Wednesday, September 14, 2011

me time

One of my absolute favorite things about spending time alone where I live is the freedom not to wear any more clothing than I want to or is necessary due to temperature.
I just took a shower after trying to plant some things. I may have put the sprouted avocado upside down, and that potted basil may have been too late in meeting the garden. That's entirely beside the point. The point is, that I am sitting here bare-ass naked, save for my glasses. I do not even have my nose-ring in and am not wearing the lucky Japanese coin which seldom leaves my neck.
There is a delightful breeze coming through the window, my bedroom door is open, and as I am not expecting anyone else to be here for another 24 hours and the downstairs door is locked, that is all just dandy.
I think I came late to appreciating nudity, relatively speaking. Little kids seem to love to be naked, and having worked with youth a lot, I can tell you some take a lot longer to pick up the social conventions of when/where and how much clothing they are expected to wear in various circumstances. From what I remember and have been told, I was not one of those kids. I was on board with being fully clothed just about as soon as I could get clothes on with minimal assistance. I didn't want to change without a lot of privacy, which was difficult given how many sports I played. When I got involved with theatre I started to loose some of those boundaries. When you've got to do a quick-change, you've got to do a quick-change, but that was only ever down to my skivvies, which were pretty modest and uninteresting at that point - I once had to do a quick change in an alley for a show that I did when I was 14. The same truck drove by 3 times in the minute it took me to change from a full male military costume into a tea dress, matching hat and shoes.
When I became sexually active nudity in that context never seemed like a big deal to me. Of COURSE I have the hang-ups about my body that people have but I guess I always figured that if someone thought I was sexy enough to get to that point with me, what they found underneath my clothes wasn't going to send them running for the hills. I embraced well (not harshly) lit sex almost right away. Otherwise, I stayed pretty clothed. My beloved Alma Mater was, to put it mildly, a pretty naked place. I would take off my shirt and leave on my bra at parties, or go to underwear themed parties, in boxers and tshirt, not lingerie, and not just barely lingerie like some of my dear, darling classmates.
A few years ago I read from some very authoritative source, as in, some womens' magazine or other, that part of the reason that women tend to like their faces more than they like their bodies is because they SEE their faces all the time, and do not often really see/look at their bodies. I immediately took up the practice of looking at all me naked in the mirror at least once a day, and HEY! It's true. Having a better idea of what my body actually looks like made me like it more, and feel more comfortable being naked - alone, around other people, just for the heck of it. I don't feel as though my body needs to covered when it does not actually need to for the sake of social comfort or warmth. It's great. I am not suggesting even a little bit that I no longer have my hang-ups or any such thing, I just like chilling out naked now. That's all.

Naked Kinsey Out