Just when you thought it was safe - OK CUPID PART 3: The Return of the WOO!

Ouch!

In other news, the Wiccan mentioned upthread wrote me a message beginning with "good eventide."

wow this thread blew up while I was on vacation!

Is there a difference between hanging out and hanging out with intent? Because this is the second night in a row of hanging out ... With no culmination ... I might as well be back in high school, when people had the time to nurture these ambiguous relationships.

I've been silently bemoaning the fact that I haven't received an OkCupid message in a while, and then I realized just now that my mailbox was full. Oops.

haha oh crap! :)

Guy Im lined up with a date for tomorrow just made an awesomely terrible Howard Jones joke over email. I like this guy =)

howard have thought

haw

an information-gathering operation for the purposes of giving mutual consent to intimate involvement

^^^^Is it just me, or does this just sound really, really hott?

But, y'know, sorry, I'm one of those awful horrible people who really, really doesn't like romance.

Part of it is just feeling really uncomfortable with the heteronormative aspects of it, and I just really instinctively rebel against anything where I am expected to play the "Girl Role". I don't think that's me being uncomfortable in my own skin, it's more me being uncomfortable with roles I am expected to play, because of the body that my skin covers.

But also that whole thing of, like, tension... I don't like tension. I like knowing where I stand with people, and what they expect from me, and what I can expect from them. Relations are hard enough when you're being straigthforward with someone. Trying to deal with someone who is playing little games because they think it's delicious and ~fun~ just... NO.

Two things: one, it seems to me that one of the best things we can do for ourselves (not just in terms of dating but just as people living life) is to stop harshly judging all of the supposedly aberrant aspects of our personalities that are intrinsic to who we are. Like, if they aren't sociopathic tendencies that are causing others harm, they're really just...okay, and they're what make you who you are. And they're the things that people who are similiar to you are going to zero in on. Which is to say that being anti-romance is really a value-free thing that will appeal to certain people and not to others. You may have been mildly facetious in your disparagement so my affirmation may not really apply, but it's probably an important thing for everybody (myself most definitely included) to keep in mind.

Two, romance (or any palatable derivative thereof) is by no means inherently heteronormative unless you play it that way. I personally would never be comfortable with romance where I was the only one doing the romancing. It's awesome when it flows in both directions, though.

Um, we'll have to disagree on that.

That romance is heteronormative?

Personally, I don't think it is, but I guess people can make up their own minds about it.

Yeah, I find romance - or at least people's expectations of it that I've encountered - have been deeply rooted in heteronormative ideas, and patterned around the idea of boy-roles and girl-roles (and that even held true when I was dating women, but perhaps I was more comfortable with that, when I was not having to do the girl-role. I don't know. It's complicated.)

I guess I feel deep down that a person can't have expectations of romance -- it happens or it doesn't. Some people are romantic this way, some are that way. You just have to be romantically compatible, at the same place and time, and also available for that to result in a serious relationship, right? It shouldn't be surprising that this doesn't happen every day. You can't make it happen. At least that's where I'm oriented on the romance-o-meter.

xpost

But...I mean, that's a thing that's largely determined case-by-case. Sure, a lot of couples fall into heteronormative patterns of romantic behavior, but that's a decision (or, probably more generally, a distinct lack of decision) made by that particular couple. If anything, I've encountered resistance/weirdness from women because I don't tend towards those heteronormative patterns. But just because some people want to cling tenaciously to those patterns doesn't mean they aren't mutable or that you can't find people who want to transcend them.

People do have individual expectations of romance, though, they have qualities or ideas or behavioural patterns that they think of when they think of "romance" otherwise how are we even discussing this as a thing?

Yeah, and all I'm saying is that those qualities/ideas/behavio(u)ral patterns need to be compatible with another person's for romance to occur. It's a boom goes the dynamite thing, not like something that requires bending and contorting your own ideas of romance to accommodate others'.

way xp, but VP -- seems kinda datey? is there baggage (like friendship or work together) that might make either of you hesitant to "culminate" the evening??

culmination makes it sound like an assassination attempt

The little assassination attempt.

so i've scheduled two dates during my vacation in maine next week and one date before my vacation (well technically on the way out of town with an on-again off-again person) so i think i'm all set for getting through the danger period of temptation to hook up with the guy that dumped me last week (i can't even call him "my ex" since he was never technically my boyfriend). the only thing i'll really have to contact him for is to get my wire dvds back. i don't feel like he makes the "exes i want to remain friends with" cut, or at least i'm too pissed about his jerkiness at the moment.

i'm still annoyed at my previous ex, the guy some of you met at my birthday, because he keeps posting about how he "just discovered" ursula k. leguin in some remote bookstore in colorado and how everyone needs to read her NOW (you may remember him as the guy who said that the only good sci-fi writer was borges when i recommended sci-fi stuff to him all the time and was always too cool for it...was really hard for me not to make a snarky comment on his facebook to that effect). think it's time to unfriend him or at least hide him. not every ex can be a good friend!

Too true. Some exes are great people I never want to fall out of touch with. Some exes could not have possibly been more quickly or firmly ejected from my life.

bg, that fb post would drive me NUTS.

That guy is a pointy-haired twerp.

i really don't relate to people who think they "discovered" things that other people have known about for years with their unique snowflake spidey sense and feel the need to tell everyone the must read it from their lofty mountain of taste.

oh hey guys, i just the most amazing book while yak farming in the subsaharan desert purchased from the dusty knapsack of a traveling apothecary - it is called the chronicles of narnia and you simply MUST read it or surely you will perish.

LOL oh that is infuriating.

i feel like it's a predominantly male characteristic. the same reason that i get a zillion messages telling me i should check out ____ band because i would like them...uhm why do you assume i haven't heard them? because they are ~so obscure~ surely only you have heard them?

Yikes, I feel like I have probably sent a message like that. I just wanna chat music! No snobbery meant.

Oh, I have known girls who do that. I may even have been a girl who did that, when I was younger and more arrogant and filled with mine own self importance. I hope I have grown out of it, mostly. I suspect it's more a maturity thing than a gender thing - though lord knows some men never ever grow up.

Yikes, I feel like I have probably sent a message like that. I just wanna chat music! No snobbery meant.

well how about try - "based on your tastes, it sounds like you would like ____. are you into them?" instead of something that presumes that they've never heard the band.

also not cool: quizzing women on their interests to see if they are a "real fan" which you will never convince me is not a gendered thing. wayyyy too many women music fans and musicians deal with this constantly.

Haha, as if even teenage Bieber fans don't interrogate one another to make sure that they are ~real~ Beliebers? In fact, I think girl-fans sometimes give each other a harder time, to make sure you're a "fan" and not a "groupie" etc.

Which... don't get me wrong, it's still a totally sexist thing, and coming from totally sexist presumptions (women cannot be real music fans, we're only into lusting after cute boys, as if the two things are mutually incompatible.)

But I think in point of fact, I think I may actually have experienced *more* "are you a ~real~ fan or a groupie?" from other women than from men even? (Not that I haven't experienced it from men. I totally have, all the time.) Depends on the scene, I guess, and also the fandom.

it's jerkstore ego-centric behaviour no matter who does it, but a lot of people do it anyway, consciously or more often not. totally fine to call them out on it imo.

i've never had a women try to tell me how to use my own gear at a show or approach me to talk about how i could have improved my playing. or commented positively or negatively on what i LOOKED LIKE when on stage. but it's happened a lot coming from the other direction. sayin.

have u listened to the shins they will change your life

a women = a woman sorry so many typos today, multitasking

girl have you listened to wolf eyes
*puts headphones on her head playing music at proper volume*

blood seeps out her ears

i've never had a women try to tell me how to use my own gear at a show or approach me to talk about how i could have improved my playing. or commented positively or negatively on what i LOOKED LIKE when on stage. but it's happened a lot coming from the other direction. sayin.

Yeah, sure, OK, this one I will agree with you 99% (though I totally have had women come up to me and tell me how I rocked whatever outfit I was wearing, but it was in a "I love what you're doing" sense rather than a "you are your appearance" sense and nothing more.)

I didn't realise you were talking about "are you a real musician?" rather than "are you a real fan?" because I cannot tell you how many backstage conversations I have sat through with ladies who insist "I am a ~real~ fan, while those other ladies backstage, they are groupies!"

I just don't want every thread on ILX today to turn into "men, they are so awful!" because a lot of this stuff is, actually "arrogant people, they are so awful!"

Lots of men do not do this stuff. Some people who are not men do this stuff. Rrrrobyn's right, it's arrogance, not gender.

aw poor men :(

Well, that essay that Crabbits posted on another thread did kind of tweak me a bit. Because I don't want them to be able to use that eyerolling "gawd, *men*" as an excuse to justify their arrogance with maleness? Which they totally will, if they think it's a "male" trait?

Anyway, tomorrow is going to be painful in a kinda delicious way because I am going to have to walk the Yorkeian boy in the office through the process of what I need him to do on the stuff I work on. And his prettiness is just stupidly distracting. And I have to really be a grown-up - especially because I am in the senior, managerial position towards him - and not let this affect me. But even just today, as he was kneeling by my desk as I was trying to explain something, and I just turned and looked straight into his ~lips~ and just GAAAAAAHHHH, like, this is SO inappropriate to be feeling at work. Must concentrate on spreadsheets and databases.

And I have to put these thoughts out of my mind and just be businesslike about dealing with him. When my brain just looks at him and helpfully points out "Lips!"

When inside, I am thinking "but why but whhyyyy - my lust-bone just SHUT DOWN for like, three years, and it has to come back *now* in this situation I can do nothing about? why?"

This is all timed so perfectly with the "Men Who Explain Things" article that was just reposted online/in the feminist theory thread here.

http://yorkiegear.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/yorkshire-terrier.jpg

http://www.awesomelols.com/wp-content/plugins/watermark-hotlinked-images/watermark.php?img=wp-content/uploads/2011/12/thom-yorkeshire-terrier.jpg

those japanese dog breeders really can select for any trait no matter how recessive

GOD WHAT DID I DO WRONG IN TRYING TO POST THAT IMAGE ARGH SEE, HE HAS WARPED MY BRAIN

i guess i just think that a lot of men (or other arrogant people, fine) don't realize that they are being obnoxious when they do these things and that it should be pointed out (same with the "minimum age 20 years your junior, max age ends at your own age or younger" thing that people don't realize makes them look like an enormous douche). but i am horrible at actually doing this to people i know intimately which is why i'm probably just going to hide that ex on facebook rather than tell him i think he's a major dork :/

you should start commenting on the post with awesome recommendations

"Have you heard of.... Ray Bradbury? Someone told me he is ok. Or Margaret Atwood, I think she may have written a book or two."

Why are you still friends with your ex on Facebook is more the question I would be asking. (But I admittedly do not understand Facebook and its etiquette)

I think I need to find and read some handbook about "how to not sexually harass new employees at work" because I am so socially inept I worry I will slip up and completely freak out this poor lad.