Dodecahedron314

To be perfectly honest, if I weren't romance-repulsed, dating someone for the express purpose of stealing their nice clothes is totally something I could see myself doing. I just have a weakness for really nice jackets, okay?

If you squint, the romantic subplot in the new Wonder Woman movie is minor enough that it's pretty easy to ignore. It's still there (for like 30 seconds), but it's definitely not as egregious as pretty much any other superhero movie I've seen recently.

The ASAPScience Tumblr knows what's up.

Someone once referred to one of my friends as my "other half", but I figured she was just saying that because I hung out with that friend a lot, and it was at a conference where we were doing a lot of the same events so we were rarely in different places. Now I have to wonder if she was implying that we were dating...?

I had such high hopes for this song, and then nope. Would they even have teeth left to punch out after that, though? I've never understood how this is supposed to work without one or both parties needing some serious dental work afterwards. Mashing one's face onto another person's face with reckless abandon and no warning seems like a surefire way to chip or lose some teeth, especially if the person tries to instinctively flinch/jerk away, as would be perfectly reasonable in this situation.

To be fair, I can say from experience that past a certain point, time zones definitely start making a big difference--I'm currently in Paris, my QPP is in Florida, and one of my other best friends is in Chicago, and it makes communicating a lot more difficult, especially when all of us have our own schedules to attend to. I've still managed to stay fairly close to them, though, so the argument that distance makes it impossible to fulfill "emotional needs" doesn't quite hold water. (Of course, it could be argued that in order to have emotional needs one has to have emotions in the first place, a concept which is questionably applicable to me at best, but that's neither here nor there...)

Honestly, I really relate to this. I'm...I suppose lucky in a sense?...because most of the people I wind up being drawn to being really close friends with are generally somewhere on the aro spectrum. But honestly that little bit of "spectrum" even scares me a bit...I don't know, it's probably partially because I'm a bit paranoid/anxious by nature, partially because I sort of view my friends like a found family even when it's realistically probably unlikely that we'll all wind up sticking together just because of where we are in life (what happens after we graduate from college, if there's even still a future for us to have with the way the world is going right now? There's just no way to know, especially seeing as we all want to do rather different things with our lives), and partially because (perhaps contradictorily) it's hard for me to let myself entertain the possibility that other people could really be similarly uninterested in the whole romance partner thing, because for the longest time I thought I was the only one. I dunno, this kind of turned into a ramble, sorry.

So I'm studying abroad in France right now, and on the first day of my French class I was so visibly uncomfortable with the idea of the cheek-kiss-greeting-thing that's apparently a thing that people do here that the professor called me out on it. Nice.

We often made this joke about one of my friends in high school, who started off on clarinet but played pretty much every instrument and would play whatever was necessary for any ensemble she was in (and also wound up being drum major senior year). Of course, the irony is that my college pep band is freaking tiny, and the clarinet section is the biggest section (with a grand total of 3 people on a good day) and therefore is the most able to spare a person to play something else, so guess who wound up being that person now... *hides snare sticks* However, I am of the firm belief that "once a clarinet, always a clarinet", no matter what instrument you wind up playing more frequently.

Yes, another one, join the clarinet army!

My RH just decorated my dorm's common room with a bunch of super gaudy cutesy Valentine's Day stuff (she does this for every holiday, to be fair), and someone walked in and said delightedly, "Oh look, love is in the air!" I immediately responded with "Oh god no, someone get the air freshener."

I confess that even though I've had to help several friends through relationship issues and breakups at this point, my default response when someone comes to me crying about their romantic problems is still to unconsciously acquire a horrified deer-in-headlights facial expression and nervously offer them junk food to make them feel better because oh god why is water leaking out of your face about something I don't understand please help what do???

I got this from my English teacher when she was one of the chaperones at prom. Why the heck do people think it's ever going to be anything other than a.) pointless, and b.) extremely awkward, to say something like this to someone? (I mean, the only reason I even wore a dress to prom in the first place was out of solidarity with my QPP, who would've been forced to wear a dress if he'd gone because his family was being really awful about his gender. Otherwise, I would have just straight-up worn a suit, or whatever approximation thereof I could've thrown together out of the vests and dress pants I had because I wasn't out yet and didn't have any money.) Speaking of which, what is it with the whole obnoxiously gendered prom culture thing? Is that a thing outside the US? Because here, at least, the amount of expectations of conventional femininity that are attached to the whole affair is more than a little horrifying. Just flip through a prom dress catalog or talk to a "normal" high school senior, I swear it's like the whole thing is some sort of cult initiation ceremony or something.

In all honesty, if I had the energy and time to devote to writing that I wish I did, I would do this in everything I wrote. If non-aro writers have gotten the satisfaction of nattering on and on about their favorite set of emotions for practically the entire history of media, then I should definitely have the right to exact some degree of schadenfreude-y satisfaction from crushing their shipping dreams. @Ace of Amethysts I'm definitely aware of that, and I'm definitely aware that most people are somehow okay with this (though even the non-aro people I know who have watched it have huge problems with the specific example I was ranting about). That doesn't make me any less bitter about it.

Aren't a good portion of his fans teen girls because Doctor Who? ...Moffat has fans??? I've yet to encounter anyone who watches anything he's involved in and hasn't gone off on him at least once. Although to be fair, his episodes of Doctor Who *before* he took over the show were fantastic, at least. (I'm not far enough into the show to pass judgement on what he's done as the showrunner, but considering I'm told there's an entire season that's basically just not worth watching, my hopes for something as magnificent as The Doctor Dances or Blink aren't too high.) Also, the trope @Dodgypotato mentioned is just one more of the infinite fiendish tentacles of amatonormativity. "Everyone has the capacity for ~*~romantic looooooove~*~ inside them, they just have to meet that ~*~special person~*~ and ~*~open up their heart~*~!!!!11!!!1!" How. About. NO. You're not wresting away one of the most relatable characters I've ever encountered, who's relatable specifically for the exact reason that you're trying to erase. Stoppit. Stop that right now.

I confess that, as an aroace, I'm honestly feeling a little bit personally attacked by the amatonormative/allonormative bits of the most recent two episodes of Sherlock. Specifically: The Lying Detective (S4E2): The Final Problem (S4E3):

Here, have the two things that have been stuck firmly in my head for the past week for some reason: Science and fandoms...honestly, a pretty accurate representation of the contents of my brain at any given point.

I totally understand this, actually. For all my ridiculous amounts of introversion, I've also come to realize at this point that when left to my own devices for too long and cut off from other people, my mind basically turns into an echo chamber and the reverberations all interfering with each other make a mess out of the whole situation pretty quickly, if that makes sense. Much as I logically should be totally fine with being a hermit, experience tells me otherwise, and so I've been forced to admit that I have to factor other people into my plans in some way, shape, or form.

Let's just say there are many reasons why I've always described myself as "flamboyantly aro", and I have yet to get a surprised reaction from anyone after coming out to them: When I was a little kid, my mom was apparently 100% certain that I would grow up to be a lesbian, because at one point I'd asked her if it was possible to marry a girl because I didn't like boys. (Her response was "Well...maybe in California?") The part that she didn't realize was that I'd asked this question because 4-year-old me was under the impression that marrying someone just meant that they were your best friend to the point that you wanted to live with them, and 4-year-old me didn't have any male friends, so of course that logically meant that I would wind up marrying a girl, because that's how that works, right? (Of course, the amusing part is that I wound up being in a QPR and will probably move in with my QPP after we both graduate, so maybe 4-year-old Dodec knew what's up after all.) I had a male best friend in 4th grade, and I couldn't understand why we weren't allowed to have sleepovers at each other's houses like everyone else was allowed to with their best friends. (Sadly, our parents' concern was probably well-founded, considering that friendship ended after he started chasing me around the playground trying to kiss me, which I knew even back then was something I was 100% not okay with. Thankfully, small tomboy Dodec had great stamina after being in tae kwon do for 2 years at that point.) The argument I still have about once a year with my friend from grade school, regarding someone I knew in 8th grade: "X liked you." "No, he didn't, he hung out with me because I was literally the only person who talked to him and didn't run away when he approached them." "Nope, X definitely liked you." Sometimes when I was down about not having anyone I could really relate to in early high school, and high school in general just not going anywhere, I would fantasize about meeting my socially-mandated Someone who's Out There for Everyone in college and sitting on a roof and having intellectual conversations and looking at the stars until all hours of the night...and that was *all* we did. Even back when I still thought I was a straight cis girl, my idea of romance contained zero actual romance.

Neither I nor the post that was formerly an awkward negative paragraph from 3am and is now a single period have any idea what you're talking about...

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My definition of TV is "bouncing between ~5 different long-running sci-fi shows on Amazon Prime, all of which I'm years or decades behind on and will probably not be fully caught up on anytime soon". Also..."non-pay" TV? There's TV you...don't have to pay for??? Is this an Aussie/UK thing, or...? As far as I'm concerned, that's what podcasts are for--sure, there's no visual aspect, but they're all free, and vastly better-written than the overwhelming majority of TV shows in my opinion, because they're written by small production teams of actual people rather than gigantic media conglomerates that care more about making money than telling a good story. As a matter of fac--*hook appears out of thin air and yanks Dodec off the soapbox plastered with podcast logos they pulled out of nowhere*

*quickly googles temperatures* Yikes. Even 50% humidity is too much for me at 30C. The humidity makes a huge difference, yes...but unfortunately up here, dry heat is far rarer than the alternative. Hence, my point about summer being The Actual Worst still stands. (I still have a vendetta against the entire season thanks to having to do my first year of marching band camp in a heat index that, with 95% humidity, worked out to be...*googles again* 45.5C, or 114F for you 'Muricans.)