Lucy Kemnitzer

As an official motherly type, let me first say: 1. Sometimes the best thing to do with a cold is to ignore it. Really. I can't tell you a rule of thumb for how to tell when you ought to "take care of yourself" and when you ought to push yourself. I guess you just pick one and see how it goes. As I sometimes have had to tell my kids: if you're going to feel bad anyway, why not feel bad while --- doing whatever it is you're trying to figure out whether or not to do? 2. As for the guy -- I don't know that avoiding an inappropriate crush object is always the best way to put them into their proper place. I mean, if you just met him -- maybe he's not so compellingly attractive when you get to see how he behaves? (well, if he is, that's something else) About Rory: Yes, he's a pain in the ass. That's the story, though: he's in a sustained state of panic and he's doing all stupid things. Quinn, and Owen, and Rory have this in common: they are panicked boys who demand a lot from the world and the people in it before they will trust it at all. They each feel that the people around them lie to them, conceal things from them, and that it is dangerous to reveal the truth to them -- they're very frightened. I've pointed out before about how they also have in common the condition of unavailable parents -- but in spite of these things in common, they're each their own boy with their own story. Owen had no available parents: Quinn's mother becomes available and he doesn't know what to do with it. Rory's father is becoming available but there's this truth thing between them. It's like they are exploring the whole world of how truth and mystery affect relationships.

No probs James. It is a strange country and for your information, we started debating about adoption for gay couples. Our highest court (supreme court it is called in the US i believe) has voted in favor of this, but now it is up to the politicians. Although they are now searching for means to raise the taxes without suspicion, after all they want to be re-elected in 2007. They came up with the increddible idea of raising taxes on the interests we make on our savings. appearantly Belgians have one off the biggest savings accounts, but as with everything, the 80-20 rule applies. So the topic of adoptionrights for gay couples isn't high on their list. Huggs, Peter P.S Can you do a split? This is a requirement for cheerleaders i believe In large parets of the US, which is hardly the most progressive country in the world, gay couples, who have few rights otherwise, can certainly adopt children. (California, for one, which is all by itself a large part of the US!) So I wouldn't dismiss the chances of Belgian couples getting it sometime soon. But I have certainly noticed one thing -- it's always a surprise. A place will have a bunch of progressive and a bunch of backwards features all mixed together with no seeming logic at all. Individual people are like that too.

I'm very sorry I didn't express myself clearly -- in this case I meant that, when Dom finishes one story, he can write another. And he can't write new stories if he doesn't finish old ones. -- I'm also sorry about the use of the word "whining" -- it's a word that some other people here have used for themselves, when they're impatient waiting or worried about ending. No intention whatever in chasing anybody away or ordering them around: my sole intention was to support the writing of stories the way the stories want to be written.

Thank you... but it really is time to end TOU. I

Now, if anyone figures out how to carve a pumpkin without making a big mess, please share What you do is you get an old sheet and cover a wide place with it and you embrace the mess!!! (moderation, see?)

Dom, your squiggle at the side of the post says you're 21. Is that out of date? A lot of the best writing happens with young writers, mostly because they just go and do it. It's not that people's writing doesn't mature and get better, but that people who write while they're young have an intensity to their writing (and are probably very writing-oriented to begin with so they've had more practice proportionate to their lifespans so far), and what they don't have is the timidity that makes people wait on their writing, or worse yet, write and don't finish or publish. (I do not believe that people have only a certain amount of good writing in them: that is, if you write good stuff when you're young it doesn't mean you won't write good stuff later: that's up to a lot of other factors)

Is that a serious question? If it isn't, forgive the next bit. It was "weblog" at first, and they were sites where people noted down the interesting things they saw on the web, with just a little comment to string the links together. I don't know when it started meaning web journals in general. Moderation in the alcohol, I hope, though . . .

So, Dom -- did it rain where you are?

Yes, well. I was a student there 70-75 when there were 5. And then 6. And the fifth one was called 5. That's where my kid is: it's Porter now. Do you remember Elfland? That's where 9 and 10 are. But there are still cows in the Great Meadow and Bambi still gatecrashes the colleges.

I think the thing Dom is talking about isn't so much rtain for its own sake as for a day off, because he works outside. I've been anxiously watching for rain too. The rain I'm looking for is the first rain of the season, defined as being enough rain to flush the crud out of the storm drains. This is my second year of volunteering for the Coastal Commission to help test the storm drains for water quality (they drop their water right into the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, which explains their importance). My daughter's at the University this year, and there's a tradition up there for a crowd of students to run naked in the first rain from one end of campus to the other (it's quite a feat: the University is divided into ten colleges, most of which are at the tops of rather steep paths through the forest, and the students who do this thing feel they must run to every one of the colleges). I don't even have to wonder if she's going to participate, since she has an injured sciatic nerve and can't make it up all those hills, but I know she's sort of looking forward to the general hilarity. We had a late end to the last rainy season, but still, it hasn't rained since early June (usually it quits for good in mid-May, with very little rain after mid-April), and even though the first rain could happen any time now the season won't really get underway till late December. So construction and "allied industries" are pretty busy about now, around here.

What I would like to figure out is this: Was I being new-age honest man or frigid b*tch with a lolly up his arse? I'd say you were being self-preserving. Those are pretty scary things for a potential boyfriend to have going on.

I'm sorry, but at my age if somebody says "it took me a LONG time (till I was 22)" I just burst out laughing. If a person is twenty-two, they haven't spent a long time doinganything if you know what I mean. 36 is pretty young, too, I'd say. But I don't mean to be mean. I mean that if you are in your twenties or thirties you have all the time in the world: it's way to early to say that anything is a certain way with you, that you will always be something or do something or that you will never do something or be something. I also think that it's quite true that there are people who have seasons to their lives. There are those who are sexual butterflies in their youth and true-blue loyalists in their age. Or vice versa (though I'd think that would be kind of risky, emotionally). Or for another kind of example: I know more than one person who, having raised their children with perfectly reasonable opposite-sex spouses, came to the conclusion that the second act needed a same-sex partner. I don't know anybody who did it the other way around, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Thank you for mentioning this story. I read it a while back and liked it a lot, and I think about it every so often, and just now I went back to reread it (and I'm up to chapter 3) and it's such a pleasure.

You know, I just don't think this is true. I think people vary a lot in their "capacity," and I think people also vary a lot in what emotional content they have in any relationship. And that's before you add in the variations caused by culture and environment. Does a person only care deeply for one sibling at a time? It can be the same kind of thing. Not always.

Dom, all of those thoughts make perfect sense in the development of the story. I'm glad it came out the way it did, though, because Aiden is so interesting.

hehehe. okay, here's one for you: Owen from TLW almost ended up with Ryan. Oh my, Dom I'm sorry, but that comment requires more of an explation please. Well, it explains to me why I thought that might be what was going to happen for a chapter or so there. I can't remember exactly where, but there was a moment when I was thinking -- "what? No, it has to be my imagination that there's this spark here."

While I don't dispute your experience, my own doesn't match yours. Sex outside the primary relationship isn't cheating if it's part of the contract between the partners: otherwise it is: but even without making that exception, I'd say that the majority of the people I know who intend to be monogamous and say so are. Drifitng off to a tanget: Lately, there's a movement to call it cheating whenever a person has any kind of friendship outside the primary relationship, including friends you go to the movies with, and that's just stupid and makes life more difficult. Makes it much harder to be a good monogamous lover, because you have nothing to bring home to your sweety.

I have -- I am -- a counterexample, Dom, so you know you can have it. I moved in with my nice fellow when I was eighteen, and have been monogamous since. One exception: I was definitely in love with a friend of mine for years. Nothing happened there: we were friends, I would see himand we'd talk and have lunch like any friends and then I'd be in a flutter for a while and my nice fellow would get the fallout (a little extra snuggle with my own guy, right). But, the way I figured it, the nice fellow is the guy who gets to live with me when I'm a slob, gets to support me when I'm disabled and can't work, put up with me when I'm going crazy trying to find work, listen to me when I'm whiny or bitchy, smell me when I'm sick . . . it's just not fair to take my fun parts and give them to someone else. My dad and my stepmom live in a deliberately, ideologically open relationship, but as far as I can tell they're monogamous for practical purposes because of how busy they are and my father's health. And that's what I think about it: I don't think monogamy is a value so much as a strategy for being in a healthy, honest, supportive relationship. I think it is the default strategy: I think it's tremendously difficult and time consuming to do things other ways, if you're going to be a good, fair, honest, and loving partner to your main squeeze, and honestly, that's too much trouble just to get it on with a different person. But it's possible to run other kinds of lives. Also, you also don't have to think that you have to hook up now or never. One of my dear friends had almost despaired of ever having his own sweety but he met the most wonderful man when he was in his forties, and had fifteen years of happily ever after before death did them part. (the most wonderful man was somewhat older) And fifteen years is not nothing.

Nasty characters are starting to rebel. They do that, don't they? The novel I'm transcribing to the web right now developed a romantic subplot which I can no longer imagine the story without -- a minor walk-on character turned into lust at first sight and true love by chapter eight.

Dom didn't exactly ask for ideas about why he has a headache. Headaches are really common -- even persistent ones -- and there are lots of reasons to have them. Including pissed-off little sisters.