Today marks the 3rd month that I have stopped inhaling marijuana

HAPPY NEW YEAR!  I am starting off the year in Los Angeles reflecting on the differences between this year and last year.  Last year I started out with a big wad of sugar daddy cash on my person because Christmas in the Bay Area had blessed me with an amazingingly generous client that allowed me to get my solo theatre show “Modern Day Asian Sex Slavery” off the ground and have a cabaret with a full jazz band and sexy sex worker burlesque performers…Those are the two big accomplishments of 2011 that I wrote in my list of things that I was proud of having accomplished that year.

The OTHER big one is more recent and carries a different weight for me.  3 months ago I attempted to go on a weed cleanse because I was sick with a cold and had stopped vaporizing for a few days because when I am sick, I don’t really feel like being high because my head is already light, so I took advantage of the 3 day streak I had already started and tried to push myself to continue it for as long as I could.  I vowed that I would go easy on myself if it was a decision to medicate or have a major mental breakdown, I would medicate.  I believe in 3 months I may have vaporized about 3 times only.  but I EAT edibles on the weekends to get high and have fun dancing and enjoying my life as opposed to using weed to just get through each day.

Previously for me, marijuana was the anti-depressant that I felt was the very thread of my survival.  It was painful for me to think of not having it in my system and there were many many times when I would be driving to the dispensaries in LA with tears in my eyes.  I’d sit down with my grinder and vaporizer tube and count backwards 5-4-3-2-1 and then after 2 inhales I would be relieved of my pain, my tears would dry and I would feel better.  Medicated.  Positive thoughts again.  In July of 2011 it was getting really bad for me, the weed was not really working that well.  I was ready to get on psych meds, the intake staff person told me he had an art gallery so I sent him some of my artwork (which is sexually charged) from my phone giving him my number as well and he started pursuing me in hopes of trying to PIMP me.  (he told me he had experience in that game and then ended with a “I’m kidding” when he noticed I reacted negatively). No lie.  My path is full of vultures, I constantly have to breath fire in their face and make them back down.  Thank God for the ability Sprint has to block numbers from calling and texting you.  During the time he was trying to contact me a lot, he had just gotten fired from that place and just got out of  jail for a getting in a fight he casually told me in our 1-2 ever conversations which always ended with a “sweetie” at the end of them.  Remember, pimps can live anywhere, be of any race, age or gender but most noticeably seek you out when you are at your most vulnerable with offers of help and resources.

That center did a half assed intake and never called me again even though they charged me $20.  I wanted my money back!  Apparently, although they didn’t inform me in any way, I guess I wasn’t insane enough to need their help.  I was disenchanted to say the least.  I decided I would try St.Johns Wort and it worked a miracle on me.  A true saint indeed.  As an uninsured American, herbal remedies are the KEY to my survival.  I use St.Johns Wort (SJW) in combination with Passionflower (for anxiety) to ease my pains and it helps me get through each day without marijuana.  I wanted to prepare my body for the baby that I wanted to have in the next 5 years and although I do know mothers who have used weed to term and bore healthy babies I thought it would be better if I cut down.  I NEVER thought I was going to be able to.  My weed use as decreased by 75% with the help of my other herbs and I haven’t had a medical card since August which means I haven’t been able to enter any medical marijuana clubs since then either.  My vaporizer is shelved, my bongs are dusty, my grinders are put away.  I am a marijuana supporter and sympathizer forever but I’m no longer a stoner.  There are no actual weed flowers in the house!  That, to me is amazing.  For me to go 5 straight days without medicating with weed is no less than a miracle.  Its been 3 months and I am still amazed every day.  In previous years when I’d done cleansing experiments, I’d used passionflower to be clean during the day, but then I’d eat an edible every night.  I’d try to make rules saying I would only smoke when the sun was down, but I’d be anxiously awaiting the sunset.  But I wasn’t using SJW yet.   St.Johns Wort helps with mood elevation and depression.  It helps me balance my brain chemistry.  I have been resistant to daily anything in my past.  You couldn’t get me to take vitamins, supplements, birth control pills daily nothing.  I’d forget, I’d skip, I’d stop.  But I take my herbs with my coffee every single day now just like I used to sit there all day in front of my home office computer with my vape tube in my mouth every hour because IT WORKS. and it works well. Some herbal remedies don’t always work on me.  People swear by 5HTP but I tried that and it didn’t do the trick like what I have now.   For me personally, I wanted to go back to a time when marijuana was recreational over the time when weed was something i would fear being without for too long.

Sometimes I still have anxiety and hard times but I’m able to push through them without weed now.  I am stronger.  I made myself stronger and I am proud of myself.  I’m not sober, I’m not clean, I’m just a new version of the same old me.  To not have the kind of depression problems that I have been plagued with for years is such a relief.  If you have never been there, you probably don’t know how dark the darkness feels even in the light.  I would be at the beach trying to lift my mood but I’d still feel hopeless, negative, worried about the future, hearing voices of defeat and the worst lonliness, even when I was trying to fix my situation by try to go out and dance (alone and go home alone w/o conversing with another person), watch a movie (alone) or go eat (alone) or to martial arts or yoga classes.  I would make a log of the time when I’d just sit in the car in the parking lot and feel that there wasn’t anyone in LA who was lonlier than me at that moment.  It is still an ongoing battle for me.   but I am happy to have this under more control.  I just got high yesterday, because, hey it was FRIDAY!!  i started to have inspirations about ideas for new paintings and decided to start painting again.  I was going off on idea after ideas and facebooking manically with joy.  That’s what weed does to me.  The ideas are real.  The ideas are still good.  Its just that now that is not me everyday, the amount of ideas that I spew out are more manageable and realizable.  If I was feeling like that on a daily basis, I noticed I would get frustrated at how I knew I was never going to follow through on these ideas because it would be impossible to manage them all well.  Idea diarrhea got annoying at meetings as well.  I’d be like hating my own interruptions and blurting outs. Fuck I shouldn’t have said that.  o well i just said it.  i wanted to be in total control of my thoughts and actions again.  Before I met my first majorly unhealthy partner at 22 I smoked occasionally and didn’t even own a bong of my own!  But after we broke up was the beginning of my new found lifestyle which I was totally content with and loved.  I will never renounce it.  I’m just happy that I am able to overcome certain difficulties in different ways and the major suffering has eased.  And I don’t rule out that I may go back to those ways, but probably not.  I went from bong to vaporizer for almost 2 years, then SJI/Passionflower and edibles on the weekends.  Weed/drug use is kind of like sex work for me.  I’m not concerned about knowing when it will end, I can’t know that.  I will stop doing what I am doing now when I am no longer doing it.  Period.  I STILL have no regrets about ending friendships to people like Kristina Wong (who tried to shame me into quitting) or my ex roommates at the Basswerks (who ran an intervention on me as a condition to staying in the) house I lived at in LA who made me feel like shit for needing to medicate with marijuana.

I’ve been trying to cut down for years but I couldn’t.  I would not compromise my survival because I knew what I needed to be well.  If I don’t have my herbs I will also start freaking out in the same way I did when I was out of weed because I can feel when I am not medicated.  I am now just medicating with something else.  I am also super relieved that I did not have to get on any expensive and long term destructive pharmaceutical anti-depressants.  I love herbal remedies as well because it fits my budget.  If you are trying to ween yourself off of any substance: TRY PASSIONFLOWER.  It takes the edge and craving off of life and it works.  I swear by it.  I swear by both these herbs just like I used to swear my life on my indica weed.  I was in San Francisco for December 17th “International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers” and Robyn Few, the founder of SWOP was there.  She gathered a circle of known potheads to share in her homegrown joints as usual and I did not partake!  It was the first time in the history of my sex worker activism that I didn’t smoke weed with Robyn Few when she offered.  Robyn’s love and her shameless weed smoking was the reasons that I joined the sex worker rights movement in the first place.  I had finally found my family I thought.  A bunch of loving prostitute stoner women hanging out in a room?  Wut? I’m IN!!!  It was a beautiful thing.  Robyn is still battling cancer with 2 joints in her hand, and I am still battling my demons too but we are both STILL ALIVE and kicking and smiling and looking hot.  SURVIVORS.  I asked her if she would ever stop smoking weed and she replied defiantly,”NEVER.”

This year music and art are my big goals.  I am going to Japan finally for an extended stay THIS YEAR for sure.  6 months to a year.  I’ve decided to leave South Central LA.  Sell my stuff.  go to Japan and make my own cultural journey without my mom’s help.  It is my lunar year.  The year of the dragon. This has got to be big. I will accept nothing less. I stopped going to weekly therapy at the start of 2012 and decided to direct that $25 into paying my pianist and start rehearsing with him on the regular again. time to get this music train BACK on the track with NO excuses.  Music is therapy anyway.  Singing sets me free and gives me immeasurable joy.  I need to do it like my other art forms.  Including my martial arts.  I had done my cabaret in January and then totally abandoned working on live music.  It got reprioritized, like my painting did. I come back to things.  but I don’t always know when.  I just had no desire to paint after I sold the last painting for $1600 and after David Perry died.  he was my painting partner.  my inspiration actually.  he was an awesome painter and the best friend I ever had.  I still miss him.  I make a mantel for his stuff in every house I live in and I told him I was going to paint again.  I said it to the mantel.  I told it to his face which was painted in his paintings.  Wendy Babcock is with him now.  I put her photo on his mantle.  I’m sure he’ll enjoy the company.

I’m already doing an exciting group show at the Aljira Gallery in Newark, NJ near Manhattan NYC and it feels like I’m going to start going somewhere again higher than where I am at now.  The curator is trying to get the show to travel to Boston as well.   There is another show at The Museum of Sex in the nearby NYC area at the the SAME TIME as the one that I am already in that is asking for a call for submissions.   I would simply have an art orgasm if I could actually have two major NYC shows at the same time!  Even just having the one show is amazing.  I am thinking that I am glad that I quit teaching and started focusing on my art and music again.  It is what I was meant to be.  not a teacher.  not a non profity worker.  Mariko Passion.  exactly who I am now.  I want to be singing in a club or restaurant with my pianist this year too.  But this always seems to be a goal.  It’s really nice ot have the visual art thing come back though.  trying to sell my shit in the back of bars and clubs in LA wasn’t going well.

I have decided to start painting again because I have been hit with inspiration for WHAT I would paint.  I haven’t painted for almost 10 years, I gave all my brushes and paints to my sister and quit until…perhaps now.  I’ve done  a  few small projects here and there but nothing has inspired me to start seriously painting the way I used to until yesterday when I get high I had these great ideas that I knew that I would actually follow through on.  These are NOT hallucinations.  It is just easier to produce my great creative ideas when I am not hearing voices from my family’s rejection telling me that I am a fat, can’t sing, too sensitive, wasting my life, not interesting, always broke.  When I am high I am nothing but positive almost always.  and more than that I am a creative genuis!!! At times like last night I wonder why I need to cut down in the first place.  It started with wanting to stop smoking because asthma but I still have asthma even though I don’t smoke or vaporize but its way more in control than last year.  I am always thankful and grateful when the pain is relieved.  I learned how to manage my asthma with plant medicines too.  Lobelia tinctures with water taste like shit but stop the wheezing.  Much better than paying big pharma $200 for an inhaler that lasts a month.  I learned how to use an alternative because I HAD to.  I like it that way actually and am really proud of the many many natural remedies that I have to cure asthma, yeast infections, bladder infections, depression and anxiety!  fuck yea!  I’m an amazing broke girl!  Really.  FUCK BIG PHARMA.

It’s the weekend, I’m high and practicing new songs to sing.  I’m bursting with creative flow and ideas and working on a proposal for the Museum of Sex due in 5 days.  Getting the New Jersey show was the first step.  The Museum of Sex is the 2nd.  The snow storm will follow.  I feel good.  I feel great.  Gonna have the whole world on a plate.

My fairy boy twink straddled me and continued to rub my breasts in circles, never touching the nipples.  His body would pull back and shudder when I reached down and touched his cock even minimally.  When he did finally ejaculate, it was mostly without my touching him, but of him touching me, fantasizing what he wasn’t or couldn’t have in that moment for whatever reason.   He came with such intensity it shot me on the side of my cheek as I turned my face away and closed my eyes.  Clumps landed in my hair and bits were in his hair well.  He was the one to run to the bathroom to get a towel for us (that was usually my job) and we laughed as we cleaned his mess off of both of us.  This was nowhere NEAR the usual reaction I would procure if any client’s semen got near my face or even on my hair, but because he was such a delightful twink, he got a glowing pass.  I was happy to please him by allowing him to please me.  It was his willingness to oblige my fantasies which opened up my willingness to oblige his.  And his were so easy to oblige compared to most of the guys that I had come across in months.  The whole evening would be full of healing but the simple interaction and exchanges between me and this client was the beginning of a long needed rejuvenation.

My next client was a nurse.  A Mexican guy with a decent job.  Where have you been all this fucking year?  I didn’t fall too hard for him though like I would have done in the past.  My days of falling for clients was over and I was too guarded from previous experiences of past months.  Our sex was good.  I am always extremely pleased when men can fingerbang my pussy til it drips wet puddles all over the bedsheets.  He was a very silent lover so I had to imagine nasty things were being sad and done to me from deep inside my headspace.  I had a very satisfying orgasm on his dick.  This is a rare occurence for me actually (i can orgasm but ON a dick directly is a different story, usually fingers are more precise).   It is much easier to do when I haven’t had satisfying sex in many weeks, its like my body LONGS for the release.  I can always tell how long its been by how my body reacts to the stimulation.  Very similar to the fairy boy earlier in the evening, probably had pent up tension from MONTHS or perhaps YEARS.   I grabbed the nurse’s body and pulled it close to mine and released all my post coital bliss hormones all over him knowing we would dose off for at least an hour in afterglow.  We talked about how long and much needed that sex was for both of us.  But the cuddling, as you know, is what I live for.  I knew better than to want too much from him.  During our session he talked about different interests like going to Vegas and strip clubs and tequila and gambling and I recognized our differences so I never tried to want more than just repeat business from him.  “I’ve had a really shitty time dating people,”I said placing his arms around my body, placing his hand over my breast like I like.”This is all I really need and want from everyone I try to date but it seems so hard to get.”  I went home at 6am and slept in til 5pm the next day alone and content in my lovely comfy bed much better than the cheap notel motel bed I was on hours earlier.  I woke up rejuvenated and ready to face the world of sex work that had lately become cruel and harsh again, ready to bear more clients good and bad, my battery recharged, my soul reminded that it was good and deserving and knew no wrong in seeking the basic needs of all human beings.  Reminded once again that we all really sought the same things from each other at the end of the day.  Reminded that there were days that I used to love my clients and my job.  Reminded that not everyone was psychotic or hated me or wanted me dead.  Reminded of the goodness in men once again.  I wasn’t yet ready to date anyone yet, but these kinds of experiences were key in balancing my soul and preparing it to feel like I could imagine sharing it with someone again.  This was perfect, as much as I needed and wanted.  not more, not less.

Starring down the barrel of a gun

Wondering again how the fuck I got here

Wondering again why I put myself in this place again again again

No one is going to believe you

What happened to all your training sister soldier?

But life is not as perfect as drills in a martial arts class..

Starring down the barrel of a gun

Realizing this life is kicking my ass

There is just no way I can win first just last

I wish it were so easy

But hope and fortune just strip and tease me

Cuz soon it all falls apart again

Its just a matter of where and when

I realize if a Charles Manson (or a Gary Ridgeway)  wanted to get me into his grasp

He probably could

The psychological ways they tie you up so easy

Dehumanize, degrade me

PTSD freeze me

Cold

This song is getting so fucking old

Even I’m tired of singing it

Again again again all my training gone to shit

His ugly misogynistic face I wanted to hit

But somehow my punches never quite

Reach

It…

Where is your self efuckingsteem?” He asked me when I picked him up shitfaced from OccupyLA.  I thought it was funny when he said it at the time, I really did.

[If you treat me like shit] I will NOT love you LONG TIME.  Nope.  Definitely not.  This I know from experience, especially if someone causes me so much pain in such a short period of time.  Luckily all this stuff goes in vicious cycles, so if you missed it the first time it hit you [me] in the face, rest assured it would come around again and again and again and as you kept trying so hard to juggle all the balls, they kept being thrown at you and all of them falling faster than the music, faster than you could chase after them down the hill, onto the freeway, lost forever….

I found out today that I have codpendent tendencies, but no, I am not a hopeless codependent.  I am becoming less and less so with every romantic partner.  They are following a vicious cycle, but they are coming in and out of my life like acid rain storm clouds.  Messing up my atmosphere and then it clears up faster and faster and faster disappearing into another bright and sunny Los Angeles day.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Love and Sex addicted I am not.  My counselor is always suggesting I go to meetings of different types.  I look up the definitions and read the meeting descriptions and laugh.  the funny thing is that once I stopped using weed, the sex between us changed.  it was sooo amazing the first night and then it was decent, but he still needed to be trained.   It was the intimacy/cuddling/affection and passionate kissing is what I live for everytime.  It’s what I turn my phone off and drive across town to get even for a little bit.  Even if it means sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a messy 23 year old’s room in his mama’s house.   I had temporarily quit using marijuana for most of this affair, which was related to me catching a cold and wanting to have a different relationship to substances of my own accord.  Now that I look back on it, that’s how I should have seen that he was an addict.  Because he was in no way trying to respect my desire to try to be sober, trying to get me to break and give in to using weed every time we saw each other.  It was pretty easy to resist as I was determined.  Even when I told him it was for the future baby (not his necessarily).  This is why he didn’t drive.  This is why he had a broken collarbone and a broken heart.  I only went back to MaryJane tonite but I don’t feel guilty about it.  I knew I would break down and use when it was “absolutely neccessarily.”   I felt stronger instantly.   It was Maryjane or the clown.  And I chose wisely.

This affair was short but sweet sixteen days,  because we went through all of the same bits and pieces faster for some reason.  He flaked on me again.  Twice in a row, the second time was the last time.  He was unapologetically drunk again and I did not desire to pick him up and make things better with his alcoholic embrace.  The last time was to fix my pathology and this time would be to appease his, and I was able to refuse it much easier.  An obnoxious drunk is easier to turn down than a slick romantic abuser manipulator.  If he had called me up drunk telling me that he was sorry he didn’t mean to hurt me, he needed help or some other smoother story like my other abusers were able to come up with other than the sorry pathetic one he presented I may have gone to pick him up instead of cut him off.

I did not imagine that he was massaging his female friend’s shoulders in front of me the other day. She was low key challenging my worth, even asking me where I went to school. (I have a Master’s Degree actually, I told her).  I didn’t like the situation at all. I felt like I was amazing artist Frida Kahlo watching her asshole fat ass non deserving but talented husband Diego Rivera paw her sister in front of her (“I know I don’t believe in monogamy, but I know I don’t feel good right now”) It challenged my views on open relationships and non monogamy even though me and the clown were not yet in an official relationship he knew that I liked him and should have talked to me about her before touching her in front of me.   Jealousy and pain.  Too much too fast.  Do they do this on purpose just to see if you will still be there after they shoot daggers at you?

He actually told me that he wanted to keep fucking me and stop kissing me when I told him I had herpes.  I burst into tears and cried so hard all day that my eyes hurt at night. (you cannot automatically get herpes from kissing/fucking someone with herpes, even if they have an outbreak on their lip (tho of couse MORE risky indeed as any open sore is), but it is especially not risky if they don’t though the “always contagious”  and “even condoms won’t protect you” doctrine is still prescribed by some doctors and sex educators).  I don’t even get those big open sores that you often see on people’s lips.  And condoms don’t protect you when your making out with someone, that is the reason behind that statement.

I did not use weed to feel better that day.  I called him and asked him to make it better, to kiss away the pain he had caused..   I do not kiss my clients because I want every kiss I give someone to mean something.  I want commercial intimacy and personal intimacy to always be different and mostly but not always something special. It makes making out with someone as exciting as it was when I used to do it at an 8th grade dance at times.   I don’t have the strength to fight the whore stigma anymore these days.  I really really don’t, even though when I wear my fancy sexy whore revolutionary outfit it appears as if I do.  And I do on the outside.  A trained warrior.  Just not on the inside.   I’d been through too much lately.  Had a shit of time internet dating on several sites,  so I had literally just given it up before I met him.  He was like a godsend when I met him at a Burningman party.  I stumbled into someone I had been looking for on the internet in the “real world.”  The first day he made me cry so hard was the first time I asked him to make things better in his embrace.  ”You need to make it better.” I cried, knowing that that was just a band aid solution and that I was willingly following an unhealthy relationship pattern that was too familiar to me.  I am a survivor of relationship violence, so I will always have a tendency to seek comfort in asking the violator to heal me when I can.  And of course, he did, gave me a colorful lollipop to cheer me up (in one hand, and a can of Modelo beer in the other) when I picked him up and kissed me passionately, holding my face like I love, filling me with hot flames of desire, making me feel whole again as I rocked my hips towards him.  Later that night as we were walking to the protest (it was awesome that we were both activist/artist types), he was laughing while I was telling him about my feelings from the day and I guess I punched him pretty hard in the chest to stop his laughter.  I didn’t think that I did but he acted pretty wounded.  It’s likely since I’ve returned to martial arts and he made me cry earlier that I could have hit him harder than I thought.  But this is another codependent trick, to flip the blame on the victim. (An ex abuser has started an argument based on the fact that I “accidentally grazed him in the balls on purpose”)  Now I am the abuser.  I have been the person to hit my boyfriends in the arm or chest (the way you may have seen teenage couples fight)  or make violent motions towards their face without touching them to express my anger and desire to tear into them for the pain they have given me.  This is still violence I know.  I know.  If a man did this to me it would be equally problematic.  Now I am the one who should apologize profusely.  Good trick.  Do it again.  Again! Again! Again!

But the later offenses weren’t fixable with an apology or an embrace.  I had seen it before and I had walked away before.  Except the last time it took me 2.5 months and way, way more damage than this little affair had caused.

I went to (my best friend that died at 26) David’s burial ground and held my palms out and stared into his gravestone, hoping to channel his love and support, hoping like I have many times before to get his ghost to appear and talk to me for a few minutes.  I needed a friend bad.  I needed a lover and this floppy clown came along.  It was super fun for a while and taught me so much about me.  It was because I was more sober I was able to see his addictions with a clearer lens.  But I am no classic codependent, and he was a classic case of a borracho payaso drunkard.  Big clown shoes and sad story of time and creative potential wasted, lover after lover of his gone lost and walked away in sadness and anger before me and after me too no doubt…Promising talent, dedicated to his craft and a heart with the potential to shine a room full of children or make even the smartest, sexiest female in the room take him home.  But he clearly had no self esteem only self hatred that filled his belly which was not fat with food.  not fat with love.  Addicts make it so hard to be loved but they want and need it the most.  I know this because I have fallen in love with too many of them, except that they were closet addicts able to hold up a facade much better than this clown so our affairs would end up being longer.  No mas.  Where is my self efuckingsteem?  I still have it apparently.  I would rather be codependent with Maryjane than an alcoholic.  What I was proving to myself lately though was that I wasn’t a drug addict, I could exist without cannabis medicating through traumatic times, through the triggers, through the sadness.  But tonight,  I took comfort in her vapor and through the steam cloud I was able to dry my tears and open my eyes and see again.  I am going to use weed differently.  I am still committed.  I am going to love and do relationships differently.  I already have been.  I mourn for the loss of him and placed his number on my wireless carrier block list.  The familiar block list that I put all my ex boyfriends and lovers so I do not have to cave into them calling me in the middle of the night with sweet promises, even if they talk of them after the pain has subsided months later….I will not go back.

Yes, I am a naive child spirit that still wanders lost in the body of a 35 year old woman, but apparently I am not as vulnerable and desperate as I look sometimes.  I did do better this time, So send out the clowns.

I hate the word CHOICE.  Hate it. Fuck choices when it comes to work.  Choice is a continuum.  And for me, so is sexual assault.  I have been violated so many times I stopped counting because it would just be disturbing.  I have been violated so many times that I have accepted that I am a permanent warrior enlisted in the gender violence war.  And that is not my choice. But ‘Choice’ is the dominant paradigm that sits in opposition to FORCE.  forced sex work.  forced prostitution.  sex trafficking.  slavery.  Choice is also a word thrown around in the PRO-CHOICE movement.  This same pro-choice camp also so often fails to notice the lack of choices available to poor, marginalized women of color in regards to reproductive options and sex work is a part of that.   They are all for women being pro-choice with their bodies except when it comes to “choosing” to do sex work.  We sex worker rights folks are aware of the FALSE DICHOTOMY between force and choice.  But still sex workers talk about choosing sex work because it sounds good.  Connecting sexual abuse, drug use/addiction and sexual assault to prostitution sounds awful, pathological, typical.  How can we make these connections without these attributes?  Those sex workers may believe that they have the choice to do sex work just as simply as they choose to eat candy in the morning (or not) or fast food at night (or not).  Perhaps I feel like it is not a choice because so many times I have had to go to WORK and suck up my feelings time and time again and it was far from what I would have chosen to do with my time.  The nature of the SERVICE INDUSTRY particularly ones with BOSSES or SUPERIORS is that when you don’t want to do it, it will always feel like slavery.  This is true of housekeeping, childcare, farmwork, garment work, office work or anything that has a naturally submissive aspect to it in order to earn gratuity above minimum wage.  For me, it started when I was a stripper hating the repetetive monotony of my job.  I had just gone through my first major breakup of my 20s with a guy I was in love with and going to work to be chipper and sexually entertaining to the world and other men was the most difficult thing ever.  It was at this point when I started to medicate with marijuana on a daily basis in order to create a positive facade over the hatred I had for the job.  In the beginning of the healing I would dance on stage and go in the private rooms to cry.  13 years later I still medicate depression and anxiety with marijuana on the daily but now I don’t feel so bad about it.  Using weed is not just a result of being a sex worker, nor is my depression or anxiety but I definitely can be fond of eating a half of a pot cookie, smoking a bong (in the past, I vaporize now) or heating up a vaporizer to deal with anything in my life that I have to go out and do that takes strength.  This included going to grad school, student teaching and regular teaching.  Marijuana allows me to reach a level of seratonin balance that life doesn’t.  I have a deep and intimate relationship with MaryJane.  She is my mothers nipple to nurture my cries in an empty apartment at times when I am bawling hopelessly on the floor.  She is also just a way for me to push out the negative voices and replace them with positive affirmations about the big picture: the beautiful sunny Los Angeles day, the awesome music, the delicious food, the fact that I have many talents, that I am an intelligent analytical being, a writer, a singer, a funny joking child like spirit that deserves to live life to the fullest.  Maybe I choose weed over heroin, alcohol or speed or other substances that close down emotions and thought or maybe I am just choosing to live.  Is that a choice?  I don’t even know anymore.  I think so.  I mean, I know I have potential that is greater than being a junkie or commiting suicide or even relegating myself to a full time “normal” job.   The word has been used in so many negative connotations (mostly in my choosing to do sex work) that I don’t even use it anymore except as a necessary part of sentences.  Let’s just say I don’t use it fervently.  I don’t believe that work is a choice in America or anywhere in the world.

Mostly because I truly believe that I have been attracted to sex work and have stayed in sex work for as long as I have to unravel and discover my power struggle with sexism, rape culture and patriarchy that was NEVER my CHOICE.

My first sexual assault was a date rape on the beach at 17.  A naive teenager is getting drunk at a youth hostel with backpackers in the their 20s.  One of them asks me to go to the liquor store to get more drinks for the rest but instead I found myself laying in the dark at a secluded beach in Honolulu, Hawaii the sight of my first taste of what it meant to not understand the intentions of men.  As Tribe Called Quest would sing,”Classic example of..a date rape.” It wasn’t physically violent so [all my]  perpetrator[s] probably thought it was consensual.  I don’t remember who he was, only that he was some white surfer dude and that I knew exactly at the moment of penetration that this was not my choice.  There were many more after that.  The worst was from the first boy I ever fell in love with at 16, my best friends brother.  This assault would tear my best friend and I apart for many years and create a rift in our relationship that was only fully healed when at his funeral when he died (heart disease at only 26)  I had to face his brother again for the first time since the assault and be cordial. It worked out. We hugged and I was able to forgive him. David helped me from heaven or wherever he was. Then, another backpacking incident in Northern Australia, a vulture asks me to come to his room to get a massage and naive 21 year old adventurous me thinks that he has innocent and therapeutic intentions. NOT.  Because of that incident is the reason I attribute to why I feel I get so much out of the sensual massages that I give men.  Sensual and consensual they come so easily in my hands.  It is more than them ejaculating.  It is like the power blood gives vampires.  A refill of my power supply that had been depleted by trauma.  A refill of my power supply that had been depleted from the sexism of that day walking down the street before I came into my power or dealing with the privilege of men of that given time in my school, in my dating life, etc etc.  Melissa Farley and her clan love to hear stories like this.  It makes them hard, gets them funded, makes them look smart, makes them feel that I fit the stereotype.  The big difference is that I am empowered in the end.  More so than not.  Otherwise I would not be in it for as long as I have.

“Everytime a client comes an angel [hooker] gets her wings…”

Some sex workers are in denial of this connection.  I’m not.  I see it everywhere I turn.  I saw it especially when I was working with street workers in Skid Row.  So many of those girls find street work and prostitution satisfying because it is a gritty hustle.  Because their Uncle used to take for free continuously now they can not only not be around that abuse but get paid for the same desires that their pervy Uncle once had. And yes, it IS more empowering than being returned home or going back to a foster home at times.  I get it.  Do you?  I like craigslist/LA Weekly/Backpage clients for the same reason.  I attain high class clients occasionally through these outlets, but mostly I deal with working class, younger, drug using guys that I can yell at (if they act up) and never see again.  And they call me for the same reason and I DARE them to try to disrespect me.   Workers can be mean and strict with their tricks and get paid for it.  We prey on their shame of what they are doing.  We get paid for their racism.  PAYBACK in the short term, but in the long term perhaps more damaging.

NOT ALL MY CLIENTS ARE DICKHEADS THAT WANT TO RAPE ME.  Lots of them, most of them are great and fine, average guys that I heal myself and them simultaneously by surviving our transaction with ease and bliss.

In my acknowledgement that I am in the tail end of my sex work career, I acknowledge that I have attained enough of the positive and the negative to move on.  I have pissed in the mouths of men and slapped them around with their own dicks (practically).  I have watched them destroy themselves with drugs throw their money at me in effort to seem manly and as a result their manliness has disintegrated before me.  They’re not nearly as strong as I thought they were before I first started dancing at 22.  From my first day at the stripclub, I wore my 4″ stilettos and was suddenly able to look them in their eyes and see them for what they really were: vulnerable.  lonely.  compassionate.

It was the prostitution world that really helped me see this, as well as being a dominant.  I didn’t finish the journey in the stripclub, as all the stripclubs in America are ruled by pimps that exploit their workers at least to some degree and in the worst case scenarios they mirror the sexism that the mafia has with their harem of girls that one has become familiar seeing in movies.  (“Tell her to go upstairs and see the boss if she doesn’t have her stage fee..”) I have defiantly held my ground in verbal altercations and watched them back down.  Sometimes I have lost and a screaming cussing dude has chased me into my car after I have refunded him his money back.  So,  I have also lost and retraumatized myself in this effort.  Prostitution was the only thing that could have done this.  Stripclub stripping is legal, somewhat safer.  I could have not gotten arrested in a Craigslist sting, nor robbed or ripped off in ways that I had as an escort by staying the stripclub.  It was all a part of my beautiful struggle, my journey that I am still on.

Today is the first week of my 2011 marijuana cleanse.  I try to do it once a year.  Last year it was because my asthma had gotten so bad that I could barely breath without coughing like an old man every morning.  I abandoned my bong for 50 days and then broke down and went back to it without condemning myself.  I have since switched from smoking to vaporizing and have eliminated smoking anything from my life.  This also eliminates most of the social rituals of being a stoner because most people don’t vaporize.  I can’t believe it’s been a year already.  I used to love my bongs so much, now the taste of smoke sickens me.  I caught a cold Occupying LA and going to rallies in front of city hall.  It was the first major rainstorm of LA’s autumn/winter cold.  This rally was also the first activist event that I had really believed could make a difference somehow.  I hadn’t been to a march or rally in over a year, maybe two.  I thought often about supporting Oscar Grant’s case, but I just knew what the outcome would be whether I took the time to wake up in the morning to support his cause or not.  I was right.

Whenever I am sick, I don’t feel like using marijuana because clouding my head with what would normally be euphoria just ends up feeling like I’m just clouding my brain with smog.  So sickness often is a blessing in disguise for me to take a break from a medicine that I am usually mentally dependent on.  I have since kicked my dependence on asthma steroids.  I weaned myself off of them slowly using a herb called Lobelia which I would drop into water and drink to help relieve some of the symptoms.  It was working.  This was a relief to me as the ashtma medication that seemed to work on me the best cost $200 for a months supply.  I knew that this was just a sham from big pharma.  The doctors prescription said I NEEDED it twice a day everyday when because of finanncial constraints I started to use it once a day and then once every 3 days and then..only as really needed. (in addition to Lobelia tinctures).  I was proud of kicking this dependence.  Medical expenses are no fun.  I still owe my asthma doctor $350.  A visit to that clinic was the same cost to me as I charged my clients ($300/hr) yet, it never seemed to even out, it was never easy to pay the bills and buy the needed medicine and I still have a tab with them.  Today I am proud of the fact that I have found St.Johns Wort to help with my depression, Passion Flower extract to deal with my anxiety and I have only used marijuana ONCE in 7 days.  The cold allowed me to not crave and the herbs help to alleviate the symptoms that I often use marijuana for.  I use marijuana as a pain reliever for chemical imbalances AND emotional pain.  When I face difficult situations with people I am often running to my weed supply, driving straight to a dispensary to feel better and be cradled by my familiar nurturer who sings an internal lullaby and tells me softly “Do not worry about what they are saying.  Do not worry about what they do.  This, too shall pass.”  It is like an herbal teddy bear, I cuddle it and it helps me sleep better at night.  Judge me if you will but you aren’t the one who is holding me or offering to come over when I am depressed, you are the one who doesn’t want to hear my bullshit, who can’t hear my bullshit because it inconveniences you, because it triggers you.  So keep on talking your shit, and I will keep using my weed.  I want to have a baby in the next five years and join the ranks of all the wonderful sex working mamas that I know who have succeeded in defying society’s stigma.  This year’s cleanse is not for the asthma, its for the future baby.  Twice already this week tough times have come and gone, I have cried in depression without crawling to my usual supply of painkiller and survived.  I am super proud of myself for this.  Every little obstacle that I overcome I give myself a gold star because you won’t.  and it’s quite alright.

but i am not trying to “get a job” either.  I am working hard on my art, submitting proposals, actively seeking new opportunities on a full time basis, doing the work to become the artist I want to be, as Gandi would say.  I wish that I wasn’t such an idealist, i am so suprised it hasn’t been burnt out of me.  I remember this feeling of nausea, of hatred of each day…of the impatience at the same shit on a different day.

2 bum calls and one Black guy who had such scary energy I was super glad I got out of there when I did and not a second sooner.  He was the kind of man who looked like he wanted to kill me but couldn’t find a reason to.  I shined all my golden light into him but he never received me.  He was evasive and didn’t want to answer my questions and he had the death look in his eyes.  This death look is what you see when you think someone could kill you.  You may have seen this gaze in a lover or a partner’s eyes before.  I’ve seen it before.  Nothing that I could say, me the master of de-escalating myself out of violence over and over again, was going to make this guy WARM UP to me.  And that was what made me nervous.  I did not want to have sex with him.  I upsold the sex so he wouldn’t do it.  The truth was I was sick to my stomach of Asiaphile Black dudes with their Asian fetishes and varying annoying personalities.  I did a hand job/body rub with one and then actually turned down his money because I just would not allow myself to sit through a situation where I would feel molested for money again.  At least not in such a short period.  Is it their racist imperialism?  Or is that I can’t stomach faking it more than once.  I’ve concluded that that was part of it.  I actually kind of HATE regulars.  And the guys that I am actually attracted to, I just end up trying to date or discount and so it doesn’t really last long either way.  But fucking the same dude that I didn’t like the first time gets super hard for me pretty quickly.  I remember doing mushrooms with one of my sugar daddies who insisted saying “I love you” to me all the time and I literally started vomiting.  It was a great way to get out of having to be close to him or have sex with him.  I chose to hang out with my best friends instead of make $1500 a day.  They thought I was crazy.  They were worth more to me though.  I know more than ever since doing so much sex work what in this life is PRICELESS and what is not.  I knew i couldn’t stomach him anymore is why.  Throwing up was the last resource I had.  I used that money well.  But it’s gone now.  I launched my solo theatre show with it and funded a cabaret.

This Black guy wanted me to be his personal travel assistant, around the world rubbing his shoulders, Thailand, Japan.  Bleah.  That would be my equivalent to sex slavery.  I can barely work a regular job with a boss., let alone be a sugar baby for longer than a week.  My true colors shine through and I throw off their patriarchal (they usually can’t help it, they’re in their 50s) shackles and usually walk out with my last donation liberated and relieved.

I drove to this tweaker’s house 30 minutes away and the way he talked to me was so cold.  He did not care that he had wasted my time.  He didn’t have weed, or a beer to offer me, nor gas money for my time.  He wasn’t going to give me shit.  just a bongful of shit.  Bleah.  No thank you.  I just gave that up for the last time, nasty horrible fucking shit.  I won’t even try it for kicks like I used to.  Sometimes I would do it just to see if it would do anything for me.  I would take it in a few hits and marvel about how I felt nothing, compared to a few hits of smoking a bong of weed.  I was boggled by how much power it had over so many people!  I use it as a tool of hopeless self injury when I have done it, not in the ways of how many tweakers use it.   I tried to understand the mind of a tweaker but I could never do it.  I am too strong and healthy.   Never again.  The vultures they call you to partake, they have no intention in paying you.  Just getting you high and fucking you to death.  I’m so sick of all the toxic drug addicts.  I am no longer content to just take their money and exploit their addictions, because this becomes my addiction too.  It’s a form of codependency that I have…and I am trying to kick it…Because the nature of SEX WORK includes dependence on money, it a really hard addiction to kick, especially in my personal economy when love and money are in constant need.

When you are doing sex work with a partner that you despise and you hate every second that they are intimate with you, it feels like you are being molested.  (I have only been date raped so I can only imagine this is what it feels like).  Me, the survivor is always trying to push myself to the limit, to the edge….I have pushed myself for nearly 5 years now and now I would like to be done.  I have danced with the devil and burned in the belly of the beast, fought off its invitations, corruptions, and henchmen.  I have seen my potential and realized some of my dreams with this work.  I have fought hard to create normalcy and justice for myself, for other sex workers who hated me, for those that never knew.  I’m done.  But i’m just done in my head, because as you know this transition can take months or years.  I did almost transition in 2009 when I was on probation, I quit one of my agencies and had a hard time of going indy and faced the famine which led to the nearest I have ever come to suicide in my life.  I have NOT truly considered it since but i often use it as a reference point so it concerns people sometimes. I was on probation, had just lost my teaching rights and just ended a horrible relationship and quit swop-la the first time.

My facebook friend Wendy Babcock recently died.  They said she committed suicide but I don’t believe it.  She was alive and well when I was “talking” to her through her facebook posts. She was actively writing, being interviewed, doing activism and reaching out to me.  Not the kind of person who is hopeless, depressed or suicidal.  Perhaps we don’t really know what suicidal really looks like then.  It scares me.  She was born on May 29.  We have the same birthday.  When she died, a part of me died too.  She was a valiant sex worker activist in Toronto, Canada.  She and I had just connected on how negative I felt about sex work and she was a thread of hope and support for me in this time when I do need it and continue to need it.

I am trying to date men and women on various internet dating sites with very little luck.  I am experimenting with telling them I am a sex worker on the second date.  I don’t blast it in my profile.  I used to just say, fuck you, i am a sex worker, love me or leave me!!! but the kind of men I attracted were just losers and abusers so I thought I’d try a different approach…

last nite someone stood me up and I knew it was NOT about me but it just bummed me out hard because I have been working so hard on creating these loopholes, revising my profile, trying to ease someone into the idea of dating a sex worker, testing the boundaries by talking about porn, hiding the true details, accentuating the minor into major to cover up the sex work…

there are still good days and good clients.   great clients and good times to ease the pain.  thank the universe for that.   Unlike my stripper days, I am older and wiser and I know how to take good care of myself better…but it is still hard.  I am single and dealing with this on my own.  It is sort of unfair to bring a new romantic date into my chaotic mix because I am really negative and emotional…it’s hard not to just unload on someone that I want to just hold me…

I think my reverse escorting days are done too.  I tried to make it work time and time again, but in the end, it never did.  It was just a long, drawn out, unpaid or low paid session.  I was never their girl.  Never qualified and they let me know it.  In Gun Hill Road, the trans woman character (who is not a sex worker) has a lover that just fucks her but won’t take her out to restaurants or movies.  Sadly, I could identify with my last lover that I would find myself gushing wetness under every month.  twice a month at most. I knew it was abusive.  But more self abusive though.  I was complacent in going over there and indulging in what he was offering.  I do not blame myself at all because I WAS better off than alone.

I still stay in their arms if they’re decent and willing and we are exchanging good energy.  I ended my 9 month unhealthy affair with the above mentioned former client turned lover who was really just a PnP addiction.  It was just a little bit of money, lots or orgasms, affection, and a little bit of drugs.  I trained him to go from 0 to hero in 3 sessions.  I used to hate having him go down on me and soon i begged for it.  9 orgasms was the most I’d had in perhaps ten years!  Do you blame me?  In my 30s, the combo of sex love magic stays in my body and warms my spirit for a good 24 hours afterwards.  I don’t remember being that conscious of it in my 20s of even having the kind of relationship I have to body and energy as aI do at 35.

Gay boys and hookers PnP for the same reason.  Toxic people, mutual loneliness, trying to live up to beauty and sex machine standards, remnants of past trauma and the emotional deficit collide.  he didn’t call me for the last time and I wanted to injest him for the last time until he cut through my veins and caused every muscle in my body to hurt and tense up in soreness for over a week.  And then I blocked him from being able to call me (My wireless carrier allows you to do that now! I wished they had this service when the crazy white trash girlfriend was texting me cussng insults once she found out i was fucking her man).

I did a cathartic sort of Amy Winehouse-esque memorial ritual the weekend she was found dead and I learned that I was stronger than letting your addictions kill you.  stronger than drug addiction.  stronger than sex work.  stronger than rape. robbery. arrest.  racism. conspiracy theories.  mental illness.  rape culture.  pimps.  I’ve learned my lessons and it is time to move to a different chapter.

I ACTUALLY SELL THEM FOR $50 + S&H www.facebook.com/asianprincessartifacts

It took me 3 years pursuing education and teaching and neglecting art making to realize that my soul consists not of teaching or serving the community, but it consists of MAKING AND SHOWING MY ART.  Singing, creating visual pieces, writing, speaking, performing…If all I wanted to do with my life was to be a teacher and die, I had achieved it.  It was the most difficult path in itself, as I chose to be placed in the most at risk schools in LA and SF.  I saw it as doing my time in the WAR AGAINST EDUCATION and I put in my time, I even got a short haircut.   Now it was time for me to return home away from that war and be an artist again.

I was determined now to travel the world as an artist and activist and fully experience life.  Also, I wanted to get my SEXY back which somehow along the way, I had lost in the name of achieving my normal status.  I worked hard like a good workaholic.  I woke up at 6am and went to bed at midnight.  Before I moved to LA for grad school, I was exactly what I am now: a full time artist and full time sex worker.  But, a part of me always wondered constantly WHY I never got the jobs I wanted, if I was only good at doing sex work jobs, if i was STUCK.  It seemed like the one of the things that I seem to excel in is SCHOOL.  I am an excellent student and a pretty damn good teacher, it seems.  I am great at school and I can teach YOU too to excel in school, but I am unsure whether that is really the key to success and happiness for all.  I did above the bare minimum, wayy beyond what was expected and more, which in any districts eyes was successful.  As long as you had your grades at the end of each semester, you’ve fulfilled your legal requirement.  It was the perfect job for someone who has trouble working under direct supervision of bosses.

SOLO SHOW SPONSORED BY THE MAKERS AND SMOKERS OF CRACK…

“Hellloooo?  You’re a prostitute!” a family member said recently,”Are we supposed to want to tell our friends that?” she said.  Well, I guess you can lie, or you can tell them, I’m an artist.  A singer.  A theatrical performer.  An organizer.  A writer.  A woman who makes the media include her voice by being interviewed for sex worker editorials all over the U.S: a media maker.  Maybe you can tell them I just had an interview published in a new South End Press anthology called “The Revolution Starts at Home.”  Maybe you could open your eyes and think of something good to say…

I love my LinkedIn profile actually.  I work on it a lot and update it.  I have created a name for Mariko Passion over the years and I have worked hard for every single achievement.  Hungry for more.  much much more.  I just realized that I have only had the Mariko Passion persona for LESS THAN five years.  I have to be proud of all the things I’ve done and gotten to do, as a direct result of my decision to be a WHORE/ARTIST!  There are so many people who are constantly cutting down the tall poppy.  It’s a constant battle!  But, I’ve found that my SSRIs are still doing their job and my moods are more stabilized than my income lately, and that has been a HUGE part of being able to RESIST criticism.  I asked my REAL friends to make themselves known to me and they seemed to emerge out of the darkness one by one.  I called a family meeting, asking essentially for more compassion and caring.  It turned into a barrage of bad news for me meeting, I thought but I think I can see some progress in our communication…

Somehow, in the days before I left, there was an interesting client, a crack addict who pretty much shall I say SPONSORED my trip to San Francisco so I could run my one woman show there for the week.  I did get an honorarium from the Sex Workers Art Festival but I was set to leave to Chicago to do my comedy improv training and I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to get the money for that.  If it was meant to happen, it would happen.  And it DID.  All in the nick of time and as if it were somehow fated by a higher power.  Here comes a crackhead who wants to drop a bunch of money on me so that I can now purchase my plane tickets and maybe some hotel nights on the next leg of my tour!  Thank you Crack Cocaine!  Thank you U.S government for making it!  This is why I love Michelle Tea’s book RENT GIRL so much.  I can really relate to the sex work in it.  It’s not Tracy Quan’s Manhattan or Jetsetting Call girl, though I can relate to some of those types of clients as well, it was gritty grimy indoor rent girl prostitution w/ drug addicts and the often other misfits of society.  they call me for companionship and I oblige, but only for a high price.  With this crackhead, I was counting the minutes on my phone clock tick tick away.  I was sooo bored.  I wasn’t smoking crack.  I was texting my friends trying to entertain myself during this jail sentence like silent escort session.  He was pretty non functional because he was so high, but that didn’t stop me from brining him back to reality when the time was up to collect my hourly fee.  I stayed for 3 hours and could have stayed for more but I was literally going CRAZY of boredom and wanted to run out into the streets and just inhale the clean outdoor air as I left.  I didn’t feel like I was a loser, I felt like I was a WINNER!  Just in the nick of time, as a lot of things like this in my life happen to be. I now had enough money to do my San Francisco tour stop and not have to worry about working that week while I performed in the festival and I would be able to buy my plane tickets to Chicago and NYC.  Blessings.  Someone needs to show these guys a “good” time. LOL.  I cross paths with these parasites who don’t have any money.  Just drugs and usually a bunch of lies.  When I got back to LA, I hit up this same crackhead client.  He didn’t have any cash this time, just a gold necklace with diamonds that seemed like a real piece of expensive jewelry but I wasn’t in the business of pawning jewelry.  I do barter for product but only for tips.  Unless I am sure of the value of what I am bartering.  I’ve made this mistake tooo many times in my life.  I went to the garage to get some cash out of S’s car.  He drove a really nice, clean and new SUV.  A 50K car for sure.  I had no sympathy for him.  I decided the torture of being his companion was only worth it for lots of cash and if he didn’t have any of that, I was leaving.  Maybe the necklace was worth a lot of money, I just didn’t want to do it for anything less than a pile of money.  Sorry.  I gave him his necklace back and stayed around for 30 more minutes in exchange for $140 I found in his car.  Thanks for sponsoring my tour earlier, cracker jack, call me when you have more MONEY.  He let me sketch him and take these pictures.  His poses weren’t as good this time though.   I didn’t tell him I was going to blog about it though.  I don’t have to, in my opinion.  My experiences and blog posts are MINE.  If you recognize yourself, GOOD.  If you don’t like what you read you can request to have me change it, but it might make things worse.  Our interaction creates a REACTION in me that I have to express creatively.  I cannot keep all of these juicy experiences to myself.  It is what fuels my fire.

 My life is ART, ART is my life.

When I was in Chicago and NYC I filled my days with training, performance and viewing other artist’s work.  Scheming about bringing my show to Chicago and NYC.  Networking and connecting with people.  Posting up backpage ads and trying to make enough money to keep eating and travelling.  It works perfectly sometimes.  It’s difficult at times but when it works so well, it is really really nice.  Its been FIVE YEARS since I graduated, quit teaching and decided i would pursue my art full time.  I got sidetracked for THREE YEARS while running SWOP-LA full time and doing art/performance only part time, but now that SWOP-LA is no longer in the picture, it is a blessing in disguise and I have only my art to dedicate myself to.  It is what I was supposed to be doing in the first place.  I think I just got scared and tried to do something practical, like direct a non profit.  But, according to some, I FAILED.  LOL.  Thanks for your words and hallucination of friendship and support BITCHES.  Now I can go back to making ART.

CRACK makes you act STRANGE!

he tried to give me this Gold and Diamond necklace as collateral for an overnight date. LOL. Do i look like a PAWN SHOP?

this is him looking kind of normal, but he would POSE for at least 15 seconds in these wonderfully contorted facial expressions over and over throughout his session

reading and inculcating my brain of 9 pages of script lines at my favorite SF eatery Chows in the Castro (bread pudding and ginger ice cream?)

I feel like I am on some crazy scavenger hunt like reality show (Work for P Diddy?) where everything that can go wrong will go wrong and you are left to make the best of what you have to work with and very very little time to get it done. Somehow, the DVD I burned for the my theatre show, burned all alias files instead of original files so I had to get my neighbor to give my friend, who happened to be traveling to SF the morning after I arrived for a non sex worker festival reason. With my harddrives in her car, heading past Magic Mountain, one hour outside of LA…her 21 year old friend’s car…BREAKS DOWN! Because they were 21, they couldn’t rent a car so I had to scramble on craigslist to find a rideshare ride to pick up the hard drive. Someone who does regular trips up and down the coast agreed to do it for $75. This meant I would have my harddrive in my hands by evening time. It was probably going to be okay, but I still made the driver of my drives text me every 3 hours just to make sure they hadn’t crashed.

NO MORE BIG DISASTERS. I apparently survived judgment day. Too busy to put dry ice in my shoes but I thought it was a fun idea.

Overall, things during the week went smoothly. I came and did my first long theatre run of my solo show “Modern Day Asian Sex Slavery: the musical.” I felt like it was a big success. Well, let me qualify that, it was a big success to me. Not a white middle class privileged version of success. I didn’t have a line around the corner or 100s of people there. I didn’t sell out shows or make lots of money. I did work very little to bring in the 15-20 heads that showed up to pay $15-20 each night for the Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival and that was a success to me (more a success of the festival and Carol Leigh’s hard work). I saw LOTS of very important people in my life come out to support. I got a great editorial piece in the SF Weekly about it the night of the show. This was a huge success to me considering that even in sex worker savvy San Francisco, an Asian sex worker speaking directly about the perception of Asian sex work is still mostly absent in the media and mainstream communities. When Gavin Newsom orders raids on massage parlors, my Asian American SF State UC Berkeley City College sisters are actually nodding their heads in approval thinking that they are saving victims.

I had a political and artistic interpretation to communicate and I did that with a very targeted audience which was mostly empathetic to the cause. I’m positive that my show and working with me made an impact on two young interns at the CSC who happened to also be women of Asian descent, one just home from college to volunteer and learn! This definition of success is how I have always done my sex worker and artistic activism, because the mainstream definition has not always been an option for me and I have had to reshape it accordingly in order to keep having the motivation to believe that my work ALWAYS makes a difference in the lives of SOME people out there. It is how I motivate myself to continue to try. I don’t do it for the money or because it is a popular cause, that’s for sure.

This way of defining success comes from my time as a teacher with ‘at risk’ high school students. I had to find value in the short one on one, interpersonal relationships that I sometimes had with my students. There were many students that I would form a bond with and suddenly after 3 weeks or 2 months they would disappear. They may have dropped out, been shot, transferred to another school, kicked out, sent to juvenile detention, etc. Was your impact on this student successful? Yes. The social justice school of Education cohort that I was taught in would say yes. I still live in the neighborhood that I once taught in, and am now adult friends with several of my former students. To me, one of the marks of a good teacher is how much current and former students keep up with them outside of class. This is how I was mentored by the teachers models (professors) that I had. Social justice education/outreach is about interpersonal impact and often transient but significant teachable moments. White middle class education and success means getting a diploma and a “good” job.

I made this show a friendship test of sorts. This was a big artistic milestone in my life and my 35th birthday and you kind of needed to be there for this or say something about it, if we were really friends. I understand people are busy but it was a 4 day run and I at least expected a text message or Facebook message excuse. If I heard nothing, then I felt that the bond that I had with those that I had invited could not be that strong. I have been recently grappling with figuring out who my real friends and support network really were, since my asthma attack at Dinah Shore. I have been grappling with the meaning of Facebook friends and status updates, I have been arguing with the members of SWOP-LA. (which I recently cut all ties to).

I have begun taking St.Johns Wort (SJW) for “mood stabilizing” and it has really made extremely difficult and tense situations seem lucid and manageable. I am the newest victim to big Pharma because of the asthma medication that I need seems to think charging folks $180 for a months supply is fair. (considering millions of people need it in order to breathe, insurance does not cover it, and no generic version is available). I am resistant to being dependent on any prescription medications that are not herbal. My counselor suggested that I consider taking anti-depressant pharmaceuticals and I went as far as the intake appointment and paid $15 for it. It went nowhere because I was disqualified for being a counseling client elsewhere even though the place that I currently went had no psychiatric services available. Counselors and therapists are pseudo monogamous relationships. If you cheat on your mental health professional because you simply need more support, you need to keep it on the DL. The SJW caps I take most afternoons seem to be doing the trick. In the pits of my recent depression, I felt that not even cannabis was helping. I was willing to try new things, but hoped that I could try less harmful or expensive things first and they would work. SJW is supposed to inhibit the effectiveness of your other medications, particularly the ones that use your liver somehow. I noticed that my edibles did not fuck me up the way they used to! I noticed that my alcohol tolerance was MUCH higher. Mostly I noticed that the need to burst into tears or be apathetic or be overly self critical seemed to quiet down.  The potency of the words of others and any criticism seemed to just glide past me, especially if I had already processed it to be false or unfounded.

Our minds and bodies are connected. My physical health is often determined by my mental health. My body cannot lie.

My kindergarten friend/prom date Jon did the spot light for me (he has stepped up to help with tech stuff at other musical productions of mine in high school too!) and my 9th grade boyfriend/FIRST sexual partner was there too! My sister and her partner came, my dad came out to TWO shows and lots other friends and fellow activists as well.  A non English speaking Chinese man looking for a underground gambling hall also gave his $15 donation to see my show though he probably couldn’t understand it! The new Center for Sex and Culture space was a squatted in unleased building used for Chinese born Chinese gambling circuits complete w/ a piss trough and brothel rooms! He was like a relic from the Gold Rush days offering his support for my revitalized legacy!
Eventually the show is going to portray Madam Ah Toy, the legendary Gold Rush era madam, the first Chinese/American whore revolutionary. This guy kind of reminded me that San Francisco’s Chinese immigration history, including its history in “sex trafficking and slavery” includes the historical account of Madam Ah Toy, notorious and respected Chinese prostitute that somehow managed to have white privilege in ways that even other white women and even male Chinese (coolies) did not.

understanding, analyzing and identifying MY MANIA! (patterns of manic behavior) comes like some sort of GREAT RELIEF to my psyche. Now, I am just self diagnosing myself here but i am on the road to getting a real psychiatric evaluation, but the process for the uninsured low income folks has to be an ardous one.

The feeling I’ve had lately with this self diagnosis is comprable to the feeling I had once I realized that the chronic coughing that I had been doing for 4 months in 2010 was an ASTHMATIC COUGH not a whooping cough, a cold or a side effect of my bong smoking. The feeling I had once I had come to terms with my many instances of sexual assault/abuse before 21 and had committed to working with a counselor towards healing the past and becoming stronger to survive the inevitable imperfect future…the beginning of identifying as a survivor.

I had always known I had anxiety and depression, but had never until Jessie took over SWOP-LA did I start to see that I had these manic leadership tendencies that really stunted the growth of many of the projects that I’ve started. Manic people do amazing and brilliant things though, do not underestimate our abilities! I feel liberated in identifying a pattern, but scared that every great idea is just mania and needs to be controlled with someone silencing me. like i shouldn’t raise my hand anymore. is this what psyche medication will do?

one of the peer counselors at the domestic violence/rape crisis center I started going to after breaking up with the crazy abusive ex suggested that I have ‘borderline personality disorder,’ which wasn’t curable and could be improved with the support of group therapy.

i watched a few youtube videos on a few different personality disorders and I did not see myself as having borderline personality disorder AT ALL. Her misdiagnosis could be so potentially damaging to another client who wasn’t as analytical and fact checking as i was. This counselor just did not really understand my drug use and sex work behavior. She did not understand that the period of self destuction had everything to do with the sexual abuse that occurred from my martial arts instructor.

The borderline personality is characterized by the feeling of “walking on eggshells” around an unstable person who could snap. one day they LOVE this person/husband/girlfriend and the next day they HATE them, they broke up with them, they’re throwing their stuff out the window, etc. They are deathly afraid of being alone. This describes one of my friends really well, and explains why she keeps going back to her abusive husband with co-dependent boyfriends in between. This personality disorder is believed to be created or [un]nurtured by abuse or neglect in childhood. I may have had some of those traits when I was early early in my dating career from 16-21. the time period before sex work. the golden innocent but naive era of my life. when i cared about what men thought and said about me. The period where my happiness often revolved around liking a guy and whether he liked me back. It seemed like he had all the power over me back then and it wasn’t until I started hustling lapdances that I finally got my power back. But that’s a different epiphany….

while i was researching on youtube i started looking at manic depression/bipolar videos. Manic 1/Bipolar 1 clients I have had lots of. I have been elated to princess of the week by two extremely manic sugar daddy clients. I am typing on a MacBook Pro I was gifted, can boast of being flown to Vale, Tampa, new snowboard boots, 5 star dinners…I was Sasha Gray for a week! high class escort for a month and then a piece of forgotten shit the next! O well. I still have all the things and the memories! I never saw myself in this man. I was much healthier than him, i thought…

we are all crazy. just different levels of crazy. finding compatible pathologies and mating. pair bonding in dysfunction and semi function or living life alone. My friend might be a borderline personality but I care about her, am still her friend and want her to get out of her abusive relationships and heal. but i don’t spend too much time on trying to fix her. We don’t hang out that much but i try to support her, and in turn, she does well in trying to support me but each of us has our plates full with our own stuff.

I love the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland. When the Mad Hatter character has MANIA he starts spouting off Scotish soliloquies until Alice and his other friends make him snap out of it by calling his name so that he calms down. I remember having to do this with my late best friend David. He would paint for days and then sleep for days. He would mash his teeth and go off on literal mad tangents just like Johnny Depp portrayed but in such a lovable, non alienating way that you accepted it as part of him and wanted him to know that he was still lovable and talented, though he was mad. David wasn’t as mad as the Hatter, he would break out in spot on Chris Farley impersonations who no doubt was also manic but it was his mania that made him hilariously famous! My best friend David was equally brilliant as Johnny Depp, and most definitely bipolar. I am the one who introduced him to medicating with marijuana. His paintings transformed from dark, grey and green Francis Bacon (screaming zombie like figures stabbing themselves) type of paintings with suicidal themes to happy, funny stoner paintings, brilliant, bright colors, equally skilled but clearly riddled with so much less mental pain. Marijuana is medicine. It helped him, it helps me and so many others but sometimes, some of us need a little more. “DAVID!!” me and his girlfriend would yell…and he would stop doing the Flashdance chair scene in the restaurant because our table was ready…”What? What? Was I ‘going off’ again?” he’d say. “Yes, calm down. Restaurant. table’s ready.” we’d say laughing as we all headed to our table. When you are unmedicated and the world is nothing but dark and hopeless, how could it be bad to feel better, especially if the substance that medicates you does not destroy you at the same time.

I feel like I am going back in my own timeline and noticing all the times my mania was controlling my decision making and driving me to the point of burnout or inevitable failure. Sometimes at the last minute, I will look on the schedule of my martial arts school and find out that the next class is in 25 minutes and rush rush rush to try to make it, run in 10 minutes late, fight for an hour and then and only then do I calm down on the drive home. I inhale cannabis AFTER my workout, take a hot shower or bath and wait for the phone to ring. Sometimes I do all that rushing to class and I am too late and I end up getting angry at myself for always being late! Its like I get an emergency telegram to my brain and it RUNS with it vigorously for a couple of hours and then stops. I think I use the marijuana to calm myself down as well as to help with the depression, although at times being stoned has increased my mania, increased my good idea outbursts at meetings and increased my dominating the room or conversation with jokes or performances. People definitely think that I am funny and have good ideas, but they rarely get on board with them and now I know why! It’s almost like I need to call my own name and calm myself down when I begin to “go off” and start envisioning fire department permits so we can have Burningman style flame throwers and live amplification in West Hollywood for the next December 17th Day of Rememberance.

i have had clients with borderline personalities, in my last relationship i fell in love with an undiagnosed schizophrenic who may have had borderline as well, and have lived with a mother who went completely mad for over a year but somehow came back but not nearly quite back to normal. The videos say that the best way to be X is to be raised by X. This is true for alcoholism, abusive patterns and mental illness it seems. Most of my exes are codependents and this man that I was most recently attracted to is also a codependent but with interesting talents, a job, a car and more direction than most of them have ever been.

Escorting has a lot of head games. A borderline personality type client will say they are coming to an appointment, they are on their way, getting off of the first light, and then oops, they’re cancelling at the last minute. What makes them borderline and not just regular clients who are flaky though has to do with the story that they spin and weave you into BEFORE this manipulation. They pretend to empathize with your situation, they will haggle your rate down knowing it degrades you, and then on top of that they will cancel at the last minute. They feel that if they let you down before you let them down they have somehow survived something. Or maybe they never had the money in the first place and were just playing a game with you. I am in contact with a lot of head cases as both a sex worker and as a sex worker activist. But perhaps it’s because I am also crazy and only crazy people can tolerate crazy, but our pathologies have to match up!

The feast or famine pattern of sex work IS MANIC DEPRESSION defined. How could it not be depressing to be unable to pay your rent on time, pay bills that you normally can pay, to not be able to do destressing activities like workout in martial arts and yoga so you don’t feel so much anxiety? How could it not be elating to suddenly have money to pay doctor bills, buy needed prescriptions, pay musicians to back you up in gigs that you have coming, pay a director to get your solo theatre show off the ground and premiered to the public? I reasoned that if you were not manic before you started sex work, independent sex work and (stripclub stripping also has this pattern) will CREATE symptoms of manic depression in anyone. But maybe this is just the way it is for everyone who runs their own business. When I worked for the agency 4 days a week and took indy calls on the side it was way less manic, but crazier in a different way. (you can never win).

I get soo excited by men (and women, really) who are above and beyond because I’ve dated such low men on the totem pole. When the “ideal man with the ideal job/house/car” that I had a mad crush on called me back to talk I felt incredibly insecure about my class and my work and any future we could have. He would never accept or like a girl like me, I knew it. I can’t keep my mouth shut about my bohemian lifestyle. It emanates out of my person even when I am not speaking. I suddenly realized why I sometimes shoot low, and crawl into bed with a sancho that I nicknamed my LAME (but sweetie). I get to see him whenever he feels like making time for me, which is randomly about twice a month. He makes me feel great in limited doses until something true comes along. He reverse escorted me somehow. I use him for short term Boyfriend experiences. (BFE)s and it is good for what it is because I have zero expectations. I care about him more than he cares about me. Sometimes, I wish I could make him better or somehow up his game and fall in love with me and do those things that people do for people that they love, but he never will. But when he is there for me it’s soothing and nice. It keeps me from being undergoodsexed and lonely. He’s not capable or interested in having a relationship with me or anyone, and it’s really okay because he’s pretty inadequate as a temporary boyfriend as it is (...youd rather change your own windshield wiper blade than see his weak ass whiny reaction to your request). The relationships that he had had not been as demanding as one with me would be. We are very different. We don’t talk about art and music. He likes the Lakers, gambling (throwing money away) at casinos and watching ESPN on a big screen TV (i don’t own a TV) are fun to him. (Bleah..) We talk about wrestling entertainment and laugh and have a great time staying in bed all sunny day (with real boyfriends I would be going on hikes or to the beach) having lots of orgasmic great sex, sleeping cuddled together, showering and making out. We go to dinner and I go home fulfilled and wanting more but am always denied. I bitch at him like I’m his baby mama sometimes but neither of us have a kid together nor are we even in a relationship tho it’s the way we interact. I even tax him when he pisses me off and he pays me a little cash so I will keep seeing him. That’s what gives it that baby mama vibe that I’m sure would be the same whether or not I had a kid or not. He helped pay for my engine repair and from that night he became my favorite client and slowly won over my heart. Money, (when someone gives me the money I need in a desperate situation) is also a trigger for MY codependence. Orgasms are also another way to keep me hooked! I am really amazed and proud that I easily trained this man from being a painfully shitty lover to the first guy to give me 9 orgasms in 12 years, so in that way I literally feel like if I can coach him to success in the bedroom, why not outside the bedroom as well? My favorite line is,”If you aren’t going to put the effort in making this like a real relationship then you gotta pay me to be your whore.” and he does. otherwise Fuck the sex. and the intimacy. RIGHT?? sometimes. something about this unattractive mediocre man is so irresistible to me….sigh.

Money (not having money suddenly) is my trigger. The borderline will say come come come come come come and at the last minute push you away and say, never mind. You can see how this can INFURIATE the wrong person into a fit of rage. Sometimes I have been that wrong person and its because I felt manipulated by them dangling a carrot and having me follow it and denied at the last minute. One of my ex boyfriends did that to me once and I nearly broke up with him because the situation led me to an outburst early on in our dating. A client that was going to be the first client in a dry spell of almost 2 weeks with little or no income decided that he would cancel in my face without giving me gas money and then turn around, run in the house and slam his door in my face as I chased after him. I started to kick his gate on his front door while I rang the doorbell vigorously. I was yelling shamelessly revealing what I did and that I needed the money, i Pleaded with him to open the door…and he did. And we went from that to a multi-hour appointment and me selling him a couple LINES of coke for $50. (like buying a beer at a baseball game, I charge A LOT). I did a couple lines with him like I usually do. I had an appointment in the Valley to escape to. I sped up the 101, flipping through my ipod and switching my air from hot to cold every five seconds. When I got to the gas station at the Universal Citywalk exit, I parked and reclined my chair to relax and think.

Thoughts raced through my blood into and through my brain…

I was too jacked up to see a client now.

I stayed in the car and put my phone on silent. The prospective clients hotel was 5 minutes away, but I chose to pass on the call and try to calm myself out of the anxiousness I was feeling from just 2 lines of coke, which usually doesn’t give me a rise like that.

This was the 2nd call since my mushroom meltdown that I had had to pass on for safety reasons. I was too jacked up to drive and the anxiety that coke sometimes brings on is crazy for someone who already HAS anxiety…! I know some of you don’t get the continued desire to use. Like living queer youth, it does get better. I love the numbing effects and the ride slowly up is light but euprhoric..the down is usually not so bad, especially with the pop of xanax as a calming aid…but lately its not been fun at the top. and that’s when we know it’s time to stop.

I decided to take a drug break. TWO TIMES now I have had to pass on seeing clients because of drugs. Drugs getting in the way of my money? Not acceptable.

I did this in january. They last about a month. A month and a half. In a period of 120 days, 100 of those days I will be offered drugs to do, often for free.

Fits of rage are exhausting. By the time I dated him, I was no longer willing to fight and yell with anyone that I was in a relationship with on a regular basis. I was not afraid to be alone. Being around him was like walking on eggshells. One moment we were in love, the next he was texting me verbal assaults and calling me out of my name with death threats. I thought that HE was a borderline. BP people make good abusers or good abusive partners. Abuse to honeymooon. Rage to honeymoon. Repeat. Not me. I did 2.5 months of that shit and threw it back in the trash. (well it wasn’t that easy, but anyway..)

I think if i can recognize my shortcomings I will be able to work on them better. If I recognize my pathologies I will be able to control their effects on me and others around me. I will understand why I tend to get fired at jobs so quickly and why my relationships attract codependent and helpless men. I am scared of psych meds. scared of losing my sex drive. I am scared of my asthma inhalers and the detrimental effects of steroids. Scared of the price. Scared of how to have a sober pregnancy when I depend on marijuana and asthma steroids everyday. I have no choice now in taking those as they change my daily physical state daily with or without them. My depression is certainly affected by the level of asthma sickness I have in any given day or week. I am dependent on these drugs to breath. 10 minute coughing fits and feeling like you might pass out at a party is depressing. The weed helps but it has not been strong enough lately. I am doing much much better now after having these epiphanies and finally making some money.

Money makes so many things possible and better in my life. I am working everyday to eliminate this cyclical pattern and make it less painful for me. My health is currently much better than it was in Palm Springs. I changed inhalers to a stronger one. A flurry of clients came 4 days in a row to ease the finnancial deficit. Her misdiagnosis was a blessing in disguise.