ConnMan8D

I've debated long and hard with myself over the past few days over whether or not I want to make the two revelations that I am going to make in this journal.  I've been keeping these two things mostly secret about myself for the last few years.  This is mostly because I've been unsure of how those close to me would react to them if I were to reveal them.  

Recent experiences in my life, however, have brought certain aspects more into my life than they were otherwise, and these past few days I've been feeling a need to unburden myself after all this time.  Further reflection makes me feel that those who truly care for me will accept both of these heretofore unknown aspects of myself... at least after their initial reactions have passed.  

And really that's what I've realized I was dreading the most about making these things known.  The initial reactions from those close to me.  Casper and Mancha will probably laugh and make a few jokes at my expense, and that's actually not so bad.  Humor beats revulsion.  Ben I'm not so sure about.  Sometimes I can read him like a book and other times he's a total enigma, so his initial reaction is sort of a crapshoot as far as I can tell.  Cristin is who I'm most worried about in terms of initial reaction, mostly because of certain unguarded comments I've heard from her expressing disgust at visual representations of some of what I'm going to be talking about.  I'm sure that if she knew these things about me and knew how much those unguarded comments made me uneasy, she wouldn't have made them, and some of this journal is aimed at rectifying that fear-induced lack of communication on my part.  Others who read my journals and watch my dA but don't know me quite as well (*cough*Hexit*cough*), I hope that my revelations do not weird you out to the point where you no longer wish to be associated with me.

So I decided to write this in a journal instead of speaking it to all of you, partially because I express myself better through writing and partly to avoid those dreaded initial reactions.  I've also chosen my dA journal as the venue because certain elements (coworkers and family) who I am not ready to bring this up with do not read it.  Some of you who read this, you know who you are, already know what I'm about to put down.  Others of you might find yourselves nodding and chuckling because certain things suddenly make sense.  I get the feeling that most of you will probably be caught by surprise, though.  I hope that, after the initial surprise and gut reaction fade, I can still count on you for the friendship and emotional support you have heretofore shown me...

The first of these revelations is that I am bisexual.  To be more precise, I sit right around a 2 on the Kinsey scale, where 0 is exclusively heterosexual and 3 is evenly bisexual.  So I'm basically bisexual but I lean a bit toward the opposite sex.  Casper, Mancha, stop laughing.

The second one has me a bit more nervous about revealing because I'm really not sure where this is going to take all of you with your initial reactions, especially after the first reveal.  Part of this also has to do with the conversation we had at our last cookout about psychological diagnoses of certain things and how certain things are listed as disorders on the DSM-IV.  Well, the DSM-IV can go to hell.  It was originally written in the 1950s, the golden age of American sexual repression, and despite its revisions over the years, it is still dead wrong about some things.  Just because something differs from the norm doesn't mean that there's something wrong with it.  I guess I should stop being defensive and just tell all of you what I'm beating around the bush about.

I am submissive.  Yes, that kind of submissive.  No, that doesn't make me a weirdo.  No, I'm not going to go into complete detail in this journal.  Some of you may remember some... odd behavior... on my part this past Sunday evening.  That was because on Saturday I had an experience that was absolutely amazing and firmed up this particular self-identification in my head.  It's also most likely the primary reason I suddenly feel a need to tell all of this stuff to you guys.  I will not divulge any more details in this journal, and I can't even say a whole lot more in person because a lot of the details are protected under similar conditions to Safe Space (anyone familiar with Residential Life will understand what I mean), but if you want what additional limited details I can divulge, just ask and I'll send you an email or something...

Casper!  Mancha!  Seriously!  Stop.  Laughing.

Anyway, levity aside, I really felt like I should let you all in on my little secrets, and after having written this journal I'm feeling an odd mixture of relief and dread.  I truly hope that what I have revealed here does not make any of you reconsider me as a friend or choose to dissociate yourselves from me.  I may or may not click the Submit button, now that I think of it.  The jury is still out.  If you're reading this, it's obvious that I did, and if I did, then at the very least please consider yourselves at the very least honored that I trusted you all to reveal myself to you despite my reservations.

Thank you.

I've been thinking about things, and I've come to a realization.  My life has been defined by nothing more than a long series of mistakes and fuckups.  Now I know what people are going to want to say.  To err is human, we define ourselves by how we deal with the mistakes and fuckups, what's important is what you learn from it, etc.  I wish I could believe that.  But if that were really the case... if people really believed that, then why are they so quick to judge others for mistakes made?  And why is the justice system more interested in punitive action than reformative?  No.  The truth, confirmed by real attitudes rather than false platitudes, is that some people are just fuckups.  And I am one of them.  

My long history of errors begins somewhere in Junior High.  It was then that the tormenting from those more popular than me consistently reached my personal breaking point and left me in tears, which resulted in making the tormenting that much worse.  So I decided to bury my emotional reactions entirely, stealing techniques from the Vulcans on Star Trek.  The result was that I closed myself off emotionally and quashed my natural, sensitive nature for several years.  It wound up becoming so extreme a closure that I was unable to cry and let things out even at my grandfather's funeral.  It also caused later problems that I will address below.

My other big mistake from those early years was being so uptight.  I was too goody-goody to really get into the mischief that others did and that people tend to remember fondly.  I was so uptight that people would approach me and try to get me to swear.  "Greg, say shit," they would say.  If I had just let my hair down for a second and said it, I may have even earned some small measure of respect in their eyes.  Instead I further set myself apart as being socially inferior.  While it is true that I was able to let loose a bit more by my junior year in high school, the simple fact is that in taking me that long, I'm sure I missed a number of social opportunities that I may have really enjoyed.

Then there were my early relationships, which primarily consisted of me settling for people who were not right for me, and, in fact, were so wrong for me that the relationship was pretty much doomed from the word go.  That being said, there were a couple of good relationships in there, but I still wound up handling them badly, especially the ones in my junior and senior year of high school.  I know I hurt a couple of people very badly, and I will always regret that.  

There was one relationship that I can't regret, even though I probably should.  That was the minor distance relationship I had with Jenn my freshman year of college.  I had said the words "I love you" before, and at the time I had believed it, but this was the first time I had felt anything this profound.  It easily left every other relationship before then in the dust.  I'm sure that the fact that she was the girl after whom I secretly pined for years while we were in junior high and high school helped with that, as did the fact that she knew me so well already that she could, for all intents and purposes, read my mind.  And even though the relationship itself lasted only a couple of weeks and was something of a parenthetical between two separate relationships with the same guy (to whom she is now married), I was madly in love with her... and some small part of me always will be.

I've only felt this strongly for one other person in my entire life.  And I fucked that one up, too.  My mistake was in failing to communicate just how strongly I felt... failing to make her understand the full measure of my feelings.  I was so convinced that she understood, and that together we could be truly invincible, that it came as a crippling shock when she left... and it hurt me far worse and deeper than I've ever actually admitted to anyone.  I still haven't been able to truly move on from it, and it's approaching the one year mark since her departure.  But it's partly my fault for not making myself completely clear, and I'm not sure when I'll forgive myself for that stupidity.

While I'm on my more recent fuckups, I should probably address all the academic mistakes I've made over the last five years.  First and foremost, of course, must be the fact that I allowed stress and depression to completely overtake me not once, not twice, but at least three times (maybe even four) over the course of my university career, nearly flunking out and doing permanent and irreversible damage to my GPA, so that what would have been a high B or low-to-mid A average was instead a mid-range C average... well below my potential.

My other big mistake was in leaving the music major part of my double major, although if I had it to do over again I'm not sure that I wouldn't make the same decision.  It was clear at the time that I had to give something up... stacking an English major and a music major with my executive positions on RHA were killing me.  But I loved all of them so much, and the one that was truly causing the most stress was the music major.  I know that if I had quit RHA in favor of keeping both majors, I would have missed out on one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and if I had quit the English major I would have missed out on studying a subject that I truly loved.  

But quitting the music major also made it so that I lost touch with things that I really loved.  Now every time I go to a symphony concert, or even just hear a recording of something with a soaring French horn part, I think of what was and what might have been, but what will most likely never come to pass now.  Despite my highly sensitive nature and the nervousness, stress, and proneness to errors I always experienced with solo playing and juries, I also remember the soaring joy I felt playing with an orchestra and taking part in performances of classic works of beauty such as Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony or Brahms' First Symphony (with its amazing horn solo parts in the fourth movement), and how I will never feel such joy again, because ending my study left me in a place where I am not good enough to make an audition into any orchestra or even a grad program.

While I'm at it, I might as well address my other failures in the areas I did pursue.  It's true that I did finally graduate with a B.A. in English and an emphasis in Creative Writing, but what has that really gotten me?  Did I enjoy my studies?  Yes.  But was I all that great at it?  No.  First of all, my writing is really not that great.  My work is hackneyed, cliche, unoriginal, and unimaginative.  I haven't written one word of good, original work in at least a year.  My brief foray into playwriting was a dismal failure (despite getting an A in the class), and every piece of prose I've written since my last creative writing class has either been fan fiction or new characters in a pre-existing universe.  As it is, I have little to no inspiration, and no new ideas.  I'm stagnating in a big way, and even if I weren't, it's pretty clear that I'm just not good enough to do anything worth someone else's time.

So now I have a degree that's really not doing anything for me at the moment.  I'm stuck in a stupid dead-end job that I hate with my entire being, making only slightly more than minimum wage and selling products to people against their own self-interest.  And I keep looking back, wondering where my life derailed, and then realizing that I know the answer to that question already.

On top of it all I'm fat.  I am so goddamned fat and ugly.  And I have no real motivation to do anything about it.

The hell of it all is that I'm sure everyone knows what a fuckup I am.  They can see it just by looking at me.  They all know it, but they act polite and ignore it so that I won't have my feelings hurt.  But I know they can see it every time they look at me...

Tonight I decided to improvise a bit on my dinner.  I've been really lazy about food a lot lately, generally going with easy stuff that you just pop in the microwave or the oven and heat up.  This is all well and good... there is plenty of good-tasting food that falls in that category.  But what really makes me enjoy my food that much more is when I have to actually put some effort into it (when I feel like putting in effort, that is... ^_^).  

I've been working on developing my instincts for improvisation in the kitchen, and so far it's worked out pretty well.  I've only had one thing that didn't turn out well so far, and that was when I made the mistake of dredging catfish in just Old Bay seasoning... waaaay too salty.  Tonight, though, I had a pretty good result.

It started this morning, when I got some skinless boneless chicken breasts out to thaw.  The original plan was that I would make one of my Macaroni Grille pasta kits with it, but as the day went on, I decided I wanted to do something different.  This led to a couple hours of brainstorming about what to do with the chicken now that I had it thawed.  When I got hungry, I went down to the kitchen and just started looking at possibilities.  I wound up, of course, at the spice drawer, and the curry powder was looking rather tasty.  So I decided to do my own take on chicken curry.

In a small bowl I mixed two tablespoons of sesame oil with two teaspoons of curry powder, one teaspoon of chili powder, and one teaspoon of salt.  In a pan I sauteed the sliced up chicken breasts in a mixture of vegetable oil and mixed garlic (such a useful thing to have, that mixed garlic).  Halfway through the cooking process, I added the curry sauce and let it continue going.  When the chicken was done, I covered it and let it simmer while I boiled some linguine.  Once the linguine was done, I scooped it into a bowl and topped it with the chicken and the sauce, then added Sambal Oelek (www.complex.com/assets/images/…) to taste and heat.

It was delicious, and the best part was that after I finished, I still had a small amount of the sauce leftover in the bottom of the bowl.  I saved it, and am looking forward to trying it out with something else... ground beef, maybe?

Those of you who know me well know that I am fascinated by personality studies and personality typology.  Well I just ran across a test that I hadn't seen before, and the results were really scarily accurate about me.  I have appended them below...

You are exceptional and unique. Your quest in life is to identify exactly who you are and why you're here. What's important to you is the journey of self discovery, determining who you are today is not the same as who you'll be tomorrow.

You resist being categorized and are quick to question any social standard that you sense someone imposing on you. Stereotypical gender roles always interest you and, in your mind, connect to issues that most other people would never even consider related.

You can "connect" with any individual person and practically read their mind, but you have a natural tendency to match your actions to the expectations you read from their mind and yearn for company that lets you truly, naturally be yourself. You struggle between letting yourself naturally match the sentiment of the group (which feels like putting on a façade) or letting your individuality shine, which may allow people to see how different you are.

You are particularly accepting of other people and have a special talent for seeing people's true selves instinctively. It takes time for you to trust your gut instinct about people because even you don't believe that someone could be so right about another person's nature so quickly. This intuitive sense about what people are thinking (which is actually your hyper-attention to nonverbal cues) is your special talent. You may think it is available to everyone and that others just ignore it, but in truth others could never develop the skill to the level which comes naturally to you.

To you everything happens on a personal level. Your friends come to you for advice because they know that you'll love them for who they are and put yourself in their shoes to look at the world. Your advice, although varied in delivery, usually boils down to "be true to yourself" and "listen to your heart." You are also an excellent confidant because things told to you never return to anyone through the grapevine. You exude this quality so strongly that even strangers will sometimes spontaneously begin confiding their deepest secrets in you.

Despite all of that, you are not much of a talker. In fact, words sometimes trip you up because you prefer nonverbal communication. Unfortunately, most of the world is not as attuned to nonverbal communication the way you are, so your opinion can get overshadowed if a more outspoken person is part of the decision.

You focus more on nurturing other's self esteem than any other type. As a result of this naturally caring nature your close friends often turn to you for moral support.

You are by far the most talented of all types at reading nonverbal cues. In your admirable attempts to convey a message diplomatically, those who aren't sensitive to inflection, tone, insinuations or body language sometimes simply do not get your message because they only receive the verbal half of what you said.

In the same way that you're the best at reading nonverbal cues, you're also the best at sending them. When you speak they miss the nonverbal half of your message, then they speak and transmit twice the message (verbal + nonverbal) which often gives away more than they intended but is sometimes carelessly inaccurate since they don't send nonverbal cues as well as you do. When you're tempted to assign bias based on someone's tone or other nonverbal cues it is wise to have them restate what they said and see if ignoring the careless, unintentional nonverbal half of their message lets the true meaning through.

If you have children your focus is making sure that your child has a strong self-image and high self-esteem. More than other parents it is important for you to be friends with your children.

You are more philosophical than most and passionately think about ethics and justice more than other types. It is when ethical issues come up in conversation that you most strongly sense that you are fundamentally different from other people. You become visually emotionally focused when these issues arise, while others easily laugh them off and switch topics to something trivial. To you, it seems that everyone should be passionate about ending racism, sexism and other social ills.

You go by the book and are suspicious of anyone suggesting that rules or laws should be ignored. You think constantly about improving laws, and see that at a major avenue for advancing social change because you see legislation and rule creation as the consensus opinion of the group working together. For you the focus is seeing everyone working together in harmony.

You are a healer and probably give great massages and know what foods will make people happy again. You prefer to surround yourself with direct, honest, authentic people who let you reinvent yourself every time you meet. You want nothing more than for there to be peace and harmony in the world, and your actions clearly reflect that vision.

You are more strongly moved by poetry and artistic expression than any other type. You are interested in the finer points of different artistic mediums, having many complete and incomplete poems and stories in your head if not on paper.

Some of my friends are aware of the existence of the TV Tropes Wiki www.tvtropes.org. It's a place where I've spent many hours procrastinating with random link hopping from article to article (but it could be a helpful resource for future creative endeavors as well). Anyway, I recently ran across the entry for "The Five Man Band" tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php…, and realized that my group of friends is a textbook example.

First, we have Ben, "The Hero." The leader of the group. Can be clean-cut and upstanding, bold and charismatic, serious and driven, or some combination of the three. Typically the main character. The Leader. The Captain. The protagonist. The Knight. That shining star that holds the whole mess together. In a team lineup they will be front and center. He can personally accomplish a variety of goals, but his real superpower is getting the whole diverse set of personalities under his command to focus and pull together. He'll always know who to ask for help, and when — and usually how.

Then there's Cristin, "The Lancer." The second-in-command, usually a contrast to The Hero. If the Hero is clean-cut, the Lancer is a grizzled Anti Hero; if the Hero is the driven and straight-laced type, the Lancer is more relaxed and level-headed. In a comedy situation, the Lancer is often The Straight Man or a Deadpan Snarker. The right-hand man and go-to guy for The Hero. He has the same well-rounded skill set as his counterpart, but lacks his pure leadership ability and team spirit. If the hero is The Captain, the Lancer is his Number Two. This is the member of the Five Man Band who is most likely to not be a team player. He's the one who sneaks off on his own to advance the team's goals independently.

Mancha is "The Smart Guy." The physically weak, but intelligent or clever member. Often annoying or for comic relief. Frequently a trickster and a buddy of the Big Guy. The Smart Guy is the guy in a Five Man Band whose focus is on intellectual pursuits. This is the team member who will always be prepared, sometimes Crazy Prepared. They will be at the computer doing Rapid Fire Typing. Expect some fancy talk and Techno Babble from this character. Because their role is about ideas, plans, and being Mission Control, they often leave the action stuff to The Hero, The Lancer and The Big Guy. Physicially they are usually short and wear glasses. They may even be a child. The Smart Guy is sometimes written as mousey and withdrawn. If not antisocial, at least non-social, sliding into TV Genius.

Casper is "The Big Guy." The strongman of the team, often dumb. Or mute. Sometimes a Genius Bruiser. The Big Guy is essentially the powerhouse of the Five Man Band. Often they are the largest member and even more effective in combat than The Hero or The Lancer. They will often be the point man, they cause a disturbance and hold off the mooks while The Hero challenges the Big Bad. Usually what holds them back from leadership is being Dumb Muscle, they know how to knock heads together but don't do much in the way of strategy. While The Hero and The Lancer fight side-by-side, The Big Guy is a One Man Army.

and I'm "The Chick." Don't laugh, "The Chick" can be, and often is, male. The trope is just named this way because in western pop culture, this sort of character is usually female because of gender stereotypes. Usually the band's "heart" or moral center. Though not necessarily female, this role is usually taken by the token female of the group, hence the name. The Chick's role is to balance out the group's usually-aggressive other roles, bringing them to a nice or at least manageable medium. Their functional role will often be the moral compass, social skills and influence of the group. They look after innocents, deliver The Aesop, get The Smart Guy and The Big Guy to get over their argument, talk or bitchslap The Lancer out of getting too dark, and convince the Obstructive Bureaucrat to let them continue their quest. Alternatively or additionally, the Chick can be a healer of emotional hurts, through an exceptional ability to understand people and reach out to them. This might be due to psychological training, social skills, and/or empathy. These skills also helps her to gain resources for the team through diplomacy, or work her way through different problems without lifting a hand against anyone when times are hard.

Note: Variations occur where the core five are different or overlap. Don't take the title too literally — it's the roles more than the numbers that matter. In this, I think Cristin and I overlap a little bit in our roles as Lancer and Chick. There are times when I can act more like a Lancer and she can fill more of the Chick's archetypal roles. But the majority of the time, I think the role scheme holds pretty true to the above...

Furthermore, we have a couple of the oft-found supplemental characters in our group.

Vanessa and Ben Fifer each serve periodically as our "Sixth Rangers." A johnny-come-lately addition to the team, often an outrider type who has been lurking on the edges of the action from the beginning. Their addition to the Five Man Band usually shakes up the status quo. Has a tendency to be a defector from the bad guys. Sometimes the Ensemble Darkhorse.

Sam and Moriah sometimes show up as the "Tagalong Kids." Usually the Hero's or the Chick's younger brother. Gets to save the day about once per season, thus generating about a 1:63 ratio of "being useful" to "getting kidnapped."

And I suppose we can call Gozer the "Team Pet." The dog, cute alien, or Robot Buddy. Might occasionally enable plots, but not really a character in the conventional sense.