“Your first reaction is usually the right one.” - Japanese Proverb

Sometimes it feels like I’m starting over; as if there’s a door before me, barely within my reach, my arm stretched out, hand open, fingers which lightly grasp the shining brass knob as I lean in and slowly begin to turn as I push forward. The door creaks as it opens. All I can see beyond the door is darkness – unknown of what will happen if I find the courage to take that first step into what I know somewhere deep inside me is a place I must go if I am to survive, and yet, there is fear and apprehension – but the need to walk thru this door overwhelms any lingering hesitation, and so, with my eyes open, I breach the threshold and slip into the uncharted waters of uncertainty.

Change is always the most difficult circumstance we ever have to cope with. We tend to become comfortable with settings and situations, even when they become self-destructive, and we usually linger and hang on to the notion, or perhaps it’s a belief that things will somehow get better and magically revert back to a place where we felt better about the whole thing. Life is rarely that giving. If things or situations change, ultimately the decision lays with each of us to either adapt or continue living with whatever it is that’s causing us distress. That’s not to say that change is always bad, but sometimes our perception of change causes us to view it as something beyond our control, and most of us, myself included, don’t generally like things beyond our control.

But the whole world is beyond our control! We are as much masters of our own destiny as the moth dancing around the flame; drawn to the fire for reasons it doesn’t understand, yet it is always compelled to do so – without reason, without purpose – yet like gravity, we all eventually find ourselves falling out of control into a place where change is the only certainty. Something is going to change, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Some things tho are within our control, even if it’s only the illusion of control which pacifies the raging emotions within us. This idea of control has been something weighing on my mind quite heavily lately, and it specifically revolves around geishaland.

I recently posted here about writing being the medium I choose to express my art, but I find myself feeling very much like the round peg trying to fit into the square hole lately, and much of that has to do with what I wrote here about my feelings surrounding writing about the erotic and my decision to move that content to a password protected area of my site. This was not a decision I came to lightly, and much of the conflict I felt over making such a change had to do with my roots, or better put, the well from which my public journal grew – because for me, this has as much to do with the public as it has to do with the private. The two are separate but never divided.

From the practical point of view, moving a year’s worth of erotic posts to a private section of my site meant that all of those entries fell by the wayside of every search engine looking, and I knew that would happen – yet there are many other entries such as toy reviews or articles about female sexuality which are technically about sex, but not quite the same as erotic writing. So, I still now find myself straddling these two worlds again – is this a sex blog or personal blog? My first instinct is that I no longer want to be known as a sex blog, but as they say, breaking up is hard to do, especially when you’re still writing about sex, right? But why must we insist on taking everything in this world and compartmentalizing it and sticking a label on it and making everything so neat and well defined? And even tho I’m personally drawn to such order in many other areas of my life, I find that this place, that my art, my expression, is different.

On my about page there is a line which reads:

“… life is about vibrant shades of color and that life is lived best when we wander outside the lines….”

I find myself wanting to increasingly wander outside those lines.

A good chunk of my afternoon was spent having a long conversation a cyberfriend, and while what we chatted about really isn’t important, what is relevant is how diametrically opposed we are when it comes to the very basic idea of keeping an online journal, as well as profound differences in the particular bends in our kinks, but be that as it may, we’re still friends, and yet his journal is clear and well defined about its purpose and place. I’m not so lucky.

You see, as I said to my cyberfriend today:

“I’m just a mess of feminine contradictions…”

Maybe some find confusion in those contradictions, and yet there are those who continually tell me that they find comfort here, that my words have carried some measure of weight and purpose for them, even if they were simply whatever random idea managed to escape my mind and find its way out into the world – but I only know how I feel after I’ve written something, so I can’t say for sure what impact it has elsewhere.

On my entry here, which is private, I received a comment from a friend about the weight of my words on her, and I’d like to repost part of my response to her because it’s somewhat relevant.

“You see, ‘lazy geisha’ itself is an idea. It’s an idea that all women are beautiful, that it is the struggles we face in living this life as women which help define that beauty; far beyond the limits of what’s considered physically attractive, tho that’s certainly a part of what makes us beautiful, but also, the things we keep inside ourselves. The secrets we keep, the secrets we share with very few, the secrets known only to us about our private worlds.”

Perhaps that’s the real truth about why I still do this; because I still believe in that idea, and I still believe my voice is still relevant when speaking about this idea – even as I struggle to break with my past and forge a new future for myself in the great morass of cyberia.

While this wasn’t what was on my mind this morning when I wrote this here, it wound up being what was on my mind as the sun faded into darkness and as I watched the milky white moon rise above the trees and take its place in the heavens. So, maybe I am a mess of contradictions. So what?

Part of what lulled these deep thoughts out of me today was some new inbound traffic from this site called Blogged. I have no idea how my site wound up being listed there, but there it was, and I thought it was kind of cool until I realized that I was again listed as a sex blog. Not that it’s a bad thing, it’s just not where I want to be, and also, it’s kind of unfair for someone to waste their time coming to my journal looking for pictures of titties or stories about orgies when I spend my time writing about my life and my own warped view of reality, such as it is – so I managed to get it changed to the category called Personal Blogs, because that’s really what geishaland is; a personal blog – and again from my about page:

“It’s a blending of sex and technology, philosophy and logic, and ancient traditions with hip sensibilities all to create a uniquely cultured and distinctive voice. My goal is to defy conventional wisdom and challenge the way you think about things by engaging you on a wide array of topics and ideas.”

And I can live with that.

I’m still not completely comfortable with how the world always wants to attach labels to everything and anything, and I kind of like being undefined anyway, but I suppose all it really means is that I’m not ready to color within the lines just yet. Maybe I never will be.

The New York Times had an interesting article about blogging that I’d encourage anyone who keeps a blog to check out here.