Being published in the Walrus Magazine!

We got some really big news this morning! I had been interviewed by Hal Niedzviecki last year for his blog. I had been really surprised last month when someone called and wanted an interview with me based on the one that I had done with him for his blog. I was extremely surprised when she told me she was from the Walrus magazine. She wanted to interview me! I was really blown away when she told me that my interview would be published in their magazine in an article they were putting up about blogging! I didn't want to jinx anything so I kept it to myself. I wasn't sure if it was really going to be published. Until this morning.... My friend, Doc came on MSN this morning and mentioned Walrus Magazine and me being on there! I knew right away what she was referring to. I looked up Walrus Magazine and there it was!! Here is the link for the article: The Other Porn Addiction It mentions: She calls herself padme, and she shows the world everything. Her blog, featuring posts replete with pictures and videos, leaves out nothing but faces, names, addresses, phone numbers, and social insurance numbers. padme lives in a suburban community in the Fraser Valley, not far from Vancouver. She often posts pictures of the snow-capped hills, lush foliage, and blue waterways of the Pacific Northwest. Her husband works full time. She stays home and takes care of the kids, aged seven and thirteen. padme is a bit lonely. She doesn’t have many close friends. In 2005, she started the blog as a way to branch out, find new pals, express herself. At first, she was reluctant: “I thought, ‘Who would read what I write? I’m not a very good writer.’” Soon, though, she was blogging methodically about the basics of suburban life: I just found out that Chuck E Cheese where we are going to have Skywalker’s birthday party had a pipe burst and they canceled his party on us…The woman on the phone didn’t seem to think it was a big deal but we have a ton of kids and people coming to the birthday later and now we have to try to find somewhere else. Also all the loot bags and cake and package was done through Chuck E Cheese. Now we have a lot of running around to do. Urg!! She also wrote about her health: The surgery went well…They are doing some tests on the polyp I had removed from my uterus during the D&C that they did on me. I am not sure yet if I will need more surgery or not for my fibroids. The uncertainty of it all has me feeling cranky. I have no patience and I want to start feeling better soon. And then there was this: The kids were back to school today and Master was back to work again after the holiday break. I was a bit worried I might be lonely today but I was glad to have the place back to myself again and I had also been given permission to use my Hitachi and masturbate this morning. It’s been weeks since I last had the chance for some private time with my favorite vibrator. These are the kinds of posts that have attracted more than 1.9 million people — 1,000 to 2,000 a day — to the blog padme calls Journey to the Darkside. In addition to her alone time with her Hitachi, she writes about spankings, elaborate fellatio sessions, and her need to be dominated by Master Anakin, the man she’s been, as she puts it, “married to for four years, living with for twelve years, and best friends with for eighteen years.” The tone of padme’s blog is as frank and unpretentious as you might expect from a suburban middle-class mom. She tells all in a pleasant, upbeat manner that belies the significance of the blog in her life: “I don’t drive, I don’t work,” she explains. “I’m a stay-at-home mom and I’m alone all day. It’s been a great way to connect to people.” The connection she describes is largely with a geographically dispersed group of men and women in similar “total power exchange relationships,” in which one person makes all the decisions. Among members of this community, padme is a brave explorer of alternative sexuality, a fellow practitioner of a distinct lifestyle. Keeping up the blog, though, requires her to maintain a wall around this compartment of her fragmented life. She doesn’t want her “real-life” friends to stumble across the blog, and yet she appreciates that the details it contains could allow her to be identified even by people who only know her casually. But she also believes that anyone visiting the site would be too embarrassed to expose her. As a result, only a few people in her daily life openly admit to knowing about Darkside. Much of her social existence happens online, in a state of partial anonymity. “There are a lot of lurkers, a lot of return visitors,” padme says of her readers. “People are curious. They want to know what we’re doing next.” She feeds off that curiosity. As more and more readers started visiting the site, her posts became more frequent and she began to experiment with explicit videos and photos. In return, the community shored up her emotional life, responding to her outpourings with everything from e-cards to offers of assistance: Thank you for all the comments and support during this last week. Southern Angel even did a lolcat just for me this week and it cheered me up a lot. I got a lot of e mails and e cards. I’m sorry I haven’t responded to them but I’ve been trying to recover from the surgery and not feeling too good…I want to be feeling better so I can start being more like a slave. Master’s been taking care of me and helping out a lot but I hate not having my structure. The chores list and rules help me to stay centered. I miss feeling like a slave. “It can definitely be addictive,” agrees padme. “I’ve tried to cut back a bit. But you get to 1.6 million readers, and it’s really hard to just walk away from that. I can’t even go a few days and I want to blog. ......... I got a phone call recently from someone who read my interview and wanted to interview me for a documentary they are doing about blogging. So that could be something that is happening in the future! It's really exciting to be published in a magazine and feeling a bit famous from it all! Very cool! :) May the force be with you all!! ~padme amidala