#and if you actually listen to ace and aro folks there is often a pretty intense alienation there that nobody takes seriously.

[wanderingchronicle]

reminded viscerally of the time i got a really persistent hate anon specifically because this person was convinced I was a straight person trying to be special like

mate.

[nobody-knose--archive]

i’ve been aching to commentate spirit phone’s commentary for ages. glad i finally got around to it, this was an ejoyable experience. liveblog below the cut

-i'm like half certain i've heard this commentary before. maybe not the whole way through & it was probably actual years ago

-nice hearing stuff like this. in-depth personal view of the album-making process. makes it seem like more of a real thing i could do myself someday

-neil cicierega real person momence

-i could probably go real in depth about neil cicierega/tally hall parallels specifically concerning like. the arc of their musical careers. but i won't, here

-wild how i legitimately don't care much about micheal jackson

-didnt we get a bunch of spirit phone stems from the needlejuice release/his patreon? we could probably hear the funny track he speaks of here in that

-i love hearing musical artists, especially neil cicierega, talking about the meanings of their songs. like, not only has this song been claimed to hell & back by the tumblr gays, but with later ones i just can't see where he gets these ideas from. also, claiming there's any one meaning or plot to a song just seems silly to me

-shoutout to neil reusing a midi from like, 1998, that he made at 12 years old, whose entire melody was reused for the main verses of everybody loves raymond. loved finding that out on my own 2 years ago. now it's common trivia in this fandom. not bad times

-it'd be neat if neil did individual trans tracks here like he did with view monstel, those things are half of why i consider it my favorite album

-it's a lot easier to ignore the creator's intended meaning behind a song when he can't even remember it. thanks neil

-seesaw effect

-and there's my joke all but 1 of my followers wont get. moving on

-what kinds of movie theater lobbies has neil been to where there are arcade machines. i mean im not one to talk but that does sound rather strange

-why do songs' titles even need to be taken from the lyrics. ive never seen that as any sort of requisite. it's like titling any form of prose you can just give it whatever name ya like

-"this part sounds pretty cool right"

-is neil's vocal range only mildly better than mine? with training i could change that

-oh i haven't processed any of the last 25 seconds hold on

-god. a shit ton of vocal modification in this song. it's like neil returned to his roots but with quality this time

-i, as an ace/aro, have never related more to an allohet guy in my life. what is the point of eyes!

-professional humming/whistling takes skill. it's different from the recreational or casual stuff. i'd know

-there's a name for the way sound (especially music) gets distorted when moving past you and i can't remember it but it's probably what neil's referring to here in the way he recorded the intro

(- update: it's the doppler effect no need to tell me cas already did)

-as someone who hasnt seen the rugrats or take me there by blackstreet i'll just say it sounded like a bouncy music box melody. nice to hear a song that messes with the typical scales though. lydian & diatonic.

-that's a rather specific thing to be glad about, but given what he talked about in his last full audio commentary about the jew harp i suppose i'm not surprised

-i know that tmbg song now. listened to it & saw the music video too. yep they're different alright

-where the hell does neil get all these instrumence from anyway

-huh. hadnt heard this part of the commentary before making my oc concerning this song but i like to hear neil's approval concerning part of my interpretation

-i love how ive heard a billion different tellings of this mellified man story from lem dem fans talking about this song and neil's is by far the wildest

-good god that does only make it worse neil

-i love making liveblogs of lemon demon albums. with the fullerenes or tally hall i cant name a specific dude to take out my woes on generally but with lemon demon i can just say neil all the time. i like being on a casual first name basis with this dude ive never interacted with once ever

-is sweet bod the one other than cabinet man with a demo in the bonus tracks? i forget

-holy shit the boston molasses disaster someone call up soapy if it doesnt already know, it'd love this

-two thousand nine. god i miss the fiddle solo. the ver with it is truly the best one

-he pronounces it jeff? i've always read it as gef with a hard g. that's what i get for knowing words that are never spoken aloud

-that's a fun meta interpretation of this ghost story that's over a century old. i like that

-i've noticed neil generally does the same synths across a whole album. it's especially more clear in the earlier ones, and does mean i occasionally mix up songs between clown circus & live from the haunted candle shop

-ah! ancient aliens! my least favorite track on this album. i cant even claim to have the least interest in a popular one i've just generally not liked this one much from the beginning. so im curious to see what neil's got to say, i think ive been in ~new commentary zone for a while now

-anyway. newest update on the loolin not realizing a song's funky time signature front: i think this one's in 6/4. or at least switches a lot between time signatures. granted i dont listen to it very often for the reasons stated above

-see the way neil describes it. eldritch horror upon being visited by the unknown at a time when humanity'd hadn't even yet had a chance to imagine such a thing occurring. should be right up my alley. but the sound itself & many of the lyrics simply turn me away.

-must i specify i don't dislike it? spirit phone is neil's best album it not being my favorite doesn't mean i think it's bad yadda yadda nobody should be surprised by this it's not like anyone in these fandoms reads my liveblogs <3

-granted i think this is. the first bit of spirit phone content i've made on my blog ever. so who knows things can change <3

-the transitions in spirit phone are much less view-monster transition tracks & more extended outros. view-monster's were a bit more intro than outro sure but they also seemed directed upon making a 2-way rather than 1-way bridge between tracks. or something like that

-.............soft fuzzy man is an incredible nickname for a cat. i'd steal that if i werent afraid of introducing my relatives to lemon demon

-jirls

-an underlying metaphor is good enough. the literal side of the lyrics are fun. nothing but agreement here neil my good man

-the transition into as your father i expressly forbid it from soft fuzzy man is the best one in this album

-buddy you ask if a musical idea has been used before odds are the answer is yes in this day & age the question is has it been used in the way you're using it. like sure this soul jazz record from the 60s that was sold out in kansas stores for a week used this bassline that youve found yourself copying. but seeing as youre using it in some angsty garage rock ballad type tune does anybody actually care

-doesn't everybody like to say things in an unhinged manner from time to time

-imagine having a guitar dad, i say, with my dad being a folk accordion/fiddle dad, which is infinitely worse in every way

-i think he was in an actual folk band at some point. idk the 90s were weird

-iron my life?

-m-more intimate? there are a lot of ways i'd describe this song but intimate isn't one of them. granted as your father is negatively intimate so from there i guess you've got nowhere to go but up

-...still glad to see his interpretation kinda supports my oc at least

-the way he says characters in songs shouldn't worry about death really strongly makes me think this is some sort of. thematic continuation of stuck from dinosaurchestra, even if there's no real death in there. interesting. would also mean that the dad from these past 2 songs is named carlos betty (no last name)

-i literally never assumed this was a flute solo. piccolo at best. it's pretty clearly a recorder

-my mom plays the recorder. i wonder if she can play recorder better than neil cicierega

-we can throw a party in honor of the crushing weight of responsibility! i simply won't be the one throwing it because i have enough on my plate already <3

-what the hell does "a sense of intent" mean

-i've never heard rush before however i disagree with neil's understanding of 6/4. 6/4 is meant to have emphasis (onbeat or another term i can't remember) on the 1st & 4th beat of every measure, which is greatly different from a measure of 4/4 then a measure of 2/4. it's why his 5/4 always sounds weird, because while it's recognizable in sequences of 10/4, it's more 2 measures of 4/4 with one of 2/4 tacked on the end. that's also how it's different from 3/4. i don't know much music theory but what i do understand i will fight to the death about

-"canonized" that's. a very interesting term to use when referring to a former president

-from now on i will interpret every love song directed at some unseen "you" to be inviting me to marry them for tax purposes. thanks neil for being an aromantic icon

-ah hell yes hell yes man-made object is my favorite goddam song on this album

-short & sweet & good damn vibes. neil's thoughts on it all are only making it better

-wild how he uses very few vocal effects for a song that he clearly is straining his vocal range for. go off neil

-the qualifier of man-made is a wonderful thing. oldest or biggest thing? oldest or biggest man-made thing? what a incredibly important specification. a world of possibilities lie between the two. oh i love it

-just gets me thinking yknow! what we consider weird/impressive in another species, in our own species- what kind of equivalent to that would there be from an outsider looking in? are there alien versions of the significances we place upon things, that we could never imagine? the limits of the human imagination mean we could never conceive of something else in the world that isn't, in some way great or small, just like us- and are we wrong for thinking that? such a juicy topic i wish there were a name for it because it's kinda hard to explain concisely

-spiral of ants. my second favorite song from this album, in fact. a good one to experience

-the vocals are just another instrument. they really truly are. i wasn't going into this commentary expecting to feel solidarity for neil cicierega in this chili's tonight on more than one occasion but here i am.

-like, his whole stance on interpreting songs is something i agree with almost entirely. you can take it at face value, you can dig to their very depths, you can listen to songs without caring what the lyrics mean whatsoever, and those are all fun. & yeah while any of these people can be annoying as one of the types who enjoys gliding on the surface more than anything i find those who dedicate themselves to figuring out the whole meaning of a song over anything else to be both slightly scary & slightly annoying <3 keep up the good work

-i want to make songs for my siblings the way neil makes songs for his sibling(s)

-spinch

-neil really shouldn't be allowed to be this funny like this whole album youre thinking golly! he's just a normal man this neil cicierega! and then he starts listing the cat hacks jokes & you remember he's had ridiculously consistent viral success with all his humorous endeavors and holy shit it's neil cicierega in action talking about his music. god bless you neil

-you're welcome, no problem, my pleasure. good eveternoon, radio audience!

[hufflepirate]

Why I Cried About the New Dixie Chicks Song

Ok, alright, so I’m having Extremely An Emotion about the return of the Dixie Chicks, and I know a lot of folks on here are either too young to remember the blacklisting or weren’t in the country scene at the time, so here’s the whole story the way it felt to a 12-year-old girl who loved them.

You should love and support them!! This story is why!! The vague recaps of the situation in articles about the new release don’t cut it!

*********

So. Let’s start at the beginning (for me). It’s 1998. I’m 8 years old. My parents aren’t really into Christian radio, but we’re also Good Southern Baptists, so obviously the only radio we really listen to is classic rock/oldies and especially country. You can’t trust those pop music stars these days. Or, God forbid, rappers. They don’t make music the way they used to. (Yeah. I know. But I’m just telling it like it was.)

I hear “There’s Your Trouble.” The singer’s boyfriend is constantly comparing her to his ex and she is Calling Him Out and I have never thought about such a thing before because I am 8, but I am deeply certain that any woman deserves to be loved by somebody who sees her for her. This is important to me. I don’t understand why.

It’s still 1998. I have recently moved west and I am still only learning to process the new geography. I am a child. I do not yet feel the full impact of “Wide Open Spaces” the way I will come to as an adult. And yet... already the idea that part of freedom is having “room to make a big mistake” matters to me. Instinctively, I know that one day, this will be a thing I need, even if I don’t right now. I am right.

We don’t get the album. That’s fine. They’re on the radio a lot. They top the charts multiple times. They win grammys. They sell more cds than all other country groups combined. They are, if you read writeups of them, “not yet political,” but there’s something about the idea that a girl can not only want but need space and independence, need it as a necessary part of growing up, that is setting the stage for what they will become, at least from the perspective of someone who grew up hearing ‘feminist’ used as a dirty word for women who have been brainwashed by... someone?? into having a victim complex. (Again... just telling it like it was.)

The next year, I am 9. They drop Fly. I am never the same.

The first single to hit the radio is “Ready to Run.” It is bouncy and happy. The singer is not getting married, because she does not want to get married. She knows what she wants and she won’t be pinned down by expectations. I am Living, and the feelings I did not yet have about “Wide Open Spaces” are Here In Full because it is hard to imagine being a grownup for the first time, but it is easy to imagine taking off to be yourself instead of doing what everyone else wants and it makes me feel alive.

“Cowboy Take Me Away” is deeply romantic and makes my little 9-year-old heart swell with feeling. It will be years before I realize that is because she is living her life and talking about what she wants and he is just... there. She is doing what she wants and he holds her when they sleep and smiles at her in the daytime and that is all we know. It is the peak of romance, and I, too, want to walk and not run, skip and not fall. I too want to grow something wild and unruly and that thing I want to grow is me.

My parents buy the album.

“Goodbye Earl” is released as a single and starts getting played on the radio. I grab the CD out of the basket we keep them in and it lives in my CD player until my mother begins to worry about the degree to which I am obsessed with this song about murder. I do not have the words to explain that the appeal is not the murder, it is the solidarity. I am being bullied very hard in school. I have only one friend, and she is often mean to me. It will be many years before I understand the true extent of the truth they are dropping in this song, but the details are chilling and honest and disturbing and when Maryanne flies in from Atlanta on a red-eye midnight flight, I feel something I cannot put into words.

It has been 21 years and I still do not have the words to explain “Goodbye Earl.”

Trigger warnings for domestic abuse and I guess also for poisoning domestic abusers and like, murder is bad or whatever.

The album is a masterpiece. It is an experience. I am 9 years old and I do not want to fall in love, because I am 9 years old, and I am learning right now that if a boy falls in love with me when I clearly do not want to date him, that is his own damned problem, and I am singing at the top of my lungs to tell the world that I don’t want to fall in love but if I do, then screw them, I will drag everyone else down with me.

There are limits to how many vids I can drop in here, so I was just gonna drop in the ones that were important to “Hey, you should love them!!” but I can’t resist dropping this one in. This one was never a single but also like... y’all. Do you know how many times in my life I needed songs that told me it was ok to not be in love/pursuing love/dating people? And I’m not even aro/ace? Anyway, this one sounds so sad but feels so good. An indulgent vid choice, but this is my post, so??

Also the album had some bops. These will probably not convince you to like them if you don’t like the country sound/genre, because the Dixie Chicks sound was always very country, but I dug the sound of 90s country then and I dig it now, so here you go.

Some Days You Gotta Dance

Sin Wagon (Fun fact about this one, which is like........ aggressively country I can’t even. It was not a single but it did get enough radio play to chart anyway.)

And then. The end. (For then.)

It’s 2002. They drop a new album in August. I am 12 and their cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” has me all up in my feels on the radio. In December, they drop “Travelin’ Soldier,” a cover of a shmaltzy song about an 18-year-old soldier who dies in Vietnam after writing letters back and forth with a high school aged waitress who loves him. It’s sad. It features a couple young enough to be relatable to a 12-year-old. I am not so foolish, at 12, that I don’t realize even though they say Vietnam, I’m supposed to be thinking about the fact that we’re at war in Afghanistan and they’re talking in the news about how we might go to war with Iraq and Congress had passed a resolution saying we could.

Here’s the thing that sometimes gets lost in things about what happened next. This song was popular. It’s anti-war, but it’s not particularly toothy. The actual text of the song is just that a young soldier goes to war, a girl he met right before he left gets his letters and is faithfully his girlfriend because... soldiers?? and then he dies and she’s sad. It’s not supportive of war, but you have to be pretty far out there not to agree with a premise like “We should be sad when soldiers die,” or “There is/should be someone who cares about every individual soldier even if other people just see them as one of a list of names/a statistic.” The song charted. The album sold well and won awards. And I missed all of it, because it takes a while for things to trickle down to a 12-year-old whose friends, at that point, listen almost exclusively to showtunes.

On March 10, lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”

Country music listeners lost their shit. Some people didn’t, of course, but a lot of people did. They called radio stations. They dramatically and publicly destroyed or threw away their CDs. People in the industry got involved, many of them in abusive ways, but I didn’t know much about that. All I knew was that one day they were ubiquitous, and the next, they were completely banned from the radio.

My local country station, or at least, the one my family listened to, was owned by Cumulus Media, who instituted a 30-day ban on the group’s music at all of their country stations (though not their general top-40 ones, apparently? I did a google this morning.) Other large media corporations mostly let their individual stations decide, though Cox Media also did a general ban. Lots of stations banned them individually, some for much longer than 30 days.

My parents didn’t make me stop listening to my beloved Fly. But the clampdown was, at least where I lived, intense and immediate. It felt like all of a sudden, they were gone. Dead in the water.

It fundamentally did not make sense to me. My parents shrugged it off with a similar attitude to President Bush, whose response had been, “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say,” but also, “They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out.” This was all, to me, baffling. Sure, people could decide they didn’t want to listen to them anymore, but why did they get to decide for everyone else that we couldn’t? Why did they get to ban their music?

I was 12, soon to be 13, and this whole thing was, to me, the antithesis of what freedom of speech was meant to be. I believed in freedom of speech. I believed it applied to everyone. I believed that even though, in my confused, hurting, terrified, post-9/11 12-year-old mind, I liked the President and thought we should go to war, no one should be stopped from saying we shouldn’t. I believed freedom of speech was a moral imperative, a principle for interacting with other people and respecting them even if you disagreed. I believed it meant protecting people you disagreed with, because otherwise who would protect you when the disagreeing one was you?

It was utterly baffling to me that one comment - one comment that she apologized for, because she said she’d phrased it too harshly - could so utterly shut me off from something I loved. I assumed, when she apologized, that even though she said she still didn’t believe in the war, that things would soon go back to normal. They didn’t. I turned 13 a few months later, and the Dixie Chicks were still not on the radio in my town.

By the time they put out their next album in 2006, I was running with a crowd that listened to CCM and classic rock and never country, and when I listened to country at home, the radio still wasn’t playing them, not necessarily formally, but certainly in practice. I heard that Natalie Maines had come out and said she wasn’t sorry about what she said, after all, and I didn’t like that she’d said she didn’t think the President deserved her respect, but I didn’t even realize she’d said it in the context of new music.

The 2006 album, Taking the Long Way, was a commercial success. Their song about the event “Not Ready To Be Nice” also did very well....... but not on country radio. I was still listening to country radio at the time, not exclusively, but enough that when I looked up songs that had topped the charts, I recognized more of them than I didn’t, by title alone.

I never heard the Dixie Chicks’s new album on the radio.

Here’s what my local station didn’t play. What they were too scared to play, maybe, or maybe what they didn’t want me to hear:

So, yeah.

That happened.

Badass.

But it happened without me, because the radio station was instead still playing “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” a song about women’s butts that a bunch of men wrote in a club in an hour while, presumably, staring at women’s butts. A song that sparked slogans on t-shirts in a little t-shirt shop my friends and I visited that year on a school trip. A song the middle-aged man who worked there (and with whom we were alone) referenced when he leered aggressively at my 16-year-old friend and made suggestive comments to our whole group (4 teenage girls) that made us run out of the building and race back toward the fast food places nearby where we hoped to find some of our teachers.

Country music was never the same for me after the Dixie Chick blacklisting. I knew it didn’t believe in freedom, even as it bandied the word about aggressively. I knew that it relied on everybody saying the same things and believing the same things, and it didn’t have room for me not to agree, and that was not then and is not now any kind of freedom. As the years went on, there were more and more Honky Tonk Badonkadonks, and I was less and less willing to give men a pass for being sexist and disgusting and entitled.

I miss country music, in the sense that I miss the Dixie Chicks, and I miss women like Jo Dee Messina and Sara Evans who were singing similar stuff at the time and might still be but aren’t on the radio because they’re over 40 and not also white men. I miss the way county music women made me feel in the 90s. I miss women who called out the men who’d done them wrong, who stated their own value and self-sufficiency, who sang about independence and made me believe in it. But more than anything, I miss believing in them. Some of that is of course still happening. But as much as I love Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, I can’t ever get back there. Not really.

The thing is, I believed the Dixie Chicks when they told me I could have the space to make mistakes. I believed them that women could and would stick together. I believed them that I could be single and happy about it, that I could say no to men I didn’t love, even if they loved me, that if I wanted to fall in love, I could find somebody who would love me without ever tying my wings. And I believed I could be and do those things and still fit into the culture of country music.

I still believe the rest of it. But I’ll probably never believe that last part again.

Anyway tl;dr you should love them because they tried to be themselves and tell the truth and because they tried to buck the system, and you should love them because they never backed down, even when the system pushed back so hard that, from where I sat as an impressionable preteen, dependent on my parents and the radio, it completely destroyed them.

[thatoneaceinthecorner]

Tag Game: About the Author

I was tagged by @jaywrites101, I love your blog and thank you!

Rules of the game: Answer these questions and tag blogs you’d like to know better.

Nickname: Hmm. I don’t know that I really have a nickname? My younger sister calls me Loki but that’s about it. My parents still call me a little abbreviation of my first name sometimes, and so does my oldest friend, but most people just use my name.

Zodic: Scorpio. I don’t really believe in zodiac stuff, but I do fit pretty much every aspect of my sign except the high sex drive thing. I’m asexual, so that’s definitely inaccurate, but everything else is pretty close.

Height: 5’ 9”. But I’ve been inspired by Jenna Marbles and have decided to grow four or five more inches. No one can stop me.

Time: It’s 2:27 in the afternoon. I just got home from a doctor’s appointment and getting an IV treatment. I’m tired, but that’s a permanent fixture of my existence.

Favorite band/artist: I’m one of those people who has a playlist full of random songs of different genres that I happened to like becuase either they tell a story, or have some other emotional draw, rather than having all the songs be a specific artist. However, I do tend to enjoy Barnes Courtney, Imagine Dragons, Panic! and few others pretty consistently. Also I listen to a lot of obscure showtunes (Death Note, Hadestown, etc.)

Song stuck in my head: Lately it’s been Avicii’s cover of Feeling Good.

Last movie I saw: Avengers Endgame. I cried. Several times. And I don’t usually cry at movies.

[Edit: Fuck that movie. It was terrible.]

Last thing I googled: The Norwegian word for wonderous. For a writing project. (It’s vidunderlig, if you’re curious.)

Other blogs: @mustbewriting is my brand new writeblr.

Do I get asks: I have gotten exactly one ask. Though it wasn’t actually a question, it was a comment about how my username reminded them of a song.

Why this username: Honestly it was just the first thing that popped into my head. Also it’s accurate.

Following: Only 81 blogs, now that I look at it. I’m just here to goof off, if I like your stuff I’ll definitely follow you but I don’t actively engage a ton. I’d like to, I’m just not very good at it.

Averge amount of sleep: As much as I can get. I’m chronically ill, so I’m at home all the time. I go to bed around ten and get up around eleven. I don’t sleep that whole time, but if I get much less than that I’m even more of a groggy mess than I’d normally be.

Lucky number: 11 and 13.

What I’m wearing: Black t-shirt with a Doctor Who quote on it, black pants, black and grey argyle compression socks. Usually I’d be wearing pajamas, but since I just got home from the doctor I’m still dressed.

Dream job: I’d like to be an at least marginally successful novelist, making enough to support myself comfortably. I’m going to write books whether I get paid for it or not, but getting paid well for doing what I love would be spectacular.

Dream trip: I’d like to traipse around Europe, taking as much time as I want without having to worry about the cost. And when I say Europe, I mean all the way from the tip of Portugal, through every European county, around the UK, up into Norway and Finland and Sweden, and all the way down to Greece and Turkey.

Favorite food: Oh, this is hard. I have so many dietary restrictions it’s hard to come up wit a “normal meal” that actually gets me excited. I think I’ll just go with really dark chocolate. That’s a food, right? Anyway, it’s the thing I eat with the most consistency.

Instruments I play: Guitar, ukulele, a bit of mandolin, and some piano. I can’t read music, and I’m self taught, so my skill pretty much extends to any song I like and can find chords/a tutorial for.

Eye color: They can’t really decide between blue, green, and grey. They could be any of the above with an -ish added to the end.

Hair color: It’s brown on my birth certificate, but often people refer to it as blond. I don’t know. It’s an odd burnt honey color, I suppose.

Aesthetic: Hmm. For colors, that would be black, dark green, silver ... I’m a slytherin, so something along those lines. As far as clothes go, I’d rock a sharp black suit, no tie, with my silver snake earrings and black boots. Maybe an infinity symbol pinned to my lapel.

Languages I speak: English is my first language. I’m learning Norwegian, I speak a tiny bit of Spanish, I have an array of random Italian vocabulary, and I used to study Latin, so I have all the major Latin roots still floating around in my head.

Most iconic song: Sinners by Barnes Courtney.

Random fact: About me? My younger sister has designated me ‘Protector of the Crawlies,’ becuase I rescue spiders that have wandered into our house. The rule is that if I name a spider, she isn’t allowed to kill it. Most recently I liberated a spider that was chilling on my desk, and another (very tiny) that was for some reason hanging from the lense of my glasses. I’m starting to think that they like me.

Tagging: I’m not super active within the tumblr community, so I don’t know a lot of folks, but here’s my list:

@kirschteins-delivery-service @kissgiirls @smallnico @aro-ace-from-outer-space22 @thebibliosphere @thorlokibrother @headspace-hotel @gayandgoodatmath @owl-writes @swordsdippedinshadows @galexy-eevee

[aroworlds]

Aroace here. A place I’m on has an ace community but the aro community there is pretty much nonexistent so I stay on the ace side. It’s really frustrating to be there at times because so many alloro aces are completely clueless about aros, and I’m constantly having to correct people. Like people are always getting squish and qp wrong and making it into an ace thing. Someone said qp meant a relationship without sex. Someone said that the reason there are so many aroaces is because aces- 1/2

-default to aromantic because apparently it’s easier than dating as an ace and of course the Ace doesn’t mean aromantic! We still can feel love like any human! I see it so often I don’t even say anything anymore. It still hurts. It doesn’t feel right to go around correcting everyone because it’s rare that anyone is an actual arophobe they’re just uninformed. I think the big problem is just ignorance. (And a part of it is an unwillingness to in any way be associated with aros)     

At this point in time, anon, I believe that anyone who says “we can still love” deserves a lifetime of stepping barefoot on Lego bricks. It’s aromisia and amatonormativity from alloromantics; it’s ableism from other aro-spec folks. I would love everyone to take that phrase, toss it into the fire and move on to actual, substantial conversations on how to respect and support other human beings. It doesn’t matter whether someone loves, because no human being deserves to endure aromisia/acemisia.

“We can still love”, be it referring to romantic or non-romantic love, carries one hell of an implication that in the (actual or perceived) absence of love, the behaviours of aromisia/acemisia are acceptable. That people need to proclaim their ability to love just to be respected and safe. No, no, no. Let us please consign this phrase to the bonfire and talk instead about how aromisia/acemisia are never acceptable, irrespective of the target’s ability to love.

Seriously, let me say this one again in header type:

It doesn’t matter whether someone loves, because no human being deserves to endure aromisia/acemisia.

(Sorry, anon. My hate for this phrase is immense. I can never just let it be.)

I’m really sorry that you’re having to deal with the awfulness you’ve described, anon. I hope you know that it is absolutely okay to conserve your energy, and you are not required to constantly play activist, especially when you know that your words are going to be ignored. I look talkative here, but my offline world is one where I’m ignored outright at best and activism is often quite dangerous for me. You are not doing aro-specs harm by saving your words for when you know they’ll be heard. You are not doing aro-specs harm by looking after yourself first and foremost. Not saying anything doesn’t feel right or good, I know, but that’s not a situation made by us, and it’s extremely unfair that we are the ones having to expend time and energy and spoons in response to a problem not of our making–often just to go dismissed and ignored.

It’s rather perfect that you discuss and describe the problem as ignorance, because I was thinking yesterday that it’d be a really good thing if multi-moderator ace-spec community blogs made a point of bringing on aro-ace mods who are connected with the aro-spec community. It would be the easiest to way to combat aro erasure, aromisia and amatonormativity, as well as a way of showing good faith to the aro-spec community in terms of making change. Most importantly, it’ll give aro-aces a much-needed and authoritative platform to speak on the subject of being aro-ace in ace-spec spaces.

I know there’s a heap of aro-aces who are engaged in aro-spec community discussions in varying ways. There’s a heap of aro-aces who are informed, passionate and willing to put in the effort to build a more inclusive ace-spec and a-spec community. There’s a heap of aro-aces already speaking with eloquence about aro-spec erasure. There’s a heap of aro-aces who see the challenges facing allo-aros, will listen to allo-aros talking about their experiences of erasure and then signal-boost their conversations on aro erasure in ace-spec spaces.

If the problem is trying to speak over the divide between aro-spec and ace-spec community spaces, aro-aces who are engaged with the aro-spec community while moderating ace-spec community spaces will bridge that divide.

I keep coming back to this idea that ace-spec community blogs don’t realise that having an aro-ace mod isn’t enough to combat aro erasure and amatonormativity if that mod isn’t equally engaged with the aro-spec community as the ace-spec one. Having an aro-ace mod isn’t enough if that mod considers “aro” an afterthought and “ace” the primary identity or if that mod doesn’t follow common aro-spec conversations. I’ve seen plenty of aro-aces engage in, promote or support acts of aro erasure, and how can they not, when they are not connected to the aro-spec community? How can they change if there is nobody in ace-spec spaces to teach them?

I keep coming back to this idea that in ace-spec community spaces, the people who are most heard on the subject of aromanticism are aro-aces not connected to the aro-spec community, because aro-aces who are engaged in the aro-spec community are pushed away from ace-spec spaces.

If you’re a multi-moderator ace-spec community blog, and you see this post–please, put out a call for an aro-ace mod connected with the aro-spec community. It won’t be comfortable to have this mod correct and challenge you, but if you care about building better ace-spec and a-spec spaces, it is necessary. This is also the easiest way to begin to regain the trust of alienated aro-aces, and if the conversations here mean anything, this is something ace-spec spaces must prioritise.

There’s only so much we aro-specs can do on this side. We can explain and educate. We can emphasise with and validate our own. But we need someone from the other side to offer a hand, and a real, tangible way of doing this is for ace-spec blogs to bring in aro-ace mods from the aro-spec community.

If we want a solution to the problems this anon (and many other aro-aces) describes, here’s a step ace-spec community blogs can and should take.

[angelofseeking]

just more rambling

about memories and how absolutely fucking angelkin i am lmao

Soo, I’m not saying I’m Raphael because I’ve literally never thought about him even for a second, or prayed to him or anything. (Which... I guess that would be kind of weird and like praying to myself? Maybe I was avoiding it subconsciously? I dunno.) But the more I read about him, the more I feel this really strong connection, if I’m being completely honest.

My search for otherkin stuff began shortly after I had a nightmare about a demon. Some signs were presented to me that led me to research Azazel, who was not a demon but a fallen archangel. I’ve heard many stories about the Watchers and the Nephilim and the Annunaki and so on, and... I can’t say that I necessarily place any stock in them, but for the first time I started to really sympathize with the Watchers. It’s definitely something I want to look into further.

I’ve pretty much ignored Christianity since leaving the Catholic Church, so I’m rather out of touch with it but I’m familiar enough with the context and archetypes and so on. My brief study of Kabbalah has brought me back to Judeo-Christian concepts. But I was searching for more information about archangels and found a painting of Raphael by Murillo and I was kinda struck by the resemblance? Which, like, this is an artist’s interpretation, but still it led me to research more about Raphael.

Raphael is the patron “saint” of healers, the blind, travelers, medicine, and music (among other things). He is only really mentioned in the Catholic Bible in the Book of Tobit, where he disguised himself as a human named Azarias, who claimed to be a traveler, cast out a demon in the desert, and healed a blind man. His counterpart Israfel in Islam is supposed to signal the end times with his trumpet and was also said to be “a beautiful angel who is a master of music, Israfil sings praises to God in a thousand different languages, the breath of which is used to inject life into hosts of angels who add to the songs themselves.”

And you know what else? He was the archangel who bound Azazel and cast him into darkness.

So, I’m thinking about all the other angels I’ve researched. Raziel stood out to me for the longest time, at first because I had an OC named Rasiel (pronounced the same way) and thought I had invented the name. I had a great liking for Raziel as a figure, but I never had the confidence to suggest he was myself. I thought maybe even Azazel was a possibility, because I sympathized with him a lot. Then I thought it was Azrael, because I have a morbid fascination with death and meditate on mortality and the liminal space of nonexistence a lot. But... It just didn’t feel right.

And this? Feels right. If God (Michael) tasked me to bind Azazel, would I feel guilty? Would I feel justified? Was I torn about the decision to follow orders? (I use these names/events more symbolically, as I believe that the truth is not able to be conveyed in a way that humans can understand.)

Because I feel like I still carry this regret. I feel like I understood why Azazel chose his actions. I feel like I loved Michael and Gabriel but that I felt as though I was living in their shadow. I feel like a coward for not joining Azazel when I wanted to. I am frustrated that I chose my love for my brothers over a cause that I believed in. I feel responsible. I feel responsible.

On a lighter note, I find it significant that Raphael is tied to music, and music is central to my practices. I rely heavily upon music to do any kind of spell/energy work. I believe resonance/vibration is extremely important. My mom told me I sang before I ever spoke my first words. Singing is often a spiritual experience for me, and this was nurtured throughout my childhood. When I make music, I perform best when I close my eyes and really put my heart into the sound. It’s kitschy to say, but that’s the only way I can explain why, like... bitch I might be Raphael.

The only time I am ever flirted with or hit on is when I’m at a karaoke bar. As time goes on, I feel I am becoming more asexual and aromantic. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like the attention, but I think too much about obligation and I’m real bad at telling people “no thank you, but I’m flattered.” I’m just awkward.

It’s not just because it’s a place where people drink. And it’s probably very egotistical of me, but I think it’s because I have a nice voice? But the amount of people who get crushes on me after hearing me sing is evidence enough. I’m going to delete this later probably.

Anyway. Two boys hit on me. Usually when I get hit on at these places, I can brush it off because it’s folks I’m just not into. Tonight tho, they were actually cute. And I’m like “cool” but... Nooo? I really wanna be your friend but!! Dating is just too weird!!

But I have been thinking lately about how being angelkin has affirmed my sexuality. Being ace/aro is absolutely a normal human thing (like being non-binary) but it just makes so much sense now why I’m so... like, I really like the idea of sex, I just don’t want to actually do it? I think because it’s one thing to fantasize, but when I do it with other people I just feel embarrassed? It’s not even insecurity, I don’t think. It’s just such an awkward ritual and I don’t think I can enjoy it in the way I’m supposed to. But I guess I’m not fully ruling it out. I just feel like it’s not going to happen again.

when i do stop and think about being in a relationship again, i think about being with another angel. i think about how we communicated/connected through a kind of cosmic music or resonance or whatever. i don’t know what to call it and it’s not just “singing.” i realized i have memories of communicating this way, so that it wasn’t exactly having sex but rather the act of love itself allowed me to connect to another being on a subatomic level.

it’s honestly like the difference between animals mating and humans mating. animals mainly do it for reproduction or pleasure. humans are the ones who mix feelings into it, although not always. doesn’t make it better, just makes it a little more complex. well, i have done it with a decent number of a variety of humans in a variety of ways, but it just doesn’t do it for me. i think that’s why i kept “falling in love” with the people i had sex with. i was so desperate to connect deeply in the only way that i was familiar, the way i was able to do before, but it just left me feeling empty and unfulfilled. that’s how i realized that i was not going to get any fulfillment out of a relationship with a human. it places far too much expectation on them, and it’s completely unfair on my part to do so.

but conversely, i expect a lot from myself in relationships. (and in general) i have always had this frustratingly overwhelming need to help and protect people, and it’s led to fucked up dynamics in relationships. i transform myself to suit the needs of a romantic interest -- not uncommon, of course, especially for survivors of abuse. but in my case it’s also possible that i was coerced to believe that the only way to truly love/value someone is to be involved with them romantically. this is absolutely false.

i love. i love deeply. i see so much goodness and beauty in everything. there is bliss in sadness. the night is bright and full of stars. the trees in winter have a serene beauty. death brings us peace and completion, returns us to the earth. there is bravery in weakness and passion in sacrifice. i turn away from nothing and listen to every perspective.

i don’t believe that everyone is right. i believe that anyone is wrong if they believe only they are right. i can’t bring myself to avert my gaze from the horrors of existence, because... i want to know. i want to understand. if i don’t hear every perspective, how can i know who is wrong and who is right? how can i decide my own opinion?

it takes me a long time to make up my mind but i can never take any perspective at face value. and when i do settle on a position, i ride it into the goddamn ground. fuck cops. eat the rich.

also meant to mention: i don’t know what i would do if somehow i met an angelkin that i felt connected to in a potentially romantic way. i feel like it wouldn’t be any different from connecting with a human. the last person i developed intense feelings for was angelic in the way that they were androgynous and pretty but also felt very ancient and shared my passion for justice. it was better that they did not reciprocate my feelings, and it made me reflect a lot concerning my capacity to exist in a romantic relationship. i wanted more from them, likely because i thought it would make me happy. i let this desire blind me, and i hurt them more than i’ve ever hurt another human, and i’m too full of shame and regret to make the same mistakes.

it’s perfectly natural and human to realize that a romantic relationship is not for everyone, just like having kids or getting married or making any kind of life choice is not the only choice. i just feel like there’s this added layer of “i can’t connect with people romantically even though i care about them deeply.” it’s a poor analogy, but i always compare it to the relationship between a pet and their owner. you love them deeply and would absolutely make any sacrifice for them, and crave their love and company, but you’re... well, you’re two different species.

my body is human. i am not human. 

if i found someone exactly like me, there’s no telling whether they conceptualize it the way i do. are they really like me? if they were, the closest we might be able to get towards a remnant of that deep connection we had as angels, it would be something involved with music. ideally, we’d make music together.

that might’ve been why i thought i was in love with that “angelic” person. we spent a lot of time just cuddling and listening to music. it led to other stuff. i didn’t mind to other stuff, but i might’ve been fine without it.

in the words of miike snow “ooh, i wanna make up my mind / but i don’t know myself”

[aroworlds]

@aromantic-official: Pride Week One, Aromantic Identity

It’s still the first week! We’ll just ignore that I’m posting this on Saturday, okay?

How did you realize you were aro/arospec? How long have you known?

It’s been a few years now, although I’m not sure on precisely how long, since I realised it at a time when I was too ill for blogging, so there’s no internet record of my realising it. I don’t even remember when I happened across it, as my memories of that period (thanks, clinical depression and dissociation) have more holes than Swiss cheese. I have this vague sense there was a lightbulb or eureka! moment after reading something online, but it wasn’t until long after that I put it into words or labelled myself that way.

There wasn’t much conversation outside asexual spaces on being aromantic as separate from asexual until relatively recently, and as someone who didn’t feel myself to be asexual at the time, I didn’t know this was a thing I could be. (I’ve decided since I’m abrosexual, shifting between pansexual, greysexual and asexual.) I had asexual and aro-ace friends and I still didn’t know I could be aro without being ace! For years I was writing so many posts in frustration about how my pansexual and agender/trans identities were only framed in media by romance narratives. I was dreaming of starting a LGBTQIA+ genre fiction press that published non-romantic pieces (it was one of my stated goals in doing my writing course, actually). I was tired and frustrated and alienated by an amatonormative, alloromantic world, and everything I said and wrote was just waiting for the word “aromantic” to identify it.

Have you come out to anyone? Share a coming out story (coming out to yourself also counts)!

I’m out online, everywhere. I’m out to offline friends, but I think they all know me online, or at least enough of me that there was no real coming-out process I had to deal with. I’m not out to my family, oddly enough--or at least I don’t know if they know I am aro, because as a writer, they could easily have jumped on my website and read all about me. My relationship with my family is not the best, and I’ve got a lot of reasons for not trusting them, so I don’t tend to gift them with personal information given how they’ve used it against me in the past. Likewise, if they know things about me, they don’t come forward with it, so it’s this complicated, silent mess.

For being aro, I don’t have any good coming out stories. My writing tends to signal my aromanticism before I have to, be it in my profile, discussion posts on my personal blog or in promoting this blog. For being otherwise LGBTQIA+, most of them are pretty awful, so I’ll stick quite happily with being the kind of person online who doesn’t have to come out.

Sometimes I feel cowardly, for being this person who is so out I’ll never find my way back to Narnia, yet still being so cagey (words like “queer” are useful to me for their lack of specificity) with my relatives. My reasons are good, and my safety matters, but being in the closet, even partially, is a crushing weight. I wish society understood that, how much being in the closet damages you, because it is so tiring to have to talk around my aromanticism with comments like “I don’t like romance much”. I wish I felt safe enough to be completely out.

How/Why is your aromanticism important to you/your identity?

I don’t have a whole identity in the sense of many pieces fitting together to form me; I have more segregated sense of identities that I switch between, although they definitely colour each other (look at the way I can’t not talk about autism here). There are definitely identities more important to me than others, though--autism, agender/trans and aromanticism are definitely the top three identities that come closest to my feeling a sense of me.

I am other things--physically disabled and mentally ill, abuse survivor, abrosexual--but I just happen to be or experience them. Autism, agender/trans and aromanticism are who I am. They’re the words that make sense of who I am in the world and why I feel the way I do. They’re the pillars on which everything else rests, and recognising each one was profound, a relief, so wonderfully sense-making and defining.

What are some misconceptions about aromanticism that bother you?

All the “aros don’t love” and “aros are heartless” nonsense cuts me twice because it draws from a well of rendering aro-specs too inhuman to be allowed, but it does so because we’ve been taught certain behaviours about love and connection, commonly associated with neurodevelopmental disabilities, mental illnesses and abuse survival, are wrong ways to be. As someone who is all of those things and aromantic, it puts me in an untenable situation: I come across as that touch-averse, heartless, love-doesn’t-describe-how-I-feel-about-people, alienated-from-people aro stereotype from a combination of autism and abuse/assault. I see my experiences used to erase or deny me as an aromantic but simultaneously rejected by my own community in their fight against these hurtful assumptions/stereotypes.

The blame for this is squarely on the people who hold these beliefs and use them as a weapon against us, but it is so difficult to experience this sense that I am a monstrous example of everything an aromantic should never be, that I damage my own community just by existing, that my community is fighting back against stereotypes that harm us by rejecting me. Where do I go then, when the autistic community is fighting back against the “autistics don’t love” stereotype by the amatonormativity of insisting on our ability to love romantically? Where do I go as an autistic, mentally ill aro?

Ableism shapes aromisia so very often, and the two twined together as they are hurt me in ways I struggle to describe.

What’s something you like about being aro/arospec? Something you dislike?

I have this profound contentment with this word, this identity, this experience. For me, it’s liberation: I don’t have to shove myself into a box that never fit me. I can just be me. I love not feeling romantic attraction, I love writing aro-spec characters, I love questioning and exploring what constitutes a happy ending, I love the discussions about non-romantic relationships and connections with other people, I love the art other aro-specs are making, I love the way aro-specs are coming together to support each other. I love being aro. There is no way I’d choose not to be aro, just like I’d never choose to have a gender or be allistic.

Everything I dislike is steeped in amatonormativity or aromisia/aro antagonism, not the experience of being aro. I hate, profoundly, how writing characters who are aro like me makes it that much harder to find a supportive and encouraging audience. I hate the lack of categories and visible tags for aro-spec writing. I hate the way gen/low romance/no romance works are seen as childish or uninteresting. I hate the way aro folks are unquestioned targets for hate because nobody wants to listen to us talk for long enough to understand.

I hate how amatonormativity impacts me as a creative so much I made this blog.