Just a quick note: I am currently utterly blown away by Ms_Persephone. This and maintaining my other commitments and relationships means I'm probably not responding to your messages for a little while. I will be restoring normality as soon as I am sure what is normal anyway (if you get that reference I will smile very much).

Fearsomely independent, brightly coloured, kinky, non-monogamous fantasy creature finds herself in need of strokings and approval so arrives at OKCupid to hunt out providers of such things. Do you has strokings?

I think it's fair to say I stand out in a crowd. It works for me though - no point pretending to be someone I'm not. I tried having blonde hair and dressing normally as an experiment for a few months once, and I just wasted a whole lot of time having to filter through all of the bigoted and dull people who wanted to get to know me. I far prefer the attention of the queer and unusual ^.^

When JNDM is available, I like to get strokings and approval from him. You could call him my boyfriend, but then again the fact that we don't plan to "make a life together" because we both have very separate lives 250 miles apart makes that a misleading description. We adore each other, we're committed to looking out for each other and encouraging personal growth and best experiences for each other. It's really good. One of the beautiful things about it is how we provide a benchmark for each other that stops us dating anyone who is less considerate, open, supportive and constantly surprising than we find each other. I have other relationships which operate on a similar level. If you're looking for the one true love of your life and don't want to share, this is the wrong creature for you. I am like a cat, you can't own me. I'm free, happy, loving, and on the whole FAR more assured of how adorable I am than I would be if I chained a favourite human to me for life, with promises that limited both our experiences to keep. Every time a close friend contacts me I feel privileged to be thought of, whether it's a request for help, a link to something they think will amuse or delight me, or to arrange to chill together because it's been too long. I want to feel the same way about people I fuck. Why should that be considered complicated?

My MBTI is INFP; my enneagram is 7 of 9 and I'm a O90-C2-E53-A32-N3 Big Five. I think you will find those are all better ways of assessing the basic flavour of who and what I am than horoscope nonsense. Essentially, I live in a waking dream. The beauties of that include an eerie intensified empathy that verges on telepathy, and my prized ability to be calm in the face of pretty much anything. When you're not expecting or confined to considering everyday predictable things, you perceive so much more. When you're between worlds enough that the sky turning purple wouldn't faze you, there isn't an accident, an incident or an emergency you can't cope with. Straitened circumstances, commitments, deadlines and other such matters that require long-to-medium-term reining in of impulses though, they're a whole other matter. They are my kryptonite.

Here's a mixed bag of nouns and adjectives that may apply to me in addition to the above: intuitive, psychonaut, irreverent, expressive, epicurean, sensuous, brat, synaesthete, indolent, lover, genius, shameless, incorrigible, sapiosexual, challenging, wilful, sadomasochist, animal, insomniac, mystic, liberal, chimerical, fearless, autodidactic, curious, unfathomable, neko, indomitable, hard femme

Really enjoying parenthood. I never intend to do it again, so I'm making the most of my one AWESOME kid. She's 9 and draws me pictures of mythical beings in lieu of rent.

Pouring love into some other very special people besides my daughter, and delighting in watching them grow. That is what we are all here for, and I am proud of the honed craft of love, honour and consideration I have cultivated in the years I've been lucky enough to be afforded the opportunities to practice it.

A degree in religious studies. The spiritual impulse, and the different expressions of it around the world and through history, really fascinates me. Dogma and control structures upset me. So I want to find out as much as I can about both. Plus, I didn't get to finish a degree yet in anything and that kind of bothered me, so now seemed as good a time as any. Being a student gives me more free time to spend with the smallperson than a job would, and the levels of financial support available to single parents here at the moment are roughly equivalent to the wage I'd get in West Wales for my skillset (which, believe it or not, is accounting, payroll, office management type stuff).

Politics. I am an active member of a major political party. I wonder if you can guess which one?

Other less formal learning.. both from books and in fun skills. I read textbooks for fun. I love hanging out with physicists and activists. And I can eat fire. I really want to learn falconry next.

Creating. I don't let the fact I'm not particularly talented stop me from drawing, painting, and writing. Mainly because an evening on my own spent doing any of those things ends in far more satisfaction than slumping in front of a screen.

Playing out. Because movement and daylight are as good for the mind as for the body. I like stomping through the woods, breaking into ruins, admiring fleeting moments of beauty like murmurations of starlings filling the sky, and when the weather allows for it I like swimming in the sea. All this is best with sexy, erudite company. Even more especially with kinky friends with cameras. I love it when an impromptu fetish photography plan comes together!

Psychedelic hairstyles. Want one?
Fire eating
Baking cakes.
Driving - I want to learn rally driving
Words.
Empathy
Holistic, non-sugar-coated advice with no agenda but love.
Kink
Interpreting dreams.
Altered states of consciousness
Intense locked eye contact combined with agonisingly perfect tribadism. Well, dependent on the necessary mental connection.

"You give off a sense of being interesting and thoughtful and safe" is the latest word. I'm happy with that.

Ah yes, the obligatory wall of text that gives you a representative sample but by no means all of my tastes. I can do that.

Comics: Sandman, Death, Judge Dredd, Halo Jones, Watchmen and Tank Girl

Fiction authors: Neil Gaiman, H. P. Lovecraft, Aldous Huxley, John Wyndham, Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse

Poems: Symptom Recital by Dorothy Parker, The Extasie by John Donne, Invictus by William Ernest Henley, Blake's Eternity, Wordsworth's Perfect Woman, Bitcherel by Eleanor Brown, all of Piet Hein's 'Grooks'

Non-fiction subjects: religion, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, astronomy

I have an only *slightly* infrequently updated profile on Goodreads if books are your thing.

Movies: My absolute favourite is Waking Life. If you've seen it, you'll understand what I'm like for better or worse for knowing that. If you haven't and you're a 90%+ match, please do come round for chai and shisha with me and I'll happily watch it again with you. Other honorable mentions go to So I Married an Axe Murderer, A Life Less Ordinary, Mean Girls, Cruel Intentions and Shooting Fish on the hetmonogamous paradigm, non-challenging, mainstream end of things; But I'm a Cheerleader, Stick It, And Then Came Lola, Y Tu Mama Tambien, A Home at the End of the World, Shortbus, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, Better Than Chocolate, and Itty Bitty Titty Committee for inyerface queerness (which I quite often want as an antidote to the aforementioned hetmonogamous system so please if you have any related recommendations fire them my way!); and then some other assorted quirky and silly, or clever and thought-provoking, or refreshingly-good-to-raise-my-daughter-on things: La Haine, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Weird Science, Spirited Away, The History Boys, Stardust, The Truman Show, The Butterfly Effect, The Big Lebowski, Dogma, Avril, Thank You for Smoking, Stranger than Fiction, City Of Lost Children, Heathers, Soylent Green, Logan's Run, The Science of Sleep, Time Bandits, Big Fish, Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbour Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Ginger Snaps, Nausicaa, Labyrinth, Drop Dead Fred, Beetlejuice, Tideland, Pump Up The Volume, Stigmata, Mr Nobody, A Scanner Darkly, Life Force, Altered States, Tank Girl, Everything is Illuminated, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Barbarella, Attack the Block, Paprika, Baise Moi, Withnail and I... and if you agree that Dredd 3D was AWESOME because you could resolve each scene into frames like a genuine 2000AD story in your mind's eye as it played out, and you grinned like a lunatic in the cinema, you get a high five ^.^

TV Shows: I have regularly revisited DVDs of the following: Brit comedy stuff Black Books, Spaced, Look Around You, Red Dwarf, Smack the Pony, Stressed Eric, Rex the Runt, Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, I'm Alan Partridge, Peep Show, The Armando Iannucci Shows, The Fast Show, The Day Today, Brass Eye , Monkey Dust, Nighty Night, The Thick of It, The Trip, Father Ted and others; a fair bit of the best stuff that happened on TV in my childhood so my daughter doesn't miss out on them - remember Round the Twist, Eerie Indiana and Are You Afraid of the Dark? And I do have a taste for anime - the silly reverse-harem series like Fruits Basket, Ouran High School Host Club are BEST, and Ghosthunt, and I really REALLY like Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne. My favourite TV show of all time is Lexx. As with my favourite movie, if you know it, that probably tells you a lot about me. I don't watch TV as it's broadcast at all any more. I care for TED talks a great deal. Especially Susan Cain's one about introverts. Amanda Palmer's one is quite good too. Oh and that one about the Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown. Everyone should watch that. Twice. What's your favourite?

Music: Lamb are my absolute favourite thing to listen to ever ever ever - Andy does the quirkiest prettiest things with noise, slightly different on every album but enough the same peace-and-quiet-power-inducing feels to keep me from shock; while Lou sings and writes lyrics that express so much intensity and love I feel remade by her... for similar chilled goosebumpiness I like Ladytron, Red Snapper, Laika, Portishead (though Dummy is the only album they made I really like), Massive Attack, Tricky, Phaeleh, Dub Tractor, DJ Shadow (including the UNKLE stuff), All India Radio, Future Sound of London, etc... I also enjoy the stuff of my youth on occasion, which comprises punky stuff like Rancid, Bad Religion, The Ramones, The Bloodhound Gang; a dash of metal and Britrock - think Pantera, Sepultura, The Wildhearts and Therapy?; and all the usual Mancunian acts you might expect from a girl who grew up in the grim North (oh yeah, might have forgotten to mention - I've ended up in South-West Wales for the last ten years but I am originally from Manchester), so The Stone Roses, The Smiths, The Verve, Mr Scruff and James - along with random others too numerous to mention - check them out at http://www.last.fm/user/stephmog if music is your thing! Actually, one more deserves a mention, come to think of it - if you play Flux Pavilion at me, I will get hot and bothered. Masturbation with headphones on, it leads to odd Pavlovian reactions.

Food: good coffee, salted milk chocolate, nachos with stuff melted on them, chai latte, bonfire toasted marshmallows, pizzatoast, kirsch soaked cherries with ice cream, cinnamon bagels, banana bread, sweet potato fries, green olives, stonebaked pizza, blue cheese with ginger biscuits... I have been discovering the joy of tacos recently thanks to svengynge - damn that boy can make my mouth happy.

Feline company
Driving to music
Incense and candles
A very comfortable bed
Time outdoors
Coloured pencils (they give me ASMR and calm me right down when I feel overstimulated and out of place)

Politics of the liberal, feminist, queer variety. The obliteration of gender and sexuality norms.

Synergetics and Bucky Fuller flavoured world peace.

Psychosynthesis and dissociation.

Why it is my highest matches seem so often to be militant atheists. I'd describe myself more as a pantheist if anything (for the uninitiated: "pantheism can be understood as asserting that God is distinct from the world and its natural contents but nonetheless contained or immanent within them, perhaps in the way in which water is contained in a saturated sponge. God is everything and everywhere, on this version, by virtue of being within everything. This is immanentist pantheism; it involves that claim that nature contains within itself, in addition to its natural elements, an immanent supernatural and divine element.")

What a genius Jung was. When I'm not describing myself as a pantheist, I describe myself as 'Jungian' when people want my belief system laid out for them.

How enormous the galaxy is. And the universe. And how very sweet it is to be so infinitesimally small that really, those things that bother me might as well not exist.

When Betelgeuse is going to hurry up and explode.

Fnord

My lovers. Sometimes in a hazy, lazy, sweet memories way; sometimes while touching myself in an impure manner; sometimes plotting some way of getting the best out of my next time with them.

Exploring beaches or woodlands, lighting bonfires and watching stars in the summer.. or curled up in my candlelit living room reading a book and listening to trip hop or watching a movie with a cat on my lap in the winter.

I have occasional dissociative episodes that are as mentally debilitating as, say, migraines. At those times and for days afterwards, I need for life to be very gentle and only to be in contact with people and situations where I feel safe and non-pressured. Sensitive little flower, more so than I look.

The more um.. *entertaining* stuff's all on FetLife

I like meat. Seemingly this is unusual among people who otherwise match well with me on here. I did try vegetarianism - I kept it up for just over a year until a nasty bout of gastroenteritis left me delirious and weak, and after a week of it, all I wanted was fried chicken. Nothing else would do.

You've seen Lucy around here. I've not seen her in about three years and I miss her terribly.

You need a lesson in taking this temporary situation we call life a little less seriously.

You're a girl like me. There aren't so many of us about.

You're a sysadmin, code monkey, or other techie type. Yeah it's a weird kink, but as far as I'm concerned you people who do that matrix shit with computers are all WIZARDS and it makes me come over all quietly inappropriate. No, really.

CRUCIAL: You have something more interesting to say than "hi, how are you today?" - I rarely do smalltalk with friends and family, I'm certainly going to ignore it from strangers.

You can encourage me back into strength training.. I'm a bit shy of the gym (I feel silly there) but I love being toned and energised by weightlifting. Or if you can teach me yoga or pilates or something that will improve my core strength, or want to drag me to a local class. Ideally I would LOVE to learn jiu-jitsu but in West Wales chances are slim, I realise.

...and if you don't mind that sometimes I reply immediately whereas at other times it takes days or weeks. The same thing can be said of my movie watching, reading or even housework habits. Phases, cycles and inconsistencies in all activities.