Tonight I’m placing ten years worth of clips, press hits, photos, diaries, manuscripts, cribs from my lectures, notes from other people’s lectures, letters, and really sketchy wireframe illustrations in archival boxes. (I mean, really sketchy, and really too many of them. If I actually created all of the websites I’ve mocked up…)

I am also watching the original Grey Gardens, or, as Julie Klausner put it, “Hoarders 1.0,” so.

I collect. I keep. I regularly go back and take stock. In a moment of kindness, a friend compared this behavior of mine to the assumptions one could make about the German people’s fondness for nostalgia as evidenced in the design of their toilets. A less forgiving take on my need to hold onto the past is that I am collecting intelligence on everyone who matters to me, including myself.

My answer is that I’m not good at living and writing at the same time, but I do take very fast and accurate shorthand.

This is why I still have to keep a diary. The press clips and lecture notes and even the wireframes — that all I keep out of vanity. The diary is practical, and has nothing to do with exposure. I’ll read it to anyone who asks. There are no secrets.

I don’t hold onto it all in order to reveal anything. I do it to remember that the truth changes and to become a more accurate observer of when I got it wrong in the stories I’ve told myself over time.

Now I go back and read: where I thought I had it all down right, where I didn’t, where I have to accept that I can never capture it any better and so hope those were days that don’t mean anything because now, aside from what’s missing, they can’t.

(I wrote another post this week called “New Zeroes,” but that’s on tumblr. Which, ever the mind towards the archival, I’m wondering if I should just fold in here. Or this there. Do you have an opinion, or is this just what passes for ‘content strategy’ or ’spiritual crisis’ these days?)

The noughties. When it seemed like a fitting moment (and a previously unblogged niche) to hold forth on the future of sex. Which I did, from 2005 to 2008, at Sexerati, and for a half-dozen episodes of a video podcast, The Future of Sex. Which I did before that, accidentally, by falling in with some of the web’s first girl-pornographers, and the first generation of online sex workers, even longer before that. This has been my decade of writing about sex online: from December 1999, when I took my first paying gig as a writer, $2/post to do scene reports on alt.culture happenings for a nascent nudie site (which was doomed from the start, I mean, really, who needed a hyphenated domain name in 1999?), to Valleywag, under Dentonian wage conditions that made living quite brokely in San Francisco and reporting on the underbelly of the web the grandest thing.

The future of sex, if you went looking for it inside of computers, was probably a total letdown. It did not come packaged as a lubricated USB dongle, and it did not come at all. Because if the past ten years of technological innovation have contributed anything to the sexual future of the blood-and-sweat human beings who wrought those advances in the first place, it will prove this: to put so much stock in the the promise of teledildonic fuckbots, we’re leaving most of the world — and ourselves — behind.

Here, then, are the three most overlooked technologies that will deliver us to the future of sex:

Online social networks. What we old school (c. 1999 – 2001) bloggers once pulled off with Notepad, some shabby HTML with hard-coded links, slow servers, and even slower dial-up connections, a new generation (and possibly a second by now) can take for granted every day. Social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace, not to mention those more widely adopted outside the US like bebo, hi5, and (who can forget the Brazilians) Orkut, move once marginal sexual conversations and displays to the next necessary step for a mass movement towards embracing sexuality in our everyday lives. Evidence of our gender identity, sexual orientation, and romantic and sexual partners trickles out in a constant stream in each status update, photo, Like, comment, and friend request we transmit. Over time, the picture of our sexual selves unfurls at a more honest and thorough clip than we could ever have reported one-on-one to the best Kinsey Institute researcher. Add to that socially-networked media sharing websites, like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter (itself defying that category) and Tumblr, and the richness with which we can tell the stories of our sexual selves outpaces our ability to hold ourselves back. And that’s the beauty of it. People who never thought they were “blogging about sex” do it every day. Death to the sex blogger. We’re all fucking on the internet now and there’s no going back.

The near-total mainstreaming of the mobile phone. Mass adoption of mobile phones, especially mobile phones with cameras and web access, has done more to drive sexual expression and the availability of sexual partners to one another, than ever before in human history. Not by way of location-aware services and GPS — just the humble text message, which has been with us since the 80’s, is enough to communicate to who, where, and how you want to fuck. Building out the mobile phone into a proper handheld computer is promising and sexy, but what about the future for those in Asia and Africa, whose 3G and 4G networks came before broadband (which is itself nearly unnecessary now)? When the mobile phone is used by health care providers in field hospitals, when the locations of sexual health clinics and surveys on HIV/AIDS transmission can be sent and tallied via SMS — and when sex workers can swap prepaid mobile minutes for session times — what will the role of the personal computer even be in the global south? If porn drove broadband prices down in the north (which it may well have), how might cell service become an emerging currency itself? Forget sexting. This is the future.

Near-to-free (and if not free, affordable and magnificent) digital cameras. What damaged the smut business more efficiently, the digital camera, or the distribution networks that moved photos and videos around from computer to computer? I’m going with the camera, as a naked girl who started out this decade scanning Polaroids onto her hard drive and hoping for an audience. If we had to go from film, where would we even be developing all those casually nude photos we all have stashed away somewhere — of ourselves, of other people, trophies and lovers and fans and ex’s and friends — and would we even take so many of them? The twin innovation of the flippable view screen on digital video cameras cinches this as the decade of autoerotic documentation. If we could put a gesture in the Smithsonian, it would be the camera-in-my-hand-30-degrees-to-the-side-and-above position for self portraiture. Now take your clothes off. Now you’ve killed pornography.

There’s nothing pneumatic or long-distance-controlled about it. No AI and no wetware. It’s as simple as what you can do with what’s already close to your warm little thigh right now.

No, the future of sex is not using MMS to send a mobile phone video of you whacking off to another mobile phone video that you ‘accidentally’ post to that Tumblr blog you forgot was auto-crossposting to Facebook and Twitter.

It’s what you do with yourself after everyone sees it.

And when someone returns the favor.

(I meant this to be a much longer and thoughtful sort of retrospective, sum-it-all-up, make-it-all-make-sense sort of blog post. But in the interest of moving my life along rather than documenting the back story perfectly, here it is:)

On Wednesday I’ll be joining the staff of the Third Wave Foundation, a feminist, activist foundation that works in the United States to support young women and transgender youth. As External Relations Officer, I’ll be finding ways to amplify the stories of our partners’ work: advocates intimately engaged in supporting reproductive justice & sexual health and rights. A good deal of that will involve using new media, and a good deal will be done the beautifully old-fashioned way: through relationships, trust, storytelling. It’s a crossroads move for me: from San Francisco to New York, from working out of cafes and bedrooms to a Midtown office with other people in it, from staying up until 3 am writing to oh who am I kidding!

True and appropriately embarrassing story: I first came to Third Wave as a loud-mouthed but shy-faced sex worker activist, invited to speak on a panel on sex work and feminism. I dug up the bio I submitted for that gig on Valentine’s Day in 2003, and oh god I am not it sharing here but! It is young and precious and earnest and also, not that off-the-mark. Now six years later, I just had to pull the same kind of thing together, but this time, for my new staff bio. And this is what I wrote:

Melissa Gira Grant is a writer, artist, and activist working at the intersection of sexuality, new media, feminism, and human rights. She is the incoming External Relations Officer at Third Wave Foundation, and the former Development Coordinator and Social Media Coordinator at St. James Infirmary, a peer-based clinic for sex workers in San Francisco. Working in collaboration with grassroots community-based organizations and non-governmental organizations, including the Open Society Institute’s Sexual Health and Rights’ Project, the Tactical Tech Collective, the Desiree Alliance, THE LINE Campaign, and the Internet Sex Information Service (ISIS-Inc), Melissa develops editorial content, education and advocacy campaigns, and offers technical assistance and peer-led workshops in using new media for social justice. She is the co-founder of the sex worker policy watch and media advocacy blog, Bound, not Gagged, a columnist for $pread magazine, and a contributor to Slate, The Huffington Post, and RH Reality Check. She lives in Brooklyn, and her website is melissagira.com.

Aside from the fact that not a lick of that existed in 2003, again: I don’t feel I’ve changed all that much, honestly, in who I am and what I do — even if I rarely spell it all out in one neat paragraph (and how I have tried). What does feel like a shift is that now that I have a title on my head, some people are going to look at me as a sort of professional feminist. With all the attendant and marvelous baggage that brings.

Like more pencil skirts and smart blouses and heels! Of all of the things I’ve done for money, I’ve never got to wear office drag in a legitimate office environment quite so often as I’ve donned it for the purposes of slipping in and out of hotel lobbies and airports to look as little “like a prostitute” as possible. And because of the beautifully curved way my life has come around itself, I do not even have to offer this story as a grand coming-out gesture to any of my new colleagues. For once, that outing moment is actually among the least incendiary things I could say about myself. They know. They’ve funded the sex worker run clinic I once called home, St. James Infirmary, based on a proposal I co-authored. They’ve already seen me blushing and awkward and ready to take on whatever long before I was ready for everything I’d set myself up to take on.

There are no closet doors here.

But of course there always are.

Just give me at least a few weeks to obsess on the one that’s directly across from my own bed before I start talking about how it feels to emerge from the rest.

Today I put into play something I’d put in my own diary about a month ago: slowblogging, a microperformance, a call to action best answered by just a small handful of people. For three hours, I invited anybody who wanted to come get a private reading from my diary, if they managed to catch the announcement I made about it as I was doing it (on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook).

Why not just put it in your blaaaaaag Melissa? I wanted to tell stories without them being part of the awkward, extended performance that is my ten years of blogging. I wanted a private place in public. I wanted to share it.

Blogging had done something corrupt to my diary writing. So I took the last few months to turn almost completely away from (sorry) personal-storytelling-on-the-internet and headed back to the diary, which can keep a secret for at least a few minutes. There’s nothing pure or sacred about it. It’s really just about being fair to time and to memory. (Even if I go back and read it almost immediately.)

My diary is my favorite book to pull out on the train or waiting for the train or waiting for someone or after someone. It’s my constant. I’ve been keeping track of everything that way — dates, lovers, transformations, scraps of stories — for as long as I’ve been writing, which is almost thirty years. The first one I still have is from when I was six and even then, there is a sense in it that it will be read. There is kissing in it.

There’s an element of performance to it, keeping a diary. The diary itself is compromised: let’s blame the rise of the memoir, and the death of books, and Facebook, and Anaïs Nin, who never got enough credit for her work as the first blogger. Nin lied in hers. She never let anyone read it. She’s got over a dozen volumes in print.

We don’t believe in diaries. They are instruments for writers to build bigger stories about themselves, or, they are boring. There’s not room much in the middle, and they don’t even sell for that much money these days.

My diary is the first thing I wanted to put on the internet. I’ve scanned so many pages I’ll never let anyone upload. This was before all of this: before it was easy, before it was an act.

But this, even this is a performance. Telling you this. Telling you I have a secret. Even in bed when a lover runs down a list of our night previous, I have to make fun of myself — “Oh, are you just doing the sketch for the diary yourself now?” — before he takes his own turn at me. It’s not narcissism. I’m not in love with myself. I’m in love with the story.

Two weeks ago, my new New York pal Kat Bridgeman (who has given me permission to call her fella) invited me to an unconference that she’d helped to organize, and at breakneck speed. SocialChangeCamp was for internet people and non-profit people to get together and figure out the answer to everything, or at least as much we could before the open bar. Out of my commitment to the BarCamp model of valuing one’s ability to show up and talk cogently about whatever, and one half of one cup of coffee, I proposed a session to round-up the people who worked in sexuality and related issues, and the people who wanted to absorb us talking shop.

Which produced (ha ha, that’s the first Foucault callback) this thing! This thing! I am in love with this ad hoc infographic. At the very top of the session, one participant commented that his organization (a pretty progressive political party) “doesn’t work with these issues” because sex was so “private” and “personal,” and I couldn’t hide my shock-dismay-educable-moment-face and called out, “I’m shocked.” And then asked someone to fetch me a marker and started drawing this: first writing Sex, then /uality, then a nice little protective bit of nylon umbrella (it’s red in my head, of course), a pretty curvaceous handle, and then these two divided spheres: the bedroom and the public square.

And from there, the rest, until it was clear that sex contained (yes) a lot more than fucking.

There are tensions here, all over this thing: my head broke a little when I had to figure out where to place GLBTQ on the infographic, and so I deemed the umbrella broken — until we had to figure out where to put race, gender, and class, too, and so mended the spine with all four of them.

Also awkwardly positioned in the middle: that would be the internet.

While the conversation swung and wheeled around sexuality as a cluster of concerns — how the physical act of sex is re-constituted across issues like health care, citizenship, rights to mobility, and education — we stayed grounded in this idea that it was wrong to confine sex to the realm of illness, or danger and risk, or even the erotic. To people who work in policy, or development, or health, or human rights, this isn’t abstract. We can say from experience, we are not usually turned on when gathered around those tables together. Even at St. James Infirmary, which is a pretty sexy place to work, the exam rooms adorned with marabou feathers and signed posters from all the major gay porn studios, we hold firm boundaries between our individual sex lives and the ways we talk about sex with our community members (which was St. James-ese for the people formerly known as the patients). Maybe it’s because so many of us have done sex work that we have that ethic, that we value it so: we know from experience how to set the tone around sexual talk, and we know how to keep different parts of our lives and experiences separate yet still whole.

It turns out (and here’s where Michel and I may diverge) the more we think and talk about sex, the more control we develop — and the more forms of social control we participate in. For good and certainly for ill, sexuality isn’t an unruly, messy, overly personal force: it’s one of the most regulating forces in the human social order. Sometimes I’m sure that nothing could be less private, less personal, less individual than sex.

Just like in the hot mess of a picture at the top of the blog, there’s a big middle space between who and how we fuck, and our power and mobility in the world. That tension across the middle is where sexuality lives: just like fucking, it’s always taking place between people.

I usually use my tumblr for this sort of notetaking, but for the sake of all of it one place (and having more than one video to go with it), here’s some of what I’ve been watching, in all its bashed-up, barely captured and YouTubed resolution — the next lifesaving blonde icon of us daughters of the pop 90’s. First there was Laura Palmer (we’ve killed that one), and now, Madonna.

Truth of Dare. My mother canceled our MTV after the 1984 “Like A Virgin” performance. My godmother was the one allowed to hint to me that Madonna existed. She took my nearly albino cousin, not me, to go see her, with sprayed red M’s on their white-blonde hair. My mother flipped the channel in silent embarrassment when an afternoon show tried to explain how controversial the “Like A Prayer” Pepsi ad was while showing as little of it as possible. My mother helped me get on birth control. She reminded me often to “be modest.”

So with my bedroom door shut, I taped Madonna off the radio I got on my own in seventh grade, and made out with my first boy to “Crazy For You” and insisted a best girlfriend give me the new Immaculate Collection on CD because I wanted it forever and I knew it was all silly but Madonna was the first thing I liked that everyone liked and the first thing that made me love about myself what no one else did: my desire to be desired myself, my affection for fame, my messy and upsetting need to be loved.

My mother believes in appearances of the Blessed Virgin.

Someone broke into the house where I grew up, where my mother still lived, right before Christmas the year after I’d gone to college. We always wondered it if was my father, because of what was rifled through (divorce papers, financial statements), what was left behind (all the Christmas presents). Only one actual valuable was stolen: my mother’s gold rosary from Medugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. I’m not sure what kind of gold it was, or how much it was worth: she told me it had turned to gold when children to whom the Blessed Virgin had appeared had held it.

“It was kind of my protection,” she said.

I did my Catholic best and went to a gift shop in the suburbs near Boston, the kind that sells saints for bedside tables and tall votive candles in rainbow colors, that were it on Mission and 24th Street in San Francisco or Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn or South Street in Philadelphia, she would never dream of entering, even if the inventory was identical. I go into all of those. I feel better in the ones in cities, where my Catholicism is as complicated as anything I could get over-the-counter in there.

The only Medugorje rosary I could find her was silver, but I got it for her anyway, telling her it had been blessed, too. That I had to do myself, kneeling for the last time before the peach-lit statue of Mary in the Church in which I was raised. I never called her the Blessed Virgin, the Holy Mother. There was always another Madonna who came first.

But if you saw me pawing through my bag at half past two on the F train headed back to Brooklyn, this is what I would have told you makes it all okay:

Amazing headphones. And learning how to get in and out of them and swipe your Metrocard and balance your laptop bag and get on the train going the right way. Purchasing them is also an excuse to go into B&H for the first time, where the first salesguy will not know which headphones are iPhone compatible, but the second will, and will request to be your friend on Facebook after. I showed his profile to a friend, who instructed me to not reply, but if I did, to say no more than “Dude, I am definitely not kosher.”

Boots. All of my clothes were wrong right away, and especially the shoes. The black dresses I wore when I was sixteen and still wear were okay, but still. You cannot be a kindergoth every day. This did not stop me from buying my first Fluevogs in ten years.

Ladies. Fancy-heeled teevee women of Manhattan be damned, you really do need people to call at three in the morning. (Even if San Francisco is still awake.) I am too lucky and I will not embarrass myself or anyone else further with stories of what women-friends do. But — almost nearly unrelated — I think New York has made me a little more gay? Or at least more head-turning-ly drawn towards any outwardly queer-looking woman I see around town? (Butch/femme visibility, it’s just not what it used to be.) It’s complicated. In one weekend I got to tell a genderqueer pal, Yes I Do Too Like Girls, and a metrosexually ambiguous dude, No I Am Not A Lesbian. I miss you too San Francisco!

Good sex. Also almost nearly unrelated. Attentive readers will note that the word “sex” there does not contain a hyperlink. So but and.

Amazing photographer. Better if she can also teach you how to play poker on short notice. Sarah Sharp (aka Trixie Bedlam) and I palled around Times Square with her camera and my mic and produced the photos that will haunt me should I ever get more involved with public radio someday. A few have already made it to Time Out New York. The best one is saved just for a charity calendar to benefit Sex Work Awareness, a community-based organization in New York that produces media trainings for sex workers. I will still work it for a cause.

But more and more, I want to appear on camera completely undone. I did a series of portraits when I first got to town that are the first I’ve ever posed for, that raw and also, the first under my full name. More on those when they are ready for that kind of thing,

Proseco. Because gin is a three-letter-word for bad behavior.

The iPhone Holy Trinity: Google Maps, iTrans NYC, and Foursquare (also for where you don’t want to be).

Mascarpone. On gelato, with whatever fresh fruit you can get that doesn’t completely make you miss the Mission.

Virgin America. Hello California? What’s the weather like out there now?

Unlimited texting, unlimited weekly MTA pass. For getting lost, getting back in the right direction.

Notebook. I am starting to write better in transit: subway platforms, in line for coffee, from beds.

Local guides. My grade school “boyfriend” now lives with his partner on the Upper West Side, and recommends we go fantasy Craigslist apartment hunting as a form of tourism. And with my best city friend, we executed a comparative evaluation of Prospect Park and Dolores Park (ratio of children to dogs three feet tall or greater, bare chests to bear chests, etc.), a few Saturdays at a time. Throw in learning how to get from Rivington to Houston while not quite in one’s right mind, and I’ve got a healthy start.

Out of town guests. At least once a month, to reinforce that illusion that you live here.

Some books to swap. I managed to ship myself just over a dozen boxes of books, but not enough to keep me from borrowing off of everyone’s shelves almost immediately. Ensuring that I cannot move again, I also made sure to accrue some library fines.

Hide all my old music from myself. If I were Karl Lagerfeld, I’d have bought seven new iPods, too.

Loading up again on the black eyeliner. Because evincing all my favorite shards of 90’s subculture makes me feel as if I never left and Kim Gordon would not be a bad idea to grow up looking like.

But also because no matter how perfect I will work to make it, smearing the mess that’s left on my cheeks was always the point.

I’ve been working this summer not only documenting online advocacy campaigns, but launching one with filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman: where is your line? Using Nancy’s personal documentary film THE LINE as its center, we’re going to be throwing the questions raised by her story back to our audiences: how do we express consent for what we want?

Nancy and I started talking in April, when I had about two weeks to decide if I was going to leave San Francisco. This project made that choice a little easier, and gave me some faith that I might find good work in this middle space between art, activism, and technology. There was also something totally seductive about a project where our audience was so specific, and so already immersed in the internet.

Last week, we got to bring the film and the campaign together into the world for the first time, at a screening at American University. One of our interns, Carmen Rios, is an American student (and blogger, and unshutupable activist), and hosted us and gave us all the inside info that yes, talking about whether or not to friend your hookup on Facebook is an issue for real, but also, so real that to talk about “hanging out on Facebook” like it’s all that different from “hanging out” period is getting to be a less meaningful distinction. I was equally immersed this summer, in our little office on Broadway right near the crazy bull statue, listening in on and trying to design our campaign around the many smart observations from Carmen and Melanie Wallner (our NYU-based intern) on what’s going on with sex and communication and pleasure in college.

Backstory: I was a community educator in a program at my college women’s center, doing workshops on rape, dating violence, sexual harassment, and porn, trying to infuse a sex-positive perspective to a body of work and activism that didn’t have a lot of room in the prescribed curriculum for discussions of healthy expressions of sexuality. I remember being told that by offering a bowl of condoms and lube in our open community gathering room, we’d risk triggering survivors of sexual violence. Forget the fact that I am a survivor and I’m the one making the request. I got so many messages from the other educators and the staff at the center that my experience was too hard to consider. I wasn’t the right kind of survivor: I still had and enjoyed having sex.

Nancy and I hoped that we could create an online space where people would feel comfortable exploring how we talk about consent, and then share that conversation in places where they are already hanging out online. Using Facebook alone to talk about sex is problematic: does everyone want to share everything they say on a drunken hookup amidst all the other info on their Wall? This isn’t to say people need anonymity or privacy to talk about sex honestly; we need contextual space, where we have control over what stories we share are connected with what other pieces of our identity.

All of this so neatly connected with conversations I’ve been having with Sarah Dopp for the last year, and so she was the first person I thought of to bring in to help me translate this to a real website. Sarah’s Genderfork project just masterfully deals with all these issues of identity, consent, authenticity, and storytelling. She also put me up on her couch when I was in San Francisco, and that’s where we worked until late in the night on one marathon day.

The entire campaign website is drawn from the design of our stickers — inspired by the Saudi campaign, We the Women, that raises dialogue about laws that prohibit women from driving by using anonymous stickers posted and photographed in public space, and then shared on Flickr and Facebook to inspire dialogue. Over loads of emails and two (hilarious) Skype chats, our designer in Paris, Thomas Cabus, brought the whole thing — all my messy drawings and twisty, windy explanations of what we wanted to do — together.

What’s next is more screenings, more stickers, more videos, more fun in Photobooth after screenings and sharing stories with the young women and men who want to hang out and tell us what they need, what’s not working, what’s getting missed in the media.

And I hope I get to do more things like this — just turning on the Xacti and relating the lay of the land at the college we’re about to visit, talking back to what I was taught in college to call the “rape culture” but in a voice that’s got a chance of getting through — because if we’re not spending time figuring out how to say yes to each other, we’re giving in.

Were I stopped and questioned, all I’d get indignant about is being interrupted mid-Google Mapping my way around town (truth), or, if they just wanted my first name and age, getting denied proper attribution. But then, I’m a dirty whore and there is something, naturally, wrong with me.

Were you also unnaturally un-offended? You can borrow some huff from my own list of Other Careers Women Have The Right To Be Indignant About If Asked If They Have Ever Been A…:

• Flack. Because it is impossible to be the girl in lipstick at at any formal or informal gathering of tech types without some bright-eyed man asking, “Are you in PR?”
• Dating Columnist. Any woman who writes about sex also wants to make sure you get some!
• Marketer. See: Flack. And worse: “Twitter expert.”

We’ve all got a different bottom line. Mine is keeping myself in boots, coffee, and plane tickets without having to go on fake dates and keep an up-to-date Rolodex until the day I die. Maybe public relations really is a lot like high end escorting that way! Even so, I’d never insist you call your job anything but what it is: a living.

Laugh, cry, rend your fishnets and ask for extra credit: Eliot Spitzer is now an adjunct political science professor at City College of New York, teaching a three hour section once a week on law and public policy. In another reality commanded by the New York Post, he’s also plotting a return to office.

I was not serious, New York, when I lamented not being on the ground in March 2008 to cover his “downfall” from having “availed himself” of the “services” of a “prostitution ring” — and a porn-load of other gross, gross metaphors that do nothing resembling fair reporting on the fact that “Client 9″ is no different than scores of other elected officials who are happy to legislate and enforce prostitution as far as they can from the guilty, nasty, professional sex they enjoy in expense-accounted suites.

(And they are so guilty. You can see how guilty quite a bit on MSNBC. Or at Slate.)

It’s not happening. And if I’m wrong, you can tease me for ever having shamefully hoped I might get my chance at him.

(image: my inbox, just last week.)