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#1
I realise that I am at the point of my life where I had many relations, indiscretions - whatever you want to call them. Intimate connections with people. Mostly involving sex, but some that don't. I've never really bothered putting them in written form because sometimes, you just need to let that event be precious to you and only to you and the other person.
Some of the people I've been with have left my life. Others have stayed. For some of these, my own personal statute of limitations has ended and I feel at ease talking about them without fear of any repercussion. And I won't be naming names or any particularly identifying details. Some people may recognise certain events, certain people or certain retellings. I ask that you respect the conventions that I've laid out here.
I was originally going to use people's first or last names and have them be either x-kun or x-san but this is difficult when up until recently every person you were in a serious relationship with had a name beginning with J. So titles it is!
There is of course, the usual disclaimer that this is probably NSFW. But not explicit, just NSFW. Probably not safe for life either.
The Mathematician
Some of you who have known me for a while have seen me make oblique references to a period of my life with a man known as The Mathematician. I'm still acquaintances with him, but we've moved on to different places due to the natural drift in our lives.
It was when I was still studying in York, during my disastrous first year as a Natural Scientist. I knew The Mathematician because we were both doing radio shows in the late evenings. I had the 10pm-11pm slot playing jpop and game music and he had the 11pm-12am slot playing music that was exclusively available via a Creative Commons licensed. I was fascinated from the moment that he played musique concrète immediately after introducing himself in the first episode. From that point forward, I made it a point to stay to listen to his show in the control booth.
What followed was a strange three weeks. I would sit in the control booth, put the main output headphones on and listen to the whole thing. We would never say a word to each other but we would always catch each other's eye and look away almost as if there was a hesitance on both our parts to acknowledge the other was there. He came earlier and earlier each week, listening to more of my show each time in the same way I was listening to his. He would sit in the control booth, put the headphones on and listen.
On the fourth week, instead of just slinking away once his show ended I stayed behind to wait for him. He was apparently, too shy to ask my name or introduce himself. At first he thought I was just killing time in the control booth until I had to go home. But when it became apparent that I was listening to his show rather than miss any of it, he froze up rather than talk to me.
This was of course, met with a lot of laughter on my part. It seemed so convoluted for such a simple thing - I liked what he was playing. I was interested in him. He had a Home Counties accent but he was talking of the vocabularies of someone much more wordly, who looked beyond the mere everyday of his existence. Similarly, I must have piqued his interest because I was this half Asian half English thing who seemed to know what he was on about.
I asked him whether he would like to go for a drink. He said yes, then I remembered what time it was. I asked whether he would object to sharing a bottle of wine in my flat, since I lived near the radio station itself. He didn't object to either of that.
Now you're probably thinking, what I was I doing inviting some random dude I knew indirectly to my place. University flats are simultaneously the best and the worst for facilitating social interaction in my opinion. Nobody knew each other in my floor, because they were all foreign exchange students whose grasp of English was quite poor. They all kept to themselves, which meant that the kitchen and common areas were often empty. I often invited people I knew back to my flat to chat and to make friends. Just like I was doing tonight.
It was over a bottle of cheap white wine on the communal kitchen table that we actually introduced each other. The Mathematician was from a small English town who discovered the internet early on and just cavorted on it. He always loved music, music was his big thing but every aspect of art was wonderful. He dabbled in photography and painting. He also knew how to play the fiddle and guitar. He was also there to do mathematics and was in his second year. He was this great big oddball with black rimmed glasses and I found that entrancing.
When you really get into the stride of a conversation with someone, the words just keep going. After we knew each other on a base level and had ran out of the natural conversation topics, we shifted to common interests. He asked me why I listened to his music.
"I find your music interesting. I took Music at International Baccalaureate. You can't throw around terms like "fractal based process music" and not expect someone to not know them, right?"
The Mathematician looked embarrassed. He was so used to talking to the ether; to not getting a response back. When he finally got one, he didn't know what to do. I'm sitting there, tipsy on some really awful wine and I'm blinking my eyes trying to process this. Had no one really noticed the interesting, complicated things he was playing on air until now? Was I really the first one?
Nobody had noticed.
That made me mad. I was frustrated with the world more than anything else. I of course communicated this to him in a rather animated fashion, fuelled by terrible warm wine. In my enthusiasm, I ended up sitting on the table right in front of him because he was trying pointedly not to look at me during my little rant. When I had finished on the note that people were idiots, he was still refusing to look my way.
"Hey... it's not good to ignore someone when they're right in front of you."
"I know but... but..."
"But what?"
"I can see your pants."
"My... what."
"Your pants."
I looked down and realised due to the length of my skirt, I had been flashing him the entire time I was seated on the table in front of him. Rather than interrupting me or say anything, he opted to just look away and wait until I was done or probed him to say anything about it. If this were an anime, there would be one of those large sweatdrops falling off my head.
"Have you never seen a girl's pants before?"
"Y-yes, but what does that matter?"
This was one of those moments I could feel time dilating. I could sweep it under the rug, put it to being tipsy and sit properly, keeping everything platonic all the while playing it off as me being overly enthusiastic to the point of forgetting to watch what was happening. Or I could grasp onto his nervousness and those signals he was trying to hide. I couldn't be reading those wrong. He was trying to preserve my modesty because he was in to me.
I could have been a whole lot smoother when I replied to him, but I wasn't. I felt time speeding up to its normal pace and I had to give a response.
"Because you actually want to look at them. Or my ones, in particular."
I wish I could remember what kind of underwear I was actually wearing that day. It's been so long that I really couldn't give you anything about them. All I remember doing was taking them off right in front of him and handing them right to him, asking him to look at them.
My memory becomes a little fuzzier at this point but who has perfectly intact memory at 2am? I was confident that nobody was going to come in to the kitchen at this point in the evening so I ended up taunting him. Was he just going to look? Or was he going to do something more? The Mathematician adjusted his glasses and awkwardly squirmed in his seat to hide the fact that his boner was causing him a great deal of discomfort.
I think being fingered in the kitchen of my university flat was probably one of the highlights of that terrible year at York. But I ended up sleeping with him properly - full intercourse, in my room. Not in the kitchen, because I'm not that terrible. But that was the first time I realised that I liked making people squirm. I used to think it was a bad thing if I was making someone intensely uncomfortable and turned on at the same time, but then I realised that it was a power that not everybody had. The Mathematician taught me that I was an S.
What followed was four weeks of these late night encounters, right after our radio shows aired. Sometimes it would be at my place, sometimes it would be at his. I lived nearer, but he had the bigger bed. Wednesday evenings became associated with music and sex.
It remains a particularly poignant period of my time at York because after those four weeks, exams rolled around and we didn't really see much of each other in person after that. But those four weeks shaped the kind of music I listen to now as sometimes he would come with a blunt or a tab of LSD, excitedly asking me to listen to his newest discovery. I was intoxicated out of my mind, listening to some of the most beautiful music I had listened to in my life. This was the days before Spotify so everything he brought to me was really curated, hours of trawling on the internet to find hidden gems. (I say the internet, it was What.CD but it was still a lot of downloading and listening on his part.) I had him explain the processes to me - was this MP3 or FLAC? Was it something from a bygone age and rediscovered digitally or was it digitally made and turned into something analogue to be returned digitally?
There were S and M undertones to everything we did sexually, but neither of us could put a name to what we were doing. He enjoyed being bossed about by me and I enjoyed bossing him. I told him exactly what to do and he did it. I never tied him up but I had a feeling that he would enjoy it if he did.
Nothing terrible happened between us, but as the pressure of exams escalated, much of our goofing off time was turned into studying. Naturally, we just stopped seeing each other and that was the end of that. We still saw each other at the radio station but we never really hit off in the same way again.
To mark the end of this post, I leave one of the tracks that really surprised me when he played it to me.
Listening to Madonna seemed so left of field for him that when he played this to me and told me who had performed it, I was taken aback. It sounds so unlike any other Madonna track I had heard by that point. The Mathematician explained to me everything - Shep Pettibone, when he was producing for Madonna made a bunch of really experimental b-side tracks. Warner Records, keen to capture the club market slapped them onto her singles in an attempt to sell her singles. But because her A-sides had catapulted her into the mainstream so forcefully, a lot of these beautifully produced b-sides are a footnote in her long career. The track itself is 12 minutes of deep house, beautifully 90s in its sound and production.
The Mathematician and the period surrounding him remains one of my fondest memories. Looking back on it, it probably wasn't the healthiest or most productive uses of my time. But I enjoyed myself so much that I didn't give a shit. I had learned so much about myself in that period of time with him that I came out of that encounter a different person. I didn't have to put on any airs, or be someone other than myself to try and attract people. Some people will find what I do charming and fall for it. Some won't. I've also found that I need something interesting there to sleep with someone, because it is horribly easy to just sleep with someone for the sake of it. It also turns sex into just... a thing. A process. I never wanted sex to be a process or motions without anything behind them.
It's a good thing, that I have had a fairly large strike zone.
Some of the people I've been with have left my life. Others have stayed. For some of these, my own personal statute of limitations has ended and I feel at ease talking about them without fear of any repercussion. And I won't be naming names or any particularly identifying details. Some people may recognise certain events, certain people or certain retellings. I ask that you respect the conventions that I've laid out here.
I was originally going to use people's first or last names and have them be either x-kun or x-san but this is difficult when up until recently every person you were in a serious relationship with had a name beginning with J. So titles it is!
There is of course, the usual disclaimer that this is probably NSFW. But not explicit, just NSFW. Probably not safe for life either.
The Mathematician
Some of you who have known me for a while have seen me make oblique references to a period of my life with a man known as The Mathematician. I'm still acquaintances with him, but we've moved on to different places due to the natural drift in our lives.
It was when I was still studying in York, during my disastrous first year as a Natural Scientist. I knew The Mathematician because we were both doing radio shows in the late evenings. I had the 10pm-11pm slot playing jpop and game music and he had the 11pm-12am slot playing music that was exclusively available via a Creative Commons licensed. I was fascinated from the moment that he played musique concrète immediately after introducing himself in the first episode. From that point forward, I made it a point to stay to listen to his show in the control booth.
What followed was a strange three weeks. I would sit in the control booth, put the main output headphones on and listen to the whole thing. We would never say a word to each other but we would always catch each other's eye and look away almost as if there was a hesitance on both our parts to acknowledge the other was there. He came earlier and earlier each week, listening to more of my show each time in the same way I was listening to his. He would sit in the control booth, put the headphones on and listen.
On the fourth week, instead of just slinking away once his show ended I stayed behind to wait for him. He was apparently, too shy to ask my name or introduce himself. At first he thought I was just killing time in the control booth until I had to go home. But when it became apparent that I was listening to his show rather than miss any of it, he froze up rather than talk to me.
This was of course, met with a lot of laughter on my part. It seemed so convoluted for such a simple thing - I liked what he was playing. I was interested in him. He had a Home Counties accent but he was talking of the vocabularies of someone much more wordly, who looked beyond the mere everyday of his existence. Similarly, I must have piqued his interest because I was this half Asian half English thing who seemed to know what he was on about.
I asked him whether he would like to go for a drink. He said yes, then I remembered what time it was. I asked whether he would object to sharing a bottle of wine in my flat, since I lived near the radio station itself. He didn't object to either of that.
Now you're probably thinking, what I was I doing inviting some random dude I knew indirectly to my place. University flats are simultaneously the best and the worst for facilitating social interaction in my opinion. Nobody knew each other in my floor, because they were all foreign exchange students whose grasp of English was quite poor. They all kept to themselves, which meant that the kitchen and common areas were often empty. I often invited people I knew back to my flat to chat and to make friends. Just like I was doing tonight.
It was over a bottle of cheap white wine on the communal kitchen table that we actually introduced each other. The Mathematician was from a small English town who discovered the internet early on and just cavorted on it. He always loved music, music was his big thing but every aspect of art was wonderful. He dabbled in photography and painting. He also knew how to play the fiddle and guitar. He was also there to do mathematics and was in his second year. He was this great big oddball with black rimmed glasses and I found that entrancing.
When you really get into the stride of a conversation with someone, the words just keep going. After we knew each other on a base level and had ran out of the natural conversation topics, we shifted to common interests. He asked me why I listened to his music.
"I find your music interesting. I took Music at International Baccalaureate. You can't throw around terms like "fractal based process music" and not expect someone to not know them, right?"
The Mathematician looked embarrassed. He was so used to talking to the ether; to not getting a response back. When he finally got one, he didn't know what to do. I'm sitting there, tipsy on some really awful wine and I'm blinking my eyes trying to process this. Had no one really noticed the interesting, complicated things he was playing on air until now? Was I really the first one?
Nobody had noticed.
That made me mad. I was frustrated with the world more than anything else. I of course communicated this to him in a rather animated fashion, fuelled by terrible warm wine. In my enthusiasm, I ended up sitting on the table right in front of him because he was trying pointedly not to look at me during my little rant. When I had finished on the note that people were idiots, he was still refusing to look my way.
"Hey... it's not good to ignore someone when they're right in front of you."
"I know but... but..."
"But what?"
"I can see your pants."
"My... what."
"Your pants."
I looked down and realised due to the length of my skirt, I had been flashing him the entire time I was seated on the table in front of him. Rather than interrupting me or say anything, he opted to just look away and wait until I was done or probed him to say anything about it. If this were an anime, there would be one of those large sweatdrops falling off my head.
"Have you never seen a girl's pants before?"
"Y-yes, but what does that matter?"
This was one of those moments I could feel time dilating. I could sweep it under the rug, put it to being tipsy and sit properly, keeping everything platonic all the while playing it off as me being overly enthusiastic to the point of forgetting to watch what was happening. Or I could grasp onto his nervousness and those signals he was trying to hide. I couldn't be reading those wrong. He was trying to preserve my modesty because he was in to me.
I could have been a whole lot smoother when I replied to him, but I wasn't. I felt time speeding up to its normal pace and I had to give a response.
"Because you actually want to look at them. Or my ones, in particular."
I wish I could remember what kind of underwear I was actually wearing that day. It's been so long that I really couldn't give you anything about them. All I remember doing was taking them off right in front of him and handing them right to him, asking him to look at them.
My memory becomes a little fuzzier at this point but who has perfectly intact memory at 2am? I was confident that nobody was going to come in to the kitchen at this point in the evening so I ended up taunting him. Was he just going to look? Or was he going to do something more? The Mathematician adjusted his glasses and awkwardly squirmed in his seat to hide the fact that his boner was causing him a great deal of discomfort.
I think being fingered in the kitchen of my university flat was probably one of the highlights of that terrible year at York. But I ended up sleeping with him properly - full intercourse, in my room. Not in the kitchen, because I'm not that terrible. But that was the first time I realised that I liked making people squirm. I used to think it was a bad thing if I was making someone intensely uncomfortable and turned on at the same time, but then I realised that it was a power that not everybody had. The Mathematician taught me that I was an S.
What followed was four weeks of these late night encounters, right after our radio shows aired. Sometimes it would be at my place, sometimes it would be at his. I lived nearer, but he had the bigger bed. Wednesday evenings became associated with music and sex.
It remains a particularly poignant period of my time at York because after those four weeks, exams rolled around and we didn't really see much of each other in person after that. But those four weeks shaped the kind of music I listen to now as sometimes he would come with a blunt or a tab of LSD, excitedly asking me to listen to his newest discovery. I was intoxicated out of my mind, listening to some of the most beautiful music I had listened to in my life. This was the days before Spotify so everything he brought to me was really curated, hours of trawling on the internet to find hidden gems. (I say the internet, it was What.CD but it was still a lot of downloading and listening on his part.) I had him explain the processes to me - was this MP3 or FLAC? Was it something from a bygone age and rediscovered digitally or was it digitally made and turned into something analogue to be returned digitally?
There were S and M undertones to everything we did sexually, but neither of us could put a name to what we were doing. He enjoyed being bossed about by me and I enjoyed bossing him. I told him exactly what to do and he did it. I never tied him up but I had a feeling that he would enjoy it if he did.
Nothing terrible happened between us, but as the pressure of exams escalated, much of our goofing off time was turned into studying. Naturally, we just stopped seeing each other and that was the end of that. We still saw each other at the radio station but we never really hit off in the same way again.
To mark the end of this post, I leave one of the tracks that really surprised me when he played it to me.
Listening to Madonna seemed so left of field for him that when he played this to me and told me who had performed it, I was taken aback. It sounds so unlike any other Madonna track I had heard by that point. The Mathematician explained to me everything - Shep Pettibone, when he was producing for Madonna made a bunch of really experimental b-side tracks. Warner Records, keen to capture the club market slapped them onto her singles in an attempt to sell her singles. But because her A-sides had catapulted her into the mainstream so forcefully, a lot of these beautifully produced b-sides are a footnote in her long career. The track itself is 12 minutes of deep house, beautifully 90s in its sound and production.
The Mathematician and the period surrounding him remains one of my fondest memories. Looking back on it, it probably wasn't the healthiest or most productive uses of my time. But I enjoyed myself so much that I didn't give a shit. I had learned so much about myself in that period of time with him that I came out of that encounter a different person. I didn't have to put on any airs, or be someone other than myself to try and attract people. Some people will find what I do charming and fall for it. Some won't. I've also found that I need something interesting there to sleep with someone, because it is horribly easy to just sleep with someone for the sake of it. It also turns sex into just... a thing. A process. I never wanted sex to be a process or motions without anything behind them.
It's a good thing, that I have had a fairly large strike zone.