We'll call it a win

Within three hours of being informed that the cute and fun girl with whom I thought things were going just swimmingly and felt no need to changed informed me that a) She did not want a relationship, to 'move forward' and in response to my telling her that I did not want that either that b) she could not continue as things were, I had secured a date for this weekend.
Maybe I'm not completely hopeless.

It still feels like an unbelievable revelation when I find out that someone thinks I'm sexy.

Comprehending that more than one person might think this at any given time is like a brick to the head.

That's all.

Happy whatever you celebrate.

actions and identity, or a consideration of love

I'm going to give a vague Glee spoiler alert here if you happen not to have watched any of season 2 or season 3 thus far. Okay?

Santana is in love with Brittany. She's come to the conclusion that she is gay/lesbian. Now, these two things could very well both be true, both in the world of brilliant television musical dramadies, and life, but the first does not necessarily make the second true.

What do I mean?

I mean that who a person loves does not encapsulate and define all of, or even most of their sexuality. Sometimes, a person just falls in love with a person, or for that matter, is just attracted to a person and that person may be of a sex and/or gender that they have never before or never again been attracted to, collectively or individually.

This is a tricky thing to talk about. "Okay Kinsey, so if who you love and who you fuck doesn't define your sexuality, what does exactly?"

The answer is: lots of things. Those included. Right now, for the sake of brevity, I just want to talk about this one person idea.

A person can be a revelation. I always had some sense that I was attracted to women and really didn't think much of it until I had been given a vocabulary and context for those attractions: lesbian, gay, dyke, and, the women with whom I wanted to get all dykey, or, specifically here, one woman. At the start of grade 11, when I had not yet turned 16 there was this new girl in my English class. It may have taken all of five minutes being in vague proximity to her, without her even flashing that heart-melting smile at me, or becoming my friend and cuddling with me while we watched movies to turn vague sense in to,

"WHOA BABY DEFINITELY DO I LIKE GIRLS!!!"

or at least "WHOA BABY DEFINITELY DO I LIKE THIS GIRL OH MY GOD SHE'S LOOKING AT ME WHAT DO I DO WHATDOIDOWHATDOIDO???"

That single revelation allowed me to understand that there were a whole lot of other women in the world who were going to make me feel and act like a complete idiot. I was right. There were, they did, I did.

It didn't take much time, maybe 3 years all told to go from crazy about the girl from English class, for whom I would carry a torch during the rest of high school, which included: her dating a boy with whom I had a brief flirtation thing the year before and him being super weird about our friendship and me thinking it was so funny how backwards he was on the matter that I almost told him, both of them getting expelled, her coming back the next year, me marshaling all my courage and asking her to go to the prom with me and her telling me she didn't want to be my date to the prom because she wanted to go with a boy, and later turned out also to be queer and is some roller-derby superstar now. I digress.

We were talking about some time later when I had mostly come to the conclusion that I was only interested in women. I solid in my identity as gay, BUT, even then, I did hope and believe that I was capable of loving people as people and not just social constructs and bodies. (again, tricky stuff)

This change was a little more gradual, but the big, HOLY SHIT, MEN! moment came again with an individual first. I was so unbelievably head-over-heels in love with this man that I didn't really consider for a while whether or not other men might possibly be appealing to me, because I was in a place in which I couldn't imagine ANYONE ever being interesting except for him ever again. Well, life happens, and as I mentioned Mon Amore and I went our separate ways over a year ago now, and I have found out that, yes, men are, if you will, 'on the menu' for me, they held appeal. I believe what I discovered somewhere along the line was that BOYS held no interest for me, where as MEN sometimes do.

Being as I am now one of those confounding fence-sitters who will not even allow themselves to be called 'bisexual' because it is a label that, for me, does not fit. I am frequently asked to explain myself in this regard, or break down my attraction into ratios or fractions. I believe I have addressed my annoyance at this point ad nauseum in the past. I like people, I love individuals for who they are, not 'what'. People are 'whats,' they are 'whos'

In brief review: loving a single person does not define a person's sexuality. Individuals can help personify and clarify desire. Identity is complicated. Love kicks my ass.

Yep.

worries

He didn't say that I worried too much.

He didn't tell me to stop worrying.

He said " You're an amazing person and you don't need to worry as much as you do."

That was new.

me time

One of my absolute favorite things about spending time alone where I live is the freedom not to wear any more clothing than I want to or is necessary due to temperature.

I just took a shower after trying to plant some things. I may have put the sprouted avocado upside down, and that potted basil may have been too late in meeting the garden. That's entirely beside the point. The point is, that I am sitting here bare-ass naked, save for my glasses. I do not even have my nose-ring in and am not wearing the lucky Japanese coin which seldom leaves my neck.

There is a delightful breeze coming through the window, my bedroom door is open, and as I am not expecting anyone else to be here for another 24 hours and the downstairs door is locked, that is all just dandy.

I think I came late to appreciating nudity, relatively speaking. Little kids seem to love to be naked, and having worked with youth a lot, I can tell you some take a lot longer to pick up the social conventions of when/where and how much clothing they are expected to wear in various circumstances. From what I remember and have been told, I was not one of those kids. I was on board with being fully clothed just about as soon as I could get clothes on with minimal assistance. I didn't want to change without a lot of privacy, which was difficult given how many sports I played. When I got involved with theatre I started to loose some of those boundaries. When you've got to do a quick-change, you've got to do a quick-change, but that was only ever down to my skivvies, which were pretty modest and uninteresting at that point - I once had to do a quick change in an alley for a show that I did when I was 14. The same truck drove by 3 times in the minute it took me to change from a full male military costume into a tea dress, matching hat and shoes.

When I became sexually active nudity in that context never seemed like a big deal to me. Of COURSE I have the hang-ups about my body that people have but I guess I always figured that if someone thought I was sexy enough to get to that point with me, what they found underneath my clothes wasn't going to send them running for the hills. I embraced well (not harshly) lit sex almost right away. Otherwise, I stayed pretty clothed. My beloved Alma Mater was, to put it mildly, a pretty naked place. I would take off my shirt and leave on my bra at parties, or go to underwear themed parties, in boxers and tshirt, not lingerie, and not just barely lingerie like some of my dear, darling classmates.

A few years ago I read from some very authoritative source, as in, some womens' magazine or other, that part of the reason that women tend to like their faces more than they like their bodies is because they SEE their faces all the time, and do not often really see/look at their bodies. I immediately took up the practice of looking at all me naked in the mirror at least once a day, and HEY! It's true. Having a better idea of what my body actually looks like made me like it more, and feel more comfortable being naked - alone, around other people, just for the heck of it. I don't feel as though my body needs to covered when it does not actually need to for the sake of social comfort or warmth. It's great. I am not suggesting even a little bit that I no longer have my hang-ups or any such thing, I just like chilling out naked now. That's all.

Naked Kinsey Out

add it to the list

In theory, intentionally avoiding relationships should prevent one from finding one's self feeling as though one has been dumped. In reality, this is not entirely true.

Let's get over this

My darling wife reminded me of the conventional wisdom that it takes half the duration of a relationship to 'get over it' once it has ended. Mon Amore and I were together for 45 months, meaning I should 'be over it' in April of 2012. You know, if the world hasn't already ended by that point.