So, the question of the day seems to be whether i prefer awkwardly and ineffectually flirting in person, or awkwardly and indistinguishably flirting via instant messenger.
Not much of a question, huh? Meanwhile, someone just found my website using my full name and “krisis” as search terms. Hmm… someone checking up on their awkward suitor? That’s what IP logs were made for…
129.25.17.# drexel.edu @ 4:28:53 pm, who are you?
flirt
All this kvetching about things related to my (ever-precarious) gender role and identity may have to do with a date i may have tonight. May. It may be a preliminary evaluative “check-out-the-goods” opportunity where i’m supposed to try my best to be coherent while maintaining a vague sense of romanticism. Or, it might be two friends going out to dinner. Except, i think it could be a date… you know, Friday Night and all that. But, i don’t want to assume. So, it’s really out of my hands. I have nothing to do with it. I just need to shave and shower and show up looking pretty. Well… pretty for a guy. You know what i mean.
Thus all the anxiety about the razor. And the fairy.
Okay, i hate the phone. Got that? Hate it. If i ask you for your number, i really don’t want to have an at length phone conversation where i can make a complete ass out of myself for an entire hour without being able to do anything endearingly cute. This is not to say that i don’t want to talk, it’s just to say that it’s hard to have a meaningful silence on the telephone and so i fill them all with a ton of meaningless blather until you contrive a reason to hang up on me.
Not that she contrived a reason to hang up on me; i’m not that inept.
Yes, this means i got up the guts to pick up a phone and call her. No, i do not have an actual time for our lunch date. Yes, i suspect i am absolutely moronic enough on the telephone that any tiny inkling of attraction she might have had has now been flushed down the toilet. Yes, this means i have to call her again some other time if i ever want to see her.
Girls. What was wrong with asexuality, again?
So, this is as out of order as the rest of my life right now, fittingly, because i got all the way out of New Hope and into the umpteen hundred magic cards on my bedroom floor and skipped Saturday. So, that whole thread on masturbation will have to get resolved later. So.
Saturday.
In Autumn, hardly a week goes by without a party, and having been here for three years i’ve noticed that fall quarter falls into a neatly distributed schedule of nighttime affairs. Welcome Back! for returning people, and then Welcome Freshmen! to meet new girls, and then Kegger (part 1)!, and then Halloween, Supertech, Pre-Play, Cast Party, Post-Play, et cetera ad nauseum. Yes, i am a social fucking butterfly, because i wind up at all of them one way or another. But, anyhow, this past Saturday was Supertech and so we appeared at the corresponding party already quite inebriated from hitting the house liquor from last weekend. At some point before or during the inebriation process i was informed that one of the “new girls” seems to have a little thing for men of my type, so not only was i slightly drunk, i was slightly drunk with a mission!
Point being, not only does someone quite apparently have a crush on me, but she’s, like, sorta kinda really hot. And listens to good music. And has this really hot roommate… oh, wait, didn’t i mention that i had previously declared her really hot roommate the only Freshmen worth flirting with? Such is life. But, rest assured, they’re both really hot.
Please also rest assured that i’m not pulling a Selina on you and that i am, in fact, not currently at this girl’s place blogging around the issue. Here i am, blogging in the issue, tracking it all over my easily locatable page for all to see. Blog blog blog.
So, i don’t know, if she found my portrayal of a drunken lout charming i’m apparently just her type. Heaven only knows what that’s supposed to mean. As soon as i figure it out i’ll tell you…
Scattered scattered scattered.
Yesterday was all about scattering myself like a dandelion in the wind to see where i wound up. I didn’t like many of the places, and so i kept scattering again and again until i had nothing left but sleep, and so that’s where i finally wound up.
Some things amaze me. There was a girl flirting with me, and she seemed nice enough but to me she was very unattractive. She was thin, and pretty, and talkative, and everything — but she absolutely didn’t mean anything to me at all. She took a hold of my necklace and asked me if i knew how to hold the reigns of a horse and i found my body suddenly sliding out from under me and two minutes later i was locked in a bathroom hiding.
The funny thing is, other guys at the party were eager to flirt with her… in fact, nearly all of them were, considering that she was blonde and single. I just couldn’t understand it; am i broken somehow, that i’m a boy yet i don’t immediately want to even so much as kiss someone if i’m not implicitly interested in them? Am i supposed to want to kiss just for the sake of kissing, and to see where it leads?
Do you know that some boys really still tally up their sexual partners like proverbial notches on a bed-frame? I always assumed that teevee-bred frat-boys and other such miscreants did it all of the time, but it’s a strange otherworldly feeling to be in a room full of boys who are having that conversation where i keep thinking… why would i want to give some of myself to so many different people? I can’t even begin to talk about the whole ordeal because it wholly involved the private-me and not the internet-me, but what i can say is that there is someone who i used to quite like as a person to talk to who i now can’t even look at because he disgusts me on such an inherent level that my stomach is currently churning. It’s not just sex… it’s disregard for self-worth. And personal safety.
In the same way that i never thought of my own friends as those sorts of boys, i never saw the Players’ dating habits as indicative of college as a whole. We are thespians, after all. However, suddenly there are all of these new girls floating around and i am old enough that i am separate from them at the parties we attend, and they make me wonder. Are they flirting with nearly everyone because they like the sudden power they have over men? Do they have their own notches and bedposts and bragging conversations that i am blissfully unaware of? Or, are they somehow hypnotized by the plain old bunch of us just because we’re older and have apartments and wet-bars and roles in plays?
I wonder if i acted anything like they do when i first got here… i always thought i had found my real friends for the first time in my life, but maybe it was just that i had finally found a social structure that i could weave my way into. Maybe for me it wasn’t the beer and the pot and the escape from the dormitories so much as the feelings that i was braiding myself into a continuing history that had existed before me and would go on without me, and that forever-after a smattering of those rambling tales of wild weekend nights would inevitably include me.
If you don’t know me in person the point of that whole diatribe might have been lost on you, so i’ll lay it out simply.
I like girls. I’ve liked girls since i was in prekindergarten. I am more often than not head over heels for someone. That’s part of why this page is called what it’s called. But, in person i do not come off as masculine, and i am not forwardly aggressive with women. I do not turn around to look at nice asses, i do not generally leer at women in movies, and i don’t make comments about who i’d like to bang and why. Furthermore, because of various experiences i’ve had in the past, i enjoy subverting gender roles. I think it’s funny to flirt with boys at parties if there’s no one worth seriously flirting with, because i inherently know that i’m not flirting seriously. I will make comments about a man who’s attractive because i don’t feel as though i’m objectifying him by doing so. I have a wholly different operational mechanism for interacting with women.
The point was not that i want to flirt with men, or kiss men, or anything of the kind. The point was that everyone immediately assaulted me for not having kissed a man, and it made me want to slink up the stairs to lock my door behind me. If i was belittled to such a degree in that situation, what would i have been made to feel like if i had ever kissed a man? What if i had experimented once with another boy in my youth? What if instead of just feeling incredulous and belittled i felt marginalized? My friends are of a great mix of gender, race, and sexual preference, but somehow i’m still uncomfortable more times than not, and it’s not because of anything i’m doing… or not doing, as the case might be.