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Psychologically, it feels like this little blurb is more about our own perception of ourselves (or the perception we want others to have of us), then it is an accurate description. I feel it's incredibly difficult to write any form of autobiography or "about me" blurb without sounding like a pretentious asshole, or just fluffing up our profile like it's a High Schooler's first resume. So rather then give a big flowery speech about my interests and experiences, I've decided to just list them off, and maybe add a little personal insight at the end.

Honestly though, the best way to get to know me is going to be to throw a message my way, and initiate a conversation.

My areas of interest include but are not limited to:

Dance: Salsa, Tango, Electronica, Raggaeton, Ballroom, Hip-Hop, Swing, Trance, House, Fire Dancing, and anything else with a decent beat. I've danced professionally and choreographed live performances.

Martial Arts: I am a full contact fighter, and I teach a women's self defense seminar. I also run a clinic where I bring in local instructors to cross train in a variety of styles and diciplines.

Psych: Both in my personal life and my profession, I love to figure out 'why? people behave the way they do. Hell, I work in the rehabilitation of paranoid schizophrenics because of the challenge (Primary interests are the psychology of BDSM, polyamory, open relationships, group theory, and group power theory).

Relationships: I am in an Open Relationship with the love of my life, a beautiful source of inspiration and adventure who I have been with for the last year and a half. We have experience with polyamory, but both prefer to maintain a purely Open dynamic. A such, we easily retain our primary standing, but each have the freedom to develop physical and emotional intimacy (as we both believe the two are inseparable) with outside friendships.

Communication: I can't possibly stress enough how important this is to me. -laughs- Just look at how long my profile is. I am constantly communicating my wants, thoughts, and desires, and I expect the same from my partners.

Subcultures: I am a subculture junkie, I love studying them, learning about them, and experiencing them firsthand (Goths, geeks, ravers, fire-spinners, burners, PUAs, steampunks, cyberpunks, grunge punks, and any other subculture I get my brain around).

Storytelling: I'm an extrovert, I love to be in the middle of a crowd spinning a good tale. While the handle may seem like vanity at first glance, I have spent the better part of my life collecting the stories. Always placing myself in new and exotic locations and scenes in order to live my stories firsthand.

Geekery: I'm a hard-core geek, and while I'm no longer a video gamer, I still run a weekly tabletop group. I'm a regular follower of Zero Punctuation, Rifftrax, Penny-arcade, XKCD, Freakangels, and a collection of other webcomics (plus a few comic books like Transmetropolitan and Red Son).

Politics: Specifically, international politics. -laughs- I have a degree in it, I better be interested. It probably all stems from my love of world travel, but there you go.

Books: Douglas Adams, China Mieville, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., William Gibson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Paolo Bacigalupi, Terry Pratchett, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jim Butcher, Ian M. Banks, Orson Scott Card (before he got homophobic, which is weird because of all the gay subtext in Ender's Game), George R.R. Martin, and a collection of other authors.

Organizing: As I have mentioned, I am deep into the extroverted side of the Meyers-Briggs spectrum. I have worked hard to help make my household a social hub, and I continue to work to maintain that. I organize and throw all manner of gatherings from my home, from small scale Maker's Meetings, to large play parties, to gourmet potlucks.

The Lifestyle: About little over a year ago, I had the connections in place to make the transition to full 24/7 life-stylist, had I so chosen. I have friends who have made that jump, and it would have been easy for me to follow in their footsteps. However, I decided that that was not the path I wanted to take. While kink is an important aspect of my existence, it is not the primary definition. I felt that, for me, making the jump to 24/7 would change that, and I am happy to keep kink where it is now.

Kink: If you want to find out what kink is to me, well... you'll just have to ask me.

Misc interests: Gourmet cooking, wine tasting, home brewing, leather working, DIY in general, Burning Man, BRC Rangering, Fire Conclave, fire breathing, photography, and music.

As for my experiences with all of this? I learned the basics of how to run a scene as a service Top when I was younger, and you can see the list of what I've had personal experience with down below. However, it wasn't until I threw myself out into the local scene and started finding peers and mentors that I really began to make the transition from service Top to Dominant. I'm thankful for some truly amazing teachers, teachers who showed me not only how to safely use what I had learned, but how much there still was out there to discover. More importantly, they helped me practice and learn what I believe to be the truly important part of being Dominant (and really of any relationship), good communication, good communication, and good open communication. Finally, they provided me with an excellent venue to make observations about the psychology of BDSM. It is probably as a result of these wonderful mentors that my favorite thing to do within the community is act as a resource and mentor to those who are just awakening to their kinky side.

I made this profile to stay current with local kinkster events, to make new friends, find new mentors, and bring along new students.

Raconteur


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2/21/2010 2:20:26 PM
So for the last 3 years or so I've been running under the name of Avatar whenever I am in a public play space. For me, it had deeply personal connotations. I've always been good at reading people, always had an intuitive grasp of their emotions and desires, but I didn't always have the unshakable confidence in myself that I do now. I went to a Waldorf School in my youth, which in my area was basically an artsy private school for poor kids. It means I grew up with the same 30 kids, and never really had to learn to make friends. We just had to be friends, and new kids had to learn to be friends with us. So, when I moved to Public School, I had left 30 best friends behind and had absolutely no idea how to make a new friend. To compensate, I quickly started relying on my natural intuition, and developed it as much as I could. I would listen to a group of people talk, what they talked about, and observe how they moved. When I was sure I knew what I was doing, I would sit down and talk about things I knew they would be interested in in a way that they recognized as familiar. I could copy dialects, subjects, and even body language. In High School, I was a chameleon, blending in with whatever group of people I happened to be sitting with at the time. It was how I made friends. This practice is probably one of the reasons I enjoy subcultures so much. I could go to someplace new, someplace strange, and fit in easily with whomever or whatever was there. It meant that I acquired a lot of cool experiences. I put myself in a lot of strange and uncomfortable places and as a result was able to meet a huge variety of fascinatingly bizarre (and awesome) people. As I got into college, I found that I was still exhibiting a lot of my earlier personality around the people I met. I was no longer a Chameleon, mimicking my surroundings to fit in. Instead, when I met someone, I would do a quick read of their personality, and then present to them the aspects of my personality that I assumed they would like the most. I wasn't pretending to be something I was not, but I was only showing a part of my personality, an "Avatar" of myself. Very few people would ever get to meet the totality of me. One of the key catalysts of my transformation from service Top to Dom was a unbelievable surge in confidence. I am confident bordering on arrogant. When I want something, I earn it and take it, end of story. But to reach that level of confidence, one of the biggest and hardest steps I had to take was to stop making Avatars of myself, to stop presenting to people only those aspects of my personality that I knew they would be comfortable with and find fascinating. I had to stop being an Avatar, and just be me. It was the most important step I have ever taken in my development. By destroying the Avatar, I forced myself to develop strong communication skills, to learn to appropriately convey who and what I am honestly and bluntly. To stop lying, not to everyone else, but to myself. It was then that I took up the name "Avatar," as a reminder of what I had once been and what I had become. It has been my name ever since. And now, thanks to a children's Anime program and a James Cameron film about Noble Savage stereotype blue cat people, the name is totally and probably irrevocably fucked. So here's to you Avatar, it was a good run. Now what?

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JoanFrost
 
 Age: 32
 The Hague, Netherlands