The Things I think About

Men are such self congratulatory, demeaning, misogynistic pigs (and especially the ones from the previous generation).

For context, I’m recently a new homeowner (finally made it against the odds!), and this is my first winter at the house. And today was the first real snow fall of the season (everything else has melted almost instantaneously).

Which means I need to shovel my driveway and my front steps and my sidewalk (because I’m not a monster and expect people to deal with it even though I rarely use the sidewalk and front entrance myself).

So, armed with my newly acquired snow shovel, I set to work. And the man across the street, the one I don’t hold a high opinion of to begin with (since I’ve heard him multiple times yelling profanities at his wife) comes outside, and proceeds to faff about.

Because his driveway has already been cleared. I assume he did it earlier in the morning (I had slept in because of a rough night with a heavy flow and a headache. Thanks shark week). “So why is he outside now?” I wonder as I get started on my grueling task.

As I huff and puff to get my driveway and the front steps and the sidewalk clear, every time I look up, he’s still there, seemingly clearing the snow off his truck even though there’s hardly any snow on it. And then my shovel catches on one of the dents in my driveway (for the 100th time, more on that in a sec) and I actually hear him chuckle and I look up in time to see him shake his head.

My dude.

I am struggling to finish my task in a timely and efficient manner because of many obstacles that come with my house (don’t get me wrong, I love my house, but it’s not without problems).

My driveway leads up the side of my house. It’s so long it can accommodate three cars in a row. Plus it’s at a slight incline so to ensure my car doesn’t go sliding down, I park it way up at the top where it’s flat, meaning I need to clear three car lengths worth of driveway to avoid a slip and slide. My driveway also isn’t one solid line of concrete. The two “ramps” are made up of large blocks, with the middle section being covered with gravel, hence why my shovel kept catching the edges and preventing me from just smoothly pushing the snow down. The sidewalk and my front steps are also made of sections, hence why my shovel kept catching there as well.

The twat across the street doesn’t have to deal with any of these problems. His house, oddly, is set further back from the street, so his driveway is set right on the street and doesn’t actually have a sidewalk, it’s all one big block of asphalt (no seams no dents no nothing). It’s shaped like a square and can accommodate two cars (both which were out and thus preventing the entire driveway from actually being completely covered in snow).

How dare you, you overweight mediocre white man, come out just to watch a single woman, doing her due diligence as a homeowner, struggle with a task.

Do you have to come out and laugh because deep down my very existence threatens your long held patriarchal beliefs about men and women?

Are you angry that a woman, living by herself, no sign of a boyfriend, is maintaining a single family home all on her own?

Does the fact that I don’t need a man bother you? So much so that it makes you feel insecure?

Probably not much of a hot take, but I think Luke Evans should have played the Beast in the live action B&B. Can you imagine him taking that himbo persona he had in the first part of the film and doing that with the Beast?

“Hmmm…how to get Belle to love me. Wait, she likes books? I have a whole three story tall library! I’m gonna give her the library! …But what if that doesn’t work? Better have a backup plan. Girls like chocolates and flowers right?”

…at the dawn of the internet, there were authors that got mad at people for writing fan fiction of their work. To the point where they would send lawyer backed cease and desist notices.

Which to me is such a strange response.

For many reasons, some (but not all) being: they (the author) thought they could control the masses, shouldn’t they be flattered that people like their work so much they want to be part of the stories in some small way, and it’s basically free publicity why would they shut down free publicity?

I have a feeling that it came down to money. Which is still illogical. Because:

Author: How dare you profit from my hard work!

I also grew up in a household that insisted that no food should go to waste. That meant tons of tiny portions being saved in the fridge (should also be noted that leftovers give me the ick for reasons I can’t articulate - and now I realize I have no obligation to do so). It also meant food that was bought on a whim would stay in the house for YEARS.

As an adult, it’s taken me quite a bit of time to realize that just because something was done a certain way in my parents house, does not mean that I, as a grown adult with her own home, have to do it that way as well.

Which means, if I went out of my way to treat myself to stuff from Trader Joe’s (which is quite a feat given where my nearest stores are located and the very poor parking situations each one has), and got a bunch of food there but ended up either getting an upset stomach from it or just not liking how it tasted, I am under no obligation to keep said food.

Did I end up wasting money on that trip? Yes. Did I end up wasting food because of it? Yes. But is it my obligation to keep said food in the house despite the fact that I’m the only person living there and will never eat it? No. And should I feel guilty for throwing it away? Maybe a little? But only for a few minutes. Because it’s certainly not something I should lose sleep over. Of all the moral conundrums going on in my life, this one should not be causing me anxiety, especially when I have so many other things I get to be anxious about.

Part of my ND healing journey is about learning to be kinder to myself, because I’ve spent my life trying to be accommodating to people’s perspective on how I should live MY LIFE.

I’ve been made to feel that MY WANTS, MY NEEDS, are not correct and thus not acceptable. That I shouldn’t be allowed to listen to my body and make decisions based on what it tells me, even if those choices seem wrong to someone else.

My life, my rules.

Once a month my reproductive organs get mad at me for not being used to their fullest potential. They squeeze my insides until I feel like I’ve been punched by a buffalo, and then send a river of strawberry jam out of a very awkward place to have a stain.

And they do that because they’re not communicating with my brain and whatever organ holds the soul-probably one of those weird ones like the pancreas that we don’t really know what it does.

And if the reproductive organs would just talk to the brain and spleen, then they would know that we’re not anywhere close to having a baby. So stop wasting valuable blood that the brain could be using to write the next great literary hit! We could have had a movie and then a Netflix series remake by now if you had stopped forcing us to lose on average 84 days of the year and several hundred dollars worth of pads and pills and chocolate!

And with all that film money we could have been financially stable enough and relaxed enough to make several babies. But no, reproductive organs, you have to be focused on the short term. You think we’re going to somehow get pregnant at any moment and you need to be prepared. But how is that going to happen when you also give us PMS in addition to the week long shark fest?

https://chng.it/9W2rWwgjHY

I was so looking forward to this season and seeing a woman with curves get honest to goodness romantic sex scenes.

For so long the sex scenes with curvy girls in film have been shown with a tone of humor or disgust or pity.

And Bridgerton season 3 was supposed to change all of that. Except it didn’t. Not for me, anyway.

Because while other Bridgerton heroines have been stripped clean of their clothes, with their entire body on full display, Penelope was not.

In all her scenes she was never completely undressed save for one brief moment that isn’t even shown fully. We get one quick glimpse of her glorious bosom and then she delegated to being covered up with a blanket. Colin goes so far as to pull the blanket to cover her up more at one point!

We don’t get to see her beautiful curves. They’re continuously hidden like it’s a shameful thing to show a woman whose waist isn’t small, with a stomach that jiggles, thighs that don’t fit neatly in a man’s hands, and breasts that aren’t small and perky.

What I got out of Bridgerton season 3 is that yes, you curvy girls can have a love interest who isn’t also plus size, but only because he thinks you’re interesting, not because you’re beautiful. And yes, being interesting is going to last longer than beauty, but is it too much to ask to be both?

I don’t want kids. Never have, never will.

And for once, I’m convinced my body actually understands that (though it doesn’t seem to bother learning anything else going on with my personal wants).

So in a show of passive aggression for not being used to their fullest potential, my periods tend to be bad. Either I’m in a ton of pain, or I’m bleeding so much it looks like someone got murdered in my bathroom.

But for the past two months, I haven’t had my period. And rather than be worried, I was ecstatic. I was actually hoping my uterus had shriveled up to the point where I’d never have a period again!

And then the week of a major event started, and my organs were like, “oh, you have a ten day trip with your family happening in the next few days? That seems like the perfect time to BLEED.”

Namely because I grew up not seeing it done in my own family so assumed I wouldn't ever be able afford to, or that was a class rule thing that I wasn't allowed to break lest I be perceived as a social climber or inadvertently saying I'm better than my peers.

Yay my Autistic black and white logic.

Since coming to these realizations, whole new levels of joy have opened up in my life.

(In no particular order)

#1 - Trimming my nails so they were all the same length on each finger and both hands

I’m honestly not sure what made me think I couldn’t trim my nails so they were all the same length. I grew up seeing adult women in my circle have uneven nails on their hands vs posh women with professionally manicured hands so maybe my mind just made the correlation. I always thought that the even nails were so elegant and wished my could be even too, but the women in my family didn’t care about manicures, and to be fair, I didn’t and still don’t like wearing nail polish, so even if I had worked up the nerve to ask for a manicure, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

But then one day when I was in my teens, I randomly, from the corner of my eye, watched a bit of some tween animated show (maybe Bratz?) and one of the girls broke a nail and then went on about how now she was going to have to trim all the other ones to match. And my mind was blown.

I realized then that having my nails all different lengths upset me. It didn’t matter if one or two of them had grown in very nicely if they didn’t match the rest. In fact, I was perfectly happy with them all being trimmed to the nubs if it meant they were all the same length.

I still have yet to get a professional manicure and I still don’t like painting my nails. I tend to keep my nails fairly short because I do martial arts and bake and gardening so having them short is practical. And having them all even makes me happier than a few of them looking elegant.

#2 - Having matching sets of themed underwear

As a teen and into my twenties, my bras never matched my underwear. Because I was raised on the kind of underwear you get in large packs. My mother openly scoffed at the pantie displays, saying pantie was such a vulgar term, and from the media it seemed wearing matching sets of underwear was reserved for “the bedroom”. Whenever I passed by a Victoria’s Secret, I’d see the piles of lace and my good Christian girl brainwashing had me roll my eyes and tell myself that I was better than the uncouth masses for not wearing such highly sensual underwear since obviously one only wore it if one was expecting to have intercourse with a man.

And then I discovered matching socks weren’t just a fashion statement limited to men.

Socks growing up had also followed the same rule as purchasing underwear - cheap and in bulk. But then I got several ballet flats and realized my normal socks were not going to go well so I got several pairs of cute floral socks to match with my outfits.

I also had been going to therapy recently and had started lifestyle changes like going to taekwondo three times a week and incorporating more healthy foods into my diet (I’m still pretty picky because most healthy foods aren’t safe foods for me, but smaller changes like using 100% whole wheat bread and drinking 2% milk have helped a lot).

Long story short, I was feeling more positive and comfortable and confident in my body and treated myself to some new clothes. Because I had also discovered Torrid - a clothing store that designs clothes specifically for women like me.

And after get a new wardrobe, the likes of which I never thought I’d get to have because all the cute clothes everywhere were too small for me, I realized I didn’t need a reason besides wanting to feel pretty to buy matching underwear sets. And to have enough to last me two weeks without repeating!

I’m such a visual person and it took me a long time to realize and embrace it. Sometimes I just open the special drawer where I keep all my pretty underwear and admire them.

#3 - Spaces beside your bedroom can be themed

By now the visual theme is well established. Stimming for neurodivergent people can take on my forms through the various senses - it’s not just limited to “flapping”. Visual stimming is my biggest stim. Nothing makes me happier than staring at beauty.

My bedroom has always been my sanctuary, especially growing up. We moved 8 times my first 18 years and my mom, being the artist that she is, tried to make the transitions easier by letting us pick a new theme for our rooms every time we moved.

The rest of the house outside my bedroom never seemed to have a theme. It was the 90s-2000s and if you don’t know the aesthetic for that time period consider yourself lucky. My parents also collected things from the places we moved and the trips we had gone on, so the rest of the house looked pretty chaotic to me (especially since in my room everything had to have a place and god forbid a single pillow was out of place).

I didn’t stay long enough in my first two apartments to put any effort into them (first one was while working as a teacher in Japan and the second was when I was in grad school). But when I got my first real job and my first real apartment, that’s when I realized I could decorate however I wanted to (because I was starting from scratch).

It took some trial and error to figure out what worked for me in each of the rooms. Obviously I couldn’t spend massive amounts of money, but with a little creativity I managed to cultivate spaces that made me happy.

My kitchen is very Japanese inspired - white base with sage green accents, bamboo blond pieces, and black or white appliances. My bathroom is white with navy colored middle eastern inspired accents. My study is white, blue, yellow, and green, the focal point being from a large Ghibli Castle in the Sky mural. And my bedroom is cottagecore fairytale with a base palette of white, green, yellow, red, and dark woods.

#4 - I can collect art from my favorite artists

For the final visual theme, ART. Growing up, my mom was a freelance artist. Our home was decorated with pieces she had made herself. From osmosis, I assumed either you were rich enough to buy original pieces, you were creative enough to make your own, or your were neither and were reduced to the cheap mass produced pieces one bought at hobby stores.

I inherited my mother’s talent for art and felt I couldn’t hang up anything on my own walls unless I had made it myself. Because why by someone else’s work when I could make my own?

But this was a problem because what I made didn’t always seem good enough for me to stare at it for hours and that would just make me grumpy.

And then I discovered that a lot of my favorite digital artists had shops. And from those shops, you could order prints.

And I realized buying prints was actually a very important thing to do, because it was supporting a freelance artist, like my mom had been. And what could be better than that? Plus I got to have beautiful pieces hanging in my place for me to stare at and visually stim to.

#5 - Just because something is a name brand and expensive doesn’t mean I can’t buy it if I can afford it

For years my mother has pointed out that I have expensive taste. For some reason I tend to gravitate towards the priciest items without even knowing how expensive they are. She also has a tendency to tell me I’m terrible with money (though living on my own without going into debt for over 10 years now should have proved to her and myself that that isn’t true).

Naturally this evolved into a strange complex of me thinking I didn’t deserve to buy name brand products.

And then I discovered Torrid (which by my upbringing is a name brand), and threw caution to the wind to buy clothes that I loved despite them not being on sale (though I still waited for sales and used discounts whenever possible).

And then I heard a rumor that Mazda wasn’t going to be making the Mazda3 model that I was in love with (because so many things about it from the color to the chassis reminded me of my favorite transformer, TFP Knockout). My old car was starting to break down and I decided I had saved enough for a new car (because it seemed getting a house where I lived would never happen anyway), and I bought my brand new dream car.

I know Mazda and Torrid probably aren’t considered high end name brands by posh people, but to me they are. Because growing up my clothes came from thrift stores or Walmart or from the sales racks at Kohls. I was never allowed to buy anything new at full price. When my family got new cars, the old ones had to be dead and the new ones were purchased for their practicality, not their looks.

My parents kept a tight leash on their finances. Both came from poorer families that had to make hard decisions and be creative to get by at times. And I appreciate the money saving tips they gave me.

Earlier this evening I was driving on the highway to head to my writers group. I needed to change lanes to get to my exit and proceeded to do so, enjoying the scenic ride. That is until a car horn starts and continues to blast behind me.

I turn to look and a giant truck has appeared behind me (I honestly didn’t see it when I went to turn). And because the truck continued at its breakneck speed (while still blaring its horn at me, causing me to get even more flustered), I had to speed up to avoid getting rammed because another car was already coming up behind me in my original lane. But my car is little and old, and can’t go 0 to 60 in 0.3 seconds, so the truck continued to blast its horn at me the whole time I’m trying not to cause an accident.

I finally make it to my exit without crashing into anyone, but then my stomach sinks as I see the truck now riding my tail as I get off the exit. Now I’m terrified this person is going to ram me out of spite.

The exit joins up to the town road, but you have to yield to oncoming traffic, so I do. The truck then suddenly swerves out from behind me, and as they rush by, the driver and his passenger flip me off as they scream profanities that consist of female slurs (which originally were just plain old words until some man decided to make them curses because they happened to be female centered terms).

Now I’m really shaken up and am forced to drive behind them until the road splits into two. But horror of all horrors, I end up almost right next to them at a red light. I can feel them staring at me and I’m now scared out of my mind.

Thankfully, a police car with its lights and sirens on drove past us, and that seemed to cool the trucktosterones down because they peeled off into the next side street and I didn’t see them again.

My fictional crush types

While I was working on my writing, I suddenly realized my first crushes have colored all my other crushes over the years. To the point that each of my main writing projects features a love interest that is influenced by said first crushes.