Stalling

So I feel as though I should dangle some shiny objects out there and hope no one notices that I haven't posted anything of substance in a while.

I just bought these shoes for a Christmas party I'm supposed to attend this weekend. They are plain, but cute. By some miracle, they aren't Mary Janes. I have a weird obsession with them that I think has its roots in Courtney Love's kinderwhore days. A good 85% of my shoes are Mary Janes.

Lest you think that I'm even remotely girly enough to engage in shoe talk for any more than five minutes, I'd like to point out that according to this quiz, which was posted on the Forum, my driving is 84% male and 16% female. I love driving. It's mainly a frustrating endeavor here in the city, but when the weather is nice, I'll go for hour long pleasure drives in the country. I have a friend who took a stunt driving class a while ago, and I've been envious of her ever since.

Completely unrelated to any of these topics is my recent fixation with finger length ratios. I thought that comparing your index finger length to your ring finger length to determine gayness was just some kind of lesbian parlor trick. But apparently this is a phenomenon that is studied scientifically as a sexually dimorphic trait. Aside from a possible correlation between digit ratio and sexuality, researchers have discovered a number of other correspondences between finger length variation and fertility, heart disease, and aggression. Who knew?

It's easy to become infatuated with the idea that one can read the body for "tells" that will give us signs of the future or insights into our personality. Why wouldn't you look at your palm and think, "These lines here have got to mean something!?" Yet I'm a huge fan of free will, so the idea that any part of my sexuality was predetermined by biology has irked me for a really long time (as politically incorrect as this prospect might be). It's an issue of control, really. Who wants their life governed by something as imprecise and unruly as hormones?

Saturday night while I was making dinner for a friend, this subject came up. We had been talking about trans issues. Like a lot of our FTM friends, both of us are pretty much exclusively attracted girls, yet neither she nor I has any desire to become a man. We wondered why some same-sex lovin' biologically-female brains tipped this way and others didn't. As we were puzzling things out, we came to agree upon some kind of biological basis for feeling like you were trapped in a body of the wrong sex.

But where did that leave us? While sexuality and gender identification don't always go hand in hand, we tend to think of these things as related. Our brains both leapt to the idea of sexuality as being biologically influenced, and so I remembered the good old parlor trick. I brought out a ruler and she measured her fingers (I already knew the status of mine). Both of us can be earmarked for potential gayness. I could tell that she was more comforted by this thought than I was, like it wasn't all just in her head. My attitude is a bit more conflicted. I still reflexively cling to the un-PC idea that my lifestyle is my choice, not something even remotely preordained, and anyone who would work to deprive me of the option can go fuck themselves. Yet I'm fascinated by the whole "what if?" factor. In any case, here's another article explaining the concept, if you find this sort of thing interesting.

And just because this got more serious than I wanted it to be, here's a picture of a cat in a rack from CuteOverload.com -