TL;DR: guy I vaguely know and am friendly with clocked a transgender woman, and I sorta shut him down.

I got invited to hang out at the mall yesterday with some people I’ve only met once before by my old friend from middle school. Everybody thinks I’m a cis guy, they don’t know i’m a transgender woman.

I got there a bit later than everyone else, so they decided to take me to a Spencer’s that they’d already visited. The joke was whatever my reaction to the sex toy’s would be. At one point, one of the employees engaged in conversation a little — I clocked her as a transgender woman around this point, but I didn’t say or do anything differently. I didn’t want to make a thing of it in front of a bunch of cis people, and knowing you got clocked has got to suck, even if it’s by another transgender person.

Later on, we’re at the food court and who do I see? The employee again! I wonder again if there’s some way I could like, indicate that I’m also transgender (as like a solidarity thing?) but eh. I’m pre-everything boymoding, so the only way I’d be able to communicate with her would be to make a thing of it. If I coulda just smiled at her or flashed a thumbs up or something, then maybe? But even a quick, subtle thing might still feel bad + I’d look like a chaser.

She walks past us, and everybody in the friend group (about 4-5 people) notices, waves a little and stuff. After she’s left, one guy who I’m gonna call ⏹️ says “I think that’s/she’s a man”. Paraphrasing slightly.

I’m worried that my response was a little too aggressive? I sharply told ⏹️ “Who cares? Don’t be an asshole”. I tried making some quip about how his ‘opinion’ was rude, like speculating if somebody is circumcised or not. Sorta flopped idk

A little later ⏹️ apologized to me/explained himself, said he wasn’t trying to be an asshole. I said something like “Yeah. That’s the sorta thing you gotta keep to yourself, coz it’s rude”. And then it never came up again the whole night!!!

Hopefully he thinks more before he speaks next time? Idk, I’m not sure what I’d expect to change on his end. Then we went and watched that new Resident Evil movie. Pretty good.

Thanks for reading, and remember!

CEF FOREVER

TL;DR: Girl makes another post on nart4 about the bad time she had. Girl is building a reputation as the gal who has bad days then comes here to talk about it. Girl has gotta find somewhere else to post this, she’s losing control over the narrative.

Second day of my history course, first actual class as the previous class was just reviewing the syllabus and I hadda leave halfway through because I shut down goddddddddddaaaaaaaaaaaaaamnit. Eurgh. Probably gonna get a concerned email from the teacher that I’m gonna have to figure out how to respond to before next class, in addition to all the other HW I gotta do.

So there was a HW assignment that was to do a reading, and then answer some questions on identifying specific figures and their big ideas that they had. It was a 20 page reading, and I waited till like right beforehand, so I basically skimmed it.

You were clearly supposed to summarize the text, leaving out some stuff about the impact that the figures had and their smaller ideas, but I was rushing so I basically only did like a sentence for each figure which feels inadequate.

I cut it so close that I was a minute late to class, which meant I didn’t pick up a scrap sheet of paper to take notes on later, and I didn’t know which group I was supposed to be in.

See, the goal of the class period was that everybody would be divided into groups. Each group would be assigned one figure, and we were supposed to come up with an argument that the figure was the most influential and using evidence from the reading. Groups could call each other out if the evidence was wrong or misused, which would lead to a loss of points, so you needed to have a basic understanding of the evidence for each figure.

The first phase was intended to be ten minutes to “harvest” evidence from the HW, assemble our argument that FIGURE HAD THE GREATEST IMPACT OF ____. EVIDENCE IN FAVOR IS ____. Afterwards we would add it to the whiteboard and present.

There was something about the winning group getting extra points or something, idk what the hell was going on.

I wound up in the group for the one figure who I had missed, so I didn’t have any evidence prepared for the assignment. All my group mates had either misinterpreted the homework, or not spent enough time on it like me. I keep sitting in the back of the classroom and I keep being shocked when the people next to me aren’t like, 100% invested in the class.

Plus, nobody had really absorbed the instructions, including me, so as we were starting we were also piecing together what we had to do in a very disjointed fashion. I’d already felt bad for skimping on the HW, and I was sorta shutting down by this point.

We started on going over our HW for evidence on the first figure, and all I could muster was a basic, useless summary of what he believed — absolutely nothing about his impact, not any actual quotations or anything — but since I was the only one talking and every one else basically didn’t know anything either, I just kept going essentially reading random sections verbatim from the reading — like, was I identifying the right sections as important? Would any of this be useable?

And somehow we transitioned to looking at evidence for the second figure and then into everybody looking at evidence for a different figure I think? It was confusing and then nobody in our group was talking and I couldn’t contribute anything because I’d messed up the HW so anything that I added would basically be me winging it.

My group was the only one in the classroom not talking, and I was the only one in my group doing nothing. It all just felt incredibly difficult to understand, and like anything I could possibly do was operating off of an incomplete understanding of the text / the instructions. Which is probably wrong, as I probably had a decent understanding of stuff, but I felt like I couldn’t translate it to something actionable without fucking up like with my barebones HW answers.

At some point the teacher mentioned something just out loud to the whole class about having to reconsider her schedule for the period as she didn’t expect the gathering evidence bit to not take this long, which really sucked. Felt like I needed to start contributing to my group, cause also my group was part of the reason it was taking too long.

But I kept not doing anything, even when one of my group mates asked. Just staring off into space away from everyone. Eventually the teacher said I could leave if I needed to. So that’s how my SECOND DAY IN THIS CLASS ended, with me screwing off halfway through and slithering off to the opposite side of the campus because I can’t actually leave. Too lazy to have gotten my drivers license yet, but I don’t wanna run into anyone from class — still might, cause I’m sitting in the very public lobby of the library.

God. This isn’t necessarily typical, i got through my freshman year here with “walk-out-of-class” or “just-skip-class” level experiences only happening like four times, but i really dislike that this incident is going to make up other people’s perception of me. Before anyone gets too worried about me, i got on the dean’s list both semesters last year + had NO outbursts, just shutdowns and walkouts.

Anyways yes i am medicated for my adhd, I maybe also have undiagnosed autism idk enough to say either way, and I was actually planning on posting different reasons why college sucks before this. Might break it up by posting something that isn’t basically a diary entry first tho.

All the fucking Mods for my videogames are only able to run on Windows! And every time I try to install Wine, an application to allow me to run Windows files on a MacBook, random fucking technical issues occur causing the process to shit itself and die.

Again and again and again. I google a tutorial on how to install the mod, and then a tutorial on how to install Wine. I don’t quite understand either of them, but there’s nowhere on God’s Green Earth that would actually fucking explain it to me in a way I would understand, so I try my best to make up for it.

I follow the tutorials to the letter, as best as I can. Doesn’t work. Try again, modifying it slightly. Random fucking error. Again. Random fucking error.

Goddamnit, I get frustrated and try a different method entirely. This time, it works! ERROR: NO SUCH FILE OR DIRECTORY EXIGO FUCK YOURSELF.

Before I know it, it is 3am and I’ve completed the tutorial five times over, to absolutely zero success. “All you have to do is download the file, open the file, and click on the red button” I DID THAT AND IT DIDNT FUCKING WORK.

You could give me the simplest instructions in the world, designed specifically to work on MacOS, and I can guarantee that every single fucking time I follow those instructions, something in my computer will shit itself and die. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

I’m worried that this is entirely my own fault for not knowing enough about how computer software works, but god help me I’m too fucking lazy to take the time to figure it out.

EDIT: sorry for using this subreddit as basically a fucking diary. I don’t think it’s against the subreddit rules, but this probably won’t get a lot of traction, for good cause.

I don’t have anyone on my life that I can complain about something this trivial tho, so. Sorry. Might happen again. Hopefully won’t be a vent, but instead rambling about robot porn or something.