#my mother has very selective memory abt my sexuality

[rasoir-national]

@ghostplantss

Garcin & Ines & Estelle were such an odd and amazingly dysfunctional relationship!!! i love it so much i'm so curious what you think of them? aaa how did the mosquito tablet thingies taste! i'm so curious! i'm so glad you're ok they sound a bit poisonous pls pls do tell abt the 5 other stories you were choosing between only if you'd like? 

Ok the Garcin & Ines & Estelle relationship holds a very strange place for me. See, when it comes to lgbt matters, I had what I refer to an education by omission : there was no doubt we were taught general values of diversity and tolerance, but we weren’t actually taught anything about lgbt matters. No joke, I realized it was possible not to be straight in high school, not because I rejected the idea, but because... no one had bothered explaining to me that this was a possibility. So, in the rare occasions in the meantime that I came in contact with lgbt narratives... My brain sort of registered it without actually registering it. Like, this was the thing that other people were. Not me.

Anyway, pretty much since birth my mother has had the habit of reciting classic theater plays to us. She has an amazing memory and she grew up listening to vinyl recordings of them by the Comédie-Française, so she knows most of Molière, Racine or Marivaux by heart. So some of those classics plays I was familiar with before I could even read. In that spirit, she recited No Exit to us when I must have been something like 8. And the relationship, both the lesbian aspect with Ines and the polyamorous aspect, stuck with me in a way I didn’t have the words to explain. And perhaps even more remarkably, it was all incidental. The play itself has nothing to do with homosexuality or polyamory, it’s a philosophical study of human relationships as a whole. Part of the relationships used as a subject just happened to not be straight. And “not straight” ? It wasn’t evil. The characters in the play, if you don’t know [spoiler warning] are in hell. They are demonstrably bad people. They tell you stories about themselves making it pretty clear they are supposed to be considered “bad”. But their sexuality is not part of that. Ines being a wlw has nothing to do with her being a “bad person”. The play does not treat her attraction to Estelle any different than Estelle’s attraction to Garcin. If anything, Ines actually comes off better than the other two characters. She’s certainly a badass, she’s smart, she’s controlled and she’s iron-willed. Furthermore, while the subject of the play is definitely people’s ability and willingness to torture each other, it doesn’t say for sure that these three people won’t manage to get better or to develop a positive, healthy relationship. It is kind of open-ended. Everyone says The Good Place is Kant fanfiction, but let’s be real : its basis is 100% taken from No Exit.

Anyway, No Exit is for me among those special stories every queer person has : queer stories they heard before they were given the tools to understand them properly or understand why they identified with them so much. You just were fascinated by them for a reason you couldn’t yet explain, before, 15 years later, it all came to make sense.

The mosquito killer thingie must not have tasted anything other than chemicals, although to be honest I really don’t remember, this was a story told to me by my mom. And yes, it’s definitely not a good idea to eat one of those, I guess I didn’t get to eat enough for it to be noticeably nocive for me. Plus, as I’m about to demonstrate, I have... a strong stomach, let’s say.

Putting this under there exceptionnally, because fair warning, some of those are pretty gross.

A non-exhaustive list of weird stuff I’ve eaten :

Out of competition aka eaten because of frenchness : escargots, veal thymus, beaf testicles, veal liver, fish ovum, pork instestine...

And now the real weird stuff :

- Paper. A whole lot of paper. My family is kind of paranoid about throwing away documents with identifying information on them (name, adress, banking info...) and so we were always told to tear them into teeny tiny bits and throw them in different trash cans of the house as kids. But that wasn’t enough for my anxious ass : what if someone was trying to piece it all together ? So I found my own solution : I’d eat it. Not the whole page, obviously, just the part with sensitive information on it. And... that’s about it. There’s not much gastronomical value to paper.

- Hair. A whole lot of hair. I’ve already explained I suffer from trichotillomania, so that’s all I’m going to say about this.

- Lice. Look, long story short, someone in elementary, school dared me to do it. It crunchy.

- Uncooked stuff. On top of the million of other things, I have a binging disorder. It’s mostly under control, but it tends to focus on eating stuff real quick without cooking them. I’m not going to make a dissertation on it here, just point out the funny aspect of it : I tend to eat raw pasta, raw rice, raw lentils (cronch), and to drink vinegar from the bottle. Surprise, all of this is extremely not good for digestion.

- Toad blood : LOOK I CAN EXPLAIN. No actually I can’t explain, I can provide context but that won’t do anything to actually explain it. So we were on holidays in Switzerland in this amazing isolated cabin with a huge garden, and there were quite a bit of toads toading around. So my sister and I did the only logical thing, we selected a god toad and started worshipping it, carrying it around the property on a stick to make other toads bow to it. At some point, an completely by accident, I hurt a toad with the end of the stick and it started bleeding. I took the little guy in my hands and so got blood on it. Which I promptly licked off. Did you know toad blood is blue ? See, royalty.

#personal stuff #this went from serious lit post to extremely gross real quick