SurroundedByBooks

An old door from a small town, painted on sea pottery.

In early twenty-first century homosexual dating, gay and bisexual men (like most allosexual individuals of any gender and sexuality) often have aesthetic preferences for their partners. They will self-describe their aesthetic as well as the aesthetic they are looking for when setting up dating profiles.

The humor of the above is that Fozzie Bear, a fictional "Muppet" (marionette/puppet hybrid developed by Jim Hansen) stylized after a "teddy bear" toy and the "bear" animal directly, described themselves as a "bear" (a literal appellation for the fictional character) on a dating website. Because of the context of a dating website, the implication is that his profile got a lot of attention from homosexual and bisexual men searching for a partner with a "bear" aesthetic. This accidental miscommunication is to Fozzie's detriment, as he is looking for someone interested in muppet bears. It can further be implied that he is looking for heterosexual or bisexual women, based on his assertion that the responses are "wrong for him."

Fozzie Bear, as a character, is known for his love of puns and word play, so it is possible that he is, in the context of the fictional show, telling a joke rather than recounting a fictional event. For the purpose of the audience watching the show, this is an immaterial distinction, as the joke was written for the audience either way.

“And one of the things they’ll try to do is they’ll try to make your story into the story they would write, instead of a better version of the story you want to write.

“And that is the single worst thing that can happen in feedback, is someone who is not appreciating the story you want to make, and they want to turn it into something else.

“New workshoppers are really bad at doing this. In other words, they’re really good at doing a bad thing, and they’re doing it from the goodness of their heart. They want you to be a better writer. They want to help you. The only way they know is to tell you how they would do it, which can be completely wrong for your story.”

Then, last fall, my very last semester of college, I took a class with a professor who told us that we were not going to use the classic workshop format. Instead of writing down everything that we thought our classmates should do, we were assigned to ask them questions. And as writers, we were assigned not to sit passively while feedback was fired at us, but to ask questions, to explain what we had been going for and ask if it worked, and if not to brainstorm together how we might make it work.

It was miraculous. Instead of shutting my mind down, this workshop process blew it wide open. Instead of going home after class dispirited, never wanting to touch my story again, I went home inspired, with a hundred new ideas.

We (humans) made all this up. For the sake of simplifying our understanding of the world we live in, we came up with categories that apply broadly to most instances. So when something new comes up, it's easiest to put things in one of those boxes.

This is not always applicable. That's why we have a word for 'fish,' and most people agree on what is and is not a 'fish,' but all fish do not share a common ancestor.

Another example: 'vegetable' is not a useful term in biology, but it is a useful culinary term. So we can put things like tomatoes (fruits), carrots (tuber), and broccoli (flower) in the vegetable category for cooking and dietary classification, even if individually they're different things.

Those kinds of classifications are useful in the disciplines where they are useful, but generally not outside of it. In an ideal situation you look at every instance with individual nuance, but sometimes that can be a bit much.

Arguing taxonomy is a favorite pastime of a certain kind of guy that I work with. It's a way to feel googleably smart, but its not always applicable in real-world situations. (Example: I once said I was cold. He told me that 'cold does not exist, it's the absence of heat.' Which might be true, but hypothermia is real. Warping of metal under extreme conditions is real. Contracting of molecules, shattering of glass, and presence of ice are all very real. So while possibly technically correct, functionally useless as a talking point. Believing that 'cold' does not exist does not make me less cold.)

When trolls are like 'what is a woman,' I'm like... several levels of education above answering that question in a way that they're willing to understand, because they are trolling. They dont actually want an answer and they wont listen to the answer i give them. "You'll still have to go to a procologist instead of a gynecologist." Etcetera.

Those are areas where the words 'man' and 'woman' might be useful distinctions, but it's also really rude to talk about a person's genitals, so I really don't need to know what kinds of doctors they see.

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