Anyway, I'm feeling a bit like a ping pong ball with all this bouncing back and forth, but it does feel better to be doing something than not. And now I have steroid cream for what she says is eczema (again, wtf?) and some 'fatty emulsion' - yes it's really called that - for my hands, which are apparently super dry. I'm supposed to rub it on and it will... do something good for my skin? I will not be doing this immediately before acro.
Yesterday I received a notification in my inbox that I'd been added to a group on Facebook. The group was called "*'s Angels" - where * means [name redacted] cos I've no interest in identifying the person.
I was somewhat taken aback by this. Normally you get invited to a group and then you decide whether or not to join. Or you ask to join. To be just added made me feel kind of weird. Who would think I want to be in a group so much that they'd just add me with no consultation? Especially a group of Angels?
So I went and had a look, and discovered this blurb:
"This is a pointless Tribe created in the spirit of personal Pride and Ego that is purely Sexist with the intent of corralling all the wonderful and beautiful Women that I secretly or not so secretly Love and/or Lust after. By joining you are officially a part of *'s Harem. There is absolutely no purpose to join except to feed my Ego and waste time. Feel free to be offended, but know this...this is Invite Only and YOU made the cut...along with 340 other Hot Chicks!!!
* hearts Ya'll with some Big Love"
Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth a little.
I know that some people would probably be flattered to be included with 340 other Hot Chicks who made the cut for this guy's Harem. I am not one of them. I'm quite big on consent for a start, and quite small on being selected like some fruit from a tree and arbitrarily chucked in with a bunch of women I don't know, with whom the only thing I have in common is that this dude gets a boner over us.
I couldn't hit "Leave this group and don't let anyone add me back and stop all notifications and kill it with fire" fast enough. And then I messaged the guy going "No offence, but I'm not into the whole harem deal." To which he responded "No worries. I like to engage folk. Sometimes my quirky sense of humor goes over the top for some."
So he thinks it's just a bit of fun, and I know from interacting with him once or twice before that he's relatively harmless. But I do wonder if he gets how icky and creepy it comes across when he adds someone to his self-confessed Sexist Harem without their consent just because he thinks they're hot. I appreciated his non-pushy response to my rejection, but he's gone down in my estimation now and it's gonna take a while before the first thought on seeing his name isn't "Ew."
And just between you and me, I'm embarrassed to admit that there was a small part of me that considered not quitting, not messaging my rejection, because I didn't want to offend. Luckily, my brain overcame my lifetime of training to 'be nice' and I realised that actually, what he'd done was disrespectful and you don't have to 'be nice' to people who disrespect you.
Bloody hell.
In other news, over the last few days I've been having a lightbulb moment, or series of moments, in which I've realised that if I can create replicas of other people's costume designs, I can also create replicas of my own. Like, everything I make is from pictures, right? I can look at something and work out how it's engineered, and then make it. I've been known to learn specific techniques just so I can make a particular thing, and I now have quite the repertoire of skills. So, if I can learn to make the pictures myself, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be able to make the ideas into reality.
Why did this not occur to me before?
