TMI Tuesday – Discussion Points

Special thanks for this week’s questions were put together by the ever loving Hedone and Sin Doll

1. What do you collect?
My mother is notorious for starting craft projects and never finishing them. Her house is bursting at the seams with fabric that has never been used, wool and a myriad of other craft projects. As a result I grew up determined not to have a house full of junk.

As I get older I am realising that this is a bit of a futile endeavour and I find myself periodically doing battle with junk and ruthlessly disposing of clothing and other momentoes. I have been ruthlessly devoted to only starting projects that I can finish and at the same time find a use for.

However a joke that I often use in response to this question is I collect chocolate cake recipes. A good chocolate cake is as good as sex… Sometimes.

2. What do you do for fun?
Hmmm the fact that I struggle to answer this question kind of shows that I need to spend a bit more time on just purely having fun for the sake of it. At the moment my primary fun activity is having sex. I have recently been focussing on purely on my own pleasure and taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. It is a journey and it is taking me down some unexpected alleys.

3. Name a place that’s fun for you to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.
I will have to say Darwin. I visited there in 2010 and absolutely loved the laid back atmosphere and the awesome winter climate. It is a truly beautiful place but I definitely wouldn’t want to live there. The climate in the summer is not that much fun and I am sure if I lived there for any length of time it would start to feel very much like a large small town.

4. Do you believe in revenge? And 5. Do you believe in forgiveness and do you forgive and forget?
I am very much a live and let live kind of person. I also have massive issues with confrontation. Generally if some one wrongs me badly I will retreat and cut that person out of my life. If it is a minor transgression I tend to gloss over it and get over it in my own time. So I guess I do forgive in a way but I wouldn’t say that I forget.

I believe very much in karma though and I have to admit that I have been secretly (OK not always so much) happy when I discover that someone who has hurt me badly in the past has experienced a misfortune of their own. I don’t think that counts exactly as revenge but it definitely does scratch the itch.

6. Are you religious? spiritual? Atheist?
I am a practising Catholic but I don’t count myself as religious. More of a spiritual person. I am interested in spiritual practices and ideas in Buddhism and Taoism and have practised Yoga in the past. There is no ‘one fits all’ religion in the world. As humans we have an obligation to look after ourselves, each other and the world we live in. Religion is many people’s way of deciding how that should happen but at the end of the day religion is a man made phenomenon and so has inherent flaws. Faith and spirituality are more personal and a much greater reflection of the person you are.

Bonus: What’s your routine every night just before you go to sleep?
Simple, clean my teeth, get undressed and fall into bed. If I am not completely exhausted and I have Mr Jones available and willing then there will be sex. Like everything in my life it is a very go with the flow kind of process.

 

As always make sure you head over to the TMI Tuesday page to get some more TMI goodness

TMI Tuesday – Love and Marraige

Thanks to Virtual Sin for the questions this week. And of course to the lovely Hedone for the extra sixth?? question.

1. Do you believe in marraige?

Obviously yes. I am married and have been for sixteen years now. I often feel that I am in the minority of people today being married to the father of all of my children with absolutely no intention of having any more children to any other men.

2. Have you ever proposed marraige or been proposed to marry? What happened?

Mr Jones’ proposal was a little bit of an anticlimax. He made a point of not proposing until he was sure I would say yes. So there was an answer before the question. He did make the effort to take me to a nice outdoor lake where there was no-one around which was about as romantic as he got in those days.

3. What would be your dream way of proposing marraige?

I think I must be getting old. I don’t really go for the lavish romantic gestures these days. Also, because I am already married to the person I am going to grow old with I don’t really think too much about that kind of thing. I think a low key, romantic dinner and a private discussion would probably be my ideal right now.

4. What would be your nightmarish way of proposing marraige?

A completely out of the blue very public proposal in front of a large crowd of spectators from someone I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to marry would probably be the worst thing I could think of.

5. Mainstream society has engagement rings; in your opinion what token should be given to signify engagement?

A couple that we are acquainted with are a mixed race marraige with the man coming from Papua New Guinea. At the time that they got married they didn’t have a lot and their wedding consisted of a ‘one pig’ feast. It has been a standard joke between Mr Jones and Myself that I am worth at least ten pigs. The reasoning behind this Melanesian custom is that a man shows his worth as a husband and provider by the number and size of the pigs he can acquire and look after. A woman shows her worth as a wife and mother by the number and size of the pigs she can command as a ‘bride price’

At the risk of antagonising the feminists out there I think in its purest form this custom is actually a good way of showing the value that a future husband and wife place on each other and themselves. In our culture there is a lot of emphasis placed on engagement rings which ultimately only benefits the jeweller when the prospective husband is forced to part with a substantial amount of hard earned cash so that his fiance has something worthwhile to show off at work and family functions.

Would you like to participate in an “open” marraighe vs a traditional monogamous marraige? Why / why not?

Well obviously the answer to this one is yes. Why? because it is just better than monogamy. Don’t get me wrong an open marraigh is not for the faint of heart. I could write a whole post about this topic. Oh wait that is what this blog is about!

Bonus: Tell us about someone you would have proposed to but never had the chance / opportunity.

Well actually there isn’t anyone. I am married to “The One” and I can’t think of anyone who came before him who I did actually want to marry.

I almost forgot! Make sure you check out all the juicy TMI goodness right HERE

TMI Tuesday – Pet Names and Body Parts

I haven’t participated in TMI Tuesday for a couple of weeks because it is the end of the term and I have been drowning in marking. In spite of this I really liked this week’s questions and so I have put together a “better late than never” post.

1. Do you give pet names to anything? (e.g. Significant other. Car. Breasts. Penis. Vagina.)
Actually I seem to give pet names to many things in my life;
Mr Jones is Babe
My teenage son is Baby Boy
My tweenage daughter is Sausage Girl
One of our cats is Sir Furry Butt (among other things)
However I never really got into naming my body parts. The only time I did was when a lover called my Pussy Mrs P. P, by the way did not stand for the obvious.

2. Is there a pet name that you can’t stand being called?
Not one that is in common use now. There were a few names that people used for me when I was a teenager in high school that I didn’t really like but I don’t think they were being used in the pet sense.

3. Has your body ever done something that you didn’t understand? Even if it was a ‘first time’ something happened?
At the moment my body is doing a lot of stuff that I don’t understand. Unfortunately for me doctors also don’t understand what is going on and I feel like I am constantly being sent for tests. None of which give results that doctors look at and say “OK this is what is happening and we can help that by doing that” usually they say “Well we didn’t find what we were expecting so we are going to have to do some more tests”.ut,d

4. Which body part do you spend the most time on? (grooming, applying, etc.)
I am a relatively low maintenance woman and spend very little time on morning beauty routines. The thing I would spend the most time on is actually my nails both my toenails and my fingernails. I don’t go to the nail technician and I have never had acrylic nails applied nor a professional “paint job” but I do like to paint my own toenails and also to file and buff my fingernails for a natural shine. It is probably the most extensive beauty routine I have ever indulged in.

5. The name of the best lover you’ve ever had.
I was told by a winemaker once that the best wine you have ever had is the wine you are enjoying right now with the people you are with right now”
I think that the same applies when it comes to sex. Of course there are duds and experiences that make you quite determined to never go there again but I think honestly once you haven’t been with a person for a while the memory fades a little and you kind of forget how awesome they were. Especially if another really awesome person comes into your life to fill that slot.

6. Have you ever taken an ex back?
This kind of question always seems like it doesn’t apply to me. I am married and have been married for sixteen years to the first and only person I ever married. So I have never taken an ex – husband back obviously. Given that I have been married for so long it has been a while since I have had what most people refer to as a boyfriend. Once when I was about 18 I did take back a boy I had broken up with but to be perfectly honest that whole time in my life and the relationships I was having with those people then seem so childish now that they don’t really count.

Bonus: What’s your biggest concern in the world today?
I teach Biology and so I am tuned in to a lot of environmental concerns that you see passionate people discussing on the news. But to put my concerns into one basket I would have to say that humankind is so obsessed with improving their standard of living that they are becoming more and more disconnected with the earth that they live on. I often find myself wishing for a simpler life where everyone knows the farmer that grew their meat and potatoes and people actually make themselves some of the items they wear or use everyday.

Body Image Part 2

I am not sure if I have mentioned this but I pole dance for fun and fitness.

When people hear the words pole dancing there are a few stereotypes that spring to mind. The first one is stripping. Unfortunately the classic image of a pole dancer is a woman in seven inch heels taking her clothes off while winding her body around a pole. There are women who do this and the majority of them get paid quite well but the modern phenomenon that is pole dancing is not about removing clothes it is about athleticism and gymnastics. Don’t believe me? Head on over to You Tube and look up some videos of Chelle Hafner or Jenyne Butterfly.

I will admit that the thing that I was looking for when I took my first class was the sexy dancing and the hope that I would learn to be as alluring as a stripper one day. I was very disappointed after an hour of strengthening and gymnastics style training with absolutely no dancing.

The second thing that springs to a lot of people’s minds when they think about pole dancing classes is a culture of young, attractive, flexible women with fantastic bodies. I will agree that there some pole dancers like that and there are definitely studios that cultivate that kind of clientele. But there are studios that don’t. On the whole I have found the pole dancing community to be one of the most accepting, empowering and encouraging communities to be around.

Being involved with pole dancing has been one of the key factors in my current ability to be mostly naked in a room full of strangers. This is because of the acceptance of everyone regardless of their size and shape. My current instructor is a wonderful supportive, encouraging person who fully embraces the idea that pole is all about your individual journey. She is the person that has convinced me that taking more than a year to invert confidently was not a shortcoming is was just how it was with me. She is also the person who has encouraged me to see that anything is achievable with enough work.

Going back to my experiences that I discussed in part one of this series I had an opportunity that evening to reflect on reverse body discrimination. As I already told you the evening was challenging for me because I felt that I was in the definite minority of people larger than size 10 getting naked in front of a crowd. There were of course women in the crowd who were supportive of me and as time went on I felt I was a little like the ‘big girl’s’ champion. What was a little distressing about the bigger girl’s group was their animosity towards the smaller women in the room.

I found myself correcting some of their negative and acrimonious comments towards some of these women trying to encourage a culture of acceptance of all body shapes. It is true that smaller more beautiful women definitely get more attention and in a lot of ways their life is easier but sometimes bigger people forget that these women experience as much negativity as they do. When they started spouting their negative comments had no comprehension that their attitude was exactly the same as the discrimination they hate receiving every day. Body acceptance is not just about being less offensive to fat people it is about accepting people exactly the way they are, whoever they are.

We are the product of our life experiences and we get out of life what we put in. It doesn’t matter what size we are. If we are negative all the time we will have a shitty life. In my experience that is how things work. When we see other people around us making choices we think are wrong or stupid we are only glimpsing a small part of their lives. For the most part we have absolutely no idea of what his happening with them. Wether we are tall, short, wide or thin we are all on a journey and we owe it to each other to remember that and cut each other some slack occasionally.

Body Image Part 1

Recently I found myself at a swingers club participating in and spectating at an amateur strip competition. The club owners conceived the competition to encourage their patrons to get up and strut their stuff all in the name of good fun. The general idea was complete acceptance of all body shapes and confirmation of the appeal of all people whatever their shape and size. Unfortunately for me I chose to enter on the same night that a whole lot of young bendy sexy things were in attendance and I found myself wondering what I had been thinking when I put my name down to do this.

I had decided to do a duo with a friend and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. Her partner and mine also enjoyed our performance as well. Which at the end of the day was all that really mattered to either of us. Once the younger more stereotypically attractive girls took over we decided that we would find something more interesting to do than hear what we already knew, that we didn’t win.

In one way it was disappointing I kinda hoped that there would be some kind of triumph of real bodies over young bendy bodies. The younger women had lacked showmanship and their appeal was based mainly around the attractiveness of their bodies, not around how they entertained the crowd. Typically, their friends and supporters were enthusiastic in their support of them but didn’t even bother to watch the other competitors.

Earlier in the day I had shopped with a vague notion of finding a new sexy club dress to wear to the event, I have put on a small amount of weight recently. I hadn’t really given it much consideration but I found myself in change room mirror after change room mirror admitting that the dress that looked great on the rack did not have enough room for my boobs and sometimes my ass.

I am not large by any stretch of the imagination but in stores that sell the kinds of clothes I was looking for stock mainly size 8. There isn’t much hope for a size 12 to 14 woman. What rubbed salt even deeper into the wound was that the stores stocking size 12 – 14 were also about sensible mumsy fashion. Not about cleavage and short skirts. The take home message I got from that? I am too old and too fat to wear sexy clothes.

In the aftermath of my failed shopping, dealing with sexy women with perfectly pert breasts and firm, smooth asses made me begin to wonder if I was the sex goddess that I perceived myself to be. I began to question the things that Mr Jones and other men told me and started to think that their compliments were just ruses to get into my pants. I started to believe that I was just another fat old lady.

It is strange how much ego stroking we all crave. Clearly I am a sexy beast, Men (and women) did notice me. More than one man (and woman) expressed a desire to have sex with me; so clearly I am attractive, But even such rational thinking was not convincing my self esteem. Somehow the small voice of self – doubt was screaming louder than the calm voice of reason. I was like a drug addict craving the next hit

A couple of years ago I was completely confident in myself. Now I find myself wondering. Spending the evening comparing myself to women who were much younger than me was definitely not doing anything to improve my self confidence. Just as the only real way to feel good about yourself is to truly believe in yourself the most efficient way to feel bad about yourself is to spend an evening comparing yourself convince yourself that you don’t measure up to other people around you.

Eventually the rational part of my brain managed to gain control. Yes the young bendy blonde was hot and all the guys were ogling her. But only in the same sort of way they look at models in a magazine. I am never going to be one of them. Maybe once I was but it must have been in an alternative universe because I don’t remember it. I don’t truly believe that I am a stunning sex goddess but enough people out there seem to. So it must be true on some level. Today I am in the process of re-convincing myself. If I tell myself enough, then one day I might just believe it.

 

<br /

Blurred Lines

I am a very black and white person. I like things to be consistent and I hate it when things don’t fit into the category that I have given them previously. Of course this has caused me endless grief throughout my life. I have not been able to get my head around friends who do things that irritate me because at the time I didn’t understand that being friends with someone did not meat I had to like EVERYTHING about that particular person. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time considering wether I should work for certain companies because I had ethical issues with some of their practices. The list goes on and on.

One of the major issues I have had is the conflict between my feeling that I should be a ‘good girl’ but what my soul wants is nothing more than to be a ‘bad girl’. For a lot of my life I was ashamed of my predilection for short skirts, low cut dresses and big come fuck me boots. I didn’t realise that my mother and the world I grew up in was not only wrong but also hypocritical. For better or worse I was determined to be Mrs Jones; the perfect good girl who was always dressed appropriately and behaved as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

As I grew up I began to give in to the dark side. I sometimes bought clothing that wasn’t exactly appropriate. I had sexual relationships that taught me that enjoying sex was not dirty. My marraige to Mr Jones has helped this process along considerably and today I find myself acknowledging that the good girl part of my personality and the bad girl part of my personality can co-exist in the same body.

And so Gemma Jones was born. In her fullest expression Gemma is not a bad girl, she is a Sex Goddess. She is comfortable with her body, who she is and knows what she wants out of life. Gemma is not plagued with doubts or concerns about what other people think about her. And most importantly she is happy.

For a few years I was able to live in Gemma mode pretty much all the time. But that was just a small window in time while I studied. Inevitably the degree I was studying was completed and I was faced with the reality of using the qualification I had just spent so many sleepless nights agonising over.

The career I had chosen meant that I would be working with teenagers. A frustrating, stressful and very rewarding field but not one that is populated with open minded people. It is unlikely that most of my colleagues or the parents of my students would be open minded enough to accept some of my more unconventional lifestyle choices,

And so now I find myself living the classic double life trying to stop my bad girl side from bleeding into my good girl life. I am an honest person. It is incredibly difficult for me to maintain a lie over an extended period. And so it is only a matter of time before Gemma makes an appearance. I can only hope she doesn’t do anything too inappropriate.

TMI Tuesday – Love, Life and Lessons

Unlike my American counterparts today is not a holiday for me. However I will be celebratingLabour day in about a month and am planning a camping trip so will be looking forward to it.

1. Are you happy with your job? Why or Why not?

At the start of this year I embarked on a career as a high school teacher. When I was studying everyone I told about my plans looked at me like I had grown another head. Why would a middle aged person who has teenagers of her own at home consciously choose to spend her working days dealing with a room full of them?

The truth is that I like teenagers, I always have. Now that I have had to deal with them in concentrated form over the period of almost a year I have to say my regard for this human sub-species has not diminished. Certainly there are days when I feel as if I have been wrestling with eels all day and I definitely drink more these days than I used to but when faced with the thought of not working at my current job any more I feel like someone is about to steal my children from me.

So I think it is safe to say that yes I am happy because I think I have made a good choice.

 

2. What do you want?

Such an open ended question! I not going to attempt to decide what I want out of life. Rather focus on what I want right now.

A long hot shower, a nice sensual massage by at least four hands and a very happy ending should do the trick. As long as there is a fairy hanging around to do the pile of work I have sitting there looking at me while I write this post.

3. Who first broke your heart?

I dated a boy when I was in my first year of university. We broke up once and I was heart broken. We ended up getting back together which didn’t last very long. I was nowhere near as heartbroken the second time. After that I kept very firmly to the rule of never looking back after I broke up with someone.

4. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in a relationship?

I once allowed myself to be seduced by a falsely charming man. The whole situation was completely fucked up and resulted in me cheating on Mr Jones. I was very fortunate that we worked our way through it and out the other side.

5. What did you learn from you last lover/ex-significant other?

Hmmmm so many lovers. Hard to actually pinpoint which one was the last one. The last man I had an encounter with for some reason which I don’t totally get has awakened an interest in kissing. Not exactly sure why but he is an excellent kisser.

6. What novel has been instrumental in shaping your views at any point in your life? Why?

The novel “Birds Without Wings” by Louis de Bernieres changed a lot about the way I viewed the ANZAC story which is such a key part of Australian history and identity. It also changed the way I thought about Muslims as a Christian growing up in a Christian country.

 

7. Tell us about a favorite TV broadcast show you currently enjoy? Give us a synopsis of the show.

I don’t really watch a lot of television. The only shows that I consistently watch at the moment are “Torchwood – Miracle Day“.and an Australian made soap called “Wonderland“.

Dedicated Whovians will remember the stunning Captain Jack Harkness and will likely be familiar with the offshoot BBC show “Torchwood” that focussed on Captain Jack’s adventures on Earth. This series is an American based version of the previously fully British show focussing on a sudden world wide miracle that has resulted in humans being unable to die no matter how sick they are or how gruesome their injuries are.

Wonderland is a soap opera that features a group of attractive twenty something’s that all share a block of units. It is a little like Friends but more modern and with more characters.

Bonus: What is your current favorite song to listen to over and over again?

This song changes over time but the current one that I find myself putting on repeat is “Another Way to Die” the theme song for the James Bond movie “Quantum of Solace” Such a sexy song,