I accidentally bought chips with dairy yesterday. I nocticed immediately because they were wavy instead of thins. Which is good because I didn’t put them in my mouth. Or rather, I did until I felt the ridges and immediately pulled it out. It was loaded baked potato instead of BBQ, damn it. I will admit, I was tempted to eat it for a hot second. I was at home and could deal with the issue (sitting on the toilet for hours, on and off), if need be.
Then I came to my senses. If I was going to suffer from eating dairy, it was not going to be chips. It’s gonna be pizza or lasagna or ice cream or something with real milk. That got me tthinking. If I did actually do a day of eating what I want to eat, no matter the consequences (in other words, resigning myself to sitting on the toilet for days), I would mostly eat all the dumplings I could stuff into my face. I miss shiu mai, steamed dumplings, fried dumplings, and all the other dumplings in the world. I have not had soup dumplings in a long time, but those are so tasty. I would want to eat all the dim sum, too.
I would eat so much pasta. Lasagna, mac-and-cheese, pizza. Yes, I know it’s not pasta, but it’s in the same genre. Fettuccine alfredo. Carbonara. Even just good old spaghetti and meatballs. But also, udon noodles, ramen, and Chinese egg noodles.
Egg rolls, too. I like spring rolls, don’t get me wrong. But egg rolls are so fucking good. I’ve had GF egg rolls, which are fine, but not the same. Moon cake, scallion pancakes, turnip/radish cake, and more. Oh god. Wait. Radish cakes is made with rice flour. I can eat those! With just a tiny bit of soy sauce–unless it’s GF soy sauce. Then I can douse ’em. Radish cake is so fucking delicious.
Anyhooooo, let’s move beyond food for a minute. I will hasten to say in my ideal world, I could eat whatever I wanted without care. Food is delicious, and it’s sad to me at times that I’m so limited. But, in general, I’m fine with it. There are decent substitutes these days–much better than what there was twenty years ago.
In other realms, I would make gender not a thing. What I mean by that is you (general you) can care about gender as much or as little as you want without anyone judging you. If your gender is deeply important to you, that’s fine. If it’s just another part of your identity, like having brown hair. Also fine. If you are unsure what it means to you, I feel you! This is all fine in Minnaland! And, if you’re like me, you just don’t give a shit after thinking about it for a very long time. This is my M.O., by the way. I ponder something endlessly until my brain goes, “I’m done” and I mentally throw up my hands.
I will say with no snark that gender is something I don’t get. What I mean is that I truly don’t understand feeling deeply wedded to one’s gender. I am not disputing that many people do or that it’s important to many people. I’m just saying for me, the more I think about gender, the more I get confused. Here’s how my brain thinks about it.
Let’s start with me being AFAB. For most of my life, i’ve been toldI’m not a woman because I don’t do X, Y or care about Z. That includes getting married, having children, makeup, fashion, cooking, cleaning, and that’s just the beginning. My mother is the head of this charge, but I’ve had women throughuout my life judge me on my lack of femininity. Dudes, on the other hand, just wanted to get me into the sack. It wasn’t better, but it was a different kind of sexism (they didn’t think I had any thoughts worthwhile in my head to worry about).
Would I be ok with being a woman if there weren’t such strict rigidity in society about what that means? Yeah, I would. But, that’s not the world we live in.
*glares at the Supreme Court*
In Minnaland, it would be, yeah, that’s my gender. Whatever. I relate more with women because of shared experiences, but not with really feminine women. K and I agree that if we were younger, we both would probably be more likely to embrace nonbinary. I don’t know, though. I prefer agender, which is how I currently identify. Because, to me, my gender doesn’t matter. This is where I get tripped up, by the way. I don’t think anyone should be limited by their gender. I can do anything I want–regardless of wnht is or isn’t between my legs (sex, I know, not gender, but I’m kinda making a point here), and if gender is not sex, then what does it really matter what gender I am?
It’s fascinating to me to read from cis people who deeply identify with their given gender. It shouldn’t because trans people often feel this way, so why not cis? I guess it’s because I think cis people take it more for granted. That’s a fales dichotomy, though, because it doesn’t mean that they hold it to be any less true.
In general, I don’t like lablels. I understand that we need heuristics, otherwise, we have to treat each instance as if it were fresh and new. That just isn’t possible. And, for political reasons, there can be power in numbers. So, ‘women’ as a political group can get things done that Jenny, Kate, Meili, Sujata, (naming a hundred more individual women) can’t as individuals.
But, I am uneasy with slapping a label on different parts of my identity as if they were static. I get Taiwanese American because that is just my two cultures mashed together. But the rest are ever-changing. Like bisexual. I chose that reluctantly when I was in my mid-twenties. I went through all the terms at the time (pansexual and omnisexual–hey, it was the nineties. We were limited in our options), and reluctantly decided taht bisexual was the best of a sorry lot. Even then, I wanted to leave it as ‘sexual’, but that gave the wrong impression.
I don’t want to be all ‘no labels’ but…I really don’t like labels. I know they are just shorthand, but they never feel like they really fit me. I explained about ‘woman’ as it being an ill-fitting coat. Yes, it’ll cover me, but it won’t be comfortable.
I know that’s probably a me-thing. If I’m goin to accept a label, I want it to fully describe me. I don’t want it to be kinda sorta roughly near to what I am–but that’s the point of labels, I guess. They are the Cliff Notes of who you actually are.
In Minnaland, anything goes. My first rule is like the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm. Other than that, you’re good to go. So the Minnacratic Oath, then. I have more to say about how the world would be if I were in charge, but I’m done for the day. I’ll pick it back up tomorrow.