yes. i realize the year isn’t done yet but i’ve got some changes happening and now is as good a time as any to summarize the past year of travel and work - especially since i’ve decided it’s the right time to move on.
i have some flights booked in the next couple of months. one is a flight from the US to London, the other is a flight from Copenhagen to Vienna, and another for Vienna to Bologna. I’m going to cancel them or else postpone them for a later date (in 2011) and we’ll see what happens.
Otherwise, I’m going to be staying state-side for the next few months. I don’t want to say that my days of traveling are over, but I will say my days of working as a fetish model are. It’s time for a fresh start, yup yup!

One major thing I notice now with my blogging is that it completely went to shit. Too many of my LJ entries are twitter crap.
Well, at least i’ve stopped the retweets into my LJ. Unfortunately that didn’t necessarily keep me posting so there are empty gaps that should have been filled with proper blogging. I need to fix that.
Luckily I do have the moblog so at least I have some sense of where I was during the year without having to sift through hundreds of one-liners.

BTW, clicking on links below will lead to more detailed LJ entries. some have lots of photos in them.

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Jan                  San Francisco, CA

Feb 04-09         Phoenix, AZ
Feb 10-16         Atlanta, GA
Feb 16-23         Tampa, FL
Feb 23-Mar 02   Fort Lauderdale/Miami

Mar 02-31         San Francisco, CA

Apr 01-06         London, UK
Apr 07-14         Edinburgh, UK
Apr 14-19         Amsterdam, NL
Apr 20-26         Vienna, AT
Apr 26-30         Bologna, IT
Apr 30-             London, UK

May 12-17        Berlin, Hamburg
May 17-19        London, UK
May 19-24        Houston, TX
May 24-29        London, UK
May 29-            Rome, IT
May 24-29        London, UK
May 29-            Rome, IT

Jun 01-04         Bolonga
Jun 04-16         Vienna, IT
Jun 16-22         London, UK

Jun 22-23         San Antonio, TX
Jun 23-30         Dallas, TX

Jul 01-05          San Francisco
Jul 05-11          Eureka
Jul 16-24          San Diego/Ensenada/Channel Islands @ Sea

Aug 02-10       Tampa, FL
Aug 10-16       Phoenix, AZ
Aug 16-26       San Francisco, CA
Aug 26-30       Sacramento, CA

Sep 29          ATL/LHR
Oct 12          CPH/VIE
Nov 05          VIE/BLQ

January - I’d been staying local. Not doing much besides going to the Nuthouse. I started using FourSquare and I also had to start up a new FaceBook profile due to being deleted. For NYE i stayed local & didn’t fly anywhere exotic. Wow. Exciting. Got to go to dinner with meico  and ayia  visiting from Scotland. That was cool. Oh, I also cemented in plans for my big bday bash (taking place in March). I was supposed to perform at another party but since they couldn’t take the time to confirm, I decided to throw my own. (and it was awesome). I ranted about models (again) and i saw Up in the Air (and I liked it). Gilles Berquet sent me a book (i’m in it). Oh, I also spent too much time ranting about Alt vs Fetish.
heh.

February - Samar and I flew to Arizona for the fetishball out there. It was great. I was so excited to be at an airport after almost like a billion days of no air travel (it was about 84 actually). and when we got to SJC, it was new and different too! (airports=porn). then in Arizona we hung out with cookie mostly, went out, and i got to swim in a super heated pool and then check out the Desert Botanical garden which gave me a renewed interest in seeing as many Chihuly scluptures as possible during my travels. I also did a lil shoot too. After I got back to Cali, I unpacked and then packed for my flight to Atlanta the next day! That was fun. Hung out with all sorts of peeps, and then jumped on a flight down to Tampa where most of my days were spent in the sun enjoying the weather by the pool and hitting DisneyWorld. Then I decided at the last minute to head over (by train) to Ft Lauderdale to visit Kendra James & Gary.

March - stuff happened. like my decision to ‘retire’ came into my head. had a huge bday party and almost everyone showed up (ok not EVERYONE). It was awesome. it was great. it was just about perfect. tho samar had a lil accident and allenfalkner  spent a little more time in the hospital than he wanted to. oh, and at the end of the month, i flew to London (hello British Airways strike!).

April - arrived in London to find my upcoming travel plans to places like Great Malvern & Edinburgh about to be disrupted (hello Rail strike!). Luckily, they were not in the end. yes, flying would have been cheaper but this time it was about the journey! there was a festival in london with a bunch of people into japanese bondage. it was fun. i skipped a fetish party to go see the Royal Philharmonic play StarWars with craigclare  and it was awesome (but not as awesome as my bday party). Went with ynl  to see the Van Doesburg avant-garde exhibit at the Tate (and that was awesome too). Spent some time in Worchestershire then headed up to Scotland where I discovered my white latex catsuit covered in stains (lesson: no more lending my shit out to bitches). Then I flew to Amsterdam. The day after my flight trouble erupted! (hello Eyjafjallajokull! btw, if you’re actually reading this and you do that thing where you read to yourself but just tripped, here’s a little hand: “AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul.”) Amsterdam was super and i got to perform with mirja  at Wasteland. The volcano really screwed stuff up. I took a train to Dusseldorf to catch my flight to Vienna (while constantly keeping track of updates). After checking in to my flight and waiting around to board, it was canceled. I spent too much money cuz of the damn volcano. But eventually flew to Vienna. Then ended up in Bologna. And then finally back to London.

May - Torture Garden Bday - performed with Satomi one night, then the following night had an awesome show with SukaOff. It was awesome (like many other things this year). I went to Holloway Rd to do some shopping and some fucktart FedEx man stole my phone. I chased after him. He got in trouble. Flew to Hamburg for the GermanFetishBall & stayed with tatsu_otoko  a bit. It was a nice visit! Performed with Amrita (it was super fun) and ran around with ropemarks  & sleek_imager  & other friends a bunch! Hung out in the Hamburg airport lounge a little longer than i wanted to but figured out how to spend the time wisely. (Hello again, Icelandic volcano). Flew to Houston (Hello, BritishAirways strike, AGAIN) for the Texas FetishBall & performed 2 shows with Athena Fatale. Hot weather & awesome relaxation time & good hanging out time too! Then back to London for a bit so I could pack for Rome!

June - the last nite of the TG/Ritual Rome party I performed. It was fun too. It was a great weekend even though doing this one performance finally turned me off on the idea of performing anymore. Doing shows like this for so little compensation is just frustrating. I can’t work the days after due to soreness and marks. yeah. So this actually turned out to be one of my last show in the EU. I headed up north via train and spent time around northern italy: Ferrara, Modena, Asti.  Even went to this nudist place which was actually very nice (and kick ass weather!). Eventually, back to Vienna, then back to London. Watched a massive amount of World Cup games. I barely missed any!  Saw ron athey discussion with ynl  which was cool. gurlesque  was there too. and then back to Texas (Yes, again! Yes, again British Airways issues!) Did a lot of things in Dallas. Performed with allenfalkner  and then a couple of days later he suspended me. we also did more stuff. Also remembered olmendoza ’s birthday - or what would have been his birthday.

July - ROAD TRIP!!! with Samar. Headed north to Eureka, and then north again. RAWR.Got covered in goo on the beach while wearing BritishPetroleum colours. Flew to San Diego and then journeyed to Ensenada (Mexico-land) to jump on a fucking boat. (do i need to mention the awesome?) Spent ONE - TWO - THREE - FOUR - FIVE - SIX & SEVEN days on the Nautilus Explorer and went diving just about every day! RAWRRRR. Then, gorgeous days spent in San Diego and ComicCon just happened to be around at the same time as was sissystck  corruptmorals  and stevedietgoedde  !

That’s good enough for now.

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i should be on around 00h30.
and it’ll def be audience participation so you can help hurt me during my show.
gah!

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i should be on around 00h30.
and it’ll def be audience participation so you can help hurt me during my show.
gah!

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Several months ago, around the time of my birthday, I made a couple of decisions. The first was to use the rest of this year to wrap up my shooting - that is, to travel as I normally would, but also tell any interested photographers that this would be my last year of booking such shoots. I’ll still do some work next year with friends like Valentina and HW/FetishLive though. The other thing that popped into my head was the idea that I wanted to try and hang. There are a number of people I am friends with that regularly do this, but when it came to figuring out who I’d look to for my first attempt, it was pretty much a no-brainer. So off to Dallas it was to visit allenfalkner . Samar flew in from San Francisco to help out (make me bleed) and Athena Fatale was there as well to document. Courtney arrived after work to help out a bit too.

There were another thing I was certain of as well. I wasn’t interested in putting on a performance. Shifting into doing hook suspensions for shows is still not my intention. I wanted this to be a private, personal attempt and putting myself on display like I normally do for work would detract from my goal.

I made the decision to do this sometime around February/March of this year. I also mentioned it to Allen when he came out for my birthday party. After that I really didn’t think much about it until I had to book my flight into Dallas. Once that was done, again, i didn’t think much about it at all. For some reason I thought that it’d be something to slightly stress over but in the end, the idea only started to make me nervous about 30 minutes before the first hooks went in.

So I spent the week hanging out with Allen & Samar and even Kurt from Art with Latex who hooked me up with some cool pasties for my Sunday evening performance at the Church. We even went shopping at Ikea to buy candles… super great smelling candles. But the show is another story. Hell, I think the ropes hurt me more than the hooks in the end. It seemed definitely more traumatic to be honest, especially after the uncontrolled rack-like experience the audience subjected me to.

OK. So here are the photos of the hanging day.
It’s almost funny to see how stressed out my face is before the first hooks compared to after the 4 are through.

before:

after:

here are more shots from athena’s phone

 

The next day (June 30)  I headed over to the aquarium to walk around and check it out for a couple of hours before heading to airport for the flight back to California finally. I’d been away for just over 3 months this time.

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Click on the flyer for more info but if I remember correctly, this event is sold out!

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then we headed back to the hotel for an early night, except I headed over to Shelter Island to the Ramada where I met up with some of the guys from the dive trip. Unfortunately, I forgot to take many photos of the drunks and the ones i got aren’t that great.

the next evening we met up with corruptmorals  and sissystck  for dinner.  we were joined by S’s friend S as well as stevedietgoedde  too. we got to sit outside and watch the freaks from comic con too. heh.

after dinner we walked up n down the street for a bit before going out separate ways.

the next day me and F & S headed for La Jolla and it was really nice!
we also came across a farmer’s market full of yum things.

Then we left La Jolla to visit S’s friend S again for dinner. The day continued to be pretty damn nice!

And that was it. Cuz then it was off to the airport…
http://kumimonster.tumblr.com

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but i did get some photos

2010 july 22 - San Clemente

I even spent time in between dives on the top deck getting sunburned - topless when no one was around - when i could.
yeah. i remember the dives this day were great. lovely kelp and great sunlight poking thru…

2010 july 23

headed back to ensenada finally.
on the way back we saw a grey whale off in the distance.
then while watching the photo montage the captain spotted a huge pod of dolphins off to starboard so we changed direction to put ourselves into the middle of them… there were 100’s!!!

after the dolphins, i went below to pack up my things…

final photos on board

in case you forgot you were in mexico, there was one giant big ass flag to remind you:

and then the drive back to san diego via tijuana, etc…

But I didn’t go home after that. Ended up staying in San Diego for a couple of days.
That get’s its own blog…

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2010 july 21

as usual woke up early and had the first breakfast as we cruised over to the dive site. omg. the water seemed like it was going to be cold too but as we were headed to the Eureka Oil Platform, I decided not going in was not going to be an option.

So yeah. i did the first one. and yeah. it was cold! But I saw some neat things, even harbor seals that played in the water though most were just chilling out where they could.

I skipped the 2nd dive. Brrr! But after lunch, we headed over to Santa Catalina where the sun decided to make an appearance. Some of us got to dive around Long Point and then afterwards we were offered the option to dive again, or hit Avalon - I did the latter where we found establishments that served beverages that were made from alcohol. *hic*

mango margarita ! and some shots of tequila from melody…

then it was back to the boat.
i had dinner and then ended up going to bed.
i heard lots of the others that went ashore entertained themselves and the other divers by dancing and drinking a little bit more.
dirty divers!

there were hangovers the next day! haha

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Woke up early again today as we pulled into Ventura Harbor. Got to check emails but still no real internet access as far as posting things n what not. Posted a few images to the moblog but kind of halted with the video postings. Cant figure out my password for google mail dammit. Anyway, got to run ashore to chase down cigarettes at the local shop. Nice.

Now back to sea and headed to Anacapa. Hopefully the weather clears up for some better diving today!

Cathedral Bay. went down with 3300 up wit 1100. supposed to have giant bass below but didnt see any. sea hare, nudies and cucumbers. lobster shells too. sea lions were swimming along side the boat but didnt see any underwater either. temp was warmer too even tho no sun. around 65 at the surface and 61 at the bottom. only about 40 ft at most. nice enough dive. kelp is always awesome. bit of a current but not so bad near the bottom. around the kelp was more surge tho.
2nd dive a couple hundred metres away. got dressed but enormous cramping started happening so i’m skipping this one. back in bed to sit it out. grrr.

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Woke up early again today as we pulled into Ventura Harbor. Got to check emails but still no real internet access as far as posting things n what not. Posted a few images to the moblog but kind of halted with the video postings. Cant figure out my password for google mail dammit. Anyway, got to run ashore to chase down cigarettes at the local shop. Nice.

Now back to sea and headed to Anacapa. Hopefully the weather clears up for some better diving today!

Cathedral Bay. went down with 3300 up wit 1100. supposed to have giant bass below but didnt see any. sea hare, nudies and cucumbers. lobster shells too. sea lions were swimming along side the boat but didnt see any underwater either. temp was warmer too even tho no sun. around 65 at the surface and 61 at the bottom. only about 40 ft at most. nice enough dive. kelp is always awesome. bit of a current but not so bad near the bottom. around the kelp was more surge tho.
2nd dive a couple hundred metres away. got dressed but enormous cramping started happening so i’m skipping this one. back in bed to sit it out. grrr.

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