#girderednerve

5. something in fiction that reads like poetry

ummm..... hmmm.... i mean it's never a bad time to recommend kathe koja's skin, right? that's rly the first thing that came to mind....

13. your favorite romance novel

why are u guys always trying to torment me with these crazy genre questions....... do i seem like a romance reader...... <- im just playing it is niceys to be asked and you are nice ^_^ i'm going to flip the script and say daphne du maurier's freaking rebecca YAAAAAA GOTHIC ROMANCE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WOOHOOO love how deeply it's in conversation with the other remote-manor-gothic-romances but with a closeted bisexual-humiliated-for-my-inadequate-femininity cucked and horny little loser as the protag, AS SHE SHOULD BE

runner-up: blood and chocolate by annette curtis klause, another sexioso fabuloso dark fantasy romance werewolf book that is actually dark, actually fantastical, and the romance is sooo fucked and cool. and the wolfs... it's a book for teens that actually respects teens as the horny monsters struggling with major life challenges and questions of identity that they are. sexually formative for sure. and written (and a signed copy owned by me) by a member of my grandma's book club LMAO

23. a book that is currently on your TBR

most recently added: pilgermann by russell hoban! popped up first on the randomly selected list: purity and danger by mary douglas

134. unrecommend any book you like!

i.e., warn someone away from a book? a court of thorns and roses by sarah j. maas. if that's not too much of a gimme. whatever you're looking for in this book, you will not find it. it's kind of like a latter-day daughter of the blood by anne bishop (very strong age valence of '90s vs 2010s for thorns and roses) except it doesn't even have the insane sauce, completely baffling structure both worldbuilding and narrative, and over-the-top sexual violence that daughter of the blood does. like is this thin gruel all that the angsty 12-year-olds writing their own OCs to ship with the violent winged masculine love interest have to reward themselves with?

.Thank you. In my defense, they did ask how to do something, and I told them and they said that sounds too long but they do want to use indigo (this process is different than any other dye and involves fermentation, careful control of the exposure to oxygen, and sometimes urine) or maybe beans. But like, on their linen be it (I could have talked about the weirdness of the return of linen as a class symbol but you did not ask me that, you asked about the big boy: )

Anthony Mantha

What I know about Anthony Mantha is he’s gingery, large, and has a pretty decent smile.

This is not a picture of him, but it is a picture of his dog, Tyson.

This is a picture of him. I left the caption because so far all I know is he seems like a goody-two-shoes. He wears white a lot: I’m not against it. I want something light or white and not necessarily fussy but neat. I’ve been into small florals today, which I usually spurn.

I’m going to go with the 1953 Dior with a simple sleeveless bodice and full skirt in high-shine white silk scattered with matte black velvet stems and flowers. The shape of the collar and bodice seems young and fun and ‘50s but shows some shoulder I think he could fill out, contrasted by black opera gloves.

astroloquacious replied to your post“nottheliterati replied to your post “a deep thought maybe? on...”

Ah, ignore my prior comment then. I do think (queer) people know what demi-bi is, but if it doesn't feel like it fits, it doesn't fit. (Explaining your identity to non-LGBT+ community members or people who don't have at least one close LGBT+ friend.) is a whole 'nother story.)

See, I never heard that one, and it sounds an awful lot like “demi-boy” which is like, a whole separate other thing on a different axis entirely. But like... I mean, it’s not that I never hang out with queers at all, so it’s weird to me that I’ve never heard it ever in all this time and feel like I had to put all that together from scratch.

And sorry, I think I’ve lost some replies in the shuffle of a real busy offline life today, but someone (oh, it was you, LOL hi) pointed out that they don’t know anyone who’s both demi straight-- and i think that’s an important relevant point too, and I’d expand that to be monosexual in general either straight OR gay-- it seems to me like being demisexual tends to also have a super high co-incidence of being bi/pan, because if your model of attraction works that way you’re clearly generally operating on some different level or axis that’s not the “normal” (i.e., the way we have any language at all to describe) way attraction works. And there was definitely an earlier reply or reblog from @salamanderinspace that has by now scrolled off my activities pane where they mentioned having attractions based on totally unusual aspects of experiences, and maybe it’s that ace-spec stuff like this just isn’t examined much?

Oh yes, here’s the reblog. an excerpt:

For a long time I identified as asexual, but I’m not asexual, I’m very much a sexual person and I feel both arousal and attraction… it’s just extremely rare that I genuinely experience those things for PEOPLE.   Much more often I’ll feel attraction around fictional characters or types of art…when Jenny Slate says she’s had sex with the moon, I feel that.  I have sometimes felt aroused by pictures of body parts, but more because they’re pictures than because they’re body parts; I’m feeling more of a connection with the photographer and the story they’re telling than the subject.

[...]

But I think what we need really is actually a whole system of new words which describe - NOT whether you feel attraction, and NOT who you feel it for, but what is the specific attribute or mechanism that causes you to feel attraction/arousal. 

really, though, the whole reblog is so interesting-- and like, yes, yes, that the attraction is not necessarily sexual and shouldn’t be taken to be about sex, it’s more than that and it’s different than that!!

I think it’s a fuckin’ shame that Ace Discourse has taken over to substitute a fucking pointless discussion of Whether Aces Are Queers for a meaningful and fascinating discussion that I think could be super illuminating about the really, really different ways a lot of people experience the spectrum of attraction-- I really think there’s an entire universe of non-allosexual modes of attraction that have nothing to do with, like, gender, classical physical attractiveness, literally anything Hollywood has ever heard of, any of the things that stand for Sexiness in movies, etc.-- there’s just a whole universe of stuff that is super, super normal, but we totally lack any way of discussing it. And since sexual attraction is a thing so intrinsic to a person, it’s basically impossible to understand someone whose modes of it work radically differently than yours.

Like, I genuinely, literally cannot comprehend what it is that like “normal” allosexual straight people experience when they see some boring straight person in a bar and are like “That’s The One”-- It is as incomprehensible to me as, like, calculus. I know calculus exists and is like, a kind of math or something, I think there’s letters in it sometimes, they use it for like spaceships and things, but that’s as much as I could tell you. I know “love at first sight” exists and I totally know there are people who only like, say, brunette chicks with slim thighs, but I can’t really tell you anything more concrete than that and I can’t actually begin to comprehend what it would be like to experience life like that.

So the problem with ID’ing as bi or pan simply because I experience attraction independently of the subject’s physical sex or gender presentation is that it feels very distinct from people who are bi or pan and experience attraction dependent on the subject’s physical sex or gender presentation, if that makes any sense?? It feels like an entirely different thing, not that I couldn’t find common cause with such a person? but i often feel so weirdly alienated by bi memes that are meant to be in-jokey, LOL.

girderednerve replied to your post “a deep thought maybe? on demisexuality”

this is So relatable, i too would like to be able to describe more or less how i feel or approach attraction with some term that doesn't require a three-minute explainer & a vetting process. it feels kind of frustrating that most of the language available here seems designed to describe (/pathologize?) behavior instead of express attitudes & emotions, but what's new, right?

YES. I guess really that’s what I’m objecting to-- I have always, always hated how pathologized it all seems, and how it’s like. You have to have a 3.5x5″ laminated card with 1000 words on each side to explain your gender identity and the pride flag you specifically are entitled to wear (like a clan tartan) (you need a genealogy to show you’ve the right to that one) (like, am i bi through the distaff line if I’ve had oral sex with a woman, can you squeak me in on a technicality even if I’ve been celibate, I paid my dues by almost getting expelled from boarding school for getting discovered naked in bed with a girl, listen I always bought drinks at the drag karaoke night I’m in the system, how does this work) -- ugh.

Like-- all of this is complicated and I shouldn’t be able to boil down the entire essence of what makes me, me, and how I love and who I love and why I love and when, to a simple phrase, but god, it would be nice to have some more nuanced language around some of this, it would be nice to have something to explain this entire spectrum, which is maybe more like a color wheel, which is maybe actually more of a kind of sphere, which is actually maybe a bit more like the branches and roots of a tree, which is really kind of more than a single mind can understand because it’s a part of the whole of the existence of living things on this planet and beyond--

Hey! :) I do know there’s Knit Happens from 2016.  

The other person to ask is @rhysiana. She and I have thrown around a quilt shop AU and she’s linked to fic about other characters knitting.

that sounds shitty & i hope you're doing okay

Surviving, thanks! What’s tough is that (a) I’m pretty sure that if I actually said to this assigning editor “hey could you not send me articles that mention childhood trauma or autism” she’d do it, but (b) that’s money I wouldn’t get, and (3) I don’t trust another editor to actually handle the articles well

Like, I was able to tweak a lot of the verbiage in this autism-related one, get sources pointing to ASAN instead of something shitty and ableist, etc.

I just, you know, get to come out the other side of it not being able to feel my lips  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯