…once again i get home from work, turn on the TV to see a panel show doing a special featuring trans women. despite the title of the special, shown on the top left of the screen as「13人のオネエ大集合」 / “Gathering of 13 Trans Women”, it was actually 13+ guests divided into three groups: gay men, cross dressing gay men and trans women. click the photos to see translations / context in the captions.
a while ago i wrote a random post titled “story time: when “African” is more important than “American””. well, it’s time to follow that up with another even more random post. back when i lived in Brisbane, Australia i used to use public transportation (photoed) a lot to get around before eventually getting up the courage to drive on the “wrong” side of the road. i met people from all over while living in Australia, but in so far as i can remember, i only ever met one African-American person during the 3 years that i lived there. bad luck on my part, perhaps. maybe. not exactly. but i tell myself that it is to ignore the other factors at play because the truth is that no matter what country i’m in, it’s a novelty to meet another African-American abroad and i’m well aware of the various reasons for that.…
so i’m at Starbucks using Starbuck’s free wifi while i work on stuff, as usual, when i randomly go on Tumblr and see the name of a familiar website, Black Lesbian Love Lab, being recommended to me. i didn’t know they were on Tumblr, so i clicked on the recommendation to check it out and was brought to the above page telling me that i’m unable to access @blacklesbianlovelab because of stipulations in the wifi service’s terms of use? wtf? i’m immediately reminded of the fiasco not that long ago when Tumblr marked the entire #lesbian tag NSFW, which i thought they’d fixed but? at the very least this seems like a remnant of that? although the wifi service itself is also involved, i can still access the BLLL website without issue and the content of the Tumblr blog by no means warrants it being treated like a porn blog. again,…
it’s incredibly ironic (and by “ironic” i mean “funny as hell”) that the very same people who call non-binary people “special snowflakes” with the implication that we are attention seekers are the very same people who go out of their way to actively seek out people like me to send these random cries for attention to. sometimes i literally get essay-length messages that amount to nothing more than “LOOK AT ME! LISTEN TO ME! STROKE MY EGO BY ACKNOWLEDGING ME!” and like… it never ceases to amaze me how oblivious these people are to the irony of their actions.
queerascat: …you know you have a problem when 3 out of the 4 hats that you own are exactly the same hat in exactly the same colors (black / gray / white) just in different patterns / materials. to be fair, though, the latest (solid black) one was half the price of the others despite being the same brand and everything, so of course i’m going to buy it. i mean, solid black is my thing– if anything, you’d have thought it’d have been the first hat i’d have bought, right? hmph. ;( more random thoughts about hats because i’m exceptionally longwinded tonight, apparently. …is it odd that i only got into hats once my hair started falling into “wow, your hair’s long feminine!” category in people’s eyes? like, before that i never even really gave hats any thought. now it’s almost like i feel a need to wear a hat…
a friend just sent me this song and it is the funniest, most Japanese– yet simultaneously universal song ever about coming across public displays of affection as a single person and being annoyed about it. thought i’d share. lol translated lyrics below.
back in October i was contacted by an esperantist from Madagascar who’d just come to my city for a year as part of a scholarship program. we arranged to meetup at a restaurant and ended up talking about random shit for literally 4 hours, which was great because it’d been a while since my not-that-social ass had talked to anyone in Esperanto offline, but damn. she is so talkative and i’m… not the most talkative person. anyway, i never intended to come out to her or anything, but i also had no intention of actively avoiding it either and yeah. how it ended up happening and how things have gone so far has been vaguely interesting, so commence word vomit. (ĉi tiu blogaĵo estas anglalingva, sed mi esperantigos ĝin se iu tion deziras.) that night when we’d met at the restaurant i randomly mentioned at some point that i had…
…so, i’ve just started watching Yuri!!! On Ice (i’m only 3 episodes in), but already there’s something that’s kind of annoying me about it. you know, how Victor keeps putting poor Yuri into really awkward, sometimes overtly sexual, situations that in real life would typically be viewed as sexual harassment or otherwise in appropriate but that is obviously considered to be more than okay by the people making the anime (and anime / manga in general) and is considered to be “cute”, “hot”, “relationship goals” by fans.
one of my least favorite things to do is attempt to explain in Japanese to a (usually LGB) cisgender Japanese person that: 1. no, セクシャリティー / “”sexuality”“ is not the same thing as gender. they usually get it once i explain it, but it’s still ugh because that inevitably spills over into: 2. no, オネエ / “onee” and / or ニューハーフ / “newhalf” is not synonymous with “transgender” and then when i use the word トランスジェンダー / lit. “transgender” from English– because i refuse to use any of the other Japanese words available– the person i’m talking to automatically thinks of ニューハーフ / “newhalf” (if i’m lucky) even when i’m not talking specifically about women who happen to be trans. i hate how bothトランスジェンダー / transgender and 性同一性障害者 / people with gender identity disorder– the most common way to refer to trans people in general– seemingly always make people think…
that feel when someone asks you how you are and you respond saying that you’re “tired”, knowing full well that they’ll take what you said differently from how you meant it. but that’s okay. because you’re fucking tired. you don’t have the energy to do anything about their understanding of the word anyway. hell, you yourself may not even know what kind of tired you are that day. are you depressed tired? are you anemic tired? are you queer tired? are you gaslighted tired? are you black tired? are you expat tired? are you anxious tired? are you one of the Many Other Kinds of tired? are you All Of The Above And More tired? ah yes, that’s right. you are a unique concoction of All The Above And More tired, further compounded upon by having to persevere through life as if you aren’t actually tired at all. when life…
