I went on a date with a beautiful nerd to see the Avengers. How did I prepare? By donning mushroom earrings, wearing Dragon Age perfume, and applying Star Wars eyeshadow.
Would have added TARDIS blue nail polish (by NerdLacquer!), but I think I might have combusted from sheer awesome. And also spent a lot of time admiring my sparkly nails.
I spent high school turning myself into a nervous wreck. Homework! Projects! College applications! I did not do the Dating Thing. I spent college catching up on the whole friend-making process, doing the writer thing, and accepting the nervous wreck that was now me.
I’ve graduated, I’ve been seeing a therapist for my depression/bipolar II/anxiety for a year, and I want to move on. I think I’ve finished at least some first stage of becoming myself.
I never spent a lot of time thinking about myself as a sexual or even romantic creature. I read a lot. In middle school I wanted badly to be a boy because I didn’t like boys looking at me (logic, what logic?). Over the next few years I wrote a very long and meandering novel about crossdressing for the sake of one’s nation, wore jackets even in hot weather, wished I were androgynous, and did not sort out my feelings about “crushes.” Girls. Boys. I didn’t like any of them desperately enough to say something.
I set up a profile on an online dating site two months ago partly as an experiment. I can now say that, according to my personal data pool, 22% of the men in my area who’ve messaged me are worth responding to. The rest shower me with things like “Hi beautiful” and “I want to know you better” and I bask in the sentiment a little before I delete the messages. Despite my lack of social skills, I have still been socially conditioned to let people come to me, and it’s working.
I went on a date with a girl last month. She was gorgeous. I was so nervous. She stopped talking to me after. I met up with a guy after work to do nerdy things downtown. I can’t figure out if I’m attracted to him or not. I like talking to him. He’s ambitious, opinionated. I don’t like the sound of his voice or the way he dresses. I don’t know what to do.
Then there’s the guy who comes with a poly disclaimer the same way that I come with a feminist disclaimer. He’s charming. I took him to my favorite restaurant and I wasn’t smooth and that was all right.
His girlfriend is kinda hot.
So is the other chick who wrote me fanfic and resembles Christina Hendricks.
I’ve never done any of this before.
I think I have some reading to do.
Full episode of The Legend of Korra 106: And The Winner Is…
Hopefully this makes your #Amonday a little brighter.
5/14/2012
I was wondering what Amon was busy with all last episode!
Chief Bei Fong is my hero.
Oh gosh, the pressure. Graduation is exactly a week from now (well, minus about eleven hours).
Bestfriend and I have decided that someday, we are going to live in a house in the woods and paint the walls blue and green (and maybe yellow) and never work in cubicles. We might open a cafe. If we can figure out what that actually entails. And also get money? And then adopt a bunch of dogs and cats to unconditionally love our depressed/bipolar selves. At the moment that is all I really want.
I have also been having what I would like to title Adventures in Online Dating. The process: I set up a profile, painting myself as the nerdiest nerd to ever nerd. Field messages from straight cisdudes; discard most. Add disclaimer about being a queerish muddle and how queer-friendliness is not optional. Still get messages from clueless cisdudes and conservatives. Suddenly strike gold and want to date ALL THE PEOPLE. Get overwhelmed and lose all nerve to reply to latest batch of messages. Make pie charts.
I think I need to go make more potions on Pottermore.
So I can find this again if I need to: Death to Pennies.
I work in a cafe. Everyone hates the penny. And the nickel. And the dime. Counting a 7% “hospitality” tax rather than regular Massachusetts sales tax, the cheapest item we carry is a trail bar at $1.34; our cheapest drink is a small cup of coffee at $1.77. We find pennies at the bottom of our biscotti jars, at the end of the espresso bar, stacked next to the napkins and milk pitchers… We aren’t allowed to solicit tips due to legal shenanigans with the property owner, put people shove pennies at us all the same. If we had a tip jar we would be drowning in a sea of coins.
In my dream country, everything is sold for a multiple of 25.
I am still learning how to tumblr. So! Letters to myself, volume the second.
It’s scary just how many things there are on the internet. How much knowledge the human race has accumulated, the discussions that are created every second. I’ve been following a lot of people from the Homestuck fandom because hey, reading material, but in the last week I’ve trimmed it down and down so I’m not drowning in posts every time I boot up the computer after a long shift at work or an impromptu nap. I want to read it all. It’s the same problem I have with Wikipedia. I just keep clicking, and clicking, and I’m still struggling with the compulsion to read and absorb every page of information until I close it.
It’s funny how a year after I finish up what I think is a totally fictitious story I realize it’s autobiographical. It’s easy to disguise, sometimes; when Fiction Professor I Won’t Name Due to Their Terribleness said stay away from genre stories, I hid behind the points of view of male twentysomethings with mother issues. A Latin teacher, a cello player, a wannabe musician/waiter at Legal Sea Foods. They were all me. Then I said screw that, splashed genre all over my workshop’s litfic comfort zone, and came out with this quietly suicidal botanist who I didn’t realize was even more me-me-me than usual. (Casual disclaimer: of course, they’re all me, but I’m not them. I can’t remember which quotable writer that belongs to.) Right now the draft I’m looking at is a dealing-with-depression-and-an-emotionally-sterile-family story lurking underneath an eldritch-ritual-leading-to-immortality story. Yeah.
Here’s a tiny piece of it.
Sometimes they lose track of each other. In the north, [she] teaches at an upstart university, or studies the newest advances in medicine, or combs a muddy riverside for herbs until the sun has set and she remembers that starving to death is still a possibility. Or she spends a year in a scholarly city slogging through its libraries, only to realize that she does not need nor want to read all the books in the world. She makes a list. If she reads all the books ever written, she will forget the ones that matter.
Hello, last April! There’s my must-do-and-read-everything problem. I wrote that after I had first started seeing my shrink and had names for things and started talking about them. It was around that point, during the workshop with the aforementioned Terrible Professor, that I dipped into some higher-circulation literary magazines (mine were AGNI and Ploughshares) and discovered what I thought was a very strange pattern of stories being about parents having midlife crises about their mentally ill children.
Fuck that, I said. So when Terrible Professor said oh, stick to real-world stuff for your final story, I went ahead and projected my emerging-bipolar-disorder-self onto one of the main characters. I’m sure his mother was having a midlife crisis over his lack of ability to function in the world. When I was writing I didn’t care about his mother. This was the child’s story. I am that child. I am that child and he is that child and we are more than the plot devices from which spring all our parents’ problems.
Sometimes I think I write fantasy because it’s easier than tackling the real world blah of psychiatry and medication and readers who won’t suspend their disbelief until there’s a diagnosis slapped on everything. …Okay. I’m done. In thirty seconds I’m going to press the submit button and stop worrying about coherency.
Notes for the next time I check this thing: Last week I detoxed from caffeinated tea and coffee. I still don’t sleep well. I guess I’ll give it a month and see what happens. This next week, I am going to get my ass in gear and submit a piece or two to the college senior writing awards. Deadlines are good.
shawnawrites asked: What did you get your degree in?
My degree is in Writing, Literature, & Publishing (it’s a mouthful), with an emphasis on the W. I spent most of last semester ripping up and then rewriting a short story collection for my BFA thesis.
Hello, internet.
I haven’t kept any sort of regular blog since the dead-silent clusterfuck that was high school. Livejournal is weird now! My locked-down posts from eight or so years ago are still there; they’re essentially verbal snapshots and it’s kind of creepy. This is me jumping ship and taking the first step toward leaving lurkerdom behind.
I used to be physically incapable of not writing daily until antidepressants and mood stabilizers happened last year. I’m still trying to figure out if I’ve lost something. So here goes: letters to myself. Five years from now I want to be able to look back and see that younger parts of me still exist out in cyberspace. Sometimes I think I am a pile of objects. Sometimes I have to wear rings and earrings to remind myself that the real world has weight.
But hopefully this all won’t be pretentious writer drivel. I have big plans? I have a pile of books to read, possibly to analyze to death; I also want to make a nice fat annotated list of Good Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books in Which Women are Written as People (that title needs some work). I want to get back into writing fanfic that I can cherish as much as my original stuff. And find some way to reconcile this whole e-publishing thing with how I have been taught sending fiction out into the world works.
Also, for reference, this is the state of things right here: I am twenty-one years old and this week I want very badly to go live in a cabin in the woods and grow my own food and never have to see another human being again. I am currently working in the cafe section of a bookstore. I received my college diploma in the mail two days ago and I am not sure that I want a “real” job, whatever the hell that even means, and I don’t think I’ll be able to deal with having a boring normal-business-hours salaried thing anyway. This past month I’ve been in a weird mixed episode, both the mile-a-minute-talking savior of the universe and the everyone-hates-me-I-just-want-to-sleep-forever pile of mush. My shrink is under the impression that I am doing great because I haven’t figured out how to tell her that my impulses to quietly end myself are still there.
I’m working on it.
Hello, future me.
