I was in the bathroom with the water running and thought I heard Deb say she would cook the quail (that Ricky gave us) on Sunday. What she actually said was that there was an IMAX movie on Whales at Fernbank.

I had a talk with Jake early on in the day to recheck in with her about where Anat and I were. I 'd gotten two "back off" lectures from Deb and Sara. Turns out Jake had completely not understood what I was asking about when I called to make sure I wasn't crossing any boundaries on Thursday. So, no more flirting with Anat. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to talk to her about it yet, but I know Jake has, so it's not like she's reading about it here.

Then I went shopping. Or, more accurately, tooling around town in the MINI, stopping in at stores once in a while. First I mailed a couple packages for Deb, then I picked up the latest issue of SIP. I'm hoping T. Moore jumps timeframe again soon. I don't want to go through the 10 years when Francie and Katchoo aren't talking to each other. I have a feeling we've got a lot of David action coming up. But I think I just realized where the kid that seems to be Katchoo and David's 20 years from now came from. Ahhhhhhh.

I stopped in to see Deb (bizzy, bizzy, bizzy � but not too busy to find out how my talk with Jake had gone) and then I had lunch at RuSans while I read my comic book. Yuh-um. They gave me two free samples. One was a warmed roll that was vegetable (some kind of squash) instead of rice with crab and some other fish in it. The other was like a California roll but with a red snapper-type cooked fish instead of crab. I ordered tuna, octopus, red snapper, eel, and two sticks of chicken gizzard yakitori. I need to remember next time that I don't like their barbecue sauce that much.

Next was my trip to Marietta to visit RSpeed, where, if you want to send Badsnake a gift of love, anything for the MINI interior will do. The MINI valve stems are cool, too.

Anyway, I don't go up to Marietta very often�not if I can possibly avoid it. So I'm on Marietta Parkway looking for a car parts place. What I didn't realize before I got there was that the ONLY businesses on Marietta Parkway are car part and repair places. And you can imagine from the designation of "Parkway" that the people in cars behind me are not particularly interested in going 20mph while I look at every business sign. NAPA, GoodYear, Pep Boys, Brake-O, Auto Zone, Bubba's Auto Service, Billy's Auto Parts, Cars R Us, Mufflers R Us, Mufflers and Sparkplugs R Us, Mufflers Sparkplugs and Hubcaps R Us, Car World, Auto Land, Vehicle Vicinity, Wallet Rapers Foreign Car Repair ... It was never ending.

I knew about how far it was supposed to be past 41, so I knew when I had definitely gone too far and had to turn around for another pass. I found it the second time around. I had been looking for a fairly large place, but it was about the size of a Pizza Hut delivery place in a strip mall. I'm not sure my MINI would fit inside the store, that's how small it is. Of course, they have a garage on the side. That part was bigger, but I didn't see that part. The guy who helped me was very friendly and opened the box and checked out the glove box organizer before he sold it to me to make sure it wasn't broken or missing a part. I also ordered a car cover, but they're on back order.

To cleanse myself of white suburban hetville Marietta, I headed back to midtown to Brushstrokes to pick up some Elbow Grease. I wanted to try the hot formula, but they only had it in the 15oz. size. In fact, they told me they didn't make it in the smaller size anymore, which now that I see that website I just linked seems to be a total lie. Errrg. So now I've got a lot of it to go through.

I request that my family and Anat not read the following part. I've already talked to Deb and Sara and Jake, and I'll talk to Anat the first chance I get. This next part is for me.

So, Deb and Sara had each given me individual lectures yesterday regarding my date report from Friday. Nobody respects the date report boundaries anymore apparently, because everybody is reading them. Even Jake read that, which I totally didn't expect.

I really don't want to have to start another diary to have some privacy from my own family, like other D-landers have had to do. I have lost some of my trust in my loved ones to not read something I've asked them not to read. The whole point of this diary is to have a complete narrative of my thoughts and feelings and the happenings of my life so that I can go back and read it when I want to, or when my memory goes. I think the girls think I'm kidding when I talk about losing my memory, but it really is one of my biggest fears that I will end up like my grandmother. So, I'm giving this one more shot. If my trust gets broached again, I'll either start a private diary, lock down this one, or stop publishing it completely and just write for myself on my hard drive and try to remember to back up a lot. I really do appreciate the emotional support I get from the audience�you guys are great, and I've met some wonderful people as a result of being public. But I can live without it. I don't want to live with censoring my writing.

Anyway, the girls were telling me Jake would not be okay with what I'd done with Anat. I said, "But I asked and Jake said it was okay." They said, "She does not know that's what you meant." Sara and Deb both said, "Back off with Anat." Sara said talk to Jake. Deb said don't talk to Jake, give her some space.

Now, I knew that Jake had answered really quickly and was all "go have fun" before I really got a chance to explain in detail what I was trying to ask her when I called her Thursday night to check in before I took Anat out to the bar. I used my serious voice, and moved to a quieter room with the phone, and said "I wanted to check in with you because the flirting between me and Anat has escalated, and I want to make sure I'm not crossing any boundaries ... " I remember the wording pretty well because I'd thought carefully about how to ask without being crude or detailed about it. Now, before I hit the end of that sentence, Jake was telling me everything was fine, she didn't need to hear about it, and to go have fun. I'd figured that she was just doing a "la-la-la I don't want to know the details" kind of thing. So, I went out Thursday night with a pretty clear conscience.

Well, I made sure to have another talk with Jake this morning. The girls had me pretty convinced that we'd had a complete miscommunication, and they were right. Jake was so unprepared for me to be asking about what I was asking about that it just didn't register that I might be asking about things going beyond mere flirtation.

So, that's not okay with Jake. I'd been thinking that she'd be okay with stuff she was okay with us doing in front of her at The Sanctuary.

This is where my head was at:

Don't take off any clothes

Kissing's okay

Verbal teasing is okay

Suggestive/intimate caresses are okay

(When Anat got down on her knees on Thursday night, I knew that was borderline even for my way of thinking, and it kind of surprised me, but I wasn't about to tell her to get up if you know what I mean. I wasn't packing. She wasn't using her mouth. Rationalizations were working really well for me right then.)

Okay. After our talk, I now know that none of that is okay. Jake feels that something you do in a public place is different than doing it in private. Jake still won't give me specific guidelines for okay behavior, but Sara and I never could get her to do that back in the early days with us, either, when we were trying to figure out what was okay to do in front of other family members. She's not comfortable talking about that. But, I did get the clear message that all of my list above is more than she's comfortable with. She also told me that she's worried about how Deb and Sara would respond to my involvement with Anat, and she's worried about the fragile place the whole family is in right now. Just for the record, I have checked in with Deb on this issue a zillion times, and she is fine with it. Frankly, and this is just speculation on my part, I'd bet that Deb is more upset by the fact that Jake feels possessive about Anat than she would be with me having sex with her. Sara has reassured me that she doesn't care what I do with anyone else as long as I don't slight our time together or get all crushed out on someone else. This has been our standing rule from the beginning. Deb did not think to make a similar rule when Jake started dating Anat or we might have avoided a lot of trouble. But that horse is already out of the barn and there's nothing we can do about it now.

Sara and Deb also called into question the timing of this increased involvement with Anat�the weekend the girls were in NJ, which saw our first kiss that wasn't just a peck. I told Deb that I'm not self-aware enough to say for sure, but that it really doesn't feel that way to me. I'm not trying to take anything away from Jake or punish her or whatever. I was really, really mad at her for about 15 hours, and then I got over it. What I do feel is stupid that I went where I did with Anat based on such poor communication.

This is how the timing issue feels to me: Anat and I never spent any time alone together until we started carpooling. Ever. With some time alone to joke and relax, I got more comfortable in her company. We playfully flirted with each other. I liked it. Anat's really good at it. I got the feeling that she wasn't just playing. One evening when she dropped me off, I kissed her more than a peck, and she kissed me back. Ungh. And yum. I liked that a lot.

So, my first guideline was "Don't have sex with Anat." My new guideline is, "Don't do anything with Anat that you wouldn't do with your sister's ex-girlfriend Sue." This is my self-imposed guideline based on what I could infer from my discussion with Jake. I would use my sister's current girlfriend, but I can't really make myself think about flirting with her at all.

Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to talk to Anat about this in person or on the phone. I can't decide if I should wait to post my diary until I talk to her, which I hope is tomorrow, but may not be until Monday. I think carpooling is still okay, but I don't remember if I asked. Anyway, do I hold the entry, or post it and ask her not to read it until I've talked to her, which I would find frustrating and weird if the roles were reversed, or go ahead and post it and let her read about my feelings before I've talked to her? I don't like any of the options.

Grrr. I'm frustrated. It's getting so that I can't talk about how I feel or throw a fit or have the freedom to be unreasonable for a half second without risking humongous ramifications. Maybe I'll ask everyone to skip this entry. If they read it anyway, I'm not taking responsibility. **(written before I wrote the part about privacy and taking my diary offline above)

So, how do I feel about the latest development? In the big scheme of things, it's not a huge deal, and in my eyes it doesn't effect the healing process that the family is in right now at all. To me it was a pretty harmless teasing with the specific understanding that we didn't have permission to ... ah ... get to any sort of payoff.

That said, I'm disappointed because it was incredibly HOT teasing, and I was really enjoying the hell out of it, whether or not there ever was a payoff. Sara has taught me that getting hot and horny just for its own sake can be a lot of fun. And I've known from the beginning that there's a good chance that Jake will never be okay with me having sex with Anat. And that's okay. She doesn't have to. That's why I never really invested my hopes in being able to have sex with Anat and could just enjoy the back-and-forth of the flirtation, the brief physical contact, the looks, the innuendo.

The kisses were hot�very much the style I like�and her lips are soft. Her skin tastes good. Her verbal and physical response to me was perfect for putting a wicked grin on my face and a twinge in my cunt.

To me it felt like doing a really hot scene at the Sanctuary where you know they have "no fucking" and "no nipple exposure" rules. That doesn't mean that you're not getting sexual gratification out of it.

And I know without a shadow of doubt that I could have an immensely good time fucking the hell out of her, wrestling her for it (as long as she didn't kick me in the ribs), and then walk away saying, "Goddam, that was fun."

You know, now that I think about it, what we were doing was pretty close to sex for me. Since nobody ever fucks me and I don't generally get off during a date unless I use a vibrator, what I get off on is the response of the woman I'm with. That's what was so fun about playing with Anat. Driving down the highway, saying the right thing at the right time, putting my gloved hand on her thigh and squeezing gently while Etta James sings "At Last," and eliciting an audible intake of breath. That's about as good as it gets for me without without the woman I'm with having an orgasm. So maybe I was really over the line.

Well, it was a very hot three minutes inside her apartment. I hope I get to do it again one day.

Moving on - 12:11 p.m. , 2007-08-14

Where the hell have I been? - 12:10 p.m. , 2007-02-19

Holy shit! - 2:24 p.m. , 2006-01-11

Stuffing recipe - 6:17 p.m. , 2005-12-13

Good Life Update - 10:22 a.m. , 2005-11-11