thanksgiving

i am thankful for my special guy and also for the extra-special person who made it possible for me to come live with him.

mere words cannot express!

indulge me

y'know, there's a quality that's such a super-big help in relationships, i don't know why they don't have a class for it in school. yeah, i know, school isn't really about helping you have relationships, but considering how much importance our society puts on them, you'd think it would be.

anyway, before i get too far off on talking about school ...

the quality is what i would call "patience plus." it's finding a way to take pleasure in what the other person is saying or doing even if it's not your most favoritest thing. it's encouraging them instead of just tolerating them when they start to go down a road you're maybe not so keen on. because whatever it is they're excited about, it's part of them, and if you love them, you need to find a way to love it.

it guess the proper word for that is "indulgence." although indulgence is something we usually associate with selfishness -- it's a lot more regular to think about indulging in something, instead of indulging someone.

but you can do both, and you ought to!

(and they ought to turn around and indulge you, too.)

so that's the lesson for today at claire's school for relationships.

your homework is: indulge!

me on top!

sometimes, if things aren't rockin' your world the way they ought to, you just have to take charge.

turn things around.

get off your back and get an angle on the situation -- be in control.

sometimes, all it takes is flipping things over, and all of a sudden, you've got a lot more freedom to move, you can position things better, you can shift and tip and find the sweet spot until ...

pow!

the cork is popped ...

clang!

the bell is rung ...

va-rooom!

that engine turns over and roars.

of course, if there's somebody else involved, you probably ought to say "please" before taking the bull by the horns.

but if you sweet-talk them, they'll probably say okay.

photorama

we did some dressing up and getting down at our house recently, and msg snapped some pictures along the way. here's a sampling ... i may post more later!

i like this one:

it makes me seem like i'm all, "don't make me come over there!"

meanwhile, i think this is a pretty good view of my assets:

later, taters!

claire

seashores and sunsets

toes in the sand ...

sounds ... birds and waves and wind ...

nice!

i like to be told i'm beautiful

who doesn't?

ode to me

i asked msg to write me an on-the-spot poem tonight, just while he was looking at me as we got ready for bed. here's what he came up with:

gentle

faithful

thoughtful

playful

wise

caring

soft

sharing

unreserved

undeserved

and

lovely

lovely

lovely

i thought it was pretty good! i told him he was wrong about the "undeserved" part, though. if anyone deserves to have someone bugging him for a poem, it's msg.

goodnight, sweetie!

: )

can i touch you?

can i put my hand on your shoulder or your face and make you feel better?

it's a big, bad world, but i'd like to make it smaller and closer and better.

i'm pretty sure there aren't too many people reading this blog.

but even if there's just one or two, and even if i just make things a tiny bit brighter for them, well, that's a start, isn't it?

anyway, if the things i write touch you, do me a favor, okay?

take them out in the world and use them to brighten the place up for someone else, too.

oh ... and if you were hoping i meant the other kind of touching, go check my other blog. i'll write an entry there for everybody who was disappointed in the non-sexiness of this one!

hugs,

claire

lucky, lucky me!

i am a happy person.

it's my best and most treasured characteristic, and i am constantly in awe that i have been blessed with it.

i'm also lucky that i'm a person with very few worries, on account of msg takes care of pretty much all the financial stuff and i don't have to work and i don't know anybody that i don't really, really like.

the only reasons i ever have for being unhappy are when i make the mistake of watching the news and see all the frustrating crap in the world, which even then i don't let bother me too much, or when msg is unhappy and there's nothing i can do about it.

he and i have both those things in common, only he makes the mistake of watching the news more often, and he has a lot more people he wishes he could make happy only he can't. so he gets down a lot more often than i do, and sometimes i can perk him back up and sometimes i can't.

but i try, and he appreciates me for it, oodles and gobs, i know.

so what is my secret for being happy?

i make the world around me with my mind.

now, don't freak out and think, whoa, this chick is crazy. i don't mean i really make the world around me with my mind. i mean i take all the good stuff from all the books i read, and all the tv shows i watch, and all the movies and music and so forth, and when i look at the real world, the actual world, i just look for the bits that i recognize from the imaginary world.

i know there's ugliness out there and we all have to work and fight against it. but i don't look for it.

i look for the pretty stuff. the good stuff. and i try to encourage people to dig on that stuff.

the ugly stuff won't disappear just because we ignore it. but some of it will disappear if we stop actively looking for it. because when we look for ugly stuff we'll always find it. and when we find it, it takes away some of our energy for finding - and creating - the good stuff.

and there's good stuff everywhere, trust me.

it's like, piled up in heaps all around me.

and probably around you too, if you just look.

love,

claire

poetry time!

my love is all that i can see

each face the crowd presents to me

is his

each painting that i spy

becomes his portrait

in my eye

my love is all that i can hear

each melody to grace my ear

unwinds

with lyrical delight

as if sung

by my shining knight

my love is all that i can taste

each sip of tea and each fine feast

dissolves

until i only savor

that astounding

perfect

flavor

my love is all that i can scent

each waft of perfume or ferment

arrives

inside this head to swell

my panting brain with

just his smell

my love is all that i can feel

each soft sensation dreamed or real

is he

is he

is he

is he

my love is all that i can be

boldly going!

okay, so here are some more of the star trek pics msg and i did a while back.

don't get too involved in the storyline ... it kinda ends on a cliffhanger.

hmm. do i hear something?

seems to be coming from over here ...

getting closer ...

whoa! what is that???

it's some kind of alien life form! i wonder if it's friendly?

(i know, i know, i'm wearing a red shirt and i'm about to reach down and pick up an alien life form. how smart can that be?)

well, there are some more pics, but the alien life form turns out to be a little naughty, so if msg ever finishes photoshopping them and i post them, they'll go up on the naughty blog. if you don't want to go to the naughty blog, or if we don't get around to posting them, just imagine that i met a suitably red-shirted end after the last pic above!

surrogates

so we just watched this movie, surrogates, with bruce willis. (i mean the movie was with bruce willis, not we watched it with bruce willis. although that would have been awesome, i don’t want to mislead anybody.)

i have not seen a movie with a more interesting concept in a long time, and it was super cool the way all the surrogates looked just slightly fake. (yeah, i know, look who’s talking!)

unfortunately, i’ve got to give a big spoiler alert here and tell you that it kind of tanked at the end. i’d say it’s still worth seeing, even though i didn’t like the ending, so don’t read any more of what i’m about to type unless you just totally aren’t interested in seeing this movie, ever.

so here’s the deal. firstly, our hero kinda gets played for a patsy at the end. he doesn’t solve the big mystery, or really figure out much of anything himself. he does end up saving the lives of everybody on the planet, only it’s not very believable that he manages it, cos he pulls it off by rushing into the secret lab of the semi-evil genius, james cromwell. now, the whole reason the story started off is, the giant corporation that makes the surrogates was trying to kill james cromwell. and to do it, they needed a super-duper weapon that could kill him through his surrogate. why would they need that, if one guy could just rush past cromwell’s security guards and find his secret lab? i mean, it turns out that getting to james cromwell is really crazy-easy, so he should already be dead, because the giant corporation needs to off him to keep him from shutting them down.

but that’s only a bit of plot goofiness, which i’m usually willing to overlook when a movie has heart or a powerful or brainy message.

what gave me a real bug up my undies was, the message at the end didn’t actually make any sense. bruce stops cromwell’s virus from killing everybody, but he lets it destroy all their surrogates, so they’ll have to start living their lives “for real.”

now, i liked this message in wall-e, but wall-e made it clear that living through the viewscreens was really bad for everybody. they were all fat and out of touch and passive about everything. but this movie doesn’t show that at all. the people in this movie live very active and engaged lives through their surrogates, and when everybody comes stumbling out at the end, they mostly look pretty normal. and obviously there must be thousands or millions of paraplegics and other invalids who are totally screwed at the end because the surrogates get turned off.

so i’m not sure i really buy the movie’s point that the surrogates were making the world a worse place. there was no murder, almost no violent crime, everybody was safe from tragic accidents, everyone seemed to be gainfully employed, and after work things looked like pretty much a constant party.

but even if we accept that it was really a bad thing for them to all be living fake lives through these robot bodies ... then what the hell are we doing watching a movie anyway? what is bruce willis’s character if he’s not a surrogate through which we get to save billions of lives and set the world right? even in his “meatbag” body, he’s a fine hunk o’ man, let me tell you, and his wife is a hottie despite the fact that she’s got a scar from the car wreck that killed their poor kid. we’re fooling ourselves more by watching him do all this unbelievable stuff and fix his marriage in the process than the surrogate users are fooling themselves by walking out of their apartments in android bodies.

so if it was a good thing for bruce to let the virus whack all the surrogates at the end, then it would also be a good thing for us to stop watching movies, right?

i guess i do have to give a certain amount of credit to a movie that manages to completely disprove its own reason for existence ... only i kinda don’t think that’s what the filmmakers were trying to do.

anyhoo, i give it 3 stars out of 4, on account of the first 3/4 of the movie really rocked, and even the weako ending made me think about things.

thinking’s always good, right?