bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with asexuality

I had forgotten how much I liked Network Effect!

Some of it might just be because I really dig the novella length for Murderbot’s wacky escapades, and having one random novel in there sort of sticks out weirdly from a series that is otherwise, so far, all novellas. I almost didn’t want to like it as much as I liked the novellas and I was a little surprised that I had given it five stars on the first read, especially given that I had only given all the novellas four stars. This was in the pre-vaccine part of the pandemic and I guess I wasn’t forming memories super well, lol.

Anyway, I started rereading it before bed and the next thing I knew I’d read the first hundred pages and it was super late. Then I did the same thing the next night. Then I blew off going for a walk on the nicest afternoon of the week to finish it (whoops). This one is riveting. There are so many factions! So much drama! An incredibly angry ART! Creepy mind control space aliens shit! Also more SecUnits, including a second killware version of Murderbot, who, among other shenanigans, increases Murderbot’s ability to waste time arguing with itself by a lot. I had totally forgotten the plot somehow but it was a really fun and action-packed space adventure with lots of twists and things not being as they initially seem and all that good stuff, and I was on tenterhooks the whole time.

I’m not reading as much YA these days as I used to, but my ace book club (yes, more book clubs) is reading Rosiee Thor’s debut YA sci-fi Tarnished Are the Stars, the premise of which seemed like a fun adventure read: court intrigue, spies and rebels, dangerous (or at least illegal) technology, lesbians, steampunky clockwork stuff in space. And it did in fact have all that, plus an aroace character (hence why the book club was reading it), and it was reasonably fun and entertaining. But I had some trouble really getting too into it, and I can’t tell how much of this is a “me outgrowing YA” thing and how much is just a “debut novel is a bit amateurish” thing, but bits of it just seemed underdeveloped/under-edited to me. Some of the language was a bit overwritten--not just in terms of overexplaining the emotional stuff in an occasionally maudlin way, which is pretty standard for writing aimed at younger readers, but also I distinctly recall early in the book running across a sentence that started with “Her gaze snapped to…” and being like “F, I hate it when people’s gazes/eyes/ocular jellies do things instead of the people just looking at stuff, is this whole book gonna be like that” and it wasn’t entirely but it was enough to keep me from really sinking into it. There was also some plot stuff that seemed sort of slapped together; there was some figuring out of riddles and clues that seemed less like solving and more like jumping to conclusions that happened to be correct (although the worst of these did turn out to be incorrect, which was nice), and I have some questions about the practicalities of the sneaking-around and avoiding-security that probably stem from me having too much personal experience in that field (there is realistic poor/uneven security and there is Well That’s Extremely Convenient poor/uneven security, and I regret that I can tell the difference). The assorted moral questions about identity and power and leadership were addressed in ways I felt were a bit heavyhanded, but the morals themselves are unobjectionable (I really cannot agree harder with lessons like “loyalty isn’t really a virtue if you are being loyal to absolutely terrible people”). Overall it was an entertaining steampunk adventure, a decent way to spend 3 hours of a rainy long weekend, but I would probably not especially recommend it to anyone unless they had some pretty specific asks like “Do you know any space adventure stories that are about heart disease?”

Another day, another Murderbot novella. A mere week after starting the series I knocked out the fourth one, Martha Wells’ Exit Strategy. In this one, Murderbot’s favorite human has gone missing, most likely kidnapped by the extra-evil corporation GrayCris, and probably as a direct result of the shenanigans Murderbot had very helpfully gotten up to in the previous book.

Also as a result of the prior shenanigans, Murderbot has leveled up, and can now do more difficult and fancier things with hacking and multitasking and otherwise autonomously orchestrating fun pew-pew space battles against a variety of human and machine malefactors. There’s some more metahumor about TV in this one, and a lot of complicated human-type feelings. It’s very much a fun, comfortable popcorn read for extremely genre-savvy nerds, which really does seem to be the publisher’s bread and butter these days, a thing I am not complaining about (especially given how much of it is fun competence porn/power fantasy for extremely online queer nerds, particularly). There’s jokes and some plausible-sounding technobabble. The philosophical shit about what it means to be human is usually text, rather than subtext, but I don’t mind, because the text is mostly Murderbot going “Well, that’s fucking stupid” and I enjoy being able to occasionally indulge similar feelings about this whole being human racket. I liked that Murderbot’s happy ending was just, like, some space to think, and a reasonably chill support system of people who weren’t going to tell it what to do. It’s nice to have space. Upon finishing I did immediately check the novel out of the library, and I intend to read it this week.

This week I read the third installment of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series, Rogue Protocol. In this one, Murderbot, in their guise of augmented human Security Consultant Rin, sneaks along to a planet that’s somehow tied up in the case against the evil-even-by-corporation-standards GrayCris, a supposedly botched terraforming case that has now been bought out by another company. However, since we are all now suspicious that GrayCris wasn’t actually terraforming at all but was instead illegally mining for alien artifacts, the research party for the company that bought the planet is probably about to be in trouble, hence their need for a secret and dubiously human security consultant.

Murderbot first makes friends with the human party’s happy, trusting, and well-treated pet robot Miki, who, having been well-treated all its little robot life, is perfectly sweet and nice in a way that causes Murderbot to have to periodically bow out of the feed and go have Feelings by themselves, since therapy isn’t an option on this planetary outpost (or at all). There is a sufficiently exciting plot involving saving the humans from the various threats that GrayCris has left on the planet to exterminate them and destroy the evidence of their illegal alien artifact mining, much of which is theatrically staged under the large, transparent observation dome of the geohub while static-interference-inducing electric storm clouds rage picturesquely outside (everything from Tor.com these days seems deliberately written in the hopes that it will someday be translated into a visual medium, which I believe is intended primarily to torment visually-minded readers like me personally). It is very cool and contains many good dunks on how bad everybody else is at security work, spiced up with self-deprecating commentary on Murderbot’s own fuckups, such as that they have yoinked far too many of their plays from soapy serials like Sanctuary Moon.

While occasionally the combination of “depressed” + “thinks a lot about threat modeling” makes these books not quite as escapist as I would like right now, I’m still enjoying them very much, will be on to the next volume today.

Immediately upon finishing All Systems Red I began reading Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition, the second novella in her Murderbot Diaries series. In this one, Murderbot has fucked off from the planet in which they were supposed to be granted “citizen” status--but a qualified form of citizenship that basically resembles a modern-day employment visa instead of, like, literally be property, but if you know anything about modern-day employment visas you’ll know that they are not the actual same thing as citizenship rights--and is now on a journey to uncover the mystery of their tragic past (the one that caused them to name themself “Murderbot”). In journeying to Ganaka Pit to research the Ganaka Pit Incident, Murderbot befriends a research transport pilot bot that they name ART (it stands for Asshole Research Transport), is hired as a security consultant by a group of human researchers (Murderbot seems to like researchers and scientists, inasmuch as they like any humans), and liberates a sexbot (but like, not in a sexy way). While this is not a very large cast of characters, it is quite a lot for Murderbot, especially the ones they have to pretend to be a human in front of. Murderbot is relatably bad at things like “eye contact” and “not acting weird” and is frequently surprised when passing as a human means that people occasionally listen to them. Murderbot attempts to pick up some human mannerisms, like sighing when people say stupid things. It’s so much fun.

Murderbot’s gender is given as “indeterminate” in this one so even though I originally read them as male-ish by virtue of being a security android (oddly, I think being a woman who does a lot of security/community safety work has just highlighted for me the degree to which a corporate “generic”/unmarked security construct would definitely be designed to be male-coded, probably it would look like Tom Hardy), but now that Murderbot is on record as “not bothering to have a gender even when given the option” I’ll be switching pronouns in these reviews.

The actual plotline in Artificial Condition is… there? I wasn’t really invested in it, but that wasn’t really the point. It did its job of getting Murderbot and their humans into mortal peril that they they had to get out of again so that they could learn something heartwarming and then retreat into a low-key depressed funk to binge-watch Sanctuary Moon. And that’s what I want out of a space adventure novella, really.

I downloaded the first four ebooks in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series last year when they were being given away by the publisher as a promotion for the fifth book. I had intended to read them last year as they fit my “no male romantic leads” stricture for 2020, as the viewpoint character is aroace. This is partly because they’re an android--specifically, a mass-produced security android owned by a company known only as “the company”--but given how many AI stories use “falling in love” as an indicator of emerging humanity on the part of the AIs, it was nice to be pre-assured that this was not going to happen.

Though it took longer than I had intended, I finally got around to reading the first book, All Systems Red, and got to meet Murderbot. And I gotta say, I like him; I find him very relatable. He is sarcastic and pretty awkward when it comes to dealing with humans, task-oriented but not necessarily invested in his job the way the company intends him to be, has a low tolerance for corporate bullshit and would rather watch melodramatic TV all day, and does security work. Honestly he reminds me of a lot of people I’ve met doing community safety work, sometimes.

Subversive people’s hero anarcho-android Murderbot has a tragic past, which is obviously related to why he calls himself Murderbot, but instead of wallowing, he has taken safety matters into his own hands and disabled his governor’s module, which is the bit of programming that makes him obey the company. Having thus made himself ungovernable, he mostly just does his job with the minimum of effort and engages in time theft to watch TV, which, despite media depictions, is in fact standard operating procedure for anti-state leftists of all theoretical stripes.

Anyway, the book is novella-length, so that plot is short and action-packed: Murderbot is on a contract with a surveying team on a planet; the surveying team is being sabotaged or otherwise mysteriously under attack; there is some intrigue and mystery and Cunning Plans and running around shooting at each other, and Murderbot becomes actually somewhat emotionally invested in the humans he’s protecting, because they’re all basically low-key and nice and competent at their jobs. It’s a short, fun read, and I’m glad there are a bunch more of them.

As a follow-up to the excellent book club on Angela Chen’s Ace, the New England Aces group decided to have a second book club, this time on Rebecca Burgess’ graphic novel How to Be Ace. Due to library wait times, I missed this book club, and was able to pick up my copy from BPL a day or two after the book club. Go figure.

Before I get into the content on the inside of the book I must express my extreme professional displeasure with whoever copy edited the back cover. There are two paragraphs in the back cover copy. In the first paragraph, someone has laboriously hypercorrected all instances of singular they to be mis-conjugated, pairing them with the same verb forms one would use for “he” or “she,” leading to the formations “they gets older,” “they leaves school,” “they starts to wonder,” and “they doesn’t want,” all in one eye-searing sentence. The second paragraph of back cover copy is conjugated normally (“they navigate”), as is the author bio below. I’m sorry, but… what. Whomst. How?

The actual book part of the book is pretty good. It’s a straightforward memoir that clearly illustrates the alienation and attempt to navigate societal expectations that many ace people experience, including the laborious attempts to logic out some kind of sense to the behavior we’re seeing modeled--a challenging task when the only feedback you get is people dunking on you when you get it “wrong,” with no ability to ask clarifying questions before going ahead and getting it wrong because most of the expectations you’re trying to figure out are so deep and so intuitive for other people that they can’t articulate them even (or perhaps especially) when you ask. It also chronicles the joys and challenges of finding out that there are words and theory and other people having better conversations out there that you can use to make sense of your experiences and the other people’s expectations, they can just be sort of hard to find. The book also talks about the author’s experiences with anxiety and OCD, and of the financial stress of navigating the Great Recession fresh out of school. I appreciated that the book talked frankly about Burgess’ mental health could affect how they think and feel about their asexuality--their self-image and their ideas about what they felt they had to do in various circumstances--but rejected the idea that one must have caused the other, and the unrealistic expectation that asexual people have to have no physical or mental health issues at all in order to prove that they’re “really” asexual. Burgess is only one person, and it’s all too easy to go through depictions of asexual people and bug out every time they fail to sufficiently reject a stereotype, so I am sure there are ace readers who will feel disappointingly un-represented by the introverted, socially anxious comics nerd depicted here. As someone with close ties to the introverted, socially anxious comics nerds community, however, I think the book did a perfectly fine job of illustrating how asexuality is not the dominant sexuality within that demographic, as well as gently highlighting how the sense of alienation caused by not sharing basically everybody’s interests in sex and romance can actively feed social anxiety, not the other way around. The depictions of sort of drifting out of conversational circles because you are just bored goddamn stupid but don’t want to, like, derail a conversation that’s obviously important to the people having it were probably the most relatable parts of the book to me, although overall it had a pretty high relatability factor given that I am also an introverted white AFAB ace person who runs in generally artsy/nerdy circles and I appear to have graduated college the same year.

Anyway, overall it’s very cute, very readable, and has some important stuff to say about growing up and self-acceptance that apply even if you’re not ace. I do wish I hadn’t missed the book club.

CW: Extremely personal

Despite my intention to cool it on purchasing books for a bit, I absolutely had to order myself a copy of Angela Chen’s recently published ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. I am not a big one for reading books on sexuality, although I have found the last few I’ve read to be worthwhile, though on the other hand this might be because I only read one every year or so when a book club makes me. But this year’s book I decided to read on my own and then managed to find a book club invitation for--by the New England Aces meetup, a group I am not a member of and have never interacted with, though one of my friends is one of their lead organizers--because this one was personal, but promised a higher level of discourse than, say, Tumblr, which is where I go when I get sick of the allo world’s bullshit and, apparently, wish to change things up by getting sick of Tumblr’s bullshit instead.

Pandemic time seems to be boring us all into introspection about identity and gender and sexuality and all sorts of things about how you fit into the world, which would be fine except I did introspection last year after tabling at the Boston Dyke March and wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known I’d just have to do it again so soon. I am usually OK with being the type of person that overthinks everything, but I tend to resent time I spend thinking about sexuality, considering it wasted energy that I could have spent on stuff I actually value.

I read the book anyway, and then I went through it a second time with a pencil and highlighter and sticky notes and marked it all up, like I almost never do. I have been having some Thoughts, and also Feelings, and also Thoughts About Feelings, and also Feelings About Thoughts, and it’s Kind Of A Lot given that I’m pretty much stuck at home and not allowed to get within six feet of people, so who knows if a single one of these thoughts or feelings will survive contact with human society once everyone’s let out of their pens again. But whatever.

Overall the book is good in that it explains concepts correctly and covers a lot of ground, interviewing a ton of different people and highlighting the diversity of ace experiences. There’s a lot of close looks at the way the author and the people she interviews respond to the expectations put on them, and how they get in people’s heads and complicate figuring out our own authentic feelings. It covers the intersections of aceness with race, gender, disability, religion, etc., and acknowledges the difficulties and uses of trying to taxonomize out different kinds of feelings in a culture that lumps all strong feelings about other people into one thing.

There are times when this book was extremely emotionally validating--about my bafflement with “normal” people, about my contempt for the faux-nonconformist rhetoric of “sex-positivity” culture, even about my disdain for certain aspects of the extremely online ace scene. While the Tumblr discourse has shredded the word into near-uselessness by defining the term narrowly as only meaning a lack of one extremely specific feeling, loaded with caveats that it does not and cannot carry any sort of implications about anything else whatsoever, Chen correctly identifies that the real uniting thread through the aspec community is a sense of not getting it. What precisely one does not get and how one feels about not getting it can vary quite widely (and there is always the possibility that you don’t “get” what some supposedly “normal” person is talking about because that person is actually a bigger weirdo than they know) but it’s a relief to frame the community in a way that accepts not knowing what the fuck is going on, because otherwise the pressure to know precisely what people are talking about so you can self-interrogate about whether you are Really And Truly Entirely For-Reals Ace can get exhausting and drag on for quite a while. So that was nice--I can be ace precisely because I have no idea what’s going on! I don’t have to feel like I’m reflecting poorly on the community by being extremely dumb! Being baffled is the community, and so I have found my people!

However, there were other times when some of the experiences and framings used in the book ran so counter to my own experiences that they kicked off additional rounds of self-doubt, starting literally before page one. The book is dedicated to “everyone who has wanted to want more,” which applies to me not at all. Other people have wanted me to want more, and I have always taken the position that that’s their problem; that it’s rude and creepy of them to try to make it my problem; and that if that’s the sort of thing that’s going to make them mad, then they deserve to be mad, and the only acceptable response on my part--if I’m going to respond at all, which I shouldn’t, but it’s hard to be completely impervious to other people at all times, especially when one is young--is to ace harder so that those people can die mad.

It is very clear that Angela Chen and I are very different types of aces, not just in terms of how we’re ~naturally~ wired to feel about other people (to whatever degree we’ve got that settled) but also in terms of our reactions to the societal pressures around us and our goals and visions of what constitutes the good life. Many of the things that Chen wants and that she was afraid asexuality would be an obstacle towards--to have a deeply felt romantic partnership, to be desired, to be normal, to be doing sex-positive feminism correctly--are things I either see no appeal in or am extremely avoidant of. (It took me about 15 years to reach a point where I don’t automatically experience being desired as a form of being ignored or unseen.) Which brings me to the unhelpful reaction where I feel like her and a lot of the other aces--nearly all of whom also struggle with the specter of not being “gold-star” enough!--have somehow “proved” their asexuality by putting it to the test and trying to be something else, because they didn’t want to be ace but are anyway. I, on the other hand, despite a handful of half-assed forays into heterosexuality, actively want to be ace, and wanted to be ace since before I knew there was a word for it--and boy could I have used a word for it! This, of course, sends me down the self-doubt rabbit hole where of course all the other aces are real and valid and part of the queer community, but I am probably just straight and in denial about it and have hangups due to heteropessimism and being that misandrist type of feminist everyone is very quick to rush to assure you that they aren’t and which doesn’t exist anyway.

That the book also discusses the damaging implications of the obsession with the “origins” of asexuality and the need to prove that it is never in any way influenced by anything whatsoever, and how that’s garbage, was helpful in pulling me back out of some of these spirals, but didn’t stop me from falling into them in the first place.

I probably do have hangups--I for certain have some measure of hangups from dealing with too many dudes who were Really Really Concerned That I Might Have Hangups, Let Me Fix Them For You, at an impressionable age--but that does not explain why I reacted to expectations around sexuality--even ones as vague as “it is expected I have one”--with horror at ever being even mildly associated with the subject, but I did not do the same with, for example, gender. I have never for one moment in my life felt not female or doubted that I was female or wanted to not be female; I always just wanted people to stop being so obviously, absurdly wrong about whatever responsibility or expectation they put on being female. There are other ace people for whom the expectations of sexuality associated with their assigned gender alienated them from their gender, and there’s got to be some inherent, authentically me reason that I responded to expectations about female sexuality with 0% alienation from femaleness--and indeed, a determination to hold onto it and to not let other people ruin it with their wrongness--but with 100% alienation from sexuality and a determination not to have one… right? Which again brings up the question of “does that count”? Especially given that I have been so unfortunate as to have occasionally been hit with exceptions to my usual opinion that humans are hideous sweaty meat sacks who invented clothing for a reason. Do those infrequent, ill-fitting experiences invalidate my aceness--literally, they must at least compromise it--even though the continually iterated promise that, once I had one of those sorts of feelings, everything would make sense and I would be normal, never happened? In fact, I have loathed those feelings so thoroughly that that they made me understand “normal” people even less, so thoroughly that I have not even felt like they were my feelings, but some horrible perverse alien’s feelings that had invaded my brain, and the idea of having to somehow identify as them is simply unbearable. And let us not even get into how outrageous it is that people who claim to love and care about me somehow thought it was bad that I had been contentedly not having the terrible feelings and that they wanted my brain to be invaded by this awful, time- and energy- sucking outsider whose goals and values and priorities run so contrary to my own. But disidentification, externalization, and alienation, no matter how extreme, aren’t technically the same things as not having the feeling, so… what are they? What category of person does that make me? Down the navel-gazing rabbit hole I go.

So the book was an emotional rollercoaster for me, whiplashing constantly back and forth between bursts of recognition and entire pages of “can’t relate, can’t relate, I have no idea what this ace person is talking about either,” with some seasonings of “the inverse of this is relatable and explanatory!” Aromanticism in particular is discussed but given rather short shrift, with a pretty big bulk of the book given over to romo aces and how they navigate romantic relationships. Given that these days I identify more strongly as aromantic than as asexual when I need a respectable-sounding word, I sometimes had to do a bit of expansion of explanations in order to apply them to the concepts where I need stuff explained. Most strikingly to me, Chen occasionally assumes that the reader, in addition to most allos and most of the ace people she interviews in this book--and even some of the aros--has absorbed our cultural scripts around relationships; as someone in her thirties who still cannot quite grasp the concept of a “date,” I pretty much just had to steal reassurances about finding other stuff unintuitive and tell myself it was parallel.

I think if you are not ace this book will do a fairly good job of breaking down some of the expectations and assumptions that some people don’t even realize they have and don’t realize that the people they are trying to help experience as pressure. But it is hard for me to really see how someone who is not fundamentally antagonistic to these expectations would react, because I am so deeply antagonistic that people who aren’t might as well be another species, so I shouldn’t assume that things that seem like unmistakably clear and lucid explanations to me will be in any way comprehensible to them. But I do hope that at least the most basic message will be clear, which is… well, to put it bluntly, that they should shut up and get off our case.

That, of course, is the really 101-level message, the baseline ask of individual allo readers to stop making ace people’s lives harder. But the real strength of the book is that it does not leave out a call for collective action. While not a socialist book, it does look at sexual commodification, conspicuous consumption, medical models of desire as a measure of health, and the economic and legal frameworks of family and care work by analyzing how they are products of capitalism that serve, e.g., pharmaceutical companies, at the expense of real people. It makes an interesting read to pair with, for example, Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, which is actually about a fairly wide variety of ways in which the economic conditions of capitalism constrain women’s freedom around sexual behavior and family life, and especially to contrast and synthesize with Sophie Mal’s article Collective Turnoff, which breaks down how much the “stressful, pressurized prurience” of the capitalist “command” to unrepress ourselves is actually a major fucking turnoff for a lot of people. This, somehow, even though I viscerally detested reading every single word of that article except the phrase “stressful pressurized prurience” (which is great and I intend to use it all the time), has oddly brought me to the closest I’ve been to comfortable with the idea that I might not really truly and irrevocably be ace. Maybe I’m something else and it’s just that my turnoffs include capitalism, patriarchy, amatonormativity, compulsory sexuality, the male gaze, sexual commodification, and evolutionary psychology lectures. (I wish to again stress that this is like, 10% of that article, tops, that I found valuable and explanatory. The other 90% feels to me exactly the same as the thing it’s trying to present an alternative to and I had exactly the same reaction to it as I do to being lectured by horny dudes about how akshually science says everyone is bi and poly: Like all my nerve endings are being dipped in glue, and with bone-deep rage and insult at the attempt to tell me how I’m supposed to be.)

Anyway, I think ACE hits a reasonable balance in acknowledging both that asexuality is a natural and normal part of human variation that shouldn’t be pathologized, and that the standard that it’s only valid if it is 110% completely and unassailably natural, immune to any form of social or environmental influence whatsoever, is also false and harmful. And by “reasonable balance” I pretty much just mean that both arguments are in there at all.

At the end of the day I think the main thing I can say about this book is that it was therapeutic, and obviously that is very personal and I cannot say that it would be so for anyone who is not trying to process all the precise things that I personally am trying to process and to evict the same ghosts from their past from their head that I am trying to evict. It was not a fun experience, but certainly a cathartic one. Other people may find it informative.

I have a blue belt! I probably should be happier about this than I am, but frankly, I don't feel like it's a huge accomplishment... especially since last year they bumped us up two kyu per test, and this year only one. If I'd been good enough to get blue with stripe this test, I'd be pleased with myself (one girl did, from WPI). I'd have to be pretty goddamn lame not to go up one kyu in four months when I had the best attendance record in the class, especially since according to the useless handouts Shihan hands out to intimidate you, blue belt is still on the "one kyu per two months" track. And the thing I am really still abysmally bad at is kumite. And since kumite is pretty much the measure of how good you actually are in karate (as Shihan likes to remind us constantly), it's not much consolation to be able to do everything else. Like... if I had issues memorizing kata, but could actually fight, I think I'd feel somewhat better about my overall abilities than I do having it be the other way around. And between WPI chick going up two levels today, and the fact that Tony got green at the end of last year, I really, really want to improve enough to go for green at the end of spring semester. But since I have absolutely *no* natural ability for fighting (being by nature both slow and highly timid), and not being able to wear my glasses makes everything out of focus and messes with my depth perception, as well as just psychologically slowing me down further (not being able to see makes me REALLY, really disoriented. I am an extremely visual person; I can't even "close your eyes and take a deep breath" to calm down when I'm nervous. Deep breaths help but the moment I close my eyes I feel unmoored and start getting really uncomfortable... it's weird). But frankly I'm not sure it'd be worth it to invest in contacts unless I had some other sort of indication that if I could see, I wouldn't still just be hopelessly bad. So yeah... I'm feeling like I made the minimum requirements today, big freakin' deal, and I have a SHIT TON of work to do if I even have a hope of progressing beyond the minimal level. And even then, I don't really know if I'll be able to pull it off.

For the moment, though, I need to stop feeling inadequate and do homework. I have two papers to write in exactly one week. AAAAAHHHHHHHHH. This probably means I also need to stop spending so much time poking around the AVEN boards, even though they are lovely and interesting and I feel like so much less of a freak there and they just make the world make SENSE. (AVEN is the Asexual Visibility and Awareness Network, btw. This be my official coming out of the closet statement, for any of you that were unaware of my asexyness (or have been misled by any of my lovesick ramblings, but you know what they say about exceptions and rules).)

I also got accepted to Heartless Bitches International but those forums (fora?) tend to have fewer discussions that are long long long and therefore any attempt to hang out there as a newbie is backreading like whoa forever. So no real time for that yet.

...I think I need a drink.

Current Mood: bleh
Current Location: the ocho
Current Music: none, but something smells like burning.

According to Wikipedia (yeah yeah, I know), Edward Gorey was an asexual:

"Gorey never married or had any known romantic relationships, and responded to an interviewer's questioning of his sexual orientation with, "I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly ... I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something." He agreed with the interviewer's suggestion that the "sexlessness" of his books was "a product of his asexuality"."

That I still have to go do Internet research every now and again to remind myself that my sexual orientation really exists and I'm not just a freak is kind of depressing, but still. We have Edward Gorey!