Ferris Mx > Recent Status Updates

Apparently, Noelle, it is easier to incur a head wound and replace a bolt lock and banish all male relations than to utter six words: Get your feet off the table.

It took years for me to consider what is even the point of being "normal". The only reason to be "normal" is to make everyone else around you comfortable. Putting everyone else, even strangers, before yourself. As Fry from Futurama said: "What's the point of being normal when you can be abnormal?"

It was so nice, so good, to have sex with the person you were supposed to have sex with. Why had no one ever thought of this?

Anita's house still looked like it was trying to be a farmhouse. If anything, more farm details had been added. There was a rooster made of cast iron hanging in the living room. Maybe selecting "farm" as a theme all those years ago had given Anita purpose. Now wherever she went she could look for farm decor. Vaguely, Cora envied this. It seemed like a more peaceful obsession than, for instance, being loved.

I thought you were for nontraditional relationships. Isn't that your whole thing?
For me. I'm in favor of them for me. For you, no. You can't handle it.

"What did I miss?" she asked her colleague Lily, and Lily took her to see the new snack machine. The snacks were the same, but the technology had improved. There was now a more futuristic mechanism grabbing the food. There was a touch screen instead of a keypad. Prices had gone up twenty-five cents across the board.

Two days later, as she removed the cuttings, blue swept through her mind. She recalled a unit on cyanotype in one of her early art classes. It was a practical, pre-xerox, pre-digital way to duplicate documents - specifically blueprints - that had been rediscovered by artists in the 1960s.

I wondered if there had been a moment when I could have prevented what had happened. If such a moment had existed, I hadn't noticed it.

I've long thought that in business, the biggest opportunities are the ones that no one else has managed to define. Sometimes, the problem is so pervasive that it simply goes unnoticed. It's one thing to develop a solution but it's quite another to frame a product in a way that ordinary people can digest. You're right in that there's always resistance to change.

I sat between them feeling like a spare part. I seemed to have entered some sort of bromage-a-trois.

So, your point is that we haven't been proactive enough when it comes to inclusivity?
Exactly, and as a result, you're not connecting with your market.
It just does't feel like it's for *everyone*. You're going to have to try a little harder. Reach out to people. Make it friendlier.

I've never understood why people are so determined to gloss over the outright racism, colourism, ageism and featurism in dating. We always use the word "preferences". Why? Why not call it what it is? It's bigotry, pure and simple. Systematic, historically entrenched prejudice.

We're an introductions service. Obviously, we attract a certain customer - people who are open-minded, people who are looking for something different - but of course there's more to it than that. Our users have high standards for themselves. They're searching for something - let's call it self-fulfillment - and they often have specific needs that they struggle to satisfy elsewhere.

Can you afford all this?
That's what the funding's there for. And anyway, it's not about what we spend. There are only two metrics in this game: customer acquisition and retention.

I tried to explain the business model at Open4. The company was funded primarily by Mindbot, a private social media conglomerate that owned more than a hundred different brands. It specialized in live sex streaming but also owned various porn aggregators like XXXbox, Youngporn, Xzilla, and Babebox.

What does it feel like for a woman?
I wanted to say that it could feel like being destroyed or it could feel like the only point of being alive.

Underlying all of it, I realized, was the hard problem of attraction. The thing was, as you gold older, it became more difficult to feel it. Or at least to feel it for anyone who might actually want you back. Things deteriorated fast as time went on.

She'd disappeared during a party, which wasn't unusual in itself, she often left unannounced if she was bored. What was different this time was the silence that had followed.

Relationships, I sometimes thought, survived only on the happiness of the first few years. That foundation was all there ever was, its memory the only defence against the inevitable decline that followed. It might be true that love required youth.

I send this letter with the greatest affection and appreciation for the many ways in which you helped me.

When I think of Henry and Oliver and Mike, I feel as if they are three different models - templates, almost - and I wonder if they are the only three in the world: The man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without ever becoming yours. I can't claim no other dynamics exist because I haven't experienced them, but I can't imagine them.

If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait for him.

But maybe this is what Hannah has always wanted: a man who will deny her. A man of her own who isn't hers.

"Cherries and also apples," Hannah's mother is explaining as Oliver steps outside. Really, it is all Hannah can do not to jump up and lock the door.

It's not that she didn't know bringing Oliver home for her mother's wedding was a questionable idea - it's that she couldn't help herself. This good-looking, charismatic man is, sort of, hers; she wanted witnesses.

continued
And not even of the couple but of the individual trying to move forward in her life, making choices that she hopes are the right ones when, really, how does anyone ever know? Forcing Allison to stand up for Sam, Hannah thinks now, was naive as much as obnoxious. Hannah used to imagine a greater merging between two people, a point beyond which you felt an unquestioning certainty in each other.

She didn't understand then that you don't ask a person to defend her significant other, that she never should have asked Allison to. Not because of the sanctity of couplehood (as far as Hannah can tell, there are only ever fleeting episodes of sanctity between any couple) but because maybe the person can't entirely defend her mate, because maybe the person has her own ambivalence, and your criticisms are undermining.

Just want to confirm there's nothing we should discuss.
Thank God for texting, I thought. Because how capacious that single line in its invitation to lie without officially lying.
Nope, I wrote, nothing to discuss.

He said, "If we can, we'll go to Ithaca." So this was to be my punishment.

Jeremy and I were too tired to give each other compliments.