Yeah, no. I'm not going to thanksgiving dinner in some pricy condo with a bunch of antique queer-peers. They're nice people. But I have absolutely nothing in common with them. All they do is talk about real estate holdings, buying & selling, blah blah blah. I've spent a handful of days out of the past year making the attempt to get to know them & their friends, all the while feeling like a class-conscious misfit, being politely bored-but-attentive. To be nice. But... There's zero benefit. They care not a whit about my art, they never ask, they never say a word.
I might as well be a couch cushion for all the interest my presence incites. Point of fact, I'm a mis-placed couch cushion. I belong on my couch, not theirs.
Self-centered? Congratulations, you're reading a blog.
It's not an excuse, because it's true: I've been sick a damned week. Sit in a room with a bunch of older people and play Typhoid Larry? Sha'n't. I mask at work. Masking at a holiday dinner? It would feel both like a forced error + a faux pas. So my ruined digestive tract & phlegmy lungs and I will stay here, at home, where it's comfortable and I'm not surrounded by people who make me feel like a class traitor.
Here's a thing: All I care about, besides my husband, IS ART. Why should I waste my time on interactions with people who know this about me, and they don't make any effort to engage? I mean, notgonnalie, it would be marvelous to have some rich queen commission something from me. But they're not going to. I've known a couple of these people a year, and it's never come up. At this point I'm fairly certain it won't. So IS there a point, besides being nice?
Being nice for the sake of, dunno, entertaining the meaninglessness of relative strangers? Is exhausting.
With any luck I'll cut a swath through some more of 'In Thrall' by Jane DeLynn. Suits my mood.
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