so I am in a better place now!

[sciatrix]

And, uh, am sorry for not responding to comments in the last post--life has gotten away from me again and I am not good with communication when I'm stressed. Thanks to everyone who sent me comforting comments, though!

Have spent a lot of time on self-care these last few days doing things that are low-stress, trying to make myself avoid tumblr, going out to eat with friends and attempting to indoctrinate my baby sister with more geekery, that sort of thing.

I was debating writing a birthday post for Writing From Factor X, since I created the blog as a birthday present to myself last year, but I just don't have the energy to write anything right now. I feel a little bit bad about that, because it's not that I don't have things to say, but more that I just don't have the time and the energy to sit down and write out something polished and acceptable to me and, you know, self care.

(Offhand, the topics currently lurking in the back of my head are: the limits of anger in activism and the point at which you write someone off, the ways in which we are arguably reclaiming 'asexual' for ourselves from the very pejorative way it is often used to apply to people, something cogent about how isolating invisibility can be, oversimplification of concepts when doing visibility and how we can avoid that, and that godawful post about the brain worms that being aromantic/wtfromantic/whatever the hell my affectional orientation is left me with, the one that's written almost entirely up but that I'm still hesitant to post. I am not exactly hurting for topics! Just... time. Would be quite willing to have conversations about any of those, though.)

Also, I have photos of my birthday cake! (Birthday cupcakes? Birthday EXTRAVAGANZA?) We did finish making it, about five people attempted to eat it, and I am currently trying to get my lab to eat most of the rest with limited success. Next time I do something big like this, I'm going to make sure I have more mouths. Anyway, photos!




Ta-da! The flavors shake out like this:
Metals are frosted in yellow and lemon-flavored.
Nonmetals are frosted in as-close-as-we-could-get-to-red and are red velvet.
Metalloids are frosted in pink and are strawberry.
Rare earth metals are white-frosted yellow cake.
Transition metals are purple-frosted devil's food cake.
Anything radioactive is green-frosted creme de menthe, because how else do you show radioactivity?

Comments

[shiyiya]

You could freeze the leftovers and have instant cupcake whenever you felt like one?

That is pretty epic.

[sciatrix]

Ooh, this is a thought! I don't know that we could fit them into our rather small and overcrowded freezer, but it's definitely something to consider for the hordes of cupcakes infesting our dining room table that no one has yet taken to work. >>

[kaz]

This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. :D

query: what's with the light vs dark yellow (Al vs Ga, for instance)? Are those both lemon-flavoured.

(and *hugs* @ feeling better!)

[sciatrix]

...that is because I made a screw-up and started piping the names for the metals, which were originally supposed to be yellow cake, onto the lemon cupcakes. >> Did not notice this until they were mostly done and then I had three cupcakes less than I needed and also no frosting left (my roommate had made it all the night before and then had gone to a football game). So I started panicking because they were all otherwise frosted by this point and agh agh it was not going to be perfect and I WAS A HORRIBLE CUPCAKE MAKER--

--and then my friend P. calmed me down, dug out some yellow food coloring, and mixed it onto the frosting of three untouched white-frosted yellow cupcakes and called it good. PROBLEM SOLVED.

So yeah, the dark yellow ones are technically not lemon-flavored, although they should be and if I ever do this again I will avoid that particular mistake. >>

[aceeccentric]

I hadn't thought before about how people are reclaiming 'asexual.' That is a very interesting way to think about it, hmm.

And ahhh that is the coolest thing :D I second possibly freezing the leftovers if you find room.

[sciatrix]

Well, I was running all these linkspams, which meant that I was essentially plugging "asexual" and "asexuality" into blog-tracking sites like blogpulse and icerocket and at least glancing at the sentence that included the keyword I was searching for. And I mean, some of what I wasn't fishing out and linking to wasn't referring to humans at all--it was things like asexual reproduction and biology papers--but a lot of it, in fact I would say the majority of it, was.

And most of it wasn't us talking about ourselves, either. Or even people being hateful to an asexual community they knew was there. (Especially at first, when I started doing linkspams. Now there's a lot more use of the word that does imply a knowledge of asexuality as a sexual orientation.)

It was--oh, people using "asexual" to mean a variety of things, but almost all of these were negative. One of the more common usages was "a character who has been incompletely portrayed, who has not been given their own romantic/sexual interests but who exists to serve the main character's interests"--think "asexual" gay and black secondary characters. Or "asexual" would be used to mean "so ugly I am not attracted to it" or, sometimes "neutered." Like an antonym to "sexy"--you know how people will sometimes use "sexy" as a word to mean "something awesome" even if they don't necessarily want to sleep with it? The opposite of that, only often with a dehumanizing component--I often saw "asexual" used to describe people who would then be almost immediately compared to inhuman objects. These are not exactly positive usages.

I have actually, myself, had to repeatedly correct people who used "asexual" with these negative connotations right in front of me, including people I had been out to for a long time and who knew very well that I identified as asexual, and I personally have had to deal with several people who seem to have internalized those "genderless" connotations to asexuality and who appeared to view me as somehow less female after I came out. (I have also known a lot of aces who did not have this problem! I may run into it more often than usual because I present in a way that is somewhat gender ambiguous and in any case very much not femme.)

And the thing is, where you do see celibacy--which isn't necessarily about asexuality anyway--promoted as somehow better than, you never see the word asexual used. It's always framed in terms of strength of will or purity or the ability to resist temptation. (Temptation the entire construction assumes we have, which isn't actually any more asexual-positive than the other end of the spectrum, but whatever.) But the word "asexual" itself isn't ever applied as a positive thing unless you're talking

So. Given that fact, I think that the thing asexual communities are doing by using "asexual" is insisting that this can actually be a positive thing, not an insult. And I think that's very much reclaiming a word that does actually have some baggage attached to it, at least when it is applied to people.

[aceeccentric]

I really hadn't thought of it that way. Though I have noticed it. There's been more than one time when I've looked up guides to writing particular types of characters, or advice on writing particular types of characters, and been told flat-out that making these characters asexual was terrible. And, I knew what they meant -- they meant desexualizing people as part of a pattern, but it still hurt. It actually stopped me from writing a few narratives it got me so discouraged (even though I was not planning on making those particular characters asexual). In my own writing, when I've failed to remember to attempt to insert overt sexual interest where it was expected, people have asked me why the character seemed "child-like."

I knew people used sexy as awesome but I hadn't noticed the pattern of people using asexual as something terrible, which... yeah, that's awfully discouraging. I did see some of that in the asexual tag on Tumblr (which I still had the fortitude to actually track tags on Tumblr) but mostly the things there, besides outright anti-ace stuff, were "I wish I was asexual because I believe life is easier for them."

It sucks that people have used asexual that way with you around, that's terrible. And even though I'm stereotypical in that way as far as gender goes, I still don't understand how people conflate gender and sexuality -- but I guess that's where the "manly lesbian" and "effeminate gay man" stereotypes come from as well.

Oh, no. I have heard a lot of rhetoric about staying celibate, abstinence before marriage, etc., but I've never once heard the word asexual either. Oh, except from the occasional person who wanders in talking about how amazing asexual people for resisting their urges and how pure and righteous we must be (which I think you've written about before as well).

It actually might make me feel a little better in the future when I encounter people using the word as substitute for "bad" or "ugly" to think of how we're reclaiming it from that use.

[sciatrix]

Oh, yeah. Seeing "asexual" used in that context hurts every time, when it doesn't just make me angry. And then, of course, people--often the exact same people who would use "asexual" when they mean "an offensive portrayal of someone like me" without a second thought--argue that asexuality is totally not marginalized at all. I don't know, the fact that "asexual" with that meaning is more or less entrenched in social justice discourse makes me even more depressed than the other insulting variations does.

And I mean, admittedly "asexual" as the opposite for "sexy" is a lot rarer than "sexy" itself in that context! It's less an "asexual is a really common insult" and more that "when 'asexual' is used to apply to people it is... never complimentary, really, ow." But yeah.

OH GOD THOSE PEOPLE. They make me want to start declaring my atheist credentials and speaking with the maximum number of curse words and references to obscure sexual acts purely out of spite. I mean, besides the total creepiness factor, I *really* resent being spoken to as if I totally must embrace that particular belief system. Doesn't happen to me offline much at all, though, for which I am grateful. I mostly write that down to my gender presentation/general mode of speaking.

I'm glad this framing of the whole thing makes you feel better? I don't know, framing things in terms of "progress we are making!" makes me feel better than framing them in terms of "how far we still have to go."

[aceeccentric]

Ahh, of course. Because it's possible for our sexual orientation to be an insult, but not other people's... mmm, right. It is harder to argue against it when people use it like that.

They are extremely creepy people. And I hate people assuming what beliefs I ascribe to. It happens a lot when I tell non-Southern people I'm from the South, in particular. But there's also a lot of that when I see people telling others they're asexual... a lot of people assume it's a value judgment. It's somehow a lot creepier when they're praising you for it though.

It does. "How far we still have to go" seems ... like a road we'll never see the end of. "Progress we are making" at least lets us look behind us to see what we've done so far.

[nami_roland]

Yay for being in a better place! And those cupcakes are truly things of beauty.

Also, definitely up for ace conversations whenever. ~grins~

[sciatrix]

I am very proud of them. <3 And yay for doing better! Sharply, sharply limiting my tumblr time is helping with that--I'd just block myself from the site and have done with it, but I can't figure out how to block my phone and now I'm in the habit of scanning tumblr when I'm wandering around campus. Er. Anyone know how to block an iPhone's ability to access certain sites?

Possibly I should have rambly threads? "Here are thoughts on asexuality I am having, want to discuss them?" Or post on group_x more with the thoughts I'm having, I dunno. >> ooh, and I meant to put in my vague thoughts about asexuality and gender identification, particularly the thing where I suspect that identifying as asexual gives you so much leeway to play with gender because you're not worrying about how people you're attracted to perceive you.

I have so many thoughts! And so little tiiiiiime.

[aceofhearts61]

Those cupcakes are amazing!

Glad you're feeling better. I've missed your posts recently.

:)

[greenchestnuts]

Those are epic, awesome cupcakes. I should do that for my sister for her next birthday. She would love it.

Belated happy birthday, and I am glad you are doing better!