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asymmetricboys · 5 years

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ten things about the Man that have nothing to do with sex

1. we went to go see “if Beale street could talk” together at a movie theatre with weirdly thick, plush armrests, and he crushed himself to the side of his seat and stretched his arm over both of the armrests between us in order to hold my hand the whole time. i looked over at one point to see he’d contorted himself down into the seat so he could rest his head on his arm without letting go of me.

2. while he was gone for three weeks over the holidays, he sent me two handwritten cards. he admitted in the first one that it’s only been two days since he’s seen me in person, but that he misses me a lot. that the reason he fell asleep instead of pulling an all nighter and almost missed his plane home was because when he lay down on his bed that night, intending just to rest for a moment, the pillow still smelled like me and he couldn’t bring himself to get back up.

the second card was written right before he came back, meaning i’d already gotten to see him by the time it arrived at my doorstep -- i hadn’t anticipated another card. in that he tells me that the distance has only made him realize how much he cares about me, and that all of my fears about him falling in love with someone else, or with his home province again, had not come true at all.

3. he gets up earlier than me, so if i sleep over, he brings me coffee in bed. he makes fun of how much sugar i use, but now knows just the right amount to put in. after I complained a couple times about having to use brown sugar, he found white sugar in a container at the very back of the cupboards for me the next time I came over.

4. he is a caretaker, first and foremost. his mother taught him to cook when he was seven. one time when I slept off an overnight shift at his house, I woke up to find that he’d been happily making falafel from scratch and some sort of curry soup for over two hours so that we could have dinner together.

“do you have snacks at your house if I came over?” I asked once.

“yes,” he said confidently. I got there and he handed me a bowl of mango slices. fucking healthy ass dweeb

another time, when i was heading to work after being at his, he gave me an entire mason jar of soup he’d made because he was worried about me not getting food on shift.

5. i asked him to read something i’d written and give me thoughts, and a couple lines in, he sat back and whistled and said my name like a deity’s. “this is the Toni Morrison feeling,” he said (earlier, we’d had a conversation where he said some authors (Toni Morrison) make him feel like, “damn, I could never write like that” and others (Carmen Maria Machado) just made him excited about the possibilities for how one could write). we have exceptionally different styles, the two of us -- his is so patently literary that i assumed at first he’d look down on mine. he never has. he takes my advice on his writing seriously when i give him notes. he calls me a genius like it’s a fact and not an opinion

6. I read a story of his once that had a scene where a teenage girl looks at herself naked in a mirror. I braced for the worst. and then the scene merely involved her noting the breadth of her shoulders, and then reflecting on a tough task she had to do later. and the story moved on.

“I actually wouldn’t have guessed a man wrote this,” I told him.

“Jesus, that’s high praise,” he said, understanding without me saying it exactly what kind of objectification I'd been afraid of.

7. he used to work with kids at a high school library, and was always trying to gently guide them and help them by finding them specific novels from different perspectives, such as recommending books with a female pov to teenage boys (or, if he sensed a closeted kid, he casually suggested queer books, the kind of things that would’ve helped people like me and him when we were confused teens).

he’s still in touch with a few former students who are now in university

one boy sent him a message their mother had sent them, asking for advice on how to deal with it. this boy’s mother is incredibly transphobic and hurtful, refusing to accept that she now has a son instead of a daughter.

the Man, overwhelmed, asked me what I thought (after asking the kid’s permission to share the letter). I have more experience with hearing the rhetoric of transphobic parents and stuff, and I cynically said the letter from the mother seemed pretty in line with sentiments I'd heard before.

“this is typical?” the Man said, soft as hell and horrified. “this is the most hateful thing I've ever read.”

another time, he read me a section of an alice munro story that contained a disturbing sexual harassment/assault scene of a teenage girl. after he finished reciting it out loud, he quietly told me he’d cried the first time he read that.

8. he’s staunchly against the oil industry, and is heavily for the environment. he’s the kind of person who doesn’t say “I don’t want to have kids” but instead, “is it ethical to bring a child into the world considering the environment crisis?”

(he knows I have no intention of ever being pregnant (it came up organically somehow), but we both spoke in admiration of our mutual friend and her wife adopting an eight-year-old. I think deep down, he would flourish as a dad. i hate that I find that very knowledge is challenging my own desires for my future, even slightly)

he makes a point of trying to buy things that are ethically made, but isn’t always a Pretentious Dick about it (just occasionally)

9. he cuts his own hair, cropped short at the sides and back, longer slightly at the top. if it gets too long on top, he gets nervous, and trims it frequently, saying he’s afraid of looking like an alt-right white asshole.

(my sister, when I told her about him, asked only, “would he punch a nazi?” as a litmus test for his personality. I asked, and he said, “obviously.”)

he is handsome in a blunt, average sort of way. his face is square and large -- he says he was teased as a child because his head grew before the rest of his body did, so he would wobble around like a bobble head, all top heavy. he’s got big blue eyes that are set a little too wide apart (less noticeable when he has his glasses on), which adds to the caveman-esque slant of his conventional attractiveness. sometimes when he’s excited and has got his eyes wide while he’s talking about something, I get so distracted by those eyes -- I'd never really known what people meant by eyes “sparkling” until him.

his closed-mouth smile is cute, but on a smile that flashes all of his teeth, his whole face comes together and he’s not average: he’s beautiful.

he looks nothing like the men I have always been attracted to (very tall, dark hair and eyes, gangly limbs, loose postures and gangly atmospheres). his body is that of a football player in college who isn’t going to go professional, but who is a solid member of the team. you’d call him stocky if his shoulders weren’t broad enough that from the back he’s still got that distinctive upside down triangle frame.

sometimes he gets this flirtatious, almost predatory look where he juts his jaw out in this bulldog-ish, smug, open-mouthed smile. it’s as odd as it sounds. I like it anyway.

it’s weird, how he has this ability to fade into the background, looking exactly like an average banker or something, standing with rounded shoulders in a sweater and a collared shirt -- and then five minutes later he’s laughing at something and he’s so sharply good-looking you’re just bowled over, like “how did I get someone this hot? not just hot for the kind of people who go to pretentious literary events, but hot enough that the girls who teased me in high school would gag themselves over him?”

I am bad at giving him compliments. he is not bad at that. sometimes, in the middle of conversation with me, he will lose all the air in his lungs in a big gust and say, “god, you’re beautiful.” he says he doesn’t know sometimes what I see in him, but I feel the opposite.

10. during a sort of fight, we wandered through a bookstore for two hours, just moving and talking. the fight had started because i’d shared a story about wading through some shit my roommate had told me and he’d said, “you put up with so much from people. you do all this emotional work and deal with so much. have i ever said something that has made you do this kind of work? do i do this to you?” and i said, well.

cause there was one thing he’d said once that i’d rationalized away (it was an out of character outburst made sense in context when i realized he was actually self-destructing about something else and didn’t know it), but i hadn’t directly confronted him about, so i brought it up and carefully went through why out of everything he’d said in that conversation, it was this thing that stayed with me. he winced hearing me say this sentence back to him--instantly heard how shitty it was and apologized. when he didn’t seem to fully get the gist of why that in particular upset me though, i explained, and he listened. when i used the word “misogynistic”, he didn’t fly into a defense. he went quiet and nodded.

later, at his house, he sat on the floor with his back against the side of his bed, and i crawled over and sank into his arms, just holding him and being held. and he spoke -- in this voice i’ll never be able to describe ever, all shaky and heavy and soft at the same time, like it was so hard to say, but it was impossible to keep in -- he pressed his mouth to the side of my head and said, “I wanna be yours.”

“I want to be someone you can trust,” he said. “i know it was a month ago that i said that shitty thing, but it feels like i’ve just said it to you, and i’m so sorry. i want to be better.”

that’s it, right there.

I have been with people who seemed so much more...good than me, who hid their failings and would not share negative feelings with me -- about their lives, about me, about themselves. I have been with people who drowned me in their negative feelings and their self-deprecation, constantly requiring me to build them up. all I want is someone who is working on themselves at the same time as they are working on us, and is willing to share that with me.

someone who, like me, wants to be better

#ace babbles #wrote this because I felt like I was giving off a skewed impression of him with a million posts about sex and none about...personality #and this allowed me to use some of the extensively long description of his appearance I had sitting in a draft lol #YES THE ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION WAS LONGER #ace talks falling in love #I am so extra lol #I wonder whether I'll keep these posts in some form if we end up staying together longer than my pessimistic brain assumes #I always thought it would be nice to have these to remember by #but what if....what if we like...move in together?#we casually have sort of almost talked about that #in a hypothetical we both have no intention of doing that anytime soon because it's too soon but we know we're interested in a future #kind of way #hmmmmm

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treehugginglibrarian · 6 years

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“But, how do I Start?” Honestly, I don’t know.

I can’t remember a time when exercise was difficult for me. Of course there have been times when new regiments left me sore or a particularly grueling workout was, itself, quite difficult. The general act of exercising, however, has always come easily to me. When people trying to get into shape ask me “how do I start?” I’m completely useless. I can offer to work out with them. I can offer to help them put together a plan of some sort. I can probably even come up with a type of exercise they’d enjoy based on their likes and their personality. I cannot give them any advice on how to “get started” or “get back into it,” because I’ve never had to do either of these things.

The first sport I can remember playing is soccer. I was five or six and my dad was the coach. I used to get carded and thrown out of games because I liked to push the boys on the other teams and steal the ball from them. Stealing the ball was okay, apparently the pushing was not. In short order, soccer was followed by t-ball, basketball, and softball. Throughout my elementary school years I was almost always involved in a sport of some sort and, lacking a video game console to indoctrinate me, I was often outside climbing trees.

I was completely horrible at sports. Just, absolutely disastrous. I had a pretty solid three-point shot for a while, despite being insanely short at the time, but other than that I was pretty awful at all of them. The last organized team sport I attempted was volleyball, while in middle school, and after the second straight season of never seeing the court during a game, my parents gave me permission to quit that shit. They did not, however, give me permission to sit idle.

I couldn’t have been much more than 11 or 12 the first time my mother looked at my anxious, fidgety, person and said “Bins, you’re making me crazy. You have too much energy. Go for a run or something.” I think she figured I would take the order metaphorically and just outside and play. I took her literally and I ran three miles. It didn’t take me long and I actually didn’t hate it. During the fall and summer months, I often made my dad go running with me so I could run at night without being eaten by bears (at 33 I’m still convinced my dad could save me from bears!).

Suffice to say, my sport of choice for my high school years had been selected and, while I tried long and triple jumping for a short period of time, it wasn’t long before I fell in with the distance runners and plodded through a mile and two mile race at every meet. I never did well, but I always finished. And unlike organized team sports, my slowness on the track was of little interest to my team mates. In the autumn I could be found sweating on the practice field, flag in hand, trying to make a rag tag bunch twirl in unison. On the weekends, I frequently laced up my running shoes and went for a jog just because I enjoyed it.

I think it was the summer after 7th grade when my mother started bribing me to go to Jazzercise with her. Yes, you read that correctly. Jazzercise. With my mommy. It was completely awesome. I’d get up every morning at a reasonable hour, eat a light breakfast, spend the morning working out with my mom, stop for chocolate or a donut on the way home, take a shower, and have the whole glorious summer day ahead of me. You’d be amazed how much 13 and 14 year olds can accomplish when they’re awake all day during the summer (I read so many fucking books, it was insane). I didn’t completely understand why my mom had wanted me to go to class with her so badly, but who was I to say “no” to chocolate covered oreos? Besides, I was weird, even as a teenager I liked my mom more than I liked most of my classmates.

By the time I got to college, I didn’t know how to not be active. I played lacrosse (again, completely terribly) before ending up on the Ranger Challenge team through ROTC. I ran constantly and, under the instruction of a gaggle of men determined to make something of me, took to lifting weights for an hour a day every morning. During a time period in which most women are gaining weight and realizing what an enemy their metabolism is, I was literally unable to consume the number of calories needed to keep up with my activity levels. Since my college years I have stayed in shape primarily through running and lifting, though I went through a triathlon stint that lasted a good three or four years and ended with the completion of a half-IronMan. I’m sure I’ll get back to it eventually, but right now I’m still too busy trying to figure out whether I will ever be able to properly bench press my own body weight or do a hand-stand push-up.

The one thing that all of these activities has in common, though, is that none of them were hard for me to get into. I didn’t have to force myself to take up swimming or cycling. I didn’t have to prod myself back into the weight room. If I’m skipping the gym, it’s because I have plans, I’m not feeling well, or my workout is taking place at home. Skipping the gym just because I’m not in the mood isn’t something I do very frequently. I have been exercising, in some fashion, for so long that it’s no longer a hobby. It’s a way of life.

They say it takes 30 days to acclimate to a new habit or routine. If the resolutioners who populate gyms and rec centers at the start of every year are any indication, it takes more than 30 days for exercise, as a habitual routine, to incorporate itself into a person’s blood. They’ll show up on January 2nd and will make pretty steady progress until they skip a day in March or April. One day will become two will become three will become a week will become a month, until the only people left at the gym are the ones who were already there on December 31st of the previous year. The next year, on January 2nd, the cycle will start over again. Turning exercise into a way of life is unlike any other hobby or habit out there, and for many getting it to truly stick is nearly impossible.

Tobacco, alcohol, and sugar are all addictions. If you get past the first 30 days without them, you’re not necessarily in the clear, but you’re definitely better off. You’re well on your way to creating a better lifestyle for yourself. Likewise with adding foods that are good for you. These are alterations that require some thought and, on occasion, self-control, but they don’t require drastic changes to your overall existence. You’ve always had to eat, now you’re just eating differently. From a time-suck standpoint, convincing yourself to exercise on the regular is much closer to convincing yourself to start reading or writing every day. You may already have the time to do so, but unless you’re the type who spends entire chunks of your day staring at a wall blankly, much of that time is being spent on other things. Things that you will have to sacrifice if you want to engage in other time consuming activities. Things like reading, writing, or playing an instrument are missing a couple of the elements that seem to make exercise so elusive, even for those willing to spend the time.

For starters, exercise seems to have people convinced that it’s something you need to “know how” to do if you’re going to incorporate it into your life. Except, if you know how to walk (or roll, for that matter) you know how to exercise. Simply moving more than you typically would in a day constitutes exercise. That’s all ya gotta do. Move. The fact that people often think it requires some sort of “know how” may also be why it’s often associated with costing money. While some of us spend money on gym memberships, or find ourselves involved in physical pursuits that require specialized equipment or more expensive attire, these things are not necessary. You can walk an extra mile or two in blue jeans and a t-shirt. There are some things exercise is associated with, though, that make the reticence to participate understandable if it’s not already something you’re doing regularly.

For a lot (most) people who don’t exercise, it’s associated with specific goals. Typically, the goal to lose weight, or size, and to get in better shape. While these are, absolutely, worthy goals and worth taking up exercising for, they’re not the only reason to bother exercising. You can be reed thin, or just be happy with your size, and exercising would still be good for you simply because exercise is a healthy activity. It’s not only a healthy activity when you’re doing it for a purpose. It’s equally healthy when you’re doing it for no reason other than “because I should and I know I should.” Taking up exercise just for the sake of exercising will not, however, prevent it from being a possibly painful process when you start. Even for those of us who are in pretty good shape, a dramatic change in our exercise regime will leave us sore and tired at first. If you’re not braced for it, the soreness felt the first or second day after a new exercise plan is started may well be enough to turn someone off the idea.

We talk a LOT about privilege in today’s environment. White privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, so many privileges it’s actually a little exhausting and, to some extent, does little more than encourage a never-ending game of oppression Olympics. “I raise you one straight, black, Christian male with one buddhist, Asian, female, queer. Ha! Take that!” Like our privileges have become some sadistic form of real-life Cards Against Humanity that we’re consistently trying to win just by proving that our lives are “worse” than everyone else’s. If, like me, you were raised by a parent(s) who had an exercise bug up their butt, there’s a solid chance you’ve walked away with more privilege than you even really understand. It’s taken me YEARS to realize the gift my mother gave me in making exercise a lifestyle.

I am 33 years old and have never actually gone on a diet, despite having a generally normal metabolism, and I’m still pretty thin. I’m healthy, insanely so. My blood pressure is perfect as is all of my blood work. I very rarely get sick and, when I do, it’s almost always a result of my irritable bowel syndrome or is little more than a cold. I am thin enough to enjoy the gift that is “thin privilege,” wherein I’m automatically perceived as being smarter and more competent than my peers, solely because I’m thinner than many of them are. That said, I’m also muscular enough that most people don’t fuck with me at this point. I try to avoid walking to my car alone at night not because I’m scared of the people near where I work, but because I have a distinct feeling I would end up breaking a nose if someone approached me the wrong way and getting arrested for assault is low on my “to-do list.” I don’t need a man to open the peanut butter jar for me, to move my furniture, or to handle the heavy lifting in the yard. And because I have been exercising my entire life, the emotional work I have to put into maintaining this lifestyle is pretty slim. Exercise isn’t something I sacrifice other things for, because it’s a genuine requirement for me. The way eating or breathing or sleeping is.

None of this is an attempt to discourage the resolutioners or those who are looking to change their lives by incorporating more activity. Quite the opposite, actually. Do it! Get out there! Just know as you’re getting into it that some of the people you’ll encounter along the way have a serious head start. While some of them garnered this head start when they were in their 20s or 30s and, like you, were desperate for a change, some of us did not. Some of us literally don’t know a life that is any different than this. We’ve been borderline hyperactive our entire existence. We’re not trying to be discouraging when we shrug off your “how do I get started?” questions or seem puzzled by your stress, we just genuinely don’t get it. Don’t let us get you down. We may be the lucky ones, the crazies whose mothers or fathers thought that exercise just for the fuck of it was perfectly healthy for a 12 year old, but it’s NEVER too late to start. It can be as simple as a walk around the block.

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