via
https://ift.tt/2ttJjStbomberqueen17:
Dude why are you sleeping in the laundry in the narrow space at the foot of the bed that I have to walk through to get out of bed in the morning when you could sleep ON the bed and get petted?
Man, cats. I miraculously didn’t step on her in the dark, I just nudged her with my foot. She was fast asleep and had no idea of her peril.
I mentioned something about my cat yesterday at work when a visiting sales rep was present. The sales rep asked if I was a crazy cat lady, and I said, well, I had a detailed life plan, in my teens, that entailed never getting a boyfriend and getting a whole pile of cats and living in the weird house at the end of the street and creeping out neighborhood kids. He asked how that was going and I said I’d screwed it up by getting a boyfriend, and the boyfriend is slightly allergic to cats and that, among other things, has limited us to one cat. Another coworker pointed out that he was holding me back– this coworker, himself allergic to cats, always makes me look at the “dating” profiles of cats up for adoption from the SPCA. He himself has a rescue pit bull who was a drug dealer’s puppy-mill mama dog. She loves to wear outfits and give kisses, and he keeps saying he’ll bring her to work except that she’s not all that well-behaved, and I keep telling him I don’t care because I need pittie kisses.
Anyway, I told him that the boyfriend wasn’t holding me back, Chita the cat was– the terrible tragic thing is, Chita hates cats, and won’t let us get another one. Which suits darling allergic Z just fine (he isn’t all that allergic, he just takes Claritin in the spring and fall and deals with it), but the point is, he’s not holding me back.
And this is leading me to a point I’d been meaning to make in a more coherent post. Since I have a cat, and do not have a dog, my coworkers (all Dog People) all think I’m A Cat Person. And thus they think I don’t like dogs. I love dogs, I was raised with both cats and dogs (and rabbits and chickens and hamsters and goldfish and horses for God’s sake, we had a menagerie and it was fucking fantastic), and I would have a dog in a second if I had a lifestyle conducive to it. But I have a tiny house, the yard’s not really fenced, and I like to travel at the drop of a hat.
Z is the same way; he loves dogs, was raised with one each of a cat and a dog, but feels like a dog is more responsibility and commitment than we can handle at the moment.
So we have a cat. Because we like cats too. And let me tell you, getting a cat was a big deal.
And I’m getting to the metaphor here. The metaphor is bisexuals. Sort of. Bear with me. I feel like the same cognitive process is at work: people think that if you choose not to have something even though you would enjoy it, then you don’t really want that thing. And in fact you never wanted that thing and if you had that thing at some other point in your life and don’t now, then you never really wanted it even then.
I love dogs. I think they’re great. I love hanging out with other people’s dogs. I love petting dogs. I see dogs in the street and yell “Doggy!” (Z actually does this even more than I do.) I have internal categorizations of the ways I feel about the various types of dogs. I think about dogs and I look at dogs and I miss dogs and I pet them whenever I get a chance.
But I have a cat and my house is full. And I love cats, I love cats a lot, and I am happy with my cat, and I wish I could have a dozen cats but I don’t have room. And that’s fine. Really, one cat is plenty.
This makes me a Cat Person. But this does not make me *not* a Dog Person, and it definitely does not make me an *anti*-Dog Person.
I have a boyfriend. I had a girlfriend for a couple of years, and I loved that girlfriend. (I love her still, I just don’t ever see her anymore, she’s overseas with a couple of kids, we don’t connect much, but the world is a better place for her continued existence and her presence remains in my heart.) I like looking at girls, I think about girls sometimes, I pet them when I get a chance (kidding (sort of) (hey I played roller derby for years, there was a lot of incidental contact okay) (I’m not saying I grabbed a lot of girls’ butts consensually, but I grabbed a lot of girls’ butts consensually)), but I have a boyfriend and my house is full and he makes me happy and I have no desire to replace him or get another one or anything like that. My house is small, I don’t have room, I’m mildly allergic to most boys, I don’t have time anyway.
Anyway. Clumsy, but that’s my point– I like boys, I like girls, I have one so I don’t need any more than I have, it doesn’t mean I stopped liking the things I always liked.
And I’ve got one more annoyed little point to make– I see posts against biphobia that make the point that if you’re bi your pool of potential applicants is bigger, and I’m like no, that’s not really– that’s not it. Just like a straight girl is not going to want every possible guy, a bi person is not going to want every possible human. I feel like I’m actually attracted to *fewer* people than most people I know. My pool of potential applicants is tiny! I almost never meet anybody I want to bang. (I meet a lot of really attractive people, but I have very close to zero urge to fall into bed with any of them. Polyromantic demisexual? IDK guys) It’s just that my pool of potential applicants is really not filtered at all by gender. I have a large number of much more nebulous criteria that I’m not consciously aware of, but the actual contents of the person in question’s underpants are completely inconsequential. (There’s a whole thing with sense of humor and direction of gaze and cut of jib and all, which I don’t think I could ever put into words.)
tl;dr Picky bisexuals and Not-Not-Dog-People as logical equivalents y/n?
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