Matter of Perspective

My life on the surface seems pretty boring. I work full time. I live with a partner, and we appeared married. We have two cats. I take classes online. We struggle with keeping the house free of cat hair, grime, and clutter (not so successfully). I try to pay down credit cards, and want to lose weight. My partner and I are at the point of needing to makes dates if sex is going to happen because of super busy schedules.

But then I find myself getting into conversations like the following. My friend E and I take bellydance classes together, and were both frustrated and disappointed in how the first class went last Thursday. So upset, we needed to vent over a beer at a bar near the studio. Both of us are starting to feel like maybe we have come to the end of the road with this place. We are not getting much out of being in in classes with big groups of people, and not really learning anything new. We have our own troupe, and come up with our own moves now. Maybe we are beyond classes at the local studio...Not to mention the crop of new people we both found annoying and disrespectful. Don't even get me started on the girl-child who came to class dressed like a porn star.

Anyhow, after venting about class, E asked me about the wife of a mutual friend. This opened a whole new area of conversation. This particular couple is very open about their alternative lifestyle. I have asked advice before about what their comfort level in being outed was, and gotten permission to share. They are poly, pagan, bisexual, and he is a BDSM switch. They go to sex parties at which he has been known to cross dress. And he has been ordained by the State to marry people. He is quite the mix of cultures, you never know whether he will be wearing a spiked collar, or a priest's collar, or for what purpose!

Because my partner and I run in alternative circles, we come in to contact with all flavors of people, and after awhile, everybody seems pretty normal to us. I forget, that some of these people and their lifestyles are pretty "out there" for the majority of society.

So I filled in E on some pieces of our mutual friends life, which pertained to giving her some background in order to answer a question she had asked me. As I told E about the poly and BDSM aspect of these people....she stopped me and said. "I feel so boring." At work, she is percieved as the "out there" artistic liberal...but compared to these people she found herself feeling quite vanilla. Yet tonight, she is having a bellydance musician party, where her suburban neighbors will see a gypsy band and all of us middle age women dancing on her driveway in cholis, ten yard skirts, ankle bells and Afghani kuchi belts. I am sure we will be a colorful noisy addition to the barbecue parties and hum of lawn mowers in her neighborhood.

So I look at my journal reading list here...I am in a poly relationship, so I like reading about other's people's journeys on path. And a lot of poly people are into BDSM, so I have have gotten hooked into some well written interesting journals on that subject, even though that's not my kink. I have connections to people who want to pay down debt and get healthy. I sometimes worry if the weight loss people link back to me that they will be freaked by the poly stuff. And I worry the poly readers will be bored by posts about cleaning or school angst.

And then I say "screw it". I am this complicated, and I am that simple. Really I just want to blog an accurate portrait of who I am at any given moment. All these sides are me. And so, people can deal with it. Read what's interesting, and skip over what's not. It's just a blog, and it's just a matter of perspective, mine at any given time.