Ooh, thanks for the additional HP recommendations; those both sound great!
And I don't know when/if I'll get around to The Princess Nun, but major props to the biography author for not making assumptions.
Congrats on all the good things that you accomplished or experienced (it sounds like NWM was amazing for you in a lot of ways) and...well, condolences on all of the crappy stuff.
I haven't read fanfic in forever (not for any particular reason, I'm just out of the habit), but I'm excited to check out we must unite inside her walls or we'll crumble from within because lady character studies are my jam.
Do you think that The Princess Nun would be interesting and accessible to someone who likes religious studies but only has a very shallow knowledge of Buddhist and Japanese history (aka me)? I don't tend to read a lot of nonfiction, but would consider this one if it's really that good.
It depends on what you mean by that. I'm all for people studying asexuality (and I recognize that for each individual study, they might have to set up some kind of basic definition of what it means in the context of their study). But trying to "define" it in the sense of knowing exactly what it is and how it is caused seems fruitless, since I doubt that any one definition could encompass everyone on the asexual spectrum.
Welcome, and good luck with your future studies! I'm not diagnosed either, but I relate enough to the symptoms and challenges faced by those with the "official" diagnosis to feel comfortable being here.
Supergirl reporting for duty!
I haven't tried this personally, but I know someone with waist-length hair who posted to social media a while back about how the hair clips from Lilla Rose allowed her to put her waist-length hair into a pain-free bun. She uses an XL for a bun and a smaller size (probably L) for ponytails, but there is one size larger than the XL that if you're interested and think you might need a bigger clip.
A lot of these are kinda feminine, but some of the less embellished designs might be okay, idk.
I work at a university, so a convenient time to go to the (on-campus) gym is directly after work. Two things that help me:
Get changed/go to the gym as soon as I'm finished working for the day. The longer I sit around and put it off, the more likely I am to talk myself out of working out and just go home.
Accountability. For me, a phone call to my boyfriend (I tell him that I think I should work out but don't really want to, and he'll remind me that I'll feel better once I've started) works for this, but there's probably other ways that you could hold yourself accountable for exercising.
From the way that your question is phrased, it sounds like you're into solo workouts, but if you are at all interested in any team sports or group fitness classes, I would also recommend those as a way to stay motivated. Even if I don't feel like playing on a particular day, I don't want to let my team down.
Hi, I'm Emily! Orientation-wise, I'm a cis-woman grey-ace of uncertain romantic orientation. Otherwise, I'm a mid-twenties PhD student working on environmental remote sensing.
In my spare time, I play ultimate frisbee, go rock climbing/bouldering (mostly indoors), play viola in a community orchestra, cook and bake delicious things, read (esp. speculative fiction and queer YA), and watch television on my laptop (esp. speculative fiction, mystery, and queer YA).
I'm on tumblr as ananzi, but I'm not super active there.
For queer YA recs (mostly wlw), in addition to the stuff you named, I like to look at Malinda Lo's blog! (Or her novels, which are also queer YA, often in a fantasy or science fictional setting.)
I went to a couple of meetups when I moved to my area for graduate school. They were fine; the people were friendly, but I ultimately didn't keep up with them because it felt like most of the attendees were already friends (and these were mostly talking/hanging out/sometimes playing board games types of meetups, less discussion about asexuality).
So yeah, I think that there's definitely room for social meetups, but that I would personally be interested in more discussion and/or outreach activities than what I found in my local group.
As a caveat, I'm coming at this from the perspective of an ace-spectrum woman in a long-term romantic relationship with a hetero dude. I'm not super confident in my romantic orientation (and tend to blur the lines between romance and friendship, anyhow), but I think I'm probably not completely heteroromantic.
From the perspective of a questioning person, sorting out my feelings towards different people can be hard. With people (esp. women) who I like/admire, I'm often left wondering: "Is this friendship, or admiration, or romantic, or...?" As silly as it sounds, I often think that experiencing more in the way of physical/sexual impulses would make my romantic preferences easier to figure out.
Because I'm not completely certain of my attraction to women (and not likely to feel certain about it until I can "prove" it by dating a woman or having clearly identifiable sexual attraction towards a woman), I don't really feel like I belong in/deserve access to queer groups and resources. Which is mostly okay, but sometimes I feel pretty not-straight and would like to talk about it with someone who understands.
A lot of non-sexualized queer relationships in media and/or history resonate with me, but I know that a lot of non-ace queer women also read their own experiences into these relationships. Idk, this isn't a fully-articulated thought, but I feel like I have to strike a balance between reading my own asexuality into things and not contributing to queer erasure.
Yes to both 'stuff about ace wlw' and 'stuff about grey areas'! I have thoughts about both and no one to express them to. (Even with friends who know about my asexuality and who don't mind hearing me talk about it occasionally, I feel like they don't really understand or care about these issues on the same level I do.)



Concept Awesome2016 recap postJan 04 at 11:27 PM


