Goot Anglisch

on
I'm contemplating abandoning Reddit, because WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT????

For that matter, I desperately want to quit blogging, because WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT????

My mom was a German immigrant who spoke with a heavy accent. I was something like 10 before she stopped pronouncing the K in words like knees and knuckles.

She worked as a maid for a LOT of years and she used to say with a heavy accent she would really like to be a secretary, if only she knew goot anglisch. 

I blog because I would rather be doing something else but, like my mother, seem incapable of managing to arrange the life I WISH I had.

I'm like 99 percent cis het female and ridiculously old fashioned. So generally speaking, men do the initiating in my life.

I used to wonder A LOT what men saw in me, why they were attracted. During my divorce, while being pursued online and mostly not meeting men in person under circumstances where it was ridiculous to expect anything to work out, I began just asking men point blank what they found attractive. 

To my shock, I rarely heard the same answer twice. 

I thought x, y and z were "what was attractive about me" or my value position. What I learned is that what men saw in me was related to them and their life in ways I couldn't know without knowing them well.

I eventually began thinking of it like how job assessment at my corporate job worked. Management knew the performance of "everyone" and both intentionally and unintentionally gave me limited information on how I compared to other people, leaving me feeling insecure and unable to feel confident that I'm doing better than other people. 

I participated in a discussion in a trans subreddit and delicately tried to make the point that "you" as a trans person think everyone is clocking you when that's probably not true. Probably some women aren't thinking "Oh, it's a he-she. (Turns nose up.)" and are thinking instead somethinglike "Bitch, you're walking the DOG in FULL MAKEUP!!! I'm trying to convince people I'm allowed to leave the house without makeup! And you're ten times prettier than me!"

(I used some other example in my reddit comment. No, I'm not that stupid.)

Anyway, my mom delivered babies in her teens, escaped East Germany with her infant niece in tow and was the most kick ass woman I've ever known. And she aspired to be a secretary and never achieved that.

At some point, I stopped wondering what men found attractive about me and began wondering if I found them attractive enough to say yes.