Mezzo Forte

Well, I'm happy about officially being on HRT, (my first shot was yesterday, but I'm happy about that today too,) and I'm about to have a grading party with some of my friends who GA the same class so we can all groan about grading undergrad papers. The grading part is going to suck, but the company of my friends won't

I tend to prefer describing my experiences minus the label, though I did explicitly tell my twin and my best friend about it. I always make sure to define my disinterest towards sex as separate from my disinterest towards romance, but I often discuss them together. My twin is very passionate about matters of identity politics, so I didn't need to give her much explanation, and she frankly wasn't shocked at all. My best friend had never heard of it, but it made total sense to him in regards to me, and it cleared up a lot about why our former romantic relationship didn't work out, yet we remained so compatible as friends. With my parents, coming out as aro/ace was actually part of my coming out as trans. They both individually asked me if my gender could be connected to my orientation (they wondered if I was into women), so I cleared the air right there. Turns out that the apple doesn't fall from the tree in some respects, as my dad had a few aunts who never dated and were happily single their entire lives. My parents feel that nobody knows what's in my head better than I would, so why should they think I'm wrong about how I identify? Quite frankly, the fact that I'm a nonreligious musician who isn't straight or cis, yet I have loving/accepting parents, friends, and siblings is probably beyond a miracle.

I'm 22, though people always did call me an old soul. I've been taking grad classes since before my 21st birthday, so I have a way of being younger than most my peers. I work with a lot of younger college students as a grad assistant though, and that has a way of making me me feel older than it should, especially since it isn't that huge of an age gap.

The biggest Harry Potter fan I've ever met (who has single-handedly won team trivia challenges at Harry Potter conventions) referred to me as the "quintessential Hufflepuff." Pottermoore seems to agree too! That fan (a Ravenclaw herself) went on to talk about how Hufflepuff is the most accepting house out of the four, and there's no way I could recapture the beauty of her words as she said it

I entered relationships in middle/high school in hopes that if I dated someone long enough that I would fall in love with them (in almost a "fake it until you make it" kind of way). I also internalized the "friendzoning people is bad" mentality and felt somewhat obligated to enter said relationships. I eventually wizened up and realized that there was nothing I wanted from romance that I couldn't get from friendship, so it wasn't worth the extra negatives that I had to deal with. I decided to only date if I fell in love and genuinely wanted a relationship regardless of feelings of obligation. Spoiler: I haven't dated since.

"Straight by default" was my go-to way of identifying. Plus, my love of men's fashion made me think I was straight, though it turned out that I just like wearing nice masculine formalwear myself. (In fact, once I shattered the notion of "straight by default," I had to let go of "cis by default" too.)

I get that a lot when I talk about my favorite composer. I actually know the guy personally, and he's one of the nicest people I've ever met, not to mention a fantastic educator, not to mention a fantastic composer! His music helped me fall in love with the marimba, which led to me dedicating my life to music, so he's had a huge impact on my life. When I see him at percussion conventions, he actually tends to talk me up to musicians who I have no business being talked up to, and has even gone so far as to call me "the perfect student." He's even thanked me for all my work learning and performing so much of his music. If anything, I should be thinking him, and I made sure to tell him that! One of my first teachers claimed that he started my "love affair" with my favorite composer by introducing me to his works, (right in front of the composer no less,) and someone I went to high school with once messaged me out of the blue saying "your boyfriend is doing a masterclass at my university, should I say hi?" I don't react when people say stuff like that because I don't want to risk them taking that as an invitation to tease, but man, when I talk about how beautiful one of my favorite musicians (who happens to be a deaf woman) is, nobody bats an eye, but if I say that I admire my favorite composer's performance philosophies, they think it must be some weird romantic obsession. >>

You should have seen me when I was grading the first wave of undergraduate papers for a music appreciation course this semester. They had to create a scene set to instrumental music of their choice (only rule was that it couldn't be an instrumental version of a song with lyrics), and man, so many of them wrote cheesy love scenes. A friend of mine even warned me that you'll always get at least one person who chooses Kenny G because they want to play his music at their wedding, and my friend was right on the money. One of them even wrote a romance between two boys, but it was still ridiculously cliche. Honestly, every time someone wrote about something like a space mission or a cat-and-mouse chase, it was like a breath of fresh air.... Until they started doing things like mistake rhythm for tempo, call cymbals "symbols," use passive voice constantly, choose songs that made my ears feel like they were bleeding, and the general joys of grading undergraduate papers for a class that they took as an easy elective. I even spent my entire Valentines Day grading some of these, so I must have looked like that stereotypical bitter single teacher.