it's been a busy march. i've been on an outpatient month and i had some vacation time so just about every weekend i had some plans. this past weekend was the first time i had some time at home to just relax and have some homebody time. anyway it was an interesting month and i've had a lot of good shit to blog about but of course not the time. i'll try to get you guys into my mind over the next few weeks.
i finally finished 'the velvet rage' book a few weeks ago. i know i keep talking about it, but i actually hadn't finished it til earlier this month. it closes with a few 'lessons' some of which i thought were pretty good.
lesson #1 was "don't let your sexual tastes be the filter for allowing people into your life".
and when i read that i thought, damn, isn't that so true of so many of us? i mean when you're on grindr or whatever, even if you say you're looking 'for friends', don't you basically judge whether you'll keep talking to someone on whether you think they're attractive? level of attractiveness is like the #1 filter gay men use when they're looking for friends. but in reality, how many of our normal friends are all 8s or higher on the looks scale? i can tell you my best (straight) friend is not the most handsome guy but he cracks me up and is incredibly smart and witty. so what if he may not turn heads at a bar or have a perfect men's health body? so why is that so many gay men use that as their major criterion for making new friends? i'll be honest, i've filtered guys based on whether i think they're cute, and have i missed out on making some awesome friends? probably. the interesting thing about having this blog is i've gotten to know a few different guys who i bet if we just happened to see each other on the street we wouldn't give a fuck, but because we actually get to know the real man behind the looks first, are actually pretty cool. i guess it comes with the fucked up territory of using these apps and shit that parcel us into little packages of sex appeal.
which segues into lesson #8 "actively practice accepting your body as it is right now".
i know i've been dreaming about having a perfect toned chest and 6-pack abs for as long as i've realized i like sucking dick. i hate my body. i don't fit into that perfect mold of ripped muscle boy that seems to be the gay nirvana of sex appeal. and as much as i keep telling myself i don't need to and probably will never achieve that fitness level, something keeps nagging me that i must work towards it. i've had plenty of guys tell me they love my body the way it is and i keep telling them they are crazy what is wrong with them. but then on the other hand i have been with the guys with the perfect bodies. and while it is a nice thrill to see them take their shirt off, at the end of the day it's still the chemistry between us that matters most, not whether i can see the lines in his abs (although those are nice to look at).
i think the fear in the back of my mind is that i'm gonna miss out on my perfect guy because my body type isn't in that range of "AWESOME" and i don't have my chest and abs ready to flaunt. so i know it's important to accept myself as i am right now, but maybe still work towards that unachievable goal at the same time. it's just so hard when gay media is telling us we need to have perfect bodies. one guy i was with said he didn't have any self-esteem to talk to guys until he lost a lot of weight, which i thought was kind of sad, but admirable. sad that he felt that way, because it's true of how much more judgmental homos are on other guys, but admirable that he achieved his goal and finally gained some self-esteem to approach the guys he was interested in. it's a fucking crazy paradox.
i guess my theme on writing about these things is to challenge you to be more open about the way you look at others. we close ourselves off to a lot of possibilities because of the impossible expectations we set for what we want. not that having standards isn't important, but i think the more we're able to look at each other without filters, the better.
let's just agree colby keller is a stud.
