So a few months ago I read Stiff: The Curious History of Human Cadavers, by the smart, funny, and irreverent Mary Roach. I loved it.

Today, on my way home from dropping plumtreeblossom off at her house, I overheard on NPR that Mary Roach had a new book out about the science of sex. It’s called Bonk.

You can bet I placed an order as soon as I got home.

Lovely weekend so far. Actually, last week was pretty good, too. Thursday and Friday were very low-spoon days for me at work, but still ended up being quite productive. Friday was my boss’ first day back from a month and a half’s paternity leave, and he and I worked together to solve a problem that I’d been having since before he left with an important piece of our infrastructure. Granted, that problem was me doing something stupid, but it still feels good to have it solved. :-)

Then Friday evening I met plumtreeblossom (whom I just almost mistyped as plumtreegoddess, but that’s not bad!), surrealestate, and massagewhore to see Snakes on a Plane, which was a lot of fun. In that connection, I have to show you one of ariwriter’s userpics, which I just stumbled across in davis_square:Afterwards we went to Happy Buddha for dinner and had a great and boisterous time.

Saturday I slept blessedly late, and then met cathijosephine and darxus for brunch at IHOP (near my and cathijosephine’s places). We were all kind of sleepy, but had a good time. When I got home I realized I could make chicken and dumplings if I had chicken, dumplings, and other ingredients. So I went shopping and ended up getting home later than anticipated, but put everything in the crockpot and got a bit of stuff done on the computer before plumtreeblossom called to say she was at Quincy Center. I met her there and we went to the local second-run theater to see An Inconvenient Truth for $2.50. There wasn’t much that was new to me, but there was a lot that I knew in words and numbers that was a lot more powerful in images, and I was very impressed with it.

We came back to my place, plopped the dumplings in the crock pot, and managed to kill the time while we were waiting for them to be done somehow. Then we discovered that the dumplings weren’t quite ready, so we popped I Am Curious (Yellow) in the DVD player (and ended up finishing it while we ate). Neither of us had seen it before, and it was weird and impressive and disturbing. (Does anybody reading this happen to know whether Martin Luther King was actually interviewed specifically for the movie, or whether they used archival footage? It sort of looked like archival footage.) Then there was dessert, and then plumtreeblossom and I got to spend our first night together, which was lovely.

Sunday morning (today) I slept very late (yay), and plumtreeblossom was excited about IHOP, so I ended up having breakfast there twice in two days. That’s good; it makes up for all the time at the gym. :-) I’d been hoping that plumtreeblossom would join me at darxus’ place for movies today, but she had a lot of things she had to get done. (So did I, but I ended up not doing them.) So I dropped plumtreeblossom off at home and went over to darxus place. I was an hour late. cathijosephine wasn’t out of bed yet. Weekends are wonderful!

ragingamazon joined us, and we watched V for Vendetta and Sin City (both of which I think we’d all seen before). Good stuff, especially V.

I’m running out of steam, so that will do for now. Hope y’all are having fun weekends, too!

So here’s a little more detail about the fabulous weekend I’ve just had:

On Friday (into Saturday), I had a particularly lovely date with cathijosephine. ( Read more... )

Then on Saturday, after I dealt with a minor problem on my Mac, we got dressed and went to the Flea (the Fetish Fair Fleamarket, which usually happens twice a year). ( Read more... )

Saturday evening,cathijosephine and I went out to dinner at Sol, the wonderful Brazilian buffet near her place, with xmelancholia, her husband, and their housemate, and thence to a fabulous and wonderful birthday party, with a spy theme. ( Read more... ) It was really nice to get the time with xmelancholia, and especially nice to finally meet her husband, who is a sweetie.

On Sunday, I availed myself of the buffet cathijosephine and I had discovered in the mall, did a little bit of window-shopping, and then came home and did some cleaning. I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I’d hoped to, but I’m a bit less likely to trip over things in my office than I was before.

And today, I made my first trip of the summer to Canobie Lake Park, an amusement park in southern New Hampshire, with eisa and maeveenroute. We had a great time. ( Read more... ) On my way to the car after ice cream, I had a great phone call with my mother. When I got home, I got to chat a bit with docorion, who had a highly productive weekend around the house, and now it’s almost time for me to go to bed.
Sorry about the length — it’s been a very full weekend!

Had a lovely impromptu date with cathijosephine last night. I needed to run an errand (selling my South Park DVDs to somebody I found on craigslist) in Kenmore Square, so I let her know I was going to be around in case she wanted to get together. She invited me over for dinner, as she’s decided she wants to do a bit more cooking at home and a bit less going out, and we had yummy marinated portabella burgers with stir-fried snow peas on them. Then she had me make a yummy dessert she thought up while she did laundry. I forget quite all the details, but it involved cooking thinly sliced apples, lots of wine, milk (which turned into something vaguely like cottage cheese on contact with the wine, but it worked!), honey, cloves, lots of ginger, um, a couple other spices I think — oh, nutmeg! — and dumplings on top. It was so good! I am posting about it here partly so I will remember it the next time I’m feeling adventurous.

Also, not last night but a couple weeks ago (just before I left for Hawai’i), we made three discoveries. ( Sexual TMI. )

Tonight after work I tried to go clothes-shopping for my sister’s and her husband’s wedding reception, but it was a failed endeavour. All I want is a white turtleneck. You wouldn’t think that would be so hard to find, but everyplace I went to assured me that since the days have just barely started to get a little longer, that was a ridiculous thing for anybody to even consider buying and of course they didn’t stock them. So I may have to wear Speedos or a mesh athletic shirt or something, since obviously it’s spring. :-)

After that disaster, which at least did score me a copy of Joy of Cooking to replace the copy I seem to have lost, I went over to surrealestate’s to hang out and play a game. We ended up playing Carcassonne, and it was lovely to see her. [Edit: I also picked up a gift I’d commissioned her to make which I am very very pleased with. Can’t share details quite yet. :-) Also had some yummy homemade peanut-butter cups she had made — wow! And I got to see M. who I don’t think has a LiveJournal account, and listen to some experimental noise. surrealestate, am I missing anything else major?]

Now, for some reason, I am really tired (despite sleeping long and well last night), so although I really should be packing and printing up directions and stuff like that, I’m just going to take the shortest shower I can manage and collapse into bed. Tomorrow I have to pick up my suit (you know, the one that would go perfectly with a white turtleneck? That one) and clean out the car and print directions and pick up the most wonderful cathijosephine I can imagine and it’s off to see my wonderful family and see whether my sister and her delightful new husband actually managed to get any sleep the night before their wedding.

You know, I have a very good life.

From “Vaccine lowers risk of cervical cancer: Shot blocks virus that causes disease, study finds“:

The vaccine targets HPV 16, one of more than 100 strains of the human papilloma virus. [...] HPV 16 can trigger abnormal cell growth and is responsible for more than half of all cases of cervical cancer. The virus is spread through intercourse, oral or anal sex. [...] For those who completed the study and didn't start off with HPV, there were 12 precancerous lesions and 111 cases of infection among the 750 placebo recipients. No lesions were found in the group of 755 who received the vaccine, while seven women developed infections.

The study followed a total of about 2400 women. None of the women who received the trial vaccine developed precancerous lesions, while 12 of the women who received placebos did.

(Now, go vote, if you’re a US citizen and you haven’t already!)

Howdy. I have lots to post from this past weekend, but no time right now, so that will wait. However, I thought some of my readers might be interested in what I did the previous weekend. Despite the cold I had, I went over to dan4th’s and took a whole bunch of naughty pictures of him. He is posting some of the better ones, one per day or so, at http://pics.livejournal.com/dan4th/ — right now the ones I took are all in the Nudity gallery. (So far there’s nothing very explicit there; I make no guarantees for the future.)

That was fun – first time I’d done a photo shoot like that!

ladytabitha asks, Why is a relationship desirable to you? I.e., why do people want to get into (romantic/sexual) relationships? Particularly diligent students of the common Eastern beowabbit (B. vulgaris bostoniensis) may wish to read my answer.

Edit: I’ve copied it here for archival purposes, given that ladytabitha doesn’t use that journal any more.

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That’s a fascinating question.

There are lots of different kinds of things I get from other people. Many of them, like a sense of deep connection, sex, and a certain kind of bubbly optimism, are things that I often get from romantic or sexual relationships than from other kinds of relationships. Many of them, like conversation, shared brainstorming, and laughter, I can get in platonic, casual friendships. So there are a lot of elements I want in my life, a lot of different social nutrients I feel I need in order to be a healthy person, and I seek many of them out in relationships with other people.

I’m kind of unusual in that I don’t tend to centralize these quests for various things in one person as much as most people do. That’s part of why I’m not monogamous, and of why the primary–secondary model of relationships doesn’t work as well for me as it does for some people. It’s been a long time, for instance, since I’ve regularly gotten deep romantic love and sex from the same people — not for any particular reason, but because those things are somewhat separable for me and that’s the way it’s worked out. Similarly, in different close friendships or loverships I get to exercise different facets of my personality: some people I love spending time with because I love having intellectual, almost abstract conversations with them; some people I love having warm emotional discussions with; some people I like to Go Out and Do Things with; and some people I just want to hold or be held by.

So there isn’t one reason I seek out relationships (or friendships), but several. I have a lot of things I’m looking for in my life, and no one person is going to provide all of them, but I tend to notice people who either happen to work well with me in a number of ways, or else who are really good at one particular thing that matters to me.

Another thing that’s a bit unusual for me (and sometimes gets me in trouble) is that close friendship and romantic love are very similar for me. There’s a cluster of things I look for in friends, and another cluster I look for in romantic interests or lovers, but the overlap is very large. So for me, the difference between friends and lovers is largely a difference of degree. (At least if you set aside simple sexual attraction, but I’m not convinced sexual attraction isn’t partly affected by the same cluster of personality traits, and I’m also not convinced that it doesn’t have at least some effect on who I form friendships with.) One nice consequence of this is that I almost always stay close friends with exes.

If I had to pick one thing that I look for in relationships, it would be something that I associate as much with my closest friendships as with romantic relationships: a certain sense of intimate connection, of emotional sharing, of uncensored communication, and of trust. It’s something I get in pillow-talk with a lover, but also in conversations with a friend when we’re connecting well.

Coming at this from a more practical perspective, one thing (some) people expect from a long-term capital-R relationship is living together, or at least spending lots of time together. So one reason to get into that sort of relationship is for the practical benefits of seeing somebody almost every day, of being able to get into those sorts of deep conversations while washing dishes or getting ready for work in the morning, of having fairly regular sex (or at least the fairly regular opportunity for sex if you and your partner want it), of having somebody who keeps up with your life just as a part of their day-to-day routine, rather than having to be brought up to date in spurts. And yes, I’d love to live with someone who was both close friend and lover (and/or play partner). But for much of the last decade of my life, until my (platonic) life partners moved to Hawai‘i, I was getting much of that sort of thing from people who weren’t lovers.

I feel like I’ve sort of gone off on a tangent, and I’m not sure I actually addressed the question you were asking, but hey, I like watching myself type. :-)

So a couple days ago, I took the match.com physical attraction quiz (Flash required¹). (I should try the personality quiz, too, but after working through the rather long physical attraction quiz twice — once for boys and once for girls —, I was pretty done with tests. Many of the results it gave me were straightforward things I knew about myself, but some of them were, well, peculiar.

( peculiarity [and some correct stuff] )

Going off on a tangent here, one of the things I’ve noticed in the past few years is really important for my attractions is voice (and speech patterns). That doesn’t so much really grab me as (tend to) rule out some people. I tend (with some exceptions) to be attracted to people who speak fairly slowly, and to people who don’t have really huge highs and lows of pitch or stress in their speech. Not monotonous speech by any means, but near the center of their range, unless they’re expressing big emotions. I like a mixture of high and low overtones; I find very deep voices without any higher overtones very sexy, but also hard to understand, which sort of gets in the way. And I tend not to find high-pitched voices very appealing. I probably wouldn’t find my own voice very attractive, for instance. But, if match.com is to be believed, I’d probably find my general body type, my beard, the fact that I wear glasses, and my nearly-shaven (or in previous eras very long) hair really appealing.

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¹ This sort of thing, which is highly graphical and interactive and timing-dependent, is the sort of use of Flash that doesn’t make me retch.

I just had a truly wonderful, amazing idea, which is sadly going to be lost on most of you: li hing mui-flavoured condoms.

( table behind cut ) Hmmm. 13.7% for LJ friends I've been sexual with (assuming a fairly liberal definition) seems high, and 9.59% for people I've kissed (but not been otherwise sexual with) seems low. (And 17.81% for people I fancy but haven't kissed seems way low. :-) But I'm the one who filled out the form, so I guess I should believe the numbers.

(Shouldn't I be packing instead of filling out quizzes?)

PS — Yay! I love my new hat!