12:12am

I saw some friends in San Francisco this weekend. It was at a dyke bar in Bernal Heights where I was scowled at by patrons either because I wore an embarrassingly ugly red sweatshirt superimposed with pink animal silhouettes, because my gender presentation was more normative than theirs, because I had invited male friends, or because they were or I was being bitchy.  I could have just been paranoid, too.

My high school LV friend brought her new boyfriend. They recalled a story of having a double-date that night with the boyfriend's friend, whose new girlfriend turned out to be KT, whom LV and I had gone to school with. They didn't like KT, but were not specific about why. Later, LV's boyfriend said, "Well, KT can go suck a dick."  

I didn't hear him say this, but RW recalled the conversation later.  RW and I agreed that that was an appalling thing for a man to say.  I'm not really sure why - "misogyny" alone doesn't cut it because seems to be a placeholder to describe something else. I guess it's the violence and lack of consent and subjugation implied in saying that a woman should be humiliated by having a penis in her mouth. It's hard to explain, but you all know what I mean.

RW and I pieced together a fuller story from what she had heard and what I had heard. LV's boyfriend was vision-impaired. So was his friend, whom KT had gone on the date with. KT had said some hard words to her boyfriend, along the lines of, "I don't know if I could be serious with you because I want children, and how will you be a father if you are blind, how will you go hiking with the family if you can't see, etc." On the one hand, you feel some complicated sympathy for KT.  On the other hand, LV's boyfriend heard this, and he was clearly hurt by what she had said, but maybe he didn't want to articulate exactly the way that this was offensive to him, so he later said that KT could go suck a dick. 

The moral of this story is . . . there is no moral.  It's sometimes hard to be a human being, in this world, with other human beings.  It's hard to know how people need to be treated. Emotional events are happening around me, and for the first time I feel that I have resources (i.e. patience and maturity and the kindest friends) to understand them, or at least not freak the fuck out when I don't. Some of this involves Harry, but it's too tedious to recall here what you can already read in the examples from Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

I was in Midway Airport yesterday trying to navigate my way out of the terminal.  Many people from my flight were trying to do the same thing, at different walking speeds, some with friends or family, all with differently sized rolling duffles and bags and laptop containers and dog totes. Down one long corridor ran a series of moving walkways. These things are a gamble because sometimes the riders ahead of you don't understand to walk on the left and stand on the right, so you end up waiting behind people and crawling along at slower than a walking pace. 

I strode on the first moving walkway behind an Asian boy with upright bearing and a tidy messenger bag. At the end of the walkway, he glanced over the shoulder of the person in front of him, held that look for a moment, and then continued onto the second walkway. I did the same and came to the opposite calculation (that the heavier-looking people in the second walkway would slow my progress, so I should walk alongside the walkway).  

I mean, I was right, of course. I reached the end of the second walkway before the Asian boy did, because halfway down the walkway, two people walking abreast stopped and fiddled with their luggage. But just watching the sharp way the Asian boy looked, calculated, and decided convinced me that he would be an excellent engineer and husband, so I raised my arms over my head and allowed my irresistable pheromones to waft in his direction.  Just kidding, I kept walking because my aim was to reach the taxi stand before the other passengers, not to lasso a smart Asian engineer husband with my armpit hair. 

On the other hand, when Harry and I took showers together, I noticed that he haltingly filled his entire cupped palm with Olympia's shampoo before lathering it up on his 1.5" of hair.  We are talking about a quarter cup of shampoo here, enough to wash a family of Lhasa Apsos.  The half-full bulk-sized shampoo container was empty after his two weeks in Chicago. (Sorry, Olympia! Please have some of my radishes.) At a loud concert, Harry was unable to comprehend how to use earplugs and when I finally rolled and stuffed them into his ear for him, he dropped his voice down to a whisper because he didn't understand that I continued to experience the loud bar when the sound was quieter for him. He is some sort of physicist/engineer but apparently not the kind who notices whose shampoo and how much to use, or other people.  Yet I found these bizarre Asperger's-like behaviors also very endearing (but sometimes, like the flat-palm clapping, appalling). 

It's hard to know what to like when I am so undiscriminating in what I find fascinating! I could marry a prune!