new musings

I've gotten into the habit of drinking whiskey now as part of my writerly routine, tonight especially, so forgive me if what follows is unclear. I don't have a really structured plan of what to write about today but I want to record something. Maybe let's start with some questions:

For a long time I've thought about what it is to be masculine and what it is to be feminine; if that premise scares you away, stay with me for a minute here. I think it's a more intriguing thought than it appears to be on the surface.

Obviously gender is a construct, anyone who's been to college (and likely many who haven't) can attest to that. What I'm talking about goes deeper than that, I think. I watched a seminar on YouTube tonight that kind of re-sparked my interest in this subject—I remember having a conversation with my friend Will when he was dating Aja (another friend), and while they were both intrigued by what I was saying, I still got the feeling that they were just humoring me more than anything else.

Anyway—clearly, there are men and women; I hesitate to call that the "default" for fear of heteronormativity (as I completely recognize that people can be born in between that binary), but a better word fails to come to me right now. I mean no offense; this is more or less unarguably the biological default, but more on the implications of that (or lack thereof) in a moment.

Maybe I've been talking to my Dad too much, but I feel a pretty strong belief in his esoteric idea of "polarity" as it pertains to nature. It manifests in many different ways; magnetism, grammar, gravity, etc. But it also applies to "gender," though that feels like cheapening a universal force with a term that carries a lot less semantic weight.

Basically, polarity exists; gender is a manifestation of it, all social-construction arguments aside. Here's the second question:

Is there a way that things "are"? Or is how things are just a product of individual perception? I.e., is there a reality to observe, or do we collaborate on it?

There's an interpretive fork that arises here—if there is a way things are, it seems (in my mind) to carry with it a way that things should be (and I don't mean that in any "pray the gay away" kind of way). If there's not, then there's not, and we get to choose everything.

I don't consider myself religious anymore, but I find it interesting that a lot of the deep human problems we face just completely fail to be solved with rational thought. All the things that make our lives matter are just stardust orbiting a black hole, in my thinking; the hole-of-meaning applies a kind of gravitational pull to all the bullshit in our lives. It orders it in a system that we can begin to comprehend (or at least one that we can model).

But the interesting part is those spiritual level dilemmas always persist. When you're with another person, you want to meet the people that make you feel full. You want to have experiences that make you feel validated, at home, alive. So what do you do when those experiences elude you?

Lately things have been really good for me actually, but it's a question that persists because it's a problem that can rear its head at any moment.

I guess my thoughts are these: that gut level absence exists, and I think it implies an absence of something more metaphysical. There's no logical explanation to back that assertion up, but I still believe that's true.

By a similar logic, I think that polarity does exist when it comes to gender; men and women can be more masculine or feminine, depending on their soul's fingerprint, so to speak. That's not a value judgment, it's just a force of nature.

I don't really know where I'm going with all this haha. Just had to get something down tonight. Talk to you all soon.
Peace,

Ryan