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[greenstorm]

Yesterday was a good social day. What does that mean, in my context?

Well, I had an extra cord of wood delivered to make it through till spring. My normal wood guy is pretty great, and last time he brought his Filipina wife who bought duck eggs to try and make balut. This time he brought some dude about my age, who in the course of conversation while unloading wood turned out to be really into original star trek. He was also into the reboot and we chatted about that a bit. It was actually great to be in conversation with someone where I could express a different opinion (oh, I didn't like it/not into the new Captain Kirk/everyone seems to like Benedict Cumberbatch these days but I'm not really for or against) and not have it feel dangerous: the conversation just kept flowing. I hadn't realized how closed-in I feel in both at work (I'm always trying to find things to agree or empathize with when people express stuff about themselves since otherwise there's pretty much nothing to talk about because no one gets what I like) and with Tucker who in many cases views it as criticism of his liking the thing or of his being unless it's a TV show.

I stacked half the wood, left the rest till I could split it, then went inside and prepared some seed trades. Well, there's one super enthusiastic person I'd been chatting with on fb back in fall and we shared seed lists but never did sort out what we were trading from each other. I let her know I'd got into peppers since we chatted last, since she had some neat peppers on her list, and she mentioned her kid who wanted to graft plants and cross peppers and be a botanist when he grew up. She was super astonished to learn that I was the exact same way at that age and asked a bunch of questions. I immediately put together some of my breeders mix tomatoes (promiscuous Lofthouse ones) and I fully intend on sending over a copy of the lofthouse landrace breeding book. My heart is full, basically because that kid I used to be is no longer alone. There is someone in time and space who has existed in a similar way to me.

So, good day. Definitely things are moving in part because of that conversation with the D&I guy at work and in part because of the sunshine and enough warmth to go out with bare arms again. That's how it works: everything is a feedback loop, and if it gets kicked into an upward spiral instead of a downward one I just need to hold it there. Finding good interactions becomes easier the more it happens.

Interacting in seed trades seems to be a good thing for me, I'll keep doing that. I need to go into my feelings on money and seeds in a different post, they're- well, not complex, but they're big.

Now, do I reach out to wood dude and see if he wants to watch Star Trek together, or do I leave it alone?

Comments

[yarrowkat]

totally reach out to him. more positive interactions! especially if you two can then have a conversation where you have different ideas and it's no big deal; that sounds worth repeating. :)

and yay for sunshine, and for that kid! and because you're doing supportive things for him around those interests, that kid is not alone, too, and gets to have a different experience. i love paying it forward!

[greenstorm]

This kind of interaction used to be so normal to me. It's weird to realize I've lost it. I am kind of terrified to interact with potentially-monogamous male folks, since I'm read as female and part of my poly stuff is so I don't have to figure out how to navigate the weird stuff around that.

I love it too. It's so good for my soul. It helps it rest.

[yarrowkat]

gender dynamics are so hard sometimes, yeah. if you had a positive experience where a cis-dude didn't get weird about it, would that help reset those concerns?

[greenstorm]

Not at all! I'm fairly confident in my ability to navigate these situations directly. Someone who may have a monogamous partner, though, with that partner having ideas about what is and isn't an acceptable line for monogamy: that's terrifying. And monogamous folks are unlikely to have had conversations about where exactly the lines in their relationship are. Is watching a movie with someone cheating? What about sitting side by side and touching while watching a movie? What about sharing emotions? What about smiling at each other too much? What about texting ten times in a day? So if dude had those conversations and was great at setting those boundaries with me rather than making me intuit them it would work out.

This falls under both "I hate mononormativity with a firey passion" and "I sidestepped having to learn these rules by joining non-normative communities and so I don't know them" with a generous helping of "I'm shitty at self-monitoring for when my behaviour crosses a societal line because I go by whether it feels sexy to me, not by whether it looks sexy to an observer"

[yarrowkat]

oh! okay, i think i wasn't seeing where the issue is and now i do. mononormativity is so silly and also harmful. not least because people don't have clear conversations about their edges & bourndaries & desires & needs and therefore can't always even distinguish what those things are.

i live in a pocket-universe where watching a movie with someone is never cheating, (given that if i/they promised to watch it with someone else, i/they have to be willing to watch it again)and sometimes i forget exactly how constrained/toxic mononormative lives can be.

[greenstorm]

Right! I just stepped out of that pocket universe and I know I'm outside of it, but haven't lived here very often before. So I'm super anxious about it. How likely is someone to have issues? How likely is a dude to push those lines and not inform me that we're pushing those lines? I have no idea!

[yarrowkat]

friendship/relationship calculus, urgh. there's no way to know without either hitting some of those issues, possibly in a sticky way, or having a super uncomfortable conversation for everybody. i don't know how to small town, either.

[greenstorm]

Yeah. And I'm feeling too old and tired to handle the "hey, I never thought about it that way, that's so cool" too. So there's really no win except not talking about it and things magically working out.

[yarrowkat]

i hear that. it's definitely work, onboarding people to the pocket universe, and not always worth it.

[greenstorm]

This is why we share pocket universes with other folks.

Heavy sigh.

[greenstorm]

As an interesting note, and maybe part of why I have so much trouble with the "no cis males" default for queer spaces and also why I have trouble with identifying as a woman at any time (I can ID as male internally comfortably a small percentage of the time) is that most of the gendered violence/enforcement that's happened to me has been from women. I trust a dude to mostly listen if I'm explicit about something and to go our own ways if that something isn't compatible, I just join the sea of non-prospects. I do not trust women to go their own ways if I do something they don't like. They will say something, and it will be cruel.

[yarrowkat]

unfortunately, that makes a lot of sense, that women would be the enforcers of a particular social/gender dynamics. ugh.