I quit Facebook a few weeks ago. Shortly after the lockdown protests began in Michigan, I posted an explanation of what their mindset was, why the protests were inevitable, and how bad an idea it was to pretend we could keep them from happening. I was dog piled by a load of people trying to explain to me in tiny words why the best way to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading was to keep people inside and away from each other. The only reply I could give them was yes, I know what science says , I'm telling you what people are actually going to do . This exact thing has happened during every pandemic in recorded human history, up to and including the fictional Corrupted Blood debuff in World of Warcraft. It is a horrible idea to predicate your public health plans on the assumptions that 1) people will behave rationally all of the time if you just shout at them loudly enough, or 2) people looking at the same data set will always draw the same conclusions. All things i...
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One of the more amusing family stories I sometimes tell is about a relative of mine, a few generations back, who moved in with another man after his wife died. Ooh , everybody goes. Salacious family gossip! Except the little town they moved to was actually Lily Dale Assembly , in upstate New York, which so far as I know is still one of the oldest continually running Spiritualist communes in the United States. Harry and Edward moved up there so that Edward, ex-model and former elder in the Presbyterian church, could start on what I think was his third career as a spirit medium. He channeled the spirit of an Edwardian actress named Lillie Langtry, also known as "the Jersey Rose". At this point, the whole 'shacked up with his boyfriend' thing has become the least interesting part of the story, and people begin to look at me funny. My parents fucked things up in many respects, several of them so egregious that I haven't spoken to them in years, but I want to g...
I've made an interesting discovery: The Eccentric is quite possibly the only person I've ever met who understands jealousy even less than I do. The Eccentric is, as implied by his pseudonym, very eccentric. Mrs. Eccentric has made the occasional crack about him being from the Land of No Boundaries, but that isn't actually true. A lot of them are just in strange places, such that if you try to go casually lean on one expecting to find it in the usual spot you may end up tipping over and falling into a big confusing void. He is aware that he wants weird things out of life, and negotiates for them very directly, probably because he's realized that this is so beyond the norm that nobody is ever going to give him what he wants unless he tells them what it is. The first thing he made clear when we started talking about dance lessons was that he is VERY married, he was NOT looking to step out on his wife, and he did NOT want me to feel like I was being creeped on. I appre...
I was having a conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and she asked the question of whether straight people were "allowed" to wear rainbows during Pride Month. I have no idea. I do, but it probably depends on where you are. I'm in Greater Boston, where they swap out four of the five American flags on the façade of the public library for rainbow banners in the month of June, and work in Cambridge, whose mayor, last I checked, was a lesbian. Pride stuff out here is more "warm weather festival" than "angry defiance", because it doesn't need to be. I'm sure there do exist bigots in Boston, but it's considered indescribably rude to voice that. They are under considerable pressure to keep it to themselves, which is really all civilized society asks. The Dancing Queerly month of events that I'm working or otherwise involved in is specifically open to self-identified queer artists and friends , so I can devote the time I might o...
Okay, like the fourth total stranger has now suggested that ye ballroom instructor has a crush on me. Y'all aren't crazy; this has also crossed my mind. He did kick this off with pretty classic crush behavior: A sudden barrage of attention out of nowhere, that he kept up for a solid two weeks or so, until he got clear acknowledgement that I'd noticed. My initial read of him was that he is exactly as gay as the stereotype of male dancers would suggest, but this all was actually ambiguous enough to make me reconsider that. The thing is, this is still ambiguous . The reason that kind of behavior comes about with crushes is that wanting to bone someone makes the idea of fucking up your first conversation with them carry a lot of emotional weight, so you get super nervous about it. The sudden burst of attention happens because it takes an extra push to get over the inhibitory effect of What if I screw it up? and make yourself start. The internal wrestling and abrupt resolutio...
I am pretty good at figuring out where other people's pressable buttons are. It's a shitty, shitty superpower you win as a consolation prize when you grow up dependent on someone whose mood swings have no clear correlation with anything happening out here in the wider shared reality. Because their experience of the world is so different, there's no good way to predict what their reactions will be, so you just learn to throw logic out the window and watch for early warning signs that you should make yourself scarce. [My mother, for instance, used to get into these moods where everything made her angry, and she took it out on the rest of the household. In hindsight, she was probably suffering from terrible anxiety/overload, which I completely understand. I don't blame her for needing a quiet space in which to recover. I do blame her for deciding this quiet space needed to be the kitchen . Where all the food and ice water was kept. In an open-plan house. They had a perf...
Is it bad when filing your taxes gives you an existential crisis? I had to monkey with my insurance paperwork when I went into the urgent care a while ago. The lady with the Official Computer Forms asked me what I did for a living, which is apparently a required question despite the fact that state insurance in MA is entirely based on income, not field of employment. I had no answer. Fiscal 2016 is the first year I've ever had to file as completely self-employed, as 0% of my paying work was as a serf beneath giant capitalist overlords. The insurance lady pulled out her phone, opened some kind of TurboTax app, and casually informed me that I was an "Artist". I might have argued with her, but I was busy trying to pinpoint what exact part of my body was hurting so I could ask them to amputate. I probably just made some kind of non-specific noise of agreement. This feeling that you have to wear your "job" as your identity has always eluded me. Identity b...
I have been sitting here for a week trying to figure out how best to explain the American clusterfuck to people overseas. It's not easy. There's a lot of context. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make any sense unless you're in it at the time. The hard fact is, people here are dying. Not of anything so easily romanticized as bombs on barricades, but of things that no citizen of any industrialized nation has any business dying of in 2016: Diabetes, anaphylactic allergies, asthma attacks, endocarditis pursuant to chronic dental abscess, stress-induced suicides, malnutrition . There is a huge economic underclass here who used to work making things , like in factories. They were, to some extent, indispensable; you have to have actual humans with actual hands to put together cars and televisions and shoes, and you always need a certain number of hands to fill your orders. But everything is now made overseas, where it's cheaper, and the "working class" ...
So on Saturday, apparently I'm going to go eat pizza and drink and commiserate and plot with a bunch of very scared and upset queer/trans people. I'm friends with these particular people from a context in which being or not being a GSM was not relevant, so I'm welcome there on the basis that they know me and are fairly sure I am not going to somehow make things worse. I'm not particularly sure I'm not going to somehow make things worse, but there you go. We all apparently had too much faith in people this fall, I'm not sure I belong there. It depends on whether you're talking physically or emotionally. There are people for whom anatomical configuration is not that important; I am unfortunately not one of them. I wouldn't rule out someday meeting a female-bodied person who is just so hot I decide it doesn't matter, but to date all the people I've crushed on are physically male, which means they're generally legally male, which means that ...
A couple of my friends were discussing Election Day worries last night. Specifically, about the prospect of "poll watchers" hanging around and being douchey. Firstly, yearrrghghgh I do not have enough drugs to deal with this , but secondly, it made me think about demographics. Dorchester is, as I may have mentioned, heavily not-white. Historically, this has been a very working-class neighborhood -- around the turn of the 20th century, there were a mix of family homes and rooming houses for Irish immigrant workers where we are now -- and this seems to have held true even as the definition of "working class" has precessed from "daily toil in the factory" to "daily toil in a boring pointless office job". I see an international panoply of clothing all the time in my various neighborhood wanderings. One night on my walk home from the T, I passed a guy in a dashiki, a lady in hijaab, and a Buddhist monk in traditional beads and kesa using his bank ca...
I recently caught a notice for auditions for a show whose producers expressed a particular wish to cast actors who were PoC, queer, trans*, or genderqueer. I am definitely not a person of color; my family is almost entirely of Celtic extraction. If I had any less color to me, I'd be clear. I am also definitely not trans-anything. I'm at home in my body; it does cool stuff, even if it does hurt for no reason sometimes, and I can get it to look the way I want it to when I check the mirror. The rest of it, I really don't know how to answer. I generally tell people that I'm a straight woman. This is the fastest and easiest way to get across that I am perfectly fine being considered female by the general public, and that the bodies I want to get my grubby little paws on are fundamentally male, if you catch my drift. This is really all the information most people need in order to get the pronouns right and judge whether it's worth the effort to hit on me, and suffices...
I was asked a while ago to read through a book by Catherine Hakim, called Erotic Capital: The Power In The Boardroom And The Bedroom . The library finally coughed it up, so I did. tl;dr: Hakim's thesis is interesting and absolutely deserves an entire book of analysis. She didn't bother to write one. The book is bullshit and you will just throw it at the wall. The review inquiry came to me from one of my readers, on the grounds that I've worked in an industry where attractiveness, specifically conformist femininity, is an asset. So you are all absolutely clear where I am coming from, this is me (NSFW, if your work is hostile to cleavage):
I gave up and spent most of yesterday curled up in bed. I hurt a lot less physically; for some reason, a metric fuckton of dextromethorphan to the brain seems to reboot a lot of things, often including angry nerves. I've no idea why. It's not even an analgesic; I use it for pain control when I've run out of other options because it's a dissociative, and if you're not in radio contact with your body parts, it's really hard for them to bother you. [It's an NMDA receptor antagonist, if you're curious. A friend of mine who's taken recreational doses of DXM and has had nitrous oxide for dental surgery says they feel more or less the same. This also inadvertently creeped out the dentist. She'd done the first quite a few times before the second, and was sufficiently used to handling herself in that state that she was able to chatter and ask questions whenever he took his hands out of her mouth. Most people do not ask for their loose teeth back, and th...
I've never particularly understood Amy Winehouse. The fuss, I mean. She was very talented, but the attention paid to that took a distant second to the attention paid to her problems. I mean this in the most respectful and non-judgmental way possible, but the woman was a total train wreck. One of the reasons I end up digging into the lives of a lot more men than women here is that for some reason, women don't seem to be allowed to be famous for being clever unless they are also completely dysfunctional. It's not usually very interesting. I've dealt with way more dysfunctional people in my life than I ever wanted to -- including, sometimes, me -- and there's not really a lot of variation. Most people who torpedo their lives repeatedly will do it the same way every time. Everyone, from children all the way out to the odd serial killer, who lies about who they are or what they're up to is hiding the same damn secret, which is that they want to avoid whatever react...
It's not terribly hot out, and it wasn't threatening to dump rain this evening, so Jazmin and her boyfriend and I went out to see the Independence Day * fireworks this year. For reasons that escape me, Independence Day celebrations have standardized over the years into 1) drinking a lot, 2) barbecuing an assortment of meat products, ideally over open flame, and 3) setting off as many fireworks as you can get your grubby little hands on. The unofficial fourth option, after screwing up one or more of these, is 'trip to the local ER', which will of course endear you to the many fine people who have to come into the hospital to work while everyone else is throwing parties. The City of Boston leaves the first two things for you to take care of privately, but throws itself into the third with alacrity. Much as the New Years Eve celebrations are televised from Times Square in New York City, the Fourth of July fireworks are broadcast nationally from the Esplanade in downto...