Femme Fairy Godmother» How to be a Grown up

Lesbian Life Lesson # 25: How to know when you’re ready to be in a relationship

FemmeFairyGodmother — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:49:30 +0000

How do you know if you’re ready to be in a relationship? I’ll give you a clue: the answer is not “because I want one.”

Here are some clues:

You have essentially resolved your previous relationship. If you are still harboring a grudge against or holding a torch for your ex, you ain’t ready. Now, some of us have exes who have done pretty heinous things and I’m not saying you have to feel all warm and cuddly about them. No, I just think you can’t be harboring an active grudge. I have an ex (we lived together from 1994-1997) who I am not even willing to forgive, but I don’t think about her all that frequently and I really don’t wish her any ill. I’d say it’s resolved. If I ran into her in the mall, for example, I would neither avoid her nor seek her out. I feel pretty neutral about her.
You are not actively trying to resolve any issues (excuse the therapy-speak) you have. When you are trying to work out any childhood abuse, domestic violence or whatever it is, that is not the time to begin a new relationship. It’s hard enough to deal with those things without adding the stress of starting a new relationship. I’m not saying you have to be perfectly issue-free (because if that were the case, no one would ever have a relationship) but that you might want to wait to begin a new relationship until you have the energy to devote to it. Also, the more emotionally healthy you are, the healthier your relationship will be.
You have a life. Being in a relationship is about sharing your lives. If you don’t have one, you can’t share it. That can lead to a power imbalance in the relationship that gives all the weight to the other person. Power imbalances do not make for a healthy relationship. Have your own friends, your own interests, your own career, your own life.
You have considered the reality of having a relationship, not just the romantic parts. Are you ready to deal with someone else’s idiosyncrasies? I, for example, have a tendency to break out into random Elvis songs. (Yes, I am a now-not-so-closet Elvis fan.) I also have ADD and forget everything. I am simultaneously unobservant and the Queen of the Obvious. I am prone to fits of organization, which I then ignore. I twirl my hair. I have epic PMS. I want to do That One Thing at least three times a da.. I mean, week. I have a neurotic Chihuahua to whom I am unreasonably attached. I flat out refuse to ever, under any reason -short of TWO broken legs and possibly fractured ribs – refuse to do yardwork. I love fashion TV. I have an IQ of 134 but I am way more interested in reading fantasy than so-called literary fiction. I will correct your grammar. All of this is balanced by the fact that I am an excellent cook, I’m funny, I will take good care of you when you’re sick, your mother will adore me (even if she hates “the queers”) and all of your friends will wonder just exactly how you got such a hot woman. Also, I am modest. In any event, in addition to the good qualities you are looking for, you should consider what faults are live-with-able.
You have considered your deal breakers. There has to be something about which you know you feel strongly. For example, deal breakers for me would be racism in any of its incarnations, and someone who doesn’t like dogs. If you are willing to overlook any of your dealbreakers, you are completely unready for a relationship.
You can talk about sex, money and your feelings. Yes, I said your feelings. I think you don’t have to talk about them relentlessly (one of my ideas of a ring of hell) but if you can’t tell someone the most basic “When you did X, I felt Y and I would like Z” then you are not ready for a relationship. If you can’t tell your partner what you do and don’t like sexually, you are not ready for a relationship. If you can’t discuss your finances calmly (at least most of the time) and objectively, you are not ready for a relationship. Most couples fight about sex and money. To avoid fighting about them, you have to be able to talk about them. Okay, you might still fight about them, but you have a better chance of coming up with a solution if you actually discuss them. With feelings, if you don’t talk about them, they will come out sideways. Better to just talk about it. Even if you do end up having an argument, at least you’re arguing about what is really troubling you (thus leaving you with a chance at resolution) and not arguing over, say, whose turn it is to walk the dog.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, I’m sure. How do you know that you’re ready to be in a relationship? What makes you hold off?

Femme Fairy Godmother's Rules for Moving

FemmeFairyGodmother — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:40:34 +0000

An impending move has gotten me thinking about how many of us move house every year and how ill-prepared most of us are to do it.

Moving is, for the most part, a big fat pain in the rump. However, you can make it less of a pain, if you are even semi-organized and think ahead. These are the Femme Fairy Godmother’s Rules for Moving.

1. Find some way to organize all of your moving stuff. I have a plastic 9 x 12 envelope that I have all my stuff in. By stuff I mean: notes on the apartments I’ve looked at and phone numbers of those I plan to call, things I’ve pulled out of magazines or catalogs, lists of various things that I think I’m going to need when I get there, etc. Also, a Moving To Do List that is about six miles long and involves paying (not so) vast sums of money to people (who are younger than I) to do the actual physical labor of moving me. Also, a note to ask them to put together that gas grill that I got for Christmas in 2007 and which a relatively unmentionable (because I can’t seem to do so without also mentioning that she has never in all of her 40 years of existence said one freaking word that wasn’t a lie, but that’s another story) ex of mine couldn’t put together, nor could my roommate nor could I. Not that I actually tried because, really, what are butch girlfriends for but putting stuff together?

2. Start packing early. You can buy boxes, but if you’re going to do that, then I’d recommend buying those Rubbermaid tubs because then you can store stuff in them. Aside from that, I’ve found that canteloupe boxes are great for many things and banana boxes for others. You can get fruit boxes from your local grocery store.

3. Use this time to take a boat load of stuff to the Goodwill. (But, please, swear to me on your favorite mascara or power tool, that you will never, ever in a million years take anything to the utterly-not-gay-friendly Salvation Army. Please. If you ignore my advice, then, to quote a country song from more than a decade ago, “Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart.”) There is no point to moving things you haven’t used for the last however-many-years you’ve lived in this place you are now. Unless, of course, there’s a good reason, like you got a grill for Christmas and can’t get it put together.

4. You could also sell stuff on ebay or Craig’s list or freecycle it. If you haven’t discovered freecycle, now is the time. You don’t get any money for your stuff, but you get to unload it and someone else is generally pretty thrilled to have it.

5. If you are using boxes, not Rubbermaid bins, then get a boatload of the kind of mailing labels you can run through your printer (the big ones,like 2×4) and print the various rooms that each box will go into. Put a label on all 4 sides of the box, which seems like overkill until you spend a great deal of time moving boxes that say “Kitchen” but on the top only and inexplicably were put in the BASEMENT.) For example, all of the boxes containing kitchen stuff should say Kitchen, all the stuff for the bedroom should say Bedroom. If you have more than one bedroom, then label accordingly. I find it helpful to also label each room but probably you want to put that on a piece of paper and tape it to the door so you can remove it. Those labels can be tricky to remove from wood. If you’re using bins, then you can do the same thing but the labels don’t stick as well. You can use magic marker to write the room on the bin but then you have to deal with that. Probably better to give each room a number and just write the number on the bin.

6. If you are asking your friends to help you move, then be prepared. Be ready when they show up, everything packed and in boxes. Do not ask your friends to move your clothes in garbage bags or various shopping bags. If you do that, it’s your own fault if things get ruined.

7. Also, for a Friends Move, be prepared with lots of drinks (water, soda, etc) and snacks. Plan to buy pizza and adult beverages (assuming you’re old enough) for dinner, along with having paper plates, napkins and plastic silverware. This is the one time I will not give you a hard time about using disposables.

8. Make sure to pack certain things in your car to take. Things like the linens for your bed, your toiletries, any necessary medications and the dog food (and both the dog food dish and water dish.) Really, you don’t want a pissed off Chihuahua underfoot. If you have electronics that are delicate, you’re better off dealing with them yourself. If you just spent more than $2,000 on a LCD HDTV, do you really want to trust anyone else to care for it? You don’t. The same for your laptop, your digital camera or anything else you will completely freak out about if you can’t find it or it gets broken.

9. Take pictures! Take pictures of the place before you move in, take pictures of your pals moving you in, take pictures all along the way. It’s fun. And you’ll be glad you did.10. If you google “moving advice”, there are literally 27,000,000 results. Probably most of them are stupid. If you need more moving advice than my Top Ten, then you could ask me to write some more. Or, if you need them more quickly than that, I recommend that you go over to OrganizedHome.com and read their exhaustive bit of info. You’ll recognize some of it since I have been an OrganizedHome fan for years. It’s more geared towards your basic hetero family but it’ll work for you, too.

Lesbian Life Lesson #16 How to break up with someone

FemmeFairyGodmother — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 08:32:39 +0000

You would think that breaking up with someone would be something we’d all learn in high school. Do they still teach “Family Life” classes? (a total aside: I had to plan a wedding in my Family Life class in high school.) They don’t teach anything useful in high school. We should learn how to break up with someone, how to balance a checkbook, how to scramble an egg, how to change a tire. But no. We learn algebra and geometry and Beo-fucking-wulf. Anyway.

All of the following supposes that you are dating, not married. For lesbians, living together constitutes married. That then is not “breaking up,” it’s getting a divorce and there are entire books that can help you figure out how to do that.

There really is a one-size-fits-all method for breaking up with someone. Here’s how it goes.

You make a date.
You show up.
You say, “Look, you’re really a lovely person but I do not want to be in this relationship anymore.”
You listen to them carry on for a while, maybe even answer a question or two.
You leave.

Here is what you do not do:

You do not say everything is fine but then manage to find no time to see the person, hoping they’ll just get the idea.
You do not start acting like a total jackass so that they will break up with you.
You don’t give long explanations. Not necessary. The only important fact is “I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore.” I know there are those who will disagree with me. What good has ever come from knowing all the whys and wherefores? Does it make you feel any better to know that you’re being dumped because your girlfriend wants to study kabuki in Japan or that your laugh gets on her last nerve? Nope. If there is a reason that you think might help the person in the future, I guess you can share it. However, only do that if you’re sure you’re trying to be helpful and not hateful. Hateful is not becoming.
You don’t hold hostage her things. Set a date/time to exchange personal items left at each other’s house.
You don’t badmouth her to anyone. Ever. For any reason. Yes, I know that it’s tempting to tell the entire world that she has lied to you every day since the day she met you or that if you had to hear about her gastrointestinal issues one more time you were going to scream. Don’t do it. It’s so much cooler to just say “Well, Lorna is a lovely woman but just not the lovely woman for me” than to say “That fucking bitch wouldn’t know the truth if it bit her in the ass.” Really. Take my word for this.
You don’t do it in a public place. One would presume that the dump-ee isn’t going to feel happy. Does she want to feel like that in *public*? No, she does not.
You don’t do it at your house because then she has to drive home. Do it at her house so that there is privacy and she can be upset in peace. If you’re afraid to do it in private because of how she acts, you really ought to think about the sort of women you date.

So, there you have it. How to break up with someone. What other suggestions do you have of things to do or things not to do? Leave a comment!

4 Ways to Save Money and (almost) Not Notice It

FemmeFairyGodmother — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:28:04 +0000

Another blogger sent a request to HelpAReporterOut.com asking for tip sheets on how to save money. That got me thinking: Probably some of you could use some ideas.

You’re probably not going to do all of these but you can probably do some of them. You might not even do the ones you do all of the time. The thing is to get yourself in the habit of saving money. With that …

1. Never spend coins. Every time you get any coins, put them in a jar. When it’s full, roll them up (or be a lazy bum like me and take them to your bank and have them sort them) and deposit them to your savings account. If you are also like me and tend to spend money if it’s easily accessible, get an online bank (like ingdirect.com) and transfer the money there. It takes two days to get the money back from ING, so that may dissuade you.

2. Don’t spend single dollar bills either. The point of this isn’t so much to put the money in your savings account, though goody for you if you do. Especially when you’re young or newly starting out on your own, it can be hard to anticipate every possible emergency. It can also be hard to save up the 3-6 months salary (or 9 months if you listen to Suze Orman) that financial gurus say you should have. Besides, sometimes you just have a minor cash flow issue. That’s where all those ones come in handy! If you’ve been saving your singles and you find yourself with more month than money, you can snag some of your saved bills to buy gas, get milk or dog food or whatever. Don’t automatically reach for your credit card! You could be paying for that “emergency” latte for decades.

3. Actually save your savings. My pal Anne said something so smart to me one day. In response to my saying, “I’ll save a fortune by not getting a latte every morning” she said”Well, you won’t have any more money unless you actually put it in savings.” Well, I don’t put the daily $6.67 for the bagel and latte I used to get every day in savings, but when I use a coupon or buy something on sale, I do transfer the money I saved to my savings account. Sometimes it takes me a little while to be able to do it but eventually I do. For example, I needed some new clothes and I got a great deal on what I bought. I saved $59.20. Well, I didn’t happen to have an extra $59.20 available right that minute but I put a note in my checkbook and transferred it when I got another paycheck.

4. Copy Bank of America and Keep the Change. A while back there was a hilarious commercial for Bank of America’s Keep the Change program. The wife in the commercial told her husband, “We just saved 37 cents!” His smartass reply was “I’ll alert the media.” Then he found out how quickly that can add up. If you don’t bank with Bank of America, you can do the same thing yourself. For example, if you buy something that costs $3.57, then you’d transfer 43 cents. You don’t have to do small transfers with each purchase, but keep a running log and transfer it all at the end of the month. I write in my checkbook, next to the name of where I used my debit card how much I should transfer. At the end of the month, I total ‘em up and transfer them. In January 2009, for example, it was $8.43. Doesn’t seem like a lot but if you think that if I only did $8.43 each month, that’s more than $100 at the end of the year, relatively painlessly.

Clipping coupons can be tedious but if you consider that coupon to not be a pain, but to be 25 cents closer to your goal, you’ll look at it differently.

What are you saving money for? Not every bit of savings has to be long term for retirement or some other big goal, though you should be doing that. Maybe your savings goal is $800 to buy a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes to reward yourself for achieving another goal. Or maybe you want to go to Africa.

Here are some other places to get money information that are reliable. There’s a lot of bad information out there – you can trust these guys.

Buy a book: The Complete Cheapskate: How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out, and Break Free from Money Worries Forever

Visit these websites:
Suddenly Frugal
The Dollar Stretcher
Kiplinger
The Simple Dollar looks good but I haven’t read it for very long.

The Basic Tools to Have at Home

FemmeFairyGodmother — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:54:24 +0000

My last “lesson” post talked about Snap On Tools, so this one we’ll talk about other tools.

Every home should have some basic tools and, no matter how femme you are, darlings, you should know how to use them. I’m not talking about sanders or planers or chainsaws, but simple tools that will help you will all kinds of things around your house or your apartment.

You don’t want to necessarily buy cheap tools. There are good things at all price levels, so get what appeals to you. I wouldn’t buy the pre-packaged kits because they always have things I don’t want and won’t use. If you buy your own individual pieces, you can also buy a cute container to keep them in. Or, a totally practical, butch toolbox. Whatever.

So here are the basics:

A hammer. You can’t put up pictures without a hammer. Okay, you *can* but if you’re going to use nails to hang things, hammers are much easier to manage than your stilettos or Doc Martens.
Screwdrivers: flat tip, Phillips head and a hex.
Cordless screwdriver.
Measuring tape.
Channel locks – I’m sure they have many uses but the one I’ve seen them used for is in plumbing.
A ruler.
A level, if you’re gonna get all anal about hanging pictures straight.
Pliers. My friend Tyler tells me that you can use needle noses pliers to reach into places your hand won’t fit to grab cables and wires. Lelia agrees, but adds that you can also use needle nose pliers to fix jewelry.
You might want locking pliers, or vice grips. They are good for pluming (or working on cars) or if you are trying to get two pieces of wood to stick together for some reason. Put ‘em in the vice grip and there you are!
Nails and screws.
Adhesive. Sometimes you don’t really need a nail or a screw – or they just wouldn’t work. There are a number of adhesives on the market that work well. Just do you research and don’t buy based on what the label claims.
Hot glue gun. Not just for crafts anymore, darlings. You can use this to do all kinds of things from reattaching the little dealies on the faucet that tells if you the water is hot or cold to reupholstering furninture. Once you get one, I’ll bet you find tons of uses for it.
Wrenches – I have never once used a wrench but there are those who swear that they can’t live without them.
Duct tape. With duct tape, a dyke can fix anything from a hole in her jeans to a leaky roof!
A utility knife. For those less schooled in home repair, that’s basically a razor blade in a safety tube.

If you have these basic tools, you should be able to manage the everyday tasks that might confront you.
Now, the second half of that story is where do you go if you have something that needs to be, don’t want to spend a bundle to get it fixed and want to know how to do it yourself? You could ask my brother in law, but given how frequently *I* ask my brother in law to help me with things, who knows if he’ll have time to return your call, let alone come fix your plumbing.

The Home Maintenance site at BellaOnline.com has some good information, to get you started. Home Repair at About.comalso has good information.

I can also highly recommnend this book: Dare to Repair: A Do-it-Herself Guide to Fixing (Almost) Anything in the Home. The Ex and I referred to our copy all the time when we lived in the old farmhouse. It explains things so that a regular person who no idea how to do anything can do what needs to be done. Even me. So, I KNOW you can do it!

ADDITION: My e-pal Jess has this to say about tools, which I think is great advice:

Vice grips! They come in several sizes. Unless you have three hands, they’re essential. Duct tape, yes. Also bailing wire. It also comes in a few thicknesses, just get a small roll that you can bend till it breaks. A light weight sledge hammer (2 pounds). A mid-price extension cord. 100′ if you have a yard, 50 or 75′ if not. Make sure it’s orange and has 3 prong ends. An inexpensive (Black & Decker) Sabre saw. Good enough for most projects.

There is no reason to pay top dollar for a tool you’re going to use twice a year. If you’re a mechanic (which I used to be) get Snap-On

So there you have it. Now, what things do you consider vital for the at home tool kit? And what brands? Leave comments here so that everyone can benefit from your brilliance!