We had arranged to meet yesterday for an overdue conversation. She was coming from uptown and called to let me know that she was hopping on an express train to meet me, a train ride that couldn’t take more than 20 minutes. 90 minutes later, she called to let me know she was 3 blocks away. Mind you, I’d been waiting at the prearranged spot all this while.

When she finally showed up at the spot, an hour later, she was carrying a Coach shopping bag, armed with a sloppy tale about the trains not running correctly, a train with no current service advisories, according to the website.

Not two minutes ago, I get a rambling, nonsensical email with a quick jab at the end that she thinks I’m disrespecting her because I allegedly turn in my TPS reports late. Not true - if she actually sat in one fucking place and worked for, oh, a single whole day out of the week, she’d see that I send everything requested to her, on time, many times more than once. Disrespecting her? OH REALLY? What do you call that childish, passive aggressive stunt? And if she calls me a “little hipster girl” one more time, I’ll give her disrespect. Right at her face.

ANYWAY, I roll up to the kiosk, and am all, WTF? No Seltzer? What a shit shot. I’m so chewing-on-sand thirsty, I say, give me a Power C Vitamin Water. Whateverthefuck. This little pint-sized piece of shit is ALL UP IN MY JUNK. Like, dumb-retardedly so. He goes past the ostensible plugged in cooler to the ostensibly NOT plugged in cooler and pulls out this bottle that’s the temperature of my asshole. I reach out to grab it and I’m all, uh, go fuck your sons, no. What is this?

Mother fuck STROKES MY HAND. “Everything is so good? Everything is so nice?” Uh, jump up off me, little man. Touch me one more Goddamned time, and you miss that hand. He pulls out ANOTHER bottle of piss-warm vitamin water. Clearly….with the death wish, mother fucker is touching me AGAIN! I’ve known people for 18 months OR MORE who have never felt the glory of my retardedly soft skin, and here is this dumb fuck of a kiosk manager touching me…nay. STROKING ME twice inside of 10 minutes.

I’m SO PISSED at myself for not lunging at that mother fucking and ripping out his carotid artery and letting the sweet bliss of his life force rain out all over us and my vitamin water. It’s these moments that I realize what an under-acheiveing POS I’ve become, just like my Social Science teacher, Mrs. Hayes, predicted so many, many years ago (her own daughter ended up as a prosecuted whore with an illegitimate baby, and yet, I was the “as risk” youth. Too bad I HAD A FUCKING BRAIN.)

Anyway, just venting. It’s a little all over the place. But more a personal reminder to say, “I will slice off your fucking dick if you violate my person EVER.” Because I’m worth it.

Shit for brains.

I had sent white tulips, with a note of apology, a hope for friendship later on down the line. Around the same time, he’s trashing me over dinner and drinks, just another night out, another evisceration of someone’s reputation.

Christ. When will I ever learn?

Was it wrong of my friend to have shared that with me? I just wish this wasn’t part of my consciousness anymore.

When I tell people I work from home, their eyes go screw ball, straight to the back of their head, while making this guttural half-sigh, half-groan - “Oh, GOD, if only I could work from home!”

Sixteen months I’ve been working from home. By now, it’s just as tedious as commuting to that cubicle, confronting that one office chatter-mouth who “can’t wait until Friday, huh?”, slinging cup after k-cup of office java, while spending 65% of the day dealing with forms, reports, and miscellaneous bullshit wondering why you decided to not become an astronomer, a chef, or a rock star’s muse after all. Wait - where did I go just right then?

Don’t get me wrong, working from home has got mad perks. My dry-cleaning bill, for example, has dropped by 80%, and I haven’t had to purchase any horrible pant suits in two years, freeing up scratch for party, party, party dresses and inappropriately high heels. I don’t spend $12 on lunches every day, I don’t swear murderous oaths on too packed trains, and all together, I have a much more zen-like approach to life. Except when I don’t.

The first thing to go when you work from home is your ability to make small talk. It simply disappears and when you are forced engage in this witless interaction, the only thought streaming through your mind is “Just get to the fucking point already.”Patience flees next; no surprise, it’s intrinsically linked to making small talk. When you are used to everything operating on your own terms, it’s nothing short of a bitch when you find yourself waiting on someone or something else, of which you have no control.

Social graces, as a whole, begin to evade you. Belching in public becomes de rigeur, as well as swearing around children (didn’t even see them there!), becoming uncessecarily demanding, caustic, or, conversely, cripplingly shy, paranoid, and awkward - the shrinking violet that you never knew your 6′1″-in-heels frame could become.

Without daily personal interaction, beyond fetching morning coffee, perspective is the next virtue to disappear into the the ether. Since there’s no one to gauge the (in)appropriateness of your reaction or your behavior, the next best thing is TV: Gossip Girls, Desperate Housewives, Mad Men, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Entourage - they become the barometer of what you consider civil society. That is not a good barometer of civil society.

“I just don’t know HOW I’d stay motivated!” is the next thing everyone says. Everyone says it. Everyone. That’s an easy one to tackle; guilt is a powerful motivator. Getting your ass out of bed and in front of the pulsating laptop is not the problem. Shutting off the damned thing and walking the hell away from it before 8 or 9 at night is. But hold the phones! Even if you manage pull the flesh, now seared to the white hot keyboard and get a life, God has given us the blackberry! Now you can keep your neuroses on pins and needles, compulsively checking and rechecking your work email whether at drinks with friends or during cunnilingus with lovers. I’m only sort of joking.

Fortunately, you can drink on the job. Unfortunately, you can drink on the job. Damn you, catch-22!

I just felt like bitching. I actually love working from home and thank God I’m not sitting in some God-forsaken, artificially lit corporate shit show…at least for the mean time [grimacey-face emoticon GOES HERE].

My Date with a Dominatrix, p1

After twenty minutes or so of banal small talk, Mame’s neighbor and friend knocked on the door. I won’t lie - little shocks me and generally speaking, my air of unimpressed aloofness is rarely contrived - but I was damn glad Violet showed up. She was slim, blonde, with an easy smile and vibe of tolerant affection that said she’d indulged Slave and Mame’s fantasies before. We drank our wine in companionable silence.

Three glasses later, conversation was infinitely easier, the tension has slackened, and even Slave was warming up to us. We discussed Italy, where he has a second home, boy trouble, and the wines and villages of Bordeaux. Just before dinner was served, I excused myself to the bathroom to wash my hands. I turned the lock, and let out a long breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. ‘This is really happening,’ I thought. ‘There’s really a middle aged man wearing women’s lingerie with a remote-controlled butt-plug stuck up his ass and my friend from middle school is holding the remote. That’s really happening out there.’

What was really happening in here was that an eighteen inch black rubber cock resting limp in the sink was making it very difficult to wash my hands. I decided that whatever I might’ve picked up from the subway commute couldn’t possibly compete with what I would definitely catch by trying to navigate around that rubber dildo. I gave up and returned to the table.

The first course was a simple green salad which was served by Slave on his knees after passing inspection by Mame. She reprimanded him for sloppy presentation and demanded he replate it. Though she was firm, Mame was kind and affectionate towards Slave, the way an indulgent mother might gently scold her toddler. She threw down a pillow so Slave could be more comfortable kneeling to the left of her, eating small forkfuls of green leaves Mame presented at her leisure. Mame was a benevolent dominatrix: a kind of June Cleaver of the BDSM world.

After our salad plates were cleared, Mame demanded Slave fetch his rope. In the time it took to refill our wine glasses, Mame had rigged slave in a complicated web of black rope threaded through his ass cheeks, ensnaring his balls, gripping his chest and upper arms, up through the metal ring of his dog collar, and ending in a thick lead which Mame used to drag him around the kitchen. Quite simply, I was floored. And his ceviche was to die for.

With all the wine, the claustrophobic apartment, the middle aged man with the butt plug in his ass kneeling not three feet away from me, I was beginning to feel light headed. Violet pulled out a pack of smokes and I asked to bum one, not a little too abruptly. ‘Would you guys mind heading downstairs?’ I was already strapping on my flats, halfway out the door. ‘When you get back, we have a little dessert for you two and I have a surprise for Slave if you care to watch…”

to be continued….

Then I got Fenwick, and he seemed kind of goofy and stupid, but he started playing fetch, too. So I’m thinking, wow, I raise really smart cats.

But then a friend mentioned that hers plays fetch, too. And someone else said the same thing. Now I think they’re just evolving.

I sleep with one eye open.

It’s a nice, breezy day - the Breeders are performing at McCarren pool this afternoon, but I’ll be over on Smith Street taking part of the Bastille Day festivities.

I’ve been socking away commission checks like a paranoid doomsdayer, but I’ve decided to dip into it and change around a few things in the living room and the bed room.

First to go is the off-white rug I got a few months ago. Within half a week, Jack had already vomited on it a handful of times. I’d never seen him do anything like that, with that frequency. Certainly not on the blue and brown striped rug in the hall, or the astro-turf flor rug under my desk, or the hundreds of square feet of hardwood flooring throughout the rest of the apartment. He choose the off-white rug for the same reason that Fenwick ignored my cheaper cotton shifts and sturdy wool garments, not to mention his scratching post, and chose the three silk chiffon dresses in my closet to shred: Murphy’s Law.

I just need to find the right vomit-colored rug. The off-white rug will be professionally cleaned and moved to my bedroom, but I have a feeling Jack, and Jack’s hairball, will find their way.

On the long subway ride back to Brooklyn, I did some more thinking, and decided to look into swimming again. I used to be a fairly avid swimmer, hitting the pool three to five times a week - a habit I picked up in Paris during the summer months between classes, when I was broke and bored and the pool pass was an easy-to-swallow 100 francs a month. A few years later in New York, I think I stopped swimming during that terrible emotional mudslide when I lost interest in pretty much everything. Still digging out of that one, I guess.

After some cursory research, I think I’m going to try out the Stuyvesant High pool which is open to the public on nights and weekends with extended hours during July and August. My basic criteria of a single train, no transfer commute (v. important) and ostensibly clean and reputable (somewhat important) have been met. Developing…