DharmaCurious

Something tells me that wouldn't fly here. I kind of like it, but it might be get me punched. Lol.

Thank you for noticing!

It's not the most common thing in the world, and to be honest with you, the majority of people around here don't hate the gays anymore (they've moved on to the trans!), but yeah, it happens. It just generally isn't reported as being motivated by their sexual orientation. It's just a random attack, or drug related, or whatever.

Jesus, I'd move to Canada in a heart beat. Sadly, I'm one of those working poor you hear about. No marketable skill that would let me. I know y'all have your own set of problems, but to be somewhere I wouldn't have to worry about healthcare? Dream come true. Feel like marrying a southern neighbo(u)r for a few years? Just long enough to get me in. Lol.

That's how my mom taught me. Basically, head on a swivel until you're safely across. Also, never trust a red light. Ever.

Well, looks like I dodged a bullet by going with the much more lucrative creative writing degree... :/

Tennessee by way of Virginia Beach, VA.

I mean, it's true. Ask an American to visualize an ounce of anything other than drugs, and they probably won't be able to. Ask how many ounces in a gallon, and they'll Google it. Even cups aren't well understood. We can eyeball a mile on the interstate, or tell you how tall someone is, or lift a box and guess it's weight to within 5 pounds. But honestly, that's about it. We just aren't really taught to visualize our weights and measures, it's why newscasters keep saying shit like "8 Olympic swimming pools!" Or "the size of three football fields" because we just don't have a coherent system ingrained in us. That's also, I think, why we're so against metrification. Because weights and measures feel hard, because we're basically only semi-literate in our own mother tongue, so a "foreign language" feels like it'd be this huge undertaking.

I'm unfamiliar, fortunately. Haha.

I really, really love knitting. I'm not good, and I have a hard time finishing projects (tragic case of batterscain. I jump from thing to thing.), but the actual knitting itself? OMG, I love having something to do with my hands, and that something actual makes a real, tangible thing? Somehow magically out of a ball of string? What‽ It's lovely.

It's insane, though, how people who don't knit/crochet will just treat a knitted or crocheted item like it's a cheap Walmart graphic tee. They do not respect the work put into it.

Rural ass Appalachia. Lol. By culture I was specifically referring to the gay culture here, but the culture writ large is also not one I particularly vibe with. I try my best not to paint with a broad brush, but it's undeniable that there are certain cultural and social elements at play here. The gay culture here is absolutely inundated with meth and "parTying." The larger general culture has an almost... Antagonistic view on anything even remotely academic or intellectual. On top of that, my political views just do not align with the vast majority of the people where I live. And I'm not trying to disparage anyone, I understand there are reasons for all of that, and that education in this region has historically been so poor that they've had to retool a lot of the testing specifically for this region. But I've lived here 10 years, and I've managed to make 3 friends, 2 of which live an hour away, and we meet up in a city that's central to us.

As far as making friends goes, it's not that I don't trust them at first blush or anything, I guess I'm just sort of stuck in my own routine, and it takes quite a lot of time before I can adjust my programming to include another human into that. I have to feel a connection with them to want to include them in my life, and that takes time. On top of that, it's incredibly difficult to find people with shared interests. And I know, I make the perfect the enemy of the good. I do that, and I need to stop.

But lemme tell you about my most recent date. Lol. Met this dude online, talked for 2 weeks. He seemed perfect. Great guy, exactly my type. Smart, funny, into nerdy shit, loves philosophy, he's a writer.

We meet up at a local park, where's there's a busy walking trail. Go on an hour long walk, where he informs me the love of his life is in prison for dealing meth, will be getting out hopefully in 2032. He wants someone who will me in with him, and keep him company, be a companion until his man gets out of prison, at which point the relationship has an expiration date.

The guy before that was also pretty compatible, not exactly everything I wished for, but a good guy, i thought it could be something. We broke up because he was in the closet, which, fine, I understand that. What I couldn't tolerate is how he would go out on the weekends with his cousins to go fagbashing. They'd catfish a guy on Grindr, and then pummel the shit out of him. He was so afraid of his family that he would participate in that. Which is horrible that he had to deal with family like that, but I just couldn't sit by idly. He broke up with me when I reported turned in his cousins.

Tennessee can be a lovely place, but get too far outside of a city, and it turns dark real quick.

I like thank you kindly! Haha

And no, I don't work at a drive through, I just use them occasionally. Lol. And yeah, miss has always felt weird to me. I know in other parts of the country ma'am has an age connotation, so maybe miss is more appropriate there? But to me, it always felt sort of... Disparaging. Like you're specifically saying "you there, child-like-female-being!" Lol. Just doesn't sit right.

And I'd so much rather be yelled at for using new fangled honorifics. Haha. If I accidentally misgender someone, I know I've potentially ruined a day, or at the very least added to a certain level of frustration. If I get yelled at for some new fangled honorific then what I've done is outted a jerk, and pissed them off, and pissing off jerks makes me happy. Haha.

I like misser! It reminds me of Messer, and that feels quaint!