How NOT to approach a girl

by blehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

You have to understand - this isn't just mindless fear coming from nowhere. This isn't media-driven. This fear comes from a million interactions with men over a lifetime - men who go too far and feel that it's ok to touch/grope and otherwise threaten you (and of course, rape, at the far end of the spectrum).

This starts early - bra snapping, for instance. I'm not saying it's sexual assault for a young guy to snap a young girl's bra, but it's intrusive, unwanted, humiliating and painful. Somehow, these boys think it's ok or even funny to do this. It's objectifying and implies that these boys think a girl's body/underwear are his to do with as he pleases.

I remember in 8th grade Flashdance was a huge movie (yes, I'm old). I was wearing - as a lot of girls were - a sweatshirt that was cut out at the neck, so one shoulder was exposed (like the lead character in the movie). I didn't think anything of how I looked, I just wanted to wear a Flashdancesweatshirt. That day, a boy I had never spoken to sneered at me and said "You're just wearing that so everyone looks at your boobs." He was angry. I have never been so humiliated before or since. I was 12 and I had no concept that someone might be looking at my breasts, or that someone would wear a shirt just to make that happen.

The thing that burned that interaction on my brain though, and makes it a propos, was his anger about it. Like I was trying to fuck with him. It's the same anger that comes through loud and clear when some guy yells "Hey, nice tits."

In Jr. high/high school we all start to learn about the unexpected grope. About the guy who slips his hand on your chair so you sit on it, then laughs with all his friends. About the hard pinch on your ass in the hallway, or the straight up grab both your breasts move. Again, mocking, angry laughter with the guy's friends usually accompanies these things.

Are you starting to get the picture?

High school is usually also when men (often much older men) start to drive very slowly next to us, trying to "talk" to us and get us in the car.

There are so many many more examples. Guys grinding on you in the club. Guys jerking off next to you on the bus, guys cornering you on the street. Guys and their friends forming a circle around you and you barely escape.

Here's another good one from my own memory banks. I was a senior in high school and went to a college party with a friend. We were both gothy girls and my friend called herself a "witch." One of the guys at the party asked her about the pentagram she was wearing, she told him she was a witch, and he started to get really belligerent. His friends joined in, taunting us both and saying we were devil worshipers. Then shit got scary - he and his friend picked up pool cues and said they were going to shove them so far up us they'd get the devil out. They tried to grab us, we shoved past them and ran.

Are you starting to understand why strange men talking to you on the street is so threatening?

I've had guys follow me home from work. There was one guy who lived at a halfway house at the end of my block who used to wait for me to get off the bus so he could leer at me and say all sorts of disgusting shit.

Thankfully, most of this has stopped now that I'm a mom and middle aged - that makes me pretty much invisible to men (it's actually kind of funny how invisible I am now!) But -- as recently as 2 years ago when I was 7 months pregnant there were guys who would yell shit at me.

Oh, and I'm just an average-looking woman.

All this to say - there's a long history for most women of harassment, straight up assault, possibly rape that has us all in a constant state of alert. So, keep that in mind if you want to meet a girl you see on the street.

Don't act threatening. Don't follow her. If she seems freaked out, stop trying to talk to her. Your best bet is NOT to compliment her on her appearance. Strike up a conversation about something else. Say something funny. Talk about the weather. Comment on what's in her shopping cart. ANYTHING but her appearance (that includes asking about tattoos, piercings, etc). That's just a giant red flag. And then, if she seems friendly, keep talking for a bit - like a friendly person, not someone who wants to get laid. And then - give her your number and ask if she'd like to get coffee sometime.

There is NO REASON for a man to talk to a woman about her appearance if he doesn't know her. It's intrusive, even if it's just "you look nice today." Why can't you just think that, and keep it to yourself? Why do you feel the need to make her know that you think she's attractive? That's all about your wants and your needs and nothing at all to do with her.

So again I say, if you want to talk to a woman you've never met, talk about anything else but what she looks like.

Why the Joker and Batman cannot kill one another

by igormorais

They are fighting an ideological battle for each other's soul. They are both two sides of the same coin:

Two individuals who, because of a horrible day in their lives, became insane and decided to take on the world and make it in their image.

The joker was a shitty comedian with a pregnant wife, a nice guy. On the day his wife died in a random accident he was bullied by mobsters into committing a crime, fell into a vat of chemicals and ended up alone, in pain, and scarred for life. The overall pain was such that he snapped.... realized that the world is cruel, unjust and random and decided he was going to destroy all fabric of the attempted, false, self-delusional order of the world and break everyone down to his level. He believes morals, ethics, are hypocritical nonsense. You can refer to the Dark Knight movie, in which he says "I'm just ahead of the curve." He spends the entire movie putting everyone in front of him in situations where, to survive, they will have to break their moral code. Even the henchmen of the black guy... there are two. For no reason other than to break them, he says he will hire the one who will kill the other.

This is what the Joker does, he lives to prove to people that he is the avatar of who they really are : he just refuses to lie to himself.

Batman watched his parents be murdered, went insane also and developed several obsessions, he fights to bring justice to a world he feels is essentially good and plagued by the unnatural disease of crime and evil. He believes in justice above everything else, he does not kill.

So what happens when these two men face each other? The Joker's ultimate victory is for the Batman, the strongest enemy of his world view, a person who refuses no matter what to break down to his level, to kill him. He wants the Batman to kill him. He can't wait for Batman to do it. It will prove his point: anyone can be broken into evil, just like him, if their pain or their reasons are strong enough.

Meanwhile the Batman is facing someone who is the epitome of cruelty and senseless crime. He HAS to beat the Joker according to his rules, to prove to himself that his rules mean something, that they are absolute. And this is a decision he has to face every time he catches the Joker: do I kill him? How many lives will I save if I just kill him? He always escapes Arkham.... I will be doing a good thing by ridding this world of this supremely deranged psychopath. If only he could break his morals in this one case.... this one time... for the greater good....

The Joker knows this. And he laughs. And he hopes.

But he also has to deal with the temptation... without the Batman he would be virtually unstoppable. Even in the world of DC Comics where there is Super Man, other supervillains fear him. They steer clear of him. He is too unpredictable, chaotic, and cruel. If only he were to kill the Batman, there is nobody out there who understands him enough to be able to stop him. If only he could kill the Batman... everything would be so simple.

They are fighting a deeply personal, deeply ideological war. They each represent what the other one hates the most, and they each depend on the other to stay alive until the other bends to his will.

The last each one of them wants is to kill the other.

It is poetic.

Can something create itself or be created from nothing?

by jmarkinman

First, consider that "Can something create itself?" and "Can something be created from nothing?" are two different questions. Next, realize that "something from nothing" does not presuppose that "that something created itself".

I should also mention that because getting something from nothing does not mean that that something created itself, the question of "is there something creating itself from nothing" becomes irrelevant. If you have nothing, and we presume that something created itself from nothing, there is an inherent semantical paradox in that question which tells us that the something itself must also be nothing, which is not necessarily true. Thus, the question of whether something comes from nothing should remain separate from whether or not that something "created itself". I hope this is clear.

Now that we have questions that might lead to an answer of value, we can explore them a bit further. The first question, "can something create itself?" is quite well established. We call them "Turing Machines" in an abstract sense. In a more concrete sense, we call them computers. Any mechanism that is "Turing Complete" can create other mechanisms that are themselves "turing complete" And yes, A Turing Machine can create something that is the same as itself. But this doesn't answer the second question.

To answer the second question, Jamotron is quite right in saying we must agree as to what "nothing" is. I believe, from your layman's perspective, "nothing" can be defined as the lack of matter and energy. And perhaps, by extension, the lack of space and time, as well. But we should ask ourselves if "conditions" are possible. Is a condition "something"? The interesting thing about conditions are that conditions are non-material (they don't necessarily require space, time, energy or matter) and they can happen spontaneously through the arrangement of information. Information is a physical phenomenon that is itself spontaneous (doesn't require a condition) and happens naturally through the fact of "difference"... that is, if there is an observer of the phenomenons, there is a difference between the phenomenons such that they could be distinguished from each other. Any difference will do. And again, difference is spontaneous and independent. Once difference is established and perpetuated, conditions can arise from the information provided by difference. We might see the standard model (quarks, gluons, bosons, etc.) as a way to see the types of differences involved in OUR universe when pertaining to matter and energy. There might be other universes which set up different differences and thus different conditions setting up even more different differences. We don't really know.

In "A New Kind of Science" Wolfram makes a case that very simple computer processes can make very complicated arrangements. For example, he has been able to model a universe where the conditions of general relativity hold true in a computer simulation.

By now, you should be able to understand that conditions can be independent of matter and that conditions arise spontaneously through spontaneous information processes. That our universe had a particular spontaneous information process that lead to the laws of nature as we know them.

ne of these laws of nature is called "The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" Which is a postulate of Quantum mechanics and tells us that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle because every particle has a wavelength and wavelengths have a CONDITION that in order to know the amplitude of a wave and the frequency of that wave, it must be in motion and position cannot be fully determined (an over simplification, if you want to learn more here is the wikipedia link.)

The Uncertainty Principle leads us quite seamlessly to the idea of Zero Point Energy. Zero point energy tells us that "the lowest-energy state (the ground state) of the system must have a distribution in position and momentum that satisfies the uncertainty principle, which implies its energy must be greater than the minimum of the potential well."

Thus, in a certain sense, energy is itself a condition of other conditions already established. When a fluctuation happens in zero-point energy, something similar to a "virtual particle" is formed and we get real manifestations of matter and energy.

Given a universe with the condition of Zero Point Energy, we have a universe now where matter itself can arise spontaneously. From here, the existence of the entire universe can be explained as a result of fluctuations in zero-point energy.

The Casimir experiment is an actual experiment that verifies the existence of zero-point energy.

I think the important thing to understand is that the nature of information is that it is not "preserved" like matter and energy are, but can be generated spontaneously, without cause and that when a difference in information occurs, something like our universe becomes possible if the difference is "sequenced" such that the information necessary to carry out the conditions occurs naturally. And this sequence MUST occur, mostly because we can reduce it to the infinite monkey theorem.

The poop that changed my life

by erikpdx

Some poops, you relief immediately. Some poops, you feel good for an hour. Really great poops, you feel good for the rest of the day. This poop, this one transcended all. This was a life-altering poop. My life is divided into two halves: Before this poop, and after this poop. Almost a year later, I still feel good. I will probably feel good from this poop for as long as I live. In that way, I consider this experience to be a small blessing.

After I had knee surgery, I woke up with a voracious appetite, probably due to the muscle loss, and all of the immediate physical therapy during recovery. I was downing protein shakes, eggs, toast, hearty soups, chicken, fresh fruit. I just wasn't pooping. It might sound crazy, but when you're in that much pain, it's possible to forget about pooping.

I hadn't even been into the bathroom very often; getting out of bed was so much work, that mostly I peed into buckets for my girlfriend to dump. Many days after surgery, I was feeling sick to my stomach. I thought it was from the pain killers and from laying in bed for so long.

I felt a great rumbling in my stomach, and my body presented me with a feeling of great urgency; I knew I better get to the bathroom quickly. I called to my girlfriend, who helped me hobble to the bathroom on crutches. Lowering myself to the toilet, balancing on crutches and my one good leg, I had no idea that my life was about to change forever.

I have never had a poop be so loud, or explode so violently out of me. Ten seconds of terror, as my bowels evacuated like never before. Blasting poop, water splashing back up onto me, blasts of gas releasing, followed by poop, followed by more gas, and more poop. I felt my stomach getting smaller. I had to brace myself. I felt tremendous amounts of mass moving through my system. For a moment, I never thought it was going to end. I was no longer in control of my fate, I sat there helpless, simply along for the ride. After what seemed like an eternity, deafening silence. It was over.

My entire body tingled. I felt lighter. I was covered in sweat, and breathing heavily. I felt high, delirious, in shock and awe. Great waves of increasing euphoria washed over me. Feelings of amazing pleasure I simply cannot describe. I felt as if I was bathing in a golden light of goodness. This was a transcending event. I felt like I had just touched the universe itself.

I down, in amazement at what lay beneath me. I simply could not believe my eyes. There was a mountain of fecal matter, filling the entire bowl, and reaching several inches up out of the water. It was almost touching my ass, and I had to be careful not to let my balls drop down into it. It was unreal. I can't tell you how long I sat there staring.

The silence was only broken by my girlfriend yelling through the bathroom door. "Are you ok in there?" She became worried when I didn't respond immediately. I was in disbelief.

I knew when I saw that mountain of poo, that chances were, this would be it: the mightiest shit of my life. The epic poop that all other epic poops would be compared to. I knew then that I could not let this moment pass unrecorded, or I would truly regret it for the rest of my life. If I were to describe this poop to others, nobody would believe me. I needed photographic proof; it would be a crime against everything I believe in, and the very universe for me to not take pictures.

Finally, I yelled back through the bathroom door.

Me: "Jen? Are you there?"

Girlfriend: "Yes, are you ok?"

Me: "I'm fine, I'm beyond fine. Ok, Jen. Listen very carefully. I need you to get my camera."

Girlfriend: "WHAT!? NO!"

Me: "Jen, you have to trust me. My camera is on my desk. Put my macro lens on it, and attach my flash."

Girlfriend: "I will NOT have any part of this!"

Me: "I need you to do this for me. Don't make me hobble out there to get the camera myself!"

Girlfriend: "Are you fucking serious?"

Me: "Yes. Either you get my camera, or I'll come out there and get it."

Girlfriend: "Fine, but ONLY because you are recovering from surgery. I hate you!"

Still high, and in a very altered state of mind, I managed to get to my feet. I got up on my crutches, and carefully turned around, still trying to come to terms with what I had created. Staring into the bowl, I felt like it was staring back out at me.

In comes my girlfriend. Immediately overwhelmed by the smell, she was disgusted by what I was doing, and disgusted that she was going along with it. Her eyes accidentally land on the contents of the toilet bowl, and she goes "UUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!!!". Jen hands me my Nikon DSLR, and runs out of the bathroom, yelling that I am disgusting - and that, in this moment, she cannot remember why she loves me.

So there I am: delirious, high, adrenaline pumping through my veins, sweating, wearing nothing but my knee immobilizer, camera strap around my neck, balancing on crutches and my one good leg, and trying not to fall over while using thousands of dollars worth of photographic equipment to take a picture of my poop. Getting a good angle was tricky. I felt as if I was having an out of body experience, and I couldn't stop laughing. The moment didn't seem real.

After taking the best pictures I could given the circumstance, I called for my girlfriend to come back in for my camera.

Girlfriend: "I HAVE TO COME BACK IN THERE?!"

Me: "You don't want me to drop my camera, do you?"

Girlfriend: "… FINE!"

She came back in, plugging her nose and closing her eyes, letting me know that "In this moment, I hate you!".

Honestly, she was a really good sport about the whole thing. For the record, she is a silly, loving, understanding person, and unbelievably patient with me. I smiled at her as she walked back out of the bathroom.

Relaxing onto my crutches, I looked at the mountain of poop for what I knew would be the last time, feeling a mixture of peace and admiration. Delirium had mostly given way to tranquilly. I knew I would never see anything like this again, but I had my pictures, and it was time to say goodbye. It was sad, but nothing lasts for ever - not even the most epic monuments of fecal magnificence.

It did not go easy, no - this poop was a fighter. The amount of fecal matter created a seal around the exit to the toilet, and the water levels started to dangerously rise. I grabbed the lid off the toilet, and stopped the water flow. While on crutches, I had to fight with the plunger, and knock the mound aside so it could begin to exit. Slowly, it began to drain out, bit by bit. All in all, it took about five flushes for it all to go down.

Only then could I lower myself back down again, and clean myself off. My ass was still wet from the water which splashed up onto me, and I used a hand towel to wipe the sweat off of my body. I was surprised my ass didn't hurt at all, but in retrospect, it was probably due to all the endorphins and adrenaline still in my system.

I managed to get up again, and cripple my way back to the bedroom, grinning and laughing. I still felt wonderful, and I wanted to tell the entire world. My girlfriend gave me a dirty look as I walked in.

Me: "That… that was AMAZING - I ..."

Girlfriend: "No! No! No! Stop! No! I love you, but I am not going to hear a story about your poop. You are disgusting."

Me: "But, Jen, I - You don't understand. It …"

Girlfriend: "No. No. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to see the pictures. You are gross. Go tell all all your guy friends, I don't care. I want no part of this!"

Me: "But, Jen, it was so…"

Girlfriend (Covering her ears): "I AM NOT LISTENING! I AM NOT LISTENING! I AM NOT LISTENING!"

Me: "If you had any idea of what I went through in there, you would be nothing but happy for me."

Girlfriend: "You. Are. DISGUSTING!"

After she helped me get back in bed, propped my leg back up with the ice cuff, and got me a drink, I had her bring my laptop and my memory card. Drinking another protein shake, I anxiously downloaded the photos. What if, in my altered state of mind, they were out of focus, or blurry? I would never forgive myself. Soon, as the photos downloaded one by one, my fears were quieted. They were beautiful - well, as beautiful as something of this nature can be.

I immediately got to work. Cropping, sharpening, rotating, getting the color and white balance just right. Finally, it was ready for the world.

I sent the photos to my friend, and gave him a call. He was repulsed, but amazed. Jen left the room while we discussed what I had just experienced.

Experience the wonder and amazement:

Mountain of Poo 

Mountain of Poo 2 

If I walked in on a poop like that, I would sooner believe it was some sort of prank, than it actually being something that came out of someone.

I've tried to relay these feelings to many people, but so far, I don't think anyone has ever truly understood. I don't think you can understand until you've been there, losing over ten pounds of poop in ten seconds. To say it was at least equal in size to a football is not an exaggeration. The euphoria one feels - you really have to experience it. Someday, I hope to find someone who has been through a similar experience. Somebody is bound to understand me, one day.

Looking back, I can remember the tranquilly I felt, the elation, and I can't help but smile. I still feel relief, even after all this time.

Best. Poop. Ever.

The prank that got me a girlfriend

by Retsejme on Reddit

I'm a prankster and this is one of my favorite pranks. So, for the five people that will see this, I hope you enjoy.

Background: I live in CA, my buddy's gf was home from college in NY. She had brought her NY roomate who is also a prankster to visit. They talked her friend into pranking me. She basically just left me a voicemail saying that I'd been fired. It was fairly well done. It sounded pretty professional and believable, but it was over as soon as I went in to work the next day.

I had never met her.

I decided to prank her back. She was an Art student (photo major) at NYU and had a website up with her work. One of her pictures was a shot of a pack of cigarettes.

I did a little bit of research, found a law firm in Florida that didn't have an email address listed (this was 1998), and started committing a felony by impersonating a lawyer. I got a throw away email account and emailed her claiming that I was an attorney who had been hired by Philip Morris to police the internet for "illicit use of their trademarked property".

She wrote back with a pretty standard "I'm not making any money off of this, I'm an art student" line.

I kept it up, began researching the actual laws that were relevant and referencing them.

At the same time I had become single, and had started emailing her on my own. I took pains to not send the Lawyer emails at any times that weren't during business hours for Florida, and tried to keep my personal emails sent in the evening CA time. When I wrote long emails from the Lawyer account I would sometimes type with just my left hand, in order to disrupt my normal writing style.

So, as the lawyer I gave her a 2 month deadline to take down the offending materials. Why two months? I dunno, I just made it up in the first email. It happened to be a great deadline, because she and I became closer over emails and I was able to get into her head and see how she was responding to the lawyer emails.

Our personal emails grew more and more involved. This was the late 90s, no one had really heard of online dating. I don't think craigslist existed, if it did no one I knew was aware of it. So, starting to get to know someone over email was a unique experience for both of us.

Anyhow, the other accidentally brilliant part of the deadline is that it happened to be right before her finals that semester. She had been meeting with the N.Y.U. legal department who were happy to take the case to trial. In a post Andy Warhol world, the art student vrs. the cigarette company would be a great win. She saw the logic in this, but she was just too busy to deal with it. She also was afraid that if the legal department didn't win she would be the one left holding the bag.

The lawyer started mentioning that if she was fined hundreds of thousands of dollars she didn't have, they would possibly tithe her wages until the principle and reasonable interest was paid off.

I told her to appeal to the lawyer as a person. She did. The lawyer regretted to inform her that he was just doing his job, which was to find and inform offenders. If she choose not to comply, he would simply pass this case along to someone else. He didn't know what would happen if he did that, no one had failed to comply yet.

She broke. Two days later the website was down. Not just the offending picture, the whole damn thing.

So, I started to realize that I had done too good of a job. (It wouldn't be the first time in my life I realized I might have different... boundaries than other people.)

I emailed her from the Lawyer, saying that he was traveling but it was important that she contact him immediately. I left her my phone number.

We had never exchanged phone numbers before. I was a concerned because the emails we were exchanging had started become more and more personal. My buddy was going to go to NY to live with his gf (and her roommate I had been torturing over email daily for a few months) for the summer, he was suggesting that I join them.

Suddenly the effect of what I had been doing hit me. I had played a double agent, acting as though I was advising her on the best way to stay out of trouble while at the same time using the personal information about her that I gained for my own sadistic entertainment.

But I had given her my phone number. I would come clean. It wasn't the first time I had ever done wrong, and I'd gotten pretty good at apologizing over the years.

I was hanging out in my room (no cell phones!) waiting for the call. After a few hours it rings. I know it's her. I pick up the phone and say "this is lawyer so and so, how may I help you?" She had already figured it all out. She saw the area code, recognized that was the same area as her roommate was always calling (for you young kids, we old people used to have to share land lines, and we'd have to identify the expensive long distance calls we made). She put two and two together. She knew who she was calling.

Back to the phone call. "...how may I help you?" She replies, "You're the coolest person in the world."

I ended up moving to NY, and staying in her bedroom.

So, after this story we start emailing and talking even more. I think it was early winter, but I'm not really super sure of the time. By spring we've sent each other packages in the mail and are listening to mix tapes we made for one another every day. About a week before I'm supposed to arrive, her roommates let me in after a red eye flight to NYC. I surprise her at 7 am. We moved into an apartment in the East Village. I got a job waiting tables, then a job bar tending. This was probably the "coolest" my life will ever be.

Our relationship was fine, but not fantastic. Even though this story makes us sound like soulmates, we weren't. I'm pretty far from perfect, I'm sure I did a lot of things to annoy her. For my part, she worked two jobs during the summer. Two crappy minimum wage jobs. I had traveled across the continent to be with her, and she was working 60 hours a week. She was rich, her family was rich, she didn't really need the money. She just had it in her head that she should be working.

I realized that her life would always be that busy. That whatever relationship we had, she would always have all these "important" things that I might not think mattered, that would keep her away from me. This was in June. This is when I stopped really being in love with her. I didn't know it at the time.

At the end of August, I stayed around for a hot second. I actually lived in her dorm for a week or so. Spent some time in Ontario, came back and spent more time with her. Then I moved back to San Francisco. I started working for my family, which meant instead of waiting tables and have 20 hours a week to write long emails, I was working 50 hours a week and catching up with my friends. I had a lot less energy for her. I was now as busy as she was, and she didn't like it.

Early December we were talking on the phone, arguing as usual. She was complaining that we didn't spend enough time talking to each other. I said that the problem was that when we did talk, all we did was talk about not talking enough. She disagreed. I responded, "We've been talking for an hour, we've talked at least once every other day, you don't even know that I quit smoking two weeks ago." There was silence. Then there was more fighting. That's when I knew we had to end.

A week or two later we talked and both thought that we broke up with the other person. I mean that I thought I dumped her and she thought she dumped me. The most mutual breakup I've ever been a part of. We were laughing at the end of it. I've only seen her once since then. She's the only ex I have that I wouldn't mind being friends with. But we didn't stay in touch. And so it goes.

What does desire/being aroused feel like for a woman?

Originally written by helloalciehello on Reddit.

Note, I am awkward about describing genitalia.

First, there will be something that triggers it. Seeing a guy, hearing a sentence, feeling something--for example, bumping into a guy on the subway, putting a hand out to steady myself, and feeling hard muscle underneath my hand, then I look up and this gorgeous man is literally inches away. Yeah, let's run with that example.

So, first, there's the trigger, and what it specifically triggers is this... jolt. Like a zap, almost, from each of my hands and feet, zapping straight to my gut. My palms tingle and my heart starts beating faster. I draw a shaky breath through my mouth in reaction to the zap. I am hyper-aware of whatever it is that triggered me, and my attention is on it 100%, though my brain feels slightly foggy. The jolt is accompanied by a feeling like my gut has dropped out of my body, a sort of "whoops" feeling like the one you get in a car when you go over a small hill quickly.

In public, at this point, I would blink and shake my head to clear the fog (literally, not figuratively) and focus on something else. But let's say I'm in a boy's apartment, and the trigger, instead, is that we were talking, the conversation drifts to a stop, he steps forward and runs a finger down the back of my arm. (Oooh lawd.)

My breathing quickens, and I feel blood rush to my face. The room feels slightly warmer. I notice that my mouth is open and close it, biting my lip. I take another breath, shaky, to try and slow my breathing. It's not certain whether or not this arousal is going to lead anywhere. My heart is beating faster, and I start to feel my pulse, ah, down there. I cross my legs or press my knees together, look down, clear my throat.

Say, at this point, he grabs me by the hips and pulls me closer, whispering "Come here." (Sweet jesus.) That's the signal, "Hey, don't worry about those outward signs, it's boner time." Then I stop strapping in my body. I uncross my legs, move my knees apart, and there's this empty ache between my legs, like something's missing and I need to fill the gap. I drop my shoulders back, my mouth falls open. Almost like I'm opening myself up to him in as many ways as possible. My breath comes faster, and the breathing is different from normally. My chest rises and falls, up and down, rather than out, or breathing from my gut, as I normally do. It's as if my breasts are trying to lift up, to touch him, be touched by him. The pulse between my legs is now stronger than the one in my chest. It feels hot and damp, and I can feel moisture slipping out of my (my god, this is graphic, OK, reigning it in)--er, right. Ahem.

With each movement he makes, I get another jolt, another zap. My palms tingle, my breath shakes, the pulse between my legs gets stronger. I seek to pull him towards me, to put some part of him between my legs, to start to fill that unfilled space. My toes curl and I lick my lips, dry from the quick breaths. My hands reach for something hard and firm to curl around--no, my body reaches for something hard and firm to curl around. I feel soft and pliable and melted. My skin feels tight and sensitive, the fine hairs on my arms are tiny antennae sending unreasonable sensory input to my brain at the lightest touch. My brain is foggy as hell, my thoughts reduced to simple needs and wants. I need something between my legs, I want something pressed against me. It's an ache, and though it hurts, it feels so good.

With every moment that passes, any part of my body not being touched tingles with annoyance at being ignored, and I mentally zero in on every part being touched. I tuck my leg up, and my knee rests against his thigh, and for a moment, that connection point is my entire world, and then the rest of my body comes back into focus and screams "HEY, ME, TOO!" and I slide my leg along his, temporarily soothing each petulant square of skin until I wrap my calf around his leg, pulling him against my, ah, lady business. I try to touch as much of his as possible, any part untouched becoming more tingly and upset, my breath quickening, heart beating faster, until the agonizing inability to touch all of me to all of him becomes too much and a little noise escapes, an exhalation, a moan. Slightly embarrassing, slightly arousing, and it triggers another jolt.

At this point, it's a waterfall down there, and I can feel the heat reflecting back from my panties. Every touch of his hand leaves a trail of shivers in its wake, with little jolts that build until all I can feel is this pounding heartbeat between my legs. I'm not thinking at all any more, just trying to feel as much as possible. It's not just a heartbeat anymore, now my muscles are flexing and pulsing along with it, almost like the throbbing after an orgasm, but intermittently, not constant.

Hopefully at this point of arousal, something is done about it, and then I'd be describing sex. But I will say, that the first moment of penetration, after all that arousal and this buildup of desire to have something, anything, fill that unfilled, aching, empty space, that first moment when it's in and--that, oh god, that moment is the best moment of sex, THE best moment, like every nerve in my body is saying "ahhhhhhh," and my nether regions are like "YESSS MOTHERFUCKER."

Anyway, that's that.