Conscence

A guilty conscence is something hard to live with.  I once crashed a party when I was nineteen.  I did not know I was crashing until after wards, I left the party when I found out.  I would never have crashed the party if I had known.  I had just asked a friend if there was a party that weekend, because the one last weekend was so good and he told me, but I did not know it was invitation only.  Anyways I was there about two to three hours and since then I have beat myself up about it for atleast ten times the time I was there.

You might call it an overly developed conscious.  Truthfully I sometimes beat myself up for thinking about doing stuff bad.  Thinking, but then realizing that it is wrong and then doing the right thing.  This I know makes me as bad as all the extreme religious people in the world, with one exception, these standards apply ONLY to myself.  I don't tell people they can't do something that I won't let myself do.

Sometimes I wish that my conscence did not exist.  I think about the times that I determined that it was wrong for me to do something that I would have liked to do, but restrained myself.

I guess moral center and a very active conscence is what makes people think I am a good person.  Which is it better to be though, good and unhappy or normal?

Post election rant

Many weeks have passed since I started writing this post, life, in this case work, got busy.

Once again there was an election in Canada and the winner won by a majority.  This time majority means 37%.  Sixty-three percent of people did not vote for the winning party.  Nearly half of all potential voters did not even cast a ballot. So, that means that the wishes of less that one in five matter and the rest don't.

There was a call to vote strategically.  I did not, I cannot, but I saw the lure.  The lure is to have your vote actually matter.  The lure is to feel that you are part of the system and not just a faceless cog.  When the political system had been created there had only been two parties vying for control of the legislature.  There were only two parties for as long as one could remember, but that had ceased being true about a hundred years ago.  There have been several other parties over the years, from the left and the right, special interest groups and people who thought they knew something that the others did not know.  Many of them lasted only for one election, a few lasted for a time, some gained national prominence only to fade and a few gained a foothold which they kept.  To say that there is only two parties is no-longer the case.  There have been election ballots that were longer than my arm with over ten candidates, but usually there are much less.  This election I had five choices in my riding in Bonnieland.

It is called First Across the Line election results.  It means who ever comes in first wins a riding, the small regional contest area.  The party the wins the most of these smaller contests wins the election.  This is how the system works and why huge majorities can be one with so little support.  Theoretically, if there were five equally matched parties and one party recieved only one more vote than all the other parties in every contest, then that party would win all the ridings, but on a fifth of all the votes.  Also theoretically, they could win a majority of the ridings with one vote and lose the minority of ridings by a landslide and win the election with far less of the popular votes of the other parties, theoretically, with this system.  Luckily that has not happened yet.

Really, there are two issues that needs to be addressed, the voter turnout and the system that we have to elect the people who govern us.  

If there was a political party called, Did Not Vote, they would have won every riding and been the only representatives in Parliament, because 49% of people Did Not Vote.  People do not vote for many reasons: illness, can't make it to the polling stations, not in the country, not interested or not motivated and apathy.  For a long time voter apathy was because the voter realized that their vote did not matter.  They could cast their vote and their opinion would be lost among the many other opinions.  One vote in a million votes means nothing and so why bother voting, and they are right.  One vote very rarely means anything.  Another reason was that people they never would vote for would get in, so their vote would never mean anything.  I should have given up years ago, I have never cast a vote for the person who won the riding I was in, not once.  So why do I bother?  And with the nature of partisan politics, once a riding goes one way, it very rarely changes course from one election to another.  Change does occur, but it is slow., so why bother.  Apathy is certainly catching.

I believe that you can make people vote if you provide them an incentive.  I prefer the velvet glove approach, provide a positive incentive to those that vote, like a $100 tax refund and a penalty if they fail to vote like a $100 fine. It would be quite simple to do, tax receipts are handed out at the ballot box and fines are delivered from e voters lists, initially I am sure one would pay for the other.  

But the best way to get people to vote is to make their opinion matter, make it have an effect, give them a voice and that won't happen with this system we have.  Previous blogs I have expounded my ideas on this before, so skip if you have read this before.  

There is value in the first across the line races; the confrontation allows the voter to judge the person that they may vote for, because people run governments and it is important to know how they work, but it is not everything.  People vote for one of three entities in an election, the candidate running, the leader of the party and the platform of the party, people also vote they way they have always voted, but somewhere in the past this was due to one of the former three.  Sometimes the candidate running captures local support so well that they don't have to be part of any Political Party to win.  In any kind of election, that local independent will go to parliament, if they get the most personal votes.  

You should be able to vote for the party and he leader of a party too, non of the local candidates is known to you or you simply do not like any of them as people, but you still like the Leader or a particular Party over the others.  Under my idea for political reform, you can do that, because representation in Parliament would be based on how people actually voted.  With a couple new caveats above the present system.  

Party Leaders do not have to participate in an individual contest, their party needs only exceed a minimum threshold of support, say 5% popular vote.  This would allow the leader to focus on the entire party and not on one set of constituents.  It would also mean that deciding who would get official funding would be easier too, do they have an elected leader, did they get 5% of popular vote last election?  

So the election is over and the votes have been counted, one third of all votes were made for specific candidates and two thirds for Party or leaders. What happens now?  First all votes for candidates and parties are pooled to discover which Parties received the most combined votes.  We discover that seven parties have gained official party status, the NeoConservatives 12%, Progressive Conservatives 13%, Liberals 20%, NDP 15%, Green 15%, Maxis-Leninist Party 5%, Psychopomp Party 16% and 2% independent Candidates.  There are 100 seats up for grabs, two independents with the most votes get in.  Seven Leaders over 5% get one seat each and a number of seats up to there percentage of the vote garnered.  The eighth party, Family Compact only got 2% of the vote and two of their candidates got enough of the popular vote to sit as independents. The people selected for these positions is based on the number of people who voted for them personally.  

I can see problems with this system, some political regions maybe without local representation and some may be represented by more than one candidate.  If the region voted for candidates or did not, but it would mean that their concerns could be picked up by more than one party, as each party would represent part of that region.  Another problem would be fewer majority governments. Some people would find this scary, but it would mean that parties would have to learn to compromise and work together, rather than fight.  It would also mean that coalitions of parties would collectively represent a majority of voters and if they did not, they would have to present legislation that did.  Elections would have to be set in stone, say every five years, and if one coalition could not make governing work, another combination could.  The point is, they would have to make it work, each major part of the coalition would get something and compromise to get it and thus serve the whole state and the people who voted for it.

I think that the two approaches, enforced voting and improved representation would increase the participants in each election and decrease the amount of voter disaffection and give people the government that they voted for.  

There is another potential positive with a better political representation model: the end of partisan politics.  Partisan politics is when people treat the opposing side as the enemy in all things.  It means that they are less likely to want to work with each other and every issue that they contest becomes a life or death struggle, as if the legislature has become a hostile battlefield instead of a place to govern a nation.  When this occurs the people lose, and a close election becomes a constant stalemate, filled with recrimination and childish bickering.  Coalitions are easily formed and easily dissolved, their members each have different views but are willing to stick together to get some of their ideas enacted.  Parties that persist in partisan policies would become outliers in the process and the governments that form are will be more cooperative in nature.  Isn't that what you would want?  And inclusive nice playing government passing laws that reflect the majority of people?

Finding the Perfect Mate.

I promised a friend a while ago that I would right how to find your perfect mate, but I don't see how I can do that, because i have not found my perfect mate.  Or rather I am still single and my perfect mate is with someone else.

But what I can do is compile a few things I have learned and a couple TEDtalks that I have heard.  30 is the new 20 is utter bullshit.  If you are planning to get married when you are thirty and you are going to have practice relationships in your twenties, then stop and ask yourself, what characteristics does your ideal match have for when you turn thirty?  Write them down if need be, be honest.  Your practice relationships in your twenties should be with people who match these characteristics.  If you practice with the abusive and yet exciting relationship in your thirties, then that is the sort of relationship you will have in your thirties.  It is simple, if you practice badly, just to have that experience, you will learn your chosen instrument badly and when it comes to picking out your permanent instrument, you will choose poorly.

I toyed with the idea of writing a book called The User Manual for Women.  I was going to send surveys to a variety of women of all ages and cultures and ask them to fill out the survey and then I was going to compile the data received and create a few archetype complied women.  Very invasive detailed surveys and anonymous.  The survey was going to be just to confirm my suspicions about women.  My suspicions are that women, are people and because they are people, they are as varied in their likes and dislikes as all people are.  My idea was to have several chapters that talk about various aspects of women's lives and what they like about dates and dating.  What makes them tick, what makes them horny what they like.  The point was going to be, to pay attention to the person you are with and learn everything about her, some women like horror movies some like action, some hate both, and some don't like movies.  You see, the first step to a great relationship is listening to the other.

The second trick is being honest and speaking the truth with them.  Remember the truth is always easier to remember than a lie and the truth is much more interesting too, you remember aspects that a lie can't fill in.  Speaking the truth and listening to what they say are the cornerstones to good communication.  And communication is the secret to  good relationships.

So recap, speak honestly and listen to their answers and seek the ideal.  Seek the ideal but accept bronze as a triumph.  Hell tenth place is a real accomplishment.  If you have ten ideal traits that you are looking for and you find a great person who has five of them in greater quantities and the other five in lesser, you might just have found your ideal person, because no one is going to possess all ten qualities in abundance and if they do, you might be setting your sights too low.  

Finding the ideal mate for you is not the end, they might not think that you are the ideal match or might already have found their match, go to your next best match or continue looking.  Don't be superficial, but be honest.  Don't tell your found mate that they were your second or third choice, such a revelation will breed resentment and suspicion.

Communicate and start practicing for your future mate right from the start.  The hot athlete with the exciting life might be fun, but they may not appeal to you after the short term excitement has worn off.  Mr or Mrs right might be sitting beside you now and you may miss them by going for Mr or Mrs Rightnow.

Oh, no guarantees; if you are communicating honestly and clearly that is no guarantee that they are too.  Communication is a two way street.

So Open that her Mind Fell Out

There are two people in this world, starts many gripes.  Or, there are 10 people in this world, those that understand Binary and those that don't.  

There are two types of beliefs that people can have that can be expressed in many ways but it boils down to two: Emotional and Intellectual.  Logical and Illogical, but it is all the same.  One can change and the other is rock solid written with pimperishable marker on the paper, you have to destroy the paper to get rid of the belief, while the other changes as facts present themselves.  One is comforting because it always remains true and you can always count on it being the same way forever.  The other fluctuates with every new piece of information, it means that you have to keep on top of the research and you can't be lazy, it means your mind can be changed.  

All arguments can have proponents that believe like this, one way or the other, but they tend to be different people.  There are people in this world that will use logic for almost everything and there are people that will use emotion for almost everything, but mostly people fit on a spectrum where it is a mix of both.   I for example realise that my belief that I have Autism Spectrum Disorder is an emotional argument.  People could not convince me otherwise if they tried, but if I was presented with overwhelming evidence contrary to that belief and they could give me a more plausible explanation, I would change my beliefs, because that would be logical.  

Other people, you could not convince them of anything, because they KNOW the truth.  God exists, because the Bible says so, as it was written by God.  Aspartame is bad for you and Monsanto is loading GMO pollen into airplanes and flying all over the place and pollinating everything.  To someone I know, these are facts.  When asked, "Is there any evidence that I could produce, that would change your mind?" the answer is always, "NO!"

I could not, for example, explain that aspartame breaks down in the digestive process into two amino acids and a trace amount of a toxin called Methanol, so small a quantity that one would have to drink 1600 cans of diet soda to recieve a lethal dose, incidentally exceeding the lethal quantity of daily water ingestion too.  Instead I am told that aspartame, insert scientific mombojumbo that she cannot explain let alone define the words she is using, that excites our cells and causes them to explode.  Their is no convincing her otherwise because she believes her story emotionally.

Emotional arguments are arguements that are part of your existence.  To deny them is to deny part of yourself and since you obviously exist, you can't not believe your idea.  The belief in observable evidence, on the other hand, allows you break these beliefs, because it is not the belief that you hold personal, but the process, the scientific method.  The belief in the process allows you flexibility.  So I guess my 'Emotional' belief is the Scientific Theory.  

Of course, last I was up way to late reading the counter argument to the latest explosion of nonsense on the evils of GMO from this girl.  She exposed the evils of GMO food with the video, "Seeds of Death".  It is always important to know a few simple facts.  Some people believe that if it is written in a book, it must be true, that modern people do not read anymore so, if there is a video it must also be true.  What this really comes down to is that there are never any sources in videos and it is easy to put official looking subtitles to make speakers look like experts with real academic backing behind their statements.

Really if you want to get the scoop behind what these people say all it takes is a quick google search.  Enter the search term that they are talking about and add the word 'skeptic' and viola instant rebuttal, backed up with peer review journals and expert responses.

Try it google "seeds of death" skeptic   What you get is a whole bunch of interesting facts, like did you know the producer is an AIDS denialist?  You know people who think that HIV and AIDS are a big hoax.  There was a well backed monthly magazine that wrote exclusively on the subject, but it closed down after all the staff died of a weird wasting disease that resembled the disease that they denied existing.  When I saw that he was an AIDS denialist, I just knew there was nothing right with anything he wrote, produced etc.

Keep an open mind, but not so open that your mind falls out.

Unhinged

I think I am becoming unhinged.  I might be working too much.  I might be suffering from too much stress.  I might be trying to carry too much all at once.  It is hard to say, but I can say is that things are getting worse.  

The hallucinations.  They might not be hallucinations, really, they could be real.  When your eye catches something in the corner, just out of focus, it tries to interpret what it is, shadows become black cats and things that you are not used to seeing like a bandaid on your arm catch you by surprise every time.  It is like being high all the time with a little paranoia to boot.  It is not so bad that I am believing that they are there in reality, but I do find them distracting.  I think this is a sign that I am actually stressed out.

No vocabulary.  Well I do have a vocabulary and I use it.  Some of the words I don't remember what they mean.  When I am speaking, though, I feel like I lose it all and I am reduced to speaking with kindergarten words.

Tired.  I get tired after eating lunch.  If I put off lunch until two or three in the pm or eat at a regular time I feel sluggish afterwards.  If I don't eat at all I feel fine until four.  Sometimes I don't want to go to work at all, and those days I am tired all day.  

Depression.  I am almost always depressed these days, my friend tells me that I have hit the bottom to which I reply that there is still more to fall.  Rock bottom is an illusion, there is a way to break through that bottom and sink lower.  

Functional amnesia.  This morning I called my landlord because I had not hot water I turned the tap to get hot water to have hot shower to relax my muscles after a seriously long ride only to only get cold water.  I might have been turning the wrong tap thinking that the hot water tap was the cold tap.  I boiled water and added it to cold water to bathe because I was convinced it did not work.  It might have been fixed this morning or I might be losing my functional memory, I don't know which.  I don't trust myself anymore.

Suicidal thoughts.  Although not as bad as four years ago, they are present again.  Last night I was cycling down a hill, a steep hill, and I was hitting between 80-100kph and all the time I was thinking if I sharply turn my wheel I could wipe out and hit the ditch and die.  As I write this, I imagine the pain and the broken bones and wish that I had done it.

———

I am really depressed again.  On top of that my boss has stirred the pot again because we were working so nicely this year and he had no drama to watch, so he gave all the men raises and all but one woman none.  The one woman got a token raise half the value of the lowest raise given to a man.  He was saying, you are worth half of what the man who got the smallest wage is worth.  Meanwhile, she does the ordering, she does all the designing, she is the first contact person for all the landscaping jobs, she manages a long list of wealthy customers who want her to design their summer flower containers and she is the most knowledgeable staff member in the garden centre.  The man who got the raise equal to double what she got, is a landscaper who stopped trying years ago because he felt he was not getting paid enough.

Fuck you.

I don't want to be there anymore, but my friend has to earn money to pay her bills so she has to stick it out even though the boss values her input so little.  And I am moving at the end of the year, she feels that she will be alone, her one ally gone.  The one person she can talk to.  She sees my depression and asks is there any way that I can move earlier?  She is under so much stress for a variety of reasons more that I have not said and I want to die which makes me feel bad for being so selfish.  See there goes that rock bottom, deeper I go.

I can't help her; I have no control.  

5000!!

Hey, five thousand page views!

I just happened to log in at the right time to see it!  High five, a thousand times.

I also got mentioned on a podcast that I listen to again, that makes three mentions to date and only one of them thought I was a girl.

My experiences with Prostitution. Reader be warned.

There are some things that I have done in my life that I am not proud of, some of them I feel I have no control over like falling in love with a minor; falling in love but never acting on it.  I wish that I could control who I love, my life would be a lot easier.  I could love no one and feel desire for no one and never want to have sex with no one, but I do not have that power.

Let me tell you about something I have never admitted on here, something that I hinted about but never actually said anything out in the open about; let me come out of the closet per se, about something that I am not very proud about: I visit prostitutes.  Let me tell you why it is wrong, in my mind to do that,  let me tell you what I get out of it and let me explain myself as fully as I am able to right now.

First, there are a lot of prudes out there that will tell you that it is wrong or that it is a sin, but they can't tell you why and there are a surprisingly quite a few people who hold the reverse view and can tell you why.  I tend not to keep things in private with my friends, my really close friends, much to their horror I am sure, but when I do things sometimes I am unsure if I have done the correct thing and I like to know if my reasoning was sound.  This might have something to do with my Autism.  So I talk to my close friends about what I do.  I also have shadow conversations, that is talking about things but keeping it vague so that there is plausible deniability.  From these conversations I have learned that quite a few women have no problem with prostitution, but to be clear, I do have a problem with it for quite a few reasons.

Some women say that it is empowering that women can get money from men to have sex with them.  The idea that all women believe that sex is something sacred and should only be shared with someone that you love is passé to some and the thought that a few women could turn it to their advantage, empowering.  Some women believe that men who can't get sex in their regular life should be able to get it from someone and if there is someone that is willing to be compensated for filling that need then it is alright.  Let me tell you this, all these women are wrong.

Perhaps sex should be sacred and given only to the people that they love as an act of love, but it is also passion and may not need to be connected to a particular person; women are people too, they have a variety of reasons for doing things and that includes sex and who they choose for a partner, it might be the person they love, it might be the guy that looks so hot that…, I am not going to judge people for being people.  The truth is some women would willingly commodify sex, I have met some of these women over the years.  They have sex and they get money for it, which they use to buy cars, buy houses, pay for their education, increase their investment portfolios,  buy drugs for them and their friends and pay the rent.  These women, should have the right to do this, if this is why they do it and they are not forced to do it.  I will revisit the drugs later.

The truth is, however, more complicated.  The women of the sex industry are heavily exploited.  Almost all prostitutes have managers who take the majority of the earned income, often in the name of paying expenses associated with prostitution, namely the room where they work and the advertising where they find customers.  Often there are other expenses, like transportation and protection but really there is very little of this.  This is called exploitation.  There are really three types of exploitation, I am pretty sure I only participated in the lightest version of it, but I can really never know.

The lightest form of sexual exploitation.  The cost of a room at a nice secure hotel can cost you a lot of money, if you are just sleeping there and you have rent somewhere else too, but as a lot of students know, hotels offer cheaper longterm rates too.  So if students live there, it can't be all that expensive, but not everyone may know this.  If the room costs $100 a night it may cost only $400 for a full week and cheaper hotels exist.  To post an ad at some of the favoured hosting sites may cost as much as $15 per ad, but dating websites are often free.  I met a few truly independent operators through dating sites, but I might have been wrong.  If you are not net savvy, this is another route of exploitation.  The result is that some people can be taken advantage through ignorance.  How badly, one manager told me that she, yes she, was taking 60% of her girls income.  Sixty percent and that was just what she said was standard, the first prostitute that I every visited me, told me that her former employers took 90% of her earnings, they also paid for her sexual augmentations, fake breasts and drugs — not hard drugs, just drugs that would extend her life as a prostitute, in her case that date rape drug, which made her feel that it was someone else that was having sex, not her.  

Exploitation second degree.  A lot of prostitutes are foreign; they are people who are truly exploited, but not fully exploited.  They came to this country to go to school and maybe get a job, but instead were coerced into prostitution.  It makes me feel really bad that I may have, probably slept with some of these women.  There is no way to know.  I search my recollections for signs, but I can't find them, which means either none of them were, or I just can't tell.  I hope for the former, but suspect the later.  What would be the signs of this type of exploitation, it would look like the other kind, because you would never be present for when they were told that they had to have sex with people or they would be deported.  I like to visit Asian  prostitutes, not because I like Asian women, but because of reasons I will go into in detail later, and a lot of them had a language barrier so that is another vector for exploitation.  I talked with more than one of them outside of their workplace and they never said a thing, but would they?  Did their manager hold their passport hostage, did they not have a visa?

The truth of the matter is that this country, any Western Country, is seen as a better place than the country that they are from or the situation that they are from in that country.  They are often exploited by their own countrymen, from their own country.  The sex industry is not the only industry in this country that exploits foreigners, the nanny and care giver industries exploit women.  One prostitute I met was a former nanny, who had been exploited by her Canadian employers and she left their employment, but since she had been exploited by her countrymen first, had a debt of twenty thousand dollars to pay before she could return home, so she turned to prostitution to make that money and to send money home to her husband and child, who were exploiting her to live better than they could have.  Of course, they never would know that she was no longer a nanny.

First degree exploitation, slavery.  I am 99.99% confident that I never slept with someone who was held forcibly against their will, but not 100%.  I actually care.  If I found out that someone was being enslaved as such, or forced into sex to stay in this country, I would call the police.  I am 100% sure that none of the people I slept with were under the age of consent.  Just as I am sure a lot of them lied about their age; they lied and told me that they were in their early twenties and not in their late thirties.  But it happens.  It happens in the country that you are reading this from.  Some men don't care.  I care, as proof I submit that I talk to them and they tell me things, these things I am writing down.  I might be a psychopath though.  Let the people who know me be the judge of that.  I care enough that I did not seduce the young people who had crushes on me that I loved enough to let them get mature enough to get over their crushes.  I hope that is enough, but really it is not, because I visit prostitutes who may be exploited.  Probably are exploited.

Women are not just exploited into prostitution, they are beaten and they are raped; they are murdered.  It is a very dangerous line of work.  They can get STDs and they can get pregnant.  In one very dark perception of reality, this is the reality of women in this world, they are often beaten, raped and murdered, they get STDs and are impregnated, why not get paid at the same time?  Most men do not hurt prostitutes, otherwise there would be none.  Prostitutes often live in fear of these things because it happens more to them than it does to other women.  This is where pimps come in, they exploit the women, but they theoretically protect them too.  They also, beat, rape and murder prostitutes too.  They definitely take their income.

Independent prostitutes use a number of techniques to limit their exposure to these dangers.  The switch hotels after a few nights to a week.  They chose secure hotels over locations.  They don't use their real name and then they know the purpose of the caller when they ask for that fake name.  They have two phones, one is their personal phone and one for clients.  They often have a safe word that they text to someone before, during and afterwards to let them know that they are safe and that person is ready to call the police if they don't get a correct response.

The tear that goes on within the person who is a prostitute.  They are people, they answer the phone like people you know but when they here the phrase, "is Candy there?" there is a switch in the tenor of their voice and they become disassociated with themselves as to say, oh no, not another one, why could you have not been my friend, a pleasant conversation, but instead you are someone I don't know who wants to fuck.  It is in their voice.  It must be in my voice too, always cracking voice, because I am asking you to do something I don't do with anyone else, I would not rather do, but I need to do*.

It is natural to hate the men, the clients, they remind them that they are doing something that they would rather not do for money.  I feel like I am damaging them when I visit them.  I feel like I am damaging myself, but I do it anyways.

I have talked to them.  I talked to them all.  I can't do the wham bam thank you ma'am.  The prostitutes like the talkers, because they get paid to talk and it is easier to do that than have sex.  I want to get to know them, they don't really want me to have sex with them, but they still want to get paid and they would rather get paid than not have sex.  

My first time with a prostitute was a bunch of firsts, it was her first time as an independent.  Her fake name was English, because she was from England, but she was also indian and I have always been partial to Indian women, but never had sex with one.  I thought it would be different if I did, I thought I might like the sex more.  I asked her to do things that I had always been curious about because she was WAY more experienced than I was and she actually was interested that I had a good time.  No one was really interested in that I had a good time before.  It felt that way.  When someone with a lot of experience tells you things positive it makes you feel good.  She wanted a regular customer but she was charging a lot, $500.  I could not afford her, but it was worth every penny.  It did not help me though, where I needed to be helped, because I did not know that I needed help. 

Prostitutes are people too.  You buy their time, but you don't own their bodies for that time.  You get to spend time with them and have sex with them but they can say no to your requests and desires, they have rules and boundaries, because they are people too.  Some won't kiss, some won't do anal.  Some won't do missionary position, some won't cuddle, some won't talk.  Some won't shut up!  For the record, I am not and never have been curious about anal, but I do like to kiss, but you never really know until after money changes what the rules are.

I bought sex the first time because I was desperately in love with someone who was not interested and because it had been over four years since I had sex and I was starting to forget how much I disliked it.  That is right a guy who disliked sex.  But let's just assume that I actually liked sex that it felt good.  I have autism and I don't understand when a woman is giving me hints that they are interested I don't understand the reverse either.  It is safer to assume that they are not interested.  I had a coworker who would tell me every morning that she was thinking about me when she was having sex with her boyfriend and yet she was still with her boyfriend; the contradiction was confusing.  Where is someone like that going to have sex?  They are not.  But just because the autistic do not understand social signals, does not mean that they don't want to have sex, I want to have sex, I am obsessed with sex, but I can't get it so I can suffer in silence or pay for it.  The question is which is the greater suffering, totally abstaining forever until you get it right, or to be one of the thousands of men that don't think about the suffering and the exploitation of the women who are compensated for sex with money?

Why did I do it again?  The first time was a positive experience, other than finding out that she was in a drug induced haze so that she would not have to believe that she was there, and that she had waited over a month to the point where she was nearly starving before she reached out to try to find a way to pay her bills.  It was positive even though her body was covered with the stains of abuse, cigarette burns and the exploitation from the escort agency she had been with who took 90% or more of her earnings.  Positive because every cent she got from me went to her, but not positive because her roommate, a guy, was obviously in love with her and he told her that she could stay rent free with him, however she insisted on independence, his eyes lingered on her knowing that I was going to have sex with her and he had not because he had not told her that he liked her.  Positive despite all that, because I was clueless and more nervous than anything you could imagine, the $500 dollars I paid her was all my spare cash in my bank account, but I had to do something because I had started showing up at my unrequited love's workplace and I knew I needed to stop.  What would you have done?

The second time though, why the second time and all the times since, about twenty times in total, why?  Also complicated.  You see I fell in love, had great, wonderful sex that changed everything.  When it became clear that it was over and everything ended badly for me, I decided to find out what I was lacking why was sex bad with everyone but her.  I went on a binge to see changed things about sex it might be good, because the idea that sex was only good with her was very depressing.  I began searching for everything and anything on Plenty of Fish, Match.com, OkCupid AshelyMadison, AdultFriendFinder and anything else.  I tired falling in love, I tried being friends, I tried one night stands, but due to many circumstances none of these were showing any results.

Then I tried the thing that might have worked or did not work, or maybe I just had not given it a fair chance, prostitutes.  In the mean time between that one encounter and then everyone that I encountered had told me that they saw nothing wrong with prostitution.  So I got up my courage to try it again.  I was living too far away in Smallville so I decided that I had to go to the BigSmoke to do this and I started to take trips to visit my friends and to continue the experiment.  And it really was an experiment.  I was hoping for something that would erase what I felt for that woman and for something technique that would let me be normal sexually.  I tried what interested me, I tried what they said they were best at, I tried what I was best at and I even tried to recreate what sex was like with her, but it all failed. There were some things that I learned though.

I don't know if it is appropriate to give details, but I learned some things.  I like Asian prostitutes, but not for the reason that other men say they like Asian women, their tightness, I actually hate tightness.  I do like the attention that they exhibit, it is more intimate to be with a woman that seems to want to be there with you, who kisses like they want you there.  Because when some one does not want you to be where you are you don't want to be there either so there is no chance that you are going have fun, feel solace, or in my case feel human and by that I mean just like a regular human what has someone in their life.

I see prostitution as an interaction between two people there is a financial transaction and there is time commitment.  The people involved can choose to act in any way between each other.  They can treat each other with disdain, one person can treat the other as an animal or one person can treat the other person with respect and compassion, with understanding and concern.  The woman sees how you treat her and they respond assuming that days, months and possibllly years have not worn her down.  I like to think that the respect that I showed to the women I had been with had an effect.  Some would tell me their real names, one invited me to friend her on Facebook, she is still there for those face creepers out there who know me.  I had a better experience with the women who appreciated the respect I showed.

Part of the problem I had was was in the end I did not really want to have sex, but it was the expectation that when you meet up with a prostitute, you have sex, she expects it and to say that you don't want that feels deviant.  What I wanted, what I needed was the feeling of closeness, of contact, intimacies more intimate than sex; eye to eye contact, lips to lips, tongue to tongue, two people holding each other.  I wanted a girlfriend.  Once a girl told me that she could be my girlfriend, she did not understand that I lived far away but I thought her request was genuine.  She likely wanted me to be a paying regular, I came to see her three more times but never had sex with her.  The second time I gave her a massage, completed the one that I started the time before.  The third time she was getting tired of her work and we talked.  The last time she did not want to have anything to do with me and I was heart broken.

It was after this, actually well after, but sometimes it takes a long while to see the connections and unpack the events of your life and reorder them so that the configuration makes sense, finally makes sense, that I realised that I had a fetish and prostitution being the only way that I would be able to know if I had been able to break the fetish.  My fetish prevents me from enjoying casual sex.  I thought the only way that would be able to enjoy my time with someone new was if my fetish was broken.  It is difficult entering a new relationship knowing they might want sex and being unable to provide satisfaction from it and women know and then they suspect and guess and speculate and strife occurs, followed eventually by being single again.

Why am I writing this now?  I have been thinking about writing this for a while, but it was the supreme court ruling that through out the prostitution laws in Canada a few years ago and it was the hope that the new laws would be progressive rather than oppressive, but the government did pass a new set of laws and they do say that women can pursue a career in the sex trade and that it is now illegal to buy sex.  It is also illegal for prostitution to take place in residential neighborhoods.  What does this mean, does it mean that it can't occur within 100m or a thousand?  It means that every location I ever visited a prostitute would be illegal.  Hotels, condos, houses would all be illegal.  Industrial parks and farms would be about the only places where they could set up.  Would I risk a thousand dollar fine to feel human?  Four thousand?  Five years in jail?  I think I might.  Sometimes I feel so lonely and if I have to pay someone to be with me, to feel normal if only as an illusion, I might just have to.  Sometimes doing that makes me feel worse, but sometimes it gives me a reason to go on.

I don't know maybe purchasing time with prostitutes makes me a bad person, but I try to follow a few rules when I do, it might make all the difference, it might not.  Some people would view it as all wrong and it would make me a pervert.  I think it makes me just desperate.  My rules are: Always be respectful.  No still means no.  Where possible try to undo some of the harm, if that means giving them a massage or reminding them that sex can be funny do it when ever you can.  Try to be tender.  Be respectful, always.  Talk to them as a person, because they are people too. 

Prosecuting children

Trying a child as an adult has a long history in all countries that have laws protecting children.  Some crimes it is because it is outrageous that a child could do the crime and get a lesser sentence than an adult would.  But the laws for protecting children who commit crimes are there for a reason.  I have stated before teenagers are brain damaged, their minds are being reconstructed and their judgement center is being redesigned and it's pathways are reformed, so the use of judgement is delayed.  Add that many crimes with youth are committed in groups, there is a peer pressure component.  I know, you hear your parents and yourself recite the phrase, "… if your friends were all jumping off a cliff would you do that too?". The answer to that question is, yes, yes you would jump off the cliff too and every adult as a teenager would have been jumping off that cliff too, and you know it.  You can say you wouldn't have but that is the you sitting in front of a screen, not you surounded by your friends and you being unsure of your social position.  Now add a mentor figure of an adult saying that it is alright to do this dumb thing, you will do it and rare is the teenage that would say no, I would say unheard of except as someone with Autism and being distrustful of my peer group who believed that the same peer group was trying to harm me, but that is a special case.

Okay, let's say the Prime Minister of Canada mouths off to President Putin and launches an airstrike into Russia and it kills thousands civilians, and Russia declares war and invades Canada.  And during the fighting, however brief, one Canadian teenager is attacked and wounded but throws a grenade and kills two or three Russian soldiers, who each have years of training and expertise in warfare.  The teen is captured, healed of his wounds and put on trial for murder, because he killed some soldiers in a war zone during a war, who invaded his country.  Sounds kind of far fetched does it not, yet change a few names and this is what happened.  Add a few things to that like after he was captured the teenager was tortured and kept in a prison where the rights of prisoners was not respected and all he had to do was confess to his 'crimes' and he would be released to a friendlier country, where he would no longer be tortured and he would have his rights of a human restored.  Omar Khadr.  Go look him up.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr

Ubiquitous Device

I use my smart phone too much?

It monitors my sleep.
I listen to the radio on it
I listen to podcasts on it
I surf the internet on it
I text people
I blog with it
I post to my employers Facebook profile
I take pictures with it
I use it as a phone
I navigate with it
I play games on it
I use it as dice for my RPGs
It is my day planner
I write notes on it
I play My music on it
I use it to date people
Calculator
Compass
Level
Star watch
I do work on it

I have only owned it for 10-11 months

Poetry, shuttered window to the heart

When I write poetry, I like to write free flowing thoughts, however it feels amateurish, but when I do that it I am happy with it.  It does not feel formal though, because it isn't.  I want to put it up a level I will add constraints, rules.  I tend not to like rhymes, but I do like hidden messages like the first letter of each line spells out a message, sometimes the last letter too.  If I ever get inspired I would write a series of poems, each poem has a hidden line to a hidden poem.  A series of poems that have a hidden poem within and of course, the hidden poem has a hidden message too.  I was starting the initial stages of this project for MagicEyes before that fell through.

Rhyming for me I can do, but it is not enough.  I could count syllables that coul be interesting.  I just thought of another hidden message technique, the count of syllables in a line corresponds to a letter in the alphabet which spells out a secret message.  Do I have a issue with saying I love you?  No, I have an issue being rejected afterwards, perhaps hiding the message of my love can appear accidental or as proof or as deniable if rejected.

I can't do iambic pentameter, I have no sense of rhythm and it extents to this mode of writing as well as songs.

— Is rhythm a social idea that eludes Autistic people as reading people?  Should investigate that, is it just me or is it an insight?

I have to go,

I am depressed still, must be the talk of love and the song on the radio, Someone I Used to Know.