Fuck That Shit, or How I May Be Accidentally Falling in Love

Swoooooon.

But don’t tell Kit that.

After all, it’s only been about a month since we first met at the bar, and only a couple of weeks since we started kickin’ it, but damn. That girl has got me responding to her texts, inviting her over to my place, letting myself be invited over to hers, actually staying, actually WANTING to stay and wanting her to stay, wanting to curl up in her arms, lay my body all over her body, kiss up on her, do various other things to her…OY.

Seriously, I just read that and I sound like a total heartsick sap. I am so glad this blog is anonymous.

The thing is, I really do like her. She has this sarcastic way about her and she just gets me, like no one really gets me except, like, my roommate, and even roomie doesn’t completely get me the way Kit does. I want her around me when she’s not. When I miss her, I get a text. When I’m feeling lonely, she calls, she invites me over, she asks about my day. GUYS, SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS THIS. Don’t you fucking say love. Do. Not.

Because, like, I can’t be in love. Love is not really my thing. I can’t be in love with Kit. I don’t want to be, anyway. I’ve just sort of stepped out in the past year with the ladies and I am not about to be tied down by one. I told Kit this, that I don’t want anything serious right now, that we’re just lady-friends with benefits, that I won’t lie to her but I’m not exclusive with her. I’ve even been talking with Nanette, trying to get something there worked out, with little success so far.

But.

Kit’s great and all, but I don’t know. There’s probably things that are wrong with her. There are things wrong with everybody. Nobody’s perfect; everybody’s got flaws, and Kit’s got her share. I’m sure of it. I just have to ferret them out, the way I ferret everyone’s flaws out whom I date, the better to make excuses about when I inevitably break it off with them.

But.

The girl does this thing with her fingers that I either can’t stand, or I can’t handle. It’s probably somewhere in the middle and I’m too terrified of the answer that I don’t want to find out. The other night, I had her tie my hands up so I couldn’t stop her, but even then, I sort of did. I was moving around like a newly-captured crocodile. I was making noises reserved for amateur yodelers.

But.

Nina has called her out. Nanette thinks I could do better. She’s got some sort of a reputation, which is fine and I’m sure I would too if I had been around in the scene as long as she has, and the lesbians like to eat their own (Alice, The L Word reference), so: Whatever. But it’s nevertheless intriguing and if half the shit they say about her is true, I’d want to ferret that out at some point. Because I sabotage everything by ferreting out anything just to prove my point that no one out there is ever good enough for me.

But.

Everything she says makes me smile. Everything she does makes me feel good, if not amazing. Every time she texts me, a little part of me gets smiley in my happy parts. And I know that’s also because it’s NEW! and therefore EXCITING!, but it’s also never really been like that for me, in a new thing. I’m not calling it a relationship. Fuck that.

But. Would that be so bad? To be in a relationship with Kit would be OK. I mean, I’d have to start telling people about her. But that would be OK. I’d have to start letting her into my life, but I think I could do that.

And, you guys, you should see the way she loves hearing me play guitar or piano. I know, I know, I got a big head, but really. She gives me those eyes. She genuinely is interested in things that I do.

But. I resist love. For now. For ever, if I must.

But she may be wearing down my resolve.

Haters Gonna Hate, or Why No One Thinks I Might Be Bi

It’s funny, being bisexual.

Maybe “funny” is the wrong word. Definitely funny-hmmm, not funny-haha. Maybe interesting is the correct term. Maybe confusing. Maybe fucked-up.

But, for me, I approach my bisexuality like two sides of the same coin. On the one side is my straight side. This is the side that, obviously, I’m most comfortable with, because it’s been pretty much my only perceived reality to most people for most of my life. Once I discovered the other side of the coin, however, I’ve been wanting to spend a lot more time there, if only to make up for lost time and get comfortable with that part of me too — the lesbian side.

The lesbian side is very intriguing to me. I’m excited to keep learning more and more about it every day. I want to be so familiar with my homosexual tendencies that they become as natural to me as my heterosexual ones. Sure, there is a part of me (the scared part) that fears this will lead to me ditching guys altogether, but really, if that happens it was meant to happen. And if it doesn’t, whatever.

Been going out with Kit for the past week or so to various bars and each other’s houses, and when we were hanging out doing karaoke the other day her (gay) roommate Dee was watching me interact with Kit as well as this other dude whom I had sort of befriended months and months ago. So we get to talking, I’m asking her personal questions about her marriage to a dude that ultimately did not work out because she doesn’t like man parts in her lady parts, and she asks me if I like guys or gals.

Now, if you’ve been following along, this makes two times that question has been posed to me in as many weeks. I take it in stride, because I don’t really mind answering if the intent is genuine and caring, and tell Dee I haven’t made up my mind yet. She laughs and says I don’t have to.

And then I get to thinking about it (of course) and say, you know, eventually I’ll probably settle down with ONE or the OTHER, right? But I’m thinking later, and even then — like, say, if I ended up with a guy — I couldn’t just then say I was straight. Or if I ended up with a lady, couldn’t say I was gay. Because, honestly, I really do not want to choose a “team” or a “side” and I don’t feel that it’s necessary for me to do so, mostly because you can be in a committed relationship and that relationship can be monogamous and you can still BE bisexual.

It’s tough out here for a bi babe. Look at Ani Di Franco — she went and married a dude, and all of her fans were like “OHHHHH GAWDDDD she totes LIED to us about being sort of in our little lesbo club; kick the bitch out! She married a penis! A PENIS, you guys. Gross.” And the other side of that is if you are intimate/partner up with/marry a woman, you’re no longer bi at all. You might as well stamp TEGAN AND SARA on your forearm, chop your hair short and wear rainbow-toned shirts everywhere because you’ve officially been denoted a big lez.

And really, what are you supposed to do? Because bi girls CAN marry straight or bi guys, or gay or bi girls; it happens a lot, that’s kind of the point of being in the middle like that. You get to fucking choose. But your choices aren’t “straight” or “gay.” Your choices aren’t “guy” or “girl.” You are bisexual. You get to choose which person.

THIS, my lovely half-gays, is THE BEST PART about the bisexual experience. You aren’t bottled up, aren’t restricted to half the population, aren’t denied the ability to crush on people without identifying it as a “girl crush,” can simultaneously ogle both members of a(n allegedly) hetero couple. You can find the good in a person without first finding out what their hardware looks like.

When I’m just fooling around, I like that I can get different, intense and yet strikingly similar pleasure from two different genders. I like that I can decide “penis” one week and “fingers” the next. (Fucking aMAYzing fingers BTW, Kit.) I like that I can assume a girl will always eat you out better than a guy and then suddenly I find a guy that just KILLS it. I like that I can figure a guy knows how to cuddle me in his arms the best and then I find a woman who makes the best big spoon EVAH. And I lovelovelove that moment when I wake up and feel skin on my skin, limbs wrapped around my limbs, and there is a split second where I’m not thinking “what is the gender of this person?” but just “this feels so good,” and how it doesn’t matter what you’ve got down there if you know how to work it to both of our advantages.

In conclusion, being bisexual rocks and fuck all the haters.

That straight girl walked into a bar and made out with a lady!

My lovely man-friend Xavier did something that was drug-related, and got caught by law enforcement for said drug-related thing, and is now paying his debt to society for this. Which, can I just say, is pretty lame. He didn’t assault anyone. He didn’t steal anything. He’s running a business, however illegitimate, but nevertheless a business that will probably very likely be eventually legalized in our fair state. But this means that we can no longer have great sex anymore. That, especially (because I only care about myself), makes me sad. But not as sad as the fact that I just went to the ladyparts doctor to get back on birth control because of the scare I had (see previous post regarding condom slippage), which was now a total waste of $20. In conclusion: F#$% the police.

The night I got confirmation of Xavier’s unintended vacation, I was already planning to go to K&Q for their Thursday open mic night. Which I did. And I saw Kit, whom I had met the previous Thursday while playing beer pong. And I was horny, being that I could no longer count on Xavier. And Kit was being VERY friendly.

So friendly, in fact, that in the middle of the night, in front of Catie and a couple other people, she kissed me. And I didn’t flinch.

It was like a fucking light switch had suddenly been flipped on right above my head and I suddenly wasn’t in the dark anymore — everyone in the previously cold-shoulder bar was like, “WHAAAAA?” This girl Nanette, right after Kit and I kissed and Kit went out to smoke, said directly to me, “So, are you straight or gay? I mean, you just kissed Kit, so I guess you’re gay.”

“Do you really want to know?” I asked. Catie was sitting right next to us, not saying a word.

“Yeah,” she said.

I told them that, basically, I date both men and women, so I supposed I was bisexual. Which has been my stock answer for people. I wish I could simplify it more, but I really don’t think it is any simpler than that and anyway that pretty much says it all.

And then suddenly Catie wasn’t the only one (besides Kit that night) giving me the time of day in K&Q anymore. Her friends started talking to me, Kit’s friends were talking to me. We even all danced as a group for part of the night. For the first time since I’ve been coming to the bar, I felt truly accepted to be in there. It felt very good.

So ladies, if you are having this problem of getting noticed in a gay bar, here is my advice: Totally make out with a chick immediately upon entering the premises. I’m glad I finally figured that one out.

And I played two of the songs I wrote on guitar while Kit held my microphone, and this drunk guy sat next to me and tried to sing along, and it was amazing and I was complimented on the songs and I felt amazing for being accepted and it was a very good night.

And I didn’t even take Kit home that night. Instead, I waited until Friday. And Saturday.

But really, that’s another blog post.

Whipping my hair back and forth

So. Now that puke diary business is over. And thank gawd. I was starting to worry about the ramifications of leaving a diary partially covered in remnants/mold from my own vomit on the carpet for extended periods of time, and it was good to throw it out.

Although, it was also sad. Call me old-fashioned, or possibly just old, but there’s something about being able to physically write thoughts and feelings of mine with a pen onto paper. It slows you down, it makes you choose your words carefully, it allows for more contemplation. In short, a regular diary wouldn’t allow me to make the sentence I just made, because I basically said three of the same things in one damn sentence, just because I was thinking all of them and it’s a lot faster to type things and you therefore get more things said.

But I’ve been having a conflict on this tumblr. I want to write about what I want to write about (and I WILL, DAMMIT), but I also don’t want to lose sight of why I started this blog in the first place, and that reason is to talk about my real-world experiences with relationships and coming out and blahblahblah. So while I like to occasionally digress into philosophical conundrums and spend a blog post exploring them, I also don’t want that to be what this blog is about completely.

My point is, I’m getting back to the good, gossipy stuff. Ahem.

I did something over Thanksgiving that was very hard for me to do, and I did it in a way that was very much a cop-out — which is to say, I got to do it, but on other people’s terms, which is unfortunately how I do things A LOT and which doesn’t allow me to grow as a person.

I cut my hair.

Maybe you’re unaware, but this is a big deal to me. I have had long hair since I was growing hair, with only an experimental short cut about freshman year of high school that I pretty much immediately grew back out. I’m currently 26. That either means I’ve decided that long hair is the Way and the Truth, or I’m just a big pansy. And it’s kind of been about six of one, half a dozen of the other.

But I’ve been talking about bangs for I-don’t-know-how long, trying to get people’s advice, trying to psych myself up to get them, trying to figure out whether I could pull them off or how short to go or whether they’d require effort to keep maintained (which, let’s just say I don’t do hairbrushes, let alone any sort of product). Basically, I was scared to do them, but trying to convince myself to do them all the same. Be bold: The motto I’ll have someday.

And so I went back home for Thanksgiving, which consisted of me attending a brunch with part of my family and then scurrying off to Bianca’s house. We smoked approximately 57 bowls and then I told her she should cut my bangs for me, because it was about damn time I did it.

And she did. And really, she didn’t do a completely terrible job. On the actual bangs.

It was the rest of my hair, which I did not tell her to cut but she cut all the same, that was the reason I emergency-texted my hairdresser friend back at my place. When I went in the next afternoon, my hairdresser friend goes, “I thought you were going to come in with the Dorothy Hamil or something.”

As it happened, I had less of the Dorothy Hamil and more of like a really long, choppy mullet with swoopy bangs.

This is NOT what you want to happen to a person who has sort of an irrational fear of getting more than an inch and a half chopped off her hair, for her to sit in a hairdresser’s chair, stone sober, wondering what the hell she’s going to do about this new, short haircut and those side pieces that will “have to grow out on their own.” Seriously, this is a phobia. I used to tell the hairdresser I’d cut all my hair off, but then I’d want to move to someplace where no one knew me so they wouldn’t ask me weird questions about my hair.

It’s the questions I dreaded the most — “you cut your hair?” “Did you do something different to your hair?” YES I would scream in these absurd fantasies of mine, just wanting to not have anyone notice that things were different about me, because my hair is apparently a defining factor of who I be, and I can’t have people thinking I’ve somehow changed that.

Obviously you know where I’m going with this. It cuts right to the core of all of my insecurities. It’s the reason I don’t have much courage to make big decisions, ask someone out, tell people who I really am. It implies that I’m somehow making a change and I need to account for that — and what if I can’t? What if I can’t explain to someone why I do what I do, feel what I feel, look how I look?

So. What actually happened was this. I went into work, let people start asking about my hair, told them I made a bad decision when intoxicated and that I had to get it fixed — which is all true, but like I said before, a cop-out. I’m not allowing myself to say, “Hey, I kind of wanted to see what it looked like. This was all my decision, sober, and I’m ready to handle whatever people dish out about my hair.” Because if people didn’t like my hair, there’s nothing I can do about it. But in my scenario, I can say, “Well, it wasn’t my fault.” Whereas, in the scenario where I actually make all of these decisions, I can’t say that. Whatever happens, good or bad, whether people love it or hate it, it’s on me.

I’m not to that point yet.

I went out to K&Q last night to check out the open mic they have on Thursdays because I might want to start playing guitar down there, and for the first hour I was in there it was pretty much like every other night I go down there. Boys being nice, but doing their own thing. Girls not even giving you the time of day except in their own little circles.

So I was just chatting with Catie and sitting at the bar watching the Eagles beat Houston and then suddenly I was like, “fuck it” and went over to sit by myself by the beer pong table, and the next thing I knew I was playing pong and meeting girls and feeling for a second like I wasn’t a total outcast in the gay bar, like Catie no longer had to invite me in, like I could come in on my own, and I might be OK, and I might be able to play guitar here, and not feel stupid.

And I remembered the names of the two girls that I met that night, and I never remember anyone’s names.

It’s weird how you can be so preoccupied with how one of your walls has come crashing down that you don’t realize it’s made the other ones start to come apart as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymKLymvwD2U

Items From the Puke Diary: Entry 8: The Cheese

You don’t just assume foolishly that you’re ready to ask the meaning of life. That’s like asking what the point of a book is when you haven’t come to the end, what a movie is about just as the plot thickens, what a song is driving at just as the first verse is wrapping up. It’s like finding a dead end in a maze and then deciding you must have figured it out, if you think you’ve got all the answers.

But it’s also foolhardy not to even attempt the quest. You don’t think you’re ready to ask, but you want to genuinely know. So you go about exploring the possibilities without proclaiming that you definitely have it in mind as the goal. Each dead end is not a missed opportunity, not a rejection, but a way that you tried and can now check off your list.

And then after you get done with the maze there are other mazes; once you’ve finished with your novel there are others to be read. And when you look back on it all you will have learned many things and perhaps acted on some of them and perhaps it all had some impact somewhere for someone, but in the end all you were doing was filling the space, killing time. Because time has to be spent doing something.

The maze has many dead ends. I’ve come to another one.

~written 10/29/10

Items From the Puke Diary: Entry 7: You Get Better At It

Fifth grade.
I don’t remember much.
A hair-pulling fight, ending in detention.
Mom said I changed.
       But they changed me, those girls
       who tormented me for seemingly everything
       when I was young and vulnerable.
Tenth grade.
When I wrote things in my diary
I never told anyone.
Mom said, buck up.
       But that pocketknife felt powerful in my hand
       as I secretly cradled it,
       pressing it to my wrist
       and wondering if it would hurt
       or if it would stop the hurt.
Three p.m. on a Friday.
Panic rising, life forever altered, they said
I sat in their living room and they didn’t know.
       But I cried for a while
       alone in my room, yelling out for my actions
       and then, after, I felt so much better
       that I couldn’t remember why I had been so emotional before.
Ten p.m. in my bedroom
I don’t remember much.
A backrub, ending in an uneasy definition.
Mom said I changed.
       But I was always this way.

~written 10/5/10 

Items From the Puke Diary: Entry 6: In Her Own Room

“I’m going on a trip,” she said, quietly, to the mirror. It didn’t immediately answer her but made her take pause to reflect upon her decision. She supposed it guessed it wasn’t one to judge such things.

She looked into her own dark eyes, which were the only things that stayed the same through it all, and narrowed them slightly. Narrow, dark eyes were either evil or seductive. Wide eyes gave away too much. She had never wanted her eyes to be so wide that they could see into her soul, into secret parts of her that she was ashamed of showing.

People who thought too much had to be locked away, she thought, at least for a while. We all think we’re geniuses, she speculated. But it’s not unless you think too much that you start believing it. And then, if you convince other people of your genius, then they begin to treat you as if you are something you aren’t. No, better to be locked away, if you think too much, and then learn to quiet the ego, train thoughts to be on the plight of others.

All of human history is facts twisted with mythology so tightly as to become interwoven, but it is nonetheless full of examples of people who were not locked away when they should have been. Rulers of kingdoms, warriors, politicians, soothsayers, gods. Tear them down so you can raise another up to tear another down in order to raise more up.

Enough of that. Enough of ego triumphing over thoughts. She was a person who thought too much, and it was time.

“I am going on a trip,” she repeated to the mirror, narrowing her eyes once more, pulling the shawl tightly against her, feeling its warmth, its security.

~written 10/3/10

Items From the Puke Diary: Entry 5: Amateur

I hear her voice speaking to someone and I’m back there again at that place where I was when this began, a little girl with a crush bigger than herself that threatens her rationalizations. I want her to speak to me, and she would if I asked her, but when I try to fantasize about asking her out or just kissing her I get rejected.

It’s at least at the point where I recognize my crushes for what they are, instead of explaining them away by telling myself I liked the way they wore their hair, was envious of their self confidence, admired their brains, wanted their approval, their friendship. My capital “A” is now written the way it is because it was the only way I knew how to deal with a sixth-grade teacher.

Nowadays I get that intensity from a person and know what it is and what it means for me right now. It means I go home at night, lie in bed in the dark with the fan on and think about that person and me together, rolling about, touching.

But that’s not it — the “it” part is the real-world scenario of me actually making a move, which is harder for me to fantasize about. I am so afraid, so terribly meek-minded about rejection. In that, I give permission to reject myself before it began, keeping myself safe, unharmed, untested, a loser.

And I watch her now, wanting her more than ever, and feel her slipping all the further away.

~written 9/17/10