September 18th and 21st, 2009

September 18^th. 2009

I was interested to read about the development of Bailey and Mika’s ideas about sex and relationship, and pleased that other people feel the same way I do about these things! That is to say, I really agree with most of the points Big D. and Cougzz made, especially regarding the notion that sex doesn’t HAVE to be a huge deal if you don’t want it to be. But I’d like to develop on that idea…

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having sex before marriage, like most people our age… and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having sex with someone you don’t love either. Personally, I always wanted to have sex with someone I loved for my *first time*, and I definitely think there’s a lot of merit in that idea- basically, if it’s with someone you love the first time you do it, you’re going to have an overall positive experience and generally enjoy it, no matter how rough the going is, which means you don’t risk developing weird sexual issues as a result of having a traumatic losing-your-virginity incident. I also firmly believe that there’s no way sex with someone you don’t love can possibly be as pleasurable as having sex with someone you love, but it’s like… Chick-fil-A makes the best chicken sandwiches, right? But does that mean you’re only ever going to eat or enjoy Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches? I don’t think so. The point is that sex is at the most primal level an act that physically pleasurable, and I don’t see why that can’t just be enough sometimes. Have sex with someone you love when you first want to have sex, because you’ll trust him and desire him and it’s safe… but if that love doesn’t last forever, and you find yourself back on the market after a few months, years, take some pleasure for yourself (especially because I think it’d be really hard to stop having regular sex once you’ve started, haha) and let it be just pure, selfish pleasure.

I remember, when I started dating Reed, I thought a lot about an issue that Mika brought up: in high school, people tend to set standards or “goals” for themselves in relationships, like “If we’re together for a year, I’ll have sex with him.” I realized very quickly with Reed that that wasn’t going to work… I wanted him, I knew I wanted to be with him in that way, and I new I wasn’t going to want to wait X number of months to have sex with him. I realized shortly after coming to that conclusion what a silly, superficial way of measuring the security of a relationship that is… and part of me felt guilty, thinking that I would be having sex with Reed three months after starting to date him, because that sounded like it was too soon, but I then started to think about the adult world, and that in all the books and movies we’re exposed to sex on the third date isn’t something given a second thought, much less sex by the third month. For adults, like Mika said, sex is just another step in a relationship, if that’s what you want it to be. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. At least, not in that sense.

I think sex is a big deal in a different way, I guess you could say. Sex… completely changes your relationship with someone- at least if it’s honest and real. At least if you take the time and the courage to express your desires and your fantasies and all the little things you’re self conscious about, it completely changes your relationship. I don’t think that it’s responsible to get married to someone without having had sex with them, honestly (and I hope, if any of you are planning on waiting until marriage for sex, that you don’t take offense to this and hear me out), because you get to know a personal, know the emotionally, in a while new dimension after you open yourself up to them like that. It’s a big deal because it unlocks a whole new world of intimacy and gives a new meaning to the words “being comfortable with a person”… and there’s no way around it, there’s no alternate route that I know of to get to that place in a relationship. I can only speak from my own experience and what I’ve gathered through observation, but those are the conclusions I’ve come to when it’s all taken in and ordered and pieced together.

Reading Bailey’s thoughts, in particular, on her attitude towards sex as a sort of extension of the life style she wants made me think a lot about myself. As you’ve all probably heard me say, I stop in my tracks at least once a day and ask myself how this got to be my life… not that I’m not happy with it, just that it’s so different than what I envision for myself. I thought I’d be that nonchalant twenty-something: young and witty and bold, with all sorts of prospects for romance and physical satisfaction. I thought I’d get married a seasoned woman… I thought I’d have numerous different boyfriends over the course of my life, and that’s not even mentioning the casual hook-ups I’d have had that didn’t become anything more. I took what I knew about myself- that I’m very flirtatious, that I’m sexually liberal (theoretically- that’s not to say I’m liberal with sexual favors), that I like to party and have fun and do what feels good in the moment... that, frankly, boys like me and I’ve always been good at attracting them or at least piquing their interest- and I formulated a picture in my head of what my future would look like based on that. But it turns out that that’s not going to be my future… and it turns out that I was looking at the wrong parts of myself the whole time. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I’m an intense person prone to extreme emotions and deep attachments, or the fact that I’m extremely demanding of people and have unreasonably high expectations of people I get close to in particular. It seems so obvious now, that the future I envisioned for myself was never going to be a reality… I’m too serious and too needy, to put it plainly, to be happy in a relationship that didn’t feel like it was the real thing. All the things that are the most important to me about my relationship with Reed- the positively constricting sense of security and stability, the unyielding and constant devotion we feel towards one another, the easiness that comes when you feel as if a person is an extension of yourself rather than another individual- would never have possibly occurred in a more casual relationship. It’s just funny… sometimes you just surprise yourself, you know? Maybe some of you will find that too, when you start to get to know yourself as you are in a relationship.

Moving on, it seem like y’all have lots of ideas for tattoos! Haha… I continue to toy with idea of getting one with the sort of sense that I’ll never actually do it. I was thinking that if I did get something it’d be kind of cool if it had some sort of tie to Virginia Tech, like a “VT” or something in maroon and orange, so I appreciated that Bailey is considering the same sort of thing for her hummingbird. But more realistically, I’m really thinking of getting my eyebrow pierced again! Reed, as a way of making up for his earlier reluctance, has offered to take me to get it whenever I want it and is constantly touching the corner of my eyebrow and saying how pretty it’ll be. Honestly, for me it’s always more about making sure everyone knows that I could do it (whatever “it” is) than about actually doing the thing itself, so who knows if I’ll really go through with they eyebrow piercing after all, but I certainly like the idea.

In other news in my life… classes are interesting, in more than the conventional sense. The theories we study in Communication continue to be both interesting and frustratingly abstract… we’ve been discussing what happens when people act in a way that runs counter to our expectation of how they should act, how people go about reducing uncertainty when engaged in an initial encounter with a stranger, and the mutual responsibility two people share for the success of an interaction (obviously we’ve moved from intrapersonal theories onto interpersonal theories). I won’t go into more details on those, at least until I’ve read through the chapters in the book, which I plan to do this weekend.

Spanish continues to be a strange sort of joy to me… we’re doing “family words” now and we have our first paired conversation in a week. I wish I could just sit there all class and listen to the language spoken, just be allowed to appreciate the sound of it- I’m thoroughly convinced there’s no tongue more pleasing to the ear. I have to work hard (probably a little bit harder than I’m working now, if truth be told) if I want to get an A, but it’s the most enjoyable sort of work I have.

European History is maybe my easiest class at the moment… I did well on the first test (though not as well as Reed did, much to the chagrin of my competitive side). One thing that interested me that we discussed recently was the development of the concept of race as we know it today… it’s not something I’d ever given much thought to, since it seemed so obvious to me that the main marker of race should be skin color, but it turns out that that notion was actually one that developed over time and as a result of a number of interesting forces and events. I also realized that my professor sounds exactly like Kermit the Frog, which has turned out to be a little bit distracting.

I have no idea what’s even going on in Geology I feel like, so I don’t have much to say about it… I should probably bother to figure out what’s up before we get to the first test. I know that the subject we’re covering is igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks, but I just can’t imagine how my professor’s been lecturing on that one topic for the past two weeks… though we do get a lot of down time every class, so maybe that has something to do with it. We also have a lot of “fluffy” homework assignments and extra-credit opportunities, so as of right now I’m not too concerned about doing well in that class.

And who would have thought that my easiest college class would be Calculus? Four quizzes and one test in, my average is still 100%. I’ve come to really appreciate the online format of the class… we have the option to take practice quizzes at home, as often as we want, and the questions on the practices quizzes are drawn from the same bank of (on average) eleven questions that the quiz and test questions are drawn from (obviously the test questions are drawn from a bank containing all of the possible quiz questions), so all you really have to do is allot about two hours before you want to take the quiz to go through the practice quizzes and make sure you’ve seen and figured out all the possible questions, and so then there’s never any surprises on actual graded work. It’s more an exercise in memorization than anything else… and it is helping a lot that I’ve taken Calculus before. I’m happy to say that this class looks like it’s going to be an easy A.

We won our game last week against Marshall handily, and my family came out to visit and tailgate with the Hornsbys, which was awesome. Well, the part about my family being there was awesome… visiting with the Hornsbys, at least for me, was a little bit tension-fraught. As I was saying to Mika the other day… I’m increasingly convinced that Mrs. Hornsby has some very real, though not especially serious, issues with me. I know it’s my fault as much as anything, as much as I might play innocent to Reed; I’m a very possessive and, as I said above, demanding person, and I can see how that would rub a parent the wrong way. Even still, I want to be liked and it sucks that I feel like I’m being constantly jabbed at when I’m talking to Reed’s mother… it’s just like, she’d be talking with my mom and my mom would say something like “So how are you adjusting to not having Reed around?” and she’d be like “Ooh, honestly he wasn’t really around much before he left for school anyways, if you know what I mean.” Like you can tell she totally resents the ways in which I’ve (inevitably, I might mention) taken Reed away from her… like seriously, while Reed was at the football game and us women were back at the tailgate chatting, every time Reed texted me with an update on the game and I’d say something about it she’d be like “Ooh yes, you’re the only one he can actually be bothered to keep in contact with… he never tells me anything, but he’s always texting you.” It was that sort of thing every time I was with his family over the course of the weekend. I know she’s half joking, but… the other half is definitely NOT joking, so what am I supposed to do with that?

And then I ended up, later in the week, sort of blowing up at Reed about how I’m “never going to be like his parents and their friends [several other couples/families, friends of the Hornsbys, were at the tailgate], which was probably not the most diplomatic thing to do. My relationship with his family is probably the most touchy area of our relationship… he’ll put me over them, choose me rather than them, but not all the time, so it’s the one subject where I’m actually uncertain of how far I can push the limits of what he’ll accept. Still, what I said wasn’t, unlike most things in my life, calculated… I genuinely felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the differences I saw between those people and myself. And that’s not even regarding the fact that they’re all die-hard Republicans (seriously… they were wearing stickers, at a football game, come on)! It’s the women, really… it has to do with what I’ve been exposed to in my life, I suppose. One thing I’ve never seen my mom do is engage in gossip with anyone other than her own mother, and even that’s rare. She just flat-out doesn’t gossip, not outside of the family at least… and so it’s strange for me even still, being in a group of women sitting around drinking and gossiping. And it disturbs me… don’t get me wrong, I gossip, but it’s just that I’ve always felt like grown women should be beyond that, you know? Or at least mostly beyond it, or at least not sitting around blatantly indulging in it. I really hated being in that situation, with Mrs. Hornsby and her girlfriends… they were in one sense everything I idolize, wealthy and confident and ooh so Southern, and in another sense everything I can’t stand, because the wealth and the special confidence that comes with that kind of wealth and old Southern glamour are things that will at best always be second nature to me, not completely natural. So that was… a little uncomfortable. But I talked stuff out with Reed and he definitely respects that that’s not ever going to be something I’m going to want to or be able to embrace completely.

I’m combining this entry with one I wrote today, so we’re going to switch over now:

September 21^st, 2009

Well, I had the perfect weekend. Absolutely perfect. Like… I don’t think I’ve experienced anything that one-hundred-percent “right” in a long, long time.

To begin with, Fariha went home for the weekend. I don’t mean that in an unkind way, like I couldn’t wait to get rid of her or something, but… the prospect of having the room to myself for a few days was really exciting to me. More accurately, the prospect of Reed and I having the room to ourselves for a few days was really exciting to me! I can’t even tell you… so starting around midday on Friday, Reed and I got to post up just the two of us and just play house, basically. We spent Friday afternoon lying in bed, having sex and watching the Office and sleeping intermittently. Perfect. Then we went out to cocktails with Mr. Hornsby, who was in town for the football game, and that was perfectly pleasant as well… at least until David and Tyler showed up.

Now here’s where the “perfect-ness” of the weekend gets to be in jeopardy: David and Tyler insisted on taking us out for the night. I even (and you’ll remember getting my text message about this) had to see Tyler in both just his boxers and just a towel, which was upsetting (he was getting ready to go out, back at his dorm). Then we had to go wait for the bus, ride the bus all the way out to this wherever this stupid frat party was supposed to be, walk all the way out wherever the stupid frat party really was, and then we get there and it’s just miserable. The house is packed, like you literally could not move, and it’s not like we knew a one of those people, so that’s not much fun for us. Ooh, and all they were serving was natty light. I got a cup, to have something to hold, and promptly said to Reed “I feel bad that I’m wasting their beer, but there’s no way in hell I’m drinking this.” I’m sorry, I can barely stand beer to begin with, and natty light is, as you all are aware I’m sure, infamous for being the most shit-beer anyone could ever imagine. So Reed said to Tyler after about twenty minutes of standing around awkwardly that we were heading back to the bus stop, confirming that he really is the love of my life. We went back to the bus stop, got on the bus, and eventually ended up back at campus (though we had to endure about 20 minutes of a busload of really fucking drunk college kids screaming “Let’s go… HOKIES” and singing at the top of their lungs before we made it home). I should mention that, though you can find plenty of bumpin’ parties absolutely packed with drunk college kids on any night of the week at Tech, Thursday through Saturday at least, this past weekend was the last weekend of fall rush, so it’s like the biggest party night of the year. Like insane. Needless to say, Reed and I are much more suited to staying in on nights such as that.

But we got back to my dorm and had a damn good time; we watched more of the Office, then we had some more sex (haha), and then we got to fall asleep in each other’s arms and not having to worry about roommates or setting alarms or anything in the whole entire world. It was the first night we’d ever spent together all alone and all the way through the night, and it was heaven. We woke up in the morning and had sex some more (hahaha…) and then, after spending a sufficient amount of time just lazing around in bed, Reed went off to his dorm and I went off to the shower, so we could both get ready to go to the tailgate.

The tailgate was just delightful as well. Mr. Hornsby was running it with about fifteen of his friends from various capacities- fellow alumni, work buddies, his brother Chip- and Reed and V.J. and I had a great time just hanging out, throwing around the football, and eating lamb chops. Reed and I tried to get tickets for the game, but they were selling for like $200.00 a piece and it’s not like we have that kind of money (it was a big game, us versus Nebraska), so we hung around the stadium to hear “Enter Sandman” and see the planes fly over and see them bring in the cannon (all Tech traditions… though a lot of schools do “Enter Sandman” I think) and then went back to my dorm to watch the game on my t.v..

And what a game it was! Our defense was pretty damn impressive, as usual, and we kept Nebraska from actually scoring a touchdown all game, despite some really, really fucking close calls. Unfortunately, our offense is total shit, like we couldn’t get a down, for Christ’s sake. It was really, really frustrating. Tyrod was looking so nervous and aside from a touchdown early on in the game, we were basically sucking at everything except for keeping them from scoring. We kept it to no more than three points either way at any given point in the game, but were losing by, like, two I think going into the half. And if we were ineffectual in the first half, our offense was pathetic in the second half. As it got down to the end of the fourth quarter Reed was just about ready to give up… the score was 15-10 them… we had literally run seven yards, SEVEN YARDS in the entire second half. We fucked up what we thought was gonna be our last possession and it looked like it was all over… but then somehow time work in our favor and we got the ball back with, like, literally a minute to go. Reed was like “Well, we’ve run seven yards the entire half, now all we have to go is run eighty in the next minute”, like all bitter and sarcastically… and then WE FUCKING DID IT. Tyrod actually threw a decent pass and the receiver ran with it. The final score was 16-15… we were ecstatic, like jumping up and down screaming. Ooh, and one thing that was kind of cool- the game was on five second delay on the t.v. and since my dorm looks right out on the stadium we could hear the crowd five seconds before we actually saw whatever happened… that made it interesting.

So obviously everyone was overjoyed after the game… we headed back out to the tailgate, got some food, hung out for a while, and then back to the dorm. God, it just made me so happy, being with Reed like that. He kept saying that it was like he was my husband and I was his little wife and that this is how it will be when we’re married and I’m Mrs. Hornsby and we have our own little place… nothing has made me happier. More sex and more the Office and then, once again, falling asleep in each other’s arms.

We woke up on Sunday morning and cuddled and had sex, of course, and drank coffee in bed and then we went over to West End for Sunday brunch. It was so cute! And really good… the pancakes were delicious! And then we went back to the room and I showed Reed my new Sims game (hahaha… so nerdy) and we messed around with that and then we made love for the rest of the afternoon. Perfect.

So that’s what I’ve been up to… I’m so happy with all that, like just everything with Reed. There are other things in my life that are unsettling or unsatisfying, but at the end of the day, he’s my best friend and the love of my life and that makes everything significantly more okay.