I have heard that Taylor Swift is not a good feminist icon because she talks too much about BOYS. Well sometimes, all there is to talk about is the dumb shit you've done for love and entertainment. I have many stories about BOYS but I have never been "boy crazy." I felt like an alien when at slumber parties girls would play N*SYNC on their HitClips and swoon over Justin Timberlake or Leonadro DiCaprio from Titanic. I never could answer the question "Who do you have a crush on?".
Maybe it was because I had such difficult looking at people's faces and I never quite saw the full-fledged features of other human beings. Maybe it was because I was more interested in learning how to become a wolf and reading books on dog behavior. In 2nd grade some boy in the cafeteria told me I had sexy legs but as an 8 year old I had only an amorphous idea of what "sexy" meant. The situation didn't get much better in highschool though, and I entertained the idea that I was gay and stared too much at the red-headed girl who read Laurel K. Hamilton during third period. (I was only half right) I was mostly a child of the Internet. I had cyber-crushes on dark elves in MMORPGs, married a man in the Sims 3, and had a virtual baby with an elven demon from Iceland.
Yet when someone asked me if I was going to a dance at highschool I laughed and said that sounded like a terrible idea. Later when I went to college I joined the martial arts club and met another freshman after he asked me to teach him a few wristlocks, who then later invited me to his dorm room to "Train him." I was too naive and inexperienced to know this was a poor excuse for a date. We never kissed because he told me he broke up with his girlfriend for getting coffee with someone else and he was using a really shitty version of "the game" on me. Later while I was participating in NanoWrimo I met a boy in a DeviantART chatroom who'd just finished his religious studies degree and was planning to go to seminary before he became an atheist. He was impressed I knew the Hebrew name for the god of the Christian bible was "Yahweh" and we chatted for a year about how much we hated God before we ran away together to Austin. Of course, I'm simplifying for comedic effect.
There were others, before and after. More than you'd think, from someone who sometimes has trouble going through a drive-through and ordering a chicken sandwich, and maybe less than you think, from a crazy girl who constantly gets into trouble because she's perpetually curious about the world. Sometimes I get tired of talking about BOYS because these stories usually just highlight how stupid I am, so I prefer to write fictional accounts of my stupidity, but to couch them in language about magic-moon children who commune with crocodiles and schizophrenics who paint their baby cribs and their walls blue to protect them from demon-gods and baby-prophets who call themselves Ezekiel and hang out in bars picking up religious chicks. Sometimes I write about women that I am stupid about too, I am an equal opportunist, (So I guess I have something going for me that Taylor Swift doesnt) which would be the whole basis for my novel "We are Wormwood", which I wrote for one girl specifically that devoured nearly two years of my life and sent me into a depression spiral. I don't regret it because I was trying to learn how to love and being stupid about it but hey, that's how you learn.
A few people have said my most intriguing trait is my "inaccessibility." We all know that you should play hard-to-get but I guess I have a leg up because I'm actually hard to get. This has usually resulted from taking people at face value when they tell me what level of commitment they want - which apparently drives people insane. This is also a consequence of being a writer stuck in my head all the time, and I generally want to hang out with people equal or more interesting than whatever Martian horror I'm cooking up in my brain that week. I get confused because I'm not asexual, not really, but nobody's ever really been able to inspire love at first sight. I find a people attractive not necessarily because of how buff or slender they are or how nice their jawlines are but because of the way they hold themselves and their smiles and the way their eyes light up when they see something they like.
This one morning the whole family was outside on the lawn and I looked at Robert and I noticed how he always held his body like he was perpetually ready, like a warrior does, and it made me love him more. It had always been a part of him, but it was really the first time my conscious brain acknowledge it. Was it there the whole time, fueling the engine of my love for him, without conscious consideration? I still don't really "get" what it is about N*SYNC that drove girls crazy but I'm beginning to see pieces and parts that comprise the vast whole of an enormous universe of love. I hope that I will still be a feminist after I write my first piece about cooking breakfast tacos for myself and a BOY but I will probably set the piece in a narcoleptic underworld where pale sirens slice sashimi for demons with their razor-sharp talons.