Yay!

A while back, a guy contacted me through social media wanting to hire me privately as an art model. Some of his ideas involved clothes and others were semi-nude. I…am not sure whether I entered negotiations with him because I miss modeling or because I’ve always found it hard to turn down money.

The guy gave me a pleasant enough vibe in his messages, but I have huge, huge trust issues from the never-to-be-named Very Bad Thing that happened at a gig pre-pandemic, so the idea of being alone and half-naked with someone gave me barfy-levels of terror. But we talked pricing anyway. I guess “can’t turn down money” was indeed a big part of this for me, although dude had ideas for themes and props that genuinely did sound fun, so there’s that.

I quoted him an hourly rate high enough to motivate me to power through my barfy-terror, and he said I drove a hard bargain but he felt he could manage that. And today we met for coffee to discuss things a bit more and yayyyyy, his personality is disarming af and he was friendly while maintaining professional boundaries (he didn’t try to hug me hello or goodbye! And when I turned up at our meeting place masked and he was unmasked, he asked if I’d like him to put his back on!).

We’re tentatively going to have our first session (the non-nude one) at the end of the month. He’s drawn me a bunch of times in the Before Times (I’m faceblind so I don’t recall him) and knows my style; he says he specifically wants to work with me because he can tell we’re on the same wavelength and he won’t have to direct me a lot. He’ll just let me loose and I’ll come up with great poses all on my own.

I’m starting to look forward to this.

Oh by the way

I finally met that guy from FetLife that I’ve been corresponding with for an absurdly long time!

The date consisted of hanging out at the dog park. He was cuter than I remembered from his picture. Conversation was nice. Not instant-soulmates-level, but good enough. And I know from our messaging that our kinks probably align really well, and I miss kink and I miss sex. So, an hour or two into the date, I went ahead and said “so hey, I’m just putting this out there, I think you’re cute as heck and would totally make out with you. But if you’re not into that it’s okay.” He said he thinks I’m cute buttttt he wasn’t really feelin’ it and he wasn’t sure why. Then he apologized and asked if his directness was too rude or whatever and I was like “nope, I like knowing where I stand.”

And then we ended up hanging out for a couple more hours. I don’t know if he’s just so chill and enlightened that he wanted to genuinely be friends, if he actually did want to immediately bail but wanted to look enlightened, or if we just got a little lost trying to make our way back to the bus stop and we both passed it off as taking a fun detour on purpose.

By the end of our time together I liked him even more. It almost seemed like me making my move and him rejecting it made him feel a bit more comfortable with me? I dunno, it feels like the conversation got a bit better and more relaxed.

At the end of our time together he asked if I’m a hugger or…? And I was like “yeah, bring it in!” and we hugged. And I told him I’d leave the ball in his court as far as us hanging out again.

Not gonna lie, I’m holding out hope that he’ll come around to the idea of makeouts etc. Or at least that he’ll keep writing to me and want to hang out as friends. Most times after a first date – even a perfectly pleasant one – I find myself not caring if I ever see the guy again. This one, though, I’m fondly remembering bits of our conversation and keep thinking of other things I wanna tell him. I’ll still be fine if he vanishes on me, but it would be a shame.

:)

I know I talk all the time about how much I like my living arrangement with The Dandy, but I guess it just keeps on surprising me how well things work.

I should’ve realized how easy it would be to make him happy. One of the repeated bitter things he kept bringing up about his relationship with Dandette was that she didn’t do things for him. She tended to be a people-pleaser with new people, so he would see her bake or make crafty things for other people, but she didn’t do much for him – not even after he started financially supporting her and she agreed to be his “housewife” in exchange. He (privately, to me) referred to her housewifing as “housewife cosplay” – a role she put on every now and then because it was fun and gratified her ego, but she was never serious or consistent about it. I think he was bang-on with that assessment.

Anyway, it’s pretty incredibly obvious that Acts of Service are a big love language for The Dandy. When I first learned to do the online grocery ordering (instead of giving him a paper list of things I wanted and he’d do the actual ordering) he visibly lit up when I told him I’d ordered some chips I knew he liked. He was the one paying for it, mind you. I wasn’t buying him the chips. I just remembered he liked them and added them to our order. Dandette had him feeling that backed up for thoughtful gestures.

I guess the main reason I’m consistently surprised at the comfortable pattern The Dandy and I have fallen into is that for pretty much my whole life up to this point, I haven’t had it in me to do Acts of Service for anyone. Having a job exhausted me and I barely had enough energy left over to take care of myself.

But The Dandy’s financial support has freed up a ton of physical and emotional energy for me, so I can do more things. And I’m so grateful for this that I’m happy to do things for him. And so, when he appears in my doorway and hopefully says “food?” I’m generally perfectly fine to drop whatever I was doing and make him something.

Just now I saw him staring into the open fridge with a speculative look, picking up and putting back containers of leftovers like he was hungry but didn’t necessarily want what he was finding. I said “want me to make you a sandwich?” and he immediately said “okay!” and happily went back to his room to mess around on YouTube, knowing I’d bring him the food when it was ready.

I’m surprised that I don’t feel put-upon or servant-like. I’m surprised that me doing as little as I do – well short of anything The Dandy or I would consider being a housewife, which as I said was what Dandette supposedly did to earn her keep – is enough to make The Dandy feel content to pay my expenses. (And he does seem content. I don’t think he really thinks about the amount of money he spends on me at all, let alone tallies it up and thinks about whether I’m worth it. I would, if our positions were reversed. But he’s not really that kind of person, I don’t think. And/or he’s happy so he feels no need to tally).

Oh, and the other thing about The Dandy is he’s patient. He seems to trust me. I sometimes go through periods where I’m not so on the ball about making food, and he picks up my slack without seeming anxious about it or like he’s thinking of giving me a Big Serious Talk about whether I’m pulling my weight around here. I always come back around eventually. I’ll have a week or two where it takes all my effort to sporadically make him convenience foods, and then one day I’ll bake a bunch of shit and make a huge pot of some main-course thing and he’ll have leftovers for weeks.

He’s similarly inconsistent with doing housework, but I’ve learned that he always comes back around eventually. The first few times he didn’t unload the dishwasher for a while I felt the dread of “welp, here comes the part where the person I live with thinks I should do all the household chores because vagina.” But I know now that it’s just fluctuations in energy.

So yeah. He still has ways that he drives me nuts but basically things are good.

Milestone

I forgot to mention, a couple weeks ago I made an online grocery order and asked The Dandy to approve and pay for it, as is our custom – and he said “You can just go ahead and finalize it, my card number is attached to the grocery account.”

I asked if my finalizing the order was a just-this-time thing or if he was granting me the power to do it every time. He said it would probably be good to give him a heads up each time I make an order in case he has stuff he wants to add to it, but he no longer needs me to ask permission per se.

This is huge. HUGE. Like I think this would be quite a gesture of trust from anyone, but considering that the last two people The Dandy lived with would voraciously spend his money out from under him so he very specifically has trust issues about that sort of thing…HUGE. I am absolutely honoured.

Delayed gratification…

(The WordPress icon for making a new post has changed from a pencil to a quill pen. Fancy schmancy…)

The guy on FL with whom I’ve been corresponding for a year wrote back, finally, after a seven week gap. Perfectly nice message but only chitchat, not taking any steps to meet in person. I want to write back and try to nail down an actual meeting, but am afraid he’ll vanish for another seven weeks. The previous vanishing were mildly vexing but if he does it after I’ve said “wanna go for coffee this weekend?” or whatever, that’s gonna bother me a lot – at least in the time leading up to said weekend, when I’m waiting to hear if I have plans or not. I suppose I can ask him to throw a meeting time at me and see what happens.

Meanwhile, I was talking to a promising person on the queer dating app a while ago, but then they vanished. It’s a shame, but I wasn’t super invested so meh.

But a few weeks later they dropped back into my inbox apologizing and saying they’d been convalescing post-surgery (and they had mentioned being about to have some unspecified surgery before). And we had another totally pleasant rapid-fire exchange of messages during which they seemed attentive and interested.

I asked if they’d like to hang out in person sometime soon and they we’re enthusiastic about the idea but wanted to trade photos first because they always felt anxious about their appearance disappointing people. They wanted to trade either Facebook info or phone numbers. I replied saying yeah, sure, I’m happy to move our convo to texting if it makes them comfortable, and I gave them my number.

Two or three days went by before they actually texted me. They cited a hectic few shifts at work. I expressed condolences and made some small talk or whatever, including asking a question in order to give them a thing to respond to.

That was a couple days ago and they haven’t responded since. I am so very done with them. If I wanted to feel like I was pulling teeth just to set up plans with someone, I’d get back with The Pedant.

This is frustrating. I just wanna have fun dates with someone who is openly interested in me and communicates in a timely fashion. This doesn’t feel like it should be such a big damn ordeal to find.

*sigh*

So,

, I’ve mentioned before that there’s a guy I’ve been messaging with via FetLife for probably around a year now. When I first messaged him, I had just had my gender crisis and realized I needed to go on testosterone. I was open about being nonbinary from the beginning, and also told him when i started doing hormone therapy, despite figuring it might drive him off (he lists himself as straight. And tbh even with non-straight orientations I wouldn’t assume someone was necessarily open to someone with my particular deal).

There was an unusually long pause in our conversation after I mentioned testosterone, but he came back eventually and acted unfazed. He neither ignored what I’d said nor obsessed on it in a worrisome way. And, in fairness, I went on T two weeks before Christmas and obviously that’s a busy time for a lot of people. Plus I suspect he has some issues with anxiety and depression. So, his silence didn’t necessarily have anything to do with me.

His next unusually long pause happened directly after I told him I’m now double-vaxxed and we can meet in person sometime if he wants to.

To be clear, when I talk about pauses I mean we would normally write to each other every week or two and then suddenly there’d be nothing from him for like eight weeks. So, a very distinctive gap. Not my anxiety making a mountain out of a molehill.

Anyway. He did eventually respond saying – among other chitchat – that he’d totally be down to meet me.

When I responded to him I made chitchat back but didn’t say “Okay, how’s Thursday for you?” Or anything like that. I don’t remember why. I think I either didn’t wanna look too eager/pushy or I was going through some depression shit and didn’t feel very sociable.

He hasn’t replied to that chitchat message and it’s been five weeks.

I’m trying not to be paranoid here but it really is starting to feel like he’s freaked out at the prospect of meeting in person and kinda putting it off.

Or, he’s prone to depression/anxiety/general flakiness to a point where I’m not sure I’d want him in my life even if we did manage to meet and we hit it off. Right now, despite all our correspondence, he is still essentially a stranger to me; his silences are a minor disappointment and nothing more. If we were to meet, hit it off, maybe play or fuck, and it turned out he was still prone to vanishing for weeks at a time? That would kill me. It would feel like The Pedant all over again. But he may well put more effort into maintaining actual in-person interactions than online ones. I know I do.

The funny thing is, this guy’s messages are…perfectly fine, but not butterflies-in-my-stomach amazing. Ditto the photos I’ve seen of him. The only reason I’ve been pinning as much hope on him as I am is that he’s possibly the only guy I’ve ever interacted with who knows to say “I’m sorry you’re going through this” when I mention something sad or painful.

Most guys gloss right over anything sad or shitty I tell them without expressing any kind of sympathy, but this dude gives the same boilerplate “oh no that must be so hard” stuff that I usually only see from women. And this makes me feel like he’s an empathetic person and/or has above average social skills, which in turn makes me wonder if he’ll be decent in bed rather than a garden variety selfish asshat.

(DO YOU SEE HOW LOW THE DAMN BAR IS DO YOU SEEEEE?)

Welp, writing to him gave my life some purpose and structure and hope during the pandemic chaos, and I will be glad of that even if he does vanish without us ever meeting.

I still really wanna get laid, though.

Ok but whut…?

I can’t remember if I ever directly told The Dandy “now that we’re broken up, I don’t want to see you naked and I won’t be naked in common areas of the apartment.” I might have. I for sure let him know indirectly that this is my philosophy, in that when I first learned that he and Dandette were naked around each other all the time even after having broken up I was visibly aghast and said their sense of boundaries was deeply fucked up. And even when I was trying to maintain some semblance of a romantic relationship with The Dandy but convert it to something nonsexual I asked him to put his dick away around me.

And so far, he has always worn at least underwear around me. Uh, kinda. He sleeps naked and times that I wanted to lie next to him for a bit, he didn’t scramble to put anything on (but he was under the covers).

Also he keeps his bedroom door ajar almost all the time because the cats will scream if he doesn’t, and sometimes I’ve gone to enter the room and tell him something like I do ten times a day and screeched to a halt because I saw through the crack in the door that he was naked – just sitting in his computer chair or standing in the middle of the room looking for a pair of pajama pants to put on after a shower or something. Sometimes the door is a lot more than just ajar because DickFace The Kitten likes to make a dramatic entrance. It is unclear why The Dandy doesn’t either move it back to “ajar” or make an effort to cover himself up.

The looking-for-pants thing mostly feels like I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the sitting around on the computer naked for god-knows-how-long with the door slightly-to-halfway open feels…a bit rude and boundary-pushing? His bedroom is directly on the path to mine, so I pass his door all the time.

I’ll admit to changing with the bedroom door ajar or open sometimes, if I can see that The Dandy is transfixed by YouTube and thus probably not leaving his chair anytime soon. A quick change, into clothes I already laid out, mind you. Not standing there naked aimlessly looking around for pants. Occasionally The Dandy does end up coming into my doorway to talk to me during those moments. I think he used to step out of the doorway and continue talking to me from out of viewing range (but I can’t remember for sure). Now he’ll stand in my doorway to chat. I’ll turn my back to the door to change my top and duck into the walk-in closet to change my bottoms, or one time recently I had on a long shirt so I was able to change bottoms without exposing anything. I don’t make eye contact with The Dandy during any of this so I don’t know if he’s tactfully looking away until I’m done changing or not.

I feel neutral-ish about The Dandy being there while I change clothes. From what i can tell he wasn’t sexually attracted to me even when we were together, and we have a history and a certain amount of physical comfort with each other. I assume the history and comfort (and maybe the pretty open understanding that he’s very unlikely to be perving on me) is why he feels okay to stand there while I change. Our comfort level/the fact that we used to fuck is why I’ll just turn away but keep talking if I walk in on him naked, rather than apologizing and running away mortified.

But anyway. He seems to be…escalating? And I don’t know what it means.

Last week or something I came into The Dandy’s room at around his usual bedtime and asked if he was going to bed soon and if so could he pet my head for five or ten minutes. He said yes, and I curled up on his bed and waited to be spooned. Eventually he shut down his computer and went and brushed his teeth and then, instead of coming back and getting under the covers and then squirming out of his boxers, he stood in the middle of the bedroom to take them off and then climbed over me, naked, to get to his side of the bed (to be clear, the location of the bed makes this the only way for him to get there. But his nudity made it weird for me). He’d turned off all the lights and I’d been lying there with my eyes shut trying to get sleepy anyway; I assumed he thought I was more asleep than I actually was, and didn’t realize that I was pretty awake and had opened my eyes to gauge how soon he’d be coming to bed and giving me that sweet, sweet platonic spooning action. As soon as I saw that he was changing I made a point of putting the covers over my head to give him privacy.

Tonight, I proposed that we order food. He needed my input on what I wanted, so I lay on his bed while he suggested various things on Uber Eats. And when he was done ordering I just…stayed there, noodling around on my phone. I was comfy and not disturbing The Dandy so there was no real reason to leave.

The Dandy was still in just his bathrobe from having taken a bath earlier, and when the Uber Eats site showed that our food was close, he said “oh, food’s almost here. I guess I’d better put pants on.” And once again he stripped naked in the middle of the damn room – this time more-or-less directly behind my upheld phone that I was looking at. He could easily have ducked into the bathroom, stepped into the part of his bedroom that isn’t visible from where I was lying, or put his pants on under his robe before taking that off to put on a shirt. But no.

I opted to completely ignore his nakedness like it wasn’t happening. I just kinda froze and unfocused my eyes until he’d gotten dressed and left the room.

Come to think of it, The Dandy’s answered the door in just that robe before. He bought it so he’d have something he could quickly throw on to answer the door (this was back when we were still relationshipped and constantly naked).

Okay, these excuses to be naked in front of me have to mean something. Tonight’s bullshit feels well beyond a simple “we’re just friends, but we feel comfortable with each other” thing. It felt like flaunting.

I don’t like this, but I also don’t feel comfortable telling him to knock it off. Especially because I feel like he’d just argue that it’s his room and he has a right to be naked in there (which…yes and no. He knows I don’t wanna see him naked so the thing to do would have been to tell me to get out so he can change, if he was so dead set on doing it in the middle of the room). I don’t want to get into a whole big thing about this.

I think I’ll just silently get up and leave if he does it again. That’ll send a message that I don’t like and won’t tolerate his nudity. And the message will land regardless of why he keeps doing this.

Three dates

I have now met up with three different people from the queer dating site I joined (arguably these weren’t dates, just…meetings? Everyone had both “friends” and “dates” listed under what they were looking for). Here’s a recap.

The first person was (I think) a cis woman (she/her pronouns and no mention of being trans, anyway) around my age. She responded to my very first message by proposing we meet up because you can’t gauge chemistry online. I was startled by her directness (I’m usually the one driving things forward, even with cis men) but I appreciated it. I got a definite feeling she was a grizzled veteran of online dating and had gotten to a point of realizing that most people don’t end up turning into any kind of relationship so one might as well make the audition process as streamlined as possible in order to save time.

So at her suggestion, i met her for a stroll in what turned out to be her neighbourhood (so, wow, she was just barely wanting to put in any effort at all. I wonder if she would have been willing to go out of her way for a meet-up once she knew she liked someone, or if she was just always a little bit controlling and making people come to her? In her defense though she lives in a really cool centrally located ‘hood that lots of people from all over like to explore. She wasn’t dragging me out to some shitty wasteland suburb). We had a perfectly pleasant talk for an hour or so and then she got a (planned?) call from a friend that necessitated cutting things short. We said goodbye without either of us explicitly adding “I didn’t feel a connection/let’s not do this again” – but I hadn’t felt any big connection and I assume she didn’t either and neither of us has contacted the other since. No harm, no foul.

My second meet-up was a walk in a local park yesterday afternoon, with a trans woman a bit older than me. I went into it being pretty sure I wouldn’t be attracted to her (and indeed I was not) but the talking online part was good and I’m open to making new friends. Also she was the one who suggested we meet up, so our good conversation plus showing active interest in wanting to get to know me better had me feeling pretty pumped.

My whole goal in joining a dating site specifically for queer people was to meet (And hopefully date/befriend) folks who understand my gender shit – like, who understand that I am not a woman even if I look like one and who understand about things like gender dysphoria and how hormones and presentation can make a difference in it. But just because someone’s been through transition doesn’t mean they’re empathetic; when I mentioned some of my body/presentation issues to this woman in passing, she was kind of dismissive, and I get a strong vibe that it’s because she can’t imagine someone not wanting to look womanly and voluptuous. She just kept saying “but you look great!” and yes, fair enough, I don’t actually think there’s anything objectively wrong with my body per se – but it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me and it consistently gets me read as a lady-person by all and sundry when I am not in fact a lady-person, and those are pretty major problems for me.

During our time together, I was lamenting that my wardrobe is lagging behind my transition a bit and she said she could give me some of her old button-down shirts from when she was living as a man. I’ve been wanting a button-down or two, and she does indeed look roughly the same size as me, so that could be cool, but she kinda cavalierly slipped in that she could give them to me “the next time we see each other” which seems a bit presumptuous at best (there was no “…I mean, if you wanna hang out again”) and manipulative at worst. I’ve had a few times before where someone was interested in me and I wasn’t interested back and they sort of lured me into seeing them again with the promise of giving me something I wanted/needed. I’m not sure if this is the case here and I’m not sure how to deal with it if it is.

Overall I had a pleasant time with her – the conversation flowed pretty easily and we have some niche things in common like being trans, kinky, poly, and artistic. But it wasn’t so amazing that I’m actively dying to hang out again – if I never heard from her again I’d be perfectly fine. But – as I observed in a post here god knows how many years ago – sometimes I think the key component of friendship is simply that a person keeps on coming back. I’ve had people where I liked them a ton and wanted to hang out but they were flaky so the friendship died, and I’ve had people I could take or leave but they stayed in my life by sheer tenacity and it turned into a bona fide friendship.

So if she writes back and wants to hang out again, I probably will. Also she’s really into daily walks as a form of exercise and I’ve been wanting to exercise more, so it might be nice to have a walking partner.

But the shirt thing still bothers me. Like I can’t tell if it’s an innocent offer and I’m overthinking it due to past experiences, or if she is indeed being slightly sketchy and dangling the prospect of free men’s clothes as bait to make me come back for more hangouts (and once I have the shirts, then there’s potential to leverage that for more hangouts if she thinks my interest in her is flagging…I dunno).

Anyway, today I did another park hangout with a fellow nonbinary trans-masc person, 20 years my junior. They’ve been on testosterone a lot longer than me, and they opted for the full, man-size dose. Basically, a stranger passing them on the street would assume by their looks that they were a guy. I’m even struggling slightly with calling them “they” because my brain processes their face as “boy.”

Anyhoo.

I rarely seem to ever feel huge, instant sexual attraction to anyone anymore, but I did think they were cute; there’s potential for attraction there. Conversation was immediately easy and comfortable and they seemed to deeply understand everything I said about gender, dysphoria, etc. I’m not going to attribute the easy conversation to chemistry, here, or assume it meant they’re into me; I think this person is just chatty and easygoing and a lot less socially awkward than I am. I’ve made the mistake in the past of assuming that an overall sociable person must be super into me because conversation flowed so nicely, and then my feelings got hurt when I realized they’re simply like that with everyone. So I’m trying to be cautious.

During the course of conversation, they mentioned both that they are frequently expected to initiate dates etc with afab folks because of looking masc (so being assumed to “take the man’s role” in dating, I guess) and that they don’t like to initiate with afab folks because they know how many of us are subject to constant come-ons from masc people. They don’t want to contribute to that, so they’re very conscious all the time of not looking pervy or pushy.

I don’t know whether they were just making conversation with that, or signaling that they would welcome me hitting on them even though they were coming off as friendly-not-flirty.

I have a history of jumping into things too quickly just for the thrill of the chase and then once I’ve “caught” someone I lose interest. This feels like a shitty thing to do to anyone, but especially to a demographic of person who’s often used as someone’s sexual “experiment.” So at the end of our time together I did not tell this person “we can make out if you want.” I did say that I had fun and would totally hang out with them again so plz get in touch.

And this is where I fall down an overthinking-hole because I’ve seen a lot of sitcoms etc say that “I had a great time! Let’s do it again!” is a completely fake thing people say to someone they’re not interested in, just to be polite. But then how does anyone ever know if their date did have a good time and wants to do it again? Also if today’s person never does write to me on the app again, does that mean “I’m not interested in you” or “I thought you were just being polite when you said to contact you”?

I guess I’ll just leave the ball in their court and not write to them ever again unless they write to me first, because I’ve definitely missed a lot of “soft nos” in the past and probably come off pushy by accident and I want to err on the side of caution now. And I mean it was one good afternoon. I won’t die if I never hear from them again.

it would be a shame if we were both into doing it again but we both didn’t make that move, though.

The saga of the chili

A few weeks ago, The Dandy declared that he was going to make a pot of chili, and ordered all the necessary ingredients for this.

But then he didn’t make chili. And the several times that I prompted “did you want me to transfer that ground beef to the freezer, or will you use it soon?” He sorta just didn’t answer, so I let the beef stay in the fridge. And then it went bad.

So I ordered some more and decided that I would make a pot of chili. It’s something I felt I could improvise, probably, and I usually cycle through the same three or four meals for The Dandy so this would likely be a welcome change for him.

The Dandy was kind enough to prepare a bowl of seasonings to dump into the pot, which is great because I don’t have a good handle on what a lot of herbs taste like (I know I like rosemary. I have almost no idea what oregano or sage or basil taste like or what they go well with). Plus it allowed him to customize the spice levels to his taste. But I did all the chopping (so much fucking chopping, of onions and garlic and red pepper) and all the babysitting of the meat (making sure it was broken up into the tiniest pieces possible, the way The Dandy likes it) and when it turned out he’d bought way too few cans of crushed and diced tomatoes to balance out the amount of meat, I figured out a solution (I added a can of pasta sauce and a carton of beef broth).

The Dandy is really big on simmering dishes like chili for aaaages: he says the flavours mix together and it just makes the whole dish better. And then suddenly I realized it was 4am and we wanted to go to bed and the chili was still bubbly-hot on the stove. The Dandy said it was too hot to put away so we should just leave it. So he turned off the heat and that was that. Personally I play fast-and-loose with food safety so I was fine with this turn of events (if I even end up having any of the chili, which I’m not that interested in); I was surprised germophobic Dandy was okay with it, though.

the next day, The Dandy decided he wanted to add beans to the chili – dried ones that need to be soaked in water for a few hours and would then need to be cooked in the chili for a good while before they’d be edible. So he soaked the beans (with the pot of chili still just waiting on the stove at room temperature) and then put the heat back on and added the beans. Or maybe he cooked the beans separately and then added them and was just waiting for the huge huge pot of chili to heat up so he could have some – I seem to recall him saying that as soon as it was hot all the way through, he’d have it for dinner.

By the time it was hot all the way through, The Dandy had settled down for a nap. I woke him to ask what he wanted to do – would he be getting up and having some dinner now, or…? He blearily said I should turn the heat down to minimum, and went back to sleep without actually answering if he was planning on getting up to eat at any point.

That was at maybe 9pm. By 3am he was still goddamned sleeping and the fact that the chili had been simmering for a combined total of maybe twelve hours – with a twelve-hour-ish overnight period of sitting out at room temperature – was making my eye twitch. I didn’t want to leave the stove on and go to sleep (and anyway, as much as The Dandy says simmering makes it better, at some fucking point I think everything’s just gonna taste dead and burnt), and I didn’t want to turn the stove off and leave the chili out for another night, either. So I ended up staying up past the point I wanted to go to bed just so I could shovel the chili into a bunch of containers (it’s a big pot) and then make room in our crowded fridge and freezer.

I’m annoyed because I put hours of work into that chili and The Dandy had volunteered to put it away but then just kinda fell asleep and forgot about it (and this is someone who regularly claws his way out of naps and back to consciousness to brush his teeth, because his mom trained him that he has to brush every single night or the apocalypse will happen or something. He couldn’t assign that level of urgency to making sure the unattended chili didn’t burn the apartment down?). He didn’t even give me any specific instructions when I woke him up to point out that it was piping hot and still cooking. Seems kinda dismissive of my efforts.

Actually, that annoyance is minor-ish. What was really bugging me was the stress of wondering if The Dandy was gonna wake up today, decide I’d made the wrong choice in putting the chili away, and give me a long-ass dissertation about what I should’ve done instead and why. Much like my father (but without the screaming abuse), The Dandy is super picky about how a lot of things are done – whether his preferred method actually makes a difference or not – and if I don’t do a thing his way, he’ll tell me. And tell me and tell me and tell me and…

Also I was worried he’d suddenly remember what a prissy, squeamish person he is, and refuse to eat the chili because it had sat out for so long. Or that he’d try it and not like it because the flavour had basically been boiled out of it.

But he didn’t have anything to say about my life choices and he has now eaten some of the chili and pronounced it good. So this friggin’ two day odyssey of trying to have chili in the house (or two week odyssey, depending where you’re counting from) is finally over.

*phew*

Large amounts of pain relievers did nothing for my neck pain (or at least very, very little).

Voltaren Emugel topical pain reliever/anti-inflammatory cream did nothing (or at least very, very little).

But half an hour after taking an over-the-counter muscle relaxant, a feeling of warmth and relief spread through the back of my neck. There’s still pain, but not if I hold perfectly still (whereas before this I had huge throbbing pain at all times). And my range of movement is marginally wider.

Thank Christ. Next time I’ll see what happens if I take two.

The physiotherapist I left a desperate voicemail for never called me back btw, and tomorrow is Friday, so I assume I’m totally fucked until at least Monday. But at least I have something that helps a little.