the other shoe

The other shoe finally dropped, but I’m not sure it dropped so much as I tossed it.

On Sunday, C invited me to her place for coffee.  We talked for hours.  But the more we talked, the more some of my concerns solidified in my mind.  Concerns that had already been playing at the edges of my mind, and now were brought to the forefront.

She doesn’t seem to understand that being queer is not the same as being straight.  Every way that she talked about relationships and dating and sex was so heteronormative.  Now, in her defense, she’s never dated a woman and has only dated men thus far.  But there was just a huge lack of knowledge of anything queer.  I mean, she didn’t even know what dysphoria was.

Anyway, I brought up all this to her the next day over text.  The long and short of it was that she doesn’t like to identify with labels.  I tried to explain how being queer isn’t a label so much as it’s a way of life, a community, an identity.  She acknowledged her implicit acceptance of the straight label, which annoyed me even more.

So that was basically the end of that.  Dinner was cancelled, and I haven’t talked to her since.

I’m okay with a lack of experience (in many ways, I feel like I have very little experience myself), but I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who wants nothing to do with being queer and who wants to model their relationship after het-relationships.  I’m not into mimicking a straight relationship.  Especially with her being femme and me presenting masculine–I am not going to be the “man” of the relationship.  I’m gay for a reason.

Straight friends don’t seem to understand this, though.  My queer friends do (they all say she sounds super straight).  It’s things like this that I don’t think I should bother bringing up to the straight friends.  I hate having to defend to them what my other friends both understand and think is reasonable.

Le sigh.

But I already have two dates lined up, so you know I’m doing just fine.

good times are suspicious times

I’ve found that since starting to dress how I like and look how I feel comfortable looking, if I wear anything that looks distinctly feminine, I feel all sorts of anxiety.  I’m not sure if this is something that will last or if it’s because I’m still in the new-ish stages of expressing my identity (with the idea that in the beginning, you hold much tighter to the identity than once it’s become comfortable/old).  Either way, in the meantime, I really only have a few items left that could be considered specifically feminine.  I don’t want to put myself into a rigid box, but I also want to feel good about how I look.  It’s a confusing line to walk.

I had my third date yesterday with C.  I’m making dinner for her next week.  It’s going very well, so naturally I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I’m too sleepy to write more.

lots going on lately

I’ve successfully accomplished two weeks of work at my new job.  So far, so good.  I’m enjoying what I’m learning and the tasks.  It does bring to mind the question of if I should start the python course in January.  I have until December to decide.  Here are my quick thoughts about it: I have found myself on a career path for finance, and the jobs I’ve had so far are preparing me for a good job someday in a non-profit context (which is what I want). However, will finance be interesting long term?  If I take the python course, I will want to use it–it’s $1000/quarter and three quarters long.  I’m not so flush that I want to spend $3000 on something I’m not certain I will use.  That’s a lot of money.  It could go to my student loan.  But what if I take it and don’t use it or can’t get a job–it is a very competitive field, after all.  Ugh.

The last date I mentioned — the thai dinner person — we never ended up going bouldering. But she was recently separated from a long term relationship, so she wasn’t exactly ready for a relationship anyway.  Or anything, in my opinion.

Since then, I’ve gone on a couple dates with another person. She thinks vulnerability is a good thing.  At the end of our second date, she laid all her cards on the table. I was in shock, to be honest. Not at what she said–nothing shocking about that–but that she was willing to be so open. It has been my experience that I’ve had to put my cards on the table first, with generally a lack of cards in return. (That has not always been the case, of course.)

She’s femme, but not like super femme or anything.  Just… femme-ish.  I have all sorts of fears about dating a femme presenting woman, so I’m going to have to work through those myself.  My big fear is them wanting me to be part of a fake heteronormative relationship because I present butch.  But that is an unfair fear, I think.  She has given me no indication that she is looking for that, and while it is something I should bring up eventually for my own piece of mind if we keep going on dates, I can just continue forward and see how things go…  Right?

Today starts the first of three evenings out in a row.  Tonight I am seeing a movie at a queer film festival with a friend. Tomorrow I am going to dinner and a concert with a friend of a friend who recently moved to the area.  The next night I am getting my tattoo finished.  Phew.