I need to get back to looking for an app that will let me dictate my posts. I have had so many ideas for posts and now that I’m sitting down at my computer, zip.
I think I may be asexual. In the orientation way, not the reproduction way. Though if you’d ever seen Alex and me standing next to each other, apparently we look like I created him by budding.
I’ve never been in step with my peers regarding sexual matters. I was surrounded by budding allosexuals for years during middle school and just felt so out of place during their conversations about sex. I would complain to my mom, who I think was more than likely ace, because she never seemed to believe me. “Girls don’t talk like that,” she’d say. “That’s not natural,” was her response when I became friends with an allosexual who allosexed quite a bit.
I think that she thought that girls didn’t talk like that because she didn’t talk like that and I think that she didn’t think it was natural because it wasn’t natural for her. Her friends may have intuited that she wasn’t motivated by sex and didn’t talk about it around her as a result, as well.
Meanwhile, the situations I found myself in were *not* friend groups. There were the eighth grade girls talking about hiding naked guys in their rooms and the sex-obsessed budding allosexuals in my Girl Scout troop at about the same time. And, like I said, I’d go to my mom for moral support and get the aforementioned “girls don’t talk like that” that really gave me the impression that she didn’t believe me.
Then there’s the real sore spot on my soul — Doctor Who. I loved Doctor Who. I loved the patchy continuity, I loved the way the quarries of the UK could so convincingly play other planets, I loved the characters, and I really, really loved the “no sex on the TARDIS” rule. I could relax and watch it and be comfortable, knowing that random penises wouldn’t suddenly be popping out at me (thank you for that stressor, Stephen King).
And Doctor Who was the first thing that Thomas and I ever talked to each other about. It was very important to me during my adolescence. I always hoped to find a good Doctor Who fan club and actually, you know, have a social life. That never happened.
After the show was cancelled and resurrected as a novel series, I picked up a few of the Virgin imprint novels and there was sex on the TARDIS. Ick. No thank you.
When they decided to relaunch the series, Thomas said that he had heard that they’d pulled Virgin’s contract because the books weren’t family-friendly enough.
My eyes are stinging right now.
Deep breath, Olivia. Let’s do this.
I was thrilled. They were going to make the new series family-friendly. Yay!
We didn’t have BBC America, so we didn’t get to watch the show in real time. I don’t even know if my cable company even had it.
So several years passed of me being envious of people who could watch it. Then they started talking about how sexy it was. How clearly the characters were boning when the cameras were off.
I know that you can’t go home again or step in the same river or whatever. But I was crushed. I’ve seen a few episodes and Thomas would talk and talk and talk about them, but I just couldn’t commit. One time after Thomas and I divorced, a group I was in was just having a field day talking about all of the sex on the show and it drove me into a full meltdown.
Poor Alex had to talk me down. If I can avoid touching my investments until my death, Alex will inherit a million dollars from me and he’ll have earned every penny.
I’ve pretty much worked out most of my angst for right now, so I guess I’ll sign off with a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Today we have Tara Westover’s memoir Educated, which chronicles the development of Westover from the home-schooled daughter of survivalists in Idaho to earning her Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University. It’s a wonderful book and I was captivated by it.