My Design Rant (mini version)

The place I work at is getting a redesign and I hate it. We all hate it. Nobody at the little fish level was consulted and it shows. I however have the slight advantage of being able to articulate why I’m so bothered by their design choices. I went down a YouTube rabbit hole recently that gave me the key words I needed, like “user-centered design” and “evidence-based design”. A much longer, more source heavy rant is probably coming at a later date, but here’s the mini version:

What is “good” design? For me good design accomplishes three things:

1) it’s Safe. I’m literally pulling the “safety first” thing, but I truly believe that safety should be the first and most important consideration in design. I hate my commute to work and to school because it feels dangerous to drive anywhere because the roads don’t feel safe. Thanks to the YouTube rabbit hole I know there are cost effective means of designing streets to make roads safer for cars and pedestrians. Another example I have from work is they repaved the road and whoever redrew the lines clearly had no idea how vectors work because at a three-way stop they made one of the lanes too narrow so that cars in the north bound lane trying to turn right towards the east were literally turning into the left turn lane for cars in the west bound lane. See hastily drawn visual aid below.

2. Good design is beautiful. I know people say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” but they’re probably mistakenly thinking of “taste” which is acquired through socialization. My “taste” probably isn’t going to match that of someone with a different socioeconomic or cultural background than myself. There are a lot of elements that I’ve grown to appreciate over the years, but when talking about “beauty” I’m referring to 5 basic elements that constantly retain viewer appreciation over the long term rather than elements that are subjected to “seasons”. The five elements are: biomimicry, ornament, curves, symmetry, and “ordered complexity”. Biomimicry refers to things we find in nature like fractals as well as obvious nature elements such as living plants and plant and animal motifs. Ornament is fairly self explanatory. Curves refers to things like arches and domes. Symmetry is also fairly self explanatory. Lastly “ordered complexity” is probably the hardest to achieve because you have to find the right balance between too little and too much. Although the amount of appreciation will vary from person to person, these are the elements that science says we like to come back to. A beautiful design is a sustainable design because it doesn’t have to be changed with the seasons.

3. Lastly good design is humanizing. We need to design things for humans with humans in mind. My earlier example of the bad paint job didn’t even have cars in mind when they divided up the available space much less people. Roads are safer when we make room for pedestrians and bikers. There’s an apartment complex right next to where I work. It’s a TWO minute walk from the apartment complex, but there’s no sidewalk to connect the apartment complex to the shopping area and it’s a 20 minute drive to get out of the apartment complex and take the main road. It’s so frustrating because it’s so fixable.

Circling back to why I’m so upset about the new look for my workplace and company. Originally the company I work for went for a “neighborhood” model, to where each store was unique and tried to integrate itself into the surrounding community. That was one aspect of the company I respected and lined up perfectly with what I learned both in class and from my YouTube rabbit hole. Now, however, the stores are all switching over to a universal design and we need to be “hospital clean”. Like, has anyone BEEN in a hospital recently? Even hospitals are moving away from the “hospital clean” look. Let me tell you, it was a LOOONG walk from the parking garage to my dad’s room in the ICU and every foot of that hospital was covered in ART from local artists. There was ART in the ICU room that served as something I felt I could anchor to in a very mentally and emotionally trying time. My doctor’s office has art in the examination rooms. There’s art in every room at the dental offices I go to.

The reason I’m so upset about the new look at my job is they are forbidding ornamentation and have taken down all the signage, they are removing all complexity and painting all the walls and doors the same bland color. I told my coworkers it’s giving “dissociating in a mental hospital”. The lighting with the new paint color makes us look tired (I mean we are because we’re healthcare workers but I don’t need a paint color to make it obvious). There’s nothing in the waiting area for customers to look at so if they’re not on their phones customers just staring at us the whole time while we’re trying to do our jobs. There also wasn’t a reason given for the changes other than someone “very high up” wanted it. Rolling out big changes without getting feedback first or giving an explanation of why the changes are necessary is a surefire way to alienate your workforce.

It’s unsafe, it’s ugly, and it’s dehumanizing. It’s a bad design.

Incase you missed it (highlights from the International Asexuality Day livestreams)

April 6th was International Asexuality Day and the ace orgs from around the world got together and did a 24hr livestream called Aces never EVER sleep. Unfortunately I did have to sleep through some of it. I was able to catch the beginning of the stream and the beginning of the Spotlight on Australia and I missed the Spotlight on Vietnam, Spotlight on India, Books with Ace Representation panel, Arts and Crafts, Spotlight on Netherlands, Anti-LGBT Laws: Georgia, Spotlight on Chile, Spotlight on Pakistan, Spotlight on Poland, the School and Education panel so I need to go back and watch ALL of that. I tuned back in for the Spotlight on Nepal who powered through their technical issues. I want to give a special shout-out to Dr. Manita Newa Khadgi and I sincerely how we see and hear more from them in the future.

Incase you missed it, I HIGHLY recommend going back to watch the Spotlight on Bangladesh with Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin, the founder of Bangledesh Asexual Association and see her amazing protest artwork. I have no words for how beautiful and powerful her artwork comes across, you really need to see it for yourself and hear the stories behind the different pieces.

Next up was Yasmin Benoit talking about her partnership with Stonewall on the Ace Report. Yasmin talked about how when you don’t see yourself represented it means you have to step up and be that representation (for better or worse as seen in her twitter replies). She talked about the tremendous effort, negotiations, and collaborations it took to get the Stonewall Ace Report off the ground- again emphasizing that if the research isn’t there it probably means you need to be the one to make it happen. I’ve seen a lot of acephobes try to rip into the Stonewall Ace Report and the report put out by AACAU trying to delegitimize them by saying it’s “not scientific enough” or the research was “done by people who don’t know what they’re doing”. There is no objectivity when it comes to aphobia. The people who perpetuate aphobia are not doing so because it’s “scientific” or because they’re “experts”, they do it out of ignorance and most of the time it’s willful ignorance so shout out to Yasmin for taking that on. Hopefully we see many more opensource research about aces and aros come out in the future. These reports are meant to start conversations, not be a period at the end of a sentence.

Next up came Chiacchierata ace [IN ITALIANO], I don’t speak Italian, but I was dog sitting at the time of the stream and he didn’t seem to mind the panel in the background (I assume it was a delightful break from the regular tv shows his owner plays from him when she’s out). The folks behind IAD have a mission to bring more diverse language groups into the global conversation and are always looking for volunteer translators.

Speaking of translations, the Italian Aces were kind enough to switch back to English for the next panel dedicated to Writing about asexuality. I confess I became distracted by Kay’s cat, however, Francesca mentioned that there is a growing body of ace literature not just in English. It’s probably very easy to get caught up in our own little communities, but but we do have this amazing communication technologies available to us, we have international cooperation efforts like the IAD livestreams, and thus there are opportunities to expand our understanding of asexuality beyond the English-speaking side of the globe.

The next panel was Autistic Aces…Assemble. There were some technical issues, as can be expected with streaming technology, so the panel is split between two recordings and picks up again here. I’ll often see acephobes on social media try to dismiss asexuality or aromanticism as “just autism” and sort of the jerk reaction from aces is to deny the claim in a way that perpetuates ablism or continues the stigmatism of mental illness. There are aces who have autism and there are aces with mental illness and it’s not fair to them to ask them to keep their asexuality and/or romanticism separate where their identity intersects. As the panelists mentioned, they did their best to pack as much representation into the panel as possible, but they represent just a sliver of what is a very big, very nuanced conversation.

We are so close to the end, thank you for reading this far into my recap. I missed a lot of the stream at the beginning that I’ll be catching up on in the coming weeks. It’s a lot which is why if you see something you want to check out first I’ve included the links with the appropriate time code. There have also been talks of hosting more streams throughout the year to feature more of the global community.

Very quickly, there was a Spanish language panel. Once again, I don’t speak Spanish, but I had it on the background for the dog I was pet sitting. After the Spanish language panel there was a panel dedicated to Aro-erasure and ace activism. This panel made my little aro heart both very happy and very sad. One of the comments that was highlighted said, “​​I’m often suspicious of fully aspec spaces as an aro person, because of the exclusion I’ve had historically. Any thoughts on how to make the spaces inclusive for folks who’ve been hurt this way?” Something that was pointed was that different countries have different histories regarding activism. The US model can’t be a blueprint because of it’s fairly unique history and it’s current status as an economic and military superpower.

And with that note, it was time to turn the stream over to the US & Canada team.

The next panel was Anti-racism in the Ace community. A lot of great resources were mentioned in the panel including Native Land Digital, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action, Ace in Grace and the Ace Flag Revision survey, information about Aspects Committed to Anti-racism (ACAR) including their Gaza Action Document. Ashabi talked about her experience as a Black woman in the ace community and how that experience is subject to intersectionality. The conversation then moved to ace (and queer) representation in media as being primarily white including how that affects biases in generative AI. Panelists shared their recommendations for works by people of color including Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2021) by Angela Chen, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture (2022) by  Sherronda J. Brown, and Ending the Pursuit: Asexuality, Aromanticism and Agender Identity (2024) by Michael Paramo. Michael Paramo is also the editor of the AZEjournal, a literary publication dedicated to highlighting diversity withing aspec spaces, and one of the panelists, Justin, has two articles in the AZEjournal if someone wants a more digestible read to start off with. Although not ace specific, Justin recommended Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner as a necessary read. Panelist Yilin recommended Song of the Six Realms by Judy I. Lin, a fantasy novel that features a demisexual character. Yilin also recommended “A Hundred Different Ways of Being in Love”: Emma, Queer Austen, and Asexuality Studies co-authored by Lillian Lu featured in Vol 36 of Eighteenth-century Fiction journal.

Yilin is also a writer and translator herself which is a nice segue into the next panel Translating Chinese poetry and literature as an aro-ace. Yilin’s own book, The Lantern and the Night Moths, came out this past week. I had already ordered my copy, but after watching Justin and Yilin talk about her work and the book I am now even more excited and I can’t wait for my copy to arrive. It was a fantastic discussion I recommend checking it out.

The last panel of the night was Split Attraction and the complexities of being an Orientated ace with Justin and Jenna. It wasn’t really any new information for me, I’ve written posts about split and divergent attraction in the past, but it aways makes me happy to see people having having a nuanced discussion about the weird, wonderful, and the queer bits of asexuality and aromanticism. I discovered tumblr when I was 25 and I was there when a bunch of young people were like, “let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks”. I was all for it then and I love it now. People are weird and people are complicated and I want the ace community to be a place where that truth is acknowledged and celebrated.

Overall I think the IAD teams did a fantastic job. A 24hr stream is a massive beast of a project and from what I saw it was executed masterfully with minimal technology issues, nothing beyond what you would expect from such an ambitious project. The stream provided an opportunity for aces orgs to see their counterparts across the globe in action. I was also very excited to be able to put some faces to the twitter handles. I’ve included a lot of links in this post, please take the time to check them out and support the global aspec community.

Dear Past Me

I just recently finished a handwritten journal that I started in 2011 and I’m very curious to see what was going on with past me. I didn’t figure out I was aromantic, asexual, and agender until 2015. I didn’t write consistently and the purpose of the journal changed to mostly evening relaxation and handwriting practice. If you’re feeling nosy you can come along. I’ll put current me’s comments/editorizations [in brackets with italics].

9/25/11
It’s been a week since my birthday and I must say it’s been a very long week. I’m twenty-two this year and I think I’ve pretty much overcome my adolescent demons. [i sincerely doubt that] A phrase that I have not read yet in a book comes to mind, “Behold, the great men of the ages past have banished all the other worldly demons. All that remains are the demons man kind has created for itself”. [meaning either i straight up made that quote up because I wanted to be a the next big high fantasy novelist or it’s from an anime and I don’t want to fess up to that]. I’ve kept journals before (and lost them) and there sits a great many blank notebooks in my bottom drawer. [I would call myself pretentious, but I think my spelling skills are actually the determining factor of my written speech patterns] I don’t expect [and “exspect” is hilariously miss spelled thus proving my previous point] this one to be any different, but I live and hope. [the rest of the entry goes on about how much my parents have supported me and some musing about being Buddhist, which isn’t what I currently identify with. In all honesty I’m finding the writing style to be very cringe so I’m going to move on]

9/26/11
Today’s insight comes from Card Captor Sakura, which is an anime whose dub I cannot stand but that’s beside the point. No doubt fans go wild at the end of the second movie where Sakura finally confesses her love for Syaoran, but do they ever stop and question it? […I’m about to say something very aromantic aren’t i? lol] Is there no, “…wait a second…” after the credits start to roll? Well, I must be strange then because I realized that poor kid (meaning Syaoran) is gonna go through hell. The movie [which current me haze ZERO memory of] ends with a freeze frame where Sakura who has just confessed leaps over a very long drop to get to Syaoran. Poor little Syaoran is telling her to wait for the magic to wear off and the killer jump to disappear, but in all her bubbly enthusiasm Sakura says no and leaps, presumably, into her lover’s arms. Freeze frame of mid jump with Syaoran running to catch her. They are now a couple (more or less) [I guess I wasn’t sold on the chemistry] and Syaoran now has a bubbly, daredevil, magic girlfriend. Although, I suppose it’s not all bad. He was originally sent to Japan to get the clow cards and now he has a girlfriend with clow cards so it’s a win-win. BUT! Girlfriend comes complete with two magic guardians, an ultra rich best friend who adores her, a father who’s the reincarnation of the most powerful wizard to ever live, and is buddy-buddy with two more ultra magic users, so in short: if Syaoran even messes up even a little bit he’s screwed. Hence I have discovered the phrase, “It could have been worse, you could have won” I’m sure Syaoran is overjoyed, but the dialogue would be something like- “yaaay…owwww”. Thus ends my analysis.

9/29/11
Wow, I am having trouble believing that September is almost over. The internet at work isn’t working so I’m doing writing therapy. Tsukiko [a friend from the same RP writing forum] gave me a very pretty Kurama sig ❤ <3. Mom wants to host a Halloween party for my younger sister, but most of her friends are no-can-do so she asked me to extend an invite to my pals. No dice. It’s a month away and my flakeish, scatter-brained pals already know they have plans. It’s amazing what a few years of college will do. I know that it’s not that I’m not important, but that Halloween after a certain age just isn’t really up there on lists of important holidays. Oh, well. The internet is still down and a full hour of work to go. Wow this must look silly, me writing in an archaic looking journal. Not half as silly as carrying a box of ears though (and that is exactly as it sounds). Such a feat is impossible to do with a straight face and the look on the other work study’s faces as I dropped the box off was very amusing. Maybe by the time I get to the last page of this journal (if I can) my handwriting will be readable. Still fuming about the internet. It’s all down then I can’t watch my anime. I need my fix. Ah, what to do? My stress levels are unbelievable with that one project for class. One class, I need just one class to graduate. Unfortunately financial aid doth not cover one class. Thus I must take three extra classes to keep my full-time student status. Which reminds me of how my work-study supervisor dared to ask me, “are you sure you’re graduating?” Uh, yeah. People tend to do that after they gat all their classes done with. My concentration is being disturbed by my coworkers. They are talking about what’s news and what’s not news. My watch ticking is getting really annoying. I better stop here, my hand is getting sore.

For comparison, here are the last three entries in the journal.

March 1st, 2024
And now I should do some serious reflection. I don’t really remember who I was as a person in 2011. My as a person now finds the greatest joy in family games nights, learning new things and new skills. I like making things. I still read when I can which is in long stretches or 15 minute bursts. Things I want to improve on is my handwriting [I have to say the handwriting practice part of journaling is NOT paying off and I need to squint and use context clues] and honestly that’s kind of it? I know I’ll naturally improve quilting by doing it. I’m getting better at figuring out my body cues. My stress was unusually high this passed week and when I clearly needed to rest, I did. I might have to miss tai chi all this week and so I will need to practice by myself or do chi gong with mom. I’m very tired and I have a headache, but I know that it’s because I didn’t eat much today. I made myself some onion soup with noodles and that helped a lot because it was savory, nutrient rich, and hydrating. I also paired with with some cherry/rose tea. So much for serious reflection. I have one more page, but I do need sleep.

March 3rd, 2024
I can’t sleep because my room is too hot, so I’m hoping a box fan on high in the window will help. I’m not going to be able to do a reflection.

March 10th, 2024
I saw online that a news organization went off-live and thus their entire backlog of news articles are gone. I’m not the best at recording my day-to-day or about world events, but maybe that’s something I can work on. I don’t know how to even begin. I think maybe my commonplace book would be better? I could take screenshots and print them out? Is it enough to just write my reaction and record the bibliographic information? Would I be saving the journal for? All of my siblings and myself don’t plan on having kids. Oh, well, it might be fun for me. I finished one journal.

What have I learned? The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess. I am apparently not one for details and just like to flutter from one topic to the next with my thoughts. It took a moment, but while I don’t think I’m the same person that I was in 2011, I can definitely see the continuity there. My mom is currently planning a St. Patrick’s day themed party for next week. My sister’s plus one is proving to be a problem. I have no plans to rewatch the CCS movie since past me gave it what amounts to a scathing review. OH, and I am ONE CLASS away from graduating with my master’s degree. Fortunately, this time it IS covered by financial aid. I don’t need an anime fix, I need a nap. Possibly a 4th cup of coffee. It was less embarrassing than I thought it would be to check in on my past journal entries. For now I’m going to put the journal away, but I might revisit it again in the future. I’ve already started my new journal and hope to report back with legible handwriting some time in the near future.

It’s Been Nine Years Since I Discovered I was Asexual

For some brief context, in 2012 I bought a book titled “How to Make Money Blogging: How I Replaced My Day-Job and How You Can Start a Blog Today” and it’s one of the many ebooks that’s just collecting whatever the digital equivalent of dust is in my digital library. The only thing I remember from the book is the tip that if you run out of ideas you can always revisit old posts and I am finally at the point where I’m comfortable looking back at my earliest posts from a charitable and reflective position. I started a blog about a year after figuring out I was asexual because I also had to figure out that I was also aromantic and agender. I keep promising myself that I’ll write more for my blog and I don’t think that’s going to happen (maybe I’ll make my New Year’s Resolution 4 meaty/meaningful posts in the next year as a SMART goal). I also don’t want to wait for the tenth year to do a serious reflection.

DECEMBER 17, 2015: “I Should Have Known I was Asexual/Aromantic Sooner”, feels a lot like a “Hello World” post. The title is a little misleading; I should have said “I Wish I Had Known I was Asexual/Aromantic Sooner”. I also really hope that my writing skills have improved significantly. There are a couple references that were mentioned and not linked so significant context is missing. However, I think I remember the inspiration for the blog post from an emotional standpoint and that’s the more interesting story that I should have told at that time. I was on my way to class (I had some education award left over so I spent it on a couple community college classes) and a song came on the radio. I don’t remember the title and don’t remember enough of the lyrics to look it up, but the message of the song was the singer was telling the listener to basically leave their man if they didn’t love them passionately enough and having just recently figured out I was aromantic at the time I found the experience of listening to the song very unnerving and hurtful.

DECEMBER 17, 2015: “Coming Out” is basically the story of coming out to my parents. It didn’t go as well as I had hoped and I still haven’t come out to a lot of other people since then. My brother and (now) sister-in-law have asked since then and when they did I didn’t say I was asexual and instead I more or less dodged the question by saying “dating is not my thing/priority right now”. A significant difference between when I wrote the post and now is I do have elevator speeches ready that aren’t asexuality and aromanticism 101. My brother is also very anti-label so discussing sexuality and orientation with him is a workout. The main sticking point that people are probably more interested in is that I am a life-long-single person. The “dying alone” stereotype is something that I’ll occasionally see aces and aros sort of overcorrect on which can be alienating because while singleness is very much an agentic choice for me, most people would rather not be single and will intentionally or not stigmatize being single as inherently bad instead of accepting it as just another stage in the relationship process. Bella DePaulo has several articles and books on the subject, but in all honesty I’ve only ever saw one lecture where she says that how happy you are when you’re single is the best indicator of how happy you’ll be in a relationship once the “honeymoon phase” is over. I found that point exceptionally validating. So, while I LOVE all the weird nuances of asexuality and aromantism and I love talking shop with other aces and aros I don’t plan on coming out to anyone anytime soon.

DECEMBER 19, 2015: “You’re so Weird” was basically me saying “I’m not actually weird” and I must now debunk that claim because since I turned 30 I basically went straight into my “retired grandma energy” era because I like tea, fiber arts, I just acquired a small collection of books on English witchcraft from a historical perspective that I read in between my small collection of Chinese novels that I read between the various on-going series I’m reading, and none of my college degrees have gotten me out of working retail yet. I also take tai chi classes and collect practice weapons. I’m also reading up on constructed alphabets because I watched a YouTube video on the Shavian alphabet and my dyslexia said “fuck that noise” so I’m going to try and construct my own alphabet for journaling and notetaking. The future descendants that have to deal with my personal effects when I die are going to be so confused. I can’t promise I’ll be historically relevant enough by that point, but maybe some of my stuff will have some archival value.

DECEMBER 30, 2015: “The Third Option” talks about being agender and there’s not a whole lot of growth in this area because I still struggle to find the language to describe my gender experience. Fortunately Canton Winer has coined a term for me and that is “gender detached” which I consider more accurate than my previous “none of the above”. I have not made many nonparasocial connections to the trans and nonbinary communities and I think that my gender detachment is informing that. The concept of gender itself feels very pervasive and burdensome so it makes sense that I wouldn’t be drawn to communities were gender experience is the focus. However, gender detachment might be surprisingly prevalent in the ace and aro communities so that’s probably why I’m more comfortable with my orientations being the anchoring point for community membership.

JANUARY 12, 2016: “Not Perfect”. I actually really like this post. Kudos to past me. The writing has significantly improved compare to my first couple of posts. I don’t remember if this was when I discovered the fine art of proof reading. A couple of changes between then and me now: 1) I no longer consider myself Buddhist, but I also don’t label myself as “Pegan” because the belief system I’m currently studying is, I think, best described as traditional folk practice rather than a “religion” or “spirituality”. 2) Thanks to some deprogramming I realize that my original point of people needing more things than they can give is most likely incorrect and very capitalistic. I’m not going to do a deep dive on that in this moment. I love that I put in writing “I’ve accepted that I will never be perfect. I’ve accepted that while I think other people-” I don’t specify who, but it was probably work or school related -“expect me to be perfect or even normal, I’m not going to be. And I’ve accepted that’s not my fault”. I do think it’s important to be charitable to one’s self. Backtracking to the folk practice thing, I don’t have a shrine or altar dedicated to a deity or anything, instead I have two thought bubbles hanging above my sleep space that say, “Seeing Clearly, Living Ethically, Daily Practice” and “What comes after helping yourself?” This intentional display is the best representation of what I’m aspiring to or trying to manifest or what have you.

I’m going to end the post there because while I’m really glad that I took the time to do some reflection, my craft project list has also become way beyond reasonable so I want to get as much done about that as possible before my class starts again. I’m going to be doing a craft speed run and get as much of my stash used up and made into actual cozy things. I’m in the middle of several quilt tops, several quilt sandwiches, a shawl, two hoody-scarfs, a quilted jacket, a wall hanging, and an embroidery sampler. Writing up a thoughtful blog post takes me at least an hour and I would really rather spend that time making cozy things, sipping on tea, and listening to video essays and podcasts. I would for sure make more blog posts if I could type and sew at the same time.

I never really had a targeted audience in mind when I started my blog. It’s just that I stumbled upon a blog post one day nine years ago and it made a difference for me on a personal level. My Fae/faer rant post is still my most viewed post, but I don’t actually know what people are getting out of it. It was really just a chance for me to do a resource dump and complain about my least favorite fantasy genre trope.

The Quest for All Things Cozy (Carnival of Aros December 2023)

Greetings! It has been a very long time since I’ve posted to my blog, but here is my submission for the Carnival of Aros for December 2023 hosted this month by Sara Jakša on the topic of “Aromanticism and Holidays”.

Something I think worth clarifying is that I’m not just aromantic, but I’m also a life-long single person; Those are ultimately two different things. Something that I can find alienating in online aro (and ace) spaces is that relationships like QPPs get mentioned quite a bit and there’s sometimes an overcorrection against the myth that aromantics are “doomed” to “die alone”. I’m slightly romance-repulsed and the pervasiveness of relationship talk can be overwhelming. However, being romance-repulsed doesn’t stop me from seeking out warm fuzzy feelings and I’m beginning to think that my craft habit is very much informed by my aromanticism.

I have a weird hobby of collecting hobbies, specifically hobbies of the fiber arts persuasion (which is also why my poor blog gets neglected). I’m currently very into quilting because I learned there was a Welsh quilting tradition (see here, here, and here for more info) and I had a lot of cloth masks left over from the mask shortage early in the pandemic. Since I can now by KN95 masks by the box, my cotton masks are now my attempt at learning English paper piecing. I also taught myself nålebinding as an alternative to knitting and crochet that was easier on my hands (I recommend this YouTube channel if you want to learn). I also have a blackwork embroidery sampler in process (it’s very similar to cross stitch and etsy has some amazing patterns and kindle unlimited has patterns).

Thus far I’ve finished three quilts (not the EPP one however) which I have dubbed “fur-baby” quilts and they will be winnable prizes for my family’s Christmas party.

My family is many things, but the most seasonally relevant traits are we are competitive and frugal. Each year everyone is only responsible for two gifts, a secret santa gift to another family member and a white elephant gift. After that extra gifts are optional because they’ll be used as prizes for games. My mom is in charge of coming up with the competitive games and they change every year. I usually don’t win many games, but I still enjoy the quality time with my family. My sister will also be without a partner this year since her boyfriend of two years broke up with her, but perhaps we can work together if there are any team games.

Most importantly for me the holidays are also a break from school. I get to catch up on the pleasure reading list that’s been piling up all semester. I just finished the last books in two series that I was reading and get to experience the “first date” feeling that comes with picking up a new book series for the first time and hoping for the best. I have a really hard time imagining how different the holidays would be if I were alloromantic or actively seeking an intimate partnership. Outside of my work and school schedule there’s very little time for anything else so it’s not surprising to me that I was drawn to handcrafts. Just sitting down in front of a television feels like a waste of time, but I can mentally justify the leisure time if I have a craft project in my hand.

The internet is actually really deceptive about how long fiber arts projects take. I have several books of easy patterns that would take me about a week to finish using my machine, but a lot of the hand work takes FOOOOREEEVER. Nålebinding, like crochet, can’t be automated like knitting can. There’s 3D printing knitting machines now apparently so while I like to think that I’m fairly speedy at nålebinding stitches making even just a throw quilt takes something like 80 hours all together. The fun part for me, however, is the journey not the finished product because usually by the time I finish a thing all I can see are the flaws from where I was trying to figure out something. Just this week I was trying to figure out a new nålebinding stitch and the pile of tangled false starts is never going to see the light of day. The finished blanket, however, will probably end up as a consolation prize next year.

Cool Qualitative Stuff I learned in Class

I’m one year into my master’s program and there were several themes shared between my classes even though each class was dedicated to a different topic. I don’t mean that each course was needed to meet my credit requirements. What I mean is each class picked readings and case studies that aliened with particular values and skill-sets that the school predicts graduates will need such as cooperative practices, professional ethics, and community involvement. For example, several classes touched on how information organizations are moving more towards a team-based structure instead of a traditional hierarchy structure. For professional ethics several classes used cased studies involving Indigenous materials that were discovered in collections, discussed patron privacy, and emphasized transparency and documenting how any why archive collections were intellectually arranged. Lastly, my most recent class deceptively titled “information behavior” required a deep dive in to user-based methods.

The final term paper directions were to “research a topic that relates to user-centered approaches within information environments to studying information needs of diverse constituencies and information services/resources meeting the needs of diverse constituencies”. Naturally I picked LGBTQIA+ as my topic because that’s a collection of diverse constituencies itself. I’m not here to rehash my paper, I want to skip to the good part of what I found in the research.

Word Cafe Methodology and World Mapping. Defined in their respective papers as “…a form of action research that develops collective knowledge among individuals and communities to address shared problems” and “an arts-based, participatory method that documents and triangulates contextual factors shaping people’s everyday information behaviors/practices”. For my paper I primarily used this article titled, Advancing information practices theoretical discourses centered on marginality, community, and embodiment: Learning from the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) communities and that’s the one I’m going to summarize because it did some really cool things with user-based methods.

The paper opens with “We align this paper with human‐centered explorations of information that address the social question of how people relate to, seek, and use information” in reference to Marcia J. Bates, who is considered one of the major influencers in Information Science.

Highlights from the Methods:

• Semi‐structured interviews and information world mapping with 30 LGBTQIA+ community leaders from January—August 2019. We analyzed interviews using an open qualitative coding process and information world mapping using situational analysis.
• A half‐day community forum between 16 LGBTQIA+ leaders who participated in mapping and interviews and 14 library staff from across a Southeastern state in November 2019. The World Café methodology structured small‐table conversations about social and structural barriers to health information experienced by LGBTQIA+ communities and collaborative strategies that communities and library staff could adopt to address these barriers. We analyzed notes collaboratively taken by participants and observational ones taken by researchers using a similar open qualitative coding process to the semi‐structured interviews.
• Ongoing virtual focus groups and information world mapping with LGBTQIA+ individuals beginning in August 2020. As of this writing, we have conducted 7 focus groups with an average of 3–4 people per group for a total of 27 participants. We are currently engaged in theoretical sampling to conduct 3–4 additional focus groups that capture perspectives underrepresented in the data, chiefly across age categories, emphasizing teens and seniors, and race or ethnicity, focusing on Latinx or Latine groups. Qualitative data analysis consists of a mixture of etic coding informed by the codebooks developed during leader interviews and mapping. Emic coding is inductively derived from participant narratives and maps and nested under etic codes. Situational analysis of maps informed by preexisting etic codes is underway, but we have analyzed participant descriptions of their maps from the interview transcripts.

Kitzie, V. L., Wagner, T. L., Lookingbill, V., & Vera, N. (2022)…. https://doi-org.libezp.lib.lsu.edu/10.1002/asi.24594

Although asexuals are included in the title as members of the LGBTQIA+ I don’t believe any were quoted in the the examples. However, the authors cited several Black participants as examples of how normative models failed to capture essential nuances related to intersecting identities. I got a lot of good information out of the paper and it was the corner stone to my term paper (which I did very well on as a result).

I personally don’t like conducting research. I’m very good at finding sources for essays and term papers, but academic research has really high barriers to entry and every single class I’ve taken on research and research methods has made me hate doing research. I really enjoyed learning about user-based methods, action research and participatory action research. My school seems to believe these methods are the ways of the future. There will always be a need for traditional research methods, but the cool thing about the sciences is they are prone to paradigm shifts and shake ups. I also thing that these methodologies are do-able for activist groups and charities.

(anywho, I had a terrible day at work and a coaching meeting to look forward to so I’m going to do the all self-care things and hope for the best)

Revisiting My Book Review Assignment (Because It Keeps Me Up At Night)

The final project for one of my classes was to do a book review on The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library by Louise S. Robbins, which I believe was originally published in the Library Quarterly in January of 2001. We had the option of doing it as a regular essay or submitting a video. Naturally I chose the former format because it is obviously less work to agonize over crafting a single document instead of drafting a script, then editing a script, filming multiple takes, and then editing the takes into a video. Apparently a couple students disagreed because they did submit a video format which the rest of us were allowed to watch. I got about 30 seconds into each video before “nope”ing out because they were basically just reading off a PowerPoint and checking off boxes of a “how to write a book review”. My biggest gripe (other than it was boring) was the tone of the videos was all wrong. This might just be my journalism elective talking, but what they should have lead with (if they discussed it at all and I’ll never know) is this book is old enough to buy alcohol, why are we still talking about it???

Earlier this month a town in Michigan voted to defund their library because it refused to censor LGBTQ+ voices. That fucking terrifies me.

Rolling it back to Dismissal, after describing a brief history of the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma which included a segue on patriarchy (which I have to skip over because of time) Robbins finally gets to what I clocked as the point (which tragically didn’t make it into the film adaptation). Two very poignant details that Robbins mentions is that the “Five Civilized Tribes” were deemed as such because they owned slaves and Bartlesville had a fucking Klu Klux Klan office in its civic center. Robbins doesn’t mention if the Klan office was contemporary with the Public Library that was also built in the Civic Center.

The Black patrons of the library when asked about what they remember about Miss Brown basically said she was like any other librarian of the day. Robbins lays out ample evidence that Miss Brown was well read and a good librarian. As a good Librarian, when the American Library Association began leaning towards desegregation so did she. It was the desegregation that made her a target of the town’s moral guardians. Thinking about the library in Michigan all I can say is, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I almost wish I had waited to take the class because there is just so much happening right now that would have tied in seamlessly with my essay. The three main points I chose to focus on (because there was a page limit) was 1) that the “American Ideal” that moral guardians were trying to uphold was, not just racist, but specifically anti-Black, 2) The moral guardians of today were employing very similar tactics (because they work) that the Bartlesville moral guardians used to fire Ruth Brown, and 3) Afterwards people hyper focused on the censorship aspect of the incident and ignored that it was driven by anti-Black ideology. Something I didn’t understand at first about the whole thing was why the moral guardians chose to use anti-communist/anti-socialism rhetoric to target Miss Brown instead of just outright saying it’s because they were trying to prevent desegregation. But then I found an article citing a Tweet (welcome to the new century I guess) by Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (Texas) saying, “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory. We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed. That’s why we created the Liberty Institute at UT.”

Allegedly coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, which hey, we know her! CRT is literally decades old and totally niche college level subject (like gender studies or queer studies) that you probably had to pay lots of money to even hear about before 2020. In 2020 it suddenly became a buzzword for, as Governor Greg Abbott (Texas again, I’m sorry) claimed was trying to “rewrite history and redesign the future” and was also “undermining the very values and core of what America stands for” which I argued based on the evidence collected and laid out by Robbins is straight up anti-Black. I can’t be the only one seeing this. This is not boring, this is terrifying.

The New York Times just put out a really good article on CRT that also happened to spark a discussion with my mom. My parents just finished up a cross country road trip and while the history stuff is sooo not my mom’s thing, after she saw the reviews for President Jefferson’s house she was like, “Oh, I have to see it now.”

Every new article that comes out leaves me feeling like my class essay was incomplete. I do have full confidence that I was at least on the right track of zeroing in on the feeling of “OMFG”and highlighting that both the film inspired by Miss Brown’s story and the ALA’s initial response to the dismissal missed the mark by focusing on censorship. Censorship isn’t the issue, censorship is just a tool that moral guardians use to shutdown actions that are “undermining the very values and core of what America stands for” which we know from Dismissal is anti-Black and, as we are are very quickly (re)learning through current events, is anti-LGBTQ+. As a final sticking point I made sure to mention in my essay that if the Texas executive branch successfully bans CRT, The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library would in all likelihood be censored. That’s why the book matters and why it sometimes keeps me up at night.

Reaction to “Does everyone ‘have’ a gender?” Medium article

I’m briefly resurfacing from my graduate class work to react to an article by Canton Winer, you can read for yourself here. Basically I know of Canton Winer because he’s formally studying asexuality as an academic and will post insights from his research on Twitter. Since his research is focused on the intersection between gender and asexuality it shouldn’t be too big of a surprise (but I was still pleasantly surprised anyway) that he noticed a quirk in the gender responses. It’s the same thing I threw out a reference to about a year ago on Hottakes:

screen shot of tweet by @aphobehottakes 8:10 PM 5/23/21 “Oh man if you thought sex was a pervasive concept in western society just wait until you hear about romance. and gender. I understand the presumption of gender is usually a safe bet statistically speaking but not 100% and literally no one is ready for that convo”

I had written the orginal tweet in response to aro erasure within the [twitter] ace community (something that is common even though community surveys have repeatedly shown that aromantics make up about a third of the ace community). A lot of ace responses to aphobia (on Twitter especially) tend to throw aros under the bus (so to speak) and amatonormativity is a hard idea for people to unpack and understand. I understood at the time that the “gender thing” was basically shelved for later, but I knew we’d get to it eventually.

What is the “gender thing”?

When I started my research, I planned to compare the gendered experiences of asexual men, women, and “beyond the binary” asexuals. I quickly found that these categories weren’t exhaustive. One major reason: about 1/3 of the people I spoke with felt detached from gender altogether.

(Winer, 2022)

The word “detached” is definitely growing on me. What does it mean to be “detached” from gender? Well for me I didn’t even know gender had a psychological element until I was 25. I knew there was a biological element (specifically in western society and I’ll expand on that train a thought in a minute) and I knew there was a social element, but until I was 25 I thought ALL genders were assigned. The reason I thought this was because of grammatical gender. If you took Spanish, French, German, or Latin (as I did) in for your high school language credit you’ll know what I’m talking about.

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Because I grew up thinking all genders were assigned, I didn’t think the existence of trans people or indigenous gender categories were weird or unnatural or in conflict with my word view. Old English had grammatical gender, but Modern English doesn’t. I figured Indigenous genders existed because their cultures had time to diversify independently before colonization. For every English grammar “rule” there’s an Indigenous language bebopping along just fine doing the exact opposite, so I didn’t think it was weird for a non-wastern cultures to have three, four, or five genders just because.

My “oh, shit, you we’re being literal/that wasn’t a metaphor” moment (my fellow aces and aros are probably very familiar with that experience) came from a diversity training I did for work. Naturally asexuals didn’t get a mention, but the main sticking point is the presenters mentioned that two-spirit people felt like their gender. Wait, what??? That meant that gender wasn’t just assigned because of cultural reasons. That was a scary moment because even then I knew that I didn’t feel like anything, but that wasn’t an exactly a safe place to ask questions. I wouldn’t be able to do a deep dive until I got on tumblr a couple years later. On tumblr I looked at every single possible gender post and description and I talked with trans aces. The response I got was always, “you just know” and I didn’t know, and while a lot of agender/nullgender/etc… folks said the “you just know” answer was super not helpful, it did help me figure out that “none of the above” was it for me.

Ollia, the interviewee quoted in the article, said “My gender is like an empty lot.” For me it’s more like when I ping my brain for “gender.exe” I get a “404 error, gender not found”. I’ve described it in past posts as a “chasm” with me on one side and gender on the other.

I introduce the concept of “gender detachment,” or individually-held feelings that gender presentation/identity is irrelevant, pointless, or even oppressive

(Winer, 2022)

That about sums it up actually. I guess it’s easier to describe as an outside observer because you’re not also dealing with the crippling anxiety that comes with bracing for the presumption of gender. My dysphoria doesn’t come from how I see my body, but how society sees me. It’s sooo frustrating seeing “gender critical” people on Twitter using hastags like “genderfree” because they’re pushing hate instead of liberation. My reaction to Canton Winer’s article is simply relief because this is a conversation starter. Instead of nobody being ready for that conversation, Canton is showing us that at least someone in academia is listening.

When I asked this question, nearly all respondents gave a gender identity. But with probing, many said that they basically give a gender identity because they don’t feel they have a choice. This suggests that gender detachment is almost undoubtedly more common than we realize — and that the questions researchers ask can submerge detached experiences of gender.

Winer 2022

Carnival of Aces February 2022

It has been a ridiculously long time since I updated my blog because wave upon wave of covid variants tanked my mental health. As a frontline healthcare worker I needed time and help to recover from burnout. Recently I’ve been doing a lot better oddly enough because of my class load. Working on my master’s degree gives me something outside of work to focus on and the coursework is challenging, enlightening, and restorative. I really lucked out with my program and I’m excited to change careers. Anywho! We’re not here today to talk about my identity as a student (or are we??? oooo foreshadowing). We’re here to see if I understood the assignment. I didn’t have the time to look through scholarly articles to see if someone’s already thought about this take or something similar (they probably have), but I at the very least wanted to get a new post up and actually finish a CoA. For the past few months I’d start a post and then give up after a paragraph because, honestly, if I’m staring blankly at an open word doc, it might as well be my class writing assignment. So without further ado-

This month’s Carnival of Aces is being hosted by sildarmillion on the topic of “Can you conceptualize your identity and/or orientation in terms other than attraction?”

The half thought that’s been cooking in my head for a while now is, “No, seriously, what if gender attraction wasn’t a main factor in forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships?” As an aroace this is easy to imagine because that is the reality that I live with 24/7. Since I’m not actually sexually or romantically attracted to any gender, it is now an even more level playing field than if I was pansexual. Now that the possibilities are virtually endless, what are the determining factors I’m paying attention to when I form and maintain interpersonal relationships?

Firstly, I’m romanced repulsed. There are specific behaviors and western cultural norms in specific contexts that trigger my flight/freeze response. Someone giving me a rose and asking if I have any weekend plans is a totally different experience than a coworker giving me a bouquet of sunflowers saying, “thank you for all your hard work and being a team player”. One of those things is more culturally normalized than the other. Secondly, the first step to forming any interpersonal relationship is actually going out and meeting people. Whooo boy, that is a struggle. I could totally blame covid, but this is a major barrier that already existed for me because there have been very few points in my life where I haven’t been working full-time and in school. I am a cat person and liking cats is pretty much nonnegotiable. I have a bucket list vacation that would require putting my life on hold for a month and I would be specifically looking for someone willing to share that with me. The popular narrative is that even if a person is perfect for you in every way -willing to meet you where you’re at, similar life goals, similar tastes in pets, and so on- if the relationship doesn’t have “that spark” it’s not going to work out. However, whenever you ask, they can’t tell you what “that spark” actually is.

Here’s my hot take: The only reason I even describe my identity/orientation in terms of attraction in the first place is because that’s the only way to get other people to conceptualize my experience as an aroace. It’s actually kind of weird if you think about it because I’m basically using someone else’s reality to describe my experiences.

I see all relationships as an emotional energy exchange. You put time and energy into the relationship and get an emotional boost out of it. It’s not tit-for-tat, it’s more like the algebra formulas you had to do for math class because every person is running on a different emotional exchange rate. I like that metaphor more than the “love languages”.

My two favorite examples of relationships that deserve more press are the favorite teacher and reliable coworker. Hopefully everyone has had a favorite teacher who acted as a pivotal point in their life. What effort did you have to put in to maintain that relationship vs the emotional satisfaction that you got out of it? Is there a coworker that you know you can always count on? How did you maintain that relationship? Sometimes it’s as simple as the “Harvest Moon” method.

In the Harvest Moon games in order to build friendship points with the towns people you have to talk to them everyday and for extra points you can give them gifts. Failing to consistently talk to the town’s folk drops their friendship score into the negative and they dislike you. It’s shocking how real that is. If you fail to greet a coworker everyday they will notice and people will call you out on it. I have a “lunch buddy” who works a different department but we somehow manage to regularly see each other in the breakroom and say “hi”. I can just imagine the friendship meter going up one point everyday xD. In contrast on Saturday mornings the pharmacy intern walks in 30 minutes after me as I’m putting orders away with my headphones on blasting my angsty pirate music and so I end up “ignoring” her when she says “good morning”. It takes her a minute to realize I’m not intentionally being rude. Zero friendship points there.

Alright, so in a perfect world where I don’t have to whip out the Asexuality 101 PowerPoint every five minutes, how would I actually describe my orientation? I’d describe it by the relationships where I get the maximum emotional payout. For me specifically my biggest emotional payout has come from teacher/student relationships. The emotional high I get from learning is comparable to the feeling (I assume) people get from a blossoming romance. The second biggest emotional payout has come from family. Our family game nights are just pure energy and chaos, I love it. The third biggest emotional payout comes from myself. When I was in middle school I got really lucky and made serious effort to have a positive internal monologue through daily practice. The meanest thing my internal monologue has said all year was “fun fact, the KJV is still a bestseller and has never been out of print unlike your favorite Steven Chow film” Ouch, xD. Other than that my internal monologue is as fluffy as I need it to be or is the voice of reason that I need it to be. From what little I’ve seen about internal monologues, it’s apparently really rare to have a fully positive one and most are a string of negative thoughts and put downs.

So, to the rest of the ace community: When you map out all the interpersonal relationships in your life, which ones stand out as giving you the biggest emotional payout? What if it was normal not to define ourselves by what genders we’re most attracted to, but instead by the relationships we find the most emotionally fulfilling? What if we found ways to talk about and celebrate those relationships with the same energy that we talk about and celebrate romantic relationships? How pissed off would the “behavior = orientation” crowd be?

Carnival of Aces: Briefly Comparing My Communities Online

[This is my submission for the Carnival of Aces for February 2021 hosted this Month by Ace Film Reviews on the Topic of “Comparing Ace Spaces“]

My first introduction to the Ace Community was through the WordPress community in 2014. I was 25 and had just come back home to Texas after working out of state for two years and had finally ran out of excuses for why I had literally never dated. Well, obviously the answer is my interpersonal skills leave much to be desired BUT I had also come to the conclusion that if dating had been a priority in any way for me, I would have found a way to do it. So, the real question was, why wasn’t dating even on my list of of priorities? With that in mind I finally sat down and literally Googled “25 and never dated”. After skipping over a bunch of pop-psy articles that amounted to “don’t worry, your prince will come” I finally came to a wordpress blog by an asexual man.

I kick myself everyday for not bookmarking the page because I have never been able to find it again nor thank him. Part of the reason I keep this blog going is as a way to pay that moment forward. That man’s blog post means a lot to me because it set me on the right path to finding out that not only am I asexual, but I’m aromantic and agender too. Before that I was living and believing the lie that I was cis and straight “by default”. It’s scary to think it’s like I didn’t even know myself before that. Because of that the WordPress community will always have a special place in my heart as a place of learning and personal growth.

The next community that meant a lot to me was Tumblr. Specifically the chat created by The Asexuality Blog. I’m missing a huge chunk of history and discourse knowledge because I tended to avoid drama. I mostly used tumblr as a resource for writers. Every single job title you can think of was putting out lists of common bad tropes and mistakes writers make. Doctors, EMTs, MEs, nurses, lawyers, firefighters, *literally every professional* you might have as a background character had wishlists of tropes they wanted writers to stop using. Historians and scientists putting out debunk lists. Every minority group you could think of was putting out dos and donts and how to lists as well as answering plot specific asks. It was a magical time to be a would-be writer. I eventually left tumblr because the nsfw ban also nuked my *collection of writer’s resources*, but before that the ace chats gave me a chance to talk to real humans in real time and that was an important step in not only accepting that I was aromantic, but also an important step in figuring out I was agender.

One major difference that was kind of alienating between wordpress and the TAB chats was the age difference. Most of the aces in the chats were in their teens and I very much wasn’t. It just felt weird for most of the chat to be talking about figuring and setting into their ace identity on top of highschool problems (by which I mean absolutely zero judgment because high school problems are serious, serious business) and then I was off in the corner figuring and settling into my ace identity while complaining about paying rent, the ethicacy of tax returns, and debating the pros and cons of coming out to coworkers. Granted the chat mods were older and wiser, but they were there to moderate rather than counsel. I still owe a huge debt to the chats for helping me figure out I was nonbinary.

Another alienating thing about the chats is how amatonormative they were. Even the aro chats! I now know that I’m a romance-repulsed aro trying to figure out life and stuff, but people are constantly wanting to talk about how cute/amazing their partner/gf/bf is. I’m not anti-romance; absolutely gush about your five year anniversary, but sometimes I *just want a break* that doesn’t involve isolating myself from other humans.

Last, but not least, I’m now mostly involved with the Twitter community. It’s kind of a mix of both info dump and real time interaction. I’ve tried discord, but that gets too overwhelming. Twitter offers a lot of control over what content you want to interact with because you can save searches and mute words as well as accounts. Since the pandemic started I haven’t actually been doing the most “healthy” of searches since most of the time I’m snooping for content for @AphobeHottakes like a sleezy mag reporter. There ain’t no drama like Twitter drama. If you missed the tumblr discourse era, don’t worry, it plays out every week like it’s on syndicate in the Twitter stream.

I can’t attest much to the conversation about RL meet ups because the only other ace I’ve met in RL is my high school friend who stopped talking to me for other (and I’m prerry sure are perfectly valid) reasons. Even at 25 I still had a LOT of growing to do as a person and while I mourn the loss of a friendship even after five years, the only thing I can control is trying to maintain what I only hope an upward trend of personal growth. For now RL meetups are on hold because of Covid, but I maintain the hope that they’ll happen some day in the future.