I hate how men can be sometimes (with toxic masculinity) but I love how they really could be, in an alternate reality.

Every man I have ever found appealing is just a character on a TV show and they always seem to care about everyone, even if it's only in the smallest of ways. They can be very manly and tough without being toxic.

In the darkness of my living room, the glow of the tv and the easy way I fall into made up worlds and the facade of a glass of wine or two, I like to pretend I can believe anything.

The lead actor, Aaron Stanford, on the tv show 12 Monkeys, Kirk Acevedo on Fringe (and also on 12 Monkeys) Jason Bateman, but only as the animated Nick Wilde in the movie Zootopia movies. I don't want to be with men intimately, but I like them so much in non-threatening, comfortably distant ways.

Ever since I started realizing what my feelings about girls in high school and later on women, in adult life, meant I have struggled with the fact that I’m attracted to women, even if it’s mostly emotional and romantically.

I pretty much am sure I could live to be 1 million years old and I still wouldn’t fully accept I’m gay.

I want to like men the way I’m supposed to like men, I really, really do.

I'm reading a book right now called The Queer Thing About Sin: Why The West Came to Hate Queer Love and I get the intro so very much:

When I was a teenager, I believed I was going to hell. For centuries, it was almost universally acknowledged that all gay men would. It wasn’t until years later that I asked myself where that idea came from, and why was it that, thousands of years ago when the Bible was written, people decided that queer love was a sin? 

It hadn’t always been a sin to be queer. In many cities across the ancient world, same-sex love was celebrated. So how did homophobia take root? Why did so many societies start executing men and women for the same love once praised by their philosophers and rulers? 

I have personal reasons for wanting to know the answer. My father died when I was two years old and for many years being Christian made me feel whole. Christianity gave me a compass with which to navigate the world and allowed me to commune with the people I’d lost. But that all changed when I fell in love with another boy at school. 

The love that upended my world was clandestine and unrequited. Little girls and boys grow up knowing they will get married; they sketch out the geography of their future relationships long before they even feel physical attraction. For queer people, desire arrives unannounced – it comes as a lightning bolt through a clear-blue sky. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. I had to keep it secret from him, from the world, and at times even from myself. It was what Christianity taught me to do.

Last night I had the strangest dream...but, then, all of my dreams are pretty much strange.

Even so the strangeness was not the bad strange that most of my dreams usually are. 

In it, my grandfather (who I rarely dream about and who died in 1986) says, "Pizza for everyone!" and suddenly there is a big party. But instead of my relatives it's mostly strangers except for my grandfather (oddly and sadly I don't see my grandmother in this dream) and my mom.

Suddenly, Julie Newmar appears and I am so excited!! I always loved her as Catwoman in the 1960s Batman series and in the dream she appears as she is now, in 2025.I want to talk to her but I'm too shy and, to my horror, I realize I have my pajamas on, the very same things I wore to bed in real life.

In that way dream movements have no transitions I am suddenly in a different place at the party and Julie Newmar approaches me and says she heard I was a big fan and did I want have my picture taken with her.

I tell her I would but I'm still in my pajamas, but when I look down I'm suddenly in a pretty beige blazer with white pants and a white top.

"I think I can be in that picture after all," I say and am so happy I'll have a picture, but then I wake up and the dream is over.

I re-watched Netflix's Dark in less than two days, during the holiday four-day weekend I had, then I started 12 Monkeys. Both affect me so deeply I struggle with the words to justify just how much I love them. (It still boggles my mind that a show as good as 12 Monkeys debuted on the SyFy Channel…actually, I take that back because I just remembered that that’s the channel Resident Alien debuted on a few years ago and I love that show too).

I have seen Dark multiple times and 12 Monkeys will be my second re-watch. There are so many similarities between the two but the latter is just so underrated it's almost criminal. I feel Dark is more bleak and emotional than 12 Monkeys  and it hits hard with its themes of generational trauma, eternal recurrence and the futility that pervades it.

Eternal Recurrence has fascinated (and terrified) me since I was rather young. I didn't know it was called that at the time, but I remember randomly thinking one day that maybe we just kept living the same exact life over and over and over again.

But looking back at that memory now, I realize it probably wasn't eternal recurrence that had popped into my mind then. With eternal recurrence, you wouldn't be aware of having previously lived the very same exact life. Everything (down to every last thought you have) would eternally recur so you would never actually know you were living the same life repeatedly.

(Speaking of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence I found myself talking with a customer about him today and it reminded me how much I can have a good day at work and how much I can love my job when I’m with a really nice or engaging customer. We talked for a while and it was just one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time. I really really really need to remember how much I used to love my job and how much I still can).

Though I am reluctant to use AI for this part (Grok and Gemini each offered horribly wrong facts about the family trees on Dark) I do find this very helpful:

• Exact Repetition: For the recurrence to be eternal and exact, every single atom, event, and thought must repeat in precisely the same order. The first time you experienced a moment, you did not remember a previous life; therefore, in the recurring life, you would also not have that memory.
• No Mechanism for Memory Transfer: The concept, most notably explored by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is generally presented as a cosmological hypothesis where the universe and all events within it repeat infinitely. It does not involve a soul or consciousness that exists outside of the physical reality of the life cycle, which would be necessary to carry memories from one cycle to the next. Your consciousness is part of the recurring pattern itself.
• The Philosophical Purpose: Nietzsche used the idea as a thought experiment, a "greatest weight" to assess one's affirmation of life. The lack of memory is crucial to this test. If you knew everything was a repeat, you might act differently, which would break the "exact same life" rule. The point is to ask if you would live your current life—with all its joys and sorrows, exactly as it is—over and over again, unknowingly. 

I was helping someone at work today as they needed computer assistance. I was leaning in to show them how to format something when they asked me why I still wear a mask. They hadn't even finished the question before they started coughing so bad it worried me, for both them and me.

"This, this, is why I still wear a mask," I wanted to say, but, thankfully, didn't. I've been sneezed and coughed on and had someone hand me something wet and identifiable. I generally like working with the public but you can run into all kinds of things on a daily basis and as time has moved on I still have a probably more than abnormal fear of germs.

Even so, I don't apologize for wearing a mask.

Before 2020 I used to get colds a lot and that area of my life has seemingly improved since then. I used to catch germs very easily, especially during the winter and when I was most around children (my favorite type of customer, no matter how many germs they might carry)

I found this article recently and feel it says a lot of what I wish more people understood:

https://misfitmentalhealth.substack.com/p/why-are-people-wearing-masks-in-2025

 

Every article in the Sunday, November 9th issue of The New York Times Magazine pulled me in, especially the cover story on Frankenstein. 

I'm pretty sure this will hit a paywall, but just in case not...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/magazine/frankenstein-guillermo-del-toro-shelley.html

There is so much within the article, but I find this of particular merit (not sure why Frankenstein is in quotes instead of italics, but still...) :

“Frankenstein” is a book about the mystery of creation — but what accounts for its own, this strange and desolate work of the imagination? Mary herself addressed this question in the introduction to the 1831 edition; how did she, a teenage girl who never had a day of formal schooling, “dilate upon so very hideous an idea”? And what accounts for its longevity? Byron and Percy Shelley feel like relics, but Mary’s work is still read, recast, passionately debated. Reportedly the most assigned college text in the United States, “Frankenstein” has been hailed as revolutionary and reactionary, feminist and drearily misogynist. It is interpreted as thinly veiled autobiography, a warning against scientific hubris, a critique of the French Revolution. It has been described as a book about fathers and sons but also might be read as the keenest expression of a daughter’s longing for her mother.

The creature appears in at least 400 films, and this season brings another, “Frankenstein,” from Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning director of “The Shape of Water.” It is the movie he has been trying to make his entire career. “My Everest,” he calls it. “Every movie I’ve done is the training wheels for this one.”