Care, Cake, Cats, Semantics, Spanking.

It's time to continue with the narrative of my life, even though I'm still writing about stuff which happened in March and it's May now. I'm not going to lie: for various reasons, April was a kind of intense month for me and I didn't dedicate the amount of time and energy to the blog that I like to (and is expected of me!) so I am really going to make an effort to get caught up on things. Some of these posts won't be as detailed as they could have been if I'd been able to write about them right away, but I don't at all regret the way I've chosen to spend my time. I hope the stories are still enjoyable to you guys, despite the time-lag. 

I wrote in an earlier post about how the start of my trip to England was very stressful. One of the things which had caused me a lot of concern was the fact that since due to horrible personal circumstances, I wasn't able to spend any of my time with Serious_Face, which had originally been a large part of my plan. Because of this, I ended up leaving my shoot in Derbyshire to go back to Paul Kennedy's house for a couple of days before I went to visit my very dear friend, Pandora Blake.

The time that I spent at Paul's house was really lovely. It was the first time I was in someone's home since I'd left Rafa's apartment in LA several weeks ago, and that was refreshing, and our time was unscheduled and very relaxed. More importantly, during the previous two days, I had discovered that I liked Paul an awful lot, and that we were very much on the same page about a lot of things. The more we discussed what aspects of this-thing-we-do were appealing and important to us, the more I noted that these things were very much in line. We spent quite a bit of time snuggling, we enjoyed a lot of sweet, rather affectionate play together and he generally looked after me. I'm often very resistant to being looked after: I firmly believe that I'm an adult and that I can and should look after myself. Letting someone else, especially someone who I had only recently gotten to know, care for me felt very vulnerable in a way that was very gratifying and, somewhat surprisingly to me, very submissive feeling. I still felt fairly shy and reserved, but the time we spent was filled with positive feelings. Safety and warmth and happiness.

At one point, we went to a cafe where we had to wait a very long time to get brunch because they accidentally gave our food to someone else(I didn't care in the slightest. I just liked sitting there and talking to him). You know how when you go out to eat sometimes they give you a number for your table, so that the person who brings your food out knows where to put it? This cafe did that in a way that made me giggle rather considerably:

Things like that, in a public setting, are enjoyably uncomfortable to me. I could hardly look at it straight on, yet I was infinitely pleased by it.

After that meal, there was cake. I know that you don't come to my blog to hear about delicious things that I ate, but screw you guys, this cake is worth talking about (Cakeboy will probably not judge me for this section, right?) . It was a glorious cake, full of cream and strawberries. I'm salivating just thinking about how damn good that cake was. Actually, I'm kind of making myself mad, because now I want to eat it again and I can't. :( It was one of the best things I've ever eaten. I'm not making that up. I like that cake.

I want this cake to be on a rainbow and in my mouth.

After those very pleasant and reenergizing couple of days, Paul took me up to London to stay at Pandora's. There was much rejoicing when we saw each other. It had been almost a year since we first met, and that was the only time we'd ever been together face-to-face. Pandora is someone that I got very close to over the internet. Besides the fact that we have a ton of fun being ridiculous together (as the stories that follow will show), I really enjoy being with her because we're able to have a certain kind of academic discourse without me feeling like I'm being a pretentious bastard. Upon me entering her home, however, we did not engage in discourse. Instead, we jumped up and down a lot and hugged vigorously. It was during this that I discovered that Pandora has a cat named Fatface. "I forgot to mention the cat," Pandora said, "but based on what I know of you, you aren't going to mind, right?"

Remember a minute ago when I was obsessed with that cake? That cake means nothing to me next to my feelings towards Fatface. Love at first site. Fatface is a big, beautiful cat. She's fluffy and mostly white, and most of the time, she gives zero fucks about what those weird humans are doing around her. The characteristics that make me like her more than the average cat (which I already like a lot) are as follows:

1) Fluffiness. 

2) Passivity. 

3) Facial expressions suggesting dissatisfaction with human company. 

4) Adorable cat food (or "biscuits" as they are referred to in England) seeking behavior. 

5) Fat. 

6) Everything. 

WTF, Alex. I came here to hear about spanking and all you want to talk about are cats and cake. 

Eventually, Paul had to leave to go home, which made me a bit sad and would have made me a lot sadder if I wasn't so excited to be seeing Pandora, and if I wasn't going to see him again later in the month. I was going to come back down to his place for further shooting in the second half of my visit.

Pandora and I spent a lot of time catching up, and then we went to the grocery store to get food supplies for my visit. She recently started doing free-running (a fact which I find kind of really sexy) and had hurt her ankle doing it just before I arrived, so she was kind of hobbling around and we decided that walking a long distance wasn't wise and took the bus. At the store, I was introduced to a lot of foods that I wasn't familiar with, including cider in flavors like strawberry lime (which is pink!) and chocolate oranges. Pandora and I also discovered that we had very similar taste in food, which made things much easier. Being adventurous, we decided to get a dragon fruit, which I'd never had before, and some strange squash or gourd type vegetable that was advertised as being good for curry and sort of looked like a cross between a cucumber and an alligator. We had high hopes for these foods. The dragon fruit turned out to be a bit different than other fruit in that it isn't really all that juicy, nor is the flavor particularly strong, but it was very good.

Pandora and the dragon fruit.

The vegetable in question, however, turned out to be some sort of horrible monster vegetable that shouldn't be eaten under any circumstance. It was bitter and awful, and it TASTED like an alligator's skin looks. I think we nearly cried when we ate it, and we had to pick every bit of it out of our stir fry in order to make the rest of the vegetables edible. Sad. Day.

That was an aside, because I was talking about food. After we had finished at the store, we had a few drinks and then went to bed, but we didn't go to sleep. We stayed up for half the night talking about all sorts of things. We discovered that we had many things in common, including strange, highly personal things that we don't often talk about. It was a great bonding experience. We also were kind of ridiculous with our combined collection of stuffed animals. This night ended up being the inspiration for one of the scenes that we filmed together later in the week.

The next day, Pandora took me to some charity shops in her area, as I was lacking some of the items that I wanted to have with me due to traveling snafus. I didn't end up getting too many things that were practical, but I did get a blouse with cats on it, a pair of white (I mean bone) shoes and a pair of purple suede heels. Charity shops are different than thrift stores run by charities in the US, like Goodwill and Salvation Army, and poppin' tags is a different activity in England than it is here. The stores they have are far smaller, and the selection of items is different. In America, you can find anything at the thrift store, ranging from really trashy, old crap to high class stuff with the tags still on it. In England, everything has kind of already been preselected for quality, which is slightly sad to me, since I thrive on weird, awkward, ironic or geeky things that a lot of people wouldn't consider "quality." I still loved the shopping experience and was pleased with my purchases. I also realized that I had an ace in my hand for hipster oneupmanship now: when someone asks me where I got these things, I can say "Oh, I got it at the thrift store... IN ENGLAND." Ha. No copying me now, bitches!

That evening, Pandora and I somehow ended up in a competition to see who could finish posting to their blog first, which aided me quite a bit in actually getting this stuff done. Pandora, however, finished her post just slightly before I did. "I beat you to posting!" she said, "Now, I'm going to beat you in real life!"

The setting of additional rules to a competition after it's already been completed like that is tremendously unfair. When I have a certain kind of energy with someone, though, I find unfairness delightful, sort of like the way that YS consistently lies to me about how many strokes he's going to give me and that somehow ends up with me being happy.

Pandora offered me a warmup, which I gladly accepted, and then put me over her lap and spanked me with her hand. It had been a long time since I was spanked by Pandora, and I was glad it was happening again. I don't feel entirely submissive towards her, so to speak, but I do feel passive towards her in play, and I enjoy her receiving her Toppiness, and I was very comfortable with her occupying Boss-space for the moment (more information on WTF "bossing" actually means to me coming in a later post). It felt sort of invigorating and exciting to be getting spanked by her. Once I was thoroughly warm, she directed me up onto her sofa for a whacking with a fairly big, leather paddle. I cuddled up to her stuffed dog, Fred, who is known as "Drop Dog" due to his ability to drop onto your head. "Comfort her well, Drop Dog!" Pandora instructed, "she's going to need it!" (I liked that quite a bit, too). She gave me a spanking that was neither severe nor serious, but still hurt enough, and put me in a giggly, happy, nicely spanked mood. (You can read Pandora's side of this story here.)

Thanks, Pandora and Drop Dog!

It turns out that Pandora and I ended up playing together off camera quite a bit, and this pleased me a great deal. Sometimes the space was lighthearted, and once it was mildly corrective: I smacked her with The Heavy Bear (from "The Bear Incident"), after she knew quite well that I was seriously forbidden from "assaulting" my friends, even (especially?) with bears. We were already in bed, but her response was very quick. She sat up and pushed me down and started to smack my bottom fairly thoroughly while I whimpered and apologized for my bear-violence. Then she got up from the bed, and I turned out of position. "Oh no, don't go anywhere!" she warned. "You're not done!" She retuned with a wooden hairbrush, which she gave me twenty whacks with before forgiving me for my little outburst and snuggling down for the night.

Side note: Hitting people with that bear falls into a certain category of bad behavior, along with picking on Mila Kohl: I know it's bad, I get corrected for it all the time, but there's just some insatiable desire in me that prevents me from ever being able to stop doing it. Both activities are just so satisfying. Mila is probably fortunate that she has never been in the same place as me when I had that bear, or else I might have clobbered her to death with it if the power of these two tempting misbehaviors combined. 0_0

Pandora and I also shared a more serious scene later on in the week, in which I was much more vulnerable than I had previously been in any of our kink interactions. I was worrying about something, like I am known to do, and I was feeling detached from my D/s dynamics back at home. I was generally a bit moody and out of sorts because of it, and felt a little less than secure. Company was arriving soon, and I wanted to be perky and cheerful for them, but it was kind of a struggle to get myself back where I belonged. I talked to Pandora a bit, and she asked me rather straightforwardly if I needed a spanking.

Yes. Yes, I did.

There's something particularly comforting to me about that phrasing as a way to initiate a scene, especially if I'm having some sort of emotional situation. It's largely about semantics. "Do you need a spanking, Alex?" makes me feel instantly taken care of. I think that the question format of this is particularly pleasing to me because it requires me to openly admit to what I need and desire in that situation, and doing that often clears my head and gives me focus (as well as being a lovely way to guide me onto the path of active submission). There's also a feeling of some level of concern for me: there has never been a situation where someone that cared about me asked that and I felt that it wouldn't have been perfectly acceptable for me to say "no" if that wasn't actually what I wanted (although me not wanting to be spanked when offered is usually a sign that I'm either horrendously overtired, drunk or need to be taken to the hospital). The similar question: "Do you want a spanking?" does much less for me as a positive trigger because it feels very casual ("Hey, wanna get spanked? Cool.") and because it just seems like a very obvious question. Am I awake/sober/healthy? Then probably, yes, I do. "Need" is a word that can be a bit loaded sometimes. There's a large part of me that doesn't want to admit to needing anything, but if someone else brings the word up first, it feels good to me, like it's been made acceptable for me to have needs. I understand that this is a very complex breakdown of a simple sentence, but these sorts of things are interesting to me. I'm curious if any other bottom-types have similar thoughts on these sorts of phrases, too.

I was slightly reluctant to accept, simply because I didn't want Pandora to feel like she had to look after me, and because my emotional state involved worrying about being a burden to people, but she reassured me and then took me over her lap while she was seated on the corner of the sofa (so it was more of an "in a chair OTK" than an "on the sofa OTK" in terms of positioning and I tried to relax myself. She spanked me with an atmosphere that felt corrective but not chastising. It was quite spot on for the headspace I needed: I didn't feel like I was being treated as though I'd done something wrong, but I did feel disciplined, as in I felt like I was existing in the comfortable space of being given the necessary structure and care. It was one of the rare moments where I felt as if I could understand the difference between "discipline" and "punishment", even if I never grabbed onto it enough to properly articulate it here. Physically, the spanking was appropriately thorough. Pandora used her hand throughout, but still produced some squeals and gasps. I didn't feel a need to struggle, although it was firm and did hurt. I just felt a safe calmness, and the feeling of my internal centering being restored. When she finished, we hugged and I expressed my gratitude. It had been lovely and kind of her. :)

That night, I got spanked one more time, although not by Pandora. She did, however, totally set it up. The company that arrived that evening consisted of Nimue Allen and Thomas Cameron, coming to spend the night so we'd be able to get up early and start shooting the next day. I had made it obvious to Pandora that I was interested in potentially playing with Tom before we shot together (I like doing that, in general, if it's possible, and I'd seen a lot of pictures of Tom that had sort of piqued my interest). She then suggested that I might need to be spanked again later in the night when my comments got slightly inappropriate later in the evening. This was largely just used as an initiating device: the spanking that I got didn't really feel disciplinary. It did feel quite good, though, in a painful sort of way. I went over Tom's lap while Nimue and Pandora watched, and he spanked me quite firmly with his hand, including spanking the entirety of the backs of my thighs. He used his hand effectively, and it hurt a lot. I wasn't sure exactly how it was going to go, but it ended up being a very fully formed scene: he kept going at increasing intensity until I broke past whimpering and into sniffling and moved into proper crying. That was a fairly rare thing: outside of a video, it's rare for someone to make me cry the first time I play with them (legends of me crying every time I get spanked are gross overstatements). I think that it worked because there was no expectation set that this would happen. Very often, when someone sets out to make me cry, they are not successful. It jinxes it. This time, it just happened, and it felt right and good.
Afterwards, there were, of course, cuddles.

Dear Pandora, I stole this off your blog. Love, Alex. 

This seems like a very good place to wrap up this post, as the next day we shot, and that will be a whole other thing to talk about.