pornography on pause
I hate to admit it, but I just can't do it.

Once upon a time, I could reel off libido-blowing sex scenes at the drop of a panty, but somewhere in the course of the last couple of years, I seem to have lost the ability. Of course, having my not-quite-two-year-old daughter wandering in and out of the room while I'm trying to write probably hasn't helped, but it used to be easy. It used to be doable without really having to engage my brain's higher functions. (And yeah, I can hear some of you mouthing off about how porn has nothing to do with the brain or higher functions. Pipe down, ya smartasses!)

I could just go ahead and churn out some mediocre work for as long as my Porn Guy is willing to pay for it, but I'm crippled by my excellence-in-all-things doctrine. So, whether this incapacity is temporary or permanent remains to be seen, but for now, the revival of my pornographic career is on hold.

"Gah", as my husband would say.


this is your brain
Dean pointed out this piece in Newsweek about an American woman who woke up from a stroke with a brand-new, completely involuntary British accent. Turned out it's a phenomenon called Foreign Accent Syndrome, which is very rare, but can happen if you incur injury to a specific portion of your brain. I always thought accents were a product of cultural upbringing, but now it seems they're partly neorological as well. So all you have to do is get yourself thumped on the head in precisely the right way, and bam! There you are, sounding authentically French or Irish or whatever. Though with my luck, I'd probably wind up speaking just like that half-assed Cockney kid from Les Miserables.

Newsweek also made mention of new discoveries on synaesthesia, which is another rare mental syndrome, in which one type of sensory input is confused with information of a different sense. For example, some synaesthetes have been known to perceive the color red as "the sound of trumpets", and the taste of grapefruit as "a twisted triangle shape". (Alan Moore portrayed it as a kind of superpower in his Top Ten.) Around one in every 25,000 people is born with synaesthesia, and sadly, I'm not one of them. Would've been cool to have a totally original way of seeing (smelling? tasting?) the world.