but so impenetrable). Performance has always been interpretive and illuminative to me. Cirque is utterly physical--like observing olympic gymnastics or figure skating, or ballroom dancing, even the occasional sports game. All the intellect and training a human organism is capable of is translated into form and movement, and the sheer inescapable beauty of that. Cirque takes that achievement even further into abstract fantasy, removing it from the intellectual, result-driven plane and into beauty. There are dance troupes and sports teams that do the same, but a Cirque show is a collection of such moments, of training and innovation and presentation that might purport to string performances along a thin and hardly credible storyline--that doesn't matter. What matters is the moment--this very one--in which you watch a human being transform into solid movement and tension and release.

Um. More, I'm sure, than you wanted to know. There are a few slots open, if you're a glutton for punishment, here.>