Coffee Rings and Scribbled Lines

Feb ‘19: Had a grant denied by an asshole during a hearing, started to spiral out from burnout/unacknowledged mental health issues as a result.

March ‘19: Actually, I think this was fine. Well, at least, I don’t remember anything happening, other than constant anxiety/fear/depression/fucking up a conference I was organizing for no good reason.

April ‘19: Found out Mike died.

May ‘19: Found out Andrew died.

June ‘19: Got in my first car crash and totaled the rental. Still fighting about the bill to this day. 

July ‘19: Got physically assaulted by a total stranger on the street for the first time.

August ‘19: Almost screwed up grad school (and my paychecks) because I’m still burnt out and can’t student right. 

September ‘19: Got stranded on a broken bus to Chicago for a couple hours (that wasn’t too bad, in the long run). 

October ‘19: Had a miscarriage for the first time.

November ‘19: Partner of 8.5 years forgot my birthday. He uses my miscarriage as an excuse.

December ‘19: Ended relationship with partner. 

January ‘20: Living alone for the first time ever, which has actually been great. But, I had to cut off all contact with now-ex-partner at the end of the month because I no longer felt safe with him having access to my place.

February ‘20: Got sexually assaulted (not for the first time). Secondary partner (on and off for a decade, friend for more than half my life) alternates between blaming me and gaslighting me. I have to cut off contact to avoid the constantly triggering behavior and denial of my agency. I’m constantly being reminded, lately, that I still have to see a guy who actually raped me a few years ago. No, I never reported that. Yes, I have reported this assault. And everything fucking sucks. 

I’m a cis-man in a long term committed polycule with a man and a woman (10+ years). I don’t know enough about the lifestyle to explain what we are but predominately he and I are a couple, and he and she are a couple. He has never really identified as bisexual but essentially identifies as demisexual just with me. He has admitted in the past that he is less sexually attracted to me and it definitely shows. Emotionally I am very happy with our family (we all live together with 2 kids) but sexually I need more. I’ve recently asked to open the relationship which he is fine with, but is it bad to just want an outside relationship predominately for sexual gratification? I require emotional connection to be intimate with anyone, but I’m not looking for a long term relationship I don’t think. Am I wrong for wanting or looking for this?

You are vastly overthinking this, my friend! Your partner is okay with it, and it’s something you want - you should pursue it. Our culture has a lot of weird moralizing baggage around seeking “sexual gratification,” but there’s nothing wrong with pursuing that kind of fun, pleasurable experience. Your partner has another person he has sex with; if it’s possible for him to have sex outside his relationship with you in a healthy and consensual way, it’s clearly possible for you. You would not be hurting anyone. Go for it!

Be careful about setting arbitrary or prescriptive limits on whether you plan for it to be an emotionally committed or long term relationship. Often, those are promises we can’t keep, whether we make them to ourselves or our other partners. Be up front with the people you meet that you’re primarily looking for an emotional and sexual connection that can stay ‘casual’ indefinitely. And make sure you check in with your partner and metamour about what measures everyone needs to take to stay safe, since you’ve been a closed triad and now will be exposing everyone to a new set of sexual health risks.

so my campus is currently hosting an ENORMOUS conference of scholars who study medieval history. they’ve been completely flooding the tiny cafe where I work and drinking our coffee faster than we can make it, but the good news is that they provide some PRIME people watching, including: 

the fact that all of their name tags include pronouns so that I won’t feel bad assuming anyone’s gender in this post

the woman RANTING about one of her colleagues on the following grounds: “he thinks he understands it from some class he took in 1996! FUCK OFF, TOM.”

the man who was loudly and earnestly discussing the “influence of the Harry Potter fandom on our modern political discourse” while he got a soda 

before he was out the door he’d switched topics to his preferred methods for teaching students about elves 

the two nice extremely polite young British lads who I could not tell apart to save my life. their name tags indicated that they were apparently not twins, but cloning does not seem impossible.

the sheer number of people graciously volunteering to buy lunch for people they’ve just met 

an unexpected number of very handsome soft butch women involved in medieval studies. I am bisexual and weak.

the guy in the flannel shirt who had the coldest, softest, most feminine hands I’ve ever encountered. I fell in love with him for a good 60 seconds. I am bisexual and weak.

people who aren’t from America being cheerfully confused by our money, including my favorite, a Canadian woman who told me “I’m slow with American money because it’s all the same color.”

I’ve learned that people who aren’t going to be in the country for more than a few days don’t give a SHIT about their change and will toss all of it in the take a penny/leave a penny jar. I collected so many quarters, y’all.

also a nice British woman called it the penny pot, which is the cutest shit I’ve ever heard and absolutely its new name.

just in general the EXTREMELY good grace and patience with which everyone accepted that we only have 2 cashiers and that it takes about seven minutes to make more coffee.

SEVERAL times after I apologized for the coffee wait (because this is customer service and minor inconveniences mean we have to grovel) the response was ‘lmao no worries this just means I get a fresh pot’

a woman approached me to day with a fucking enamel pin of that old illustration of a nun gathering dicks from a tree (you know the one) and I said immediately “oh my god, is that a pin of the penis tree?” and she looked stoked and said “yes it is the penis tree! you’re only the second person to recognize it!” what kind of boring ass medieval scholars has she been hanging with???? she was probably so fucking excited to finally have company where she could wear that pin and nobody said anything??? rude.

you know, this one

every single person who said “cheers” when I gave them their change.

the painfully hip young man who was dressed entirely in standard academic business casual EXCEPT FOR his shiny silver doc martens. 

me: “you boots are amazing.”

him: “!!!! thank you!”

the man who walked in, spotted the selection of high octane energy drinks, and nearly cried with relief. when he came to the register to pay for what was probably enough caffeine to kill a horse he looked me dead in the eye and said cheerfully “thanks, I’m jet lagged as shit and I can’t be expected to function right now.”

the dude who overheard my friend Austin listening to Florence and the Machine, started chatting with him about it, and asked him out on a date

My friend called Ford and asked him how much he was asking for the work. Ford told him doing that kind of thing helped him relax and stay sane when he was filming. Would not take a dime. Plus he paid for a new water heater and got the sewage system cleaned out.

“The Millennium Falcon was the first thing we were actually building. I had been in London and I came home back to L.A. for Christmas. So I go to Sports Chalet to do some last-minute shopping; I get there early, run to the back of the store, get what I need. I’m coming back through the store, and I just happen to pass this person holding up a pair of ski pants, and it’s Harrison Ford. I look at him, he looks at me and puts his head right down. I can tell he doesn’t want to be bothered; I’m sure from the look on my face he knew I knew who he was. 

So I walk past him, and after about 10 feet I think, ‘If there’s ever a time to say hello to Harrison Ford, I’m building the Millennium Falcon!’ So I turn around very hesitantly and go, ‘Harrison, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m co-production designer on the new Star Wars, I’m just back from London, and I’ve been building the Falcon.’ A big smile came across his face, he put his hand out, and we had such a great conversation — he couldn’t have been sweeter. 

As I’m walking away, he goes, ‘Darren!’ and calls me back. He goes, ‘The toggle switches.’ I go, ‘Toggle switches.’ He goes, ‘The toggle switches on the Falcon. When they built it the first time, they bought cheap toggle switches without any springs in them. Every time I threw a toggle switch, it fell back; it wouldn’t hold. It drove me crazy. Please, make sure the toggle switches are fixed this time.’ I go, ‘No problem! I’ll take care of it!’ 

So months go by, I’m back in London, we’re getting close [to principal photography], and I get a phone call saying J.J.’s headed down to check out the cockpit, and Harrison’s with him. I run down there and I see J.J. in the passenger seat and Harrison in the pilot seat. They’re just giddy; they’re having so much fun. And then I see Harrison look up, and he just starts throwing all the toggle switches: boom, boom, boom, boom. [Laughs.] And I remember thinking, ‘Phew, minor victory. Take solace in that and move on. Next task.’ That’s my favorite story.”

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.