Its Me, A Gay @itsthatfunkylittleboi - Tumblr Blog

I just mowed my 88 year old papas lawn and when i came back inside he lifted my arm to reveal a bug that was attempting to hitchhike into the house. At which point he said "you will NEVER escape my garden." And flicked it back into the grass

sometiktoksarevalid

sunderedstar

lahiah

beam me up scotty (beam me up inside) can’t beam up (beam me up inside)

bebx

persianmom

actually I am going to share every single thought I have

#me teaching voice lessons #the internal monologue doesn’t turn off just because you’re singing for me unfortunately #I will tell you every random tangent I come across while working #and fortunately most of my students enjoy this #like human connection or something I don’t know

toastyglow

why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit

toastyglow

"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.

vaspider

Fuck yeah, let's make this little raft we're surviving on big as hell. If I bring my bit of driftwood and you bring yours and we let as many people join in as want to, we might end up with a functional boat.

libraford

I heard someone say 'queer is that which accepts queerness' a few weeks ago and I've been thinking about it ever since.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Back when I was active on AVEN (I have no idea what it's like now), we had two definitions of asexual -- an external definition and an internal definition. The external definition, the one that's on the wiki and the press material and that everyone uses when talking about asexuality, was of course "an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction". The internal definition, the one we kept in mind when talking to each other, was "an asexual is someone who calls themself asexual".

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

And that is absolutely not exclusive to asexual communities.

ceruleanheaven

if i was a different person with a different personality and a different life things would be kinda different i think

beggars-opera

The tailors at Colonial Williamsburg made a suit for their cat

vinceaddams

The best part is that they were inspired by a diary entry from 1775, written by a 12 year old tailor’s apprentice who had been left unsupervised all day and decided to make a suit for a cat. Here’s a link to the blog post about it, but I’ll just paste the whole diary entry here:

“I had been at work about two months when Christmas came on – and here I must relate a little anecdote. The principal [the tailor] and his lady were invited to a party among their friends…while it devolved on me to stay at home and keep house. There was nothing left me in charge to do, only to take care of the house. There was a large cat that generally lay about the fire. In order to try my mechanical powers, I concluded to make a suit of clothing for puss, and for my purpose gathered some scraps of cloth that lay about the shop-board, and went to work as hard as I could. Late in the evening I got my suit of clothes finished; I caught the cat, put on the whole suit – coat, vest, and small-clothes [breeches] – buttoned all on tight, and set down my cat to inspect the fit.

“Unfortunately for me there was a hole through the floor close to the fireplace, just large enough for the cat to pass down; after making some efforts to get rid of the clothes, and failing, pussy descended through the hole and disappeared; the floor was tight and the house underpinned with brick, so there was no chance of pursuit. I consoled myself with a hope that the cat would extricate itself from its incumbrance, but not so; night came and I had made on a good fire and seated myself for some two or three hours after dark, when who should make their appearance but my master and mistress and two young men, all in good humor, with two or three bottles of rum. After all were seated around the fire, who should appear amongst us but the cat in his uniform. I was struck speechless, the secret was out and had no chance of concealing; the cat was caught, the whole work inspected and the question asked, is this your day’s work? I was obliged to answer in the affirmative; I would then have been willing to take a good whipping, and let it stop there, but no, to complete my mortification the clothes were carefully taken off the cat and hung up in the shop for the inspection of all customers that came in.”

derinthescarletpescatarian

“I was hoping they’d beat me and forget about it but to my horror they stuck my work up on the fridge”