Tuesday, January 1, 2008

2008 could be amazing

I just have to say: It's pushing 4:oo am. Ever thought I wasn't fully committed to this blog?


Well, my medicine clearly says "no alcohol" on it...but how could I resist a few glasses of champagne? I mean, it's New Year's Eve! Maybe this is the reason why I found myself, at 3:00 am in a pizza shop in the Tenderloin with two friends, sobbing my eyes out. We started out talking about a mutual acquaintance who I felt had rejected me when I said I didn't want to date him. And suddenly, I was being asked the usual questions: "So do you EVER want to have sex?" "Do you masturbate?" "You can understand why this is hard for us to get, right?" "Are you in therapy?" One friend said, "How can you be asexual when I'm afraid to have sex too?" Pardon me if I misunderstand, but that seems sort of like asking, "how can you be brunette when I'm blonde?"
Oddly enough, the situation reminded me of the time I'd seen "Edward Scissorhands" and started crying uncontrollably. Sure, the movie was quite sad, but it acted as a catalyst for my sadness about a host of other things. It was the most I'd cried in years, and I guess those few glasses of champagne had the same effect. All my confusion and frustration about being a 1% in the land of 99%s just poured out. As bad as I feel for dampening our evening, hopefully it was a catharsis that I needed. Maybe I can emerge stronger on the other side. This is what I'm listening to as I write this:

"I've been a student all my life
And this is what I've learned about girls:
They're not too hard to find
But they make you feel worse.
At the age of 24, I can't stand anymore..."
--Unidentified song from the "Grimsby Fishmarket 4, Norrkoeping 0" compilation.

Here's to next year feeling better than we ever felt before.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess I've always been pretty lucky in that my friends (who know, anyway) are generally pretty understanding. I think the "worst" conversation about asexuality was just my friend Will saying that maybe if I want to find a relationship I should "compromise on the no-sex thing," and I explained that it's not like I'm the only asexual out there and I know several people in committed asexual relationships. And he was all, "Oh," and that was that.

I guess it helps that I know a lot of my friends through Portal of Evil, where there tends to be a lot of discussion about weird sexual deviances and there's also a small but visible asexual population and in that context, asexuality just doesn't seem all that weird.

(Of course there's the occasional flamewar from people who have the same old tired notions but in general, the majority position is something like, "Okay, even if they ARE broken, at least they aren't having sex with dogs." The only real criticisms people can come up with are more due to some of the more vocal rabid folks at AVEN and so on.)

Ily said...

Thanks for the comment, Fluffy! I know that I've been lucky too in terms of people's reactions. Some of the stories I've read on AVEN would just make your hair stand on end. Or your toes curl. Or would totally shock you, idioms are not my strong suit. Anyway, what's Portal of Evil? I'll go Google it.

Anonymous said...

PoE is a site which generally features weird/bizarre websites. A lot of people (including many of the people who post on the forums) assume it's like Something Awful or some sort of ridicule site but it's a lot more complex than that and it's hard to really describe it in brief.

icarus said...

i never saw that movie...what's it about?

Ily said...

Well Icarus, Johnny Depp plays a guy who has scissors for hands and gets adopted by an average suburban family. Then he falls in love with Winona Ryder, everyone starts to think he's evil just because of his hands, and it is SAD!