I need to post about this book I read, but mayhaps this will not be the most in depth post as I had way too much fun last night and need to go get some grease in my belly to settle the alcholic badness. However, the badness is worth it as I had a fabulous night with the two ladies I admire most, but I haven't drank or shmoked that much in a while and I usually don't mix the two, but it was working last night. It was originally intended to just be a night to see Diane's house as she has a bedroom I may be renting soon, but it slowly turned into a let's get ridiculous and dance to great music and play with dogs and chat about life in a cozy basement kind of night.

I have showered and will be fine by tonight Kanga :)

Oh and yes, I will be moving as, now that I have gotten my apartment just the way I want it, my landlords have oh so pleasantly decided to up the rent by $100 A MONTH!. Gotta love that Alberta doesn't have rent hike regulations.

Okay, so the book. Awhile back, I posted here complaining about the superficiality of today's general fiction for women (there are no actual women in them, just shoppers and manhunters). I've been looking for ages for a recent non-genred fictional work that is the story of a woman's life that actually relates to me, chicklit that is about a real chick, and I finally found one. The Wonder Spot by Melissa Banks explores about 20 years of the life of a real woman, her relationships, her family, her search to find a place in the world. It's funny, it's well crafted, it's human, I almost cried tears of joy just to have found this rare literary creature out there.

She's snarky and smart, but directionless. The other characters around her are also well developed and her relationships with people are very honestly portrayed. She is close to her family and her brothers especially. The following is from a scene where her brother Jack starts dating a girl who is treating him like crap.

When his pancakes comes, he pushes the plate aside. He sighs, and sighs again. His voice is so quiet, it's as though he's talking to himself when says, "I can't hit her."

"Sorry?"

"I can't hit her," he says, and I realize how tired and desperate he must be to say these words to me.

"And you want to hit her?"

He shrugs. "She wants me to."

"In bed," I say.

"Of course in bed," he says. "Where else?"

"Oh, I'm sorry," I say. "Of course, she wants you to hit her in bed. And you can't. Go on.

"She thinks it means I don't love her."

I say, "Can I hit her?"

"Sophie." His voice is a reprimand. "Her father used to beat her."

I think, She probably deserved it, but then I turn back into a human being.

Today's post might get a little personal - why I feel I need to warn people about this in a blog called small perversions, I don't know.

I like experimenting with levels of consciousness. I really like it. I got into this through lucid dreaming. I got into lucid dreaming because of Northern Exposure, the episode where John Corbett's character Chris (one of the hotter characters ever created for TV) goes on about it. I had had many dreams where I knew I was dreaming and started to control the dream, but never realized that this was a state I could get to on purpose. I've never read any of the books on it, but did some research and found certain techniques that worked for me. I discovered I have a real facility for it.

It's such an interesting thing because when you "awaken" in your dream, your conscious mind can direct where the dream goes, what happens, but the images that pop up are still flowing from the sub/unconscious. And you can experiment letting the conscious have more control, or letting the subconscious guide the ride while your conscious is just aware that you're dreaming and going "huh, so this is what's going on in the recesses of my brain." It's probably useful as hell in analyzing yourself and your issues, but mostly I just use it to play and to experiment with levels of awareness and consciousness.

I stopped consciously trying to have lucid dreams awhile back because this freaky thing happened. I thought I had woken up, and was going about my day but then certain triggers made me realize I was still dreaming, so I just said "okay, it's time to wake up for real now" and I can usually wake myself up from a dream when I'm lucid dreaming. The usual happened where I got this image of being sucked through blackness into "awake" (I think this visual comes from the Matrix movies), and I woke up again, but then again realized I was dreaming. This kept happening over and over again and I could not wake up for real. There was a point when I was just stuck in the black sucking phase and couldn't get out of that weird in-between state. When you're conscious brain is in control of the dream and yet the subconscious still won't let you wake up - well let's just say it scared the shit out of me.

So for a long while I still occasionally had lucid dreams, but I wasn't trying to have them. It also occured to me that if the shrinks are right and that your subconscious brain has time to process things when you're dreaming, and your conscious brain suddenly takes everything over, your subconscious has no time to freely play and process. Probably not a good thing.

But I started up again recently. Just once a week or so, and as per usual with the small pervert, I don't choose to fly or go off to exotic locals, I play around with sex. But honestly it's because it's so interesting in terms of brain control (okay, well that's part of the reason). It's also because it's so freeing to have sex in dreams, you can just do whatever you want. The best sex between two people is when both partners are enjoying things and paying attention to eachother, but sometimes all that consideration of the other person can be a little bit constraining. You can completely liberate your selfish id in the dreams.

But the big news is that I have done what I had previously thought impossible: I sent a command to my "real" body in my dream state and my body obeyed. My complaint in sexual lucid dreams was that my big O was actually always a little O because there was no actual physical stimulation. The O's were coming from my brain, and sadly my brain can apparently turn me on to ridiculous extents, but it can't fully make up for physical contactwhen it comes to the main event. I've been trying for ages to be aware enough during my sexual dream state to get my hand to...few seconds while roo decides how graphic to get...rub my clit in real life. Usually I can't do it, or I just wake up trying. Now I got close a few days ago and managed to convince my brain that my hand was rubbing my clit, even though it wasn't, and so I had a better orgasm during the dream. But yesterday I did it, I had this incredible dream (which involved Pixie actually) and was controlling stuff and had a very large O and woke up to find my fingers where I told them to go and proof of my success dripping from them.

EUREKA!

Now of course, after that success I couldn't wait to try it again. So this morning, I was dreaming about...stuff, and I decided I actually wanted this to happen in real life so I made myself wake up and started to have fun. But I was still so groggy that I just kept shifting between awake and dreaming, so I let that happen. Actually passing into dream state and back into awake land, and the visuals getting more or less vivid depending on which state I was in. And my hand didn't stop in either state. And it was kind of funny because I kept passing into dream state with this weird dizzying circular image going on and I realized only later that the image was probably just a continuation of the little circles of my fingers. Mind and body concentrating on one thing. It's just cool.

Anyway, this is much more information than most of you need about my masturbatory life, probably should have waited until May (the official masturbation month). But I needed to tell someone of my success, since I don't seem to be succeeding at getting the thesis done, I need to celebrate the little things.

I'm not sure what it is about being utterly exhausted that moves me to write, but it does. I'm so sorry for everyone who has to bare with me on this little excursions into my sleep-deprived mind. Yesterday night, I wrote an email to Pickle, I don't even want to look at my "sent mail" stuff because I don't want to confirm the little sense I made. Non-sequitors a-go-go.

RAB (my troupe) held a two-day Belly Dance Superstar workshop with Kami Liddel (tribal fusion a la Rachel Brice) and Petite Jamilla (double veil and whirling) this weekend. And we had a wedding gig to do. So basically I've been dancing or doing dance related things for 20 hours this weekend. The dancers for the BDSS are incredible and sweet and so amazing in all senses, when we had Sonia in this summer and both of the girls who came this weekend, god they are just the best ever. But let me tell ya, if you're a personal assistant or organizational manager of some sort, go apply for a job with the BDSS because they need someone better than the people they've got. These poor girls deserve better managers than this, it's crazy.

And I thought RAB was a gong show.

But it was still a phenomenal success, thanks to some hard work and some great relationships among the belly dancers in this city. We rock.

I learned so much, and some things just clicked this weekend. Danced better than I have in awhile at the wedding we had to dance at (and actually two boys I used to know were in the wedding party, so it was kind of a cool surprise). But I'm amazed at my physical exhaustion, this absolute, almost calming, shut off of my mind and body. If I'm this bad at my age, how bad will I be in my 40s? Thank god for red wine, it will help fight off the soreness until Tuesday morning when I will curse the gods and all that is holy for giving me a passion for this dance.

Okay, a Buffy episode while I remove make-up and lashes and then off to bed so I can do a full days work and another 90mins of dance class.

Oh yeah, the thesis is coming along real good...

Well here I am copying Pixie's blog. Seven songs I'm digging right now, even if they are bad. My eternal quest to be a more consistant blogger.

1. Ta P'tite Flamme by Amelie-les-crayons
2. A Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley
3. For Real by Okkervil River
4. Dandaro by Gadjo Dilo
5. Just for a Kiss by Circus Contraption
6. Al Skandarani (don't know much about song, it's for a Malaya choreo)
7. Mr. Bright Side by The Killers

Okay, after that excercise in ego and fishing for compliments, I will show you something else that's pretty. From one of my fave artists, Chiho Aoshima. She rocks.

Random postings:

Science of Sleep is very visually similar to Eternal Sunshine, but he's so damn good at creating this visual that you don't mind.

Sick boys who smoke a lot of pot can start to smell pretty bad.

I'm being very good about watching only 2 episodes of Battlestar Galactica a day.

Had a photo shoot for the troupe during the Arts Alive! performance. Almost everyone who knows me knows that photogenic is not my middle name, but I'm trying to get more comfy in front of the camera. Kanga has taken so fab shots of me, for which I am grateful, and my dad always takes a good pic of me, but I for the most part, I hate the camera and it hates me. By the way, I didn't have a say in who the photographer was, otherwise you know Kanga would have been doing this photo shoot, but Kevin did a great job.

Most of the pics of me make me laugh (The lighting was really bright during the performance, that's why I look so stunned. That's my story and I'm sticking to it) but this one for the still shots is okay. The rest of the group pics are here, and there are a few beauties among them. Beauty #1 and Beauty #2

Okay, should be doing the actual mountains of laundry (I do believe they shall be able to be declared mountains shortly) but instead here I am blogging. It's all Becca's fault as I had to come into blogger to explain some html stuff for her and now that I'm here I have to post. Funny how I of all people am explaining html for someone. It is to laugh.

Okay, my picks for YA fantasy for this fall:

Twilight and New Moon by Stephanie Meyer. These are two vampire novels and though I can't honestly claim that the writing style is particularly good, they are incredibly addictive. She needs some work on her writing chops, but she's obviously a fab story teller. I read both 500pg novels in two days, and I really don't have the time to be a novel a day kind of person anymore but these were just too intriguing to put down. The first novel, Twilight, is better than the second. It's about a cheeky girl moving to a small town and meeting and falling in love with this vampire. Now yes, there is some similarity there to Buffy, but really I don't find the stories or the mythology that Meyer creates to be that similar. Her vampire mythology is quite interesting actually, I like what she's done with it. The only problem, as Kirtles pointed out, is that she makes these vampires so damn sexy and you just keep reading because it's pretty damn hot, but then you find out Meyer is a mormom so they're probably never going to boink. Yeesh.

Droughtlanders by Canadian author Carrie Mac. I put this book in here with a bit of a warning as it has many instances of rape in it, so might be better for some of the older YAs out there. It's a fabulous book about two brothers who are born in a priviledged part of a world and then are forced to recognize that they are a part of the Droughtlands, the land and people banished to the barren, disease-ridden wastelands outside the rich cities. One brother is the sensitive type and the other, not so much, but both have to learn things about their lives that force them to drastically re-evaluate themselves. It's well written and doesn't pull too many punches, which is nice to find in YA.

Avatars Book 1: So This Is How It Ends by Tui t. Sutherland. This book should be coming out this month and all I can say is READ IT! I'm calling it American Gods Lite. The unfortunately named author creates a world like ours where some weird stuff happens and all that is left are a bunch of teenagers who have been chosen as Avatars of gods from all different pantheons. I don't want to give too much away, because she's just creating the story here, of how the world changes and who these teenagers are but it's just such a great read. There's an actual geek character, not something you see so much in fantasy anymore, a guy who makes references to Buffy and new Battlestar Galactica episodes. So nice to see us represented in the lit that we read. But it's well researched, well-written, and so much fun to read. She knows that things must be somewhat less subtle because of her reading audience but in no way does it feel like she's dumbing things down.

We have an insane amount of gigs coming up, but one that is public might be of interest to you all.

Arts Alive is doing a promo for Alberta Ave - the mayor wants to do this whole big revamping of the Ave and this is one of the fundraisers for it. It's this Saturday Oct 7, and it's very cheap. Check out who's performing here. Notice Raq-A-Belly Dance is on at 7:00pm on the Metro Stage :)