bliumchik | Bacon Tabs! Brainhack! Shakespeare! The Youth Of Today! Not Necessarly In That Order!

Well, my two-week flood of assessment deadlines is over! Now I have at least three weeks before the next one starts, and I am naturally going to use them to procrastinate.

In TOTALLY UNRELATED NEWS, Portal is free from Steam for another week or so :D

...you guys, I get motion sickness from this game. And it's awesome. I do not even.

So anyway, since handing in my final assignment last Friday I've been tumbling and shooting portals at things and vegging out on the internet, woo! This sluggish state has been partly in response to the freedom from all that writing about socialists and french philosophers and moths, and partly in order to recover from Friday itself, which was approximately 36 hours long. (PS: I totally started this post on Tuesday :P oops!)

You see, they don't let you skip your 9am class on eco-utopias just because you stayed up the night before finishing a ficto-critical poetry translation for a totally different subject. And I felt bad about having skipped all those lectures, so I even actually got there at 9am! The lecturer sort of squinted at me, like he was trying to remember if I was in his class or not. I grinned sheepishly and then began the incredibly awkward task of balancing my giant cup of tea on a bizarrely unstable noun:[wooden thing that attaches to chairs so you can rest your notes on it] while eating a bacon and egg roll and looking attentive. By the way, I'm now a regular at the Michel's Patissery on Railway Square. I've had to drop by there to get breakfast on the way to class so many times that the dude behind the cash register remembers I like BBQ sauce. This morning I forgot the new PIN that came with my new debit card, and he was like "just pay for it next time." I HAVE A BACON TAB, YOU GUYS, WHAT THE HELL.

Once class was done I ran around printing off the assignment that I couldn't print at home because everything in my house fails. Everything. Faaaaails. My front door has been partialy made of duct tape for MONTHS since my mother slammed it too hard and broke some stained glass in the little window-thing. So anyway I handed that in and headed up to Ashfield to obtain a method of birth control that I don't have to pay attention to, because fuck knows I just don't have that much attention to distribute among all the shit in my life that needs it. Being a grown-up, hurray! Having never been to Ashfield before being informed that Family Planning only had the one office and that's where it was, I was amused to note that it consists largely of adult bookstores and medical centers. Excellent location choice, guys! But seriously, I passed approximately twelve of each on my way there, lol. Also a shitload of Asian grocery stores and a church, go figure.

The actual place was nice, if a bit teal. Okay incredibly teal. I took a form and an instant liking to the receptionist and spent about ten minutes waiting in the lobby, most of which were taken up by the aforementioned form. Then a doctor who looked a bit like June Cleaver came and waved me into her office. I had a bit of a laugh at her obvious attempts to reconcile my intelligence with my life choices. Once I'd demonstrated that I basically knew my options and used the phrase "coitus interruptus" without cracking up she asked what I was studying; then apparently took Communications to mean something totally different to "Glorified Arts Degree" because when I asked about failure rates she said "You do statistics, right?" and proceeded to tell me some technical things that I didn't actually understand because I never got beyond standard deviations, but their end result was pretty clear regardless, so I didn't bother to disabuse her of the notion that I do a Real Degree of some description. At any rate, I'm going back next Tuesday to get a little piece of plastic put in my arm, and then I don't have anything to worry about for three years! Bless modern technology.

I spent the return bus trip from Ashfield having a hilarious text-message conversation with

jk_rockin that began approximately thusly:

Maggie: Oh my goodness kids on my bus are making up lolpoetry about the fail whale. Apparently he's on a snail!
Jenn: IS HE ON THE TRAIL OF THE SNAIL OF FAIL???
Maggie: I BLAME CITY RAIL
Jenn: I AM STANDING IN THE MANGA SECTION OF KINO TRYING NOT TO LOL TOO HARD.

And continued on the topic of kinokuniya, awkward dudes pretending not to look at magical girl books and whose sisters Jenn may or may not have deflowered, Lady Gaga... the usual! Tangentially I am slightly disappointed in the English language for not containing the letter ж, which in Russian stands for that "zhe" sound that's in that slighty tweeny shortening of "usual" that I wanted to use just there - the ushe? the uzhe? the use? none of these look right! the uжe, on the other hand, works perfectly! Except that nobody knows what it is! *cough* anyway.

The kids then proceeded to send each other Crazy Frog ringtones. Some slightly older schoolgirls sitting behind me rolled their eyes at them - the phrase "I hate the youth of today" was actually used I swear to god. And then they started talking about brothels! I love the youth of today.

Anyway, I got back to the city and hung out with my boyfriend for a bit (STILL FEELS WEIRD TO TYPE THAT. oh also it occurs to me to let you guys know that he is the Alex I mentioned in this entry, lol, so don't get confused - although I feel like I'm going to have to come up with nicknames for two out of three of the Alexes I know...) and then headed off to the Circus-Soc show with Avi.

The show was billed as "Lesbian Romeo and Juliet with juggling" and hell if they didn't deliver. Mind you, I think they would have done better with a play like Midsummer Night's Dream or Much Ado About Nothing, because they were totally awesome in the bits where they were mostly using the plot as an excuse to show off their leet skillz - Team Montague twirling their sticks and Team Capulet swinging their ropes and the Prince with his contact juggling and all, plus tetris piece acrobats! - but fell down a bit (not literally) (except for that one unicyclist) when it was time to Express Physically How Moved They Were. Juliet! Let me show you my ~feelings~ through interpretive acrobatics!

XD that said the acts were pretty great, and so were the costumes, and if somebody failed a bit on the sound tech crew it wasn't in a disastrous way. Fun was had! Hoops were thrown! Nothing was set on fire, alas, because of safety regulations, but everybody wanted to! And then we all trooped back to Tom's house for the afterparty. And I have been to Tom's a few times in the context of going to Die Maschine and all, but I have never seen it that bloody crowded, holy shit, it was like standing room only in there with all the jugglers and unicyclists and staff-twirlers and aides-de-camp. It was like a Circus party cubed, as indicated by how much time Jess spent wrestling, cuddling, making out with or being stroked intently by some Circus kid or another. All par for the course with this crowd - in fact more than one of them made comments about being surprised to see me wearing clothes (the last party of theirs I went to, a few months ago, had a hot tub) which felt quite uncharacteristic for me! Tom, incidentally, played Paris to Jess's Juliet, which was hilarious given their history, and they did a smokin' tango. Girl!Romeo Cat only managed some awkwardly suggestive contortion with her, it was a little disappointing.

I spent the first portion of the party drinking and bullshitting in the kitchen with Justin, Tallulah, Avi and misc. Most of my alcohol consisted of vodka poured into tea - I drank so very much tea, trying to stay awake (I still ended up going home earlyish). Half of it didn't even have vodka in! Shortly afterwards most of the party trooped outside in order to give speeches, as it was the last night of the production. Being as I am not part of the Circus society either of UNSW or of USyd, on account of the fact that I DON'T EVEN GO HERE and my uni is lame and doesn't have jugglers, I declined to join them and sat around on a beanbag talking about the show with two physics students who also did not go there, and at least one of whom I am pretty sure wanted to make out with me, which was awkward as I had not yet ascertained Alex's thoughts on random make-outs. (Turns out, he's not super bothered about them, especially if they are with the ~laydeez~, which amuses me.) It's okay though, they ended up making out with each other :P

If nothing else, hanging out with Circus kids has certainly made me consciously think about my ~touch issues, and boundaries and shit. I mean, you know, nobody ever really touched me for a long time. I don't remember a single non-blood-relative hugging me on purpose before I turned eleven. And by that point I was self-conscious enough that when I started developing friends all I could manage was awkward hello-goodbye hugs, and occasionally leaning against them on buses. These people didn't know that, though, so when I started going to their parties they treated me like anyone else - and anyone else is liable to be climbed all over!

Funnily enough it was the same sort of deal with Alex. He's just naturally a giant teddy bear, he regularly picks people up by way of greeting. And in both cases, I tended to freeze up and giggle awkwardly, but rarely actually stop people, because sure it's weird and slightly terrifying, but somebody wants to touch me. And it's not like it doesn't feel good to touch people. It does. It just tends to get outweighed by the stress of being unable to stop paying attention to the fact that I'm touching somebody omgwtf. But if it's the other person doing the touching and I'm just sort of reacting, it's not such a big deal.

So, you know, whatever, acclimatisation should eventually take care of this, right? Except that at some point in the letting-people-touch-me experiment I have to run up against the bad-touch wall. (Er, at this point it occurs to me that this discussion might need a trigger warning?) How can I tell the difference between being nervous because I'm not used to skin contact and being nervous because somebody is being creepy? And what's really brought that into the light is the contrast between dating Alex and hanging out with Circus people. Now I have a baseline for touch I want, which I can compare to touch that's just sort of happening to me. Plus I can determine the line between what's acceptable from someone I'm dating and what's acceptable from someone I've met a couple times and assume is okay on the basis of the people they hang out with. I think I've found that most of the Circus cuddlepile/make-out scenarios are pretty much cool, and practically everyone I've met there seems to have a good understanding of consent issues, and anyway I'm getting to the point now where I can proactively gtfo when I get uncomfortable. (Not that I really used to stay in uncomfortable situations, I was more likely to preemptively exit them on touching-is-generally-weird grounds long before anything actually creepy had the chance to materialise.)

This is good, because when people see you hanging out half-naked in a hot tub they do sort of tend to assume they can get all up in your business unless you tell them otherwise. A funny thing happened at that party - dude I'd been chatting to previously came up and bit me at random. Now, sure, we'd both been in a multi-person ticklefight earlier, and sure I was not wearing much clothing, but biting strangers is... a bit weird. Nevertheless, it wasn't actually threatening and I was at a weird stage of drunkenness that I haven't experienced before in which I apparently regress to the age of twelve and do not find anything particularly sexual. Like there was making out going on in that hot tub. I totally could have gotten laid, if it had even occurred to me to think about much beyond "it's warm and that's nice." I was sober enough to move away from people I *didn't* want touching me, though - that one incident was sort of a drive-by :P

Anyway, another guy (in fact, one of the aforementioned physicists) was somewhat more concerned about the biting than I was at the time, and brought it up on Friday. This is the funny part - he then proceeded to carry on with the Circus-soc cuddly tradition (in this case by sitting on me during the beanbag review), except he'd occasionally look concerned and ask me if he was making me uncomfortable. Which amused me because like I said, he'd been somewhat more bothered than I about the biting. I was pretty comfortable! (Actually, it suddenly occurs to me that it's possible "am I making you uncomfortable" was code for "are you going to shoot me down if I hit on you" - whoops! I hate accidentally sending mixed signals. Make a note, Lieutenant Colonel Oblivious.)

But I've figured out where my line is, at least as far as randoms at parties go. Both of those guys at some point or another grabbed my arm or waist as I was moving away from them - in a friendly way, but in retrospect, it turns out that that is the thing I am not down with. And I wasn't moving away from them because I thought they were doing anything creepy, I was just relocating to talk to someone else. But anything else you're doing suddenly becomes a lot less friendly when you try to stop me from leaving (unless, I suppose, I know you well enough to instinctively get that you're not actually doing that), and I'm glad I figured that out before it got tested in a less safe environment than Circus. Plus, now I can explain it to the next person who tries it! Because I'm pretty sure those dudes would be horrified if they thought they'd made me uncomfortable, at least the physicist definitely would. It's the sort of environment where grabbing someone like that can totally be a friendly/flirty thing, so it's just a matter of making clear that we're not that friendly yet.

So yeah, that was a bit of a long tangent, sorry guys! The conclusion is that I've figured out I have a fairly short list of people who get to manhandle me! Who'd have thought! Personal growth, woo!