Cirumspect running

I ran for five kilometres this morning for the first time, which I'm proud of, even though it took around 35 minutes, which apparently is a long time, and I think actually counts as jogging. Oh well. It didn't feel long though, probably because - lovely as that cricket field is it gets boring if that's all I do - I ran around some pretty country roads instead. It is really fucking beautiful here - just rotten with flowers and bamboo and palm trees and really graceful eucaplypts. And I am really not into pushing myself. I get the faintest twinge in my bad knee sometime and I don't intend to push any envelopes with that.

Regretted last night not having started running before, because in retrospect there were some really lovely places to run in Yorkshire, London, Paris and Brussels, and in Toronto too. It would have added a whole new dimension of enjoyment to those places. Oh well. I don't regret not running in Italy. There are park-ish geographical locations that would have been good for running there in theory, but Italy being rife with whoremongers a woman can't actually go in them without getting propositioned; it's a bit better in the south, but then you're stumbling over people consuming heroin in one form or another unless you get out of the cities, and that's melancholy. Paestum would have been a lovely place for a run, actually. Oh well. I was busy doing other things then, and the odds are good that I'll get a chance to run in most of those places in the future.

In other news, finally figured out how to turn off the safe search on Google Images and saw the Playgirl photos of Flash Gordon star Sam Jones. If you ever consider circumcision as a reasonable life choice to make on behalf of your male progeny, just have a look at them. It is brutal. Here's this perfectly nice - frankly, basically lovely cock hanging off this man, and because the foreskin's been taken away, the big bell-end looks ridiculous and disproportionate instead of great. Sam Jones's cock should be on public service posters all over the world, warning people against the aesthetic pitfalls of fuckin' cutting off a peice of their child's penis - god, what a gross idea, even if it looked good. In Sam Jones's case, it's like slicing off the Statue of Liberty's face or stripping all the marble facing off of Florence's duomo. God, circumcision makes me mad.

Does this look sexual to you?

Very nice weekend, this past weekend was. How long ago it seems. Things used to be easier in terms of swapping continents, you know. Now that I have money and possessions and a cat it's much harder . . . between that and work and the normal fuckery of Belgian existence I feel like the two days intervening since the weekend have fried my brains like so many little peices of sweetmeats.

We watched a movie called Secretary with Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. I've got a massive boner for James Spader's voice, which alone makes him one of nature's own peices of ass. Wikipedia says he used to be a yoga instructor. Can you imagine how much pussy he would have got as a yoga instructor with that voice? Not to mention business; I'm firmly against yoga in many ways but I'd show up and pay money to be told to be bendy in that voice. He must have had a vocation to be an actor, because it couldn't have been for the pussy, because that would have been vast available quantities of yogic pussy. Anyways, he was a big part of the charm of Secretary; because even with that patchouli honeysuckle voice to one side James Spader brings a lot of sort of attractive humanity to neurotic pervert roles, and with that voice he's phenomenally well-suited to be the pants in a spanky romance.

But I must say the main charm of Secretary was Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was just smashing. Really awfully good. Which was refreshing, as just the week previously I'd hit a blank when I'd tried to think of any Anglo actress under 40 who didn't annoy the piss out of me.

I also appreciated the attempt - though I don't think the movie quite succeeded, it succeeded further than any other I can think of, as they were all erotic thrillers and hence something Americans are even worse at than romantic comedies - and Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance really helped bring a degree of naturalness - to present a dominant/submissive relationship as not perverted. The only thing holding it back was the slightest sense of a carefully affirming after-school special. Maybe the ending was a little too happy. Oh yeah . . . spoiler . . . hah hah. Sorry, there's my inner sadist coming out. Or else it needed more male frontal nudity. Or could have been the treacle soundtrack. Hard to say.

Anyways, it was also interesting as we watched it at a time where I had been thinking about domination and submission in a broader context. I'd never imagine you can come to any grand sweeping conclusions about humanity in terms of whether they'd rather spank or be spanked but it's certainly one of the continuums that makes up the dizzying array of continuums that makes us all so odd. And the special thing about this continuum is that I have a feeling it's less linear than most - that part of playing with this aspect of your personality (above and beyond it as an aspect of your sexuality) means an awareness of and occasional leaps to what seems like the opposite, polar end of the continuum.

There's a range of public behaviours I don't think people would commit, a range of tolerations and obediences I don't think they'd have, if this sort of bedroom behaviour wasn't part of a wider approach to the world. And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I guess it's just a thing. But I can't help but feel that as much of it should be restrained to the bedroom as possible, because there's a good chance the rest of the world you're submitting to your games really isn't interested in playing.