A Half-Baked Half-Dozen

I returned from the Oregon Country Fair yesterday afternoon, after five days with no email access, and was partly relieved and partly disappointed to find that my ninety-seven unread emails did not include any burning questions for Viny. Relieved, because I leave tomorrow for California, and I knew I didn't have the time to answer any complicated questions today; disappointed, because having to respond to someone motivates me (and produces better writing, too, I think).

But since blog maintenance is the last un-checked item on my to-do checklist for today, I am damn well gonna post before midnight strikes and I turn into some lesser-known cultivar of cucurbita pepo.

So, here are a half-baked half-dozen topics/ideas I have been thinking about, some of which I might expand upon at some point. (Feel free to weigh in -- using the Blogger Contact Form to the right, or by commenting on this post -- if you have a favorite topic in this list, or you have another topic to suggest!)

1. Who counts as "family" and "extended family" (vs., say, "friend of the family") among people who are open about being in open relationships? 

2. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of marriage equality, I find myself thinking that the whole concept of government-sanctioned domestic relationships has got to go.

3. I don't consider myself an exhibitionist, and in fact I'd always assumed that having an audience during sex would be very inhibiting for me, but when Cam and I went to a sex club recently, I discovered that I enjoyed having sex in public. Who knew? Yay for finding out new things about one's sexuality!

4. My last two posts (and also this post from 2013) have addressed the topic of how difficult it can be to find people to date when you're already in a relationship -- particularly an open one. (The "secret affair" makes sense to the monogamous mainstream; they'd sooner date a cheater than a person who identifies as ethically non-monogamous, it seems.) Moreover, heterosexual dating is more difficult for poly men than poly women, on average: but is that just a reflection of the larger hetero dating culture, or are poly men at a greater disadvantage than single men? Does the gender imbalance equalize as people age?

5. Transition ceremonies -- are they useful? (Relationships go through transitions; people go through transitions; the only constant is change, right?) What is the function of ceremony, anyway?

6. This one is kind of "meta" (and maybe not interesting except to people like me, who draw from private experience in order to cultivate a public persona), but when is it appropriate to share someone else's private story in a public forum? One answer is "only when you have the person's express permission." Another might be, "only when there are no identifying details." But I'm not sure I'm totally satisfied with those answers. Is information a kind of personal property? If you share it with someone, doesn't it become theirs, also? (I'm not talking about a story shared in confidence -- that's kind of like a nude picture sent via personal text/email, shared under the condition that it remain private: in that case, making the "information" public would be violating an agreement.) What about an experience that involves several people, including oneself, and some people are fine with the story being shared and some people are not -- is silence always the best default setting?

Signing off now & heading bedward. Check, check, check!