I can't wait for school to be over

I'm just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel: my extremely busy spring semester at school has one week left, and I only have 1 more novel to read, 2 small reaction papers to write, 2 more critiques to finish, and 1 longer essay to finish. I know that sounds like a lot, but it is dramatically less than I've had all semester. I've scaled a mountain of work, and now I feel like I'm beginning to hit the down-slope.

Which means: I can have more time to play with my very favorite boy, and I can see kinkster friends again, and I can have something resembling a life for three short months.

In terms of creative work, this has been an interesting semester. It is the first time my sexual identity has really started to bleed over into my creative work, in some interesting ways. My misadventures of January seem to have inspired an interesting project, inspired somewhat by the surrealist (and masochistic) work of Bruno Schulz. However, instead of Schulz writing about Dominant women, a Dominant woman (moi) is writing about masochistic/submissive men. Schulz's muse (whom he often named 'Undula') now has her chance to speak. She's not exactly waxing poetical about submissive men. Instead, I'm writing about their elusiveness -- their emotional advance-and-retreat, the way they long for a stronger, more powerful woman but at the same time, they secretly loathe her.

I was on the receiving end of this in January: a masochist who wants to be dressed/made into a woman but also hates women (and hates himself). I realized after our brief, disastrous affair was over that his fetish was actually part-hate, part-love, and that perhaps this is what many fetishes do -- they combine dread and longing in a powerful, volatile way. People cannot resist what they desire, but they must rebel against it, undermine it, and even destroy it. What is upsetting and frustrating about this is the involvement of another person -- in this case, me -- who genuinely seeks connection and a relationship, not the satisfaction of mere fetish. I certainly have my fetishes, the symbols or objects that arouse me, and I certainly won't deny that there's a mixture of desire and dread in it for me, as well. But ultimately, I don't forget I'm exploring that with another person, a person whose humanity I still cherish and value. I happen to know the difference between a fetish and a man; sadly I ran across a man who conflated the fetish and the woman, and then couldn't deal with the woman in the end.

I also re-learned a lesson New York city teaches me over and over: look at what someone does, not what they say. People are so self-deluded they'll tell themselves (and, by extension, you) anything in order to squeeze themselves into a new, convenient, desired identity. But the trail is there, the crumbs have been dropped, if only you'll be smart enough to pick them up and follow them back to the truth.

What's lovely about my little pet is that he is exactly who he says he is. He doesn't have some secret other life that he's keeping from me, he comes to me exactly as he is, and we explore and experience that together. I have let him know how much I appreciate that -- in fact, I think my recent little misadventure had one and only one purpose: to prepare me for my pet, to make me ready to appreciate just how fantastic he is.

And perhaps the other, less direct purpose is this creative work -- it all came together in such an interesting way. First, the bad experience in January. Then, I read Bruno Schulz in February and started taking notes and writing bits of text. I also created a pastiche work based on Venus in Furs, Schulz's art, and some sketches by Max Ernst. Still working on all this -- and can't wait for the summer to have time to finish it -- and meanwhile, I'm doing a paper on the feminist writing of Christa Wolf.