This post is part of the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008, and is meant to generate donations for The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).

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Before I start sharing the stories of my adult years, let’s take a break to look at some numbers.

My current age: 27

# of guys I “went out” with: 2

# of guys I dated: 8

# of guys who didn’t make it past the first date: 3

# of guys weeded out after the second date: 2

# of guys who found it necessary to share stories of past lovers: 5

. . . firearms: 2

. . . his pet rat: 1

Age at which I acquired my first boyfriend: 13

# of “relationships” I’ve had (anything over a month long): 5

. . . that arguably meant anything to either party: 3

Shortest relationship: 3 months

Longest relationship: 5 years

# of guys I’ve kissed: 5

. . . with tongue: 4

. . . and meant it: 2

Age at which I had my first kiss: 18

# of guys I’ve “fooled around” with: 4

. . . and didn’t later regret it: 2

# of guys to “round all the bases,” if you will: 1

Age at which I lost my virginity: 24

# of novenas my mother said while desperately hoping I’d save myself for marriage: 9,735,256,001

# of days it took her to get over my corruption: 1

. . . and begin asking me for grandchildren: 1.0001

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DONATE TO RAINN HERE. And if you’re feeling especially generous, please mention the GBBMC:08 and my name & blog in the “donation in honor of” field. Thanks for your support!

This post is part of the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008, and is meant to generate donations for The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).

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Jared was about as accurate as the Psychic Friends Network. My freshman year of high school I had braces and glasses, I was still shopping for clothes in the children’s department at Caldor, I wasn’t yet tall enough to ride roller coasters, and my “breasts” barely filled an A cup bra.

Oh yeah. I was a heartbreaker.

For the duration of freshman year, a group of upperclassman referred to me as “Mouse.” I acted as if the nickname was a term of endearment, even though it was clearly delivered as a taunt and I had overheard the ringleader explain to someone, “Cause, you know, she’s just such a mousy little thing.”

I was well on my way to earning the title of “Least Likely to Get Laid.” And then things got weird.

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, the boob fairy finally came to me. Perhaps due to the extended wait time, she decided to be generous. I went to sleep a girl with a roomy A cup bra and woke up needing a 36C.

I suppose I should have been excited about becoming a woman. I mean, yeah, my mom hadn’t really sat me down to talk to me about it, but I had read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Yet there I was, inhabiting a whole new body I wasn’t comfortable in. I was scared. Suddenly I had huge sweater kittens and bled from the genitals. Judy Blume couldn’t prepare me for that.

If the kids at school noticed my transformation, they didn’t say anything. Not to my face anyway. However, I did finally wind up with my first (and only) high school sweetheart. We smashed our whirlwind romance into the last few weeks of sophomore year. He called me a couple times to talk about cats and homework. I think he held my hand on the way to the cafeteria once. And he bought me a cookie. In retrospect I suppose it’s not quite what you picture when you think of horny teenagers. My peers were having abortions. I was having . . . chocolate chips.

At the time I didn’t find it at all unusual. After all, my friends were virgins. As far as I knew, I wasn’t any different than anyone else. Of course, I had no real knowledge about sex, I had never experienced arousal, and I still had yet to kiss a boy. But you know, other than that, totally typical.

I nearly missed my junior prom. My mom called in a favor and had the neighbor’s son take me. It was possibly more humiliating than staying home.

I skipped the senior semi-formal . . . after getting shot down by two guys.

In fact, the only one who seemed to show any real interest in me during my high school years was one of the vice-principals. I had never even really met him but once, and I would have preferred to go my entire high school career without knowing him. The week before graduation the valedictorian and I spent our afternoons practicing our speeches with our English teacher. I vividly remember sitting on a desk waiting for my classmate one day when the vice-principal came in to speak with the teacher. I recall little of the conversation, only that while my instructor’s back was turned as he rummaged through a file cabinet, the creepy vice principal sidled up to me and caressed my face. It was so unexpected and unwelcome that I nearly fell off my seat.

That one small incident bothered me tremendously, probably more than it should have. But I had never had anyone touch my cheek before, and there was something eerily intimate about the gesture. There was more to it too. A little seed of sadness began to grow inside me. Somewhere in the back of my mind I connected the bit of attention with my new body and fought back dread that this was only the beginning.

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DONATE TO RAINN HERE. And if you’re feeling especially generous, please mention the GBBMC:08 and my name & blog in the “donation in honor of” field. Thanks for your support!

This post is part of the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008, and is meant to generate donations for The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).

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The defining characteristic of my sexual history is there isn’t much of it.

I know that probably seems strange for someone nearly thirty years old, but I assure you that my marathon of inexperience wasn’t intentional. As I mentioned previously, I never received “The Talk,” so I knew precious little about sex in my youth.

My sexual education began to come in bits and pieces when I started public school at the age of nine. I might have had some sort of foundation to build upon if I were one of those little girls that played Doctor or House. Of course, I couldn’t be bothered with games like that. I was an active child who liked to run around outdoors, usually pretending I was one of the Thundercats or perhaps Wonder Woman. I also favored Cops and Robbers, which wasn’t as popular with my parents because they kept finding children tied to my swingset.

Bondage exercises aside, I was pretty clueless.

It was in those later elementary school years that I recall learning what the term virgin meant. I was familiar with the word. I had spent five years at Saint Peter & Saint Paul, after all. I knew Mary was a virgin and that it was relevant somehow to baby Jesus. But beyond that I couldn’t give much of a definition. Our teachers always got fuzzy on the specifics.

I also remember distinctively when in the sixth grade a classmate asked me, “Stacey, have you ever kissed a boy?” I was eleven. The boys I knew liked to make farting sounds with their armpits, flick boogers in the girls’ hair, and handle worms. And as far I as was concerned, kissing was for grown-ups and people in love. Why anyone would want to try that with the kid behind me that kept kicking my chair during math was unfathomable. My surprise at the question was apparent, so before I could fumble for an appropriate answer another classmate chirped, “Of course she hasn’t. Stacey is a prude.”

Prude was another new word for me. I wasn’t sure what it meant, only that it was said with disdain. How was I to know that my peers were already practicing sucking each other’s faces off?

If my ignorance wasn’t readily apparent in elementary school, it certainly became well-known in middle school. My first day of the new school year I immediately noticed that my classmates seemed, well, different. That summer puberty had come to the entire seventh grade . . . except me. This meant two things:

1. I would be forced to endure three years of hearing “Stacey’s so flat she makes the walls jealous!”

2. My peers were now driven by hormones. Hormones that hadn’t made any effort to begin stirring within me.

I was suddenly a child among women. My peers paraded around the schoolyard showing off their new curves and talking about Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven (neither of which have I ever played). Meanwhile I hadn’t yet discovered makeup. I was years away from a training bra. Hell, my mother never even advised me on when to start shaving my legs. I felt woefully out of place, though I couldn’t understand exactly why . . .

“And when he walked away I could still feel the warmth of his handprint on my ass!” my friend Sarah eagerly shared with a group of us. As it often does, my face betrayed my shock. “Don’t mind Stacey,” she continued, rolling her eyes. “She still thinks boys are yucky.” Laughter.

I didn’t, in fact, think boys were yucky. I adored boys ever since Brian Segal held my hand as we recited Jack and Jill together for Kindergarten graduation. Something about boys’ impish grins had a way of sending my heart aflutter. Perhaps to prove this fondness, when a boy who lived nearby had his friend call me to see if I’d “go out” with him, I said yes. I had no more interest in my new beau than I did in any other boy, really, but even at the age of thirteen I was aware that “going out” meant nothing more than a declaration of mutual like, at most. After three months of awkward phone calls and passing notes on the schoolbus, the boy’s friend called again. My first boyfriend and I amicably parted ways.

The school year was winding down by then, and soon it was time for the eighth grade dance. I remember slow dancing with a number of boys, but one in particular sticks out in my mind. His name was Jared, I believe. I didn’t know Jared well, so I was surprised and a bit intimidated when he caught me in the hallway and told me to remember to save a dance for him. That’s not why I remember Jared though. I remember Jared because as we swayed in little circles to the music, he leaned down and whispered in my ear, “I bet one day you’ll be the prettiest girl in high school.”

Me? The girl that didn’t seem to have a prayer of growing breasts? The girl that was trying to get used to wearing nylons and wouldn’t dream of attempting to walk in heels? The girl who now had braces and still had never kissed a boy? Was he serious?

I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. High school loomed just on the horizon . . .

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DONATE TO RAINN HERE. And if you’re feeling especially generous, please mention the GBBMC:08 and my name & blog in the “donation in honor of” field. Thanks for your support!

I’d like to think of myself as a loyal person, but once you begin to stack the evidence against me, I guess I’m really not. I have a bit of a roving eye, seemingly never satisfied with what I’ve got at the moment. Many relationships have been cut short when I abruptly left for something better. It’s a terrible character flaw, I know, but I assure you that I have been trying very hard to change. That’s why, despite my overwhelming fear of commitment, I intend to stick with this blog.

When I was young and capricious, I blew through the Livejournal and Blurty platforms before I even spent enough time with them to ever feel attached. They just didn’t meet my needs. Sure, using little hamsters to illustrate my present mood was cute . . . for a short time . . . but I wanted more than that.

Eventually I stumbled upon AOL Journals. I liked the platform. The design wasn’t anything spectacular, but it was a step up from what I had been using in the past. I started a blog there called Cynicism As an Art Form. I wrote about my Bohemian life as a starving artist and shared my experiences working in community theatre. I also wrote about an imaginary llama named Fletcher that lived in my pantry. Fletcher was probably more popular than I was. People found the stories and commented. The interactive aspect got me hooked.

Cynicism and I were like peas and carrots. I enjoyed writing, I had a good group of readers, and I was starting to earn some attention. The blog was featured by AOL on their journal front page or something like that for about a week. That was when I started getting negative comments.

My self-esteem has always sucked ass, so the hatefulness of these people bothered me tremendously. I began to second guess anything I wrote, afraid to offend people. Shortly after that I deleted the whole blog.

Before long the addiction called me back and I started a second AOL Journal called Facetious. That one didn’t last nearly as long. Life got in the way of blogging. The journal was neglected. Eventually it disappeared.

Next came Unrequited, which cataloged my dating misadventures. Things were going well, and then AOL pissed me off. They booted one of my favorite bloggers for “offensive content.” (They had an issue with a comic something like this.) THEN they started talking about putting ads on all the blogs. The controversy sent me straight into the arms of Blogger.

Most people knew me on Blogger as “Rabbit” where I wrote a blog called Two Thoughts Before the Epiphany. All was well and good until I suffered a bout of depression. I had always kept my blog content lighthearted, so I felt like I couldn’t post any of my thoughts or feelings. Two Thoughts didn’t want to know the real me, just the fun me. It got deleted.

Being the blog-whore I am, several weeks later I was back with Everyone Loves an Underdog. I thought that was it. I thought Underdog was The One. Come hell or high water, I was ready to live out the rest my days blogging there.

Then someone I knew started reading it and began to email me about how he knew all my “innermost thoughts.” Creepy! That was the end of Underdog.

After that I pretty much gave up on blogging. When I started TouchedByMadness it was a private blog hosted on WordPress. I kept it just for me so I’d have a place to store all my favorite stories. Then I started taking my HTML class and needed to figure out what kind of website to build for the course. Hmmmm. What type of site would be a good fit for me? And where would I ever come up with content?

So here I am. Again. With a new blog. Again.

But this time I am ready for the commitment. I’ve invested time and money into my own domain and hosting. I’ve done a little SEO optimization. I’ve even made it through my first WordPress upgrade. AND I can futz around with the design to my heart’s content. I’ve got it all, baby.

Plus, if I change blogs one more time, somebody is going to kick my ass.