i am. so sorry if i have ever used the phrase “i have an au where—” and led you to believe that there is an actual fic out there for you to read rather than, at best, a post where i explain the concept, and at worst it is simply something that lives in my brain
Really hate that the queer community's response to the creation of a gender trinary (girl, boy, and nonbinary, which is still not all-encompassing) was to... reinvent the binary. We just started grouping all genders into "masc/male-aligned" and "fem/female-aligned" and it's so fucking stupid. Even with the occasional allowance of "neutral/unaligned" it still maintains the binary as the standard. And then they don't let you use certain labels if you don't have the "right" gender alignment. The fuck.
there is so much about modern queer discourse that could be fixed simply by understanding "straightness" to be a socio-political classification & reward for conformity rather than just a personal identity.
I think I forgot, as a midwesterner, that long road trips that go nowhere near an interstate are important for my mental health. Driving back from Indianapolis to chicago, and I decided to set my Google Maps to avoid highways. It only adds an hour to my trip, and I haven't seen a real big rig in almost 2 hours. A few panel trucks, and plenty of farm equipment, but no 18 wheelers. Just huge empty fields, 20 year old pickup trucks that are still getting solid use, and plenty of silos and high tension wires in the distance.
It's actually probably going to take me two or three extra hours to get home, because I am stopping at antique malls and thrift stores along the way. No regrets.