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CaringandReal -> RE: What totally and completely does it for you? (1/21/2011 4:41:42 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: porcelaine
I think the answer evolves over time. Right now I find more enjoyment in the aspects that incite physical and mental torment. Although tenderness has its place, it's the former that I cannot live without. And in a roundabout way I find those acts gentle in their own right.
Namaste,
~porcelaine
Good points you bring up. I find the prioritization of needs or wants very interesting. If I may follow up on your two traits, imagine for a moment the torment (or rather periods of torment) go on for years but there is absolutely no tenderness, ever. Could you stay fulfilled/sane/functionable that way? I don't think I could. I would need tenderness as well, not a whole lot (I think of myself as an energy-efficient car in terms of that fuel), but in doses administed with good timing (just-in-time timing, lol) or I would reach the "there is no point to this" frame of mine in which Exit - Stage Left would seem the only viable option.
Switching them around (lots of tenderness over the years with very tiny doses of torment interspersed amongst it) strikes me as unsatifying not to mention very boring, and that leads me to the the thought, "Of course there are other things in life besides these two traits." And then I start thinking about those other things and how I would prioritize thim. In a way, this sort of thinking reminds me of Agile programming. You have to provide the customer with a lot of the features that s/he wants (the "torment," let's say) but at the same time you have to build an infrastructure (the tenderness) that has no direct value to the customer but is required in order to support those fancy features. But how do you balance the two? Too much infrastructure for the sake of infrastrures sucks and results in a lousy, unresponsive product. Too much focus on features without a bare-bones but solid infrastructure in place results in really lame features that promise a lot but do not actually work properly. I'm glad that balancing act is left up to the dominants. I couldn't do the emotional math. :/
But I still like to set myself little prioritization exercises. These seem to occur naturally when someone whose mind inclines to self-torment reads threads in a forum like this. I'll choose a pair of traits or maybe as many as four traits and then ask myself, "Ok, I have this small number of things I really like but I can only have one or two of them at most. Which one(s) would I choose over the other and why? And are such things sustainable over time?" It can be very, very hard to just choose one, which is why I worded the thread question the way I did. I was curious to see what other submissives' #1's were. It's quite hard to just choose one, if you are thinking of something that occurs regularly over time. If you are just thinking of a single moment or period of time, the momentary thing that gets you hottest is a much easier question to answer. I answered my own question first with my momentary thing, fear, and then I had second thoughts, "But what about the long-term? Do you want to live perpetually in a horror film?" My answer was, "No, I would run out of adrenelin--and probably feel a little tacky, to boot." So I had a "this will sustain me over the long term" answer as well, which was "enforced servitude." Then, naturally, I had to ask, "Well, Ok, what if I could only choose one of those: the in-the-moment intensity or the long-term sustainability? While I may be an "Agile" slave that needs both, which would I choose, if in some theoretical space I could only choose just one?" A tough question, maybe an impossible one for me. So I added a clarifiying "constraint" to my theory space: a gun pointed at my head and the knowledge that if I didn't choose one of the two in three minutes my brains would be blown out. The time constraint made the choice easy. I'd choose the second experience, enforced servitude, and give a sad--but quick! only three minutes!--kiss goodbye to the drug of fear.
(Glances at the ramshackle rambling above and shakes head sadly at self. Now look at what you made me do, Porcelaine! :D)
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