u/Graviton_Grazer

Do most cis people notice an inner voice telling them they're their assigned gender? If they don't, maybe I'm in the majority. If they do, I'm pondering something many people don't.

My gender feels like an external thing, not an internal identity. I'm still technically male because society decided I am, but I just don't feel a string connection to it. So I think if I suddenly found myself in a woman's body, and everyone suddenly perceived me as a woman, it wouldn't feel wrong, I'd still feel like me.

I do care about people who know me seeing me as my assigned gender, but if a stranger I won't run into again misgendered me, that would maybe feel fine to me. Or if I was on an online forum or MMORPG or something, it could be fun presenting myself as female if no one knows I’m actually a dude.

Even though I don't feel like I'm a different gender than my assigned gender, being able to not present as my assigned gender feels…good.

Do most cis people feel this way?  I’m not so sure they do.  But feeling a sense of freedom being able to present as a different gender-while not feeling like you are a different gender-might just be gender non-conformity, which is not the same thing as gender identity.

I'm sure most people know gender is a set of ideas society created, but can still feel an internal sense of being a certain gender.  But for me, the knowledge that gender is a set of ideas means I can’t feel an internal sense of being a certain gender.

I know “not feeling an internal sense of being a certain gender” is the textbook definition of agender, but the agender label just feels wrong, even if it might technically be accurate.

I've found some other labels I connect with. Gender-apathetic means not caring about your gender identity or how others gender you. Which is partially correct. I feel like my gender makes no difference, and I'm okay with total strangers not seeing me as male. Cassgender-thinking your gender identity isn't important (yes) and feeling indifferent to the concept of gender identity (also yes). And quoigender basically means you don’t really feel like you can apply the concept of gender identity to yourself.  That’s essentially what I said at the start here.

But I don't want to put a label on it. All people need to know is that I have a different perspective on gender than most people. And that lack of an internal gender sense doesn't affect my life at all, so it doesn't feel worth thinking about.

Exploring my gender identity felt like creating a new problem by trying to solve one I don’t have.  I was and still am perfectly fine with identifying as cisgender.  I’m not sure why I cared so much in the first place.

Lots of people with similar feelings as mine identify with the queer community. But even though I'm also aroace, I just don't feel queer at all.

Someone you're already platonically attracted to? Someone you know well enough who feels like a compatible partner? Someone you just met and can have a clean slate with?

I'm not looking for a romantic relationship myself, but this question popped into my head and was hard to ignore.

If I do subtle things like wear the black ace ring and white aro ring; or a bracelet with the aro/ace/aroace flag colors; or say something along the lines of "I don't actually feel that way about anyone". Does it still count as being out if I don't actually say "I'm aro/I'm ace/I'm aroace"?

Inside Out 2 is set not long after Riley turns 13, and she’s starting high school even though kids usually start high school at age 14.  And remember she graduated top of her middle school class, so we know she’s an excellent student.

It seems plausible she skipped a grade then, but that would make her a year younger than her classmates in Minnesota and later in San Francisco.  This is never mentioned at all, and you’d think it would be if that were the case.

If she is a year younger than her classmates, that begs the question of why Bree and Grace don’t look like they’re older than Riley.  We know they’re not in a lower grade level, because they started high school at the same time she did.  So unless their district has a really strange system to determine when someone starts, I am totally confused.

This is in large part because, well, sex is usually a private matter while romance is really common for people to talk about.  I’m pretty sex-averse and don’t like thinking about sex all that much, but sometimes, sometimes, romance is fun to think about.  I don’t have much interest in romantic fiction generally, but sometimes I like reading sapphic romance.

Therefore, aromanticism feels much more relevant to my life, and my lack of romantic feelings seems more likely to come up in conversation than my lack of sexual feelings.  My lack of romantic feelings seems like something important about myself I should make clear early on, while my lack of sexual feelings is need-to-know information only.

But also, I just feel like I connect more with aromanticism.  I didn’t spend years stressing over my lack of crushes, it was just an occasional confused thought (“This seems to happen to everyone, so why does it never happen to me?”).  But learning about aromanticism still helped things finally make sense.  And realizing I’m aromantic felt like a bigger realization than figuring out I’m asexual.

This of course raises a lot of questions.  I don’t expect to explicitly come out to anyone, but hypothetically, simply saying I’m aromantic would be easier, but I might leave them hanging, wondering if I’m aroace or aroallo.  It might make more sense to say “I’m aroace, but the aro part feels a lot more relevant to my life, and it’s what I usually focus on." I really shouldn't have to explain more than I want to.

I think I'd be eager to explain my lack of romantic feelings should the topic come up. Saying something like: "I never really seem to feel that way about people; it's cool." But somehow I wouldn't feel comfortable saying "I'm aromantic", and I'd clam up if someone asked.

In fact, someone did ask once, and I just totally clammed up.

Is it weird that I know I'm aromantic but feel uneasy about explicitly saying I am? Is it weird that even though I'm not comfortable stating it directly, I'm more than ready to state it indirectly?

Graysexual seems to fit my experience, on account of having a few times when I may or may not have felt very mild sexual attraction.  Aegosexual also resonates with me, on account of liking some sexthoughts without really wanting to get involved.

Of course, those fleeting instances of sexual attraction feel like flukes and I don’t foresee them being repeated.  And sexthoughts are private matters.  This is why I don’t actually use either of these microlabels.  In part because I don’t use them on account of “asexual” being easier-and in part because thinking about how well they fit hurts my head-I don’t really spend time thinking about them either.

I took two years of French in high school but then was out of practice for several years.  I do remember a lot of basic things: articles, pronouns, conjugations or avoir, être, and -er verbs; words for basic things like numbers, colors, days of the week, various objects; rather simple phrases, etc.

In about one year I’ll be starting university, and in order to test out of their foreign language requirement, I need to test into B1 on their proficiency test.  I emailed the department and they said to test into 201, I need to be able to: state an opinion; make suggestions and recommendations; talk about past events, memories, and future plans; express emotions and hypotheses.  Here’s what I’ve figured out so far.

12-18 months to get to B1 at 30-40 minutes of study a day; or more like 5-10 months if I aim for an hour a day.

Start by learning pronunciation, core vocabulary, and present tense, along with present tense verbs like être, avoir, faire, and regular verbs.  From there, past tense, future tense and basic sentence structure, passé composé and futur proche.  Next comes vocabulary expansion and sentence connection, which will probably involve watching French media with subtitles in French rather than English, and learning imparfait and pronouns like lui, leur, en, and y.  And finally a focus on speaking more smoothly, along with aiming to refine tenses to be polite.  I might need to book conversations with an online language tutor.

According to one online proficiency test I took, I’m at an A2 level right now.  But another one said A1. Come to think of it, there are a few things from A1 I should maybe look into again.

As for resources, I found the podcast Coffee Break French; and there are dual-language stories at French Today, The French Experiment, and Fable Cottage.  And I can talk to native speakers on Tandem.

Of course, I’m also wondering if I should wait a little longer and devote 6 or so months-with more like an hour per day-closer to the college proficiency test so it’s fresher in my mind.

TL;DR-I have some good ideas about how to get back into learning French, but am unsure if I should go into it from an A1 or A2 perspective, and whether I should start again now or wait until closer to the college proficiency test with more study time each day.

Everything that happened between Joy and Sadness running into Bing Bong and the three of them boarding the train seemed to happen in a matter of minutes, when most of the day passed in the outside world.

That’s not all.  There are countless moments where someone’s Emotions take a minute to talk things over, or something happens, and then we cut back to the human world and a second or two has gone by.  Examples include:

Joy frantically trying to get rid of the sixth core memory and getting whisked out of Headquarters with Sadness.  That took like a minute while a few seconds passed in the human world.

Anxiety arriving and introducing herself, followed by Envy climbing onto the console for the first time.  That also took a minute when seconds passed in the human world.

The amounts of time experienced in these two worlds are not always 1:1 and I’ve always been confused by this.

I remember a comment on the "How to Terraform Venus-Quickly"-that's since been deleted-where someone pointed out that since the first big step is getting the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and it's made of carbon and oxygen, it really would be a waste to just send it out into space.

Why spend millennia waiting for cyanobacteria to bring oxygen levels up when you have more than the amount of oxygen you actually need? I guess we'd need to separate some of the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen-just enough for a 21% oxygen atmosphere at about 1 atmosphere of pressure.

And instead of grinding the ground up into soil with machinery, perhaps we could engineer some bacteria to do that. I mean, the video itself says we could engineer life as we see fit.

I like my independence and expect to have an apartment to myself for the foreseeable future…once I move out of my parents’ house to start university, that is.  Naturally, I want to spend the majority of my time at home nude, only wearing clothes for safety reasons (cooking, cleaning, working with tools).  But if I do end up having a roommate, I’m understandably concerned that they won’t be okay with me being nude around the house.

If I do ever look for a roommate I'm hoping to either find one who’s also a home nudist and has no problem with it at all, or a roommate who’s not a home nudist but is okay with me being nude around the house while they’re home.

What are your experiences looking for one of these two types of roommates?  Was it hard to find one?

I guess what I want to know is if there's any media where someone says something that sounds similar to something said in an xkcd comic/What If? blog entry/book chapter; or is in an absurd situation clearly inspired by a comic/blog entry/book chapter. I want to write fiction and throw in some not-so-subtle xkcd references while I'm at it, which made me curious if anyone else has already done the same thing.

As you know, relying on faith means believing an idea without evidence, or even with lots of evidence against it.  Here’s a third problem.

My mother and I were both raised Seventh-Day Adventist and had it drilled into our heads that interpreting the Bible literally was the one and only right path.  This of course included being told the Great Flood from Genesis 6-9 was a real event.  A few years ago it became very apparent to me that there are a shitton of problems with this scenario (too many to list).
I’ve explained all this to my mother many times.  She has started to see my point that this scenario really doesn’t make sense when you think about it, and says it’s best to look into it for yourself.  That’s something.  But she still falls back to the cop-outs of “God can do anything” and “I know it’s hard to understand”.  She says that in this situation, when you know something like this is logically impossible, you have to “just believe”.

And that is another big problem with relying on faith: it can lead to someone continuing to believe an idea, even when they can recognize how illogical it is.

Having never had a single romantic interest, my experience has aligned with strictly aromantic thus far.  But here’s the thing.  Demiromantics need a lot of emotional connection with a person before feeling romantic attraction, and as someone who’s never had any deep platonic friendships, that’s a level of emotional connection I’ve never really had.  Therefore, me being demiromantic is a real possibility, but I might never know on account of being pretty introverted and finding it hard to form strong friendships.