A Word Of Wisdom On Crushes, And The Revealing Therein
I am, if you will recall, a fan of the no-obligation crush. Which is to say that in the unlikely scenario that I have a crush upon your totes adorbs self, you are in no way obliged to return it.
My crush is my own. It’s nice if we share a mutual attraction, but even if you show no interest in my pudding-like physical form, I will still hang out with you. This isn’t a contract where I will only do nice things for you unless you promise to smooch the hell out of me; no, we are friends, and while my friendship may be laced with a bit of intoxication over the idea of smooching you, I value your actual presence over my daydreams.
Tl;dr: I’d rather have you in my life as a buddy than reject you for the crime of not crushing back.
And I often do reveal crushes, just to get that out of the way. “Hey, I crush on you, this is a factor to be considered in our relationship, like the weather or traffic jams.” I do it not because I intend to arm-wrestle love out of them, but because they should probably know that if they choose to, say, complain to me extensively that there aren’t any good men out there who like them, I may get a bit huffy for reasons that might seem mysterious in the absence of this crush-visibility zone.
Yet if I do crush on someone, there are five words that are fatal to any good crush-revelation:
“So…. do you like me?”
Trust me on this one: if you tell someone you’re crushing on them, and they like you back, they’re gonna tell you.
And if they don’t, pressuring them into a revelation of mutual crushitude transforms this from the “no-obligation crush” and into the “you’re gonna hurt my feelings if you don’t reciprocate” territory. And that’s a pretty terrible place to be, on both ends.
Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with revealing a crush in the hopes of unearthing a mutual attraction. But there is something wrong with pretending to be all “Oh, this crush doesn’t matter, I’ll like you either way” and then immediately follow that up with a subtle pressure of “LIKE ME BACK, DAMN YOUR EYES, I WANT TO KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING.”
If you truly have the obligation-free crush, this isn’t going anywhere. Even the revelation of a mutual attraction may not necessarily lead to hot bedside smoochenatings, as all mature adults understand that “Attraction does not equal automatic coupling.” I’m attracted to any number of people who, in a vacuum, would probably warm my nethers… but they’re not in a good place to fulfill those needs and neither am I, so we just keep a good friendship and occasionally flirt with a sharper edge than normal.
You can like like someone and have it not turn into anything deeper. They can like like you back and have it not change much. Not every makeout session must be brought to fullness, and I think your life gets a lot better once you realize that.
Especially when you’re a flighty crusher like me.
(Originally written on FetLife, cross-posted here.)
Meet A Ferrett This Sunday: Sheffields, In Chicago, At 1:00!
Thanks to the help of my friend Jeremiah, we have a place to meet a weasel (and a weaselwife) this Sunday:
Sheffield’s
3258 N Sheffield Ave
Chicago, IL60657
Yelp seems to like it, with four stars, and that’s good enough for me. So! If you’d like to come by and hang out for a few hours, I’m told the drinks are good, and we will do some level of compatriating.
The inevitable question I get asked is, “I don’t know you, but…” Stop. There is no but. I know people in Chicago, and am trying to meet up with them. This is where I meet people I don’t know (or for who I do know, but can’t seem to schedule a happytime with). It’ll be nicer if you tell me you’re coming, so I know who to expect, but if you’ve had the urge to say hello to me, here is where you do it.
And no, I have no idea how many people will be here or not. I’ve only done this once before. But please! I welcome your company.
How Ferguson Proves The World Is Getting Better
“It seems so hopeless,” my wife said. “The world is just getting worse all the time.”
“Nope,” I said. “It’s getting better.”
The thing about watching the abysmal police violence in Ferguson is that this is not unusual. The cops have been mistreating black kids for years. When I was young, I had a black friend who I used to play with. Years later, I discovered that he got himself shot by the cops. He was handcuffed at the time, and on the ground, but whoops apparently he was a threat.
There’s been excessive brutality to blacks all along. You just didn’t have to pay attention to it.
But thanks to cell phone cameras and Twitter, we now have a situation where it is literally much harder to hide a body. What’s happening in Ferguson is not the sign that oh my God, it’s hopeless – the fact that this has made front-page headlines despite the fact that CNN and Fox were initially ignoring it like all the other cop shootings is proof that we’re making progress. Slow progress, and redundant progress – yes, similar things have happened before, and will happen again in the future…
…but don’t confuse the exposure of a problem with the intensity of the problem. Blacks have gotten the raw end of the deal from cops for over a century now.
But thank God we’re looking it in the face.
And it’s like Occupy Wall Street, which I’ve come around on. Initially, I thought, “Well, they’re not activists, they’re just raising a question.” And I’ve come to realize that even in the absence of a focused agenda, raising the question can do a lot of good. No, Wall Street hasn’t been torn down brick by brick yet, but I’ve seen a lot more debates in mainstream media about whether greed is good, and it’s been a lot harder to smother questions about “Why should these dudes have all the money?” with the usual conservative grumblings of “Class warfare, harrumph” because, well, we’ve opened up a debate.
Ferguson probably won’t end well for Ferguson. I suspect the status quo will reign there after the media leaves. But we’ll have tossed another question into the mainstream media to debate, which is “How many people do cops kill in the course of their duty?” – and guess what? Not surprisingly, the government isn’t collecting that data. Now, thanks to Ferguson, we’ve got people assembling that data, and now we’ve got people asking, “So really, how comfortable are we with these numbers?”
It’s a slow change. It’s not happening on Twitter time. Political shifts take years. But I think Ferguson will be a high-water mark in terms of getting people to understand that yeah, you can have a city that’s 67% black with a police force that’s 94% white. People will start wondering if that’s fair. And some people, God bless you activists, will decide that it’s not and start trying to fix that.
It may take decades for this to work. The Stonewall Riots were all the way back in 1969. And forty-five years later, gay activists are finally seeing the payoff for that.
Visibility doesn’t equal immediate action. Or victory. Nothing guarantees victory.
But you can’t have anything else without visibility. And man, this is like a needle to the eye.
Okay, I'm Holding A Meetup In Chicago This Sunday. Where Shall It Be?
Because the New York meetup went so well, I’m gonna say that at 1:00 this Sunday, I will show up at a public bar somewhere. Anyone who wants to hang out with me for a bit can totally say hi. Even if we have never ever met before. (Seriously. I like people.)
The question is, where should we meet?
I don’t know Chicago all that well, so I’m going to ask y’all to help me out. If you’re planning on coming to this Meet-a-Weasel Extravaganza, leave a comment with a good place that allows for varying numbers of people to show up randomly and hang out. (Preferably a space that doesn’t rely on tables, because I tend to circulate.)
I’m told Chicago is large, so somewhere easily gettable-to would be preferable. And time is of the essence, as I’ll be needing to announce the location, like, tomorrow.
So. Sunday. In Chicago. 1:00 p.m. Any help beyond that would be appreciated.
What's That, You Say? Ferrett Has Thoughts On Doctor Who? Shocking.
(Super-mild abstract spoilers. Be warned.)
So I saw Peter Capaldi’s premiere last night, and I liked it by the low standards I’ve come to accept from Moffatt’s run. I’m one of those Whovians who just gave up on Matt Smith, as I think Matt personally could probably have been a good Doctor, but the shows he was in seemed to have degenerated into a series of Moffatian tics – mysteries introduced with great flourish and little emotional conclusion, confusion presented by way of character development, compressed bursts of unearned emotion.
And what struck me the most about the season premiere is how absolutely terrified Moffatt is of staying with uncomfortable emotions.
Take the bed scene last night – no spoilers, really, every Doctor premiere lately has had the Doctor languishing somewhere whilst his companions fret over him. But what that scene seemed to suggest was that perhaps the Doctor was weary, aged, powerless. It could have been a potent scene, discussing the way the Doctor is so tired of struggling to fix the world, but he can’t…
…except who knows what it was trying to say, really, because ho hey! there’s big clunky SFX roaming the streets of London, and we’ve got to get to that.
What Moffat is increasingly reminding me of is that clever guy at parties, the one with all the interesting anecdotes. He’s great if the party needs a laugh. But eventually, you get to the point where someone goes, “So how are you, Phyllis?” “Not so good, my daughter just died”…
…and Moffat goes “Ho hey! Change of topic, amiright?” and, pulling his collar to air out the sweat on his neck, tells everyone a rollicking story about coprophages whether they want to hear it or not.
Moffatt thinks fear is exciting. He thinks action is exciting. He thinks heroism is exciting. But all of those quiet moments, the reflective ones that often make the action meaningful, well… He seems honestly scared by it. He’ll put soft moments on that on screen just long enough to have the Doctor barrel past them, as if to say, “See? Those dark nights of the soul? Nothing to fear, it’s all a larf, come on, shit, let’s tiptoe past this fucking graveyard at top speed!”
Some, of course, love that, because that’s their philosophy. But me? I remember back to Genesis of the Daleks, with Tom Baker, where he has the power to destroy the Daleks forevermore – just two wires, touched – and they take a good solid scene as the Doctor wonders whether yes, he has the moral right to do that. And that concern permeates the entire episode, that feeling that maybe destroying the Daleks isn’t morally justifiable, maybe the Doctor isn’t correct. That whole friction is what gave the series a surprising amount of gravitas for a guy in a scarf fighting dustbins.
And Moffatt, well, I suspect if he did Genesis of the Daleks, there’s been one scene where they’d ask the question, but only so they could show the answer that of course The Doctor’s right, he’s always right, why would you ever doubt the Doctor?
Sure, they did a touch of moral ambiguity last night. That I liked. I in fact liked the premiere once they went out to eat and found the plot. But the idea that the Doctor might be wrong, or fallible, or even harmful seems to terrify Moffatt so much that I just stopped watching Smith. I knew Smith would be right. I knew that nobody I liked on the show would ever be wrong, even if they had to partake in contradictory moral contortions to arrive at this conclusion. Even if half the time the answer to “Why is this man wrong?” turned out to be “Because he’s so awesome that even being awesome has problems!” So why even watch the show, when I know the ending, if not to bask in the warmth of a moral fantasy where everyone I suspected to be nice would be proven ineffably wonderful?
Now. Some have complained about the treatment of Clara, which I guess I can understand, but a) this is Moffatt, and see my low standards on Moffatt’s treatment of women, b) I don’t give a crap about Clara as a character and as such I can’t get outraged when she’s played inconsistently (even though she blatantly is), and c) alas, whether you like it or not, the show’s gotta hold hands.
What I find interesting is that some of the people who are complaining the most about the heavy-handed transition were some of the people who fucking adored the Rose-to-Tennant bridge in S1-to-S2, the one where they made it clear that Rose is the Doctor’s special-super-wonderful-lovey-dovey person and no change of personality will ever break their bond… which I, at the time, found pretty kludgy and sickening and an annoyingly explicit direct plea to the fans that yes, we know this Doctor’s different, but seriously, he still loves you. But I endured it, because the Doctor was new to many people and yes, we need this claptrap to keep the fans going.
Now a lot of those folks who, jaded in Who fandom, are always like “Yes, we know the Doctor changes, we don’t need to have this explained to us, we don’t need to have this insultingly blatant essay on how the Doctor can be unattractive foisted upon us” have forgotten that yeah, for a lot of fans, the Doctor is their version of boy-band sexiness, and so they do need a very explicit transition to grizzled old Capaldi. (Who is sexy in his own way, of course.) And no, those fans won’t show up on your Tumblr page, because they’re newish fans and maybe not as obsessive about it as you are, but they are out there.
I suspect a lot of the annoyance is partially due to, yes, Moffatt’s inevitable buried sexism, but I think another part of that is that Doctor Who has, once again, become old enough that the fandom wants two separate things. One has grown accustomed to the regenerations and doesn’t want all of the emotional fooferaw of your first breakup, we’ve done this, let’s just forget Smith and fucking get on with falling in love with New Guy, and those fans are annoyed by the fact that – just like your precious fucking Rose falling in lurve with Tennant – some newer fans aren’t quite as hip to the scene and need so much damn time to acclimatize.
Well, guys, I dealt with the Rosestravaganza of 2005, and you had to deal with the Claranation of 2014. It’s tedious, if you’ve done this fandango before. But I suspect, like me, that for every old vet out there going, “Do we really need this shit?” we have some new fan going, “Oh, thank God, this makes it work for me.”
It’s the definition of a broken fan base. But hey. I’m hoping, perhaps irrationally, that Capaldi doesn’t turn out to be yet another collection of Moffattish tics. We’ll see.