Back in MY DAY...

I hesitate to call myself an 'old school gamer'--I don't really even think of myself as a gamer much anymore, either, because I've gotten too busy and too broke to really be as into games as I used to be. The thing with me is, I tend to go through long periods of not paying any attention at all to something I love, then long periods of complete obsession with it. My interests seldom wane, and I still love everything all the same as I did before, just that when I'm interested in something it tends to completely take up my entire brain, leaving no room for anything else--so I have to cycle through them one at a time, until I've had my fill, and then go to something else. It's hard to explain.

And also that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I didn't actually get my first gaming console until I was fifteen--it was a Playstation 2, when it was still a thing but after it wasn't quite so new and shiny and my parents could merit spending money on it. It wasn't even technically mine, but my brother's. So I'm a bit behind the times. Though I did, whenever possible, play any video games I could from Super Nintendo onward at friend's houses. If someone had a game system, I was their best friend. Yes, I was a friendship whore for video games. What of it?

I wasn't totally deprived of games. I played computer games for years, which my parents didn't seem to have a problem with. I think because my dad was a computer engineer by trade and so my parents--or at least my dad--did view computers as being a legitimate tool and not an engine of Satan used to trap kids in gaming addictions. Or something like that. Whatever the reason, my parents were okay with me playing games on the computer so that's where the bulk of my gaming started. I played the Sims and all the other Maxis games, now long forgotten--Sim Ant, Sim Park, Sim Safari, Sim Tunes, Sim Tower, Sim Planet. Strangely, one of the few I haven't played... is Sim City. I don't even know why. I also played Age of Empires and World of Warcraft when it was still a map-based real-time-strategy. My favourite from the series will probably always be Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Mostly because you could blow up the sheep and pigs and seals by clicking on them a bunch of times. (Though I only ever blew up with pigs because I thought the sheep and the seals were too cute. This is how my mind works all the time--to this day my strategy for playing Pokemon and picking my teams is based mostly on which Pokemon I find the cutest and/or prettiest. No, I am not making this up. In my defense, it's served me very well.)

Again, my parent's mental block against all things video game only seemed to be associated with console games. Which makes it hilariously ironic that most of my Super Nintendo experiences were in my maternal grandmother's house. I don't even know why she had this since I never saw her playing it and I didn't have any cousins on that side until I was older, but Nana had a Super Nintendo that she would let my brother and me play. Since Super Nintendo used to come with a copy of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt, that's what I played. It was awesome. When I was eleven, the Pokemon craze was in full swing and it was still at a time when my relatives were sometimes remembering to send gifts on Giftmas and that I actually had a birthday; after saving the money for a year, I had enough to buy my very own Game Boy. And a copy of Pokemon Blue. I still have it. I played the absolute shit out of that game.

I've retained a habit from the days of having a Game Boy: I am an obsessive, compulsive game-saver.

I can't think of a single handheld game platform in the last several years that doesn't have a lithium or otherwise integrated battery. They come with chargers that specifically charge the built-in rechargeable battery, which is a good idea because it means you're not constantly buying batteries for your freaking game. I'm sure I sent a fuckton of money on batteries back then, much more than I even do on batteries for my vibrator--which should also tell you something about how I prioritize my needs. Everyone who remembers these days remembers what it feels like to be in the middle of something really fucking important and then your fucking battery died. Almost invariably as you were about to catch a Legendary Pokemon. Or, like, kick Ganon's ass in Zelda. (Why the shit is the game called 'Zelda'? That's like calling the Mario franchise 'Princess Peach'.) You don't have that problem with rechargeable integrated batteries. You just plug your game in when the battery gets low and keep playing without having to interrupt anything. You used to be able to buy A/C adapters and rechargeable batteries for Game Boys and shit, which I actually did have for my Game Boy Pocket, but the problem with those was that if your battery ran down and you needed to recharge, the Game Boy would reset if you plugged it in. In order to plug it in, you had to save and turn it off anyway.

So, yeah. I am the most obsessive-compulsive game-saver in the world. Like, every ten minutes I'm saving and I'm one of those loons who saves two or three times at a go just in case I was imagining it and didn't actually save successfully the first time.

It's all because those old game platforms could fucking die on you.

As glad as I am to have rechargeable internal batteries in my laptop and Game Boys (including, I might add, my Game Boy Advance SP), I was really peeved when I was trying to buy a new digital camera a couple of years ago. I specifically wanted a camera that didn't have its own internal battery. I actually wanted a camera that took regular batteries and I was really happy to find one. I don't even think they make any like that anymore--I bought mine in 2008 or 2009. Even though you can be really bored when your Game Boy or iPod or whatever dies on you because you didn't recharge it and then you can't plug it in anyway, it always infuriated me more to have my camera die on me. At least with a camera that operates on a couple of regular old AA batteries, I can just go into any convenience store or something and get new ones. So I'm never bothered when my batteries die because it's easy to replace them.

But dead batteries turned me into a compulsive game-saver.

And I think that drives a lot of people fucking insane!

Slow the Fuck Down!!

I think everyone is put off by people we perceive as 'moving too fast' in relationships--people who get too attached too quickly, people who say 'I love you!' before you're comfortable with that level of emotional investment, people who talk marriage and children after the second date. It depends on what you, personally, think is an acceptable rate of progression, naturally; but when someone surpasses it, regardless of your criteria, most of us are immediately put off and want to run in fear. It's one of those universally agreed-upon deal-breakers you see across the board in advice on the subject of dating--everything, from 'GQ' to 'Cosmo', whether the target audience is men or women, young or old, agrees that when someone is moving along too fast for you, it's time to break it off.

For me especially, this is a big deal. I have a much more intense negative reaction to this, in no small part because I myself take a very long time to establish those kinds of close emotional bonds with people. 'I love you' is something it takes a while for me to work up to, and while I have no trouble not being the first person to say it, when someone says it too early for my liking my immediate instinctive response is to flee. I very nearly did this with Max; he told me he loved me nearly a year before I went out with him, which frankly scared the shit out of me. But by then (lucky for him--and, it turns out, for me as well) I was attached to him as a friend so I told him that it was inappropriate and made me uncomfortable and he apologized and didn't bring the subject up again until I said it was okay.

Mostly I just think I come pre-wired not to want people who get that attached so quickly. I have never been and especially cuddly person, and, thanks to my upbringing and everything it's done to turn me into a complete emotional clusterfuck, I do not bond with people easily on any level. Establishing a friendship is hard enough for me. Establishing a romantic relationship is extremely difficult and frustrating for everybody involved because it's hard to make progress and regression is much too easy and much to excessive. Fortunately, Boything is as patient as they come. Yay.

But anyway. This is a story about the first time someone creeped me the fuck out by moving way too fast. It's a true story, and to be honest it probably has a bit to do with the fact that I am as wary of fast-movers as I am. The situation made me unbelievably uncomfortable. While I wouldn't like it any more today than I did then, neither would I freak out like I did from this. It put me off of dating, and guys in general, for a few years--mostly because I was young, inexperienced, and neurotic. The memory still makes me cringe.

The summer I was fifteen, I went with my mom and a friend of hers to a public pool in the friend's area. It was too crowded to do any actual swimming unless you wanted to bump into an awful lot of people. There were kids my age hanging out in groups, but nobody I knew and being shy I've never felt comfortable walking up to strangers and saying hello. Especially not strangers in packs. So boredom set in. A guy about a year or two older than me was paddling around and encountering the same no-room-to-swim problem. He was splashing about kind of awkwardly, like he was trying to show off but had nothing to actually show. And he was talking to himself, loudly, in what I assumed was an attempt to invite someone to answer him. It was a bit odd behaviour but didn't stand out. Eventually he stopped trying to swim around and came and sat up on the edge of the pool near me and we started a conversation.

'Tom' introduced himself to me, and straight away did something weird: he took my offered handshake hand and kissed the back of it like we were a Jane Austen adaptation. I pulled my hand away but didn't say anything; I don't even recall THINKING anything except that it was really, really strange. I was probably too shocked to think anything else because how do you anticipate that? We talked about movies and books and video games, and he seemed more than slightly awkward. His tone and manner of speaking, his body language, the way he was trying to maintain eye contact with me but only succeeded in leering, and the fact that he kept scooting much too close to me for comfort all seemed odd but didn't stand out as immediately problematic. After a little while the crowd thinned somewhat and Tom suggested we try swimming again.

I hoped being in the water would keep Tom from getting so close, but he was right back on me. He tried putting his hands on my shoulders and my back and I shook him off. Not knowing how to tell him I was uncomfortable, I asked him what he thought he was doing in hopes that he'd get the hint.

"I want to teach you to swim," Tom said. "So we can swim together."

"But I already know how to swim," I pointed out.

"Oh," he said sadly. "I just really need to hold you. Can I hold your hand so we can swim together?"

Even though I didn't want to, I said yes. (Why, Young!Me? WHY??) He put one arm around my shoulder and held me way, way too close and held my hand in his free one. This lasted all of about twenty seconds before I shook him off, pretending to see something on the bottom of the pool while trying to come up with an excuse to leave. All of this was starting to feel very weird and REALLY uncomfortable for me. I had no reason or obligation to stay or put up with it, and should have left, but I didn't know what to do. I blame being fifteen.

"You know, can I tell you something?" Tom asked.

"What?"

"I think I love you."

Finally my primitive little proto-human teenage brain snapped to attention and I immediately climbed out of the pool with the excuse that I had to go check in with my mom. I had every intention of hiding behind her until we could go home.


Somehow, Tom actually found where we were sitting (it was a really big pool complex so he must have been really searching) and tried to get my attention, walking way close and waving awkwardly right in front of my face. I ignored him, pretending to be engrossed in my book and with a convenient set of headphones. (They weren't plugged in, but he didn't know that. I find earbuds or headphones make a good prop to make people think you don't notice them, assuming you're listening to music and can't hear and are distracted.)


I'm almost completely sure that there was something wrong with Tom. A few years after this, my mom got a job working with kids who have mild to moderate autism; I used to go in every now and then to help out and those kids displayed mannerisms very, very similar to Tom's quirks. It would certainly explain why he acted the way he did and why he was so awkward and inappropriate. It doesn't make the situation any less creepy, however. You'd think his parents and teachers or guardians or someone would try and teach him that he can't say stuff like that to people he's only just met--when you have a kid with special needs, you really do have to accommodate those needs as best as you can. Part of that is learning to live with the various quirks and issues. Part of it also involves teaching them that certain behaviours, however innocent they might think the behaviours to be, are not acceptable. The guy was probably sixteen or seventeen (I didn't find out)--someone should have taught him better.


Oh well. It creeped me out then and is still weird to remember, but I'm not emotionally traumatized from it.


As a postscript: a few more years later, when I was still in my manga phase, I was browsing the shelves at a bookstore. I'm used to occasionally seeing the most radiantly socially inept guys hanging out in the manga/anime/graphic-novel section of bookstores. They don't often know how to strike up conversations so occasionally they will talk to themselves in hopes of enticing me (or another girl in the vicinity) into saying hello first. Sound familiar? So seeing a guy walking the aisles wondering aloud where the series he wanted was... that wasn't unusual. Except it struck a cord in my memory, particularly as I remembered Tom's particular way of doing this. (It involved being very dramatic and saying stuff like, "I'm never swimming underwater again!" and, "There's what I was looking for!!") As well as the sound of his voice.

Despite the fact that, yes, the situation was a very uncomfortable memory for me, I didn't (and still don't) remember exactly what he looked like. He was semi-dark-complected with dark hair and eyes but that's hardly a descriptive memory.

Even so, I was pretty damn sure that this was Tom and my 'flight' response kicked in right then and there.

I didn't buy any books that day.

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

Today, for the first time, it struck me that I come off as being very nonchalant and comfortable writing about the mistreatment I suffered growing up. Most of the time I'm not especially bothered or triggered or anything from writing them. By and large, singular memories--even the bad ones--don't really upset me to talk about. To a lot of people, this seems to suggest that they haven't had the negative ramifications on my life that I claim. Because, if that were the case, wouldn't talking about it be uncomfortable?

Well, no, it's not. Not usually. A few of them are uncomfortable to think about, but for the most part I haven't written about them and they're some of the more extreme cases. This does not, however, invalidate the fact that I still bear the psychological scars. I'm not exaggerating or faking. They are very much there and very much a real force in my life.

Just because abuse isn't extreme doesn't mean it doesn't count as abuse. My parents didn't chain me up in the garage or anything; I wasn't sold into prostitution; I wasn't beaten with cooking implements except for wooden spoons, which break. A lot of people had--and continue to have--much worse done to them. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would have seen my situation and dreamed of having a life that good. A lot of people, upon hearing that I consider the treatment I experienced at my parent's hands abusive, are quick to snap at me and point out that there are people who have so much worse and I have no right to complain.

But someone always has it worse. Almost no matter what happens to you, someone somewhere at some point is experiencing something even worse.

We don't tell people who are upset over a breakup that they shouldn't be crying because someone else's partner cheated with that person's sister and then married her and moved to Brazil but not before selling the family business and clearing out their bank accounts into private offshore accounts, leaving the dumped party alone and penniless with a bad case of herpes.

We don't tell people who've lost their job that they can't be upset about it because other people have been fired from their jobs and been jobless longer and have no money and their jobs are being made obsolete anyway so it's not like they're likely to get hired for anything more than minimum wage ever again.

We don't tell people diagnosed with cancer that they don't have a right to be devastated because it's only very early colon cancer, for goodness sake, they can usually nip that in the bud and you go on to live a normal life--there are people who have cancer in their hearts or their brains, so you with your pathetic teensy tush tumours don't have anything to bitch about.

Someone, somewhere, has it worse than you. But it doesn't invalidate your own negative experiences. It doesn't deny you the right to be upset. Going by the 'you-can't-be-sad-other-people-have-it-worse' mentality, nobody has a right to be depressed unless they're the most unfortunate person in the world. Which is dumb.

Abuse needn't have been extreme in order to be abuse. It's taken me a very long time to come to grips with the fact that what I experienced was abuse. It wasn't something I considered until recently, in part because I knew that other people were treated way worse than I was. Feeling all depressed about it was silly because it wasn't so bad.

As far as the negative experiences in my life that I have no trouble talking about go, they're not anything serious or horrifying enough to have been especially upsetting on their own. No one of them--again, apart from a few--would have, alone, caused the lasting emotional damage I'm stuck dealing with. But when they all combine, they're greater than their parts--a behemoth of bad experiences from which I have never recovered.

Yes, I survived. No, nothing seriously terrible happened.

But just because it wasn't that bad doesn't mean any of it was okay.

A Change of Heart

As I've mentioned before, I've known the boything, Max, for some years and was aware that he had extremely strong feelings for me for over a year before I decided to give him a chance. Of course, the biggest reason I didn't want to date him sooner was simply because I didn't feel the same way about him. He's sweet and cute, he's smart, he's funny, but as far as appearances go he isn't really my type. (Yes, I'm that shallow--most people are.) And as smart as he is, he also doesn't technically have any more than an eighth grade education, which sometimes makes it hard to talk to him on the level I'd like to. He's a quick learner, though, and remembers most of what new information I give him. He also seemed to be moving a little quickly--he told me he loved me when I still told him I wasn't interested in dating him, and he later revealed that he felt that way just a few months after we met. Frankly that kind of shit scares me stupid and had he told me that when it started I would have dropped him immediately because I don't like it when people become that intense that quickly. This isn't his normal M/O, however. He was just as shocked as I was that I'd managed to circumvent all of his 'rules' about relationships, that he fell so hard so quickly, and is almost completely unable to control himself around me in a way he has never experienced with anyone else. I think it's flattering and cute now, but at the time I was a little overwhelmed and it was one of many things that sort of made me wary of him as a potential partner.

But he grew on me over time and I started to become very fond of him in spite (and sometimes because) of some of these things. And this happened well before I said I'd go out with him. For a long time I wasn't sure I wanted to give him a chance, because of another thing that differed between us that I didn't know if I could cope with. Or, more appropriately, without.

Max is monogamous. I am not.

I was pretty aware that if I started a relationship with him, I'd be in it for a very long time and he was much too monogamous to be into anything like the polyamory I prefer or even a threesome, putting us in the absurd position of a guy who didn't want a threesome and a girl who did. I am also for all intents and purposes, bisexual--I think 'pansexual' describes me better but that's neither here nor there--and being in a completely monogamous relationship with a man I'd be deprived of a large facet of my sexual identity, which I wasn't sure I could be okay with.

Eventually I did tell him all of this because I wanted to be upfront. Being with him would mean I couldn't be with anyone else, male or female, and I wasn't sure I was capable of being happy with a big chunk of my personality and sexuality essentially banned. Max was understandably upset but took it shockingly well; he figured something like that was going to hold me back and acknowledged that it could potentially present an insurmountable obstacle. While a fantasy threesome was nice, he couldn't entertain the notion of a threesome. He didn't think he could be in that situation, even though it wasn't 'cheating' and he was sort of intrigued/into/turned on by the whole thing. He wouldn't be able to have sex with another woman, he said.

So we stalemated for a while with that standing between us. And then I just went, fuck it. I really like this guy, I've grown really attached to him, he adores me and he treats me really well, and he's patient and kind and extremely understanding about all the problems that other people think are too much to deal with. I told him I couldn't promise it would be permanent, and that I wasn't sure if I could be happy in the long term restricted to one partner only and unable to express a big part of my identity. But I wanted to give it a go. The months came and went and I got even more attached. Just like the sappy girly-girl I never thought I was, I fell stupid in love with this man and decided that I could live without certain things in my life if it meant I could have him.

I'm an extremely flirtatious person and Max is totally okay with this. He really doesn't mind me flirting with or kissing or making gropes with other people. Especially girl-people. That he thinks is hot. Which was frustrating for me for a while because I knew he found the idea of me with another woman appealing but didn't want to actually do anything about it. Being able to get some of my sexual frustration out of my system by being openly hitting on and kissing and fondling other women--enough that I didn't feel trapped or deprived like I thought I might--was a lot easier to cope with. I could mess around with some other ladies, then go home with Max to get downright deviant. It's not sex with a woman or comparable to sex with a woman by any stretch of the imagination, but it worked for me.

Again, the guy is pretty sublimely accommodating when it comes to me. He's extremely easygoing in general, as am I, so things that are typically major no-nos in other people's relationships are totally unremarkable and acceptable in ours. He's genuinely not at all bothered by the fact that, yes, I make obvious sexual overtures with other people right in front of him. He doesn't care and isn't jealous. He knows I adore him, and at the end of the day knows who I'm going home with and who I'm going to bed with. So what does it matter what I do otherwise? I feel quite fortunate that he has this open, accepting attitude. It would be much too much for most other people to want to deal with in a partnership.

What's turned out to be a major perk on his end is the fact that my sexuality is more or less an iceberg--only a very small portion of it is actually visible, and most of it is hidden away and it's a lot more sizable and complicated than most people are aware. He knew pretty quickly after meeting me that I was most definitely into some kinky stuff (it's probably pretty obvious, especially at the MDRF in a setting where I am unusually open and uninhibited and extremely frisky), but as more and more has come out he's been frequently very surprised at just how much and how kinky it all was. Some of these aren't things you just dump on someone all at once when you get together and trust that they'll be able to sort it all out and make sense of it and accept all of it right away. So it comes out a little bit at a time--certain things I wanted to try, the BDSM thing, that I wanted him to wear a collar, that I wanted to have a go at him with a strap-on. Most of them he's been quite delighted with. Others he's said no to. Among the things to which the answer was 'no' was the idea of a threesome--me and him and another girl. I knew it going in, and while I might have sometimes felt like I was missing out, I never felt like a big part of myself was missing.

Sometimes I'd talk about things I wanted to do with other women, but for the most part I didn't because I knew it was just going to potentially frustrate me because I wasn't going to be able to do it. And anyway, we've got handcuffs and spreader bars to try.

A few days ago I was feeling tremendously frisky all day, which tends to manifest as dirty text messages and near pornographic phone calls or Skype calls. I'm not exactly squeamish when it comes to sex and sexuality--by now that should be pretty fucking clear--but when I'm feeling unusually horny and wound up and stuff I do tend to talk in a way I don't otherwise talk and about things I don't otherwise discuss. Sometimes I use words or slang terms I don't like or never use. Sometimes I do stuff (like masturbate loudly over the phone) I wouldn't do the rest of the time. Sometimes I express a desire for a sexual role or experience that I don't normally want. Like wanting to be the sub every now and then. By and large, I'm the dominant one in this relationship and he's totally cool with that--except sometimes I just really want to be held down and ravaged. He's even more totally cool with that. Fortunately, the days I feel a bit subby tend to coincide with the days he wakes up extremely sexually aggressive and wants to pin me down and fuck me raw.

Which is how I started talking about threesomes again. Because I know it's not something he'd actually want to do, I don't really mention it very much, but for whatever reason that day I just decided to plant filthy mental images in his head and talked about how badly I, say, wanted to watch him go down on another woman. Maybe while I was over her face and she was doing the same to me. The hypothetical scenario just snowballed from there until I'd expressed a desire for just about every single solitary conceivable configuration of the female/male/female threesome.

And my god, was he into it.

Once the fog of lust had cleared we talked about it seriously.

It turns out that Max was thinking about this for a while. Even though jealousy is not and hasn't been a feature in the relationship thus far (and it probably won't be), he said that his initial refusal of the whole 'threesome' thing was because he didn't know if he'd be all right with involving someone else sexually, knowing that I could equally develop feelings for another woman. Or really anyone else. That he really wanted to give it a go but felt like he shouldn't want to give it a go. All of which he acknowledged as being irrational. Part of it is that I think he's a lot more secure with me now than he was at first--we've been together a while, we're comfortable with each other, and we're aware that there are certain things that are and aren't likely or even possible for the other. At this point, he knows I love him to bits. I'm pretty stuck on him and wouldn't be tempted away just by bringing a cute girl into the bedroom every now and then. That I don't fall for people that easily and am not likely to do so just because I boinked someone.

Basically, he's had more or less a total change of heart. He said he had no reason not to try it at least once because he really did want to give it a go--just that he wasn't sure if the partnership could weather it or that he could sideline what he calls his 'morals' in order to do something he's been taught isn't okay but that he has no emotional or psychological objections to doing and really wants to try. I know that sounds weird, by the way.

A regular fixture of our relationship as a whole, romantic and sexual and platonic together, is that I keep breaking all his rules. He never moves as fast with women as he did with me; he has a lot more self-control, sexually and romantically, with everyone else than he's able to muster with me; things like 'puppy eyes' and kittenish seduction that girls often do to get reactions from men don't do anything for him and even though he thinks it's cute/sexy, it doesn't 'work' on him the way it does on others except when I do it. One of my favourite stories with this one in particular is about the day we met. He used to boast a bit that he had phenomenal self-control and to be honest, he really does. Just not with me. He said he was totally immune to every girl and woman's 'puppy eyes' face--as cute as they always were, he could still resist them. The girls in the group all confirmed that that was indeed the case.

Well, I can't let a challenge like that go. So I gave him my 'puppy eyes' and he immediately melted and was totally enchanted. We'd said just a few words to each other before then--one of the literal first things I ever did to him was break his rules. It set the tone for the relationship as it would later develop.

Anyway.

The conversation got all steamy again but actually stayed serious. We told each other what it was we wanted from this hypothetical threesome. What was expected, what would be okay, what would be unacceptable. A lot of it was stuff like, 'So Axiom, what if I do ABC while she does XYZ to you?' 'That would be awesome but if we position it a little differently, she can do XYZ to me while I do the same to her,' '...score!! If I was gonna have a threesome this is exactly the kind of stuff I would want to happen.'

It was great how easily and quickly all our expectations fell into place and lined up. We do get along pretty effortlessly and harmoniously most of the time. I know at this point I'm basically spoiled because this particular relationship is moving along so effortlessly. Hurdles will happen, but I dunno when or how I might deal with them. In the meantime, I'm just going to have crazy dirty sex with him and then fall asleep drooling on his back.

So, yeah. I just want to get the know any potential second woman before I say whether or not I'll be comfortable with her; I don't really mind being a sub but I don't want to be restrained in any way in this particular situation. Max said he's comfortable with me and this potential third partner doing whatever we like with one another, and with us doing anything we like with him, but that he wouldn't be able to have vaginal intercourse with her because he wouldn't be able to entirely circumvent his mental blocks. (He knows this is silly, as well, but it's a harmless hangup and I'm not at all bothered by it.)

Then the conversation turned into a sex log again and I spent the night with a hand in my pants on Skype with him.

Ultimately, I don't especially care one way or the other whether a threesome happens or not or how many times it happens. I'm hugely excited and happy and insanely aroused that he genuinely wants to do it, and isn't just putting up with the idea because he knows it'll make me happy. If that were the case, i wouldn't let him go any further. If we do do it, that's awesome!! If we don't, that's perfectly okay as well.

Because I love him, and he's a lot more important to me.

Would be all kind of hot if we did, though.

You're Doing it Wrong (and here's why)

It drives me nuts when people consistently make statements or in some other way incorporate faulty beliefs or incorrect facts that I know 100% for certain aren't right. I don't like being wrong, so other people should be equally adverse to it! This is just one of many things that drives me nuts because I know it's wrong--and why.

When movies, TV shows, books, or anything else use the plot device of longtime childhood friends who realize their attraction and fall in love and get married and live happily ever after. I hate it when people do this because, for all its more or less constant use in the media, this doesn't actually happen in real life. This isn't a case of me going, 'Oh, well, I don't like this so no one else should!' but a legitimate case of there being actual scientific theories (which are, by the way, incredibly fucking sound and completely correct, just like the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution) and evidence to back it up.

And we can all thank the nineteenth-century researcher Edvard Westermarck for working it out.

His theory, first published in 1891, was named the Westermarck Effect for him and simply states that you are programmed to be repulsed by anyone you grow up alongside. Westermarck developed his hypothesis by studying Israeli tribes who raised their children communally in groups according to age--kind of like grade school. He found that marriages were almost invariably between people who did not belong to the same age group--subsequent research has found this to be true across the board. Everywhere. It doesn't matter where you come from, your culture, or your sexual preferences. You are more or less guaranteed not to be in any way sexually or romantically interested in people you grew up with. Of course there are exceptions, but these are, well, exceptional--few, far between, and abnormal. Think about the kids you went to school with, especially if you lived in a very small community where you had the same classmates your entire school career. How often did students from the same grade become and remain romantically involved? I remember very few; when it happened, it was between students who were new or students who simply hadn't known each other long. And that's all Westermarck's Effect manifesting.

Nobody knows exactly why this happens but the general consensus is that it's some sort of psycho-evolutionary safety net designed to discourage us from inbreeding, which prevents us from perpetuating bad genes and destroying our genetic variability and doing inconvenient things like going extinct. Through as an aside, as genetic variability goes humans are pretty freaking similar. 99.9% of all our DNA is identical--the .1% that varies is what's used in genetic testing. Whether you like it or not, you are pretty goddamn closely related to everyone on the face of the planet. You have more genetically in common with the tribes of the Amazon Basin or anyone else (including, it's worth pointing out, your romantic and sexual partners, all of them) than, for example, any two chimpanzees who live in the same troupe. Again, nobody is quite sure why this is. The most likely answer is that at some point in our semi-recent (within the last few hundred thousand to a million years) history there was some kind of mass extinction event that wiped out all but a few of the humans on earth. It was either pure dumb luck or these lucky survivors had some unknown and unidentified genetic trait that offered an advantage against--or protection from--whatever killed everyone else. Either way, they were all probably closely related, meaning that only their very close DNA survived.

But still, that .1% of our DNA is what stops us from dying out and evolution is quite clever and has a lot of safety nets in place designed to stop you from committing incest and creating creepy mutant offspring with webbed feet. Think about your opposite-sex siblings, if you have them--or someone you know who has opposite-sex siblings. Especially if you're a girl bitching about your brothers. What's a common complaint? That their brothers smell disgusting. But unrelated people don't notice it. Why? Because you're actually having a negative hormonal reaction to your siblings. Your body is programmed to be disgusted by the scent of your siblings so you're less likely to have sex with them.

The thing about the Westermarck Effect is that it isn't tied to your biological siblings, as Westermarck's research in the Israeli tribes confirmed. It just so happens that the children you are most likely to be the closest to in your youth are also most likely going to be close relatives--siblings, half-siblings, cousins, and others with whom it would be reproductively dicey to have children. But being a psychological--rather than physical--effect, it makes no distinction between adopted siblings and blood relatives. If you grow up with them, you find them sexually repulsive.

Even the places where the Westermarck Effect seems to have totally failed to take hold, it still often does a good job as evidence that the theory is correct. Blood siblings who have never met--adopted or raised separately--who meet later in life sometimes develop a sexual attraction to one another. It's because, having never known one another in childhood, the Westermarck Effect never took hold.

It doesn't last forever. It appears that, on average, the Westermarck Effect dissipates by the time you're six or so, so anyone who came into your life after that is less likely to seem so romantically off-putting. It seems kind of young--after all, siblings and cousins can be much further apart than that in age. Just one of mine is less than seven years younger than me. But the point still stands: if you grow up around someone, you think of them as siblings, and as such you unconsciously reject them as sexual partners because your brain is trying to make sure you don't do something stupid, like boink your cousins.

Romances between childhood friends can and do happen. Just very infrequently, and such pairings don't often last long. It's just one of many things most people don't realize their bodies and minds are doing in order to make sure they do what's evolutionarily best for the species: be attracted to the right people, have sex with them often, and keep the gene pool from growing algae.

desperation is the mother of unsavoury business practices

I've mentioned this before, but my high school and the teachers had some pretty stupid and restrictive bathroom policies enforced with a near Gestapo-like zeal. Asking to be excused during class was seen as disrespectful, lazy, deliberately inconsiderate to the teacher, and automatically assumed to have ulterior motives. It didn't seem like a single teacher believed that students asking for a bathroom pass were actually going to go to the bathroom--or at least, not solely. We were also planning on making pipe bombs, staging orgies, shooting heroin, and engaging in a lot of good old-fashioned vandalism. The only time most people could use the bathroom during the day was at lunchtime because it was the only time and place you didn't need a pass or permission. The same teachers who thought a bathroom break was a sign of juvenile delinquent behaviour would also do incredibly fucked up things like mark you for an unexcused absence or unexcused tardy--or worse, actually lock you out of the classroom and refuse to let you in--which, if you had more than a handful of, could prevent you from graduating and even get you suspended or expelled. This is not in any way an exaggeration. It's entirely 100% fucking true.

So urinary needs were a taboo at that school. Most of the time the teacher would just flat-out refuse to let you go, but some of them were even more sadistic. It wasn't uncommon, at the start of each new semester, for certain teachers to give out pre-printed bathroom passes, usually just two or three of them, that could be used in that class during the semester. If you lost or used them and had to pee one day, you were pretty well totally out of luck. You used all your passes, you can't go, you gotta sit there until you pee your pants. Similarly, some would write passes only in the school's agenda books that were handed out every year, and again, if you didn't have it then you were shit outta luck.


All of which is a big freaking problem if, like me, you have a clockwork bladder that demands you relieve it at more or less the same time every day. Teachers started getting suspicious at regular requests for bathroom passes because they thought we were all going to some pre-arranged regular meeting centred around illegal activities.

The limited bathroom passes were the worst. Yeah, you could at least go pee a couple of times over the semester, but it contributed to the school's already ruthless black market.


Again, this is not an exaggeration; I think most schools have something in the way of under-the-table or black markets where contraband items--snacks, test answers, drugs, and other things we weren't supposed to have--could be bought and sold. But because none of them were available on school grounds, the people who had them basically had monopolies and acted much like drug dealers. They raised prices, bullied students, and preyed on our desperation for their own personal gain. I'm sure most of the people responsible are either in a ditch on fire, dead, or in jail by now. They were that kind of hardcore dealers.


It was like that.


Since there were over 2100 kids at the school (it's over 2500 now), almost no teacher could keep track of how many times an individual student used a bathroom pass so if you were so inclined, you could get more in secret from the black market. Sometimes the passes were photocopied or duplicated; other times they were bought from kids who didn't intend to use them and sold to the ones who needed them. For actual money. Sometimes drugs and sexual favours, as well.


There were a lot of things wrong at that school but the presence of a black market for fucking bathroom passes says a lot about the social climate, the culture, and the ludicrousness of some of the more arbitrary school rules.

Ew, Gross!

I was less squeamish as a kid than I am as an adult. I think most people are kind of the same way. Or at least, I'm still equally squeamish about the same number of things but they're not the same ones that grossed me out as a child. Mold didn't used to repulse me but it does now; kissing used to make me go 'eew!' and hide my eyes, whereas it obviously doesn't anymore. (That would be weird if it did considering I have a boyfriend and am fucking him. I wonder how often that happens? People too squeamish to kiss other people but have no objections to the horizontal squelchy.) Even though I'm still not exceptionally repulsed by this particular gross-out, it still bothers me a lot more now than it used to.

Dissections.

Science class animal dissections are kind of mythic rites of passage to school kids. Everyone knows that it's going to be required of them at some point in their school career and successfully hurdling this particular curriculum requirement is the point at which you are a proper mature student. All my classmates had really mixed feelings about it. Some anticipated it, some dreaded it; personally, I didn't feel strongly one way or another but the thought of cutting things open didn't really bother me. It still doesn't really bother me much, except for the obvious lack of forethought that leads school board officials to conclude that it's totally not a bad idea to equip a bunch of twelve-year-old hormonal adolescents with scalpels. So it didn't cause me the kind of distress it caused some of my classmates; my best friend at the time, Hana, was on the other end of the spectrum. At that point she was a committed vegetarian and very into animals and also really, really not wanting to do the dissection. You could be excused if your parent wrote a note explaining why you (or they, or both) objected to the dissection. Hana's mom thought she was being dramatic and so no such excuse was made. Once Frog Dissection Day rolled around, she got one whiff of formaldehyde and promptly keeled over in a faint on the floor. In the end she got the school administration to excuse her. She also got a concussion and five stitches.

So I breezed through the dissections without a problem. We cut up all kinds of things and I never really had any bad experiences except that the chemicals smelled terrible and I have a sensitive sense of smell and an even more sensitive gag reflex. Smells that other people don't notice or are totally unfazed by will make me violently reverse my gastrointestinal tract. The smells of certain plants and flowers, cleaning products, chemicals, foods, and others almost without number can make me extremely sick for which I have never received an iota of sympathy. Even though I've had that extremely sensitive gag reflex my entire life--I couldn't undergo a throat swab without puking until I was in high school--my parents always just accused me of being a drama whore. Like I was throwing up on purpose for attention. Without considering the fact that, as far as attention-seeking devices go, there are a lot more easy to bear and way less messy methods than puking; or that I was always the most upset that these things made me so violently ill when no one else was ever bothered and was always embarrassed and upset by it.

Anyway.

It seems a bit weird to me that I wasn't more bothered by the fact that I was cutting up and removing body parts from a creature that was at one point alive and breathing and going about its daily business in happy ignorance of the fact that it would one day be pinned to a tray in a biology class. Part of it was, I think, that most of them didn't have faces. Or not a face that was immediately recognizable. Nothing I found especially cute or heartbreaking. And, most importantly, I think, none of them looked at me. Most of them didn't even have eyes--things like bugs and clams and little squids. Others, like frogs and mice, had eyes but were pinned on their backs so they weren't making any unnerving eye contact during the dissection. I list this possibility with a reasonable amount of confidence because of the one and only dissection that nearly made me vomit: a goat's eyeball.

It was in seventh or eighth grade. For the first time I was not only dissecting something that was looking at me, but it was nothing but eyeball. I can still see it in my head--horrible, tangerine-sized milky dead eye with all the optic nerves severed. When I cut into it, it leaked a pungent yellowish jelly-like substance that still haunts my dreams. It was over a dozen years ago and I'm still uncomfortable looking at lemon Jello because of the similarities.

This particular dissection was never finished. I got as far as picking the lens and the cornea out before I had to go puke. Rather fortunately, by then the science department had agreed that students throwing up and/or passing out would just be excused from the lesson. I wasn't sure I would be believed that I was actually bothered by this dissection when others hadn't done that before, because I was so used to being accused of faking and being dramatic whenever I got sick at home, but she didn't say anything and excused me without a word.

She probably understood.

After all, she had an entire jar of eyeballs on her desk so presumably she was aware it was weird to be stared at like that.

I'm Not Selfish (or lazy, or ignorant, or anything else you want to assume)

No, I am not an organ donor. Nor do I donate blood.

How much do you hate me for those sentences?

I understand why organ donor stickers are on driver's licenses. A car accident is the place most of us are likely going to kick the bucket away from people that know us, so it's the place strangers are most urgently going to need to know what we intend to do with our bits when we shuffle off. But my license has no 'Organ Donor' sticker on it, nor have I a blood donor card. Whenever blood drives come up at schools, workplaces, or elsewhere, I am always accosted, and I always have to decline.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I'm afraid not."

Sometimes I offer to make a monetary donation, if I have small change and I can spare it. Lately I've been skint ass broke so I wouldn't be able to do that. But people don't hear any of that. They just here 'no', and assume I'm some kind of monster.

"How could you refuse babies and old women a blood donation?? You heartless fuck! Oh my god! I hope when you get into the train wreck I'm wishing on you right now, that someone nicer and more selfless and more mature than you donated blood so you don't fucking die even though you deserve it!!"

I don't get that reaction from organ donor people very often, but when I do it's just as virulent. No organ donor sticker? ONOES. Sometimes they try and be passive-aggressive about it and ask, "Oh, did your organ donator sticker fall off your license? You can call and they'll give you another!"

You sneaky little self-righteous doodyhead.

"No, I don't have a donation sticker. I'm not an organ donor."

Cue: one rant.

Here's the thing.

I want to donate blood and organs. I would love to be able to.

But it's illegal.

No, I'm not sick--neither am I a religion that would prevent me doing so. (Which is the dumbest cop-out in the universe, for anything, may I just say?)

I lived in the UK during the 90s when there was a lot of hubbub about Mad Cow Disease. Beef imports from Europe were really heavily regulated elsewhere in the world until as late as the year 2000. (Even though, to my knowledge, it wasn't anywhere near the epidemic proportions the news made it seem.) Because of the continued paranoia by the US about forrun fuuds, anybody that lived there for more than six months between 1989 and 1996 is legally prohibited, for fear of Mad Cow spreading, from donating blood or organs.

The reason I don't donate is because I can't. It is illegal. For the record, there is nothing wrong with me. But the US doesn't want me donating life-saving bits because of some mildly annoyed bovines.

Bonus points: I don't donate a kidney specifically because I get kidney stones. Any kidney I donate would be faulty and if I got another kidney stone (or the recipient did), it would be a lot harder and more painful to live with and potentially fatal because there's just the one kidney now.

Same goes for lung donation--I have asthma. I can hardly get on with both of my lungs. With one? I would be fucked.

I can't donate organs or blood. I am not a bad person. I'm just obeying the law. I've thought to see if I can talk to the British Embassy or something about donating blood for them since Americans don't want mine, but I keep forgetting to do it. Either way, no one wants my organs.

But that has nothing to do with me being an ass.

Now you, please, stop being one yourself.

My First Crush, and How Facebook Ruined it

It's bad enough that Facebook won't let you pretend your exes are dead and that the people who tormented and bullied you in school are not only still alive but also usually having a much better life than you are. And they have less thigh fat and get laid more often. But even when your memories of people are fond ones, Facebook can still make you kind of depressed about them anyway.

As shitty as my memory is, I still remember a few names from Way Back When (TM) and among the names I actually remember is the name of my first really serious crush. His name was Daniel and we were in the sixth grade. Our last names were similar so we tended to end up near one another when seated or ordered alphabetically. I'm sure it wasn't any fun for him because I was incredibly weird back then and even more of a complete social retard than I am currently. (Which is definitely saying something.) But I could stare unabashedly at him easier that way. I thought I was being smooth and sly about it but in reality I'm sure he and everyone else in the northern hemisphere was aware that I was staring and swooning and totally had a massive crush on this guy. We didn't really even talk too much except when we were assigned projects together, which wasn't often. Not that I didn't want to, of course. I would sit and stare at him in the classes we shared--math, PE, homeroom--and try to come up with amazing opening lines for conversations that, in my embarrassingly cliched and unrealistic overactive pre-teen imagination, always inevitably ended with him falling in love with me. I rarely ever plucked up the courage to talk to him, which in retrospect is probably really fortunate for me, because most of my fantabulous fool-proof opening lines were about Pokemon, horses, or were terrible 'random humour' that is universally accepted as being the most obnoxious shit in the universe that appeals only to kids between the ages of ten and thirteen. You know the ones I mean--the kind that resulted in 'inside jokes' with your friends that were overwhelmingly loud and almost invariably included cheese, chickens, or wordless high-pitched squealing. Sometimes all three at once.

Yeah. I am probably pretty fucking lucky I didn't talk to Daniel whenever I got the urge to do so. I have a feeling it would have resulted in a worse school experience than the one I ultimately had.

I remember Daniel being quite good-looking. Like me, he was from an Italian family--and, like me, he was olive-skinned but a very light olive. He had jet black hair and, rather unusually for being of Italian descent, very light blue eyes. It was a striking and very attractive combination. One that I still quite fancy. I'm pretty sure that's where it started.

He also dressed a lot like a miniature adult. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, out of a decade of grunge fashion, there arose a vogue for teens and adolescents to dress as adult as possible. Gone were the days of overalls, plaid flannel, Doc Martens, and general unkempt aesthetics--girls weren't quite so adult, but boys who could afford to would come to school dressed in slacks and polo shirts, blazers, loafers, dress shoes, dress shirts, and expensive-looking watches. Wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character was completely unacceptable, a tragic loss in my youth for which I am trying to compensate as an adult by wearing shirts with cartoon characters well past the age where that is in any way acceptable. Boys started spending more time on their hair than girls and happily, enthusiastically followed the trend of the day that involved hair gel applied by the bucketful. For a good five or ten years, it was actually possible to puncture tires on the spiked and gelled hair of America's adolescent population.

And Daniel was one of the most grown-up and stylish of them all.

Cologne/aftershave/body spray were popular for guys, even when they were too young to have to shave yet. Axe and all its equally potent brethren had yet to be invented, but that didn't stop boys from applying enough smelly stuff to the point where they emitted scent fumes so intense they were actually visible to the naked eye. And Daniel, every the showmaster, was the most cologne-drenched boy around. You could smell him coming across the freaking school. It was a bit much, in retrospect, particularly as that was about the time I had started to develop my mysterious asthmatic cough--I was set off by other triggers back then, and intense artificial or chemical scents like cologne could make me erupt into a violent and very loud coughing fit.

No freaking wonder Daniel wanted nothing to do with me. I was a socially retarded freak with a terrible obnoxious 'sense of humour' I thought was comedic genius, and an impressive unibrow, and who had horrible dress sense (I was one of those dweebs that wore their pants a couple of inches too short in a style often scorningly and mockingly called 'high-waters' or 'flood-waters' for which I was teased--I don't know what it is, but it seems like there's a requirement for dorky, dweeby, nerdy, awkward people to wear pants that are several inches too short even through adulthood... does anyone else notice this??)--on top of which I would stare unabashedly at him in ways that were probably pretty creepy. And I was often hacking and coughing like I was about to drop dead right on the spot from plague.

I was not, in other words, anyone's idea of a catch. I'm still not. And I did know this back then, despite having all those daydreams about Daniel falling deeply in love with me for my inner beauty and my personality which was actually even less attractive than I aesthetically was. So I was aware that I was probably not going to have what I wanted. And a bit of angst was born. Daniel was never actually explicitly mean to me, which actually went a long way to encouraging my crush to intensify--when you get treated like shit by your peers, you start to expect that treatment all the time from everyone and it essentially becomes normal to you. You get so used to it that it warps your perception and interpretation of how people behave around you and someone who is polite but not friendly seems like the sweetest person in the world who must obviously like you a whole lot because they didn't dump tomato soup in your hair at lunch. It didn't help that I wasn't treated a whole hell of a lot better at home, either. Lifetime movies have jack shit on my upbringing most of the time.

Over the next two years the crush ran its course and by high school it had pretty much waned completely. My high school was enormous--2100 students--so the odds of being around any one specific person regularly were pretty freaking slim and I don't think I had another class of any kind with Daniel again. I would still see him around every now and then, though you couldn't smell him coming anymore, and I still thought he was really cute--probably just because in general I found the fair-skinned, dark-haired, light-eyed combination really attractive on pretty much everybody--but the pangs of longing and the sighing and the daydreams were long gone.

Years later, in an Anthropology class at college, who should turn up on the student roster but Daniel. I knew straight away it was him because his last name is very distinctive and not one likely to be shared by anyone else. I was a bit surprised when I saw him (not that I was anxiously looking or anything like that...) because he'd put on a whole lot of weight and was sporting kind of a greasy-looking goatee. He was still dressing like a sophisticated adult in tailored business-casual clothing and expensive leather shoes and a Rolex--except now it wasn't novel or interesting anymore because he was an adult by then. His hair was still gelled solid, but he didn't stink up the whole room with his cologne. It was more just a curiosity to me that we'd ended up in the same class since I almost never saw people I knew from old schools. I guess he was still cute but to be honest the intensity of my reaction was limited to thinking, 'Oh, lookit that, it's Daniel. He's changed. I wonder if this professor is going to punctuate every other fucking sentence with 'um' and 'all right'? That'll get annoying...'

(I did end up parking next to him in the car park a few times. Not in any way deliberately--it was the kind of place where you got there early and had to take whatever parking spot you could find--but I was sort of mildly surprised when, after class one afternoon, he hopped into the shiny new Lexus next to my classy ancient Jetta while I was swapping books. I have no idea what he was doing at the time that let him afford a car like that, but it's possible his parents paid for it. Equally possible is that he was up to his designer glasses in debt just because it was an expensive car. One thing I did learn about Daniel over my years of staring and swooning was that he really liked to portray an image of being very sophisticated and well-off. It wouldn't have been out of character for him.)

Funnily enough, I did catch Daniel staring in my direction a few times over the course of that semester. By then I looked a bit more like a person and nothing like I had as a kid. I wore girl's clothes and makeup and wore my hair down a lot. So it's likely he didn't even know who I was. I don't think he fancied me or anything. He was probably just trying to figure out if he knew me or something. We didn't talk except casually in that class, either.

So where the fuck does Facebook come into this?

In following links provided by 'People You May Know', I ended up at his profile. I really haven't thought much about him in years but I recognized the name straight away. Even though I don't have any really negative memories connected with Daniel--apart from adolescent lovesick pining--it still managed to be kind of a depressing experience for me to see this guy that I used to so intensely fancy so long ago.

This sounds terribly shallow, but the first thing I noticed was... Daniel got fat. He'd put on weight when I last saw him in college but now he's just pretty robust. He's about as chunky as it's possible to be without really standing out as being 'fat'. His face is very round, his neck has a muffin-top in his collared shirts, and in general he looks like a guy who hasn't quite realized yet that he no longer has the metabolism of a hummingbird. He still tries to look good but he doesn't do too well with it. Possibly because he dressed so much like an adult as a kid, he doesn't seem to have bothered to sort of let his sense of style grow with him. So he still dresses exactly the same but now he looks pretty dated and not especially handsome or stylish. And he seems to have also taken to dressing like a teenage rap-musician wannabe. The backward hat thing looks stupid even on teenagers, when it's acceptable; on men pushing thirty, it looks pretty freaking sad. The goatee is still there but he looks really bad with it. The hair gel still seems to be his primary choice of weapon--I'm sure this guy has singlehandedly kept the hair gel business thriving over the last eight or nine years.

I didn't even think he was cute anymore. Just sort of... blah. And I'm someone who finds just about everybody attractive. I guess those ice-blue eyes weren't enough on their own to hold my attention. I can't say whether or not his personality balances that shit out--I didn't know him back then and I definitely don't know him now. Kinda glad Facebook doesn't let you see who looked at your profile recently. I'm sure nothing good would happen if he saw that I'd tracked him down. If he's remembered me at all, it'll be because I was a bit on the creepy side.

It's a bit of a disturbing trend for me--the people I hated are all doing fabulously, and the people I fancied or just liked aren't. Almost without exception, the people I had crushes on (that I can remember having crushes on, anyway) seem to have grown up pretty unfortunate-looking. It sort of makes me wonder if I don't have really bad taste in people. Like, if I fancy someone it means they're not going to age well.

Well, oh well. All I can do is hope that won't be the case with Max. Of course, I adore him inside and out so I like to think it wouldn't matter to me. In his favour, he does have yellow eyes. Which is awesome and sexy at the same time. Weird eye colours are my thing.

And he doesn't wear any cologne at all.

Or have a Facebook.

Colour Theory

The next time I hear someone make the claim that their eyes randomly 'change colour', I am going to beat them stupid with whatever object is handy. I am so sick to death of hearing this I cannot adequately communicate how annoying I find it except by screaming wordlessly.

Listen, you worthless little fuckbuckets: your eyes are not changing colour. Nobody in normal circumstances, barring medical abnormalities, has eyes that change colour. Ever. At all. Full stop.

I can't tell you how often I hear people--particularly girls, but men do this as well and it seems to be some kind of desperate bid to make yourself seem more interesting or alluring or mysterious or exciting or something. You aren't. And your eyes are not changing colour. It's called 'contrast' you assbiscuits. Look it the fuck up.

The brain is a funny thing, especially with regard to how it processes visual stimuli. The eye isn't quite as fine-tuned a piece of equipment as we're inclined to think and, likewise, the brain interprets things in ways that might not always fit with reality. Everyone has seen that 'simultaneous contrast' illusion--where two small squares of the same colour appear different when situated in a background of different contrasting colours. The small coloured squares don't change--they merely appear different because they are being contrasted with different colours. Your visual processing wants the colours it sees to do one of two things: appear as close as possible to one another, or as different as possible. This is why artists and fashion designers and makeup artists and interior decorators of all flavours talk about how to 'bring out' certain colours by either surrounding them with a similar colour or a completely different one. You can emphasize the colour blue with either more blue, or a colour opposite blue on the colour wheel, like orange or red. Because your brain wants the colours to be really similar or really different, in both cases it makes the blue more intense based not on the actual intensity of the blue itself but on what immediately surrounds it.

It's like making yourself look more attractive by surrounding yourself with ugly friends.

When a colour is a combination of others, it can be made to look more one way or the other by carefully picking the colours close to it. People with, say, blue-grey eyes can make their eyes look much more blue by wearing certain colours of makeup and clothing--or more grey, by again picking certain colours to surround them.

The eye itself is not changing colour. It hasn't changed at all. It's an optical illusion.

You don't see this with people who have very distinct single-colour eyes. People with black eyes don't go, 'Oh, my eyes look orange sometimes, they totes change colours!!' Because there isn't enough variation there to produce the illusion. It's something you find with people who have greyish or hazel eyes--they think their eyes change colour. No, they don't. Educate yourselves because every time you say that shit, god kills a kitten. Seriously. He does.

My eyes do appear different colours occasionally, depending on my makeup and my clothing and the light. But I stopped saying my eyes 'change colour' when I was about fourteen because I realized that that sounded stupid as fuck and also wasn't actually happening. I should get off a photo the next time I cry or something. When my eyes go red and bloodshot, they look really intensely blue. My eyes are not actually blue--they're green. It's just that, surrounded by red, for some reason they stand out as being quite blue.

Your eyes aren't changing colour. No one's are. Unless you're an infant or have an eye disease. You all need to stop telling people your eyes change colour. It's like saying your height changes, just because you happen to look shorter next to people taller than you and taller next to people who are shorter--it has to do with comparison, and not a change of reality.

Morons.

Results!

I know how to deal with people. I dare say I'm good at it. It's remarkably easy to me to get a feel for someone very quickly and then adjust my approach in order to achieve a desired outcome.


One thing--of a good many things--that I've learned about people is that they often prepare themselves for multiple different possible scenarios. You sort of have a battle plan when it comes to confronting people. You think, 'Okay, if X happens, I'm going to do Y; if A happens, I'm going to do B', and so on for every permutation of results you can think of. So it's not always easy to cut them off at the pass, so to speak, because they'll have already thought of contingency plans for most of the reactions you would think of.



Which is why I quoted Shakespeare at a problem customer.


There are three main ways in which it's considered 'acceptable' for clerks to react to belligerent customers: they can be super nice, or ignore them. Sometimes you get clerks who are rude back, which occasionally startles them into silence. Most of the time it doesn't, because even being mean right back isn't weird or strange. They may not have thought you'd do it, but that doesn't mean they'd be unprepared for it. People's reactions to shit they hadn't though of is usually hostility, but there does come a point--and everyone has this point, it's just located in different areas--where you are experiencing something so unbelievably insane, so totally out of the ordinary, so unexpected, that you cannot meaningfully react. Because you just have no fucking idea what you're supposed to do in that situation.


I've been there myself. There are situations I look back on where I wonder why I didn't do something or say something, but it's like coming up with a biting retort--you only do it after you've had time to think about it because you were too shocked to on the spot. I've had time and the benefit of not actually being in that place anymore to aid me in coming up with possible coping strategies. At the time I was pretty much just sitting there thinking, 'What the ever-loving shit am I supposed to do here? Is this even real? What the fuck?'


So after a very long day with very long queues and very big purchases and very picky customers, I got a woman who was annoyed with me for taking too long and was being a complete entitlement whore. By then I'd had enough and, while I didn't want to get fired, I figured there would be no established protocol at the store in the event that an employee regurgitated Shakespeare.


Which they don't.


Which is great, because that's exactly what I did.


Specifically, it was Shylock's famous quote from 'The Merchant of Venice'. The woman was ranting about how clerks are horrible and no one is helping any customers and we're all being jerks and we should be ashamed and...


And then I piped up with, 'Hath not a clerk eyes? Hath not a clerk hands? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?'

Then went back to the transaction as if nothing had happened.


I'm not sure if I eventually will be in any trouble for this, but it did make the woman shut up out of pure shock.


Which was all I wanted in the first place.

Chit-Chat

We in the English-speaking world are a bit spoiled when it comes to how we understand one another no matter where we come from. People make grouse about certain linguistic disparities between the English spoken in the UK or Ireland or Australia or Canada or the US--and certainly there are differences, enough to induce some frustration in people trying to effectively communicate with another person who is familiar with a different version of the language. Most of the time you end up with a miscommunication--if you ask for 'chips' in the UK and Australia, you get what Americans call French fries--but there's also a major risk of embarrassment when certain words have a meaning that's not only different but also potentially obscene or offensive. That much-maligned, unattractive little nylon pouch losers and touristy people wear around their waists is called a 'fanny pack' in America, but if you call it that in England you'll get a lot of stares and a very awkward silence will descend upon the room, because the word 'fanny' is a crass slang term for a woman's genitals. Instead they call it a 'bum bag'.

So it's easy to get a bit frustrated sometimes, though in the last decade or two it has somewhat diminished owing to the internet and its ability to link people across the planet who might otherwise never have an opportunity to talk to one another. But in fact, this is significantly improved when compared to the past.

One somewhat surprising--but less known--aspect of non-European English-speaking countries is that there aren't too terribly many regional dialects in them. There are varying accents, of course, a few slang terms or phrases common in one area that are unknown or mean something different elsewhere. There really isn't much in the way of linguistic variety--they mostly speak the same way as their countrymen. This shouldn't have happened, and the fact that it worked out this way is a turn of events that most people aren't aware of to appreciate.

The British isles, on paper, speak all the same language: English. Technically this is true, but there are an awful fucking lot of accents there. there are more regional dialects and distinct accents in England alone than there are in the whole of the US. This is true for every country in Europe--people within the same country (especially larger ones), while technically normally speaking the same language on paper, employ regional dialects that are often pretty substantially different from one another. To the point that they're sometimes actually mutually incomprehensible.

No, really, this happens. My aunt married a guy from Germany, who grew up in a small town in the south right near the French border. He speaks very good English but his family members mostly don't. Though most of my mother's family can speak German, and speak it well--my parents both do, as does my grandmother--the two sets of families can't talk to one another because the German my uncle and his family speak is so different from the one everyone else speaks that they're mutually incomprehensible. My uncle is even good friends with a woman originally from Berlin, to whom German is her first language, and they have to converse in English because neither of them can understand the other's regional dialects.

It's nuts.

England and English aren't that bad, even with the myriad dialects and accents within the country. But it wasn't always like that. A 1490 account by William Caxton describes a group of sailors from London getting stranded and becalmed on the Thames in Kent, just sixty miles from their start point. A few men went ashore to buy supplies and food during the wait, but when they asked a local woman where to get these things, she didn't understand them. Their words were so different from her native tongue that she actually thought they were speaking French. And this was within the same country, a mere sixty miles from where they began.

This is gradually changing, as I said, but that's the kind of disparity I mean--people living so close to one another just a few centuries ago couldn't communicate in the same language, yet people speak more or less the same across entire continents without trouble in Australia and North America.

And were it not for a few fortuitous circumstances, that's how it would have turned out, particularly in the USA. When settlers first grew in number enough to cover a large area, and when they pushed further west and discovered they were standing on a lot more land than they realized, the assumption most people made was that communities would each individually develop their own dialects based on who settled there and when. It was also believed that the continent would ultimately divide itself into separate countries much like Europe. And it's largely thanks to two very under-appreciated things that prevented this from happening.

Part of the reason is that expansion to the west in America occurred around the time railroads were being built all over the world--one reason regional dialects form and become wildly variant is due to isolation or limited influence of outsiders. Groups of people scattered across a large area wouldn't have much--if any--contact between one another when there was a distance between them and no efficient, speedy way of crossing it. The railroads changed all that. Rather than remaining cut off from each other, distant communities were never left along long enough to develop a manner of speech too terribly different from anyone else's. Again, differences remained, but they were very minor ones. People gave Abraham Lincoln an awful lot of crap because he was from Illinois and spoke with what the snobs of Washington perceived as an embarrassingly uncultured backwoodsy way. (He purportedly greeted people with 'Howdy'.) But he had no problems making himself understood whether he was in Washington DC or Maine or Ohio or California--the language was still very much the same across the country.

Another big reason regional dialects never formed--and no other language prevailed like English outside of isolated small communities--is, somewhat ironically, because of the fact that America attracted immigrants from many different countries across Europe and Asia. And they came speaking an awful lot of very different languages, making it difficult for the newly arrived immigrants to communicate with their fellow immigrants as well as with the colonists and Americans who already lived there. Even immigrants from the same country--as we've already seen--weren't always able to talk to each other. (Italian is notoriously schizophrenic.) The most practical solution was not for all the new immigrants to learn the native tongues of all the other new immigrants--that would have been hard, time-consuming, confusing, and complicated. The easiest solution for everybody was for them to adopt a single language, and adopt one that was foreign to all of them. This sounds insane, but it is actually what happened.

More or less the same pattern happened in Australia and Canada--expansion and exploration were accompanied by advances in modes of travel that didn't let any community remain isolated enough to form a new language, and immigrants adopted a mutual language that none of them knew but that they all could learn in order to talk with one another.

Of course, I'm perfectly aware that linguistic pockets exist in all of these places. People tended to settle with their own 'kind', so to speak, which is why New York City's various neighbourhoods became associated with one particular country and culture--the Chinatowns, Little Italys, Little Havanas, and Little Haitis scattered across the United States prove that. But these are basically just anomalies, and the linguistic influence doesn't extend very far in any area. There even used to be a lot more of these linguistic pockets, little communities where people could primarily talk in any number of European or Asian languages. But these are anomalies.

The final death blow--at least in the US--to regional dialects and little towns channelling old countries came during the First World War in the 1910s. There was an intense sense of paranoia and even outright hate of Europeans and Europe in general--seen as the enemy by most Americans, immigrants and inhabitants of those little pockets (especially ones who couldn't speak English) were treated appallingly. In a fit of nationalistic ego, the state and sometimes federal governments enacted laws prohibiting newspapers from being printed in another language but English, for schools (including private ones) to teach in any foreign language, and even for church services and telephone calls to be conducted in something other than English.

The fact that any of these pockets survived is something of a marvel.

All of this seems quite a marvel to us--we find it hard to believe that such things can happen, that it's possible for so few people in so small an area can speak so many different languages so different from each other. But we only see it that way because we have no experience with a world that's structured that way--and had the people of the fifteenth century been told that one day hundreds of years in the future, people living thousands of miles apart would speak the exact same language, I imagine they'd've thought that was just as strange.

I can't honestly say whether or not I believe that an eventual linguistic amalgamation would have occurred in the end anyway, had mutually incomprehensible regional dialects arisen in what is now the English-speaking world had these things not happened when they did. They may have, had worldwide communications developed the same way--which is unlikely, I admit. I'm not an expert, so it's impossible for me to even meaningfully speculate on the matter.

But that's life, No, seriously, that's what all life is like. Everything that has ever happened, everything we know today--from the ground we walk on to our very existence to our advanced technology--is the result of the right things happening at the right time.

Old Dog, New Tricks

As can be ascertained pretty easily by the title of this blog, I'm one of those weird people that actually enjoys Shakespeare. Liking Shakespeare isn't by itself especially unusual. Lots of people do, for lots of reasons. Most of them are scholarly, or at least pretend to be--trying to interpret the nuances every which way, including the people trying to prove that Shakespeare was someone other than Shakespeare. For me personally, I find the mystery surrounding the man himself kind of interesting, but am not otherwise particularly interested in that facet. I don't even really like the sonnets, though they become a whole lot more entertaining to read once you realize that most of them are addressed to another man. Sonnet Eighteen (they're numbered, not titled, and the numbers are completely arbitrary and have nothing at all to do with continuity or chronological order) begins with the famous lines, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate', which is pretty standard formula for a love poem but the subject being addressed is actually a man.

Whatever this means about Shakespeare himself can only be speculated. It would rather appear that he had some fiery romantic blood in his veins just because a huge chunk of his plays, poems, and sonnets are romantic in nature. But the only thing that tells us is that he was comfortable and talented enough to write about it, and write about it really well. As anyone who has spent any time in fanfiction communities knows, you don't actually have to be a gay man to write convincingly well about gay men.

My interest isn't scholarly, though. It'd be nice to know more about him just because he's so fascinating--or would appear to be fascinating, based on the content of his work, but he appears to be an awful lot of contradictory things, gay and straight and romantic and dark and funny and brutal, based on the content of his work. But we probably aren't going to, so I don't think too much about it other than to scoff and roll my eyes at people who try and assert that someone else wrote it all. My interest is purely literary--I just like his shit. I'm a fan of his work just as I'm a fan of other writers; I don't necessarily like everything he ever created, but most of it is enjoyable.

In some ways I think I'm kind of lucky that I have this kind of interest because it makes it so much easier for me to enjoy his work in any form--reading it for fun, watching performances live or on film, seeing various adaptations of the stories in other settings. I'm not at all concerned with interpreting symbolism that might or might not be there in the first place. So it's just a good read for me. And especially, it means it's okay for me to like re-worked versions of the stories.

There are two camps in Shakespeare's 'fandom' when it comes to the plays being reworked and tweaked to having a different setting than the canon. One group thinks it's good fun, because it shows how the material itself--while the language might be arcane and the references and jokes and puns outdated--is still just as relevant and real and accessible and human today as it was four hundred years ago. The other camp views contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare as akin to, like, raping kittens. The kind of fire-breathing, hateful purism that comes from fans whenever any book is adapted to a film is significantly intensified when Shakespeare is involved.

As with so much else, I don't feel very strongly either way. I've seen good adaptations and I've seen bad ones. 'Ten Things I Hate About You' was based on 'Taming of the Shrew', and I used to like it, but I kinda grew out of it. I love 'The Lion King' but don't really feel it owes anything to being a supposed adaptation of 'Hamlet'. But when the adaptations are good, they're really freaking good.

Anyway. About the time I was learning I enjoyed Shakespeare--thanks to Beatrice and Bennedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing'--the BBC released a series of four films based on four of Shakespeare's plays, set in contemporary Britain. 'Taming of the Shrew', 'Much Ado', 'Macbeth', and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. I think this was part of why I eventually grew into Shakespeare, because these modern adaptations are actually really amazing and do very splendidly show how the plays are still relevant today. They weren't well-received by a lot of the audience, though, because certain changes were made to each play. But that's part of why I loved them.

People get really worked up whenever source material is tampered with. I never understood that. Some things don't translate well from book to film. Some things are outdated. Petruchio's treatment of Katherine is today classified as abuse. There aren't real witches in the world for an adaptation of 'Macbeth'. So they need to be adjusted. And adjusted they were. Very well. At least, I think so. The BBC made Katherine a career woman who becomes Prime Minister while Petruchio becomes a stay-at-home dad who crossdresses. (Seriously.)

My favourite adjustment was that Hero didn't take Claudio back in 'Much Ado'. Hero always struck me as having no personality. And Claudio is an insecure douche--he proves that time and again. When he doesn't get his way he gets really bitchy. THE PRINCE WOOS FOR HIMSELF, OH NO!! It never sat well with me that after humiliating her at her own wedding in front of everyone she knows by calling her a whore, Hero still thought it would be hunky dory to marry Claudio. Oh my god, girl, this is why women turn up hacked to pieces in trunks at the bottom of the ocean!! Instead of taking him back in the BBC's version, she flat-out turns him down. "Get married? Never in a million years."

I don't like everything Shakespeare ever wrote. But I don't like everything any of my favourite writers ever wrote. That's normal. People pretend you can't be a 'real fan' if you don't 100% love everything. But that's silly. I don't really like the tragedies but I don't like ANYBODY'S tragedies. The history plays are 'meh'. And don't even get me started on 'Titus Andronicus'. You've probably never freaking heard of that play before but it is indeed one of Shakespeare's and it is hands-down the most jaw-droppingly fucked up story in the entire world. It makes 'Psycho' look like 'Sesame Street'. Don't read it. You will regret it. Seriously.

Whatever form it takes, Shakespeare's work has earned a special place in my heart. It's still a shame we know so little about him, but we're so lucky to have so much of what he left behind. You really have no idea just how fortunate we are to have most of his plays--Shakespeare's canon accounts for 15% of the surviving plays from Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He left us two thousand new words and phrases we would be pretty lost without.

So. Whomever the 'real' William Shakespeare was, whatever he was like outside the fantastic realm of writing--I, personally, am grateful.

We all should be.

Observed in the Wild: Douchebags

I am unbelievably fascinated by human psychology and sociology. How people react, to what, and when--and how I can manipulate the conditions. This is seriously fascinating and amazingly fun for me.

Which is why I maintain two dating website profiles despite having a boyfriend. It's a breeding ground for studies like that.

I get a lot of mail that's not especially noteworthy--cliche-ridden and poorly-written, but not really outstanding. Every now and then I get doozies. And dick pics. Because women totally dig it when you just whip it out randomly for no reason, guys! I read it on the intertube, so it must be true.

I only respond to messages when I feel like it and act like myself as often as I play an outrageous character. Just controlling the conditions, nothing more. I once spent a few weeks emailing a guy who was clearly into me (I'm reasonably good-looking and into video games, this is Geek Goddess Territory here), all the while making very clear but unspecific allusions to the fact that I might or might not have been a pre-op male-to-female transexual. I never said 'HEY I GOT A PENIS LAWL!!', but I mentioned 'transitioning', 'surgery', a messy break from family and friends over something they refused to accept about me, and so on. He didn't catch on for aaaaages. I'm pretty sure he eventually figured it out himself but he was OBLIVIOUS for AGES.

One thing I get every now and then is unsolicited phone numbers. I don't know why anyone would do this. Not only is it easily traceable, it's also a very effective tool for harassment and stalking. You don't know who you're talking to at first, in any situation--giving a total stranger your number offline or on is a Really Freaking Stupid Idea (TM) because that's information that can be used to invade your privacy and harass you.

Naturally I'd never do this, but I cannot resist dicking with people who are that desperate and that stupid. I discovered a website called ICantFindMyPhone.com which is a completely safe bot program into which you enter your phone number in order to locate it by sound when you've misplaced it. Since I lose my phone a minimum of all the fucking time, I found this website useful. It totally works, it doesn't sign you up for solicitor calls or spam or charge you or anything. All it does is dial the phone.

So whenever I get a phone number from a freakoid online, I plug it into ICFMP a bunch of times at extremely odd and inconvenient times. I did it just now. It's 3.15am on a weeknight. It's going to annoy the piss out of him.

Which just totally gladdens my empty, shriveled little black heart. Have fun getting phone calls, dumbfuck! It won't teach anybody a lesson, I don't think, but it sure makes me cackle like a crazy person over my silly and petty (but mostly harmless) revenge tactic.

High Horses, Low Blows, and Military Elitism

I read this from advice columnist and frequent shitty person Amy Dickenson the other day. She almost never gives good advice, advising people to make bad choices and take subservient roles or compromise on things that have no business being the subject of compromise. I hate her advice but I belong to a snark community online dedicated to mocking her and other bad advice columnists from the internet and archives.

For those who don't want to read, the letter I am focusing on is the first one, which proclaims to be from a woman whose family served in the military, whose husbands and sons are all military, and who tragically lost a child to the military. Her daughter (of whom tehre is no mention of military service, incidentally) is dating a young doctor who, by the letter-writer's own admission, is respectful and nice and makes her happy. But she can't stand him because he didn't serve in the military. The letter-writer thinks he's 'entitled' and a bad person because he doesn't go to church and never joined any armed forces, because he's (the horror!) a plastic surgeon, and because he (????) drives a foreign car.

Look, lady, I'm sorry for your loss and shit but seriously--you need to go fucking die in a brick kiln for your attitude. Fuck you hard with a hammer. This is not fucking Communist North Korea. This is not the Vietnam War. This is not the fucking Roman Empire or Sparta. Military service is not and should never, ever be compulsory. You know what you get for forcing people to serve their country? People who really fucking hate their countries. You can't make people be patriotic and sacrifice their lives and their freedom--even in the event they never see combat, they lose their fucking freedom selling their souls to the fucking military--to their country. That becomes meaningless, for one; a country is best served by the people who want to serve it. Though my cynical brain makes me wonder how voluntary the service of the children actually was. People who come from military families tend not to actually realistically have very much of a choice in this area. There's almost never an explicitly-stated message of 'enlist or we disown you', but that tends to be the subtext.

Military service is fucking sacred and no one dares speak against it, but I'm going to. Not everybody who joins the military is an all-around hero. They're not automatically good people because of this. Even when they go off to fight and die. They are not always doing it for the purest of intentions. Sometimes they're really, really fucking atrocious individuals. Criminals exist in the ranks of the armed forces just as they exist everywhere else. Just as there are bad people who join the priesthood, or the medical profession, or become teachers, or police officers, or any other 'respected' authoritarian profession purely to gain access to people to victimize, there are people who join the military because they really, really fucking suck. They do it to kill people. Not everyone who wears a uniform is like this, obviously, and there are bad people in uniform who are bad in ways that have nothing to do with their reasons for joining the military. Charles Whitman was a marine--before he climbed the fucking clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and shot people.

Wearing a uniform doesn't make you a hero. And refusing to wear one doesn't make you a bad person.

What I really, really, really fucking hate that I've seen time and again in military families is this elitist prejudice against people who aren't military. Like no one is worth a shit until they sell their soul and stop being human for the motherfucking government. Go fuck yourselves. You all deserve to be slapped for thinking of this.

People who like the military have such a fucking hard-on for it. I've known military families from all branches, good and bad people. Most of them are not like this, but the ones who are tend to be really egregious offenders. When you think the military should be the be-all, end-all for everyone you really need to pull your head out of your ass. Not everyone is cut out for that shit. Not many people actually are. I, for one, would not last a week. I am emotionally unstable and extremely volatile and if you taught me how to handle a gun I would probably follow Charles Whitman right up to the clock tower and shoot people. I don't take orders. I odn't like answering to other people. I do it all to an extent because I have to but beyond what I consider reasonable accommodation, I refuse to do any of it. I would not be a stellar choice for anyone's military unless you decided to plant me with the enemy for the sole purpose of collapsing their entire system of government.

My grandfather was in the Air Force and is one of those guys with a major fucking hard-on for military service. He has pressured--really, seriously, intensely pressured with the threat of cutting off communication and disinheritance--every one of his grandchildren as they get older to join the military. None of us so far have been obvious first choices for military. I am not, my brother is a fat nerd who doesn't shower and can't be nice to anyone (actually that sounds pretty military to me), my cousin Ian is a very skinny computer nerd type and extremely timid. None of us are military types. We would not have ever done well. We all passed through high school and Grandpa pressured us all to join the military--some branch, any branch--ostensibly to 'help pay for college' but frankly the price is too high for any degree. For some reason he wants us all to be Marines. I don't know why.

Anyway: the answer has always been NO, but Grandpa doesn't listen to this. He talks about how awesome it would be for us to be in the military. He talks about the 'opportunities' (yeah, to get fucking killed). He talks about how good an experience it would be. (Know what else is an experience? Cancer. It's also an experience I hope I never have.) The answer has always been NO. I get that he just wants to make us do what he thinks is right but he needs to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. No means no. No means I do not want to join any branch of the military for any reason whatso ever and no circumstance conceivable, including gunpoint, would entice me to try it. The discussion should end there, but the discussion never ended there. We got literature in the mail, calls from recruiters, applications to unwanted places sent to us.

No.

Knock it the fuck off, Grandpa. Go away. Stop it. Cease and desist or I will switch your multivitamin for cyanide.

My next cousin is going to be a junior in high school and he's pressuring her. Join the military, military service, military, military, military!!!!!!!!!!! No. She is not military type either. She has said no. Still he bugs her.

This is not acceptable. Someone says no, that is the end of everything.

If you want to join the armed forces or something, go ahead. Have at it. Totally your choice. That's what the freedom you rub your tiny little peen with comes from--people who choose to serve because they want to and they defend those freedoms. When you take freedom out of the equation it becomes meaningless. I understand wanting to recommend something you love to people you love--like sharing a good movie or a book or music. But when they don't like it, you stop pushing it.

And that is especially applicable with things as life-changing as a decision to enter military service.

I don't know whether or not the initial letter-writer was simply writing out of grief and anger at her son's death (guilt, perhaps?), or whether she wrote it because she genuinely believes that those who serve are inherently more valuable than those who don't. I sincerely hope she gets the help she clearly needs because this is not an attitude that should continue. She's so worried about how 'future grandchildren' might receive a 'message' from this--but what message is she so scared they'll get? That it's okay to be different and follow your dreams? OH, wait, that's right, military shitbags don't like people who are different. Somehow I don't think she'll have to worry--if there are grandkids and she keeps that attitude, I suspect she won't be invited to spend too terribly much time with them in the end.

Get over yourselves. Stop insisting everyone needs to be a military personnel to be a human being. They don't. You know what you are? A terrible little entitled fuckhead.

Not all military families are like that. Most aren't. But, as I said, when things go bad there... they go really bad.