Carding

I love seeing the fam and old friends from high school and college years, going out for drinks, gambling, pool, bowling, and all that fun stuff. What's not fun, and I'm not sure if I've talked about this here before or not, is how short and sweet I am. I have a seriously sweet face, and it gets me carded all the time. I went out a few weeks ago with friends and the bar came up to my collar bone. I felt like a six year old. When I requested a Shirley Temple because I had to drive a long, curvy, country road home, the bartender actually said "Thank God."

I get carded when I want to buy lottery tickets, I've been pulled off casino floors and gotten my hand stamped to enter (did you even know they did that at casinos because they do), I've had to pull out credit cards to prove my ID isn't fake. I'd like to say it's flattering. What girl in her mid-twenties wants people to think she's forty? But seriously, yo, stop thinking I'm under 18. It's not cool.

I've learned certain things over the years: when I wear my hair in a braid, it takes off 2 years, add glasses and it knocks off another 2 or 3, pair it with skinny jeans and some converse and I'm a high school kid. But even busting out the boobs and throwing on high heels doesn't seem to help with the carding dilemma. What else can I do? Paint my face in clown makeup?

Tonight was fun, nonetheless. I had a good time catching up with people I've missed. It's always a little awkward around high school friends because they knew me as a completely different person. They knew "pre-gay, baby wanting, Mormon marrying, Tabby" and don't know what to do with the "out, single, comfortable, happy with her life and her sexuality so I don't-need-to-discuss-it-every-second Tabby."

Whenever my sexuality comes up in conversation, people think it's okay to ask for details about my sex life. "Do you do this? Is scissoring a real thing? I've always wanted to have sex with another girl but I don't want to taste it." I don't find out somebody's straight and say "Hey, do you like the taste of his sperm and let him do crazy shit like sign you up for gangbangs?" No, I don't, because I have manners. I'm going off on a tangent. I promise I'll do a whole other post on that topic. For now I'm just trying to deal with the carding sitch.

Also, I've been updating the first:girl series, so if you haven't signed up, email me or leave me a comment with your email and I'll send you the password.

Incidents/Unresolved Emotions

I dated a boy my freshman year. He was a few years older than me, and we only dated for a few months. I was young for my year, so it never progressed to more than making out. The summer between my junior and senior year, we met up. I had just gotten out of a relationship where I gave my boyfriend head every day that we saw each other, so it was habitual and almost routine when I went down on Freshman Boyfriend.

I didn't like it.

I got into another friends deal where I was used predominately for oral sex. That spring of my senior year, a few friends and I decided to drink at the beach so that we didn't go off and get crazy in college. We came back to my house and camped in the backyard. We drank more and lounged around and eventually everyone started falling asleep. I was sharing an air matress with Freshman Boyfriend when he started grinding into me, inching his fingers into my waistband. I'd gotten hotter, gotten older, become more experienced. He wanted me now, instead of the little kid I'd used to be.

He touched me. I told him to stop and he didn't. My friends heard me crying from the tent next to us and didn't help. Before he could get my jeans all the way off and actually rape me, I pushed him off, ran inside the house and locked the door.

We began talking again. We ignored it. Never spoke of it. We became friends again. Now he's telling me about this girl who broke his heart and all I can think about is that I wish his heart broke for the way he hurt me. I just want to scream "You molested me! You screwed me up and ruined any chance I had at a normal sex life!" But I can't, because I don't know if that's true. I don't know if he really did molest me. I remember him touching me in places he shouldn't, but I'd been drinking and it's all a bit fuzzy.

I thought I'd gotten over it, moved past it. I don't want revenge, I just want him to realize what he did. I want him to cry for me; for breaking me.

I confronted him, and granted, online was not the best way, but he doesn't remember it. Any of it. I hate crying.

And now I feel broken all over again.

Storytime/parallel lives

Meredith Baxter just came out and pretty much summed up my high school years in just a few sentences.

'But in an interview with Today show host Matt Lauer, she revealed that she had had a "later-in-life recognition" of her sexuality and has been in a relationship with her girlfriend for four years.

"Some people were saying, 'Were you living a lie?' You know, the truth is, not at all," Baxter told Lauer, saying she'd only been out for the last seven years.

Baxter said she'd always had a great deal of difficulty connecting with men in relationships, but she was also involved with people who made her think they were the problem.

"It never occurred with me to think, 'Oh, it's me."'

See the rest of the article here.

It's such a relief to know that some people never felt queer growing up. Most people I talk to say something along the lines of "by the time I was 15 I was experimenting and knew I was attracted to girls." That's just not the way it went for me. I was 17 before I even looked at girls with the possibility that I found them sexually attractive. I was almost 19 before I had a thought that there was a possibility that I would consider having sex with a woman. Gay? I didn't consider that possibility until I was the same age as most of my friends had already come out of the closet. Granted, I was never really in the closet. Once I realized "hey! I want to have sex with women!" my friends already knew and my mother and my sister were the first people I told. (Granted, my grandparents don't know, but they are old and fragile and I don't want to cause unnecessary heart attacks unless I'm bringing a girl home to them.)

I also found this quote from Teh Portly Dyke today

"And I think that's a big part of what's kept me from blogging. Part of what marks me as the "New Improved Portly Dyke -- Now More Functional!!" (in my mind, at least), is that...is no longer the central issue of my life every single day -- and I think that when peeling time comes around again, I get scared that it will subsume my life as it did 18 years ago."

This feels a lot like what is happening now. I don't expect to write about much more than my sexuality at the moment because it is still so new. It's also why my friends and family won't be reading this. This is a safe place for me to explore, to to bare myself without fear that the people who have predispositions about who I am or should be will contaminate this experimental area.

I'm obsessed right now with being gay. Obsessed because I don't understand it. Obsessed because I was introduced to it and then left out in the cold. Obsessed because I thought I would never enjoy being in a relationship, or loving, or having sex. Now I have the capacity and the urge to do all those things without having anyone to do them with. I think it's only reasonable that I am obsessed. So this is what I write about.