19rubbersoul65-blog

[19rubbersoul65-blog]

There are times that I feel like a stranger in my own life. I think about how I see the world, how I react to things, how I handle stress and setbacks, and I wonder “when did I become him?” I see setbacks that would have sent my younger self into a spiral and shrug them off with a pragmatism I never expected. I accept things that I once thought were outrages. I awe the person I once was with skills I never thought I’d have. I navigate a world not made for me with a deftness I don’t deserve. I shrug off that which would have sent me into apoplexy once upon a time. I accept things about myself I once tried so hard to deny.

I stand on tiptoe to see the bathroom mirror, and I see a man’s face looking back at me, and I’m shocked to realize that face is my own. 

[19rubbersoul65-blog]

Follow up on the music thing- just in case anyone has any other ideas, Foo Fighters is the greatest band on the face of the planet and Dave Grohl is the fucking man. Fact.

[19rubbersoul65-blog]

Remember when literally everyone had band t-shirts? From like sixth grade through tenth you could tell someone’s taste in music by looking at their outerwear for a week. Then it stopped. i don’t even think I own any band t-shirts anymore. I used to have a decent selection- a couple Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Foo Fighters, the obligatory smiley face Nirvana one, and so on. I used to not listen to anything not on 93.3 WMMR.

Annnnnd now I just added a Lil Peep song to my Spotify playlist. A guilty pleasure, mind you, but still. 14-year-old me would be so disappointed to know I secretly listen to emo rap. 

[19rubbersoul65-blog]

Musing on the little blue dot

Just a heads up: I can get really philosophical when I’m bored. 

There’s an ugly nihilistic streak in modern culture. Don’t get me wrong- I love me some Rick and Morty, but I think there’s an r/iamverysmart-style tendency on that show to talk about how meaningless everything is and how little everyone is and how nothing matters and nothing changes in the grand scheme of things. 

I honestly think this is a mistake. The thing people don’t get is that we aren’t separate from the universe- we’re a part of it just as much as everything else. Yeah. Everyone here is one out of seven billion people on a planet that is one in trillions in a galaxy that is one of billions. Kinda makes you feel small and insignificant, right? Wrong. 

You see, people have this solipsistic tendency to think of themselves as one entity and everything else as another. Well, when you put it that way, you are significant. Also, if you think that way you’re stupid. 

You aren’t separate from the rest of the universe. You’re the hero of your own story, yes. But you’re also a part of so many other people’s stories, and they’re a part of so many more people’s stories. You may be the NPC in a strangers story, but you still exist, you still interact, you change the lives of everyone you interact with, at least in a tiny way. Everyone has a story, and everyone is a character in someone else’s story, and in this weirs Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon sort of way everyone’s story overlaps and interacts and gets woven together in this ungodly tapestry of life. 

People say that individuals aren’t significant.I say they’re the only thing that is. 

[19rubbersoul65-blog]

Getting to be a kid again (in a manner of speaking)

People vary over time in terms of how interesting they are. They reach a false peak of interestingness around like 7 or 8, then steadily decline, reaching a trough around 16 years old. Then their net interestingness recovers, reaching a second peak around their mid to late twenties. 

The reason for this is simple. Late twentysomes have lives and experiences and beliefs and have lived a life, but they haven’t yet settled into old patterns and habits. They haven’t yet become set in their ways. 

You peak around 7 or 8 for the opposite reason. I find children fascinating because of what they represent. You take this tiny little homunculus that only a few years ago was just a bag of poop and tears and all of a suden it has thoughts and feelings and it reacts to stuff and learns stuff. Everything’s new when you’re little, everything’s fresh and exciting and mundane things that grownups take for granted are special and amazing. 

Then they reach 9 or 10 years old and they think they know things- they think that because a sunrise is no longer exciting they’ve reached the peak of human knowledge. In other words, they’re on their way towards becoming a teenager, quite possibly the most boring creature on the face of the planet. 

I think your twenties are kind of like a second childhood. At least, they should be. If you do it right they are. You think when you’re a teenager that you know everything that there is to know, and then all of a sudden you’re pushed out into this whole world you never knew existed, the world where you’re on your own and have to solve your own problems, pay your own way, do your own laundry. 

I was in traffic court for a speeding ticket a couple days ago. Probably the most mundane, pain-in-the-ass thing you can imagine. And yet when I walked out, having plead down and avoided points on my license and gotten the fine reduced by fifty bucks, I felt accomplished because this was something I handled completely on my own, no parents or adult help. Learning to do simple things like cook for yourself and keep house and pay your taxes and make your own appointments are like adult potty training, basically. 

Pretty soon I’ll have a real job. I’ll live completely on my own, visit my parents instead of live with them, pay down my student loan debt, come out, start having real, genuine relationships, and stand on my own two feet. I’ll be a fully-fledged, independently-functioning adult. Right now I have a job that pays double what I’ve ever made, and even if that only adds up to 17 bucks an hour, it’s something. A halfway-real adult job. Like Kindergarten for adults. 

As I find myself accumulating life experiences and approaching my mid twenties, I find myself becoming less boring. 

[19rubbersoul65-blog]

Hello internet people.

Rubber Soul is the best Beatles album. Fact. Actually, it’s one of the best albums ever made. There’s just something about transitions, going from mop-top boys in tidy suits to experimental, fuck-you-we’re-bigger-than-Jesus out-thereism. I guess that’s why transition periods are the most interesting parts of history. So much possibility, so many roads not taken.

I guess that’s where I am now. In transition. I graduated, I have to start figuring my life out, I have to start adulting, I need to figure out what I’m gonna do with my degree. My life is finally starting and at 23 I have no fucking clue what to do with it.

Also I’m gay. Or maybe bi, but probably gay. Whatever. I have aspergers, and I guess that kinda confused things for me. The thing about having aspergers is that you tend to blame everything odd or unusual about yourself on the aspergers. I guess I always thought that the reason I can’t get it up around a woman is because of some sort of shame spiral of self-hatred (a requisite feature of having what amounts to dyslexia for social skills, along with depression and anxiety) and god fucking knows what. The actual reason is simply that I like dick better than pussy.

Which is why it’s honestly kind of sad that it took me 23 years to figure this out. I blew right by my extremely progressive east coast suburban elitist Fake America public high school with it’s extremely active GSA chapter and its retinue of gays ranging from extremely fem to extremely butch, my college where it was kind of just whatever, and now I’m on my ownsome, finally coming to the realization that I am so fucking gay.

It’s funny how it happened, too. I was watching an old episode of Glee (okay, maybe that should have been a sign, too) and was watching Blaine complain to Kurt that it seemed like NYADA was all they ever talked about and how it hurt him that it seemed like Kurt couldn’t wait to be hundreds of miles away from him, and it hit me: I want that. I want a guy that my voice breaks and that I’d be on the verge of tears talking about how it hurts that he’s gonna be hundreds of miles away soon. I want a guy who being away from them hurts badly enough that I make a puppet of them to pretend they’re still with me. And then it hit me that specifically I wanted a guy like that (incidentally Darren Criss is a hot piece of mancandy even if he is straight IRL) and that’s when it finally hit me: I’m gay. I’m so, so fucking gay.

Not like super stereotypical or fem, either. More like Nick Robinson’s character in Love, Simon- someone you wouldn’t expect to be gay just on first sight. I guess in hindsight I should have realized it when the overwhelming majority of the porn I watch is gay porn and I can get hard at the sight of a nice male ass at the drop of a hat, but the human capacity for self-deception is endless.   

I wanna be sure, though. To do that to a degree that satisfies my STEM Lord standards requires experimentation. With both sexes. Gimme data, goddammit! As they said in that one West Wing episode “if you wanna convince me, give me numbers.” How I accomplish that… who knows? I’m hopeless with women. Cannot read signs- it’s a symptom of my brain being wired differently (that and what some people call my “robot voice.” Hmm, maybe I should start acting fem just so I have some default inflection for my voice). Got my date stolen by my drunk friend who blacked-out barely remembers it, apparently (I mean, he could be lying, but still. And on that note can I just point out that she was okay to drive like an hour later? If the genders were swapped that would totally be considered date-rape. Fucking double standards. The more I think about it the less I envy him.)

Question is, who do I come out to? Not my parents, not at first. I could never have them be the first. I mean, they’re great, but I need someone my age to know first. My best friend is an option. He’s the one I usually dump my shit on, but at the same time… I don’t know. I’m in a frat, so I have a bunch of guys I could tell. It’s funny- when you think about a frat you imagine something like SAE or Pike or Teke, but we’re… not that. Just a bunch of fucking misfits who were mostly secretly losers in high school and need some guy friends. It’s not buying friends- it’s friends pooling money for booze and weed and the occasional trip to some godforsaken part of the country for a conference where you ignore whatever National crams down your throat and then get shitfaced with guys from all over the country. It’s a second family.

Option B is my best friend from home. I only see him a couple times a year nowadays, and he goes to a college a couple hours from here (yes, as a dirty Ameeeeerikan, I’m using hours as a unit of distance.) I know he’s, like, super Catholic (at least compared to my dirty heathen ex-Catholic atheist self. Hail Satan/the FSM), but he’s also one of the nicest people I know and I know he’d understand.

I’m not really sure where I’m taking this. Maybe this is a one-off thing, just me shouting to the heavens and the pajama people on the internet, maybe it’s the start of some kind of an actual blog. Right now, I’m just figuring things out. It’s a funny thing: once you graduate high school you get two chances at a reboot of who you are, once when you start college and once when you graduate. Two opportunities to put the past away and look forwards. I’m on the second reboot: Me 3.0.

It’s like the problem of the Ship of Theseus: when you replace every part of a ship, is it the same ship as before?