My Weekend Henna
So my girlfriend Bec76 did some beautiful henna on me this weekend, and I documented the process in photos for those who’ve never done it.
I frickin’ love henna, since it’s like a mutating tattoo, and the process is a strangely personal one – having someone draw on your skin is surprisingly intense. And when you have someone who’s really good at it like Bec is, you wind up hauling around some very much pretty. (Note that Bec is available for parties, weddings, and bar mitzvahs, if you live in the Cleveland areas.)
The process starts with Bec using a tiny pastry squeezer to draw small lines of henna-mud onto my hand. This is what stains the skin, and you have to be careful – the henna tends to draw heat from the skin, making you cold, and then you have to be very careful in the first few hours not to smear or touch it until it dries. (And even after.)
You can see the thickness of the henna here, which is a crust on your hand, so you have to keep all body parts absolutely still. It’s kind of a trick.
This time, Bec used a gold paint to stylize and seal in the henna – which didn’t really work very well. The problem is that the gold leaf washes off in a day or two, and it’s only really there when the henna is still intensifying – and considering how much work it is to put on, it’s not really a good use of time.
Now that it’s gilded it looks pretty, but normally what Bec would do would be to seal in the henna with a lemon-sugar-water combination. (Otherwise, it would brush off too easily, so we need something to stick it to the skin.) This gilding took about an hour, whereas brushing on the water is a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, the gild is much better at protecting the henna while it leaches into the skin, so what she’s going to look at is finding a clear version of this that’s kind of like a shellac – easily added, but tight.
Next, we wrap the henna in a protective coating so that it won’t rub off while I sleep. Say hello to Mister Socko!
And because you people seem obsessed with my sock-related photos, here is a picture of my foot. I don’t know why you’d think it would be anything else.
Now, henna normally lasts a week or two, but here’s the trick to my henna: I’m fucking obsessive about keeping the henna on until I absolutely have to. I spent much of Saturday typing with my hand in a sock, and left this crusty bit on for about twenty hours. Doing so is a real pain. For comparison, Gini’s henna (which was, admittedly, on her back) was off in about ten, and was pretty destroyed by the morning. You can already see where mine flaked off, though… But since my last two hennae have lasted almost a month, it’s a small sacrifice.
When you finally scrape the henna off, the design will be very light, as it is here. It will darken somewhat. The darkness of the henna depends on the thickness of the skin. In thin-skinned areas, like a back or a shoulder, it will be about this dark when it’s done. For thick-skinned areas like the pads of my fingers, it will get almost black.
And this is the henna as it looked two days later, taken this morning:
It’s beautiful stuff. If it wasn’t such an absorption of my girlfriend’s time, I’d have this on all the damn time. It makes me feel pretty.
New Story! "iTime," At Redstone SF!
Ever wonder what happens when Macintosh develops the first personal time-travel device, and it lands in the hands of rich college kids? Well, wonder no more, for my story iTime has finally been published at Redstone SF – and you can read it for free!
An excerpt:
I’d say that my roommate Rochelle had to have the latest in technology, but that would be incorrect. Rochelle had to have the most expensive thing, and the trendiest thing, but it barely mattered what her accessories did so long as they didn’t clash with her cheerleader’s outfit. When she got a personal biometric scanner, I wanted to use the data to generate a customized probiotic treatment to optimize the bacteria in her lower intestine; she used it to send scans of her boobs to cute boys.
As assigned dorm mates, all we had in common was our love of hardware. That was why I was the first person who got to see her new iTime. It was made of white enameled metal, shaped like an old stopwatch, smooth as an egg except for the plug-timer on top and the recessed nav-wheel on the front.
“You got one?” I asked. “Isn’t there a waiting list?”
“Daddy paid four hundred thousand on eBay for an unbonded four-hour model,” she said, puffing out her chest. “He said it was worth it to get me something that was guaranteed to bring up my grades. I begged him for the eight-hour version, but he didn’t want to clean out my college savings.”
I reached out to touch it; it flickered away underneath my fingertips like a hologram.
“Oh, that’s the safety feature!” Rochelle squeed, clapping her hands in joy. “The salesman said it was bonded to my personal timeline; it doesn’t really exist for anyone but me. Otherwise, you could do all sorts of nasty things to me if you found it.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. He tried to explain, and I got bored. But ask me that question tomorrow, and I can rewind time back four hours to before you asked me, and everything would happen again just the way it did before I rewound. Except that this time, I’d read all the instruction manuals and stuff before I got here – so when we finally re-met and you asked me what things the iTime could do, I’d know…..”
The full tale is over here – and if you like it (and only if you like it), do me a favor and post a link to it on Twitter or Facebook or, I dunno, I hear LiveJournal’s still kicking around. But hopefully you will like it. Enjoy.
Why FetLife?
A couple of people have complained about me moving my more sexual essays to FetLife. They don’t want to start a new account, they don’t like the ads, they don’t want to potentially get messages from skeevy people. All of which are valid complaints.
The answer is, “Then don’t read.” I’m not trying to advertise FetLife or anything, but the essays I’m writing there are of a different quality.
Let me explain: the essays I write for this blog here are polished for public consumption. I spend a bit of time on not just the content, but on how it’ll be perceived, making sure that they’re good enough that if a stranger who loathed me read it (which is pretty much a given) that my meaning would still be clear. I check them for clarity and correctness. When I fail to be clear (as I have with the Gay In YA post, which I’m still considering), it bothers me considerably.
There’s a lot of time and effort put into the posts here. Because I am, fundamentally, writing for an audience.
FetLife essays, however, are where I’m tracking an increasingly changing sexual landscape, where I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. I’m starting to experiment with dominance, with being more open about my sexuality (not just reciting what I’m doing in a humorous way, as I’ve always done, but actually acknowledging the turn-on). I’m opening up new territories.
That’s fucking difficult enough to do by itself, let alone without having a bunch of strangers walking in and going, “Hey, why don’t you stick to movie reviews?” or “That’s a sick thought, you shouldn’t have it” or “Me and my seventy friends over here have analyzed your desires and we’re all having a coffee klatch about what’s wrong with you.”
I’m not excusing myself from the idea of being politically correct, mind you – but as Poppy Brite said, “I’m still figuring it out for myself, and I’d like to be able to chronicle these things without feeling guilty about it.” It’s easier to write about such things in a place that’s specifically designed for exploring such areas.
And you don’t have to read it. I’ve been asked to remind the people who don’t read FetLife a whole lot when I’ve updated, so they can go look. This is not me taunting you, this is me reacting in response to some people’s requests. And I’m happy to put up breadcrumbs.
I’m not saying you can’t come view it. You can. Come get an account, friend me – I’m a friend-slut, I just want to know who you are – but what I’m doing over there is, at its core, very different from what I’m doing here. It’s a smaller stage for a different audience, and purchasing the tickets is cheap…
…But just realize it’s a different venue. I’m learning. I’m going to make more mistakes as I learn more lessons. And it’s my right not to want to broadcast those mistakes to an indifferent crowd.