I have three dates with three different women lined up for when I get back to town. One is that date I have been meaning to go on for ages but she lives three and a half hours away. When I make some money again I am going to go down there and hang out with her! Yay! Another one is someone I met from OK Cupid. I don’t know if that’s going to go anywhere, but I figure I should keep an open mind, and she is cute. And another is a date with someone I had a date with a while ago.

I am also going to keep my heart open for Germany, in case I meet someone there. I am willing to fall in love these days.

I did some pre-packing for my trip, and laundry, and some paperwork that I needed to do. I was going to shoot some more stuff, but as it turns out I can’t use the horse because it is currently lame, so that’s that. Maybe someone in Germany will have a motorcycle I can sit on and look all butch. Or maybe I will get very creative with my packer, y fronts, and fake mustaches! Maybe I can walk around with a giant bratwurst in a suggestive way. Who knows!? I am open to my project evolving while I am there. I wish I had enough money to throw around to buy a lavalier, there’s a really good one at Don’s Photo that I was looking at. Hmm. Maybe I should buy it anyway. It would be good to have, and I will always have it. I’ve decided after all that fussing to take my tripod. I found the foot for it, so that’s good. Oh, sorry, the Camera Quick Release Plate. That’s a very long name for such a small (yet crucial) piece of the tripod! I am also bringing my hand held mic, it is really good quality but made for vocalists and not really used in videotaping, unless you want to look awesome while you rap! Anyway, I usually use it for voice overs because like I said the sound is awesome. Who knows, maybe I will sell it when I get my lav. When I get money to make my feature film I am going to shell out for a boom mic. A nice Sennheiser. With a puppy and everything! (For those of you who don’t make film or video, a puppy is the fuzzy thing they put on mics to cut down the wind noise!)

Dreams! 😀

I’m so excited about going to Germany that I have hardly thought about my butch project. Whenever I try to articulate what being butch means to me, I have a really hard time with it. So it will be interesting to make this video. I will have to explain exactly where I am coming from as a Butch woman and also explain how I don’t fit the stereotype and yet SOMEHOW there is still some essence of me that reads as Butch. I’m a fairly faggy butch. I suppose I should wear my fedora over there. It would make a good prop. It would also be a bitch to wear on the plane, I don’t know where I will put it. Maybe I can stick it over my face like all those debonair sleepy detectives. I’m taking two of my other nice hats too, and a couple ties. I don’t know how to tie a tie. I am gonna have to learn. Thank Sappho for Youtube Tutorials. Maybe when I am done I will give one to my cousin to tie her dreads with. Dreads tied back with a tie look awesome!

Or maybe I will become A Butch Who Wears Ties. One never really knows what the future will bring. Which reminds me, I have to take a dressy shirt with a collar if I am gonna wear a tie.

I’ve pared my sex toys that I am bringing down to a glass dildo, a vibrator, and possibly a strap on. And then the necessary accessories like condoms, lube, and dental dams. To be honest, I never use dental dams. They are a good idea, but until they make a dental dam that tastes like cunt, I am not into it! I don’t want to go down on someone and get a mouthful of rubbery mint or grape or even banana! Good thing oral sex is so low risk.

That being said, I really don’t know if I will get lucky this time around. I might not. But I must be prepared!

I was at the doctors a while ago and she was reading my file and I looked at some notes that Dr. Saffy had taken during my last physical and I noticed a diagram of my breasts, with the notation “bilaterally retracted nipples.” WTF? I looked it up and it turns out I have inverted nipples! I was unaware of this. Oddly enough though, I remember being upset when I was twelve because my nipples were inverted, but my mom told me that I was normal. SHE WAS WRONG! I was never bothered by my nipples before, but the last time I played with them they totally disappeared into my breast and I spent five minutes trying to coax my left nipple back out and it was just so damned impossible! It was like playing with one of those plastic tubes filled with fluid that collapse in on themselves so they slip out of your hands. Apparently I could fix this with either a four thousand dollar cosmetic surgery (which ironically is the same cost as getting my tits cut off) or by getting my nipples pierced. I say no! No no no! I will have to learn to deal with the Magic Disappearing Nipple. Which really, when I think about it, hasn’t bothered me much in my past sexual dalliances. And none of my lovers have ever said “Hey, you have weird nipples!” BUT I remember their nipples always seemed much more jaunty and erect than mine. They were perfectly roundy at the tips, while mine have little slits in the ends. This is all probably TMI, but it’s my blog so nyah nyah nyah. Besides, maybe I can reduce the stigma of the rest of the 20% of women who have inverted nipples and feel nipple shame. Do not be ashamed my sisters!

I spent three hours tonight making a playlist of 381 songs for my travels. If I listened to all of them it would take me 24 hours! Which is good, because my plane flight is going to take 21 hours in total including all the stop overs in Toronto and Amsterdam. So I won’t have to listen to a repeated song. I’m listening to my playlist right now, so far I haven’t wanted to skip a song! That’s always a good sign.

I have two power adapters now, and a USB power adapter. I need to find that! It’s somewhere around. It’s the only one I know for sure works because I have taken it there before. I got two different power adapters for plug ins because the first one I got said it wouldn’t work with computers, and the other one says nothing about not working with computers. Once I got an adapter and took it to Paris, and when I plugged it in it started smoking. I guess I hadn’t got one with a voltage converter. So I couldn’t recharge my hi-8 camera. Sad! No more videoing for me!

I’ve got about four hours worth of batteries for my camera, so I am going to charge them all up for when I am there. Just in case! I’m really worried about my computer though, because I don’t want to fry it. I went to Neural Net, which is our Mac store, but they couldn’t sell me a travel adapter because they were sold out, and by the time I went down there it was too late for them to order me one. BUT there is a real Apple Store in Hamburg, so I might go there if my adapters don’t work.

What else? I’m going to do some writing on the plane, write out some of my monologue. I am also taking Butch Is A Noun by S. Bear Bergman and Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. And a Gail Vaz Oxlade book called It’s Your Money. But I am hoping by reading the first two books, it will spark off conversations I want to start with my video about being Butch. I’m starting to really bite into my topic, which is always a nice feeling. Until really recently it was pretty much like “What do you want to talk about?” “I dunno, what do you want to talk about?” “I don’t know, what do you want to talk about?” ad nauseam. With MYSELF! IN MY HEAD! Ugh. But after shooting a little bit and pondering more, it’s starting to become a little more clear.

I know one thing I want to talk about is the discrimination faced by Butch women, particularly in the area of employment. So many times I went to interviews and as soon as I walked in they would thank me for coming and shoo me away by saying they would call me and I could just tell my resume went into recycling. Or the garbage. Either one. It made for a lot of poverty. That has always really bothered me. Maybe I could do a scene where I get ready for a job interview and do a monologue about how I never get hired or properly interviewed even. Hmmm, must think more on this.

I guess I should go to bed. I am just having fun writing to you. Which is a really good sign because it means I am getting creative. Some of my best ideas get formed through my blog.

I’m trying not to write as much about sobriety because it gets boring, being fixated on what one does not do anymore. But it’s still true, I am still not drinking, or smoking cigarettes, or smoking pot. Or doing chemicals that aren’t approved by my doctors. I’m a goody goody girl. It’s awesome. But what’s even more awesome is that I am excited about so many other things and have talked about them in this post. I think this is the first project I will have made as a straight edge girl, well, since I was a baby dyke making baby dyke videos. I think my first three videos I made I was straight edge. So maybe I will inject some of that enthusiasm into this one.

I’m also excited because I am going there to work on a project totally self sufficiently in terms of equipment. I have an editing suite on my laptop, a camera, mics, cables, it’s awesome! So I can totally immerse myself in making this video while living with these queer feminists and I won’t have to rent or borrow equipment. HOWEVER I may need to borrow a cameraperson for a few shots. Hopefully that won’t be too hard! Hopefully gracious Germans will come to my aid! 😀