Monthly Archives: September 2010

On the ubiquitous use of “crazy”

“I have a crazy commute.”

“With three kids under five, my life is crazy right now.”

“I have an insane workload at my job.”

“My schedule is crazy; I get up at 4:30am, and don’t get out of class until 9:30pm.”

“I’ve been in school… wow, three years now! Isn’t that crazy?”

These are all things I heard tonight, during intros in class as the new quarter started. “Crazy” (and its progenitor-twin “insane”) is used incessantly by so many. It’s our culture’s catch-all for bad, or overwhelming, or chaotic; it’s an amplifier, with bad or neutral or even good connotations, depending on tone and context; and it’s what we use when we don’t know what else to say, how else to respond (“I got these shoes for only $5! Can you believe it?” “Woah, that’s crazy!”). I encounter this online as well, to be sure, but it didn’t occur to me until tonight how much less the circles I travel in use it, and how much easier it is online to say “um, please stop.”

Because I want it to stop.

I want you to stop.

What? Why? You must be crazy if you think I’m going to stop using crazy!

Because your commute might be long, your life might be chaotic, your workload might be stressful or heavy or overwhelming, your schedule might be unbearable, the length of time you’ve been in school might be longer than typical, but I promise, none of them are crazy. None of them have a mental illness, none of them are neurodivergent, none of them are emovatypical, none of them have been diagnosed with a mood disorder. Not one of those things is crazy. I am crazy. They are things you want to complain or exclaim about. And I am not your prop.

But that’s just nuts! I don’t mean actually insane. You don’t know anything about metaphor!

Metaphor, noun: a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance.

In what way does your commute-life-job-workload-schedule resemble me, exactly? Is your job buxom and great in bed? Is your commute witty and clever? Is your life a talented writer, opinionated, have a taste for bad puns and worse sci fi shows? No? I didn’t think so.

But I didn’t mean those things about you! I meant your craziness! I mean, craziness in general!

Yeah. You meant this integral part of me, parsed out, isolated, dehumanized, de-person-ified. You meant my badness, my overwhelmingness, my stressfulness, perhaps? You meant this aspect of me which you don’t understand, and don’t care to think about the reality of. You meant this thing about me that you are going to ascribe meaning to, regardless of how I feel about it, regardless of the meaning it has in my own life, regardless of whether I think of it as a thing at all.

Why are you taking this so personally? I’m not even talking about you!

Of course you’re not. I’m sure you don’t mean to say anything bad about me. I used “crazy” the way you do not that long ago, too; I get it. But why are you taking so personally my statement of preference that this word wielded against me so cruelly not also be used so casually to mean anything you want it to mean? I’m not attacking you; I’m telling you how this word wounds me.

Now you’re just being melodramatic. Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?

Sure. I have mental health disparity because of racism and other bigotries, and exorbitant prices of prescription drugs, and insurance that won’t cover the medicines that work for me, and mental health wards closing, and overcrowding and dehumanizing protocols in the ones still open, and cops shooting people they know are unwell, and mental health used as an excuse to take away our kids, and a lack of effective treatments, and a terrifying mortality rate that people treat as a dishonoring failure in morality. I got lots of bigger stuff to worry about.

And I have this. This one teeny, tiny, paper cut of an issue, which I encounter a dozen, a hundred times a day. This minute, puny little issue that does nothing, except hurt me infinitesimally in isolation, infinitely in combination. This one so easy to overlook aspect of an entire culture that hates me and devalues me and dehumanizes me and degrades me and dismisses me and uses me for a punching bag and as a punchline. It is one tiny word used a million times a day that reflects and reinforces the culture that is responsible for all that bigger stuff, which I am impotent to dismantle. So you’ll excuse me if I sometimes address something not so big.

You’re taking words away from me! This is censorship!

Oh, would that I had that power. I’m not sure I would use it, but it’s fun to imagine.

I am taking nothing from you. I have no power to deny you the use of any words. I don’t even wish to have “crazy” stricken from your vocabulary. I only ask, and I ask only, that you think about how you use it, and maybe start reaching for different words sometimes.

But what else am I supposed to use?

I don’t know. What are you trying to say? How about: chaotic, overwhelming, wonderful, awful, surprising, unbearable, untenable, unbelievable, unorganized, ecstatic, hectic, really, very, muchly, heavy, excessive, sublime, supreme, crowded, distressing, disgusting, irrational, irritating, ignorant, great, good, or simply bad? You might be amazed how much bigger your functional vocabulary is by reducing your use of this one little word.

That’s too much work! Can’t you just deal with it?

I can deal with it. I can shrug, and roll my eyes, and let it slide off my back, and take a deep breath, and laugh it off, and let it go. I can do this a dozen times a day. But a hundred? My shoulders and my eyes are getting tired, my back is getting bruised, I’m starting to hyperventilate, I don’t much feel like laughing, and I can’t get rid of it for all I try to.

Why must I do all the dealing, all the coping, all the work? Why can’t you do some for a while?

But I’m crazy too, and I don’t care!

Yeah, neither did I. Except the part of me did, the part of me that internalized that to be crazy meant to be chaotic-bad-inhuman-devalued. The part of me that said that maybe it was just as well, that I deserved the names, that I deserved to be treated as less-than. When I started letting go of that part, so long hidden, the rest of me started caring.

Maybe it isn’t the same for you. Maybe you can exist in a world that tries to cut you a hundred times a day and not be damaged. Maybe you have an infinite ability to laugh it off. Maybe you have Kevlar skin.

I don’t. Doesn’t that matter?

It’s not going to change anything, even if I stop. You’re fighting a losing battle.

If you start using other words where now you use “crazy”, it’s going to make my life that little much more kind. If you start thinking about the words you use and noticing the words other people use, it’s going to make you a better person. If you start asking other people to change the words they use, and challenge the attitudes those words reflect, it’s going to spread the message. If you use this new awareness to pay attention to the headline that your local government is cutting mental health funding, that another person was shot when they should have been helped, that some politician is trying to get you to think less of another because a family member is a lot like me, and you vote differently and add your voice to the protest and make a small donation to a cause that empowers us, if you do this and ask others to do this, actually, it can change quite a lot.

I don’t expect the use of all degrading metaphors to cease in my lifetime, and possibly not in any lifetime. But I have to believe, and have reason to believe, that the world can be better for our working for it.

But I don’t want to think about all the hurt I’ve caused. And I know I’m not going to be able to stop right away!

Neither do I, and neither did I, I promise. Our whole life our entire culture has told us that this is ok, that using one person’s pain for our convenience is right and proper. But now you know better. Now you have an opportunity to do better, to at least try, and keep trying, until it becomes habit, and easy, and you wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.

No one is asking or expecting that you do it all at once. Just that you try. And I bet you’ll succeed, because it is just a tiny little word.

***

So now we have option A: Yeah, whatever, you nutter.

And option B: …I guess.

You can be a perfectly lovely person and go with A. I did, when I first had the choice, and pleasantly for me the friends who had this discussion with me didn’t kick me to the curb. And I won’t if you do the same now.

But I hope you’ll pick B. Will you?

74 Comments | Posted on 29 September 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: ableism, language, Mental Health

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Magnificently Simmering: the blog I would wish I were writing if I were a foodie and which you should be reading regardless

I write a lot about bodies — mine, others’, the experience of existing as an embodied being (because we all are). I still haven’t quite managed to articulate what it is about framing my experience as body-centered that is so compelling, so necessary to me, but it is true nonetheless. When I finally manage the blog overhaul I’ve been dreaming of for the past few months, and simplify the categories to three main topics, “Body” will still be one of them. To tell the story of my body, to really be in it, and to care for it are some of my highest goals.

Thus when a dear friend, whose life has near-frightening levels of parallel with mine (but with more getting published and less knitting), started the blog Magnificently Simmering, with the tagline An American Anglophile’s musings on mindfulness, sensuality, and the cookery of Nigella Lawson, I knew I was going to fall, and fall hard and fast, despite being far too lazy to be a foodie of even wannabe-Nigella caliber. And fall I am, for all the blog is only a few days old and a few posts long.

Here’s a sampling of why:

At first, when I started a year ago, I could only [practice mindfulness] while cooking. Even when the monkey brain was in full-on Speed Racer mode, something about setting out a cutting board and some vegetables, or turning on the tap to rinse out a stockpot, would immediately signal to it, Shut the funk up, we’re pretending to be Nigella, now! And I would chop, and do my washing-up, and concentrate on those tasks with such excruciating care, that eventually I could kinda, sorta, by my standards, think of blessed nothing other than ginger, and carrots, and dish soap.

– Why Nigella? And we get the sensuality bit (oh, and how!), but what’s with the mindfulness business? Aren’t you just an ersatz Julie Powell, with more Zen and fewer f-bombs?

After a freak 85-degree day in which I endured three-plus hours of un-air-conditioned public transit, ran across a highway in a slim skirt, and bit my nails to shreds at the pharmacy waiting to find out whether my new wonderdrug prescription was going to cost $200, let’s just say, Gentle Reader, that the only mindfulness I could summon was an awareness of what flavor of ice cream I wanted my minions to spoon-feed me with one hand, while fanning me with palm fronds with the other.

– Spaghetti alla Carbonara

If this happens to you, do not, as I did, immediately grab a spoon and commence forcibly scraping. Simply view this as an opportune moment to practice radical acceptance and distress tolerance skills, and pour your mixture over your croissant bits, before stepping away. Nigella, after all, says we must let this concoction “steep” for 10 minutes.

Once you have deep-breathed and mourned the caramel for the requisite amount of time, return to your steeping slop o’goodness, and place it tenderly (for, it, too, must be mourning the loss of its caramelized potential, and wondering whether it’s worthy enough for Nigella to crawl into bed with it) in the oven.

– Caramel Croissant Pudding

For foodies, for those of us struggling to be present in our lives and to live in and love our bodies, and for those with an unbecoming penchant for watching dreamy sensual women lick caramel off long-handled spoons, (and surely most everyone, certainly among my readership, is covered by at least one of those categories), this will be a blog to watch.

Just be sure to keep a drool rag handy.

2 Comments | Posted on 28 September 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body | Tags: bipolar, food, Links, Mental Health, woo woo

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Transcendence and terror: A morality play set in two scenes

Scene One: Transcendence

It is bedtime and then some. I am up, trying to work, again, always. The Man, exhausted, declared his intention for sleep twenty minutes ago, setting off a twenty minute melt down in the Boychick, that is only getting louder and more violent as The Man gets more ready for bed.

I get up from where I have been waiting for calm and quiet to start my work, waiting and listening and cringing and despairing. I get up and head down the hall, the assault on my ears getting louder still, the pullings at my heart stronger still. There is my child, sweat and tears streaming down his face, screaming his anger and impotence at the world, pulling at blankets, striking out with intent, if not strength or accuracy, at his father’s legs, striving to dump baskets — anything, anything to keep The Man out of bed, keep him playing, keep himself from the terrifying inactivity of sleep.

I kneel behind him, bring my body, my being, down to his level. I block his arms, but otherwise give him space, and sympathy, and murmured repetitions “of course, of course”. I learn he wants to blow up the bed, so his father can’t get in it, and blow up his father while he’s at it, and then put them back together and tape his dad’s head back on and toss the bed in the street. (We’ll have a think and a talk about our child’s chosen expressions of anger later, his dad and I.) Now, I just go with it, and despite his protestations that we have to go to the store to buy real bombs (maybe not that much later) soon we are tossing pretend bombs and real laughter at the bed, the sheets, the frame, the blankets, the nightstand, the dressers, and yes, his dad, and everything, everything goes boom, boom, BOOM! We count down, of course (no suicide grenades these), use the count to ten — one two three four sixteen nineteen TEN! he shouts — to hide, his hands over his face, his head in my shoulder, my arms around him, holding him: no matter how violent you are, how much you destroy, I will embrace you, protect you, say these arms, even as my mouth shouts gleeful destruction. Soon, he agrees, everything is rubble — wait, the curtains! his father’s legs! his father’s shoes! you toss one there, I’ll toss one here. Ten, nine, eight… BOOM! — nothing remains standing, everyone is smiling, and we begin the work of rebuilding. Because this is a child’s reality, the building goes so much faster than the bombing.

Then it’s make the bed, fold the sheets back, let his dad get in. Find a book, no a different book, yes, that one, have a hug, and another, and another, and help me get naked, and goodnight mommy, and wait! wave me goodbye, and I love you, and I turn off the light, and walk back down the hall again, the giggles in my ears getting softer and softer still, the soarings of my heart stronger still.

From screaming to snuggled in bed in twenty minutes. Yeah. I’m just that good.

*******

Scene Two: Terror

We are playing after dinner, laughing, indulging his current favorite game of steal-the-baby; I have him and his dad tries to steal him, and when he wins, I steal him back, and we all laugh and his ears are filled with “my baby! no, my baby!” — exclamations of belonging, of family and tribe and yes-I-will-fight-for-you, and his body is held tight and pulled and swung and he loves it so and he needs it so, so we indulge.

But I am done, feeling now the earliest hints of hesitancy from my back, and I give him warning, give him happy, joyful one-last-time and enormous hugs, and go to set him down — and he grabs, and clings, and now these are not hints these are memos, picket signs of protest, what are you doing??, unbalanced, unhappy, and I am firm now, “let go. let go. you have to let go. Get off of me get off GET THE FUCK OFF OF ME NOW“, and these are screams and this is anger and there just a one-more-touch away is the urge to hurt, to beat, to protect the self even at the cost of the child, and his father is pulling him off me, and I am running, and he is following and I panic, I panic and shove chairs between us, trying to overlay terror with rationality “I need space, I need my space now, please leave me alone just leave me alone leave me the fuck alone!” I fail at the appearance of calm, but I manage to keep my distance, keep my fists away from him, keep my hands even from forming fists, for all they feel the urge. My partner picks him up, plucks him off his attempted climb over the chairs toward me, and he screams for me, and he reaches for me, and all he wants is me, and all I can think is no, no, no, stay away, get away! and I flee, and slam a door between us, slam a pillow over my head, and block his vocalized agony, and shove down mine.

From laughing connection to screaming obscenities in less than twenty seconds. Yeah. I am that bad.

*******

The Moral

The moments of transcendence and the moments of terror are equally rare in most lives. We strive to skew the proportion, fear its skewal the other way, but the bulk of our lives are spent somewhere in the imperfect middle. What makes us good or bad as parents isn’t the inhuman ability to spend all our time in transcendence, nor the equally inhuman ability to completely avoid the terror. I do not win medals because of the first scene; I do not become the devil because of the second.

What makes me know I am as flawed as anyone is not just the second scene but the one where I played half-hearted, the one where I showed my irritation, the one where I asked too much, the one where I give too little. What makes me know my child will thrive is not just the first scene but the apology and reconciliation and half hour of play after the second, the time I filled him up with love and kisses until he slid off my lap of his own accord, the time I got him dressed with laughter and pants on our heads, the time I held him and kissed him and didn’t laugh when he fell back and hit his head. What determines the grace of our parenting, fills the memoirs of our children-grown-up isn’t the transcendence or the terror, but the thousands of interactions in between; it is those mundane moments, collected, that shape our relationship and our legacy — for better or for worse — far more than the worst we do, or the best.

We see others only in moments, only in the stories they tell about themselves, only in the glimpses we steal when they are unguarded, and we form images based on what we see: this one is The Good Mother, the one we will never be as good as; that one is The Bad Mother, the one whose children would be better off without her. We make these judgments, carve these idols, cast these stones based on the smallest moments — if she does this she must be ideal, if she does that she must be awful — so often forgetting our own highs, our own lows. Or we judge ourselves based on those outliers alone, whichever we remember most vividly at the time, and we forget all the many, many more moments spent struggling between.

We cannot see the shape of another’s parenting from glimpses, from moments, from stories loudly bragged nor gossiped in happily horrified whispers. Nor can we, in the thick of it, in the mess and minutiae of its creation, see the shape of our own. Not all shapes would be equally pleasing, if we could see all; there are, alas and indeed, parents who need more help than others, parents for whom patience and play come easier than others. But we cannot see. We cannot see all the moments of another’s parenting, cannot see with clarity all the moments even of our own. So tell your stories, and lend your ear to others’; but remember always that they might be true, these stories we tell, these stories we hear, these stories we invent with so little evidence, but they are not the truth.

The truth is life is not transcendence or terror, life is and. Life is the and between transcendence and terror, mundanities and miracles, spit up and toothless smiles, tickled giggles and trudging for groceries. You are and and I am and: good and bad, worthless and wonderful. We are the scenes that do not make it into the morality plays. And as hard as it might be to believe, our children are all the better off for it.

18 Comments | Posted on 27 September 2010 by Arwyn | Tags: attachment parenting, beautiful words, falling short, perfectionism, the stories we tell

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Stability or Repression? Or, Parents Don’t Have Time to Cry

Crying is not always bad, pathological, or a sign of emotional instability or depression. Crying, sometimes, is how we work through emotions too deep, too big, too painful to otherwise healthily process. As we learn in many good parenting books, and from our expert children if we allow them to teach us, sometimes a good, messy, noisy, desperate cry, supported in the arms of one who loves us, is the only way to get past these fears and hurts and traumatizing memories. What traumatizes us often isn’t the event but the event we cannot leave behind; crying can be how we let go.

I cannot cry. Or at least, I haven’t in a while, not in any meaningful way, not in longer than I can remember. It’s not that I haven’t anything to cry about — oh do I have — nor that I lack the impulse. But as though some part of my brain has decreed that breaking down is beneath me, I find crying beyond me. My face becomes stone when the impulse comes, and no mere waterworks shall be allowed to deface me.

I am invested in stability for a reason, desperate to never again return to the hell-on-earth of out-of-control mixed states moods. But I also have a belief that I feel fully, passionately, unbridledly, and I value that as well.

And now I find I cannot cry. And I am not writing, instead choosing safety and an early bedtime above expression.

Sometimes that isn’t bad. Certainly, to follow the emotional and creative trail every time it presents itself would be disastrous. I would never be able to function, not even as little as I do now.

But increasingly I suspect that what I once mistook for stability — a lack of tears, a more regular bedtime — isn’t the same as what the emovtypical experience. Or if it is, that they’re a far more fucked up group than I’ve long believed, because this — the feeling that the feelings are there, trying to crack the facade but unable, and unreachable when one turns inward to let them free — is not healthy.

This is not tenable.

And yet I write this with no particular affect but blankness. A slight tightening in my chest, but more a wall encountered as my heart strives to reach out than a hand embracing to empty me of tears. I write this wanting to want to cry, feeling a self that once would have been screaming in a corner, now in an oubliette unaccessible, the map forgotten. I can remember times when I have sobbed until tears and snot and saliva mingled and bubbled at my mouth as I decried every wrong that had been done me, every failure I had fallen, every obstacle the Universe had strewn in my path, and a part of me wishes that for myself again, if only to have that all out — but all I feel is a slight tension in my forehead, and I ignore it except as a mild irritation.

As a human, I long to cry, have a reason and a right to. As someone with a history of disordered moods, in which much of my life has drowned, I have a reasonable fear to, but all the more reason to. And as a parent, I haven’t the time or the freedom — or so the stick that pins me down, props my blankness tells me.

As a parent I have every reason not to make a habit of breaking down in front of my child, and a culture eager to blame me for his every once and future imperfection if I should; but also I have every reason and need to do so somewhere, more than ever.

Parenting is hard. We are unsupported in the work we do, alone except for an ever-watchful, eager-to-blame-us gaze. And the work we do is hard, did I mention? Not only do we have the daily trials of keeping our child(ren) and ourselves alive and relatively unharmed throughout the day — every day, day after day, unceasing –, each hardest moment with our young ones brings us back to our own youth and the traumas we suffered then. We rage at our seeming impotence now — to dress an unwilling child content in hir nakedness, to hurry one who would rather play and has yet to learn to be ruled by clocks — because we so keenly are reminded of our impotence to dawdle and play and choose for ourselves then. We have more cause to cry than ever, more need to expel through snot and tears and an hour of much deserved wallowing the fresh hurts of now and the long held hurts of then — but we have a child begging for food, for play, for one more one-more book, we have groceries to buy and a house to halt sliding into squalor and library books to return else risk the wrath of the librarian and trigger another childhood terror, we have playdates and preschool and story time and science museums and doctors appointments and if we are lucky self-care pampering appointments to get to, and we are late and they are dawdling and we have to go now and we have no time to sit and sob and feel sorry for ourselves.

And when, miracle!, by blessing of alloparent friend or dint of multi-hour bedtime rituals or at cost of unaffordable but still underpaid child-minder, we have a moment, at last, a moment to ourselves — we cannot cry. Blubbering, bubbling, needy, necessary breakdowns resist scheduling, and rarely come when called, and besides, we’re supposed to be unwinding in the tub, undressing with a lover, or questing for the holy Grail of Finally Enough Sleep. And those things are good, and those things are necessary, and those things are possibly needed first if we are to let go enough, become vulnerable enough for the ocean inside to wash over us and wash us clean — but our hour’s up, our friend’s impatient, our bed is calling, the sitter’s leaving and it’s on to the next day the next crisis the next appointment and hurry the child and think of the child and stay strong for the child and don’t traumatize the child and keep going keep surviving keep repressing we can rest when we’re dead, right?

Perhaps no wonder I cannot cry, not really, not fully, not as uglily and as messily and as self-pityingly as I need. Somewhere I learned that open bawling is not for proper adults; sometime I discovered I’m too busy to be able to; somehow I confused repression for stability, blankness for being content, not crying whatever any cost for not needing to cry.

We all need, sometimes, to get naked and messy, to soak in salty water and messier, thicker fluids, to cycle through pain clenching our bodies and relaxing and rushing through us again, to be wrung out, to be held and heard throughout, and to be lifted, at the end, in the embrace of those who love us unreservedly, without our needing to have earned the absolution of their love. So we, born now anew, can live.

I want to live.

19 Comments | Posted on 25 September 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Parenting | Tags: Mental Health

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Celebrate Bisexuality Day 2010

Today is some-day-we-can’t-decide-on-the-name-of-but-is-definitely-about-yay-for-being-bi day!

(Variously known as Celebrate Bisexuality Day, Bisexual Visibility Day, and Bi Pride Day.)

There are two problems with the term “bisexual: b and i, that two-letter prefix meaning “two”. Because bisexual says — however else we mean it — of or relating to two sexes. The most commonly accepted definition of bisexual is “sexually attracted to both genders”. And that “both” indicates not only two, but only two, which erases nonbinary persons of many different genders.

There are several suggested replacements for the currently-umbrella “bisexual”. My own favorite is queer, both because I like the word and because it indicates solidarity with other non-straight sexualities. Its main appeal is also its major limitation, though, which is that it doesn’t distinguish between queer monosexualities (eg gay, lesbian) and queer non-monosexualities — and while I, as all queer folk do, experience marginalization specifically because I am not straight (despite also having straight-appearing and straight-partner privilege), I also experience marginalization based on not being monosexual. In order to talk about this difference between monosexual and nonmonosexual queers, we need to have a word for the differences, which is why queer cannot be the primary replacement or “fix” for the problem that is bisexual.

As I used in the prior paragraph, another option is nonmonosexual — which, while linguistically useful, is overly long, overly academic, and centers on what we are not rather than what we are. Pansexual is possibly the one whose meaning I like best — across all — but is both obscure and not personally appealing. Omnisexual, also obscure, perpetuates the anything-that-moves stereotype. Polysexual means exactly the same as non-monosexual and thus might be ideal, but its abbreviation — poly — is already taken by the polyamory community.

So I am still waiting for a perfect word — not to dictate to others the word used for their own identity, but to have the perfect pink-purple-blue umbrella for all our identities that doesn’t erase our own or our loved one’s genders. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to let this day go unnoticed.

Because as problematic as the word we use to describe it is, I’m not dropping the chance to celebrate my sexuality –

Because bisexual isn’t incompatible with monogamy, but monogamy isn’t any better and shouldn’t be more accepted than polyamory –

Because it’s about attraction and identity and potentiality, not history and actions and who I’ve boned –

Because straight folks never have to prove their sexuality, and gay folks usually have their proof accepted (if not welcomed) –

Because sometimes bisexual is a transitory identity; sometimes so is straight; sometimes so is gay –

Because bisexual doesn’t mean “exactly equally attracted to two genders” — not least of which because there aren’t only two genders –

Because not everyone is bi, and we are not un-PC for wanting to name ourselves –

Because we are not “gay-lite” and we do have unique experiences –

Because the Boychick just told me one of his kid elephants has two dad elephants and another has three mom elephants –

Because we teach our children about love every day –

Because we are not faking it –

Because we have decided –

Because visibility really does matter –

Because I am bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual, nonmonosexual, queer, dykey, hot bi babe, big fat flirt, not gay, not straight, and still not gonna sleep with you –