Welcome back to our discussion of ten essential slut skills outlined in Chapter 8 of The Ethical Slut. In the last installment we examined the skills of communication, emotional honesty, telling the truth, knowing yourself and affection. Today we’re going to continue with the remaining five skills, one by one.
Planning: I like my life to have a fair amount of spontaneity in it. I don’t want to schedule every minute of my time or have an extremely rigid rotation of partners (a la Big Love for a non-poly example). At the same time, I’ve recognized the necessity for planning. It’s easy to drop in on my lover Honey J, who lives here in Austin (and in fact is in the process of moving into easy cycling distance from my house), so while we do try to get together on a regular basis there can be a lot of flexibility. Compare that with my pet, who lives in Houston for the moment. I make sure to record her days off in my calendar and we try to plan in advance so we can make it to play parties or other events we might enjoy. Even with my local lovers there are many situations where it makes sense to keep track.
Easton & Hardy talk about poly groups that use “complex online calendars” to share their schedules, and I think they are partly right — online calendars are great. However, I think a solution like Google Calendar is anything but difficult to use to keep track of my appointments, dates, and lots of work related scheduling. It’s a piece of cake to share my calendar with my friends or loved ones, and it plays nice with Androids and most other smartphones as well as Facebook’s events calendar. Here in Austin there’s even a calendar of kink events you can add.