favor

i've been feeling a lot better about gender stuff since i started telling people i'm agender. it makes it more fun to play with gender stuff, i think. i've been spending time with more trans people lately too and that's nice, although with some of them i have to take gender very seriously which is weird to me. i recently asked a guy his opinion of a shirt that i thought suited his style, and he told me he didn't want it because it was a women's shirt. i guess i understand why he'd care about it but it took me a minute.

regarding the person i like, well. i've been told by lots of people, including her, that the reason it's hard to get hold of her is that she's busy. the reason she's been so busy recently is that she's in grad school. apparently she has just finished though, so maybe i will reach out to her soon.

i know about her grad school and stuff because i recently sort of made friends with someone who's very close to her. (i didn't know they knew each other.) this girl is cool and i mostly like spending time with her and we have a lot of common, but the way she talks about some things really rubs me the wrong way. she talks a lot about how people treat her because she's conventionally attractive, in a way that assumes everyone thinks she's pretty and/or wants to look like her. it's unpleasant. i feel like mostly i've gotten to a place in my life where i'm happy with how i look even though i'm not what most people would call hot. i'm interesting looking and people like it. i have strangers coming up to me to tell me how much they like how i look all the time and even sometimes people ask to take pictures of me. it's kind of neat and normally i like it a lot. but sometimes things happen that remind me that i'm not really supposed to like it. it sucks. and this girl talks about it so much that it's hard not to remember how much i used to hate the way i look.

anyway, i talked to my best friend about it because he's an attractive white guy who doesn't worry about this stuff and can't give me condescending advice. he said i should probably just spend less time with her and try not to get too emotionally invested. that's what he says about every interpersonal problem (well, that and "you should tell her she sucks") but he's right.

this leaves me in a somewhat weird position with the person i like. i had hoped that by being friends with her friend, maybe we'd someday get to spend time together as a group and i'd get to know her better. when i wanted to be this girl's friend, that was just a nice bonus to me. but now i don't want to be her friend, so i'm not sure what to do. is it okay to use someone a little if they're not being hurt by it and you don't actually lie about anything?

i actually know someone who does this to me. he has a crush on someone i'm not friends with anymore and every time he sees me he asks about this person and every time i have to remind him that i don't keep up with this person's life anymore. but he also introduces me to people and tells me about future jobs, so maybe that's just networking.

i could probably bypass all of this if i just asked the person i like on a date, though.