New shoes at the Feral Living Shoe Project: Joeri and yecal woman. Yay shoes.

If this keeps up, The Bug will eventually pay for his own URL and hosting. I’ve just added another store with Zona Nuda merchandise. Any design/products requests or feedback is welcome (like, does it look like ass or fall apart?).

The Bug store in English.
Dutch Bug Store

French Bug Store
Swedish Bug Store
Zona Nuda attire and collectibles available at the
ZONA NUDA Shop (do you think the orange is too drab?).

On a related note, if you’re absolutely dead-set against contributing a naked picture of yourself, front-on, non-pornographic, to the incipient Zona Nuda Naked Blogger Project (that’s miguel@surreally.com, folks) then how about wearing something from this fine line of fashion: alba couture.
[Link from Joeri, who else?]

8. If everyone gets lost except you, follow those who get lost
The Golden Rules of Ensemble Playing

[Via Joeri]

Do you ever hate someone you love? Someone you need or who needs you? I do. I always have, for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I used to keep myself awake nights, punishing myself for whatever sin I’d committed during the day (usually beating up my little brother and then lying to my parents that he was crying because he’d fallen down) by telling myself my mother was sick, my mother was in the hospital, my mother was going to die. Basically, I think now, I was hating my mother and hiding it from myself that way, because hating your parents as a little kid – scary thing.

Where does this shit come from?

Is it the Id being bad? Or what?

Wherever it comes from, I respect Gamma when she tells me that she doesn’t love me; she says it when she’s mad, and she usually says, “I don’t love you right now” or “I’m not going to love you for a while.” Then she gets over it and we’re okay for a while again. I think it’s important to support her in this, being honest about her feelings. I used to lie about mine as a kid, and I still catch myself doing it, and it doesn’t help anything in the long run.

On the contrary.

For instance Gamma’s mother is away this week on business and Gamma’s unhappy (as unhappy as such a sunny little person can be, anyway). Gamma has headaches and other aches and pains because she misses her. Yesterday morning she told me her heart hurt. I’m sure it was emotional and it went away soon. But for an instant, I caught myself imagining the whole thing, just as I had with my mother as a little boy – Gamma going to the hospital, getting sick, dying, the funeral, life without her. Free time!

It’s awful. How could I think such a thing? Where does that come from? Do all parents do this? I suppose so. Usually I can shrug off the frustration and pressure with this “sitcom dad” thing, say “sheesh” or “ack” or “gah” or “feh” and joke and it’s okay. But people depending on you, people needing you, it’s as bad as needing people I guess. It’s not all sunshine. There are some creepy fish swimming around down deep in the ocean, where it’s dark.

I think something negative loses strength when you talk about it, and grows stronger the more secret it is. Parents kill their children every day, they gas them or shoot them or drown them in the tub or locked in a car they drive into a lake; this is to be avoided in my opinion. It is good, I think, to admit that it’s not always easy; that great love and resentment can co-exist, that this isn’t the devil telling you shit, it’s your Id.

Or is that the same thing? Maybe it is. Id, Superego and Ego; the bad guy, good guy and the face we show the world. Or something. What do I know?

(I was considering posting this to Raising Hell but thought I’d try it out here first…)

Perfect for Dads ‘n Grads! Now the Eurosnob Shopping Experience is only a click away! For a limited time, The Bug products are available in English at the new Feral Living store.

Update: The Bug products are now available in Dutch at the Dutch Store (thanks, Joeri), in French at the French Store (thanks Joeri’s brother Jonathan) and in Swedish at the Swedish Store (thanks Francis).

Zona Nuda attire and collectibles available at the ZONA NUDA shop.

Collect ‘em all!

Shop early and often! And tell your friends!

[Thanks to Joeri for organizing the translation. The Bug will soon be available in Swedish and Dutch as well. Any other translators out there? Esperanto, maybe?]

I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but here in Austria there is, at least among enlightened people, the general view that Americans are extremely hung-up about nudity. Have you any idea how crazy that looks, seen from the outside, this obsession with nudity being dirty?

Sometimes I think it is an American thing, but we ran around naked at my house when I was a kid. Except for my mom. I remember one winter when my mother accidentally locked my father outside, when he’d run out naked to write his name in the snow…

Only a pervert thinks nakedness is dirty. When we were visiting Seattle several years ago, Beta was playing in the sand by Greenlake and since she had no bathing suit with her and was about 5 at the time, we just let her run around naked like we did here. My Austrian in-laws were along for the trip, and my father-in-law took a bunch of pictures of her since he’d just gotten a new camera. A lifeguard came over and asked Beta if she knew this man. I don’t know what was creepier, the lifeguard sexualizing a naked little girl, or knowing that he probably had a good reason to. It was an interesting moment.

I’m not saying people run around naked all the time in Austria. They just don’t seem to be, in general, so uptight about it. (Although there does seem to be a trend – for decades – in the media to eroticize the body, of course, for advertising reasons). Maybe it really is part of the American puritan heritage. I mean, what the hell is so bad about running around naked? What exactly? What do you think?