Happy Pride Month!…objectivity and Robin Williams’s floating head
Happy Pride Month!
This is my first pride month sort-of out. (Mostly out?) It’s nice. Before, I was always in a place of going, “I have to walk the line between closeted and ally *extremely* carefully.” I didn’t want to post any ally stuff; it felt like a lie to say that I was an ally. In retrospect, it would have been fine. If you’re closeted and you don’t know whether or not to say you’re an ally, from this side of the jump, let me just say it’s fine. It feels better not to be in the closet, that’s true. But in my opinion, it would have been fine if I’d said I was an ally. I was an ally. It’s just that I wasn’t JUST an ally.
The part I feel comfortable talking about today: I’m demi-pan. Demi = I’m not attracted to people until I get to know them, and even then not often; pan = I’m not particular about sex or gender with regards to that process.
For me, this translates to: “HAHAHA, everybody is made of meat!” until suddenly it’s like, “HEY! Nice meat!”–I’m fine with kitchenware jokes about being pan; I tend to think of everything in terms of flavors, anyway.
It took a while to find the right terms for what I feel like.
I knew I wasn’t bi, although bi is a perfectly acceptable term for people like me. I realize that bi encompasses more than just attractions to two genders. For me, pan has that extra flavor of “first the attraction, then the figuring out the technical details.” I’ve been attracted to several trans and non-binary people, several times while they’re figuring things out. It’s weird; I don’t experience a sense of them changing as they embrace different gender labels (even as my stupid brain struggles to remap pronouns, which are stupid anyway). It’s more like, “Ah yes, *I* can now relax more around them, because I don’t have to worry about talking around something I wasn’t supposed to talk about but that I knew, either consciously or subconsciously.” I don’t *know* that people are trans or non-binary before they do (mostly), but I usually know they’re not comfortable with their gender presentation.
I finally figured out the pan thing after the term became more common because of the stuff going around about Captain Jack/John Barrowman from Doctor Who. (I’m not a huge Doctor Who fan; I got to the first regeneration of the modern era, just about died of heartbreak, and haven’t gone back, although I always think I mean to. I should see if Ray will watch it with me.) It felt like a relief to know that a character like Captain Jack existed, and that other people didn’t just outright reject him, even if they treated him as kind of a joke at times.
The demi thing throws everything else for a loop; while other people are like “Person X is hot,” I’m like, “Yes, that is a perfectly aesthetic piece of meat; how beautiful! how elegant! such curves and volumes!” It took a long time to realize that other people experience “hotness” in any other way
When I started seeing stuff about Captain Jack, I laughed and went, “Okay, that’s how it would work for me, if I weren’t so picky.”
I found out about demi stuff soon after, fortunately; it’s probably not healthy to think about ace/demi stuff (or FOOD, for that matter!) in terms of “pickiness” when it’s really your mind and body telling you what it wants or doesn’t on a subconscious level.–Sometimes attraction takes a long time for me; sometimes it doesn’t. Given the way my other tastes work, my brain is probably like, “This is one of the perfect combinations of flavors in the universe” where sometimes those combinations are easy to suss out and sometimes more obscure. When I know I know, though. (Side note, I think the ex engineered a pseudo-self to be to my tastes during the love-bombing process. Once he “won” me, that self slowly disintegrated and I had to maintain it in my mind for him, with minimal effort on his part.)
It took knowing about both pieces, demi and pan, for either piece to make sense.
I spent a lot of time thinking that I wasn’t “gay enough,” because I didn’t fit into the categories that I understood. I knew I wasn’t straight, but I was living the straight lifestyle, as it were. I didn’t “count.”–That kind of thinking made it easier for me to stay trapped in a bad marriage, though, so I’d just like to assert that if you’re thinking the same things, you’re “gay enough.”
That’s all I got for that, today. Other than I’m trying to make a shirt for Auntie Pride, and I got a message saying my account was suspended on Redbubble for copyright violation, for trying to post stuff I have the legal right to post. I’m too pissed to be sane about it at the moment. I’ll argue with them when I can be effective. Or I’ll take my business elsewhere.
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We went to the beach on Saturday! Yay beach! I sang to the gulf for so long that I ended up with a song solid enough to remember and write down. Secret bucket list item I didn’t know I had: write a complete song. I’m quite proud, even if I can’t now remember the lyrics (curse you, ADHD!). I sang it and put it on YouTube, though, so it’s preserved. I could probably write it down in musical notation but I’m lazy.–The last time I went through The Artist’s Way (a “how to get unstuck for artists” book I like), I was like, “Hahaha, she’s learning how to write musicals but she’s a wriiiiiter. I’ll never be like that.” But the more in tune with myself I get, the more I spread out from being a writer to being a general “creative type.” It’s nice. A+++, highly recommend. I still like writing fiction best, but who knows.
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I can’t remember whether I mentioned it yet, but Ray is volunteering at the library this summer. I told her she had to do SOMETHING to get out of the house, because she gets depressed if she doesn’t. She really likes it, even if she does get all up in arms about one of the people she works with who is always bending over backward to help other people, beyond her own resources. Sounds like a sweetheart; I might go to the library and see if I can pick the person out. Ray’s not the kind of person to mention names, mainly because people’s names mean zilch to her (she’s *far* more likely to remember someone’s pronouns and personal tastes than to remember their names). She’s also working on designs for stickers or (I hope!) enamel pins. I really like three of them (floating eyeballs with cute designs on them; you’d have to see them to appreciate how cute they are) but the fourth isn’t there yet. She loves enamel pins and I keep telling her I’ll back her on testing setup and development. Like a lot of us creative types, she has trouble moving forward past the “I just make my art” phase of creation. Fingers crossed.
While I was trying to set up the Auntie shirt, I discovered another shirt in my Redbubble cart–one of hers that I’d put in the cart and then completely spaced. It’s a design of alchemical glassware that she made for me after the divorce; it says “The Alchemy of Separation” on it. It’s lovely. The fire underneath is making the potion boil, and in boiling it separates into two colors. I bought it. I’ll take a selfie with it when it gets here.
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I woke up this morning feeling no pain, feeling objective and detached from everyone and everything. For a couple of minutes I was like, “Yay! I like feeling like this.”
Then I remembered that it wasn’t the first time that I’ve been to that place. Feeling “objective” has always been a dangerous temptation for me. (What good is objectivity for a writer?!?) When I realized where I was, mentally, I laughed: when I catch myself feeling uncritically objective, I always think of Robin Williams’s floating head in the movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
“I’m free! I’m free at last! The body is dead! The body is dead, long live the head, it’s finished, finito, heh-heh! Bye, body! Ha-ha! I shall prove a head does not need a body to survive! I am omnipotent, ha-ha! Yes… OH! Oh no, I got an itch! Oh, no! Oh no, oh no… AH-CHOOOOO!”
As soon as I remembered that, pain crashed in. More headache, more feeling the ache all the way up and down the spine. I felt dizzy while lying down, sick to my stomach, too. But I had feelings and I felt connected to the world, filled with affection for its idiocies and grace.
There’s a point in several spiritual traditions where you’re on some kind of path to wisdom, and you have to re-embrace your own lack of wisdom and loop back around to being a beginning idiot. If you still think you’re wise, you’ve failed the test; you’ve tried to hang onto an insight that rots on the vine. I hit that point this morning. Because the spiritual tradition I can still swallow is often tarot (like yoga, it’s extremely nerdy once you get down into it, which I really like), I just went, “Back to the Fool for you!”
Thinking about it further, I realized what I was feeling like: like a baby that was flinging its arms and legs out because it didn’t feel like its head was supported.
Ahhhhhh. I know people like that, people who hold themselves like that, with the hunch through the shoulders and the weirdly snobby tilt to the head. Me. I’m people. I’m pretty sure feeling unsupported at a young age happened to me, because reasons. I talked kindly to myself about it and imagined putting my hand on the back of my head, literally supporting it. I imagined so hard I could feel it. And the pain eased up. I’m still in pain, but it’s mostly my feet and shoulders today. My ears are popping from draining and my sinuses feel sore from same. I can taste earwax and snot. Hot flashes, as per usual as I unkink my spine, ensue throughout.
I don’t actually *want* to be a floating head, detached from the petty-ass problems of the world. I don’t *want* to be objective. What I want from detachment is not freedom from attachment, but a clean place for a new mess, a freshly swept stone path with a couple of leaves on it instead of a foot of ever-growing toxic sludge that prevents people from walking around safely, let alone enjoying themselves. And I’m tired of walking in circles, rehashing the same old problems.
I’ve been saying for a while that my home is in the mess of the world; that doesn’t mean I can’t help sweep out the parts of it I can reach, starting with me. I am flawed. That won’t change. (I got reminded this morning about the fuller stack of genetic bullshit I have to deal with mentally. Yeahhhh…plenty of flaws, and that’s not even counting the new ones I’ve come up with on my own.)
What I can choose is not to fight the flaws, but to use and direct and channel them; to find the tortuously labyrinthine middle path through the bullshit about what I “should” do; to find compassion for myself and others; to use my flaws as a way to connect to myself and others, instead of seeing myself as above or separate. To love.–I am not omnipotent. Being human is, for the most part, better than that.
As someone I love said to me this morning, “It’s just pretty shitty to have taken so long.”
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Here’s the link to the song!
Candle for Ray; she’d written some smartass thing about how we need candles, also, get new screams of the damned, on a to-do list on the fridge. I pretended not to notice for months, then gave her a bunch of candles with stickers on them that I designed for her. She LOVED them.
Midjourney AI’s idea of a jellyfish “mascaron,” or architectural ornament on a building, usually a human or chimeric face, meant to scare off evil spirits.