The Triumph Of Self-Publishing

So-called “professional” writers tend to look down on self-published authors, thinking that they’re just clods writing “DICK ENTERS THE ROOM AND SAYS HI LINDA LINDA BE MAD AT DICK” novels on butcher paper in crayon.  But though the perception of self-publishing is that of a bunch of Harry Potter fanfic writers wanking it to Hermione’s freshly-grown wand, the truth is that self-publishing offers a freedom that no one else can offer.  Freed from the restraints of having to actually, you know, make money, self-publishers can offer titles that no traditional publisher would touch with a ten-foot pole.
Or, in this case, a ten-foot pole covered in a condom.
That’s right; if you’ve been thinking, “I love it when my partner jizzes all over my face – now, how can I combine that subtle aroma with pancetta and a nice rosė?” thankfully, the fine folks at Lulu have, er, come through for you.  Fotie Photenhauer’s Natural Harvest – A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes is now available for a mere $24.95.
Notes the book: ” Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food.”
One finds it hard to imagine why semen hasn’t caught on in restaurants.  I think we all would like to gulp down the potentially STD-laden load of our waiter, mixed with some asparagus and perhaps a dusting of saffron, so when someone asks, “Why are your lips so covered in sores you can’t speak without bits of your philtrum flaking off?” you can say with pride, “I, madam, am a gourmet.”
After all, as Fotie says: “Some tend to dismiss semen as food and describe it as bitter or salty. This is similar to a person who tastes wine for the first time [and] says it tastes sour. Like all other foods, the tastes and aromas of semen open up and are better appreciated when you are able to compare and discuss the different tastes with other connoisseurs.”
If that’s not the classiest blowbang I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is.
As it turns out, this book of squirty enjoyment has sold over 25,000 copies, so my hat is off to Fotie!  She found a need and, er, filled it.  This truly is an example of what people can do when they set their heads to it.  I think this is just proof that traditional publishing is going down.

Blogging About Blogging Is A Sin, Part 1: FetLife And LiveJournal

FetLife gave me a sad reminder of what a vibrant social network looks like.  Or, more accurately, what LJ used to be.
On Thursday, I posted my essay “So I’m Going To Be A Dom” to FetLife, a light little humor essay I tossed off in fifteen minutes.  After some consideration, I cross-posted it to my blog – and, more relevantly, LiveJournal.
What happened was that it went up on LJ, got 36 comments (a third of which were mine), and promptly hit the black hole of Yesterday’s Content.
On FetLife, it got about thirty comments (each expressing “breadcrumbs,” the Fet term for “I make a comment here because I think you’ll want to read this,” as each comment posted shows up on someone’s friends feed unless you specifically mute comments) before it hit Kinky & Popular on Friday.
Kinky and Popular is Fet’s automated “Best Of Fet” collation system, where once a post/picture/video hits a certain popularity it gets to their global feed.  I went viral (for the second time).  By the time Friday was over, I had 220+ comments and 163 people “loving” it, each getting it out to a greater audience.
Now, the popularity is, in part, due to audience.  I mean, it is a kink site, and since I’m mocking the Dom stereotypes, writing something that reflects their annoyances means that it’s going to be a bigger hit in a kink-focused community than the more-scattered audience of my LiveJournal.
But part of that’s due to LJ’s lack of social networking infrastructure.  Yeah, friends lists were great back in the day… But LJ’s lack of a “trending topics” or “share this post without reblogging it entirely” or a “User <3s this essay or comment” means that basically, there’s no inherent mechanisms for easily sharing your love of a given topic.  (I mean, you can add a “+1 on Google+/Reshare on Twitter/Link on Facebook button manually, but that’s something each user has to manually do.)
LiveJournal’s stagnated technologically.  They used to be the leading edge; now, it seems that they’re behind the curve.  And you can go, “Oh, but I like the fact that it doesn’t spam me with all sorts of muck I don’t want!”, which is fair, but it means that some really good gems of writing get completely lost unless someone chooses to make an entry specifically linking to it.
Add that to the fact that LJ’s audience seems to have wandered off in search of better options. Yes, I obviously love the long-blog topic, but the fact is that most people seem to think that writing five paragraphs is onerous.  You can hate Twitter’s popularity – but really, that 140-character limit works because most people don’t have that much to say.  “Here’s a photo I liked.”  “I’m sad because I got fired today.”  “You know what’s still awesome?  Buffy.”
This vomiting of words and shaping them into an essay seems kind of antiquated.  Maybe it’s time to admit that the vast majority of people see writing as a task and not a joy, and for them putting their thoughts into an essay is a painful and trepidacious project.  As such, a huge text field is a lot more intimidating than a tiny status box.
Someone once posited that LJ was in part dying because of all the x-fail shitstorms flying around the Internet – that once everyone saw how many people could be pointed at a poorly written blog post to be dissected by angry people, folks said, “Shit, I don’t want to be in the middle of that” and skedaddled.  I don’t know if that’s true, mainly because I don’t think most people are aware of the X-fail shitstorms – and of those who are, most of them were long-form blog writers who were already aware of the dangers.  Still, it’s a lot easier to make an ass out of yourself in a Facebook status post, where the worst that happens is that your friends mock you and maybe someone takes a screenshot with blurred names and faces and posts it to a Facebook FAIL site.
I think that’s a contributing factor, though.  LJ, unless you go friends-only, is out to the world.  Facebook’s just for your friends.  People would mostly prefer to just talk to their friends.  I’m baffled when someone’s bent out of shape by one of those mean comments when a stranger wanders across their essay – I mean, you don’t know this dude, why should you give a shit about whether he’s angry at you or not? – but I’ve seen it enough to know it’s a phenomenon I can’t dismiss.
I dunno.  The English side of LJ seems smaller these days, held together by a handful of bold (and old) personalities who keep people here by force of will alone.
I mean, I remember when I could toss off a silly essay and return to 150+ comments back in 2006, simply by dint of more people being here.  And comments don’t equal love, or quality, but it certainly does match my level of interest – I’m on here to interact with people, dammit, and there are a lot fewer people hanging out, for whatever reasons they may be.
I’m still enjoying my time here because I love the people who are still here with a fierceness that surprises me.  But I can foresee when this becomes the mySpace of the Internet – some backwater place where folks are surprised to see anyone there.  It may be there already.
Meanwhile, on Fet, I’m interacting a lot more.  There are more pictures, more posts, more local people I know.  Maybe that’s the kinky nature of it.  But at least on Friday, it felt alive in a way that LJ doesn’t, and that bothers me.

So I'm Going To Become A Dom

(NOTE: I originally posted this at FetLife as a humor piece, but figured it was amusing enough to post over here.  We’ll see how it goes.)
Looking over the FetLife profiles, it seems like “Dom” is the ideal career choice for the older gentleman who wants to get laid… So imagine my thrill! Here I am at 42, starting to pick up the whip! I thought my sexual career was over, but here I have at least another decade left in me!
Alas, I don’t have the look. I’m gonna need the look to get the babes. At least according to what I’m seeing on FetLife.
First thing I have to do is stop all of this inopportune smiling. I must always fix the camera with a steely glare, as though the camera was very naughty and needed to be punished. Perhaps, occasionally, rarely, a smirk may peek from the corner of my mouth, as though I am faintly amused at all of your frantic antics. But not often. For guffawing is not the realm of the True Dom.
Doms do not smileyface in texts. Ever. You can tell. Doms are SRS BUSNESS.
Next, I need to either scale up or scale down. Right now I’m a middlin’ tub o’lard – decent arms, beer belly, man-tits of maybe an A-cup. When I jog, things go swinging, but not enough to hit me in the face.
Ah! But the True Doms seem to come in one of two flavors. Either they’re elderly and musclebound, with that sort of workout fiber that says “MY FLESH WANTS TO SAG, BUT I STAPLE IT TO THIS HE-MAN PHYSIQUE SO ALL YOU NOTICE ARE SLIGHT RIPPLES OVER MY ROCK-HARD ABS.” Then I just wear a hat and leather chaps and wander around all day baring my gray-haired chest at people like it was Superman’s S.
Or I go the other route – gain a hundred pounds. Just get that big ol’ torture-room belly where I eventually look like the Rancor keeper, the look that says, “See that? Fuck you, society. I look like this, and I’m still gonna walk around in a loincloth. Because I don’t play by YOUR RULES. I am so confident that I will redefine cultural hotness just by LOOKING AT YOU, a black hole of expectation-twisting manliness!”
Then, of course, I have to shave my head. Can’t be a big ol’ torturer without a smooth pate.
Look how wrong my default picture is! No True Dom would ever have a default picture showing a lemur on his head. No, that lemur is topping me, my smile showing that I’m too willing to please, my face either too flabby or not flabby enough. I need a gaunt picture of me, perhaps at an SCA festival, impassively wrestling a lemur to the ground to show it who’s boss. THAT’S a Dom shot.
Then again, my photos are all wrong. The big problem? They’re of me. True Doms are all Leica experts, people who spend a lot of time in the darkroom perfecting glorious photos and videos of their subs. The goal of a True Dom isn’t to show what they look like, but rather to show off their attractive collection of half-naked women, a kind of fleshy charm-bracelet to jangle at other potential subs. It’s a way of saying, “Hey, this club’s full of hot women, and you could be a part of it! Fill out this application, we’ll talk to the bouncer. You can be a part of my kinky Borg collective.”
Of course, that means as a True Dom Old Guy, I’ll need to assemble my squadron of hard-bodied twenty-three-year-olds. They’re obligatory. You can’t get into the official Dom Resting Room at the airport without them (which is a lovely secret chamber to rest in between flights, with a St. Andrew’s cross and cigars and kneeling waitresses). I’ll need to get about seven or eight of them, perhaps hanging around the graduation ceremonies at Florida State University to try to pick some up on their way out the door.
Okay, sure, maybe there’s something a little weird in mackin’ on someone five years’ younger than my daughter, but here’s the trick: All those young women with the smoking hot bodies and the uncertainty inherent of being in your early twenties and not sure where you want to go with your life and the sexy pouty mouths and the willingness to try anything for the first time?
They’re all very mature for their age.
Truth, man. Every one of them, amazingly, is not just model-hot and willing to try anything at least once, but by some bizarre coincidence they’ve all got this intense wisdom that makes them, oh, just really so much smarter than everyone else their age. Except for these seven other identically-hot women over here of the same age that I happen to be playing with, they’re also all strangely wise beyond their years and also model-hot. But you? You’re special. Here, have a glass of good wine.
So yeah. I’m doin’ it wrong. I need to start bulking up one way or the other, and wrassle a lemur, and remove all these inconvenient smiling pictures. Then I’ll be on my way to a lifetime of hot babe-sex. What could be better?
Domminess, here I come.

More On #OccupyWallStreet

Despite appearances, this essay’s about #OccupyWallSt.
Now.  I’m in a bad mood because my work day has been yet another tangle of “This documentation tells me this will work, but it doesn’t” and people changing their minds willy-nilly, causing me to have to reprogram entire modules because they can’t decide how things should function.
Furthermore, I’m working in the kind of code where I have to concentrate.  And Gini’s the sort of person who, despite years of getting better about it, still sees me on the couch, thinks “Couch is not work,” and will jar me out of programmer-space me without so much as a by-your-leave to tell me about some internet meme.
So when Gini barges into my concentration for the third time today to ask me if I’ve seen so-and-so’s post on cheesemaking, I:
a)  Say “JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK WOMAN, I’M WORKING HERE, CAN’T YOU FUCKING GET IT THROUGH YOUR THICK SKULL?  IT’S BEEN YEARS, YOU SHOULD KNOW THE LOOK ON MY FACE.”
b)  Snap, “Working.  Now.  See?” and point at the computer to let her know just what an idiot she is.
c)  Shake off the rage, which isn’t really her fault, and quietly point out that I am working, sweetie, and you’ve interrupted me twice today, and if you don’t stop that I’m probably going to eventually snap at you in a way I’ll regret.  Please respect my space.
The correct answer, of course, is C…. But it’s also the least satisfying.  I don’t get to have the Tower of Righteous Rage, I don’t get to make her feel as crappy as I do, I don’t get the satisfaction of the dramatic apology I might (miiiight) get if I made a much bigger deal of this.
On the other hand, I don’t have to apologize later, and I don’t make her feel as crappy as I do, and she doesn’t pack her bags and leave after I pull that shit enough times.  So there’s that.
The lesson here, children, is one of those big fundaments of life: The right move is not necessarily the satisfying move.  It’s said that in diplomacy, a good compromise often makes both parties feel as though they didn’t get what they wanted.  And they didn’t.  But they got more than if they’d went to war, and probably lost.
The reason I bring this up is because I just got a comment that read:

So I’m doing a little teeth-grinding here, Ferrett.
Because at what point is something going to count as doing something?
You’ve previously posted, grouchy about people who make Tweets or posts or whatever in solidarity with something because they weren’t out doing anything.
Well? Now people are out doing something, and you STILL are saying they aren’t doing anything. At what point will it count? What has to be done for it to count as “doing something?” People are doing what they can; why isn’t it enough? Why can’t you/we not recognize that you don’t go from nothing to everything in a snap?

That’s an incorrect summary of my position.
I wasn’t grouchy because they weren’t out doing anything.
I was grouchy because they weren’t doing anything effective.
Too much of activism is about what feels satisfying, and not what’s actually effective.  One of the reasons I laud MLK is that he said, “Hey, you know what, we could yell a lot and be ignored, but frankly, these people are going to go out of business if we stop patronizing them.  Let’s be respectful enough that we always look meek and noble in the press, and behind the scenes we fucking squeeze their throats until they choke.”
That wasn’t satisfying, I’m sure, taking the upper hand as much of the time.  I’m sure rioting is a lot more satisfying.  But it would have just gotten everyone jailed.
Now, at this point, I’m glad that #OccupyWallSt is raising big questions; that’s great.  Whether they’re actually going to be effective in the long term in achieving their goals is another matter.  And I’m concerned that it’s going to turn into some big ball of everyone getting their satisfaction on by making a big stink and hanging around in crowds and waving signs, and in the end getting actually no legislation passed. (And hey, they’re not rioting and causing bad press.  Good job!)
I can recognize that we don’t go from nothing to everything in a snap.  But I can also recognize, for I have seen, protest groups dwindle into irrelevance because they’re more concerned about feeling good than doing what’s effective.
As such, for me to ask, “Hey, is this actually working?” is not only a question you shouldn’t be grinding your teeth over, but one that should be foremost in your fucking mind when you’re looking at it.  I’ve seen groups whose sole goal’s been to get the word out, and they got plenty of that word out, and nobody fucking cared.  I don’t deny they’re doing something.  But what are they actually doing?
As I said, I want to be proven wrong.  Maybe this evolves into something more significant than a bunch of people getting together, feeling good, and walking away with exactly the same legislation and power structure that was here when they got here.  Maybe the questions take root and make real change.  I am, at least, heartened to see consistent nationwide protests about this sort of thing, which is more than has been done in recent memory for any non-war-related activity that I can imagine.
But what I see from here is an awful lot of satisfaction in the form of “YEAH WE’RE HERE YOU SHOULD BE TOO, IT’S AWESOME” and comparatively little effectiveness in the form of “THIS IS WHAT WE THINK WOULD FIX THINGS, GO DO THAT.”
As such, I’m never going to stop asking, “Well, is this working?”  And neither should you.

A Melange Of Reactions To #OccupyWallSt

Here’s the thing about Occupy Wall Street: I want to like it. I’m sympathetic towards its causes.
I just don’t know if it’s really doing anything.
I mean, right now it’s doing something, and that “something” appears to be the purpose of Dennis Kucinich showing up at the Democratic Presidential Debates: raising a lot of questions that nobody really wants to answer. In particular, the responses to Occupy Wall Street have produced a lot of good videos and op-eds in response to “Why would all of these people just hang around waving signs?”
In particular, I rather like this four-minute-long video that explains everything that’s gone wrong with deregulation:

And wow, does former Representative Grayson absolutely school P.J. O’Rourke in this video (who resembles nothing more than a slightly more hysterical Harlan Ellison here, interrupting and capering):

And Paul Krugman’s Panic of the Plutocrats is succinct and well-written.
But that’s the problem I have. The responses are being inspired by Occupy Wall Street, not coming directly from Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street seems like that shy, emotionally incoherent girl in eighth grade who everyone told you dude, she’s totally into you, but whenever you talked to her you just got damp hands folded in skirts and low mutterings you couldn’t quite hear.
In a sense, that’s its strength: Occupy Wall Street isn’t like The Tea Party, which was bankrolled by corporate interests from the get-go, and had its soul pretty much gripped in the tight fists of spin doctors from Day One. No, Occupy Wall Street is a genuine grass-roots movement, and like grass, the roots go every which way.
That’s good. It’s hard to co-opt a movement like that. But it’s also hard for a movement like that to go anywhere. What we have is a seething mass of people who feel strongly about things and can’t quite seem to form a coherent shout that tells us what they want.
And people say that it’s the media who’s doing this, the media is following their traditional methodology of “Ignore, then overblow,” but I’ve been reading a fair number of the blogs and videos and Tweets from the whole thing – not all of them, but certainly enough that I feel reasonably confident that if there was a consistent solution that all of them were seeking, I would have stumbled across it by now.
It feels like they’re just sort of, you know, angry about the 1% in power (and they are in power) and the way so many conservatives have fetishized being rich as being equivalent to smart and qualified to lead, and they want people to, you know, do stuff about it. And I don’t know how that’s going to work out.
Steven Gould, that notable children’s author, told me that if I was on the ground I’d know. It’s clear there. And that’s fine, but he’s in New York and I gotta work. I hope to make it to one of the Cleveland groups, but really, from here it’s a bunch of echoed watermelon-cantelope-watermelon-cantelope noises.
Keep in mind, I agree with them. So if it’s not necessarily clear to me, how’s it playing in Peoria?
Occupy Wall Street is useful for now, because the question of “What do they want?” is circulating through the media, forcing debates on things that Fox would prefer not to discuss, holding Democrats’ feet to the fire so at least some of them are stating the truth of “Yes, this is class warfare, it’s always been class warfare, and we’ve been losing for three straight decades now.”
But what happens next? Brad Hicks makes a cogent analysis (as he usually does) about the likely consequences of Occupy Wall Street, and what he says about “Hey, when it gets cold and freezy, how many people are likely to keep showing up for hours at a time?” seem particularly relevant.
Then again, Occupy Wall Street is a peaceful movement. Say what you will about violent revolution, but it gets results one way or the other: either you smash or get smashed. The fail state of a peaceful movement is incoherent stasis – I remember seeing a protestor group in 1994 standing in New Haven green, passing out fliers to “Stop The Gulf War.”
For the record, this was four years after the first Gulf War had ended.
But they were still upset about the changes that had been wrought, and took the not-entirely-indefensible-but-certainly-unclear position that the ongoing damage and fallout still counted as a current war. They were handing fliers to baffled citizenry who you could see muttering to each other: “Did another war start up when we weren’t looking?”
The danger of Occupy Wall Street is that they become the Kucinich – the guy who raises some damn fine questions, then hangs around for too long after it becomes clear that the people in charge have zero interest in answering them and he doesn’t have any power to compel them.  The Tea Party was effective because even if you hated them, you had to admit they all lined up nicely to be voter-aimed in a specific direction.
Is Occupy Wall Street the new core of a revived Democratic Party the way that the Tea Party has become the chocolate center of conservative power, with old-school Republicanism rapidly becoming a thin, crunchy shell?  I don’t think so.  Would I want it to?  I think so, because we’d have some real fire at last.  People would be stating what the Democrats really want, making a case for socialism and regulation and government aid, instead of muttering it quickly like a sniggering teenager says “adouchesayswhat?”  We’d have to stumble for a while, given that you know, every major politician has been agreeing with most of the main Republican tenets (LOW TAXES BUSINESS GOOD REGULATION BAD) for years… But you know, the Republicans spent the better part of a decade in the wilderness before finally finding culmination in a Reagan who stood on the podium to express sentiments that would have been unthinkable in the 1960s: “Yes, greed is good.”
I dunno. I want this to work. I want to be heartened. Instead, I just find myself with the same sort of hold-your-breath feelings I had when Dubya invaded Iraq: I can’t see this working, but let’s hope.

How To Have A Long-Distance Poly Relationship

Those who say you can’t fall in love with someone because of their words don’t know how to read properly.  No, in these days of the Internet, it’s startingly easy to fall in love with people who are inconveniently distant.  And if you’re poly, you may start a relationship with these far-flung lovers, trying to make a real relationship out of someone you get to see twice a year.
Long-distance relationships are fucking hard, man.
But having had both some success (I’ve been dating Angie for almost three years, I married my wife who I met online) and some magnificent failures (*cough cough* NO NAMES) on the LDR front, I think I’m qualified to discuss some of the guidelines for carrying on a successful LDR.
Tip #1: Recognize That An LDR Makes For Ugly Fights, and Plan Appropriately.  
The reasons that LDRs are so hard is that the arguments last, but the snuggles are crap.
Which is to say that if you have an argument with your meatspace partner, you’ll fight – but then you’ll snuggle afterwards, hug off the tears, and probably have some rather nice makeup sex afterwards.  There’s all this slack just hanging around, free and lovely, and you don’t even think about it.
Whereas in an LDR, the arguments can start like brushfire because often you’re texting and can’t read expressions or body language, and those arguments stay longer.  You don’t have the benefit of happy cuddle-time to wash away the inevitable clashes, so every conflict feels magnified.
The solution here is twofold: first, recognize that any arguments seem way worse than they are because of that distance.  Second, the best way of preventing arguments is to assume nothing but good will from your partner.  If they say something that seems dickish, suppress your normal RAGE TO KILL and ask, “If I was going to frame this in the best possible way to make it sound as though they loved me ahow would I do it?”  Then speak to them as though they were, indeed, trying to be good people.
Doesn’t always work.  Sometimes they are being dickish, at which point it’s time to course-correct.  But by assuming the best intentions, you will stave off a lot of the little miscommunications that kill.
Tip #2: Get Used To Disappointment, Princess.  
An LDR is a lot of lonely longing.  You want them around, but you can’t afford the plane fare or the vacation time or whatever.
You have to recognize this is what you’re signing up for when you get on-board.  It’s not going to be as fulfilling as having them around to take to the movies; the reward is that you get some time with that fabulous brain that you wouldn’t have otherwise had.  But you’re going to spend the majority of your time living in the real world, without them.
You can ameliorate that with texts and constant emails and whatnot, but an LDR is to a certain extent an exercise in loneliness.  It’s not going to be like your other real-world dating relationships – it can be emotionally intense and time-intensive, but it’s still going to be saturated with “This would be so much easier if she were here.”  But she’s not.  She can’t be, by definition – that’s why you have an LDR.  And if that longing is going to be a constant ache that you cannot deal with, then you probably shouldn’t be in one.
Which is why the next tip is so important…
Tip #3: Have A Real Life, And If Possible Have Have It Symmetrical.
A lot of LDRs bomb out because one partner has a vibrant social life and is going to parties all the time, and the other is stuck in an shit apartment with a bare bulb and no friends.  That imbalance is going to cause jealousy, because one partner is going to want a lot of time that Mrs. Party-Happy may not necessarily be able to give.
The solution?  Don’t let your LDR be the excuse for not building up your own life.  The more satisfying your life is in the place you actually live, well… I mean, come on, do I have to sell you on the idea that “It’s a good idea to be happy in your own space”?  But if you have an LDR and hate where you live, that’s going to cause problems.  If you want your LDR to work, then recognize that “improving your life without your LDR” is part of the process.
And this applies even if you plan on moving to be with them!  If you’re the sort of person who never gets out and stays lonely inside your shell, then moving in with your LDR just means that there’s a better-than-even chance you’ll be lonely and clingy and miserable with her.  If you can’t maximize your happiness without your LDR, you’re probably not gonna do it with your now just-plain-R, and it’ll bomb out a few months down the line.
Shape up.  It’s a good idea regardless.
Tip #4: Have Goals.  
LDRs are lonely, but it can be better if you have plans.  Always try to have the next visit-date planned as soon as you can, so you have something to look forward to (even if that visit date is “Christmas, 2012”).  If the goal is to move in together, then try to set a date for that.
Give your LDR a sense of “I get to see him in X weeks!”  It genuinely does help.
Tip #5: Have Dates.  Or At Least Rituals.
This can be as complex as a Wednesday night Skype-date, or as simple as making sure you see the same movie and talking about it afterwards.  But make sure that even as LDRs, you have activities you do together.  For me, it’s often writing long-ass emails about my day, wherein they respond with long-ass emails about their day.  In either case, having this symmetric set of activities works.  It makes the distance feel shorter.  It makes you feel as though you’re sharing things.
Tip #6: Let Real Life Happen.
One of the greatest gifts I was ever given was by my girlfriend Angie.  We only see each other maybe five times a year, and I was in the middle of my annual spring depression YES I HAVE INVERTED SEASONAL AFFECTIVE DISORDER, YES IT’S IN THE SPRING IT HAPPENS SHUT UP.
But I was down.  I couldn’t function.  And I said that I didn’t think I could make it out, I was too oversocialized, too low on battery power, and if I came out I think it would just go poorly.
And she let me cancel.  She let me reduce the number of physical visits from five to four just because I was in a black hole.  She didn’t yell at me, she didn’t make this about her being insufficient, she just let it go.
That is, I think, a major portion of the reason we’re still together.  It’s not that she didn’t want to see me, but rather that she was willing to let real life be real life.  I would have been shit that weekend, probably depressive and crying and fight-picking…
…and while others would have made me feel terrible for having issues, and don’t you realize this is all the time we have, we have to make it work?, Angie just let it slide.  And we hugged a lot closer the next time we get together.
The point is that you’re going to have real life intrusions.  Don’t make them personal.  Sometimes she genuinely won’t have the cash to come out when she said she would, or his fibro will flare, and all your grand plans will fall down.  Just like they would in real life.  Yes, your get-togethers are scarcer, but let real life happen.
Tip #7: Think Your Partner Is Amazingly Awesome.
Really.  You’re gonna go through all that trouble for someone who’s not that awesome?  Just remember why you wanted them in the first place.