Pregnant

So, I've been away awhile.  I think I got discouraged.  I honestly can't remember.  A lot's happened.  I finally left my club.  I didn't realize how crappy it was until I got to the club I'm at now.

It reminds me of home.  No, seriously, it reminds me of the club I used to love working at back home, before all the churches in town signed a petition and put us all out of business.  (They thought we were bringing rapists and murderers into town.  Turns out, something else was bringing rapists and murderers into town, and now their jails are overflowing, their police force is overwhelmed, and we're all long gone.  So I guess it wasn't our fault after all.)

But, yeah.  I'm at a good club.  I don't know the best way to describe it, but the atmosphere is completely different when you step through the front doors.  There isn't a panicked, frenetic sense of urgency as strippers run from customer to customers: "Would you like a dance?  No?"  Next customer.  "Would you like a dance?  No?"  Next customer.

It's very relaxed and pleasant here.  Everyone's friendly.  No one seems to be drowning under the weight of all their stress.  The girls are earning enough money that they aren't all on the verge of nervous breakdowns because none of them can pay their bills.  The rules are very fair, and easy to follow.  The clientele is generally very pleasant to work with.  In a nutshell, I've landed in a good place and I'm very happy.

Except, that I'm probably not going to stay for very long.

Because I'm pregnant.

My husband and I decided around December that it was time to start trying for a baby.  Statistically, it takes about 80% of couples roughly half a year to conceive.  That gives my husband a nice bit of time to hunt for a really good job, so I can take time off work to get as round as a barrel and, hopefully, pop out a kid.

Two months later, I was pregnant.  My husband is now scrambling for a job, and I'm very soon going to be kissing my wonderful new workplace goodbye.  At least temporarily.  I should probably crack a joke about pregnant strippers here.  Can't think of any at the moment.  Too bad.

Anyway, life's good right now.  My best guess is that I'm at the eight week mark, however, I could be way off.  The doctor will confirm it for us tomorrow.  Hopefully.  I've been having some pretty bad luck with the medical field lately.  Let's call it a severe case of Murphy's Law of Medicine.  If it could go wrong, it has gone wrong.  I imagine I'll be posting more on that, tomorrow after my doctor's visit.

Still, I'm (mostly) healthy.  I'm not on any drugs or medications.  I'm eating healthy foods.  I had a bowl of blueberries for breakfast this morning.  Last night when I got home from work, I had a sauteed head of broccoli.  Lunch might be egg drop soup.  I'm trying to think positive thoughts, and avoiding both stress and caffeine.  And the urge to bite someone's head off.  I really need figure out ways to deal with the mood swings.

I really had no idea what mood swings were.  People talk about mood swings.  I was a teenager once.  I was moody.  I kept it all together.  Pregnancy is the same thing, right?  No.  No, it is not.  Must... resist... urge... to... shriek.  Granted, on the bright side, most of the times I've wanted to scream, it's been stuff that would make ordinary people want to scream, too.  Mostly.  And it's not like I have screamed even though I wanted to.  Mostly.

Food has gained a whole new level of awesome, and I can't seem to keep myself awake.  My energy zaps out a lot faster than it used to.  I've been scavenging the internet for every money-saving parenting trick I can find.  (Cloth diapers.  Styles and brand comparisons.  The all-in-one diaper?  Or maybe the flat diaper with a cover?  Home-sewn diapers can be really cute or really ugly depending upon the skill of the sewer.  Can I even get my old sewing machine to work?)

I think I've been so busy trying to brace myself for impact, that it really hasn't registered in my brain that my (hopefully) future offspring will be cute.  Or endearing.  Or lovable.  Right now it's just an expense I have to prepare for, and a responsibility that I have to live up to.  (Eat healthy foods, avoid cigarette smoke.  And stress.)

I'm very excited, but in the "I just got hired for a new job" sense of things.

Getting Fitter

Worked last night.  I've been working a lot more lately, and I can feel the difference.  I'm not nearly as tired when I get home from work, and I've been able to do more vigorous tricks later into the night.  (If I'd known it would work like this, I think I would've worked a lot more often a lot sooner.)

So, anyway, I had a customer ask me out of the blue last night if I studied contortion.  Yay!  I told him I've been doing some contortion training, but I'm really very much a beginner.  He said it showed, and that I looked more flexible than any of the other girls in the club.  So, again, yay.

Ooh, and while I'm thinking of it, I've been working on some new poses.  I used to twist one of my knees back and around to hook my foot against my rib cage.  While it looks cool, I've been doing it often enough now that my ribs are starting to hurt.  So now, instead of hooking it against my ribs, I stand up and pull my foot back, up and around to touch my head.  Really should be posting pictures instead of trying to describe this stuff...

I've been trying to challenge myself to do tricks I don't normally do while I'm onstage.  I've got an arsenal of very fancy regular tricks I pull out just about every time I'm onstage.  They're nice, but I know so many other really cool pole tricks, that I never do because I just never think about it.  Since I've been kind of working toward improving my overall strength and ability, I'm trying to pull out some of these moves, dust them off, and use them.

Particularly because I'm getting stronger.  Not just from the dancing, either.  I am bound and determined to learn how to do a handstand.  So I've been doing handstands against the wall on a very regular basis (not quite daily).  My shoulders feel ever so slightly bigger, and my forearms are getting a bit more solid, too.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff.

So, last night, I had the following conversation with a customer, and it kind of made me laugh.

Me: (All super-sparkly happy) "Hi!  We're doing a dance special.  Would you like a dance?"
Him: "No.  I'm not spending any money here tonight.  I brought thousands of dollars to spend here, but then you guys kicked my brother out."
Me: "Oh...kay.  Why did they kick your brother out?"
Him: "Because he opened my beers."
Me: "Umm, how old was your brother?"
Him: "He's twenty."
Me: "Well, there's nothing they could do about it then.  They have to obey the law, or this club will get shut down.  They shut down my old club, and everybody there lost their jobs because of it.  It's not like they've got any choice."
Him: "I own two liquor stores."

I don't understand how owning two liquor stores sudden makes you so crazy-blessed you can break the law anywhere else, but okay.  I got up; I walked away.  I kept trying to sell dances.  People confuse me.

Seriously, if anyone can answer this for me, I'd be thrilled.  We're a strip club in a city that doesn't like strip clubs.  (Not many cities do like strip clubs, but that's beside the point.)  This city has done everything they legally can to make our lives difficult.  I should be earning a hell of a lot more to work than I do, because there are so many crazy, illogical, stupid laws in place here.  (Laws that I obey because I just don't give a crap about money.)

But, let's say we do start breaking laws.  Little laws.  Let the kid drink.  He's almost twenty-one anyway, right?  In a city that HATES strip clubs and would close our doors the first chance they get.  All because this one guy brought "thousands of dollars" and he owns a liquor store-- oh, sorry, two liquor stores-- which somehow makes him the Great Panjandrum of the Ffordian Universe.

I... really can't see the logic.

I also can't see why he sat on his fat ass in the front row for the rest of the night, telling anyone who would talk to him that he wasn't going to spend a single dollar on anyone in the club (dancers, waiters, nobody) just because his brother got kicked out.  I mean, if he was so pissed off, why didn't he just leave?

Oh wait.  He was an asshole.  Sorry.  I forgot.

Anyway, people are funny.

A bit bruised...

So, I worked for the last three days.  Got some good stretching in.  Got so good and sore and tired I couldn't lift myself up on the pole anymore.  Which is why I'm taking today off.

Bought new shoes.  My old shoes-- veterans of three years of my abuse-- shattered onstage when I landed on them after dropping off the pole.  Poor shoes.

My left leg is covered in bruises.  Fell down while leaning on a chair and tying my backup shoes onto my feet.  This gal rushed past and I think she bumped the chair because it wobbled and I dropped.  There's a red line following the indent of the tile flooring I landed on.  The rest is just purple.

I'm a little tired.  The first day I made exactly zero dollars.  I didn't loose money to the club, but I didn't take home a single cent.  (Part of that was losing my shoes and then falling down and being too hurt to move much.)  The next day, I made roughly half what I make on a normal night.  Last night I made a little last than the day before.

Such is life.  I'm tired.  Bought myself a book by Tanya Huff.  (Smoke and Mirrors.  A favorite.)  Gonna sit quietly and read.  Don't have energy to do much of anything else.

Been working on book stuff, too.  So far I've got... never mind.  I don't know how many pages I've got.  Just a lot.  Been typing like a mad person.

Yet more of the tiredness.  Still, life is good. :)

Got a Good Feeling

...So there I was, with my fists jammed into the small of my back to support my lower spine while bending my middle spine, and I realized there was all this skin hanging off my back.  Me being me, I couldn't quite resist grabbing a handful of this stuff and just kind of squishing it around in my fingers...

Where was I now?  Let me back up.

I worked again last night.  Eight or nine hours.  This morning my husband woke me up with coffee and helped me build a little nest on the couch.  I didn't want to move.  My muscles are all sore.

I got a ton more stretching done.  Lots of middle back work, and that was mostly because I kept shoving my fists into the curve produced by my lower back and supporting that while trying to focus on the area of my rib cage.

I'm sure I made a weird sight, nearly bent in half in the wrong direction, taking careful breaths to pull my ribs up and apart, and allow my upper and middle back to relax and curve downward.

Just ordered a softball to shove into that gap so I can protect my lower spine from stress while working on my upper body.  Excited to get my hands on that.  I'd like to do some extreme contortions onstage.  People seem to be impressed by them and they tip me for it, not because it's particularly sexy, but because they've never seen anything quite like it before.

Didn't work on my pole-assisted one-armed handstand.  Forgot to for the first half of the night.  By the second half of the night I just didn't care much.  I spent the first four hours or so without much money.  I only managed to sell one dance, and I even asked the floor guy how much I'd owe for the night so I could estimate how much I'd have to pay in next time I came to work.

Then, all of a sudden, one guy bought a dance.  Then another.  And another.  I gave so many dances in a row that I became exhausted and had to go home an hour before closing.  (Gee, do I wish that was my complaint every day.)

One of the floor guys asked me if I'd employed any of B's dancing techniques and I told him I probably wouldn't.  He told me that was cool.  If it wasn't my style, it wasn't my style.  He said B likes to rub on guys, but not every girl at the club does.  He named a handful of other girls who don't touch guys in private dances, and I felt very encouraged.

It's nice not to feel be alone in something like this.  I'll still never win Miss Nude Tennessee, but at least, I'm not the only girl in the whole club who follows the letter of the law.

Today's got a weird feeling to it.  Probably because I'm so worn down physically, but I feel so light and airy. I feel intensely peaceful, too.

You'd think it would work differently.  People who are tired generally talk about feeling heavy, weighted down.  I feel that when I try to move.  But just sitting here, meditating and writing, I feel like I could float right up off the couch.  Everything is beautiful and magical, and I feel like I am part of it all.

And no, I didn't take any pain meds.  LOL.

I really do suspect it's just the exhaustion.  All the endorphin from all the muscle pain and stretching.  Natural highs anybody?  Just make yourself miserable enough, and you'll get there.  Yeah, I'm sure that's a drug that'll sell.  And yet, from what I've heard drugs always feel unclean in some way or another.  Right now I feel like I've been scrubbed inside out and made all shiny and squeaky-clean.

I think I'm going to soak up all this good feeling for a while.  Since I'm at it, I might as well add this wonderful floating sensation to the list of stripper pros and cons.  Extreme exercise will, occasionally, render extreme rewards.

So what if I can't win?

So I slept on all the things that upset me and woke up in the morning feeling a lot better.  After all, nothing's changed.  Now I just know about it.  Damn, wasn't ignorance blissful?

So what if people bitch about my dances?  They've always bitched about my dances.  The day people stop bitching about me is the day after my funeral-- although it might be safe to say they'll still bitch about me after I'm dead.  That's just a condition of being alive.  Can't help it, can't really waste the energy to be upset about it.

I have been asking myself, though: What am I working so hard for?

Why am I working so damn hard?  It's 5 am and I haven't gotten any sleep and I'm sitting next to the computer listening for music I might dance to in the next competition and doing exercises to strengthen my wrists so I can do new pole tricks.  Why?

I know now that there's no way under the sun I could've won Miss Nude Tennessee.  I was the only girl giving a 100% legal dance.  Of course mine was going to be the least sexy out of all of them.  In fact, it was really rather silly of me to try in the first place.  Even if my stage work had been excellent and my swimsuit piece flawless, I still probably wouldn't have had a shot in hell of winning.  (I still think the girls who won deserved it, but I want to know how far down the rung I ended up because of my silly lap dances.)

And none of that even matters.  What matters is why?  Why?  Who am I trying to impress?

I'm working on my novels.  I'm trying so hard to get Justine out and published.  I'm writing out the layout for Promethean Riddle #3 while penning down #2.  Who reads this stuff anyway?

I work my butt off every time I sell a dance to a guy.  I do anything I can think of to amuse and entertain him (within the letter of the law).  I make it my own personal goal during that song to make that guy smile.  And he still goes and bitches to the next girl how I cheated him out of his money. Why should I dance for him at all?  Why I don't I stand in front of him and just sort of vaguely rock from side to side then grumble at him, "Sorry, no refunds."  Will it even make that much of a difference to these guys?

And then I tell myself to stop acting like a drama queen.  I do my best on the lap dances because I at least owe it to these guys to try and be entertaining.  And besides, it gives me exercise which makes me healthy.

And as for the books, I'm doing all that craziness because I'm hoping-- praying-- pleading with the powers above-- that if I can maybe maybe get enough people to read even one of those novels and give me good reviews (or, hell, any reviews) I can pitch my work to an agent.  I can say, "See, I've done the work, I just need a publisher to add a bit of polish and help me make it bigger."

The thing is, right now, I'm doing the work, and there's no reward.  There's no end in sight.  There's just me and the work.  And every now and then I find myself wondering if I'm just kidding myself.

I love what I do.  I really and truly love it.  I will be doing these things until the day I die.  Maybe I'll just be doing them for myself, though.  Maybe I'll write my books just because I get depressed when I'm not creating something.  Maybe I'll keep dancing just to keep my health up.  I'll probably be doing these things when I'm ninety.

And yet, I can't help but think I'm leaving something undone.  There's some avenue I haven't taken yet.  There's someone I haven't talked to yet.  There's something--something-- that I haven't tried.  And that something's the key.  Whatever it is, wherever I find it, once I've done this thing, I'll start making progress.

Then again, that probably isn't how it works.

Someone who wanted to be a millionaire told me that he was at least pursuing the goal of a million dollars.  He was that much farther ahead of all other people who wanted it but did nothing to get it.  Every step I take puts me that much farther ahead of all the other people out there striving to reach the top.

Will I ever reach it?  Dunno.  I do know that if I stop trying now, then I definitely won't reach it.

Proof that the world is fundamentally UNFAIR

Just got home from work.  Left work because I was too royally pissed off to try and smile at people and sell them dances anymore.

Why?  Because I give shitty dances.  Why do I give shitty dances?  Because when I got my license to work, the very first thing I did was ask the lady who worked at the licensing board:

ME: "Durr, what's legal and what isn't according to Nashville law?"
LICENSING OFFICIAL: "Blah blah blah... blah blah blah and no physical contact during dances."
ME: "None?"
LICENSING OFFICIAL: "None."

So I give shitty dances that no one likes, because all I can legally do is stand in front of these guys and dance in front of them.  I've been doing this for two years now, and every guy I dance for complains to me, but life's a bitch like that so I deal with it.

They love me onstage.  They think I'm awesome onstage.  But then they buy a dance from me and immediately ask for their money back.  I've gotten so very good at asking for my money before I give a dance, because every time I give these poor motherfuckers a "legal" dance, they immediately want their money back.

So, we had a staff meeting on Sunday discussing the slight (yeah right) discrepancy between what is "legal" and what is outrageously illegal in a dance.  The head manager said we needed to clean up our act.  He said only two girls were following the law on their dances: me and a girl we'll call "B".

I was really excited.  Gee, I thought to myself.  You know what this means?  This means that I'm gonna be on an even footing with the other girls.  At long last, I'll be able to sell dances in this club without practically having to break someone's arm to do it.  Because I'll finally be giving the same dances that all the other girls are giving.

Nope.  Nope.  Doesn't work that way.

Today, I asked B to tell me how she gives dances, because she doesn't have trouble selling them and the manager said they were "legal".  She said she just does what she always does.  Okay.  So toward the end of the night, she told me that she was going to give me a dance to demonstrate how she dances.

ME: Thank you.  I know nobody likes my dances.
B: Yeah.  All the guys you've been giving dances to tonight have been complaining about you to me.
ME: I'm not surprised.

So B takes me to one of the rooms and proceeds to give me her typical "legal" lap dance.  And just about the point where her boobs are rubbing across my face, I start thinking, "Gee, I never thought any of this stuff was legal."

So afterward, I asked her if it was.  She told me that, technically it wasn't.  She also told me that if the inspector ever drops in I need to dance the way I've been dancing or just not sell any dances while she's there.  She then proceeded to tell me when the inspector usually comes in so I'll be duly forewarned.

I was like, "So, really, it's not legal."  B was like, "Well, if you want to get technical, it's not 100% legal."

So... yeah.  I thanked B and went to the manager.  I told him that everybody's been complaining about my dances, and I'm pissed off because (apparently) I'm the only girl in there following the letter of the law.  I told him that I feel like I'm punished because I'm doing the right thing.  Because I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, I'm making far less money, and the customers bitch about me to all the other girls in the club.

The manager (not the head manager) was caught between a rock and a hard place with me.  He couldn't really tell me to go ahead and break the law "just a little" but at the same time, that was probably the only good advice left available to him.  I thanked him for at least listening to me bitch about my problem, then got dressed and checked out.

Outside, I told another dancer named M about my problem and immediately she was like, "Oh, so you're the girl everyone's been complaining about."  Yeah.  That's me.  I'm the girl that everybody regrets buying a dance from.

So there you have it.  Proof that the world is fundamentally unfair.  I can either start breaking the law so that I won't have people bitching about me "cheating" them all the time.  Or I can keep obeying the law and just deal with the fact that I'm working twice as hard for half the money.

Right now I'm thinking I'll just keep obeying the law, but I have no idea what I'm gonna do.  I'm angry that I have to make this decision.  I SHOULDN'T FUCKING HAVE TO MAKE THESE KINDS OF DECISIONS.

So fuck the fucking world right now.  I'm mad.  I hope you all have a good night, and I will post again when I no longer feel like screaming at somebody.

Busy But Happy

Work has been physically exhausting lately.  I'm very happy with it.  I have several ideas I want to put into my stage work.  I've been trying to figure out ways to improve my couch dances (because no one seems to like those).  I've been working at improving how I do my job.  And I'm happy with that.

I'm also just worn out.  I want to write, but I'm tired.  I'm halfway through Justine, and I want so badly to finish.  I'm also trying to remedy any plot inconsistencies before I write them down.  Is the ending sufficiently climactic?  Are important matters explained so that they would make sense to a reader who's new to the Promethean Riddle universe?

Am I inserting enough philosophy and introspection to match the original flow of the series?  Can I insert it without making it feel tacked-on and unnatural?

Yesterday my husband threatened me with Tylenol to get me out of bed.  LOL.  I'm pretty anti-medication, and while I was considerably sore, I'd much rather be sore than take a pill to make it go away.  So anyway, when every other tried and true method of getting me up failed, he resorted to bringing me Tylenol and a glass of water to help me get past the soreness enough to crawl out of bed.

By now my muscles feel pretty normal.  Tomorrow I'll be back at work trying to wear them all back down again.

That's all good and well, but nowhere in my immediate schedule is there time to write.  That was what yesterday was supposed to be for.  I kinda dozed through it.

I suppose I've got right now, but I'm still trying to get the right rhythms running through my head.  Instead I wrote a chunk of the outline for Promethean Riddle #3.  So far, it's still going down on paper easily enough.  I just need to figure out the ending.  Worried about that.  Need to know how it will end so I can write in all the little threads to foreshadow it long before the event itself occurs.

Until then, I've got what I've got.  While I'm inclined to call it a hot mess (because that's how it feels sometimes) I know it's not.  It's just unruly, that's all.  Like my hair.

A very gut-instinct driven part of me wants to take some time to just float... meditate, relax, ponder, listen to music that doesn't come from work (i.e. not loud dance music).  Do things that are calming, centering and peaceful.

I imagine this is exactly what I need to be doing.  It's not what I want to be doing.  I want to be rushing through the second half of Justine and finishing off Book 2.  I'm pretty sure if I did this, Justine would come out with plot holes and a certain lack of depth or thought in the belief systems of its characters.

I wonder sometimes if Promethean Riddle #1 did that.  I don't think there was really much time in the environment and situations the characters were thrown into to contemplate the universe.  I know Raina did a little bit, and maybe I should have given her more time to voice her thoughts.  But where would I have fit that in without disrupting the flow of the story?  I know I could have.  If I wanted to badly enough, I could have.  I think...?

I think I'm doing that thing again where I throw too many irons into the fire and wear myself down to nothing, then have to stop for a while just to recover from all the many things I'm trying to make myself do.  If I stop now, and meditate, I should be okay in a few days, to go back to rushing around like a chicken with no head.

I think I'll go now and do just that.