Not only queerer than I imagine . . .

[kiya]

One of the things I'm finding fascinating about the Feri work is the way I recast myself in response to -- not the work specifically -- but the community.

It's the one community where I've felt oddly self-conscious about my apparent heterosexuality; the basic assumptions and basic culture have a part of my mind trying to seek reassurance for my not being queer on that particular adjective, to have justifications handy in case someone is going to poke me about it. Nobody has, and I think I would be honestly shocked if anyone did -- but nonetheless the shift is an enlightening one.

At the same time, I find myself playing up my other queernesses, and I recognise the feeling of justifying my presence with them as part of why. But there's also just the sense that I can be these things and have it not be a bizarre thing or one completely unheard of. (Like talking about my perceptions of my own etheric structures with leafshimmer when he asked me if I'd ever been told I have a lot of male energy.)

And also yezidatalked about Feri as something that tends to bring the edges to the center and walk along the dividing lines, maybe a little this way, maybe a little that, but never out of sight of those borderlands where the nature of things breaks into fractal patterns and complexities that don't happen when things are one thing or another thing. So I pull up my internal edgewalkings, like singlet/plural, the weirdness that is my view of gender, or the one most overt in the Work itself, the complicated line where the reconstructionist sensibilities directly abut on the raw always-evolvingness transformation of Feri. This is where the real work that I have to do is, and I know it. (Born-men like fractal patterns.) Some of those edges are damaged and need to be cleansed and made kala; some are glorious as they are, and need to be acknowledged and celebrated. Most are probably somewhere in between or undefined.

(keshwyn's inner druid can stop smirking at me now. Really.)

I've been neglecting several levels of Work. My big task for developing the will is learning the discipline that I've never been any good at at all. And some of it I'm weirdly anxious about, afraid of making commitments, and some of it I just have to get up and do and stop making excuses about.

I think I've stopped being temperature-horked. With a little luck, bludgeoning myself into demi-lucidity with Tylenol Flu will mean my throat will be better too. And then I'll be out of excuses.


In other news, trelana is very, very funny. And so is ardaniel.

Comments

[ardaniel]

Aw! *hugs* Thank you. :)

[keshwyn]

She's not smirking. She's too busy being totally sympathetic. :}

[trelana]

I find it fascinating how many people find me funny, because I don't. I can see myself as a snide smartass with no problem at all, but I never really intentionally go for Teh Funneh™ -- I think if I did, it wouldn't appear anyway. Humour is a fickle partner, it seems.

... where I've felt oddly self-conscious about my apparent heterosexuality.

For me, that's California as a whole, and it's really more of a Not Queer Enough. Actually, I've found that I either feel Not Het Enough (at shul, or working with my clients) or Not Queer Enough (at .. well, pretty much everywhere else), and it's really quite disquieting. Northern California is a very judgement-based place, I've found -- the Peninsula can be surprisingly straight-laced about sexuality, while the City is so aggressive about tolerance, to the point that those of us floating around 2 with leanings toward 3 on the Kinsey scale seem many times to feel Not Good Enough to fit in with the leatherdykes and bois up in the City. It's, oddly, the least comfortable place I've ever lived -- Texas was actually an improvement. At least they were either completely accepting of you however you were, or outright outspoken against it and you knew where you stood.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

I feel that way in many of the various companies I keep, particularly online, when it's just me, instead of me-and-meiczyslaw. Many of my friends are gay, many are poly, many have simply sworn off relationships altogether for the damage they've taken, and I'm friends with at least three transsexuals.

I often feel like the odd-one-out, being straight, monogamous, and happily married.

It can be lonely.

[brooksmoses]

How very odd. I suspect my social circles (I live in Mountain View, with friends up in the City) and yours must loop through each other like two nets that intertwine but never touch, because that's not how I've found the Bay Area to be at all. I've nearly always felt completely comfortable, both here and up in the city; virtually all of the social spaces I've been to have felt like places that people of all sorts of sexualities (including mine) were welcome, without judgement.

Then again, I suppose that with however untold many millions of people there are here, it's not surprising that we've met completely different sets of people.

The thing that really bothered me about certain parts of Virginia (I've not been to Texas for any length of time) was the social circles in which people joked about homosexuals in a way that just assumed that everyone present shared their prejudices. And there wasn't space to object without starting an argument, and so it just became a continal state of feeling that I was betraying my friends by not objecting. The fact that they accepted me wasn't meaningful, because they were accepting who they thought I was, not who I really was.

[ardaniel]

I've had moments of Not Poly Enough and Not Publically Pagan Enough in NorCal. I think it really does depend, as Brooks said, on social circles and social expectations, and where you are geographically (I was in Mountain View for a while and then Sunnyvale, but my social circles tend to Berkeley/ Oakland).

Then I moved to LA, and there are *too damn many people here.* It is *impossible* to figure out if you're being judged for anything. Heck, my housemate assumed that my SO and I were Hardcore Republicans for the first six months I lived here-- and he's *known* my SO for ten or eleven YEARS now. It doesn't occur to people to ask down here, as far as I can tell.

Or, that might just be my current social group, movie-industry art and technical nerds. 45-70+ hour workweeks don't leave you much time for interpersonal curiosity and judgment. ;)