Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

D came along to lift club this morning! It's so much more fun when he's there.

This afternoon we had a snuggly nap.

When I woke up this evening, angelofthenorth was making amazing delicious food. It smelled so good. What a treat.

This evening, D and I had a couple beers and watched the Twins actually win a game! And explained things to angelofthenorth as they came up.

I didn't get as far as Sparkle on its first day today but I did go to the Village for a meal with a local disabled group (moat of whom are also queer/trans) which I'm adjacent to, with a friend who needed a PA.

(I was glad to learn that I can still queer this friend/PA binary; it used to make up my whole employment for like five years.)

I got to my friend's house before we went out. They had glitter on their face and offered me some. I love glitter but it was the kind of hot day where I started sweating as soon as I got out of the shower. After having to hustle over to their house, my face was so sweaty I told them not to bother putting it on my face because I'd just sweat it off. Of course I had a sleeveless t-shirt on (the one D bought me at last year's Sparkle!) so they offered to put it on my shoulders. Pretty soon both my upper arms were covered in pink, purple and blue glitter, it was great.

When I got home, D saw me and pointed this out of course (as well as my "painted for the first time in five years" fingernails (chrome with rainbow sparkles over them).

I said it'd be the perfect time to flex my biceps, now that they're extra gay.

"Guy-ceps!" he said. "Guy for guy-ceps."

I had a fun time tonight watching D play a very silly round of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, which then got surprisingly stressful and harrowing for a game about taking spaceships apart, and then had an eventful and actually sweet cutscene.

Short version:

• snuggling in bed with my lovely boyfriend, being the little spoon, holding my phone up for both of us to watch

( Long version: )

It's almost midnight and I'm too tired to say much about today but every part of it was brilliant, from the treats I bought my household at the Birmingham Bizarre Bazaar to the new friends we accidentally made there to the old friend we ran in to -- who luckily recognized us from the internet, because we never would have recognized him! -- to meeting up with B and being introduced to a polycule, to having dinner with D's sister and her awesome family, to good and much-needed conversations on the trip home.

I've gotten a lot of time with D this weekend and it's all been so great, I feel so lucky. Friday will be our sixth anniversary and it still never ceases to amaze me that I get to have my favorite person as my boyfriend.

Literally did the Distracted Boyfriend meme this morning. The glaring girlfriend was D trying to tell me how electricity generators work, and the girl I was distracted by was a HUGE cactus just on the side of the road

It was much taller than me, looked like it had lots of fingers growing up out of the ground, I wanted to touch it so bad but I didn't know how prickly it was.

D of course didn't notice this at the time but, when he found out about it, said if we see another one he'll tell me if its too prickly to touch. Aww now that is good accessibility support.

I understand that modern big-budget video game sound design is not optimized for the gamer's boyfriend who never plays video games. I'm annoyed about something in each new game and I accept that.

But when the gamer himself is yelling back at the NPCs' dialogue because it's nonsensical or even the opposite if its intended meaning...there might be an actual problem there.

This post andrewducker shared about good new years resolutions reminds me of the December when diffrentcolours said "This has been such a shit year, I don't know what the next will bring, so I'll limit my resolutions to [sexytime thing he wanted to do with me]." (This seemed wise to me so I similarly suggested a sexytime thing I wanted to do with him.)

It was wiser than I knew; we were saying this at the end of 2019 and it turned out any "normal" resolution would've had no chance.

(We've done mine (I think) just recently and still haven't quite managed his. It's fine if the resolutions take more than a year, too.)

Meanwhile, I determined that the end-of-year wrap-up for every app (app-up?) is getting out of control. This afternoon I got a notification from my bank app that says "2024 mobile wrap up. Here's how we have improved the app this year and what we're working on in 202..."

At first I thought it was gonna tell me what I spent my money on this year and that thought alone made me almost drop my phone in horror.

This afternoon I walked with diffrentcolours to the pharmacy to run an errand.

When we got there, I said "I didn't bring a mask so I'll wait for you outside."

He said, "Oh yeah, you don't have your man bag. On International Men's Day??"

#

Three years ago I wrote:

Today is the first International Men's Day where I have felt like it might be anything to do with me.

Thank you to the men and masc people, who've introspected about their gender and decided, whether cis or trans, to embrace manhood. You've shown me it isn't all toxic and unemotional and aggressive and hurtful to everyone it comes into contact with.

Thanks to those who've made me feel welcome with my new name this year and my increasingly defaulting to he/him pronouns.

By now, while I'm still relieved when strangers gender me correctly, I'm also pretty unremarkably a man in most contexts, and it feels comfy and nice.

#

A social media friend said:

So for #InternationalMensDay, I'm interested to hear what your favorite thing is about being a man?

Difficulty: it can't be ironic/a joke, and it can't be protecting someone else.

I wasn't sure how to answer.

Of course, fundamentally, my favorite thing about being a man is that I don't have the fucking static in my brain that it felt like I had all the time before I thought that I could be a man. (I still have other kinds of static in my brain, don't get me wrong. But that actually makes me all the more grateful that I don't have this one.) For me, manhood is a place of security and calm. For all my tendencies to impostor syndrome, I've never once thought "I'm not really a man" since I started thinking it. I've never thought or said "I am bad at being a man" (except in very obvious goofiness, as above) whereas I used to say and think "I am bad at being a girl/woman" all the time.

My favorite thing is probably embracing the dad vibes in a way that feels different when I did the same things (outside chores, sports fan, no fashion sense, inflicting pedantry and bad jokes on perhaps-unwilling audiences, etc.) as an alleged woman. There was something transgressive in how these things were perceived when I did them which never sat right with me. I thought it was because those things shouldn't be so gendered (and of course I was right) but now that people's perception of me doing them is different, I can tell that a part of me feels better now that I fit in to the pattern rather than having to be a surprise or an outlier in the ways that I most easily express my personality and my values.

What I actually said is "it makes my relationships with men gay instead of straight," which I worried was too flippant an answer for someone who said he didn't want irony or jokes (it's not exactly either, but I wouldn't blame someone for thinking it was).

So I also talked about clothes (I know so many trans fems who delight in the millions of colors and styles now open to them but I found it stressful and miserable; I actually find it incredibly soothing to have the more limited color palettes and other options of mainstream men's clothes) and accidentally started a conversation with two other trans mascs who are apparently about my age because we all have strong and negative opinions about cap sleeves and low-rise jeans.

If anyone would have understood it where I am, I'd have been Tim Walz for Halloween because I swear that guy looks just like I'm gonna look in 20 years.

(Instead, D and I were robots this year.)