...but moving ahead in life is a complete other.

It is not exaggerated when I say that sometimes, when we were still living in LA, we literally were going to bed hungry and with painfully rumbling stomachs, because for us it sometimes was between buying food, or buying gas to get to work to make money the next day. You have no idea how many times we had to ask our roommates for help to either pay rent, or to help pay for our weekly groceries, and if it weren't for them I don't know what we would have done sometimes. It wasn't always like that, but more often than not, unfortunately, it was. The Fiancé was working two jobs, and I was doing as much freelance as I could, yet it was never enough. Whatever little money we made, it immediately went into bills or debts, and there was just no moving ahead. There was staying afloat, at best.

This situation was one of my main motivators to consider the move back to Europe, and leave everything behind that was so dear to me. Give up such a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We wanted to move ahead in life, wanted to be on our own as opposed to living with roomates like we were stuck in our early twens, wanted to have jobs that would enable us to become financially stable and think of things in the future, like children.

The move was painful, and the memories still are... but today we just returned from the office, where I confirmed my interest in this large 2-bedroom apartment. A large 2-bedroom apartment that is located at the border of Vienna, very close to the Vienna woods and other green recreation areas. It is relatively quiet, and a small creek runs right by it that is surrounded by green, which is lovely to take strolls in or just relax. Instead of traffic noise there are birds singing. And what's best? The complex is still being built. It is still a raw concrete building. On August 1, 2007 we will be moving into a brand new apartment that nobody else has lived in before, where we are not subject to landlords, and where we can do whatever we want. Everything will be new and shiny, and it will be all ours. We have two bedrooms, a large living room with balcony, and a large kitchen. The ground around the complex will be covered with lawn, going directly into the nature area where the creek runs. There will be two playgrounds and two toddler playgrounds, one of which will be in direct sight of our balcony.

It will be a wonderful place to have a baby in.

You see where I am getting at? Only a year ago we were struggling for survival on a daily basis, and now we are 7 weeks away from our wedding, preparing for a 4 week vacation in México, getting ready to get a loan for this apartment that we will be able to deal with, are in the process of paying off our car in LA and importing it to here. The Fiancé is getting his driver's license and will have his work permit soon after the wedding. I have a business of my own. We are currently able to work on paying off those debts that we have. We are thinking about a time plan on when to try for a baby in earnest.

My head is spinning from all this, and I am so excited about everything that I don't know what to be excited over the most at any given point in time. :) The progress we have made since we left LA is amazing, more than I could have hoped for in our desperate situation.

What's more is that this apartment finally will be something we will be staying in for a good amount of years... not a temp solution like everything has been since I moved out of my parents' in 2001. I can ask my friend, The Architect, to design the place for us, and it will be money well spent to invest in nice furniture. We are having a Mexican style kitchen in mind, and an oasis of green on brick tiles and terracotta pots and a Mexican hammock for the balcony. Custom-made furniture everywhere else. Dreams... possibilities... potential...!

No more renting of pre-lived-in places with used old furniture that we can't do anything about. No more holding off on buying beautiful things because there is no point in fixing up an old temp place anyway.

Finally... our first real home.

Today was one of the most beautiful days of my life. One of the most beautiful days in our life as a couple for sure. I will be forever grateful to my boss for giving us the information about this wedding ring workshop, it was the best thing we have done so far for this wedding.

I don't think there could be anything more loving and romantic than making a wedding band for your future spouse, that he/she will wear every day for the rest of his/her life. Sure, I was worried about my performance as a novice goldsmith, seeing as I consider myself a rather clumsy person when it comes to crafty things, and I am most certainly a very impatient person when it comes to small and detailed work that needs some real and undivided attention for a long time. I was afraid I would give up before I got to any real results, and that The Fiancé would have to take over and finish his own ring, because I would be just about ready to throw my work out of the window with all my impatience and my need for immediate results that require no detailed labor.

The opposite was the case - I found myself diligently and carefully working on The Fiancé's ring, making sure it would be a piece of jewellery I could be proud of having crafted and he would be proud of wearing every day, and I asked him for help only a few times when I didn't have the necessary strength in my arthritic hands to bend the metal correctly, or to get a particularly deep scratch out.

The results of today are two beautiful raw and rough unfinished white gold rings, that only need an hour or so more of sanding, and then a good polishing before they will shine in all their beauty and glory, and can be sent off to have the black/white diamonds put in, and our personal engraving done on the inside.

It was one of the most wonderful and amazing things to see a square stick of metal slowly morph into a beautiful ring with sharp oval diameter under my hands... I admit that at times I was questioning myself and my ability to make this unshapely piece of metal with sharp edges and uneven curvature into something beautiful at some point, yet I did it, and the process was wonderful. Making those rings and having been so intimately involved in their creation has made them so much more special than they could ever have been, if we would have just walked into any jewelry store and picked out a pair that we may have liked. They will be gifts that come truly from our heart not only in meaning, but in their creation as well, and are absolutely unique. My energy and soul is in The Fiancé's ring, and his love and devotion went into mine when we were smithing them from a soulless piece of square metal.

Nobody will ever have appreciated the gift of a ring more than we will, come 9/9/06.

Let me share some of our day with you in pictures...

Girl.MD isn't working out for several reasons. a) I am not attracted to her, and after our experience I am having the same sentiments about her as I would have if I had had sex with a guy I didn't feel attracted to, and it makes me feel kind of funny inside, and b) she has confessed feelings for me that are "more than are good for her".

Yay.

I start to understand men more and more, how they can get annoyed with women's constant need for emotional connecitivity and closeness outside the bedroom, when all they wanna do is fuck.

I just wanted to fuck, m'kay...?

We emailed a couple of times since then, and those emails were really honest and out in the open. I told her that one of our basic rules is that we cannot continue "using" people if there is any sort of emotional attachment developing, and that I cannot be emotionally attached to her, she said that she has never imagined it would be so wonderful with me, but that the more time passed since then she realized that her emotional attachment was just an overreaction to being overstimulated, and that with all this openness and confessions of what we want out of a relationship like this, she does not want to continue intimacy with us.

This really works well for me, and I am glad that she said it like this, before I would have had to hurt her feelings with a more blunt statement than my polite beating around the bush before.

So I go and email Bud for some nice m/m/f... and he goes ahead and tells me that he has a girlfriend now. Of the "I-wanna-be-faithful-to-her" kind. What the...? Girlfriednds were never part of the contract! I mean, don't get me wrong, I am very happy for him... but... ugh? What a bummer. I think these kind of "relationships" actually are more complicated than we thought... especially when needy women and handsome single men are involved.

So it's either monogamy, or a couple with the same needs and ideas of how this is supposed to work as us.

Either way I am fine right now... I am feeling accomplished and in tune with myself, and much clearer in my head than I was before. I could give The Fiancé some of what he wanted, and that makes me happy, too. The wedding will take place in 7 weeks, and there is so much left to do and to organize, that we don't have time for anything else anyway, our current 12-hour-days at the office taken into consideration.

I never thought I'd ever adopt such a manly way of thinking in certain regards. Shane from The L-Word, much...? No kidding.

So we got this tip from my boss, who has done this himself when he got married: make your own wedding rings. There is this lady who offers workshops for couples about to be married to design and make their own unique rings.

We met with the lady yesterday to discuss what we would like, and settled on a pair of 14 carat white gold rings. 18 carat, which would be the norm, would have been way out of budget, considering that The Fiancé would not settle on a ring that was narrower than 8 millimeters for his large hands.

We already had a pretty good idea what we wanted: simple, elegant, no intricate decorations, oval diameter of the material. When the lady showed us black diamonds though, our minds took on a bit different route:

...two identical white gold rings, a simple small stone in each one - white for one ring, black for the other - symbolizing how we are one, bound to each other, a union, a team, yet still two individuals, two different people... not a merge of two lives and personalities as so many people start seeing themselves once they are married. surrounding the stones should be a subtle V-shaped carving enclosing it... it's a V for his name when looked at one way, and flipped over it is the hinted at shape of an A for my name. Inside there will be a carving of the date of our wedding, and his name in my ring, and my name in his ring: in our own handwritings (- I didn't think this was possible, but I love the idea!).

Don't ask what this'll cost us... but considering that we are supposed to be wearing these rings until the day we die (ideally), and you cannot get any more personal than smithing these rings for one another, we believe that this is absolutely worth it. Plus... there'll always be a story to tell on how we came about these rings...

8 more weeks... so hard to believe now...! :)

So, how do I start the post, that this whole blog was intended to lead up to? The grande finale? Should it be smut-extravaganza, or should it be the simple rational conclusion I came to?

Internet, I have no idea. Let's just say that after dinner Girl.MD and I got a bit snuggly on the couch, and as things slowly and tenderly progressed, The Fiancé must have had the hardest time of his life to remain where he was and to not get himself into the mix. We were playing by her rules, and her rules stated that he be a spectator at best during her (and my) first time with a woman. I could tell that he was the most tortured spectator the world has ever seen. After a while he retreated to our table and focused all his attention onto his current drawing, to keep himself distracted and his mind occupied. But there was sweat pearling on his forehead, and the glances he shot us from time to time were animalistic in nature. It was a huge turn-on for me to actually see him like that - driven by his need, yet bound by his promise.

Girl.MD started things of slowly... lots of kissing, touching and exploring, and at first I thought that's all that there was going to be. I am not much of the long-foreplay-type, so I was very pleased when she finally discovered that I was wearing no panties underneath my skirt, and things started picking up quite rapidly after that.

She was just as eager as I was to explore the mystery that is a woman up-close, so I soon forgot the world around me and focused on her explorations. I kept an eye on The Fiancé, who was sweating profusely by now. His drawing has progressed more last night than it has over the course of the past weeks. It was a very interesting hour to say the least. I felt, I touched, I experienced, I learned. Things that were previously happening only in my head were suddenly right before me, and I used every opportunity I was given to its fullest. It was exciting, educational... very focused inward and with much listening inside myself.

Of course The Fiancé was rewarded for his patience and for his iron will to respectfully keep his promise, and the night took on a completely different turn then. I half-expected to feel a pang of jealousy when I saw him kissing her, and later when I shared him with her fully - but I learned then, as The Fiancé had before when we were with Bud, that it really is all just a matter of how to approach things in one's own head. Things previously perceived as a threat and danger to any relationship suddenly are welcomed, wanted, and a huge enrichment of our love-life. It was a wonderful experience.

She left around 2 in the morning, 4 hours before we had to get up again for a long day in the office. It's been my hardest day in the office yet, I had lost count of my ingested espressos around noon. Yet The Fiancé and I have been moving through this day like we are floating on a cloud, and I am very happy that I had finally had my opportunity to repay him for the selfless and open-minded things he has allowed me before.

As far as my experience with Girl.MD is concerned... I enjoyed it a lot, and it was very different from being with a man. Actually, it was all that I always imagined it to be, and it was wonderful. I am still no more attracted to her than I was before, and I would have given a world for the opportunity to experience last night with the woman who inspired this whole journey in the first place. When I closed my eyes I saw Jo instead... her pull on me is still that strong. It was wonderful and I am sure I will do it again when the time is right, but at the same time - after this experience - I have realized that men will always hold a stronger spell on me than women. I felt a very strong urge to be with The Fiancé after I was with Girl.MD, and his masculine presence was very reassuring for me.

All throughout the day I felt a bit weird about myself. I felt affirmed in my bisexuality now that it has moved out of my head and into the real world, and I feel wonderful and accomplished. Somehow whole. But all the questioning is gone now too, the unproportional desperate significance that my mind had put onto my bisexuality due to my lack of any real-life experience has snapped back to normal size, and retreated somewhat into the back of my conscience again. Sex is wonderful with men, and sex is wonderful with women as I now know - but it isn't about the genitalia attached to a person that makes it or breaks it, it is the person itself. Having had sex with Girl.MD to me was like having sex with Bud. Purely physical, and without any emotional gratification the way I get from The Fiancé. For all my desperate longing for a woman, in the end I just wanted to be with my man. I learned that it's not a primal longing for a female body in any shape or form that I am suffering because of some genetical particularity of myself that allows me to be attracted to both genders, but a deeper emotional longing for one certain woman, or somebody who can captivate me and hold me in her spell the way she did. And that woman is not Girl.MD.

It's all a learning process.

This blog is almost two years old, and it took this long for me to come to this realization.

I know now for certain that I truly am as bisexual as I thought myself to be in my head, but I now also know that I will not deal with my attraction for women in a lose manner. I am now comfortable with the physical confirmation of my mental assumption, but I will not allow this to deteriorate into a carnal using their bodies to satisfy me whenever the urge strikes me. I want being with a woman to remain special... to share it with a special woman that captivates me like Jo did, and to stick to my beloved men for the animalistic and wild fuck-fests that are so much fun for me. :)

In tense anticipation I am awaiting this evening.

Why? We have invited Girl.MD over for tonight: for dinner, and...

I purposefully left in the "..." with my invitation, and she interpreted it just the right way.

Now I feel just the way I did when I went to this horror Chemistry exam some years ago, for which I studied intensely for a full six months, and then just barely passed it. The Fiancé will cook, she'll bring the fruit pie, and I am full of intentions to eat said fruit pie off of her naked body.

Or maybe not. In all honesty, I am not even sure how I am feeling about this at all. Very nervous, that's for sure. It'll be one world of a difference in potential having her in my apartment vs. standing with her at a Bloodhound Gang concert with The Fiancé behind me, and my hands around her waist and tummy. And this potential will be obvious to everybody in the room, and it'll make the tension so thick that it could be cut with a knife. We'll say awkward things and eventually one of us will make an awkward move, that'll hopefully lead to all awkwardness to drop and us finally making the experience we wanted to make for so long - and then as an addendum for The Fiancé to make an experience he has been lusting after for years.

Two days before her 30th birthday, even.

I'll spare you all more incoherent babbling... I'll post again after the glorious bisexual deflowering... or whatever disaster this evening will turn out to be.

So, this friend of mine...? Let's call him The Architect. Basically, The Architect and I have known each other for 26 years... ever since he was born. Our parents used to be friends, and while they are not anymore today for reasons unknown and irrelevant to The Architect and I, him and I still keep tight contact and are better friends now than we ever were as children.

He trusts me with his deepest thoughts and emotions... and whereas I am not completely open with him about myself and my relationship with The Fiancé for fear of alienating him, I am still closer to him than others by my ability to give him advice from a woman's point of view without there being any male-female tension or sublimial "somethings" between us.

Only a few days ago he confided to me that he is still a virgin. I wasn't exactly shocked, because I knew that he has extreme difficulties closing the deal with women, but at the same time I didn't think that his problem was this big. I don't quite understand his difficulties either, for he is a very handsome, very smart, very sophisticated, and funny man, who is more charming than most, and has no difficulties starting up and holding conversations with women wherever he goes. He is not exactly a tall man, but as if to make up for it, he has a very tight body. His pecs would put many men to shame, and he moves about and acts with just the right amount of confidence and arrogance that women find charming. Yet he never gets more than one or two dates in at best, before he's being ditched again. I have been sitting back and analyzing this for years, and whenever he asked me for advice, I was there giving him my stand on things: he is too intense, he is suffocating his dates with his gifts and his attention, he smells like desperation. It's more than that, but those are the main points I keep telling him over and over.

I know he is starving for female attention, and I know that he is very frustrated with himself for having reached every goal and every dream he has set for himself, yet not the one he is craving for most. And as life goes, the things we want but cannot have take on a huge significance for us, usually much more than they should.

What's more, the household he grew up in was and is dominated by a very strong father who couldn't be any more macho than he is. Sexist and homosexual jokes are on the daily menu, and on top of that his mother is been pestering him with questions about "when will you bring home a girlfriend" for years. The Architect has taken on a lot of his father's ways of acting, and the target demographics for his jokes are pretty much the same, which is another reason why I had been reluctant to out myself (or The Fiancé) to him until now.

Last Saturday we were invited to a pool party at his parents' place. We had a really good time, and much alcohol was consumed. As the night got really late and The Architect had drunk a few Long Island Ice Teas more than were good for him, we all went down to the basement to play some table tennis. You can probably imagine the carnage. At any rate... as The Architect lost one game due to his lacking brain-body coordination, he walked straight up to The Fiancé and leaned against him, hugging him for solace in play-desperation over the lost game. The next thing I know, he kisses him several times with tiny playful pecks on his shoulder, just where his mouth reached standing up straight. My eyes bulged a bit, and to play it over I announced a loud curse over not having had my camera when I needed it, to which The Fiancé hands me his cell phone, which has a camera built into it. And lo and behold, The Architect goes right back to embracing The Fiancé, this time planting a few tender kisses onto the curve of his neck. Of course I took the shot with the cell phone, officially as blackmailing material for when he is sober again, but I am glad that I have taken it... otherwise I wouldn't have believed it myself for it was so COMPLETELY out of character for him.

The Architect then tried to play it off with a reassuring "Oh, you don't have to feel uneasy." to The Fiancé, which made me giggle inside a bit, cause - if you only knew, my friend. The Fiancé didn't say anything either, and soon after that it was time for us to leave on our quite long ride home anyway.

This little episode made me think, though. As already mentioned in the title: the saying goes that drunks, like children, never lie. Could this be an explanation for his bad luck with women, for his inability to close the deal? Is he in reality a closet-case homo-/bisexual who is so repressed and conditioned to a certain way of life, that he cannot admit it even to himself, yet subconsciously averts any closer contact with women without knowing that he is doing it? Has his father's conditioning of what a man is supposed to be like and act like been successful enough to reduce him to a fool that makes an a$$ out of himself when he's blabberingly drunk, that only substantial amounts of alcohol free him up enough to act upon what he really wants, only to be able to blame it on the alcohol when he's sober again, not having to take on any real responsibility for his actions, and not having to further deal with it on any conscious level?

After he was done nibbling on The Fiancé's neck he briefly turned around to my gaping self, grinned, and said something to the effect of "after a few Long Island Ice Teas it just has to be a man for a change...", obviously finding himself to be very funny, maybe even provocative.

He left me not quite knowing how to proceed. He's always come to me for women-related advice, and he trusts me and my opinions. I am honest in my attempts to help him to get to lead a more fulfilled life, and I am not beyond suggesting he explore "different" ways of approaching love for himself... though I am not sure if I should. Would revealing myself and The Fiancé to him serve as a good example of homo-/bisexuality NOT being a bad thing that has to be joked about and looked down upon, or would it alienate him from The Fiancé and maybe even me, and cause him to think less of us? Would him knowing about The Fiancé being all many and masculine as he is yet still enjoying sex with men on occasion inspire him to look beyond the conditionings of his social surroundings, or would it cause him to close up even more than he already is?

Should I even mention the little incident last Saturday to him and question him about it, or should I just metaphorially brush it underneath the carpet and assume we all forget about it?

When The Fiancé and I left, The Architect hugged me and suggestively brushed up against me and held me close for a bit longer than he should have, and it felt to me as if he was making up for what he had just done to The Fiancé: to get a bit touchy-feely with a woman to acertain his role as a manly man. I didn't push him away or think much about it... he was drunk, afterall.

The last man I knew who remained a virgin until the age of 25 and never managed to close any deals with women suddenly turned up with a boyfriend. He's a full-blown gay man, and much happier than he ever was in the years before admitting to his preferences. Any advice on how to proceed with The Architect would be welcome.