Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

i work as a doorman/security guard, formerly in a famous hotel, currently in a residential building, and currently most of my shifts are 11pm to 7am

no regular bedtime.
i sleep for 4 hours per day on the days when i work that shift
i sleep about 15 hours most saturdays

i am heading to bed shortly myself (not working).

what about you?
And how come the summer dread, Swen?
Or the Winter Love as the case may be?

amazing. love the nighttime so that sounds cool and a big thumbs up to sleeping on Saturdays. i dunno i've just always loved staying up late, gray days and winter lol. emotional safety. i'm not sure. sometimes it feels like there's some connection between daytime and my relative experience with trauma from the past that i can't put my finger on. dunno, that's probably way overthinking it! <3 hope dreams are sweet tonight.

i love gray days, too. you think it's a north shore thing (i had extended fam there growing up, still do)? it's really beautiful on gray winter days. so now on gray days in the city that's what i think of.

wish you sweet dreams too <3

oh, blackout curtains. i couldn't survive without blackout curtains

i have them literally always closed in my bedroom lol. i grew up on the north shore!! :D you're prolly right about that!

i know you did, why i said that. same, mine are permanently closed.

oh boy, i suspected by the way you said that you prob already knew but you know, new display names and such, i barely know what's what!! we will need to dig deeper soon haha.

we don't go way back or anything but it's come up :)

okkkkkk glad you're not a family member i'm forgetting :D :D

hoping the sun today finds you all well. is anyone else a morning person / sun worshipper? i empathize with night people, like i think there's a lot of pressure to join the sun race and if you're simply a night person you must feel alienated and kinda sore about it. my first ltr was a night person. if 0 is 100% daytime all the time and 10 is 100% nighttime all the time, he was like an 8? i am essentially a 0 unless forced otherwise. that ended up being way harder than i thought it would be. my current ltr is like a 3, much more doable.

i have this feeling that where i live is in a weird interzone as the climate changes. we're definitely getting warmer, but also a little wetter (though the wetness does less because it isn't snow). having acknowledged that we're all fucked, where i'm at could be better, could be much worse. an instinct to go north and try to live closer to the land, which started off as a fanciful idea and something i was interested in watching other people do, has only grown stronger in me over the past few years.

an aspiration towards grounded-ness, i love it!

i empathize with night people, like i think there's a lot of pressure to join the sun race and if you're simply a night person you must feel alienated and kinda sore about it.

It’s true, I appreciate your empathy

3 sounds perfect, I agree. Think my ideal sleep schedule would be like 12:30-8:30

The warming trend is pretty scary, New York used to be unbearable, bitter cold in the winter, now > 45 is normal, we used to get blizzards with 3-4 feet of snow in one shot, now if it snows 2 inches this is touted as a once in a lifetime event, like a solar eclipse. Def wanna live closer to the land myself, and I don’t know if that’s the right instinct actually, to isolate myself more

I think about what I want vs. What i should want, and like someplace warm where i can go to the beach every day would be the healthier choice for sure

i'm just still kind of confused about what people do on the beach. like do you nap? i guess people read?

I swim, then lie in the shade for about 20 minutes before retreating to the indoors

The sun is my enemy and wants to kill me and may do just that one day

Good afternoon!

oh hellso!

xp that sounds about right. i do enjoy like walking near the water.

I was a night person until I started working early mornings, which quickly turned me to a morning person, and now I am probably about a 0. I can count on one had the number of times I've stayed up past midnight in the past twelve months.

1230 to 830 is actually my typical sleep schedule, apart from Friday DJ nights when it’s 0300 to 0900 and a second sleep in the afternoon. My peak time has always been 4pm to 8pm.

I just don’t get beaches. They were fun when I was a child and playing with sand, but since then: eww no, the mess, the discomfort, the boredom!

i like swimming in the ocean or a lake or a river. i can make a day out of it if i have some shade, food and protection from bugs (more of an issue at lakes). generally prefer exploring a rocky coastline with tidepools and such over miles of sand, and anything crowded is a no-go for me. the last time i had a great day on a beach was at a sandbar next to a relatively calm stretch of the colorado, massive red rock cliffs above us, a boat floating by every once in a while, alternating between cold water and hot sun, etc.

I'm an absolute morning guy. Up at 5:20 a.m. even if I'm partying.

that's radical Alfred .... like what do you do at that hour
i mean what time do you go to bed

omg i used to have to be at work at that hour. it was absolute hell.

it was a menial job at a market research company. i'd just plow through the work and spent the rest of my life in a catatonic stupor. i mean way more than i do now. i never slept, ever, during the week.

i spent several nonconsecutive hours a day tossing and turning in bed, none of them asleep

I just pulled an all-nighter to write a paper!

i get up before 5 am most weekdays. gym time before work. i'm usually in bed by 8-8:30 pm. once i'm back at my thursday night dj gig that will all probably slip an hour or so later.

sw3n what was the paper for?

lol i'm glad i remembered to googleproof your name

lolol i was like

that's so interesting, so like what kind of exercises do you do at that hour
like are you like jumping around or is it more dumbbells

u know, it was a proposal for a family foundation. it really took me a hot minute to write but I think I did a decent job.

heavy stuff for the most part. wtg!

xxp irl lol

had to google what a family foundation is, look at you!

getting up at 5am to lift weights is like intimidatingly impressive

it's so scary lol

grrrrr

i should be writing proposals to family foundations instead - proposals to give me all their money!

I won my age group in the bouldering competition over the weekend. I scored 500 points more than the next guy!

I love working out early in the morning but the dogs have taken over that part of my day, earliest I can get to a gym is around 9. When we left the house yesterday morning around then, I felt like it was a miracle lol

congrats, you must be in the wrong age group ;)

that's awesome t!

deflatormouse, well, i also beat the number one in the two age groups below me. ;-) i told yall i’m in good shape!

the issue is that the way competitions work is that you can enter in an age group, or in the “open” category, the latter being where the real crushers are— people scoring 700-1000 points higher than i can, at least right now. i would have come in 19th if i had done open (gendered “male”) and 24th if we’re taking all the open scores from both “male” and “female” competitors. (there were trans competitors fwiw, in both categories). out of 125 competitors that’s still pretty good, but i wanted a glory moment. if i am solidly flashing most V8s by next competition season, i will enter in the open category, tho it is unlikely i will ever place.

that's radical Alfred .... like what do you do at that hour
i mean what time do you go to bed

― Swen, Tuesday, February 27, 2024

I get up, make coffee, grade papers, shit, go on a walk. When it's all over by 7:30 I'm a new man.

My dumb gay autistic ass. I swear.
I'm waiting at the physical therapist's and the old Woodstock hippie next to me, beads around his neck and everything, says to me "Excuse me, do I know you from somewhere?"
And me like a champ immediately responds "I don't know, are you gay?"
He kinda laughs and says "You don't know, do you?"
My brain is still in autism mode so I respond "Well, that's why I asked!"

Like, to me, everybody I know is gay and if he knows me that's probably how. But I'm not going to assume he's gay, I don't have any idea, so I'm just guessing as to how he might know me.

Anyway then we get talking about how he's cool with it, he was in Haight-Ashbury back in the '60s, and I start infodumping about oh actually the hippie thing contributed a lot to SF's queer culture in ways that aren't necessarily recognized, a lot of these hippies moving across the country because they weren't happy where they were, their being queer had something to do with that. Then the other guy waiting chimes in about how he lives on Haight Street in PDX, and everybody mispronounces it because nobody in PDX wants to say "hate". Which is one of the most Portland things ever.

BTW he's seen me because we live around the same neighborhood.

LOVE that response. lol. i allllways wish i could be that blunt. i used to be when i was a kid and then it got lost in my neuroticism! ironic that neuroticism reads so closely to eroticism when it just about the complete opposite haha.

xp damn, Alfred, a walk even -- i swear y'all are in some kind of gay episode of Friends that i don't know about

the issue is that the way competitions work is that you can enter in an age group, or in the “open” category, the latter being where the real crushers are— people scoring 700-1000 points higher than i can, at least right now.

a mere technicality 🏆💪

how come all the people who get up early in the morning are so fit and energetic and the rest of us are meh, what's the correlation

you guys.. that "love" thread destroyed me yesterday, i miss my ex so much 😭

nooooo to painful feelings. what do you think you are going to do with these feelings? or maybe you don't have any ideas, which happens a lot to me as well. (i'm not sure if you've shared, apologies if i missed - are you on good terms etc or no etc?)

honestly,
i'm wondering if we can jump back in or if it's notching a boat to seek a sword
we're friends. i'm usually the one who reaches out, but he has also proffered gestures of friendship over the years
he was my only ltr
communication broke down abruptly 3 years in due to my insecurity and he ended it. i learned to love myself through this relationship, but i had to complete the work. i don't think it's still an issue.
realizing, finally, that if we're not together we probably also shouldn't be friends. i mean duh, but that's too hard to even think about (also duh)

2 bungled marriage proposals in our history (1 each)
it's complicated

ouch, sorry to hear. don't mean to sound like an overly glib advice columnist about it, but move on. i mean, duh. harder in the near term, easier in the long term. just rip off the band aid and block him on everything. this coming from someone who has recently contemplated sending his ex who ghosted him 9 years ago a letter asking for a friendship. and also someone who doesn't do friendship with exes. so your mileage may very much vary.

personally I don't see the problem with being friends with an ex, though of course the situation is so particular to everyone. I just think love is precious and if you can stay friends, it can be important. but I will say, the two things that stood out to me in your description of the relationship are that you only found self love after you were together, and that you're the one who usually reaches out. meaning, those might be two things that are important to consider in whether or not you put yourself out there.

otm

I'm friends with most of my ex's, and a strong sense of future -- a sense of self -- is necessary

that's well said