Confused people and a facet of the GBF

I’m having a drunken musing about some of my GBF problems, including some of the people in my life who try to treat me as a mascot, or a toy or feel a desperate need to get close to me to be their bestest friend so they can be one of the cool crowd.

It’s annoying. And many of them are annoying for the usual reasons of fetishism/privilege/dehumanisation and general annoyance that comes with straight privilege and causes me headaches.

But there are a couple who surprised me because I though, to a degree, they had more sense (and, to be fair, they generally behave better albeit still annoyingly). I, for a long time, put it down to the fact that it’s amazing how good people can be at hiding their prejudices and it can shock you at the worst times making no-one truly safe (case in point, friend I complained about lately in long complainy post I mean to go into more detail on when I’m not drunk and typing drunkenly on a tablet while laid on a drunk Beloved who is, indeed, drunk).

But there is another element (not to friend-I-complained-about-and-is-no-longer-friend, but to others) to these generally clueful people. It comes to not understanding what being “out” means to everyone.

Because, of course, being gay is a big big big, super big massive secret, right? So if she’s in on the BIG SECRET then that must mean she’s one of my closest of close friends, right? Because it’s not like I would ever tell a near stranger that I’m gay!

But I view being gay as basic biographical information for me – it’s not a secret, just about anyone who knows me knows I’m gay. A casual acquaintance will know I’m gay.

So she thinks she’s my bestest friend ever because I trusted her with my biggest secret. I think she’s a person I met once or twice who has a poor sense of boundaries.

It’s not an excuse for the overwhelming majority (displayed by general behaviour) but for this odd blip of behaviour from an otherwise apparently decent person it may be the key

Of course, there follows the “I’m sorry, we’re not actually friends, sorry you got the wrong impression” conversation which is AWKWARD. Hallmark should really make a card “You think we’re friends! I don’t really like you – sorry!”

Or maybe a cake? Chocolate with “I don’t like you very much! Take a slice and go away!” written on the top?

(It could go with my “You’re my husband’s friend, not mine. I have better taste.” Victoria Sandwich).

Remembrance Day

Most years I do talk about Remembrance Days and what it means and it’s importance and how I think the way we commemorate the day is different from the way a lot of other people seem to commemorate this date.

To me – and, in general, to the people around I’ve seen and the country as a whole, I don’t think this day is about veterans. Oh the British Legion is there in force, of course, handing out the poppies, but I think living veterans has always been a very minor part of what this day is about in Britain.

And it certainly isn’t about honour. Or glory. Or victory. It isn’t about celebration or joy or remembering that we won or the enemies we defeated or “freedom” whatever (apart from anything else, the date chosen is the end of World War 1, the Great War – a war that was pretty much devoid of anything resembling honour, glory or even definable victory. A war which can probably be best characterised as one fought for so little in the way of actual reason beyond foolish pride and hair trigger tempers and lots of damn fools looking for a damned excuse)

To me, this day is always about loss. It’s about utter tragedy. It’s about rows upon rows upon rows of graves that had no reason to be filled. Long fields of death and loss. It’s about cities reduced to rubble, it’s about families who lost entire generations in the meat grinder of war. It’s about the refugees losing everything – it’s about blood and tears and the sheer, utter, enraging pointlessness of it all.

On this day I don’t want to hear of “honour” because honour means nothing to the millions of dead. I don’t want to hear about “glory” because the glorious dead are still dead. I don’t want to hear about “victory” because the dead never win. And I certainly loathe the creeping habit of CELEBRATING this day – you do not celebrate millions dead before their time.

This is a national day of mourning. And a day of shame – shame because the atrocity of war happened and is still happening – and we wave our flags and rattle our sabres and do not learn. Perhaps if we stopped telling the old lies, stopped treating war like a game, then maybe we would begin to truly Remember.

When we had the first 2 minute silence in the UK in 1919 it was hard – because the crowd had to fight back tears of too-fresh pain. That is what we should remember.

*waves* I'm not dead!

A fuller post will be posted later

The last few weeks have been chaos with more chaos and extra chaos. Actually it's getting on for months now

We had family drama then family socialising then more drama from the socialising topped with more socialising and relatives all over the place and you're not allowed to kill any of them

We had the work drama of DOOM due to 3 colleagues all not working for different reasons (hiatus, pregnancy, leaving to another firm) and NO-ONE TELLING ANYONE ELSE ABOUT THIS and the SPs again proving that they may be bloody excellent lawyers but they're bloody shit organisers which created WORK LOAD OF DOOM.

A 52" 3D television turning up in my living room then being dismantled for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom. Beloved was involved. Things became complicated. A fish tank broke.

Various things conspired to completely destroy the lead we'd built up on Fangs for the Fantasy just as the busy Autumn season starts and I know, hiatus is fine, dropping some of the schedule is fine - but my obsessive-zomg-you-do-this-or-you-have-FAILED does not agree.

A person who thinks she's a great friend of mine but I considered to be a moderate friend has kind of reinforced why I was never close to them. They're a source of great drama and stress and worse they ARE a big-uber-good friend of F who now feels torn and it's a complete minefield of emotion and badness

Beloved's parents said something pretty tasteless and hurtful to Beloved and then tried to explain themselves by being even worse but it basically boils down to they don't think Beloved and I should ever ever ever think of having children for reasons-that-are-totally-not-homophobic-honest-but-really-are and they're now playing they we're-totally-not-going-to-resolve-this-we're-just-going-to-not-talk-about-it which works FINE if you're arguing over whether Aunty Pearls vase is more hideous than a mutilated cow's arse, but is rather inadequate when the topic is "would we shun our grandchildren". It's causing some fallout beyond that because Beloved was still living under the rather naive delusion that his family had fully accepted him; which is kind of odd because it was kind of blatantly obvious that, no they hadn't but at the same time it's easy to convince ourselves of something we want to believe

Freaky note writer is still writing freaky notes but that's kind of background noise

It also meant that everything I mentioned here just kept happening. Endless human contact, endless people needing something from me, endless social events and never ever alone has frankly eroded me down to a very brittle, fragile state. Still I cling to the positive - I may be brittle and fragile and fraying at the edges and needing to tip-toe desperately around my teetering sanity but I HAVEN'T shattered. And yes, that's an achievement, that's progress.

Beloved isn't and doesn't shatter, he quietly fumes, loudly raves or just decides "well that's done then" and just abandons huge segments of his life, no matter how invested he is in it - it's a rather terrifying element about him. He will decide a thing, a hobby, a job, a person even a close friend or loved one is no longer a source of goodness to him and... they're gone. End of. Erased. I'm both impressed and quietly freaked out by his ability to do that