You know how people list the books they've been reading because they want to recommend them (or not)? Or so they'll seem cool because they're literate? Well, I read a lot. In fact, it was a problem when I was in school--I was constantly busted for reading non-class material and having my books confiscated. The confiscated material varied wildly. In the third grade, I had a Garfield comic book and Gone With the Wind taken from my desk. I'm still pretty bad about it, though I don't read in class, at least not in these. I'm at the point where my classes have about 20 students, so you can't really get away with it. Also, I want to graduate.

Anyhow, I have a huge stack of books with me right now.

Oh, also, I'm not going to link to Amazon anymore, because of this lovely site: buyblue.org. I mean, I'm keeping my wish list, you know, but book and movie links go to Barnes and Noble. Also, I'm going to feel better about buying Starbucks from now on. It's a fun site and I highly recommend it. You know, of course, that I'm buying from those companies which donated heavily to the DNC, but I suppose this site is an equally effective resource for those who wish to buy red.

Now what would be really amazing would be finding a company who declined tax abatements when building a new facility. "No, that's fine, we'll pay our fair share."

Anyhow, back to the books I recently finished:
The New Confessions, by William Boyd. Like Any Human Heart, The New Confessions is a wonderful fictional memoirs about a life filled with disappointments mitigated by periodic highs. Ultimately, they're about how we're not special and our lives are more likely to be troubled and troublesome than a happy story about the human spirit. Very British. Or Scottish, in this case.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Jonathan Safran Foer is 28 and has arguably written two great novels already. Kind of like Martin Amis. But Jewish instead of really interested in Jews.

More later. Off to the Original Pancake House!

Thursday saw the return of a favorite old customer who was in town for a bit; we spent an enjoyable couple of hours back in VIP. He brought me some undergarments he wanted to see me dance in. I won't get in to particulars, but one of them was something I couldn't easily incorporate into normal clubwear, nor could I wear it on stage, so each time before I was called to stage, I would have to quickly change out of the VIP wear and back into normal stripper wear. I'm sure there's a way I could incorporate this particular item into a dance routine, but it would require, I think, some custom tailoring to turn it into what I would consider dancewear.

So Thursday was a wonderful day, thankfully. I was really exhausted afterwards though, and on Friday slept a whole lot after class. There are only two more weeks left . . . I just don't know what to think.

I'm going to have a lovely beach vacation for a couple of days next weekend; oh, how I'm looking forward to it.

Yesterday was a decent enough day, enlivened by Foot Guy, whose brain I picked regarding local dominatrices while he gave me an energizing foot rub. Occasionally I get emails from guys looking for domination, and I'm not really equipped to handle this sort of thing, but I don't have anyone to refer them to. It looks as though that will continue to be the case. It seems to me that a talented, professional, sane dominatrix could do quite well in the Austin area and I'm a little surprised there's not one that I know of.

Lord, there is this one customer who gets far, far too excited who I saw on Monday . . . it was really dead or else I probably wouldn't have danced for him. He simply can't keep his hands off of himself, and constantly grabs his crotch and massages his dick through his pants whilst bucking in the chair . . . I just wasn't in the mood for it this week. It was a dead day overall, though I ended up making decent money, but it was an irritating day. Girls were bitchy, clientele was weird, everyone was just a pain in the ass. Except for Carissa; she's cool.

I've tried to encourage one of my internet stripper friends to check out the club in Indiana, but she's carless, which makes it hard to be a dancer when you're in Cincy and the closest club is 30 miles away. She's only danced once before and had a million questions about how to get hired, which is really funny once you know how it actually works.

"Hi, I'm interested in working here."

"When would you like to start?"

That's pretty much it. You'll get a speech about each club's particular rules and practices if you're lucky or if it's a particularly strict club. At that club, they do have to explain things to you because it's run a little differently, but the management is pretty straightforward with you (hi, Phil). The longest speech I've gotten recently was in February when I went to Pure Platinum for the first time. The shortest one was back in December at the Living Room, where my ID wasn't even checked at the door.

Today is hooky day; I'm taking my one absence for the summer session at exactly the halfway point, partly because I am no longer concerned that I might fail Spanish (and partly to work on other, non-school or stripping work). I did much better than I expected on the first exam, and it looks like I might actually finish school a mere two and a half weeks from now . . . I might just order up some announcements.

My Austin friends know better than to ask me how Cincinnati is by now. I drove up in December, and by the time I came down in March, they all had had an earful of my frequently unfavorable opinions about the city. I have been ranting about it now for months, and hope that one final vent, and a comparison to two cities I love more, will help purge it from my system so I can get through the fall there in a state of blissful neutrality.

What I Hate About Cincinnati

There are no strip clubs in the entire city, save one Deja Vú, a company for which I hope to never work (they are the Wal-Mart of strip clubs, with similar labor practices). This means I've had to drive at a minimum an hour each day for work. It's in stark contrast to the ten-minute trips in Austin. Plus, it expresses to me that I'm in a city that's hostile to my line of work, and by extension, me. Imagine being a bartender in a dry county, or a plaintiff's attorney in Texas, and you'll understand how unwelcome this small detail makes me feel. Plus, there's HB 23, an extremely strict piece of legislation that would kill the adult industry in Ohio. They clearly don't like my kind here.

There isn't a Whole Foods. I know, I know, there's a Wild Oats, but it really isn't the same thing. I'm used to having the option to shop at food fantasy lands like Central Market and WFM, and now I'm stuck going to Kroger.

The local food specialties are sugary. The local pizza sauce is sweet. The chili is sweet. Does this perhaps belie the immature, infantile tastes of the local populace?

Every time I meet a local artist, writer, or festival organizer, I am seized with both admiration for their persistence in the face of utter indifference and with soul-crushing pity, for I know their efforts are doomed. There is simply not an audience here--at least not an educated one. A friend traced the sad state of Cincinnati audiences to a failure of the local educational system, though I think it goes deeper than that.

And that brings me to the general attitude of the people: it's insular and fearful. These are people so suspicious of change and risk that I'm stunned they ever built a new stadium. I mean, people in Austin and Portland want to keep their cities the way they are or were, but those cities were cool and nice. What can possibly be gained by keeping Cincinnati the same? The tiny percentage of the population trying to actually improve their city is quashed at every turn.

It's just so sad. Some of the most beautiful architecture I've seen is in this city; it's got a ton of cheap available space and a low cost of living, which would seem to make it perfect for artists and new businesses. But the city will have to overcome its inertia and hostility to new endeavors before it can attract them.

They should also calm the hell down about the possible ill effects of some naked breasts; when you have violent crime (yeah, I didn't mention the four or five people killed in the two blocks around my house since I've been there, or the streetwalkers three blocks back, or the drug violence, or how the cops clip civilians) like they have in Cincy, it's laughable to worry about the potential detrimental effects of a couple of titty bars. Of course, I would still not want to work there.

To be continued with my thoughts on Austin, my home, and Portland, my future home.

I was in the car today and had just about decided to blow off work and head back home after running errands, but I-35 was a mess southbound, so I took a detour and then changed my mind and headed in to work. Thank god; it was wildly busy for a Saturday and well worth it. Not particularly remarkable otherwise; it's all kind of a blur because I stayed so consistently busy.

One young man said, after tipping me on stage, "You have a lot of personality! You seem really sassy." Hee. I'm sassy. I should think a certain amount of sass is necessary in this line of work, whether it's apparent to the audience or not.

Another guy in a "Greatest Dad" t-shirt today. Not nearly as appropriate a club choice as the one a kid was wearing on Thursday that read "Medium Pimping."

I'm thinking of doing a little stripper clothes shopping tomorrow; any suggestions for fun new outfits are welcome.

This article from Seattle, which I found in Mistress Matisse's blog, is an extremely patronizing piece of work. I encourage any strippers reading this to send her exquisitely written and perfectly spelled emails.

Yesterday was a pretty damn interesting day; I was expecting to see a certain old favorite customer of mine, but he couldn't make it in, so for a while I was concerned the day, slow as it was, would be a waste. However, I scored with about $180 worth of dances from a fellow in VIP who wanted to simply look at my lovely ass in a pair of white shorts. He asked me to pose in certain positions to accentuate certain features of my behind. I think he had his hand on his dick, but you know, I was a couple of feet away so he could have a good view, so I wasn't worried.

The male dayshift employees are like a bunch of women! They were telling ghost stories--you know, "And then I swear I felt someone in the room with me, and it turned out that at just that time my friend had crashed into a ditch"--of the sort usually relegated to the dressing room. I'm easily irritated by conversations about how astrology and the paranormal are so totally real (I'm willing, however, to give some thought to the theory of morphic fields) and can barely restrain myself from giving the simple explanations I have at hand, but I stop, since I'm really not that much of a bitch.

San Antonio's licensing laws will go into effect in about eight weeks, and we've already seen some new dancers coming up from the Alamo City. It will be interesting to see what shakes out--one thing the above linked columnist should note is that in Houston, passage of the three-foot rule and mandatory dancer licensing accelarated the transformation of that city's clubs into free-for-alls. Not that Seattle has a much better reputation at this point.

I am struggling in Spanish right now, but I keep telling myself that these next three weeks are all that I have left before I can demand graduation presents. Hah. I don't think you're allowed to do that when you've muffed as many attempts as I have. Six years is probably as long as you can reasonably take to graduate and still expect people to say "Congratulations!" instead of "Finally!" I don't care. I don't care that I won't walk and I don't care that I won't have a party. The sheer satisfaction of being done will be inexplicably wonderful.

And you know what? There really always is someone older in the class (and the club, for that matter).

I'll be heading over to Palazio after school today to check it out, possibly working. It's so conventient. I hope it's busy.

Nothing says summer like waking up at 6:45 a.m. each weekday morning, going to class for three hours, then working for seven. Praise be for the recent rains that have kept temperatures below 104.

Last week was a fairly busy one at the club, though it is quite apparent that management (by management, I mean the general manager, not the shift managers) has decided to let the day shift be a free-for-all. Now, when a customer asks if I "go into VIP," it means, "Will you let me finger you and might you give me head?" So when they ask I say, "Sure! It's (double the going dance price) per song to go back there with me, and all I do is dance." That takes care of that.

Something I saw last week: two separate customers on the same day during the same time come in wearing "World's Greatest Dad" T-shirts. Stopping by on the way home from Home Depot, I suppose.

Nothing like having your site be offline for seven days while you switch hosts . . . ugh. I'll be doing some things this week but hopefully all is stabilized.