reiofhope's stuff showing up around the art deprartment. I was jealous of her technical skill and... bravery, I guess, for doing things like slightly stereotypical anthropomorphic characters. Nobody calls her a dork for it. Hell, the opposite: she wins catergories in the student art show -- by that same token, though, that might get her some grace on what she does otherwise. In any case, I later noticed her on DevArt or something and asked a friend, hell, we're already name-dropping, cgranade if it was the same person he had a couple of classes with, and it turns out, yes. Later, all three of us ran into each other at the horrible campus cafeteria, and he introduced us. We talked briefly and went our seperate ways. Just after, a couple of other people, then just friends-of-friends, approached us and asked who I was talking to.cgranade innocently but misleadingly said "they met on the internet."Then the two then-just-friends-of-friends laughed and laughed and laughed.
I felt like my humanity had been ripped off.
I felt like I had been somehow, inexplicably, put in my place. Somehow put into the paradigm of the nerdy dork, hell, I wasn't apparently supposed to have any more dimension than that, regardless of everything I say and do. And because I'm a bit of a nerd, yes, and I can be a dork, sure, but do those things, the negative expectations of them, do they have such gravity that they pull in everything about them, that the person is lost into those gaping cultural voids? At that moment, it seemed that way to me.
But, you know what?
A few years later, I'm in a relationship with
bossgoji. Yeah, we met over the Internet, and yes, it is "real", so would everybody kindly stop asking or even daring to insinuiate that it isn't, and should anybody insist on that flavor of cruel snobbery, I invite them to snort a line of razor blades. I'm not going to let them deny me any yet more happiness with their twisted, broken monkey games.Like I said. What people say and do to do me or around me affects me. I'm not made of steel, and neither is anybody else. I've exhausted myself by acting the contrary.