Orson Welles on Better Living Through Adversity...

I had to write this down before I forget it. Its just what I mean about thriving under adversity. It makes for stronger, better people with more character.

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Thank you Orson Welles, for the great quote.

More Corset Woes

Wearing a corset 23/7 means that I sometimes (read...often) have little mishaps that require repair. I am in serious need of a better backup corset for when I have to repair the main corset. Well, I have been wearing the back up corset because my main corset is having some trouble with turning steels at the back, which gouge into my skin and cause unbelievable pain. My husband calls me the corset terminator. I have now broken the busk in my backup corset, and having tried to repair this problem in a previous corset, I know that I have to do this in a delicate manner otherwise I will render the corset completely unwearable. I have reinforced the front of the corset with 1/2 inch wide double thick steels in each pocket and then an additional two of those in each side of the busk. Now I have to sew it all back together and see what happens. If anyone reads this, wish me luck...

My daily dose of adversity in the form of...corset training

So as if all of the other things aren't enough, I add a little extra adversity to my daily life by trying to function while wearing a corset? You would think I love the toil and trouble. This is probably going to be a boring, just for me kind of post, so unless you are a corset enthusiast, I'd skip it.

Actually, the corset makes me feel better, believe it or not. It is my protective shell. The stiffer and more immobilizing, the better. I prefer no bend in the torso whatsoever. I am in a constant struggle to find the right corset, the right style, the right fit. Of course, if you are going to attempt to wear a corset in what enthusiasts call "23/7" you MUST have a custom fit corset. This is not as easy as one would think. I have been wearing a corset for a few years now and have now worn corsets made by several makers and it seems like its just a neverending process of finding just the right one.
I dont plan on writing a whole bunch about my corset wear now, mabye later. But as with other things, I want to write down what I think when I think of it. I have just been looking at some photos of me in older corsets and it suddenly occurred to me that I am happier and do better when my corset is leather. This might sound like just a preference, but I really feel prettier, sexier, and more motivated to train my waist when I see it in leather. Feeling pretty is a huge motivator for me. If I dont feel beautiful I have a hard time motivating myself to do anything. I swear I'm not a total narcisist (sp?), or maybe I am, I dont know. All I know is that the smooth feeling of running my hand down the side of a leather corset to feel my shape is just a happy feeling I cant get with anything else. My husband and I discussed this more than a year ago, and decided that all of my future corsets should be leather, but for some reason he changed his mind. I guess it was the expense. He used to be more involved in my corsetting, but seems to have lost interest, so now I have to do all of the lacing myself, which does take some of the fun out of it for me. I liked the closeness of him lacing me. I need a real job that pays well so that I can afford leather again...sigh.

This post was published to Better Living Through Adver... at 5:21:49 AM 5/31/2010
An explanation of sorts...


Two posts in one day...this will likely be the only time this happens, unless I am extremely inspired or bored. One comes more than the other.
After looking at my very first blog post I realized that the title might not make sense without a little background. I chose the title after reconnecting with a friend I’d had a falling out with for many years. I came back from the dead so to speak, and many did not expect me to. I think most expected me to continue living my life like a speeding train waiting to crash and burn and later it would be talked about as some inevitibilty. Of course, I am the kind of person that strives even harder when someone has the expectation that I will fail.
It seems like my entire life has had some sort of adversity. Someone told me that its because I’m a Scorpio…I tend to think that being born to the parents I have, it was probably inevitable, regardless of my date of birth. My mother took us to a hippie commune where we lived for a few years, and nowadays when people think of hippies and the 60’s in general they think peace, love and good vibrations or whatever. What they don’t seem to remember is that hippies were social outcasts, people HATED them! People wanted to actually do you harm for being different. Sort of odd now that I think of how the same statement could apply to my teenage years in the punk scene. My mother and her friends were seriously bucking the system by ‘dropping out’ and going to live in the wilderness. The communities surrounding this wilderness were not exactly happy that ‘the hippies’ had moved in. There were FBI raids on our land and brutalities that most people only see on TV. The FBI agents scared the shit out of me as a little kid. I was under the age of 6, but don’t remember my exact age when I got interrogated. Without another adult present, without my family. My interrogator scared me so bad that to this day I remember his name: Barry Lawson. He tried to get me to tell things about my mother that weren’t true and threatened that I would be taken from her, etc. Of course these days this kind of thing might happen, but people would be pissed about it at least. Back then, if you looked different you might as well have just checked your rights at the door. Ok…so now I think on that, and it’s probably STILL true. I have memories of SWAT teams pointing their guns at children, beating and slamming the bodies of our friends inside car doors, and my mother imploring me to be quiet as we hid inside the Wolf Creek Inn (a now historic hotel in Wolf Creek, Oregon) watching through a basement grate at the violence happening outside. Ok…I am rambling off of the point that I had wanted to make…it being that I grew up very differently than your average American, and that made it difficult for me to fit in a lot of the time. I have always felt like I am swimming against the current. I guess you can just say I am a survivor of many things: unenlightened parenting (though aren’t we all?), drug overdoses, kidnapping, rape, torture, heroin addiction (13 years clean, thank you), PTSD, and I am still trying to survive marriage and motherhood. I seriously struggle with the last sentence turning over and over whether to leave it and I probably will because despite the discomfort it causes me, it illuminates a small amount of the adversity I speak of and somehow writing it makes it less powerful and reminds me that life’s seemingly large problems are only bumps in the road and they will not crush me. I am so, so fortunate to still be here to write these words…
EDIT: The photo is a LIFE Magazine cover that pictures the commune I grew up on. Yes, they did a story on us; cool right? And no, I am not pictured...I was a year old at the time.

May 31, 2010

As good a place to start as any...

Today my husband is home from work and is listening to old Beatles music, something I would never choose, but still seem to enjoy. The song “Yellow Submarine” brings back memories of when I was a little girl. I loved this song and the movie. I loved to watch the escape from the Blue Meanies (click here to see the whole movie on Google), and I would sing along. I sang yellow submarine like it was a nursery rhyme, which is what I thought it was. I could not imagine why someone would make something that great for grown-ups, it had to be for kids. I thought Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was the prettiest song ever when I was three. Maybe because I could imagine all of the things described clearly, having already had a massive lsd trip when I was two.
My mother had taken me to a friend’s house who happened to be a drug dealer. She and and him were chit-chatting away happily when my mother said, ‘whats that in her mouth?’ at which point her friend leapt off the couch (this is my mom’s part of the story, as I have no recollection of this part of the story) at the speed of light only able to say oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…My mother was able to get out of him that it had been his stash of super powerful 4-way LSD tabs…7 of them. I ate all of them. That’s 28 hits people, in a two year old. And as far as I understand, the content of each tab in micrograms and in purity was much higher back then (1970). So you could say that I was flying pretty high within 30 minutes or so. Too late for stomach pumping, etc., though to hear my mother tell it, I was an expert at finding drugs in anyone’s home and if they had lost it years ago, chances are I would find it and eat it within minutes of arriving. My mother had to stop taking me to her friend’s houses and only invite them to her home…but alas, we still had instances of drinking Clorox, an entire bottle of cherry flavored pink medicine and who knows what else.
I know it will be hard for some people to swallow, but I actually remember bits and pieces from that ‘trip’. I may elaborate on that some other time, as I think that writing it down might cause me to remember more. I also wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I remember things from before I was even able to talk. There are some people who think it’s impossible to have pre-verbal memories, but I can tell them without a doubt that they are wrong. I can remember the entire layout of our home when I was only a year old. We lived in Forest Knolls in Marin County, California, USA. I remember the trunk below the window at the top of the stairs. My mother would climb out of that window to sit on the roof and sun herself. I could climb the trunk and go out with her. I remember discovering gravity when I set my slice of banana down on the slightly sloped roof and watching it roll away as if it had a life of its own and had just decided it did not want to be eaten by me. So I let it go. I remember that house burning. I remember a lot of things, but I won’t write them now. The mood just struck me and I figured this is as good a place to start as any.
For anyone coming across this blog: As I wrote in some previous notes, I am mostly writing here to compile my thoughts. There will be no attempt at chronological order. If you happen to read it, please feel free to ask questions, as I hope they will help jar my memory or cause me to think in a direction not previously thought of.

KKinDK