Primal With A Side Of FABULOUS page 312

[Owly]

FW, you made my morning.

[Finnegans Wake]

I think I've gone a bit mad on the iodine.

Cuddly/creepy monkey: Gollum, the Early Years.

[drssgchic]

The star-spangled eyes are what get me. Like it's a god or alien in a deceptivly fragile body placed here to study/reassure/toy with us. (Never can tell which it is- whether you're dealing with gods or aliens)

Then, of course, it'll open it's mouth too wide to be physically possible and swallow your head. Because that's the next logical step.

[naiadknight]

naiadknight - You look NOTHING like I imagined! Nice rack though

I get that lot online. It's like people are expecting a 6'3" Viking warmaiden or something to match my personality.

Yeah, between you, Naiad and Saoirse this is turning out to be quite a good year for boobs. In the name of men everywhere, well done ladies. Well done.

Thank you, thank you! I'll be here all... well... I'll be here until I get a job or get bored, whichever actually makes me leave. Try the 'roo!

So, cute but bitey.

I've heard that phrase applied to me. As to the the monkey, it looks like it could be patient zero for any number of apocalyptic diseases. All cute and cuddly until it bites you and you drop dead of Captain Tripps or turn into a viral zombie. It's those eyes, like "I could kill you, if I wanted to. Just come closer because I'm cute."

[Saoirse]

FW- that was awesome.

my toddler was mesmerized by the monkey pic. usually his response to cute animals is "awwww" but he just stared intently at that one.

[justyouraveragecavemen]

I tried to buy iodine at the walmarts yesterday...they didn't have any with the regular vitamins. I should have looked somewhere between the enemas and paintbrushes. I'll try another place today, maybe walgreens or CVS.
*FW-that comes scarily easy for you, to channel prince herbert like that...pretty funny though.

[cori93437]

I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure this is the look you get right before the monkey jumps up to eat your face off.

Just sayin'.

Exactly... wasn't there some Stephen King horror thing where there was black stuff in peoples eyes to show that the monster was in em? Hmm...
Anyway, that's how I feel about cute lil' monkey... he's obviously about to transmit the zombie virus to some poor unsuspecting soul!

Also... horrible admission of the day: I have not read the entire Panda thread...
Starting it was very good for me last night though.

[Gay Panda]

PART ONE: I was a little in love with Three Things I Do Well, even if she was not my type.

After graduating from college, I reeled for footing in the adult world. Deeply in debt, following leads from my college’s career office that never panned out, I ended up shelving books at a library for a princely six dollars an hour. My first relationship had come and gone, a five-month disaster with a partner who did drugs for breakfast, sold drugs behind the 7-11, gave drugs to a puppy, and told me not to do drugs. This was romance? This was what I'd waited for? Hoping that it was an anomaly of what I would find out there, I parted my hair a new way and made nervous forays back into the dating scene.

I’d thought being an adult meant I would be the captain of my personal ship at last, but it felt more like I’d walked off the plank. School was never something that Gay Panda enjoyed, but it provided a structure to the day, to the week, to the year. School delivered participation prizes and filtered a steady stream of cheap corn syrup compliments to boost my insecure ego. School was a purgatory with graduation as the long-awaited purification. I’d suffered and burned through long years of hard study, and now it was time to put all that work to use in the reward of a career. But the adult world didn’t want me nearly as much as I wanted it, and putting books on a shelf in the right order engaged exactly no part of my brain. I was bored half to death and frightened in the other half that this was all life would be.

I met Three one day at the barn where both she and Lady Friend kept their horses. My impression was of a woman who had this Life Thing down. Three was one of those people who inhabit their skin. Where Gay Panda slinks through life in a quiet apology, Three stormed through hers like a force of nature. She was loud. She was aggressive. She was earthy. She was deliciously funny and did not suffer fools, an attractive brunette in her late twenties who wouldn’t recognize an inhibition even if it wore a nametag and slapped her in the face. She rode horses and broke bones and rode horses and broke bones and rode horses some more, taking her temperamental stallion jumping in the arena and yelling at him to knock it the hell off when he was having a fit in his paddock. If an inhibition had actually slapped Three, in two seconds it would have been on the floor clutching its family jewels while she unloaded obscenities and kicked its arse for good measure. Then she’d suggest they go out for coffee. On her. Truce?

She lived in an apartment complex and every neighbor of hers worked the dominatrix scene. Because Three had no inhibitions, every time we went out for meals her conversation was of the XXX-rated goings-on in her complex. One day while getting her mail, a man wearing a leash and collar was shoved down before her, the dominatrix behind him shouting, “What are those, slave?”
His face inches from Three’s feet, the man wheedled, “Boots, mistress!”
“And what do we do with boots, slave?” the dominatrix roared.
“We worship them, mistress!” the man cried. And he began licking Three’s boots*.

I sat there in the Chinese restaurant with my jaw dropped to my dish of shrimp in lobster sauce. Gay Panda was very innocent of such things, but under the tutelage of Three, I was rapidly gaining speed. She’d attended torture sessions and supplied her feet at foot fetish parties and whipped a man tied up in an adult club for mouthing off that girls didn’t have good arms for the activity. Her blow made him squeal. She’d done a hundred other things I could scarcely envision. I listened in fascination along with the nearby tables at a succession of restaurants. When she ran out of dominatrix stories, she talked about a haunted house where she’d once lived, and her boyfriend who refused to believe it was haunted. One night as they argued about this, she said, “It’s haunted!”

“It is not!” her boyfriend squabbled.
The light bulb burned out at that moment.
“You see? It’s haunted!” Three exclaimed.
“It is n-” her boyfriend said, but was interrupted by the television suddenly going black. “It is not!” he protested one more time, and a picture fell off its nail to the floor.
They moved.

[justyouraveragecavemen]

More!

[Gay Panda]

PART TWO: My job in the library was under a boss prone to poor tempers very loudly expressed. Once a week we had a meeting in the staff room with this terrifying, unbalanced man, ever on the prowl to attack his underlings and he had reduced the children’s librarian to tears with his viciousness. None of us spoke in her defense during his ridiculous tirade, and of that I will always be ashamed. The twenty of us in the room stared at our laps. It was safer to not say anything in his presence, simply nodding or shaking one’s head in imitation of his. You laughed when he did. You agreed to everything. When he headed down an aisle as I shelved, I scooted to another and prayed he hadn’t seen me.

To state it crudely, Three didn’t take sh*t off anyone, man or beast. When she discovered her fiancé had relapsed into alcoholism and refused help, she dumped him. No way in hell was she going to marry a guy drunk at ten in the morning, no matter how much she loved him. Her boss was a nitwit and she gave it right back. Fire her? Fine. Honey, there are other jobs out there. One night as she talked horses with Lady Friend at their barn, the owner stepped out of his trailer. He was an older, balding man dressed in boxer shorts, with a potbelly under a torn and stained undershirt, grizzle on his face and rheumy eyes. Seeing them standing by their cars, he called querulously and condescendingly, “You girls just out here gabbing?”
“You just out here looking sexy?” Three retorted.

How could anyone not adore Three? In truth, I was in awe of her. Whatever activity in which she was engaged, she was present down to the cellular level. Three didn’t second-guess herself or her life choices. She charged forward with torpedoes blazing, and I wished that I had that kind of confidence. One day I sat by her at the barn as she watched jumpers in the arena. Sighing with satisfaction, she said, “Gay Panda, there are three things I do well.”
“Oh?” I said.
“I ride well. I write well. And I f*ck well.”
Unused to people being so graphic about their bedroom talents, I said, “You write?”

She did. God, was she a good writer, she stated. She was going to make a TON of money off her writing some day, blow everyone out of the water with her great children’s series. I was amazed. I was twenty-one and deep in the bowels of my very first book, struggling every morning before work to figure out the mechanics of plot and character. A series? I couldn’t even conceive of it.

When people say that they are good at something, my instinct is to trust. After all, they should know. When Lady Friend says that she is good at something, her judgment is accurate. She is good at tech. There is no disconnect between what she believes and what is the truth. Likewise, when friends tell me that they are good at swimming or cooking, I have found their assessment usually close. They know their strengths, for the most part. I was a good technical musician, but a poor expressive** one.

So I trusted that Three was a good writer. Wanting a beta reader for her children’s series, she delivered part of the first book and asked for my honest opinion. Over the next week, I read an atrocious manuscript. There was almost no dialogue. The description was excessive to the point of being stupefying. Her work was intended for an audience of horse-crazy tween girls but her protagonist was the barn owner in his forties. This was a huge problem. She had younger female characters, but they were peripheral to the grown man. The next draft needed to be reworked to put the girls at the center for this to have a viable chance of being published. Otherwise, it was dead in the water.

Of course, I worded this more diplomatically when I returned the partial novel. The overall idea was a good one, and definitely worth the time and energy of seeing through. But I read very heavily as a cub and kept up with the tween/young adult market as that was what I wrote, and I couldn’t think of a book for either boys or girls with an adult in the starring role (unless it was an animal/magical creature like some of the books in the Oz series). They probably exist somewhere and maybe you know one, Reader. I can’t say when I was ten, though, that I would have been very interested in reading it. When I was ten, I didn’t want to read page after page of some grown-up dude worrying about how to pay his bills. I could have immediately connected to a child protagonist seeing his or her parents worry about the bills. That would have spoken painfully and viscerally to me. But from the adult perspective? No.