chat

"We need to sex up your wardrobe. What do you mean you're not comfortable wearing that? Oh honey, don't be such a prude, all the girls are doing it and you want to be successful don't you? No one's going to watch someone that dresses like their grandma."

I get sick and tired of so called leftists equating exploitation to sexual liberation.

My girlfriend is really close with her siblings and every second week of the month she always has all of them over to have dinner at our apartment so they can get together. It’s a large group of 5 other siblings so it gets loud but it’s all fun and they’re very nice people and we all get along. Her brother is really cool and builds computers for fun and I think that takes a level of knowledge that I don’t really posses so I’m like very happy for people who do things like that and I do see building computer is a hobby because it takes skill determination and a lot of time to do and there’s a healthy component behind I think. I think I see it as a puzzle.

He got upset at me though when we were talking about some computer parts, he was saying how one computer part is running very hot that it burns the cables and breaks the computer and even though this happens he says it’s rare and he still wants one. I asked him how that happens and he said it’s usually because the parts are put under a lot of pressure when they’re being used and sometimes they get really hot and they break and he said it’s usually because of a video game. I laughed a bit and said something like “breaking a computer over an video game lol” but I don’t think he got it and he said “well that’s the whole point of the parts to play video games.”

I laughed a bit but he wasn’t laughing and looked like a said something rude. I apologized for not knowing about the computers and he said it was okay. I told him that I only play Mario kart every now and then and that it’s my favorite game because me and my gf play it every now and then and that’s when he said “that’s a good hobby for you both” and I got confused and said “it’s not a hobby just a bit of fun.” He said hobbies are supposed to be fun and that’s why games are hobbies because they take a lot of time and energy. I frankly disagree with this so I told him “people put time and effort in work but work isn’t a hobby” and he got mad again and said “you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I think I upset him over the computer parts so I tried to make it up to him by saying “I think building computers is a hobby and that takes time and effort” but then he said “don’t patronize me I know what you’re doing” so things got really sour. He left the dinner table and went to watch tv.

After driving him home my sister told me that he spent a lot of money like thousands on online card games and that it was a sensitive topic for him. I didn’t mean to offend I really like him but now I feel like he probably thinks I’m some condescending person. Is there any way I can make it up to him?

I'm an IT manager for a tiny non-profit org. I had one employee, older guy who was fine at what he did. Didn't want to learn any of the new tech but was reliable at answering tickets and kicking things he didn't know up to me.

He got caught by HR clocking in and leaving to go home for a few hours before coming back....as far as we can tell going back years. HR knew he clocked in way sooner than they saw him pulling into the lot. He admitted to going home to get some coffee.

I just had to sit their while my boss doled out the termination...but I still feel like shit. I was the one who was lenient when I started and said "I won't be on your ass like the last guy, if tickets get solved and you're nice to our users, that's all I care about" but I did not expect this from him.

It's honestly king shit, steal from your employers all you can...but don't talk to the payroll person as you're walking in from your time home. He's union but since this is considered a severe infraction it doesn't go through the progressive discipline process.

I hate this world and hate that I contributed to its perpetual suffering.

Both me and my sister stayed there recently, and I guess he assumes we lost it. But I barely cooked when I was down there and my sister and her husband say they didn't have pasta while they were there.

This was a cheap ass pasta strainer mind you. He even admitted he didn't like it that much and got a new one at the dollar store for under $5 bucks. Mind you I'm pretty sure this man is technically a millionaire at this point (hence why he has a nice place near the beach I like to go to).

Jesus this man needs a hobby.

Edit: HE FOUND THE STRAINER!!!

The series from 1995. I had seen it as a schoolchild when it came out but now I see it with new eyes. Rather than the romance that we're meant to be focusing on when watching it, I couldn't help but concentrate on the behaviour of the lower classes towards the upper. Mr Darcy is the richest character in it, he has a stately home with huge grounds, and an income of £10K a year (equivalent to around £1 million a year now). He appears to get his income by being a landlord, renting out properties on his estate.

Mr Darcy doesn't appear to work, he's never even been in the army like may rich men did then. He doesn't even go to the trouble of managing his own estate, but has a steward to do that. He does nothing but go to balls, have dinner and sit around with his friends.

So basically he is a typical upper-class scrounger. He lives off the hard work of others, raking in rents, and gets a very luxurious lifestyle by doing this. And yet, the lower classes, the people who do all his work for him and pay him the money he lives off, have to show him great respect instead of vice versa. Every time a lower class person such as a servant appears in his presence, they have to bow and curtsey to him and call him My Lord. Even though their hard work is what keeps him alive.

And he is so snobby towards those below him, even towards other landed gentry who are a bit poorer than him. And it's so similar to rich people today. I just wonder what goes on in the head of someone like that. Other people do everything for you but you think you're better than them. How does that even compute in someone's mind?

It's so crazy that this is still going on in the 21st century, especially with the royals. Prince William is a shitty landlord who owns 600 rental properties that poor people live in, he lets them go to rack and ruin so the families live in mould and damp and struggle to pay their rent so William can live in luxury, yet instead of being grateful he expects people to curtsey to him and call him Sir wherever he goes.

The royal family have four palaces as well as multiple other homes, Buckingham Palace alone has 775 rooms. There are nearly one million unoccupied homes in the UK. Of these, over 265K are long-term unoccupied, mostly owned by rich individuals and rich corporations. There are also 280K second homes in the UK. Meanwhile there are over 354K homeless people in the UK. Not to mention millions more struggling to pay rent to landlords. All of these homeless people could be housed with room to spare, and many more could be freed from the burden of rent.

Why is the most respect and deference given to those who hoard this wealth so that others go without, who feather their own nests at the expense of everyone else? We are long overdue for a revolution.

Hi I am in a rly awful mood rn xwx

I shouldn't even be here rn, I deleted my main acct just cuz the drama here got too be way too much for me to not feel like shit half the time I visit but I still lurk for some reason (there is no other site like this place in spite of its incredible ability to generate fighting over pointless and/or esoteric stuff)

Maybe it's just me being more sensitive to it lately cuz I haven't been struggling with mental health as much in past year but I feel like it's getting worse

And every time I read these threads it's the most obvious alt accounts for ppl who have been banned like 100 times already and I've been so online I am like 67% sure I can tell who is who now lmao

DayOfDoom (not to target you specificallyyy but its been very blatant and ofc that was part of your bit for a while) and all the creepy and/or brainwormed cis white guys who got purged during the last site cultural revolution before everyone involved burned out or left are still fucking here (the rowing guy, for example, I actually like you but it is kinda wild how mad and like.... antisocial the gas stove thing made you :| I had to remove some of your posts right after that omg, idk)

Idk what's up with Melina but even me mentioning faer is gonna invoke some of those irony poisoned ppl in fae's social circle to start shit under this post with their 17 alt accts lol. Literally just read their names. Do you recognize them? Was their account made 13 days ago and has been solely posting in /c/fakenews or the news thread? Do they post anything other than irony poisoned bits or antisocial yearning for billions to die? It's so fucking obvious but we aren't banning them, idek

Oooh, and one of the more entertaining and obvious wreckers I like to watch is Voight :3 Guy who posts like 10 rant replies to you before you even see their first reply. Did you end up going to Vietnam? I hope you're logged the fuck off now lol, site stuff obviously rly bothering you :/ I'm too tired to remember details of weird politics stuff you posted

Ugh idk, here's some things I think we should do:

• Ban /c/fakenews

Yeah it's mostly not funny and is run by and invites the same kind of irony poisoned ppl who keep cooking new drama. It was basically Melina's comm for a while cuz almost no one else wanted to be around fae's posting

• News threads and general megathreads need more oversight or smth

The news megas are kinda likeee a whole different site, populated both by ppl who have genuinely interesting stuff to share even if it's often wrong and the rly brainwormed irony poisoned geopolitics enjoyers. I didn't spend a lot of time there just cuz idk... vibes were off kinda so others know a lot more about their drama incidents than me. But there are a lot of ppl who were banned or need to be banned who only participate in the news thread and go on the main site to stir up shit lol. Here's some words to create ✧˖°. discussion ✧˖°.: ZPoster the ultimate ban evader, uhhhh LargePenis getting bullied off the site for a bit with a lot of it from ZPoster, also its kinda wild anyone thought that xiaohongshu imposter drama post could've been anything but one of their haters from the news thread making fun of them

The general megathreads..... okay Im running out of horrible self-harming drama energy to keep writing buttttt they did often have ppl posting a lot of rly personal stuff especially about other ppl in a way that is rly problematic and continues to be (ban crushposting, just fuckin ban it)

• Make the site account creation process require an invite or someone to vouch for you. Or start logging IP addresses, idk. Have the server pipe log output to a program that greps for them, sends a copy over a encrypted connection to a . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . securer . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . machine that the admins control directly, and sends the rest to /dev/null, something, anything. Not logging IP addresses doesn't rly mean anything tbh, it's running on a cloud server in fuckin :france-cool: feds can get those IP addresses easily if they want them, get them off the server so hypothetical hackers cant get at them all easily but yeh

Here's a hot take: power posters CAN be good.

It means literally nothing for your opsec that you delete your account periodically. We have a wrecker (I can't find the source for this rn) who has admitted that they have a server federated to us, which means they SEE and SAVE EVERYTHING. Who upvotes what, what actions moderators have taken, the polite requests to delete stuff local users deleted (for a while, post deletions didn't even federate lmao)

Also, Lemmy is scraped constantly now. Not only by ppl who need AI stuff or advertisers or whatever. Plug you account into the wayback machine here: https://web.archive.org/ I bet it's there lol

How can you build a community when everyone is changing names and avatars every few weeks? You can't, which is why we have a community of power posters for better or worse

Power posters create so much of this fuckin drama but also any one power poster is soooooo much less likely to be doing the kind of shit the obvious alt accounts are doing, cuz being here for any extended length of time and being recognized means you are trusted more to some extent

Okay im hitting post before every neuron is telling me not to post this

Oh one last thing, there is an incredibly trivial way for anyone to see who is performing moderation actions. Admins of other servers in the network can also see and that is probably unfixable

None of this info I learned through privileged channels

Also also, the Lemmy code sucks ass, how does every Rust project start to look like a node.js project after like a year lmao

News articles about people asking things like "I have £1 million in savings and a £1 million pension pot. I own my 7 bedroom mansion outright with no mortgage and I own three other properties that I rent out. Can I afford to retire?"

Two years on from graduating and I've become my computer science degree isn't worth the paper it was printed on, so I've made the decision to try and swing a civil engineering degree in two years. Enough credits transfer that it should be a normal class load. But beyond that, I want to get the hell out of the south yesterday. I want to give living in the PNW a shot and I'd rather avoid waiting another two years for it because I'm at that age where I get very self-conscious about what little time left I have as a """young""" person and how I need to meet somebody or get ready for a dating market where most people my age are taken. We're working with layers of complexes here.

My plan is to see if I can't convince the two friends of mine who were already looking to move to come with me, work a year so I qualify for in-state tuition, then do a two year in-and-out at the university of oregon. On the surface, moving 2500 miles away from the only place I've ever lived to go somewhere I've only heard about through the distorted lens of media in order to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt is a fantastically awful idea. Upon closer inspection, it continues to feel like a very bad idea. I could very easily end up far worse off than I started, and I'm already in a very precarious spot. But you know what? I've only done what I felt like were good, safe ideas so far and I'm deeply dissatisfied with where that's left me. I went for a safe major that was supposedly guaranteed employment in a high-earning field and after eating all of the time and money that degrees generally do, it did nothing for me. So now I'm going to take a risk on going where (I think) I want to go to do what (I think) I want to do. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't terrified of the consequences of my own actions, but I just can't take living in the fucking suburban south another year.

I have to acknowledge that, along the shallowest dimension, I want some place that lines up more with my personal aesthetic tastes. Cowboy country pick-up bullshit grates against me tremendously. But more practically, the southern states are on a downward trend. They're the most conservative, the more environmentally at-risk, and the poorest, all of which are troubling signs for the future of the people who live here. Maybe the proper Communist thing to do would to be to stay and fight the rising tide, but at the end of the day, I am a coward who knows no community.

My schedule is pretty rushed since I have to be there before September if I want to qualify for in-state tuition for next Fall. I'll miss my parent's dogs (as much mine as theirs) deeply, and I feel guilty that one of them is getting old and I won't be there to see him through to the end. I'll miss bluebell, gumbo, and Mardi Gras. As frustrating as they can be, I'll miss my parents and my sister. And that's the heart of it. I don't know if I'm giving up everything I've ever known because I'm so internet poisoned that I think I'll be happy because the vague notion of communism is more popular, the economy is better, and I think cold weather is cool. So that's it for this pseudo-diary entry. Can anybody relate? More broadly, has anybody here bootstrapped themselves in a wholly new place before?

I'm genuinely considering getting a replica, so I can wear it to demos and stuff

I made a friend over the last few weeks and he’s pretty cool and has a really nice beach house on the coast and me and my gf hang out there a lot because we both really like it. The old man is a cool person and reminds me of my grandpa but he acts weird sometimes but I think this is just how he is and I think he’s lonely so he sees a child he never had in me which is weird but I don’t really have a good connection with my family anymore so I understand those feelings.

He wanted to show me his toy collection so we went to a basement where he had lots of toy UFO and alien toys from the movies. He looked at me for my approval and I said “very nice” but then called me out saying “you’re a disbeliever that’s okay there’s still time for you young bloods” and I felt weird with what he called me especially the use of the word “young bloods” but maybe he meant like new blood. I don’t believe in UFO being aliens so I was like brooo what the hell?

He spoke for about an hour telling me how the universe is inside of an orb and there are multiple orbs including parallel universes that are just like ours. The orbs are of alien origin and we live in “the petri globe” and everything that goes on inside the orbs are part of alien research. The aliens use the things we create on earth in order to incorporate it into their own society, with a higher emphasis on art because art is relative to a lived experience which makes it unique unlike universal principles of scientific variety. He then said aliens are making humans stupid to prevent a “catastrophe” aliens experience time differently to we do because time is a construct that has been created for us and so they know the future and something like humans do something to the universe that fucks it up for these aliens so they imprisoned us in these orbs before we invent the tools we need to be capable of ruining their system.

I’m like “broooo what the hell?” But I didn’t say that I was just saying it in my mind. It sounded cool but it was mostly just creative writing from his end. I asked “so how do you know and who told you” and then he was like “I’m part of a group that has found evidence of these truths” ummm 😧. It was starting to make sense now why one of his favorite movies had Tom Cruise in because he’s an alien Scientologist so I asked old man if he was Scientology and he got kinda angry and shouted “don’t be preposterous!” I’m like bro chill WTH… but he was kinda cool about it and said that Scientology are “dumb American frauds and hacks that only want to sell books and by extension their packages which cost thousands or millions of dollars to complete.” He’s stopped talking about it and then said he wanted to make me Cubano sandwich.

I ate the cubano sandwich

Ranting here because I don't have anywhere else to do it. It's been 4 days and these people are already driving me up a wall. Some are very kind, others are just taking my groceries, not doing their dishes, constantly starting shit, and just generally being nasty.

Came in, the fridge was full of moldy and rotten food that had been in there from last year. Nobody had thought to throw it away. The dish situation has gotten so bad that the house manager is now going to throw away all of the actual dishes and replace them with paper plates and plastic forks which I hate in my soul. I can't bring any of my nice kitchen stuff here because these fuckers will just abuse it then get it thrown away by just not cleaning it. Dish doesn't get done? It goes in the trash. House manager's rules.

I bought groceries yesterday, nothing too major, came up to about $50 and it should be enough to feed me and a few other people in the house who are struggling financially for the week. Some bitch stole a can of beans all to herself yesterday. So now the tacos I planned on making later this week? No can do. Then proceeded not to clean the pot. She's also the person whose only interactions with me are asking me if she can have my food. And when I give her my food, she takes so fucking much that other people end up not getting any. Also always starting shit.

Go to take a shower for the first time since I've been here, and the water is fucking HOT AS FUCK. Now as many of you know, I've been in kitchens all of my adult life, I can handle some heat. This water was too hot even for me, I could barely take a shower in it, my head is minorly burnt from this water. I think this is what set me off so hard.

Then I go outside barefoot to get some sunlight (not smoking anymore!). Big mistake, there's a shit ton of broken glass all over the place nobody thought to clean up or warn me about until I stepped on the broken glass.

There are also meeting requirements in this house, so I have to go to 4 AA/NA meetings a week. No big deal, I already planned on doing this while I was in rehab. Problem, my home group is a zoom group and they only count one zoom group a week, so now I gotta put up with the bullshit local meetings with no car. At least there's busses here, unlike where I lived before this, but I don't know them at all, and I can't just leave the house to learn them until I'm paid up and working.

It's not all bad though, some of the people are really nice, and I do need the extra accountability to stay on top of my recovery. I don't know, maybe I'm just getting irritable because of PAWS, maybe I just need to stay in my own lane and things will get better eventually, but goddamn if this isn't annoying right now

I discovered it this week and I love it! Not sure how new the feature is.

It's easy. Just put the citation inside square brackets, and then preface all that with a caret. Like this: Beanis cures cancer.^[I made it up.] It automatically takes care of the numbering and shit.

Example:

Beanis cures cancer,^[I made it up.] and aliens will arrive next year.^[It was revealed to me in a dream.] More and more people are saying these things!^[https://hexbear.net/PPB]

Obviously it is, the question was rhetorical. I find that if one does anything left in a big city, you're bound to bump into NGO types everywhere. Nearly all are good intentioned and very left of centre. Most people I meet who work at an NGO are very critical of their job and the whole "NGO industrial complex" thing. People need to eat, I'm not gonna shit on someone for filling out grant applications and throwing events.

I was always really uncomfortable with the "But did you know that in China" spin that nominally lefty NGOs would try to throw into the discourse, uncritically sourcing the US State Department or VOA. It's been weird seeing these same NGOs, who have always positioned themselves as lefty yet not disclosing their funding, suddenly go public about their difficulty once USAID got gutted. Nothing previous to this disclosed nor thanked anyone for USAID funding, this is the first we've all heard about it. I'm at the stage right now where I don't want to listen to any NGO that doesn't list their funding.

For the record, I know dick about China and I'm happy to engage with some critique. Hell, I'll even read through Trot and anarchist commentary as long as they're not referencing their facts from the great Satan.

I did, though mostly secondhand (I had a couple of classmates who were into them). My main exposure to them was via an evangelical's huge multi-year writeup dissecting exactly why they were awful.

These things sold tens of millions and informed a huge number of Christians' religious views. Some highlights include:

• The very first words of the very first book are "Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot..."
• Russia and Ethiopia fire their entire nuclear arsenals at Israel. This is because the authors see it as fulfillment of the Bible verse discussing "Gog and Magog." Divine intervention destroys every single missile and aircraft with no Israeli casualties. Somehow, this does not cause any of the characters to question their own religious beliefs.
• The Rapture happens. Billions of people vanish overnight. Somehow, this exact fulfillment of the Rapture prophecy is treated as something between "Huh. I wonder if the Christians were right" and "That's just a kooky Christian theory, it was actually caused by the electromagnetism from nuclear weapons."
• Less than a week after The Rapture, the world gets back to normal despite something like a third of the Earth's population having just disappeared. There is no sign of long-term trauma or logistical strain.
• The Antichrist is a Romanian who takes over the world by ascending to the position of UN Secretary General. His evil plan includes dismantling the world's militaries and using the money saved on weapons to pay for the development of the Global South.
• Female characters have two possible personalities: perfect tradwife and sinful harlot.
• One of the later books includes a graphic, gory description of Jesus simultaneously exploding tens of thousands of people.

Due to some events in my life I really don't have any friends or partners, my only real social connection is my sister and her husband who I hang out with infrequently. And for a while this made me really depressed, but now, I'm finding myself enjoying the solitude. I've gotten really good at keeping myself entertained, I take long walks, I read books, I watch movies. Sometimes I'll just lay down and meditate for an hour or two.

If anything I wish I had a bit MORE solitude right now. I'm living with two roommates and have a retail job but wish I could just get a cabin and a remote job.

While I was in rehab, I read a lot of books, some were really good, some I wasn't really feeling.

First one was great, a book called 2 Trans 2 Furious, a collection of poems, essays, stories, and art about Fast and Furious made by trans people. I could not stop laughing at this book the entire time, the sense of humor was on point. I had never seen Fast and Furious before this, and it made me love the movie when I did eventually watch one (I watched 4, wow it's so gay. Family.) The book has unexpected emotional moments, some decent body horror, and a lot of comedy. Would recommend. The cis people at my rehab wanted to burn it when I talked about it, so you know it has to be a good one. Check this out if you're trans and love a good high effort shit post

Second one I read was also great. Normal Sucks by Johnathan Mooney. This book really changed how I viewed the world. It's part personal narrative written by a person with ADHD and Dyslexia, part history lesson on the way normal came to be, part stories of the disabled. There's a lot in this book, and it's fantastic. I will warn, the author does use the r***** word a few times in the book, but in the context it's being used I don't find it offensive. Check this out if you want to be a nicer person.

Third book I read was Bible Belt Queers, a collection of art, poems, personal narratives and other such things from well queers from the Bible Belt. I was so so on this book, I found the essays and personal narratives to be really strong, but I didn't really care for the artistic side of the book. Some of the poems were good, but most of them seemed to drag a bit, and a lot of the art didn't really catch my eye or was too cluttered for a book page. Maybe I would have felt different about some of these if I saw them on a computer screen or a canvas, but wasn't a fan of the art in the book. Your mileage may vary though, check it out if it sounds interesting.

Fourth was Fast Time in Palestine by Pamela Olson. The library I was at was fairly conservative, so there weren't a lot of picks for books on Palestine that weren't Zionist, so I picked up this one. My biggest criticism of this book is it's written by a Midwestern American and it often shows, but as she spends more time in Palestine she seems to understand the local's positions more and more as she sees the oppression they're under. It's split between her personal narrative and the stories of horrific violence her Palestinian friends had witnessed, with occasional bits of information about how the genocide is enabled by the rest of the world interspersed throughout. This book is a good read to anybody who isn't 100 percent sure about what's going on in Palestine, definitely one I'd hand off to lib friends, not sure if anybody here would really care for it though.

Fifth and final book is A Land with A People, a collection of essays, poems, and art from Palestinians and Jews confronting Zionism. This was a much better read than Fast Times, diving much deeper into the problems of Zionism, into its history, its effects on both a wide scale and a personal scale through both art and essays. This book is really high quality, albeit a bit hard to read as a monolingual English speaker (I was in rehab, I couldn't Google the anglicized Arabic words, give me a break) but even with the occasional linguistic problems I still got a lot out of this book. I wouldn't give this book to libs because it goes hard on terms like settler-colonialism, but I appreciated it actually tackling that so much. 10/10 would read again.

What should I read next? What have you read recently that's interesting?

“My brain is 78% microplastics”

Mosquitos may have beat me today. They arent like Russian Taiga in the summertime bad but still, fifteen minutes is about all they need to bleed one dry.

I brought deet, picaridin, and a thermacell. I brought my hammock, which has a bug net built in. It has been treated with permethrin some weeks ago, is unwashed, and i figured the treatment would be current enough to provide protection. Boy am i wrong.

Deet applied to exposed skin to the point of being tingly. Picaridin on top. Thermacell chugging away. And still not quite enough. More of the fuckers are getting thru my defenses than im ok with. The bananas i had during my hike arent helping.

So i go get in my hammock, which is great mostly. Bugnet keeps them off my head, and the thing has been treated with permethrin so it should be helping some too. But it just isnt, really. I brought my spreader bar hammock because im a side sleeper, so the bug netting is only on the top half. Since it is in the 70s&80s im leaving my underquilt at home, which helps to keep things cool but the lack of under quilt means that wherever my body touches the hammock the mosquitoes have direct access to me. And they are biting me.

Im going to be a misshapen mass of hamburger before much longer. Im probably going to have to go sleep in my car. JFC.

"The rich give away a smaller proportion of their money than the poor do."

I always think about this whenever people praise people like Bill gates for giving money away.

This will be different than the usual post I do. Mainly because I have now had enough time to look back on my various experiences and think about it all.

I am writing this while taking public transport back to my place. The sex was alright, although nothing amazing, nor was I reciprocated, but that was expected. A faceless profile, although did post his face after asking, discrete “full top” older man that was uncomfortably inching closer to my parent’s age more than I would have liked.

It was a boring day, I went in not expecting the sex to be great but mainly curiosity on my part. A confirmation of my own preferences really, and this has sealed the deal.

After the event, we talked a tiny bit. He complained that he was on night-shift having to travel into a town that was 100% outside the city we were living in. I asked about his rent in his place, because it painfully reminded me of the place that I lived years ago. The number that came out of his mouth was a bit unbelievable considering he did not even have a shower head, and that the flat was clearly haphazardly built on top of the roof of the council building, which is why the elevator doesn’t even lead to it and you need to take stairs that is definitely too steep for anyone with mobility issues.

He complimented me right after the sex, said that I should have it chopped off since I would look “so sexy”, and after making a face of disbelief he clarified that people in Thailand usually do that. I tried explaining to him in a language he understands - “I am not a girl”. And he instantly asked - “oh so you want to get married?”

I should have expected that response, and my answer to that is a solid no, but not how he would have interpreted it. I don’t believe in same-sex marriage as an end that is beneficial for anyone but the upper class gays who rarely face the brunt of discrimination anyways.

I quickly cleaned myself up and packed up as he also had to get going to his work. I had to walk across a park to reach the nearest station and decided to sit down and think about what just happened. I have had a lot of “fun” with many people now, of age gaps that would definitely creep out any straight person.

Looking back, I just find it all a bit funny. For many years, I lived a similar story of so many, internalised homophobia for much of my early teenager years. A lot of years of guilt and regret for something that has yet to happen. I have now lived multiple years in weeks. Getting a glimpse of many gay lives, both closeted and open, both young and old. Every life a unique and sometimes common, and sometimes a sad story to tell.

I myself am an interloper in this megacity, a so-called Third Culture Kid, an immigrant, a person with an “international accent”, a person with torn identities. The cliche continues running amok, there’s no point in containing it.

I could say I regret what I have done so far, but I have not. I could say that I am scared of the future, but I am not. I could say I am an hyper-sexual sex addict, but I really am not. That’s what I have learnt.

We continue walking on this Earth and cross heavily convoluted paths. We learn. Constantly. Sometimes without wanting to.

Stay safe all.

Capitalism has delivered me a great boon today, time to run to the store and make myself go bankrupt