Boy Improvement

I recently posted about how I'm trying to treat my submission as a challenge,  to engage my competitiveness to become a better Boy. I'm starting to take small steps in that direction, and one step that's seemed pressing recently is my attention span.

In a lot of ways it's been a major obstacle to me being better, not least of which because of how often I "drop" orders. For a lot of people, the problem isn't so pressing, because if they haven't paid attention to orders, it's easy to tell. But because of my job as a call centre worker, and because of my family and romantic history,  I've become extremely good at making acknowledgement cues, even if my brain hasn't actually processed the request. Worse, it's nearly automatic - I often don't realised I'm doing it until someone (often Daddy) knocks me out of whatever thought process I was on.

It's been incredibly frustrating for Daddy, and I'll freely admit I haven't been doing a lot of work on fixing the problem on my end. So, this morning, I decided to work on improving my mental workspace,  and I found a website called Lumosity. It's a website that engages you with games that practice specific mental skills - including attention and global perception,  two skills that I really need to improve more on.

I know this isn't a cure all - there's still plenty to be done with working to stay in the present, which is a big component of my lack of attention. But, improving my mental skills can only help, I think.

Why can't I just be automatically good?

In the last week or so, Daddy has decided that I'm going to be taught proper dinner table manners, as he feels that mine are somewhat inadequate. He's given me an etiquette book to read (which I have been, dutifully), but this week he's decided to actually make me practice my table manners. Of course, he's been doing this slowly, and he decided that this week he's focusing on a single thing - how I hold my fork.

Of course, the way I hold a fork is very similar to how you would hold a spoon, as I'm very much a shoveller. As a result, I'm entirely unfamiliar with how to hold a fork properly. For the last couple of times I've been eating I've been railing against it, almost angrily against this stupid "proper" way of holding a fork that seems entirely in appropriate for a how a fork is designed, and designed to entirely prevent you from actually eating anything that's even slightly squidgey. Last night it pretty much came to a head, when I was pretty much throwing my hands up in frustration at how stupid the whole thing seemed.

Daddy was looking at my slightly dumbfounded at exactly how badly I was taking this whole etiquette thing, and being slightly hurt at how vigorously I was attacking it. And even I had to admit, my reaction seemed wholly out of proportion to the entire thing.

And then, I realised why I was railing against it so much - I sucked at it.

Like so many gifted kids in school, the kind of praise that I was given was based on how well I did at things. So, in a perfectly obvious turn of events, if I didn't do well at something, I would stop doing it. After all, you don't get praise at something if you don't do well, so why bother doing it? In many ways, this has been part of a lot of my behaviours throughout my life - I don't get the idea of training yourself until you're good at it. It frustrates me to fail, and the idea of sucking a whole lot to get good at something is a horrible idea to me.

And the thing about the etiquette thing was that the discomfort of using the fork a different way, and Daddy constantly correcting me, were constant reminders of how bad I was at the task. I didn't have the option of giving up, since Daddy wouldn't let me, so obviously I started lashing out at the task. Venting my frustration became hating the task, thinking it was stupid, etc.

And this was just one little task! I can only imagine what my reaction would have been if Daddy (or someone else) had been deciding to train me in a big skillset entirely that I had no experience and no natural skill at. I could very well have exploded, and done a lot of damage.

I will need to start paying attention to this, methinks. If I'm to be a good boy, I need to start learning how not to be frustrated at my own shortcomings, and learn how to be a good student when I'm not already good at something.

Fantasy Boy for April, 2010

So, last month I missed my regular Fantasy Boy segment, but I still want it to be regular, so here we go! This month, I'm devoting my fantasy list to my Dominant side - here are some fantasies where I'm doing things, rather than merely receiving things from others. Some of these fantasies straddle the line, somewhat, but they're all related to my dominant side.

Training Dom
I have a sub, a sub that is wholly mine, at least for a session. But of course, I'm a very inexperienced Dom, and my Daddy knows that. So, what better thing to do than to have my Daddy "supervise" my Domminess? He teaches me about each implement I use, tells me exactly how to use each device. As we get further into the session, I become less of an extension of my Daddy's will, and become more willing to branch out, experiment with my new-found skills, and as

Okay, so this is a little bit cheaty, but it's a huge fantasy, the Dom training the sub to be a better Dom. It's a fantasy with a goal - I don't have a lot of experience in a lot of Dommy areas. And it's the kind of fantasy where I get to have both sides at once - I get to actively Switch in the same scene, and that's an intensely exciting idea for me.

Me and Daddy don't tend to participate together in scenes a lot, mostly because when people ask to scene with Daddy, they're asking for him, in particular, and it's very poor taste to bait and switch and turn a scene into a training scene for little Dom-in-training. But in all honesty? I have a desire to have Dom skills at least half as awesome as my Daddy's skills. That itself would be pretty awesome.

The Suitcase of Sensation
In a previous post, I made mention of being interested in building up my collection of sensation tools (at the moment, if I'm playing with sensation stuff, it tends to get a bit MacGuyverish, as I rummage through the blindfolds, floggers, crops and other toys in my toybox and press them into alternative usage. But in my head, I have this idea of an entire suitcase, dedicated to sensation play. Gloves made of any number of materials, wartenburg wheels and other pointy things, massagers, even (in this wonderful, fantastic world), funky cold devices and heat-wands. This box full of play equipment comes out when I have a victim play-partner on the table. I blindfold them, and then one by one, they get to experience every sensation at my disposal, always guessing what might come next, and what I'm really doing to them at that point. At the end, they get to guess which sensations are which, and how I did everything I did.