Happy Birthday Polina!

This Sunday was Polina’s birthday, and we spent pretty much the whole weekend together which is why I’m posting this a day late. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to write a recap of all our adventures soon (although not tonight since I’m going to Poly Cocktail Hour in the city).

As I usually do in my blogs, I try to say a few nice things about people on their birthdays. Last year she escaped this tradition because we had only just met. As a side note, I was just realizing that with my last three relationships, I met each of them right around this time of year - October/November. And of course this year, I’m very happy to be able to say a few words about my sweetie.

I know Polina doesn’t necessarily like reading about the qualities in her that I find so attractive, but it’s hard for me to be objective since I’m so fond of her. I suppose one way to say it is that I see a lot of Agnieszka Prime in her, which I know means very little to anyone reading this. Sometimes people just have a certain charisma, an energy to them that is responsive to your own. You see something in them that touches a part of you and a connection is made. From there, you continue to find small links to each other, and like strands upon strands of tiny spider webs, each little thing builds upon the others to form a strong bond.

For us, our initial connection was obviously formed through polyamory, and then through identifying as pansexual and transgender, and to a lesser extent through a shared spiritual philosophy. We’ve reinforced our bond with books (Laurell K. Hamilton, Tamora Pierce, Tom Robbins), TV shows (Firefly, True Blood), music (Linkin Park, Paramore) and late night talks over hot chocolate. Polyamory and being involved in the poly community in New York continues to be the main driver of our relationship and the requisite open communication is the glue that keeps it from falling apart in the face of our many differences.

Some of our differences work for us instead of against us. People tell me that Polina has an old soul, and it is true she is remarkably mature for her age. I’m the opposite, being very young at heart for my age, for reasons that should be quite obvious to those who know me. Our inverted biological and emotional ages tend to cancel each other out and make our age difference less of an issue for us than it would be for most couples. It also gives us some fluidity and freedom in how we act toward each other – we take turns being parental or filial toward each other, although we generally treat each other like most girlfriends do as equals.

So what qualities do I like about her? She makes me laugh; she has a refreshing sense of humor. As I’ve mentioned before, she can be bold in expressing affection toward me. She shares my core philosophies of being true to oneself, living in the moment and loving unconditionally. She is a frank and honest communicator, and she appreciates that quality in me. We make a really good team, with our respective strengths and weaknesses complementing each other – I forget what our Myers-Briggs scores are, but we do seem to mesh well together when we embark on a common goal. We have lots of fun together with whatever we’re doing, whether alone or with other people. And for me, seeing her smile is as beautiful and warming as the sunrise after a long autumn night.

Happy Birthday, my dearest Polina - you are the star by which my heart navigates me through life.

Upcoming poly events

It is shaping up to be a busy week for me, with Poly Cocktail Hour at China 1 on Monday, Nov. 9, our Women's Poly Group meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 11, then our Open Love NY party on the 14th. Polina and I spent most of Saturday afternoon and evening working on stuff for the OLNY party - it's going to be a lot of fun.

For those of you on Facebook, we have created a page on the Open Love NY site on the event, which you can find here.

Open Love NY/Polina Party

For the small number of people who read my various blogs, I am announcing here first that Polina and I are planning the first big public party for Open Love NY that will be a joint celebration for Polina's 19th birthday.

It's going to be at the Lyons Wier Gallery, 175 Seventh Ave. (at 20th Street) on Saturday, Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m. Non-alcoholic beverages and snacks will be served. Admission is $10, which also gets you a limited-edition Open Love NY bracelet. Plus, $1 from each ticket sold will be donated to poly-related efforts that are important to the poly community.

Lyons Wier Gallery is conveniently located near the 23rd Street Stations on the C, E, 1, F and V subway lines. More details will be forthcoming in the next few days, but I wanted to start getting the word out here.

Work update

So, as promised, there is some news about my job that is altogether encouraging. I've been working now for about six weeks in the marketing communications department of my company (codename: Nearing) as a senior writer under a contract basis, which means technically I'm a contractor for a company down in Sugar Land, Texas working onsite for Nearing in Princeton, New Jersey.

A lot of things happened just this past week. First of all, one of the junior communications associates left the company to work elsewhere. So that's good for me because it will probably mean more work to do. Also, Nearing is an open office environment, which means there are no offices or cubicles, just rows and rows of open desks divided by rows of file cabinets. Even the CEO sits at an open desk. Each section sits together in groups called pods (which means we're all pod people, a la The Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Up until recently, there was no room in the communications pod for me or Erik, the guy who does internal communications, so we had to sit on the other side of the building with the human resources people. While that did have the advantage of being quieter, it was rather distracting overhearing all the HR chatter, like people being disciplined for sexual harrassment, talking about how much money people make, etc. But once the spot opened up with the associate leaving, my boss asked me to move over to join the pod. I think this is a good sign that she asked me and not Erik to move, even though he's been there longer and is an actual Nearing employee, not a contractor.

Also this week, I've been slammed on a project to write a proposal for a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy (DOE) for a solar power plant in New Mexico. The proposal was due on Thursday, and I was working until 9:30 or 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday nights. While that means I was putting in 14-15 hour workdays, I also got lots of kudos from the government affairs people I was working with, which included some senior executives in the company. Another major upside is getting overtime pay since I'm a contractor, which means for every hour beyond eight hours worked in a single day, I get paid my normal rate plus 50% extra per hour. We finished the 120-page proposal and submitted it about two-and-a-half hours before the midnight deadline on Thursday. There will be a second round application in January, so I'll probably be doing the same thing in a few months.

In the meantime, on Friday I was put in charge as the project manager to redesign and build structure for Nearing's green energy, philanthropy and corporate responsibility Web sites. As you might guess, this is a pretty big job, so I'm excited about sinking my teeth into the project instead of just working on small projects that come in drips and drabs. It's also stuff that I not only have experience in (I was the New York office lead for Agent K's corporate responsibility team) but am also passionate about.

All in all, I'm getting more optimistic about my job, and if things continue to go well, I am confident that I will be able to move into Manhattan when my current apartment lease runs out in March.

Stony Brook visit #3

I am just back from a short but intense and lovely visit with Polina out at Stony Brook University. I left my office in Princeton (lots of work news in my next post) at 3 p.m. on Friday to have enough time to get to her school by 7 p.m., which is when her marching band practice ended.

I met up with her at the bandspace and renewed some acquaintances from prior visits and met some new faces. We followed a group of about 30 band members to a Stony Brook ice hockey game, where the team was playing the University of Rhode Island Rams. The band gets free tickets to play at the games, so I got to tag along as a FOB (friend of the band). It was actually the first time in my life I've ever been to an ice hockey game, as it is not a very popular sport in the South. But I've watched enough ESPN in my life to know the basics. It was only the second game for Polina.





Polina did not bring her cymbals to play because they had a drumset instead, so she was allowed to play the crash cymbal for the national anthem:



The game was very tight, but the Sea Wolves were overcome by the score of 3-2 when a goal scored by Stony Brook was ruled to have been made a fraction of a second after the final buzzer sounded. I would have liked to see an instant replay on that, but I guess they don't have that luxury in college games.

We returned to the bandspace and then most of us went to a party at the dorm apartment of the guy who played the drumset, Dan. I got to know one of the Sousaphone players, Steve, who shared his bottle of Chianti with me and Polina. He's from southern California, UC-Berkley, where he earned his music degree in harpsichord, and is now pursuing a master's degree in music history. He asked me what brought me to the northeast, and I gave him the two-minute version of my life history, which he found quite interesting. Then we started talking about polyamory and Polina joined us for part of that conversation, and he was supportive, but didn't think it was something he could do himself.

Polina introduced me around and brought me up to date on what's happening with some of her friends. She spent some time dancing with friends and some time cuddling on the couch with me. We left the party about 1:30 a.m. and headed back to Polina's apartment, where her suitemates were surprised to see us. We stayed up to watch an episode of Castle before climbing up to her top bunk to sleep at around 2:30 a.m.

This visit with my girlfriend was good for me in many ways, not the least of which was lots and lots of kissing/snuggling after missing each other last weekend. But also after our somewhat difficult conversation two weeks ago, I've been able to process that fully (with the help and support of my friends, especially Lori and Sylwia) and continue to live in the moment and love unconditionally. Polina and I continue to focus on loving each other as much and as best we can, given our circumstances, and building what we feel is a sustainable relationship with each other, and one that may someday include other people as well.

Poly goes international

Just a quick post about a very fun night at Poly Cocktail Hour Monday night. I went directly from Princeton and drove to China 1 Restaurant in the city - luckily, the traffic was not very heavy because of the Columbus Day holiday.

There were only a few people there, including my friend Kyle, but I recognized one face from Saturday's picnic in Central Park, a fellow named Rob who had been sitting with Polina most of the afternoon. He's from southern Australia, and he's been on holiday in New York for the past week, but only by chance stumbled upon the Poly Pride event. He actually came to the rally all by himself, which is a pretty gutsy thing to do. However, Polina helped to make him feel welcome enough to show up at PCH two nights later. I only met him briefly, so it was a good chance for me to get to know him better, and he's a delightful fellow and very supportive of the polyamory movement. It's too bad that he lives so far away - he's probably the first guy I've met that might actually have been someone we could have both dated (he's one year younger than me).



I also met a first-time visitor named John and got to know him a bit. There was also a guy named Tommy, who lives in Buenos Aires and is working on a documentary about how true monogamy (one mate for your entire life) is actually a small minority among human relationships. There was Anton, a Mensa fan who talked with Leon when he showed up with Pauline, a Teutonic teenager (she's 19) he met in Italy who came all the way from Germany to visit him. Barbara and Joe also came, and Ken, the guy I dated briefly late last year around the time I first met Polina. He's now getting married to a woman who lives in India whom he met online.

I did my best to introduce everybody around, and keep people engaged with each other. Karaoke Rob showed up, as well as Jeremy, and a few other people I've seen at past events. Reid was there, but spent all his time talking with someone, so I didn't get to talk to him except to say hi. I also met another woman named Barbara who is on my bisexual Yahoo group who was there for the first time.

I noted that I started going to PCH back in April of this year when Polina was in Argentina, and then we started going together throughout the summer ("Busy start of the week" - April 14, 2009) so I'm on a seven-PCH streak right now. When you go to an event this regularly, even a natural introvert like me starts getting comfortable and playing hostess. I'm never better at it than when I'm with Polina ("Baby kitten rescue" - May 12, 2009) but a couple of the new people mistook me for the organizer of the event and couldn't believe that I wasn't, since I seemed to know everybody.

It got to about 10 pm and I was thinking about going home, but K-Rob and Aussie Rob started talking about a hot dog place called Crif's Dogs on nearby St. Marks so we decided to go get a bite to eat. I invited Leon and Pauline along, and they said they would be 10 minutes behind us.



Crif's Dogs is a very interesting place. Not only do they have an extensive lineup of deep-fried hot dogs with all sorts of toppings, but there is a secret speakeasy bar that is accessed through a fake phone booth in the middle of the room. Leon, Pauline and I all squeezed into the booth, Leon picked up the phone and the entire back wall of the phone booth opens up and we walked into the bar to have a look. It's a very posh bar compared to the humble hot dog joint we walked through to get there. The whole set up reminded us of the old TV show Get Smart, or the visitor's entrance to the Ministry of Magic from Harry Potter.

We all ate and talked until it was about midnight, which is way past my bedtime. Aussie Rob and Pauline both were due to fly back the very next day to Australia and Germany respectively, so this is one gathering that will not be replicated for a long time, if ever. Which is a pity because if Polina had only been there, we'd have had two Robs, and teens Pauline and Polina.



All in all, it was a very good night, and very encouraging that polyamory has fans beyond the U.S. I gave Pauline a DVD with a copy of the MTV True Life "I'm Polyamorous" episode on it as a souvenir. Leon and I talked a bit about Open Love NY and getting that ship moving again. Polina and I have been talking today about what we can do together along that line, so we might have some movement on it this week. Stay tuned.

Gone but not forgotten

I am a happy person most of the time. I do get moody and emotional sometimes, but generally I believe that we are responsible for our own happiness, meaning that if we are not happy, it’s up to us to fix it. Whether that means changing our lives or changing our outlook on life, there’s usually no one else that is going to do it for us.

With that note, I will mark a rather bittersweet anniversary for me today, October 14. It was four years ago today that I met Tara, Bee and Bug face-to-face, and began the process of joining a family that ultimately did not work out for me. Since Tara severed ties with me on the first of September, I have had no contact with any of them, other than following her on Twitter.

Some people might be surprised, or not understand why these three people who used to be so close to me less than two years ago would treat me like a total stranger now. I can’t explain the whys and wherefores about the complexity of our relationship in this post, and none of that really matters now anyway.

The short version of the explanation is that Tara is an artist in the purest sense of the word, and as such she is the most uncompromising person I’ve ever met, or am likely to meet. It was one of the things I loved about her at first. Later when we became real-life lovers, that aspect of her character caused some friction and discord, because I am generally a very easy-going kind of person and she is not.

One thing I know about myself is that the rare occasions when I fall in love, I fall pretty damn hard. Part of the process for me when I’m in NRE (new relationship energy) is that I put a lot of energy into learning all about the person I’m with, and I can be pretty amazing in my ability to recollect details. Tara always used to say that I earned my Ph.D. in Tara Studies because I was so focused on learning about her when we were together. Polina might feel the same way, considering I’m learning Russian so I can understand a little more when she’s talking with her family.

So from my perspective, knowing and loving Tara as I do, I understand why she needed to have a complete break from me. I don’t bear her any ill will. A part of me will always love her, and be grateful for what she brought to my life. One of the things I’ve come to learn is that sometimes love is not enough, and it doesn’t always conquer all like in the fairy tales. While it may be the single most important thing in life to me, it’s not the only thing. We each have our own lives to live, and love cannot impede our freedom to live it. I learned that lesson painfully with Tara, and I’m constantly applying that lesson with Polina during our relationship check-ins so as not to impede her growth as a person.

I don’t think I will continue to mark this anniversary in the future, as it doesn’t have much meaning in my present life, and one thing I try to do is live in the moment. But I might do other things in the future to honor the family I used to have, and all the ways they changed me. Even if they never speak to me again, they are as much a part of my past as my estranged birth family. Sometimes we need to remember what has come before so we can carry our lessons forward, and if nothing else, I have proven in my life to be a pretty good student in all kinds of things.

Poly Pride 2009

It was a wonderful weekend for me and Polina, even though our plans kept changing constantly. Friday night she was supposed to come directly out to my apartment and stay the night so we could go to the Poly Pride Rally in Central Park on Saturday morning. But when she was getting ready to leave Stony Brook she found out that her parents, instead of leaving for a music festival that day as we’d expected, decided to stay home one extra night so they could spend some time with her.

So Friday she went home to Staten Island, which actually worked out well for us because that gave me extra time on Friday night to make some peanut sesame noodles for the picnic. This is a cold dish that I have fond memories as a kid, but have never tried to make before, and unfortunately it didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, but everybody seemed to like it anyway. Here’s a rough recipe that I followed:

1 lb. Chinese-style white flour noodles, medium width
8 oz. Thai peanut satay sauce
½ red bell pepper, julienned
½ cucumber, peeled, seeded and julienned
1 bunch green onions, sliced diagonally
2 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp sambal olek
2 tbsp soy sauce
White sesame seeds

In a large bowl, combine all sauces and vegetables and let marinate while you boil the noodles to al dente. Drain noodles thoroughly and toss with sauce and vegetables. Chill and sprinkle sesame seeds on just before serving.

I also had more time to buy food at Costco, which included some tabouli, red pepper hummus, garlic stuffed olives, black seedless grapes and a few other things. I had gotten some spicy flatbread for the hummus earlier in the week, so I was putting together a kind of Mediterranean/Asian fusion menu. Unfortunately, I had bought some stuffed grape leaves the other day and subsequently forgot to bring them. But I also had to get a picnic blanket from Home Goods – I couldn’t find one with a gingham pattern like the one my birth family used to use, but I did find a really huge white cotton one with a blue trim that was big enough to spread under my queen-size air mattress, with extra material left over to put the food.

Saturday morning I got up and ran some errands while waiting for Kerry to come over so we could drive into the city together. She had a little trouble finding my apartment, as most people do the first time they drive here, but by that time I had everything packed and we got moving pretty quickly. We loaded the air mattress, food, blankets, camp chair and her hula hoop into my cart and made our way to the Great Hill in Central Park.

Since we were late, Polina was already there and she ran over to greet me with a hug and kisses. She had been press-ganged to read interstitials and poetry between each speaker and/or entertainer that took the stage, so she had to stay nearby. Kerry and I made our way up to the top of the hill where my friend Adele (with husband Lance and child Haley from the Bridgewater picnic) was sitting. It was Adele’s 44th birthday, and she was celebrating with cupcakes for everyone. Adele, Polina and I all got a shout in the poly news blog (http://www.polyinthenews.blogspot.com/)



Throughout the day I saw many of my poly friends and acquaintances who have been mentioned in this blog – Reid, Barbara and partner Joe, Sylwia, Murray and Sandra, Carol, Karaoke Rob (since there are so many Robs, I need to qualify him), Justen, Patrick, Alan (the Boston-based poly news blogger), Kyle, Buck, Lyndell and a few others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Some of them took turns cuddling and making out on my air mattress, which of course is why I brought it. A couple of us gave Polina a back massage when she came up to hang with us for a while.

There were some wonderful musical acts, including N'Harmonics, an accappella group and a three-piece rock band, Houston Bernard & Bonfire Bandit, that were especially good. There was a hilarious cabaret performance by Raven Scheckter's We Three troupe doing poly-Jewish songs to the tunes of West Side Story (e.g. “Maria” became “A Triad”). Comic Kelli Dunham was the emcee, and Polina read various poly-themed letters and writings, in addition to one of her own slam poetry pieces. After her duties were finished, we sat on the air mattress surrounded by friends and I gave her a silver infinity heart pendant on a long silver chain to celebrate our first anniversary of meeting each other in the park at this event a year ago.

As the sun began to dip below the trees, we packed everything up and Kerry, Polina and I drove back to New Jersey together. Kerry came up to the apartment and we gave her the dime tour, as well as showing her some of our favorite books and graphic novels (Sandman, Lost Girls, Fables, etc.). She left soon after to take a babysitting job for a friend, and Polina and I went out to dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. We came home and watched some episodes of TV show The Vampire Diaries on my DVR before going to bed.

We woke up really late the next morning, another benefit of shifting our sleepover to Saturday night, and made our usual breakfast of omelettes and turkey bacon. Polina wanted to get her hair colored again from its faded orange tint, so I made an appointment for her with my hair stylist, Edison. Before we left we had another relationship check-in that was a little difficult for both of us, but ultimately brought some closure to our last conversation at the frozen yogurt shop a couple weeks ago. We drove to her house in Staten Island for a quick stop before heading into Chinatown for the hair appointment. Edison created a deep purple tint for Polina’s bangs, which she loved.

We got out just in time to walk over to the Film Forum on West Houston and 7th Ave. to watch “The Yes Men Save the World,” a documentary movie about two guys who perpetrate elaborate hoaxes that illuminate injustice and corporate greed in the world. On our way back to Staten Island we got lost in Brooklyn for a bit and found this apropos street sign that sums up our weekend:

Her parents were home from the music festival by the time we got back, and her mom had the most amusing blank look of horror on her face when she saw Penny’s new hair color. Both her parents hated the color passionately, and I can’t really fathom why because the dark purple against her natural dark brown is much less flashy than the red, orange and yellow that she’s been wearing the past several months. But Polina is very independent-minded, so I’m sure her parents’ disapproval won’t bother her too much – just as it doesn’t seem to hamper our relationship too much. I stayed for a cup of tea and we said goodnight, ending another happy weekend filled with fun and adventure.

Sex toy party

Guess it has been more than a week since my last post - I must be slipping. Although, truth to tell, my life is pretty much confined to the weekends since during the week I don't have much time to do anything other than work and commute. Generally speaking that is, because I took last Thursday and Friday off. Not because I necessarily wanted to - since I'm a contract employee, when I take time off, I don't get paid for it. But the rest of the communications staff was down in Baton Rouge, LA for a big company meeting, leaving me with nothing to do.

Thursday I ran a bunch of errands that were piling up on me, like taking my dress from Ella's wedding to the dry cleaners, dropping off clothes for tailoring, getting Yoshi's brakes fixed and getting my allergy shots. Then Friday I drove out to Stony Brook on Long Island to visit Polina. I watched her band practice for a while, then we went to dinner with some of her friends.

After they dropped us off at her dorm, we hung out there for the rest of the evening on her top bunk bed, playing Scrabble on Facebook, videochatting with her friend Patrick, and having some long-overdue private time. Seriously, despite all the time we've had lately, we haven't actually been in a bed together since Aug. 10, the last Poly Cocktail Hour she attended ("Polys in the wild" - Aug. 11, 2009), so that alone was worth the four-hour round-trip.

I probably would have stayed overnight in her dorm room except that Angel was having a Brown Bag Party at her house the next day, and I had invited Agnieszka to come with me, so I had to go back to New Jersey to pick her up anyway. Angel sells intimacy products (i.e. sex toys and novelties) through these Tupperware-style parties she throws, and at events like the Spice NYC party a couple weeks ago. Agnieszka and I drove out to Queens and had a fun time at the party, learning about different lubricants, stimulators, vibrators, and other somesuch. The thing I'll most remember is Agnieszka playing with a latex-like face used for fake blowjobs - she had me in stitches. I also won one of the games where the prize was a deck of Hustler playing cards that said "Barely Legal" on it - I wondered if Angel was making some comment about my girlfriend, but she denied it.

We came back to Agnieszka's place from the party, and chatted for a while to catch up. It's been quite a few months since our last outing ("Shanghai Mermaid" - May 31, 2009) so it was nice to talk with her about what's been happening. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've known Agnieszka longer than any other friend in the northeast who is still currently in my life, and it's always nice to get her perspective on things.

On Monday, I had a second-round interview with a PR firm in the city, on Vanderbilt Avenue right next to Grand Central Station. I met with the president of the firm, and we seemed to hit it off well. He asked me what I did in my spare time, and in a burst of honesty that comes from being gainfully employed, I told him that I do volunteer work in the LGBT community. He smoothly indicated that he was fine with this by saying that he has a close friend who was the first openly gay board member of the New York Stock Exchange. So that is a plus if I decide to work for them - I wouldn't have to be evasive about Polina, who would surely visit the office at some point.

The real issue of course is whether I want to make a job change in this economy after only a month at my current job. The job I have in Princeton is in many ways my dream job - I get to do a lot of creative writing, I don't have to deal with a lot of people, it's low pressure and low stress, and in an interesting field at a very healthy company. The free lunches and free drinks are nice, and the people are great to work with. The downside is that it's not a full-time, permanent position (which is both good and bad) and the commute is wearing Yoshi and me out. So if I stay there, I will probably end up moving to south Jersey in March, and that's not really where I want to live.

I'm not supposed to think about this dilemma until it becomes one - that is, until I get a comparable job offer from the new firm, and that hasn't happened yet. But if it does, it will be one of those life-altering decisions that I'm not eager to make right now.

Mabon circle

It was a fairly busy weekend for me but full of good and productive things. It seems like I’m finally starting to adjust to an early sleep schedule, but I still need to work on keeping my apartment clean when I don’t have unlimited time to pick up after myself. It’s not terrible by most people’s standards, but I’ve gotten used to keeping things tidy, especially when I have company over (which is a lot rarer occurrence these days).

So this weekend, I left directly from work on Friday and drove up to Middletown, NY to visit with Buck and Donna so that we could transcribe a poly timeline that was created back in March at the national poly leadership summit I attended as a volunteer. The original scroll of the timeline will be housed at the Kinsey Institute, which has a poly library of historical documents, but we wanted to capture the information on an Excel spreadsheet so it can be used and expanded on a future Web site. Friday night we all had dinner together at a Mexican restaurant, followed by some group cuddling on the couch back at Buck’s place before bed.

Saturday Donna had another engagement upstate, so Buck and I had the day to ourselves. We started with him getting a haircut at a nearby salon, which was also hosting a bridal party that morning. It was actually quite fascinating watching the bride getting her hair done, and it gave me a new appreciation of how much work it takes to create these beautiful hairstyles for special occasions.

Afterwards we had brunch at a Perkins restaurant and then went to Sunshine Studios so I could buy the Woodstock Chimes Emperor wind gong I saw last month when we visited for the Open Love NY leadership retreat. We spent the entire afternoon transcribing the timeline scroll, which extends from about 500 BCE (before Common Era) to 2050 CE and charts the growth of polyamory in the categories of Self, Group, Movement and Culture.

On Sunday I went into the city to meet up with Polina and attend my first group circle at a friend's house for Mabon. It was quite a big step for me to share my spiritual practices with other people, but as part of my continued growth and dedication to my practice, I felt it was a good opportunity to see how it feels as part of a group. My friend Katie (who is married to Patrick, one of the board members of Polyamorous NYC) organizes a family-friendly circle with her five-year-old daughter Evie to teach kids about paganism. Katie and her girlfriend Laura, and her daughter and I joined Evie in circle, and it was a lovely experience. The presence of the children made the circle feel more casual, but also brought a nurturing energy to it.

As Mabon is a time of harvest where we give thanks for the bounty we reap from our efforts throughout the year, I have two major things to be thankful for – my new job and my relationship with Polina. As I said in circle, these are the things that I’ve worked on and put effort into this year that I’m thankful have borne fruit.

Polina arrived afterwards and joined us for the potluck lunch party around the same time that Patrick and little Jasper came home from gymnastics class. I gave Polina a DVD of the MTV True Life episode she hadn’t seen yet (my big national TV debut) and she brought me a present from her trip to Switzerland, an aluminum water bottle with pictures of Swiss postage stamps on it. She also returned my copy of Stephenie Meyer’s New Moon, which she managed to slog through so we can see the movie together when it comes out on November 20.

Polina and I left around 3:30 p.m. and decided to watch a movie, but we couldn’t find a theater nearby that was playing anything we liked. So we stopped in our usual frozen yogurt place on Christopher Street to relax and have another check-in about our relationship, which is moving toward a more poly structure as we both pursue new people while continuing to nurture our bond to each other.

We both acknowledged how our relationship has progressed in the past several weeks, even given the disapproval of her family and the limitations we currently have on spending time together (although I think we are both a little surprised that we’ve managed to see each other three weekends in row after our month-long separation in late August and early September). We had a very candid talk, followed by as much snogging as we could get away with in public, before heading back to Yoshi and dropping her off at her grandmother’s house for Yom Kippur services that evening.

In other news, the job has been going very well so far, other than the commute is rather long. Through familiarity with the route, I have it down to about an hour’s drive time each way. I get to focus on writing all day long, without having to deal with budgets, team supervision, client meetings or any of the other managerial/administrative things that I had to do at my last two jobs in public relations agencies. I also keep pretty regular hours since I’m a contracted employee (unless they want to pay me overtime) and it’s nice being fed a nutritious lunch every day in the free company cafeteria.

However, I’m getting renewed interest from PR firms I interviewed with over the summer as the economy bounces back, and I admit it would be a good thing to live and work in the city, all else being equal, so that I could spend more time with Polina and my other friends. Career-wise, I’d probably be better off staying in Princeton and getting more in-house communications experience, but we’ll see if I get an offer that makes it worth making another jump.

SBU football, Thriller and Rosh Hashanah

As you can probably tell from the headline, it was another busy weekend for me and Polina. I'm really happy that we continue to find reasons and ways to see each other as much as possible instead of going for several weeks or a month between visits. While we stay in touch constantly via phone, text and video chat, there is no substitute for touch and smell and feeling her energy shine from her eyes.

Friday night I left straight from work to head into the city to meet Angel, who had invited me to a party celebrating the first anniversary of Spice NYC, a queer party planning organization. The party was held at Leopard Lounge, above a bar called Sin Sin on 2nd Avenue and Fifth Street. I was early, so I went to get my nails done and browsed at a few shops before meeting her outside the door. She was toting her suitcase full of sex toys to show at the party and we sat at a booth while she set up a raffle for a dildo she was giving away. It was actually quite funny watching her show people a giant pink dildo and trying to get them to buy raffle tickets.



I left as the party was getting hot because it was still a long way out to Stony Brook University, where Polina goes to school. I bought a Garmin GPS unit on Friday since I no longer have my family to help me with directions when I get lost (I used to call them Oracle based on the DC Comics character) so I made decent time once I got out of Manhattan. Our friend Afiya was also visiting, so they came out and met me in the parking lot just after midnight when I arrived. I changed out of my work clothes and we went to another room on her floor to watch "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" and an episode of "Entourage" with a couple guys before returning to sleep.

Saturday morning we met up with several of Polina's friends to have brunch, which turned out to be a late lunch since we were waiting on people to show up.



After lunch Polina left with her friends to get ready for band rehearsal while Afiya and I wandered around the campus looking for stuff to do. We found some people practicing walking on a slack rope tied between two trees, so Afiya gave that a try, without much success. We played basketball in the athletic center for a little while before they kicked us out. Afiya and I have yet to play a one-on-one match, which we've been trash-talking about for months now. Eventually I'll get to kick her butt somewhere. We parked Yoshi at the stadium and hung out, sitting on Yoshi's inverted couch out the back, tailgate style. We threw my softball around with her using my glove and I used batting gloves which are lightly padded in the palm - it's actually good practice for cricket, which doesn't allow fielding gloves except for the wicketkeeper.

Eventually it was time to go into the stadium, and we watched the pre-game show and visited Polina in the stands:



The halftime show was very entertaining, and I captured it on video using my camera, while Afiya took pictures from higher in the bleachers. They played Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" (also known as the cowbell song from Will Ferrell's classic Saturday Night Live skit), "Thriller" by Michael Jackson (where the whole band gets to mimic the famous dance steps, and Penny gets to do them while holding cymbals), "Bye Bye Bye" by N*SYNC and "Disturbia" by Rihanna.

But while the band was very exciting, for once they could not compete with the football game, as SBU won the game 21-20 on a touchdown in the final two minutes and a missed field goal attempt by Brown University as the clock expired. Fans from the student red zone stormed the field in an amazing display of school spirit:



After the game the three of us went to an Indian restaurant to grab a quick bite before we were to drop Afiya at the train station, but we ended up missing the train by about a minute, so we dropped her off at her home on Long Island on the way back to Staten Island. All of Penny's grandparents were there, plus another family friend visiting for Rosh Hashanah, so we slept downstairs in the living room, her on the couch and me on my air mattress.

The next morning we had breakfast together and drove into the city to Pier 45 where Penny's Jewish community group The New Shul had a ceremonial throwing of bread into the Hudson River to symbolize tossing away your sins to the fishes. We then walked to Washington Square Park for a brief lesson by the rabbi, and Penny and I recorded a digital video greeting for her Dutch boyfriend Peter, who is having a commitment ceremony with his girlfriend Floor in Amsterdam this weekend.



We stopped off at the group's art installation called The House of Awe & Repentance before going back to my place so Penny could do some homework and I could make us some food. I made her an improv meal of turkey bacon, white rice and kim chee, while I had some fried rice with very un-kosher Chinese sausage. We drove back to the city so I could drop her off at her grandmother's apartment for a birthday party which was for family only. Unfortunately, that meant I wasn't able to take her back to SBU as we'd planned, so she had to take the train back early Monday morning and call a friend to pick her up from the station.

Finally, I want to wish everyone a very happy Mabon, or Fall Equinox, which is today.

The Way I Loved You

Taylor Swift has been in the news a lot lately, and I've been listening non-stop to her album Fearless since I checked it out of the library last week. But while I like all the tracks, the one song that is on my mind at the moment is track 10, "The Way I Loved You."

As you can see from the lyrics if you click on the link, the song is about how someone can have a seemingly perfect relationship and somehow long for a volatile and tumultuous one that develops somewhat equal parts of both pain and passion. And this is interesting to me because both Polina and I have one thing in common - we both recently ended ex-relationships that fit this description. But having gone through them, we've also both realized that we're not the sort who long to have that kind of relationship back.

It remains to be seen for both of us if our aversion to relationship drama will extend into future relationships, since we are both open to dating new people. But for now, I think we both appreciate how our relationship has become one that is stable, nurturing, positive and transparent. We work closely on specific issues together to improve our communication, and we both put forth effort to meet each other's needs.

But I think the big secret to the success of our relationship so far is our ability to enjoy the present, to live in the moment, and not to dwell or obsess over future scenarios or obstacles we have yet to face. If our relationship works well on many different levels over a long period of time, we can eventually overcome a lot of the issues that seem insurmountable right now. But for right now, we focus on loving each other as best we can, and letting the future unfold as it will.

Poly parties

It's Wednesday at work, and I'm looking forward to going home and chilling out for the evening. It seems like it's been a non-stop whirlwind since I started working last week, and indeed it has.

As you recall from my last post, I started my new job on Thursday sleep-deprived because of a mix-up in communications where I didn't think I was going to start so I stayed out late in the city the night before at my poly women's meeting, only to find out that I was expected to come in at 8 a.m. And that's pretty much been par for the course as my body tries to adjust to a different sleep cycle that requires me to leave the apartment at 7 a.m. to beat traffic down to Princeton each morning.

And then of course last weekend I was camping for the wedding, which was lots of fun but not overly conducive to a restful sleep. Sunday evening was fairly restful as I got caught up on laundry and putting things away from the camping trip, but I still wound up going to bed late and waking up early Monday morning.

But enough griping since I don't want anyone to think I'm in any way unhappy about having a job or spending time with my lovely girlfriend. Monday evening I took off a little early after work to drive into the city for two different parties. First up was the monthly Poly Cocktail Hour at China 1 Restaurant, where I met up with my Open Love NY friends Buck, Donna, Lyndell, Simon, and Leon, and also was pleasantly surprised to see so many members of my women's poly group there as well - Sylwia, Barbara and Oxy showed up. I said hello to other regulars (Derek, Norman, and a few I haven't learned their names yet) and met some new people, but didn't really engage with any of them since there were so many of my friends there and I wanted to spend time with them. Oxy and I started talking about boobs and she let me touch her ample, all-natural bosom (she's an F cup) which I did ever so gently with the tip of my finger.



I only mention this because of what happened later in the evening at the second party, which was Diana and Kerry's MTV True Life viewing party. I took a cab down to Fulton Street near South Street Seaport where Diana's friend Hookah Mike rents a huge, six-bedroom loft that he shares with five roommates. The apartment has two large common areas in an open floor plan with 12-foot ceilings; one area includes the windows and the other connected to the kitchen and dining areas. This place was so big, they had room for a ping-pong table in between these two common areas, which each had its own projection TV and sofa/loveseat/coffee table. I say all this because I've never seen such a spacious apartment in the city and I was a little overwhelmed. I can't begin to imagine what a place like that must cost in monthly rent!



I only saw a few people there I knew - Birgitte (past president of Polyamorous NYC), Reid (co-founder of Cuddle Party), Hannah (a butch genderqueer I met a few months ago at Poly Cocktail Hour), Diana's boyfriend Ed and Kerry’s boyfriend Kyler - but most of the people seemed to be friends of Diana who had helped or participated in the MTV show, plus several of Diana's partners of course. The show started 30 minutes later than it was supposed to, which caused some confusion, but once it started, it was a non-stop rollercoaster of laughter, groans and general hysterics. Kerry, Diana and Ed, who starred in the show, didn't get to see it prior to airing, so they had the biggest reactions since they were on the screen most of the time.



My participation was reduced to a brief cameo, as I was in the background for a couple shots and got one close-up that lasted about half a second. None of my dialogue was used (which I’m a bit relieved about) so it's not likely anyone is going to notice me (although I was wearing a very sexy, low-cut turquoise silk top seen below with Erika, Birgitte's girlfriend).



During the show, I was sitting on the floor next to Hannah, who was sitting next to a Korean girl, who introduced herself to me as Nari. I immediately was sure we'd met before because she seemed very familiar - it turns out she is quite famous as an associate producer for the Travel Channel who appeared on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show when they went to Seoul, South Korea. I've seen that particular episode several times because I love Korean food, and it's also one of the funniest episodes of the show, with Nari's bubbly and youthful optimism in stark contrast to Tony's world-weary cynicism clashing at every turn. And I'm not the only one who liked the episode – you can read plenty of Nari's fan mail in the comments section of her recent post about Vancouver on the Travel Channel blog.

Since Nari works in television, she had a lot to say about how it looked like MTV took advantage of the three poly men from North Carolina who appeared on the show. We all agreed that Diana and Kerry (and Ed) did a great job presenting polyamory as a legitimate and workable (albeit complicated) lovestyle, requiring good communication, maturity and flexibility to be successful. Unfortunately, the flip side with the poly men showed the opposite is also true, that without those qualities, polyamory can result in major drama and heartache. It was also pointed out repeatedly that the NC men lacked any kind of poly support network or the experience of someone like Diana that might have helped them learn how to handle things better.

Of course I am reminded of my own experience with trying to start a poly family where the problem was a complete lack of buy-in to polyamory as a sustainable lovestyle by the other three-fourths of the family. My ex-girlfriend often lamented what she saw as my need to be part of a larger community to help deal with our poly situation, something she had no interest in doing. Predictably, people who find themselves in poly situations without adequate resources or experience find it a lot harder to make things work in the end.

Once the show wrapped up, people started to drift toward Hookah Mike's bedroom to talk about the show. I was talking to Nari and her fiance Sam and showing her some of my pictures on my camera. I asked Sam to take a picture of us, and he took several while Nari started getting really frisky with me. Sam sort of encouraged it while he was taking the photos too. After the photo shoot Sam wanted to go home, and said he would wait for Nari downstairs. Nari wanted to take me to a karaoke bar or do something else since the party seemed to be winding down, but I demurred, saying I had to get home and get some sleep as it was around midnight.



She was very persistent however, so I settled for chatting with her while she smoked a cigarette while we sat on the window ledge. If anyone has seen the episode with Nari on the Travel Channel, let me tell you: she is every bit as energetic and perky in person as she was on the show. We both look much younger than we actually are - she’s 27 but looks like she’s 17 and still gets carded for cigarettes. Her first guess at my age was 28 and it took her about five guesses to get high enough. I found out that she was getting married to Sam this Friday, and I asked if she was poly. She said no, but that she and Sam were very open and poly-friendly.

We talked about our exes and she told me about her first girlfriend in college. She didn't say she was bisexual, but she did say that while she loves cock, she also loves big boobs and can't wait to get pregnant so that her boobs will grow bigger (she's almost totally flat-chested). I asked her if she would like to feel mine, and she dove in with gusto, putting a two-handed grab on my chest that would make any NFL wide receiver green with envy.

I think it was right about then that Sam walked in, complaining that he had been waiting for half an hour because he'd been locked out downstairs. They got into a bit of a fight, and I tried to explain that I wasn't trying to keep Nari from leaving or doing anything inappropriate, at least given that we were at a party with mostly sex-positive, polyamorous people. Sam practically dragged her away, but not before Nari planted a goodbye kiss on me. After they left, I and two other people who had watched this scene unfold sat looking stunned at each other, wondering what it was all about. They certainly did not seem like they belonged at that party, nor should be getting married in four days. Shortly after, I said goodbye to everyone and left myself, passing the couple once more on the street on the way to get Yoshi from the garage.

Tuesday night after work I stopped by Il Trapezio Cafe in Nutley, NJ to attend a book reading by my client, author and academic Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, who has just published Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet. Several of my friends also attended - Buck and Donna, Murray and Sandy, and Adele from my women's group, who works a few blocks away at the public library. We had a nice lively discussion, and Serena signed a book and gave it to me. I've been working for her for the past three months, but I have to end our working relationship now because I simply don't have the time anymore. But hopefully the seeds we've sown in the media will bear some fruit in the coming months that will contribute to the success of her book.



So now I'm all caught up on the weird and fun stuff that's been happening lately, I'm looking forward to a couple of quiet nights at home, watching movies and catching up on sleep before the weekend. Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) begins on Friday at sundown and ends Sunday at nightfall (which I guess is full dark), so I'm going to visit Polina at Stony Brook to watch her marching band Saturday night, and then celebrating with her family on Sunday.

Postscript: A shout goes out to my best friend Lori, who just accepted a marriage proposal today from her boyfriend of 2 and a half years, Erik. The date is set for May on the anniversary of their first meeting. Congratulations!

A wedding story

I had the most lovely time with Polina and her tribe this weekend as we went camping in Barryville, NY to celebrate her sister Ella's wedding. I've heard much about Ella, but have never actually met her until yesterday, her wedding day.

I arrived at the campground around noon on Saturday and had a nice reunion with Polina - we hadn't seen each other for a month and it was wonderful to hold her and kiss her again. She helped me set up my tent and we socialized a bit and helped set things up. Here's a photo of Yoshi and my brandy-new tent with my air mattress and sleeping bag (which I bought last year for a trip to Assateague Island that got cancelled due to a bout of food poisoning):



The campground was called Luke's Landing, and it sits on the upper part of the Delaware River, an area with lots of river rafting outfits. The campground is the home of a music festival organized in part by the groom, Sasha, so it's an area with lots of good memories for both families. Here's the gorgeous view from just outside my tent at my campsite - you can hear the gurgling of the river very clearly:



At around 2 p.m. Polina and I went to get changed into our party clothes and put on some makeup. I wore a diaphanous beaded orange and yellow dress with a silk wrap, an outfit that has an interesting back story. After the fire of 2005, I found this dress at a Lohemann's store in Houston, so it was one of, if not the first dress in my current wardrobe. One of the straps was damaged, and it's a braided string of beads, so I had to have my tailor find the same beads and rebraid the strap. Then, a year later, I was visiting Mandy and Colleen in Columbus, Ohio and we went to the Columbus Fine Arts Museum. I saw the orange silk wrap, so the wrap and dress were bought separately and are a perfect match, even down to the pattern of circles on both. The dress survived the second fire in 2007 since it was in a protective bag, but I had never had an occasion to wear it until now - yesterday was the first time it's ever been worn in public.

Speaking of perfect matches, you can see from the photo that Polina's bangs, which had previously been colored a deep shade of red, have faded to a light orange and yellow blonde, which we took great delight in pointing out that it matched my dress perfectly:



The wedding started at 3 p.m. with some games presided by Polina's eldest sister Sophie, where Sasha was given several tests, such as guessing people's hands while blindfolded, and picking out his bride's lipstick mark from several others in the wedding party. Each time he guessed wrong on the latter game, the woman he thought was Ella would get to place a lipstick mark on his face. He only had to endure this twice (Polina was his second wrong guess) before he successfully recognized his bride's lips. After completing all the tests, he was allowed to go find Ella, who was hiding on the other side of the campground near my tent, and together they walked back to the party to start the wedding ceremony.

The wedding took place under open sky outside the main tent under a huppah, which symbolises their home, and the house they hope to build someday. The families of both bride and groom are led into the huppah and several rituals are performed of walking circles clockwise and counter-clockwise, sharing wine and exchanging rings.



Once the rings and vows are exchanged, the newlyweds are wrapped into the talles of the huppah, where they share their first kiss as a married couple and Sasha breaks a glass to remember the fragility of our world:



After the wedding recession, everyone gets to throw rice on them and the feasting and drinking begins in earnest. There were lots of toasts (Polina and her family sang a song in Russian about how the couple met that reminded me of the Brady Bunch theme) and as night fell, even a heavy downpour did not dampen our spirited dancing, nor the determination of a fellow named Roman who managed to start a bonfire.

We gradually migrated to the bonfire, where we sang songs (Sophie played many songs on guitar) and talked until the wee hours, until people started drifting off and it was just me and Polina, her sisters, mom and grandmother. We sang lullabys, showtunes and Beatles songs, and I managed to play and sing "All I Want Is You" by U2 and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" by John Denver on the guitar. Around 2 a.m. we decided the fire was low enough to leave for the night, so we said good night and I dropped Polina, her mom and grandmother at their tent and retired to mine (which luckily was not too wet because I'd stupidly left only the bug screens closed when I left the tent that afternoon).

In the morning we had some breakfast and chatted a bit before breaking down campsites and starting the cleanup. Polina had to leave early to catch her ride back to Stony Brook University, so we had a nice goodbye before I finished packing up my tent. I asked Ella if I could take some of the extra mugs (they were used for coffee and tea during the wedding, but some people didn't take them home) so I could finally replace the mugs I've been using since the 2005 fire, which were part of a china set that someone donated to me. It's nice to have mugs that remind me of happier things than the fire, and this weekend was certainly one of the happier times in my recent memory.

On the way home I stopped at High Point State Park, the highest elevation in the State of New Jersey, just south of the New York border, and visited the Veteran's Memorial obelisk at the summit. It was a beautiful day after the rain and clouds of the two previous days, and it was wonderful to feel the wind whipping through my hair at top of the mountain. Here's the view of the glacier lake in the park:



Tomorrow after work I'll head to Poly Cocktail Hour for a bit, then to Diana and Kerry's viewing party for the MTV True Life premiere. But I will certainly remember this weekend for a long time to come, not just for the fun I had, but also as a milestone in my relationship with Polina where we officially were recognized as a couple by her family and close friends. The way I was accepted as Polina's girlfriend, with such warmth and open-mindedness, was both humbling and gratifying, and I hope to see many of those people again soon.

First day at work

Just got back from my first day at work, an 11-hour one at that, so I'm pretty beat. But there's so much going on, I have to write a few lines just to keep up with my fast-moving life.

Tuesday night I went to Madison, NJ about 30 minutes away to hang out with my friend Kerry. She's been feeling a little apprehensive about the upcoming MTV premiere of True Life titled "I'm Polyamorous" in which she and her now-ex girlfriend Diana will be featured and wanted some advice. I'll probably also appear in a cameo from the party at the Slipper Room way back in May ("Birthdays, MTV and Polina" - May 6, 2009) but not for more than a few seconds, I'm sure. If you want to catch it, the show premieres this Monday at 10 p.m. ET ("TNG poly documentary coming to MTV" - Polyamory in the News).

The worst of it was that I had a job interview the next morning with a PR firm in Hackensack, so even though I felt like crap I managed to drag myself out of bed and get to the interview, a few minutes late because I got lost due to poor directions. The interview was fine, but it will be a few weeks at least before I hear anything. I also got emails that morning saying that I wasn't going to start my job on Thursday as expected, so I figured I'd at least be able to sleep late the next day, as I had plenty left to do on Wednesday.

After the interview I went into the city for a haircut with Edison, and he did his usual thorough job. I had a few hours to kill before the Women's Poly Meeting, so I walked around the Lower East Side and had dinner at Whole Foods before my friends all showed up. We had a new woman named Sheila who had responded to my PolyNYC personal ad, and we've been emailing back and forth a bit, which is how she knew about the meeting. Afterwards, I took my friend and group co-founder Sylwia back to Weehawken before heading home.

When I got home at midnight, I found emails that contradicted the previous ones, and asked me to come in to my new job at 8 am! Yikes! So instead of sleeping in, I got about 4 hours of sleep and showed up a half-hour early (since I didn't know what traffic would be like). The first day was very good - got all set up on a computer with two screens in a quiet corner of the HR department. I found out that they serve free lunch every day, which is wonderful, and they also have free sodas and snacks for employees. They even have an indoor half-court basketball hoop and locker rooms for working out. It's a 90 minute drive down there without traffic, and god only knows how long during rush hour. At this point, I'm inclined to go early and stay late just to rack up paychecks and avoid sitting in traffic. My paycheck today is almost double my weekly unemployment check!

That is all for now - I'm off to bed.

Labor Day retreat

Hello everybody! Well, it's been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened. In a nutshell, Tara and I formalized our breakup on Sept. 1 (exchanged house keys, agreed not to visit/talk with each other anymore, etc.), got confirmation on my new job starting Sept. 10 in Princeton, and just got back from a three-night weekend retreat at my friend Buck's house in Middletown, NY with Open Love NY leaders Simon, Donna, and Kyle. How's that for an eventful week?

As the first two items are the most important but the most personal, I will focus this post on the most recent event, the trip to Middletown this weekend. The purpose of the trip was to do some bonding among the Open Love NY leadership and talk about our mission and vision for the fledgling group. We also had a lot of fun together hanging out, going to the Renaissance Festival, shopping and cooking together.

Friday night Simon and I drove up together and met Buck, Donna and Buck's daughter Clara at Buck's house. Simon, Buck, Donna and I went to a Mexican restaurant called El Bandito for dinner, which was pretty good food for the northeast. We also stopped at a hippie store across the street and I saw a wonderful gong windchime that I fell in love with, and resolved to buy later.

Saturday Kyle arrived by train, and we all went out to Sugarloaf, a quaint village filled with artisan crafts stores of all kinds: clothes, magick shops, artworks, herbs, records, etc. We visited all the stores, but didn't buy much other than some fresh vegetables for dinner. We stopped by Donna's condo in Chester, NY to visit with her son and his fiancee who live with her, then back home so Donna could start dinner. Buck and I went out to the grocery store for a few things (he let me drive his BMW Z3 because his back was hurting) and when we came back we sat down to a meal of salad, stuffed artichokes, un-chicken parmagiana, portobello mushrooms stuffed with a broccoli rabe, angel hair pasta with tomato-vegetable sauce and ice cream for dessert.

Sunday we got up early to go to the New York Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo, NY, only the second time I've been to this particular event (although I've been to the Texas Ren Faire many times). Here we are at the front gate:



The first show we saw were some aerial acrobatics, like those my friend Kerry can do, in the context of a play about the tales of Scheherazade:



The best thing about going to the Faire was that now that I have a job in front of me, I felt a little more comfortable spending money (which makes it so much more fun!) I bought several things at various shops, including a gorgeous purple leather mask that reminded me of Neil Gaiman's characterization of Death of the Endless from Sandman (I also got an ankh to complete the image), a pewter talisman for poets and writers (appropriate for someone starting a writing job), a new sterling silver talisman of a seven-pointed faery star, and a replacement pair of goddess earrings I had bought the last Faire that I subsequently lost in the fire of 2007. I also bought a pair of lace-up leather bracers, or wrist guards, for Polina.

We also saw the glassblowing demonstration, which is always a fan favorite - here they are just finishing a small flower vase:



Kyle's new boyfriend Mike joined us for the day and we saw a comedy show starring two nuns called "Hey Nunnie Nunnie!" that was quite funny. We also saw the jousting and a bit of the stunt show. Interestingly, this year the Faire was rebranded as a "family festival" so unlike past events, you could not buy sharpened swords or other weapons (although swords for stage play or display were available) nor could you buy any whips, floggers, handcuffs or other kinky items that have been available in years past.

We came home and ate leftovers from the huge meal the night before, and sat up to watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of my all-time favorite movies which has a quasi-poly theme and generated a lively discussion into the wee hours of the morning.

Monday we actually buckled down to get some work done on our work for various poly groups, including Open Love NY. We started working on recording a timeline of polyamory for the Polyamory Leadership Network, and the bylaws for OLNY. I also tried to go back to get that wind chime gong, but the store was closed for Labor Day, so I gave Buck the money to pick it up for me later. We worked on things for as long as we could, then Simon, Kyle and I drove back to Wayne so they could take a bus back into Manhattan.

Here's a picture of our group at our lunch on Monday:

Building intentional families

I was rather disappointed with Darren Aronofsky's latest work, The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, who both garnered Oscar nominations for acting. While the acting was certainly fine, the whole movies just seemed to plod along in scene after scene of a pathetic aging wrestler. I understand that's what the movie is about, but I expected a more original telling from the director who gave us Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain. Maybe his updated take on RoboCop will be better.

On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie, The Secret Life of Bees starring Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah. It was a very funny and touching story about a young white girl who finds love and a new life among a family of Black women in 1960s South Carolina. To me, it spoke volumes about the need we all have to be loved, and how we build intentional families based on love. While my first attempt to do this here in New Jersey has not been entirely successful, I am hopeful that the experience will be beneficial for the future.

When I think about why my family did not work out, I can't really say I'd do anything differently if I had to do it all over again. In hindsight, I recognize that we came together when I was in a period of great volatility in my life, figuring out elements of my core identity and personal values on the fly. Ultimately, as much as I would have wished otherwise, my self-actualization caused a deep incompatibility that we could not overcome. I'm sure we all have wished at one time or another that people didn't have to change in ways that drive us apart, but sometimes there's no way to avoid it. We all have the right to live how we feel is best for ourselves, and everyone else is free to decide if they want to come along or not. If I decide to build a new intentional family, I'm sure I won't be dealing with the same magnitude of change in myself as before, but perhaps I'll have to deal with it coming from other people instead.

But before I can even think about doing anything along that line, my first priority is finding a job and becoming self-sufficient again. Aside from the jobs in Princeton and Jersey City, I now have a lead on a job in Hackensack, which should result in an interview next week. I am definitely seeing more opportunities out there, so perhaps it will not be long before I find something and get back to a normal life, although I'm not looking forward to normalizing my whacked-out sleep schedule.

Poly picnic in Bridgewater

I got a second-round interview for the customer relationship management company based in Israel. The hiring manager is the UK, so I have to get up early on Monday for that call. This job would be based in Jersey City, so this would be one job opportunity that would not require me to relocate just yet. We'll see what happens.

Today I went out to Bridgewater, NJ to Duke Island Park for a picnic with an older polyamorous crowd I don't get to see very often. My friend Adele, who comes to my women's poly group, is a central figure, so she invited me. Most of the others I met either at the Poly Leadership Summit back in March ("Poly Leadership Summit 2009" - March 3, 2009) or at the one Thursday night poly munch I attended back in February ("Limerancing through life" - Feb. 27, 2009). Adele was actually at that meeting in February, but we didn't know each other by sight back then.

The weather was pretty crappy but we had reserved a covered pavilion, so it was reasonably comfortable. I brought some tortilla chips and organic salsa, and baked some of my famous Ghirardelli triple-chocolate brownies, which were tremendously popular, along with Adele's peach and blueberry pie.



Here's a picture of Adele and our friend Bill - he was a volunteer at Poly Pride back in October ("Poly public relations" - Oct. 5, 2008) and also marched in the Pride Parade ("My first pride parade!" - June 29, 2009) yet somehow we've never actually been introduced, although Polina knows him. He's a former analyst in the intelligence industry, which is a fancy way of saying he used to be a spy.



Adele and her husband Lance also brought their six-year-old Haley and she was a delight to watch. She couldn't stop making comments about my height! She dragged Adele out from under shelter to splash around in the mud with another Michelle, who is in a triad with a fellow (Rob?) and a black woman named Stephanie (who recognized me from a PolyNYC meeting more than a year ago):



Here's a picture of me and Haley - she got really tired and grumpy at the end of the event, so she didn't feel much like smiling. She reminded me of Pearl at that age, who also used to get the same way. Or maybe it was her coming down from the sugar rush of eating three of my brownies. But I think I look cute in this picture, at least:



"Miss Polyamory" Beki Rosenthal called my friend Mark Van Pelt during the picnic, and I got to talk with her a little bit on his cell phone. I got to know both of them during the Leadership Summit since Beki was one of the online participants I handled during the event and Mark helped me with communications.

Polina also called me on my cell using Skype from Switzerland during the picnic, and we had a nice chat about chocolate fondue, foggy mountains, and video blogging. She comes back to New York tomorrow and goes straight to college from the airport. I'm very thankful she convinced me to start using Skype - it's been a wonderful tool to keep us connected while she's been on vacation. Plus I even had a chance to chat with her Dutch boyfriend Peter, who visited with them for a few days. But I'm certainly ready for her to be closer to home so we don't have to deal with the six-hour time difference when we talk.

All in all, it was a fun day, despite the wet weather. Tomorrow I'll go to Costco and buy some more brownie mix, since I've run out.

An embarrassing first date

So the job search is ramping up to high gear of late, which is a welcome distraction while Polina is away in Switzerland. However, she has been very good about calling me on Skype and videochatting with me regularly, so I don't miss her too too much.

The interview in Princeton went very well. The company is really in the middle of nowhere, smack dab in a giant corporate complex about 18 miles from the New Jersey Turnpike. They have a big trading floor that you can see behind glass as soon as you walk in the lobby, and the rest of the offices are open desks with no walls whatsoever. Not really my preferred environment, but I can't really be picky about that. My recruiter who set up the interview followed up afterwards and reported this morning that they really liked me, and thought I was a good candidate, but they are just starting their search and they want to see some more people. This is actually okay for me because I have a couple other interviews I want to explore before I'm required to make a decision.

The Midtown PR agency let me know they were not going to offer me a position, so that's a dead end there. I'm waiting to hear more from a phone interview I had last Thursday since the interviewer went on vacation for a week after she talked to me. Then I have another phone interview on Tuesday for a new position being created by an insurance brokerage company, one that reports directly to a CEO. That's a pretty exciting opportunity, so we'll see how that pans out next week.

In other personal news, I had my first date with someone new since I started dating Polina almost a year ago. My friend Vivek, who runs the cricket meetup group I participate in ("My first cricket game" - July 8, 2009) asked me out to Lolita Bar on the Lower East Side near my old burlesque studio. I planned to go directly after my Women's Poly Meetup Group on Tuesday, and I did, but we ran quite long so I turned up almost an hour late. It also started pouring down rain when I was about two blocks away, so I got drenched and showed up looking like a drowned rat. To add to my embarrassment, he was dressed nicely in a suit and dress shirt, and I was wearing just a t-shirt, skirt and sandals. He seemed to take it all in stride and we had a nice time talking about all manner of topics. He lives in Jersey City and runs his own mergers and acquisitions firm with a partner, matching up companies that do IT outsourcing in India. We'll try to get the group together on Tuesday after my phone interview to have another cricket practice, and maybe I can get him to go with me to Brick Lane Curry House, which was recently featured on Man vs. Food, to eat some spicy food.

I've been captivated lately by Regina Spektor's last album, Begin to Hope, which I checked out of the library a few months back and listened to, but wasn't impressed with it at the time. This time, her quirky lyrics and quasi-electronic folk music have caught on with me. Maybe I will find a copy of her latest release, Far, and give that a listen as well. I am also now more than halfway through my collection of Ranma 1/2 DVDs, just starting Season 3 now. Even after all this time, they still make me laugh. Maybe after I'm done with those, I'll finally get to watching the first two seasons of The L Word, which is the only remaining TV series I own on DVD that I haven't watched yet.

All for now. Hopefully I will have some good news on my job search the next time I post.

Job search update

First off, a quick update on my busy job interviewing schedule, which I haven't mentioned in a while. I had a decent interview with three vice presidents at a large PR firm in Midtown on Wednesday. This firm is very big on social media, and actually requires all its employees to be on Twitter (which I'm not, by the way). The job is pretty much the same things I've been doing the past nine years, so it would be more of the same, and in the same place as I was before. Not terribly exciting, but certainly not the worst job in the world.

The second interview on Wednesday was with a recruiter who has found me an opportunity with a large energy company in Princeton, NJ that is interested in talking to me. He just wanted to get some more background and meet me in person so he could see if I present myself well, and he said I passed on that score. So next Wednesday I'll drive down to Princeton and start interviewing directly with the company itself.

The third interview was a phone interview on Thursday, and it was a large company based in Israel that does customer experience improvement. The job would be based in Jersey City, and some days in NYC, plus some work from home. This would probably be my least favorite job opportunity because it's a little outside my bailiwick, but of course, I'll take anything at this point.

Friday I woke up relatively early to prepare to go into the city for one last visit with Penny before she leaves for Switzerland for a week-long vacation and then college. Since I had made plans to see a movie with my friend Angel that night, and Penny was working the last day of her job in the city, it was an opportunity I didn't want to pass up even though I thought when we parted Tuesday it was going to be our last meeting for a while.

I had been thinking about what I might get her as a college going-away present, my used mini-fridge notwithstanding. She gave me an idea when she recently expressed how much she was going to miss me, her friends, and the poly community in NYC. I decided to give her something that would help her keep all that in mind while she's away in school - a digital picture frame with photos from our adventures together this summer. So I went out to Target, picked out a Kodak frame, came home and set it up, loaded it with about 70 photos spanning the period from our cooking party ("Cooking party" - Jan. 24, 2009, the first time she visited my apartment and my first picture of her) through last Monday's Poly Cocktail Hour. I also included random photos like those of my stuffed animals and me in the dress I wore to her New Year's Eve party, pictures of our friends and a few others of us that have never been shown before. Then I repacked the frame and wrapped the box before hopping the train into the city.

I got to her workplace almost an hour early due to the train schedule, so I wandered around the Financial District until it was time for her to leave. Here's a photo of the New York Stock Exchange Building, where I sat for a while and read a book:



Here's a photo of Polina working with the dogs at Ciao Bow Wow:



Her ex-boyfriend Louis (whom I met at the New Year's Party) joined us when it was time to leave work, and we went to a nearby Borders Bookstore to buy some travel guides for her vacation. Then we went to grab a bite to eat at a cafe, and I gave her the present before I had to leave to meet with Angel.

Angel had invited me to a Meetup.com group of queer people who like movies, which certainly describes me. We were supposed to have a group of people to see the 7:20 p.m. showing of The Time Traveler's Wife, but by the time we got there, that show was sold out. So me, Angel and her straight friend Victor bought tickets to see the next showing at 8:20 p.m. Since we had some time to kill, we went to the Coffee Shop on the west side of Union Square and had a bite to eat. Victor and Angel sing opera together at an opera company. I love Angel's hair - it reminds me of the giant block of stibnite on display at the American Museum of Natural History, pictured below ("The week in review"- July 26, 2007):




Unfortunately, we dallied a little too long and by the time we got back, the theater was almost full so we had to sit near the front of the theater and look straight up at the screen. This might have contributed to my inability to emotionally connect to the movie, so I'll reserve judgement until I see it again, if I ever do.

I did have some more relationship stuff to write about, but since it's getting so late now, I think I'll save that for my next post.

Polys in the wild

It's been quite an eventful 48 hours with Polina, and following on the heels of our Great Adventure Shindig a week ago, we definitely have made the most of our dwindling time together. In four days she leaves for a week-long family vacation overseas, and then goes directly to college for band camp. That means we probably won't see each other again until Sept. 12, when she's taking me to her sister's wedding. But we've had some very good talks recently and I think we understand what's needed if we want this relationship to weather our extended periods of separation while she's at school.

Friday I brought Yoshi into the Honda dealer to have the engine problem looked at, and it turned out to be a major repair of almost $2,000 requiring a multi-day stay, so I drove a CR-V loaner all weekend. Saturday night I had dinner with my family, and we completed our Kill Bill series by watching the second movie. I think that's all the Tarantino I'm going to get out of them, but that's okay - I'm not a big fan of any of his other movies besides Pulp Fiction, which they've already seen.

Sunday morning Penny called me and we chatted for a while until Ryan showed up at her place for a visit - he came to the first part of our Great Adventure Shindig at my apartment ("Great Adventure Shindig" - Aug. 5, 2009). I packed for an overnight stay and joined them around 5 p.m. to hang out while Penny tended to laundry and helped her mom and grandmother work on a scrapbook for her sister's upcoming wedding.

Ryan, as you might recall, is a polyamorous guy who is dating a monogamous woman named Beth. We decided the best way to help him was to invite Beth to Monday's Poly Cocktail Hour so she could see for herself poly people in their natural environment, so to speak. After dinner with Penny's family, we three went upstairs so that Ryan could give us an improptu lesson in shibari (warning: link contains nudity). He performed this lovely tortoise shell tie on Penny (who of course kept her pajamas on):



He also demonstrated an ankle tie on me and performed some light S&M on both of us using a plastic rod from the window mini-blinds in Penny's parents' room. I know this sounds very kinky and probably weird to some people, but it was really just innocent play, and involved a lot of instructional talking about etiquette, role-playing and boundaries. Plus, we couldn't really do anything too loud or involved since Penny's parents and grandmother were downstairs working on the scrapbook. They even called for her once while she had her wrists tied to her ankles and we had to quickly untie her so she could go downstairs.

After we put the ropes away we sat up and watched an episode of HBO's True Blood on DVD before Ryan had to go home. Penny and I got ready for bed and watched six more episodes in bed together on her laptop until about 5:30 a.m. before we finally stopped to go to sleep. Then her mom woke us at 8:30 a.m. to ask about something, but we went back to sleep until about 11:30 a.m. before we finally got up.

We spent a good portion of Monday afternoon looking at her family photo albums and cleaning up her room, which has been just this side of a disaster area for as long as I've known her. We hung up all her clothes, sorted out rubbish from recyclables, got everything off the floor and vacuumed. Now her room will be more presentable for any guests who need to use it while she's away at college:



Ryan came over after work and we followed him into the city to pick up Beth from her studio right at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. We had a bite to eat at an organic grocery store and proceeded to Poly Cocktail Hour at China 1 Restaurant. We met several first-time attendees early on, plus our friends Barbara and Joe, Simon, Lyndell, Bill, Diana, Rob ("Karaoke virgin no more!" - July 27, 2009), plus many other familiar faces. Far from feeling threatened and insecure, Beth seemed to have a very good time hanging out with us:



The event was quite successful this month, and they soon had to open a second room to accommodate the crowd. Polina and I spent the latter part of the evening participating in some group cuddling and giving/receiving massages with various people:



Ryan and Beth left around 11 p.m. while Polina and I stayed until about midnight, saying hi to the owner Alan when he showed up late. We said goodbye to everybody and drove to Ryan and Beth's apartment in East Rutherford for a quick visit and to see some of their collection of erotic and BDSM toys. We got home around 1:30 a.m. and had some tea while I showed Penny some of my shoebox photos from my former life that were rescued from the fire of 2005 before going to bed.

After breakfast the next morning we finished the last two episodes of True Blood and we got a text from Ryan, saying that Beth had a great time with us the night before, and that "progress was being made" in resolving their relationship issues. It's encouraging to believe that their relationship will be stronger now that Beth has seen what poly people are really like, instead of what she thinks we're like.

I drove Penny back to Staten Island to pick up the things I'd left in her house from the night before and then drove her to her doctor's appointment. Then I went to the White Castle near her house and bought a baker's dozen of hamburgers and jalapeno cheeseburgers to eat on the way home. Once home, I went to pick up Yoshi and now I've got to get ready for tomorrow's trip to the city where I have two job interviews and plan to visit Simon to work on his marketing stuff.

Getting married

My friend Simon was out walking yesterday on Christopher Street and he took a picture of a lesbian couple getting married in a park:



It's such a lovely statement of love and the fight for equality that I just wanted to share it. And although I don't have any intentions of getting married again, I will continue to speak out for those who are denied the right to call themselves married if that's what they seek.