Hey what's up hello! This week we take a dive into the long history of bi/ace solidarity. We explore how our communities interacted in the past and what they are doing to support each other in the present.
Episode Transcript: www.soundsfakepod.com/transcripts/bi-ace-solidarity
Bi/Ace Solidarity Tumblr Masterpost: https://autismserenity.tumblr.com/post/142035894961/the-acesaros-were-part-of-the-bi-community-until
Slate Care and Feeding Article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/01/capitol-riot-nephew-legal-aid-care-and-feeding.html
Donate: patreon.com/soundsfakepod
Follow: @soundsfakepod
Join: https://discord.gg/W7VBHMt
Buy our book: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
Hey what's up hello! This week we take a dive into the long history of bi/ace solidarity. We explore how our communities interacted in the past and what they are doing to support each other in the present.
Episode Transcript: www.soundsfakepod.com/transcripts/bi-ace-solidarity
Bi/Ace Solidarity Tumblr Masterpost: https://autismserenity.tumblr.com/post/142035894961/the-acesaros-were-part-of-the-bi-community-until
Slate Care and Feeding Article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/01/capitol-riot-nephew-legal-aid-care-and-feeding.html
Donate: patreon.com/soundsfakepod
Follow: @soundsfakepod
Join: https://discord.gg/W7VBHMt
Buy our book: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
(0:00)
SARAH: Hey what’s up hello. Welcome to Sounds Fake But Okay, a podcast where an aro-ace girl (I’m Sarah. That’s me.)
KAYLA:… and a demi-straight girl (that’s me, Kayla)
SARAH: talk about all things to do with love, relationships, sexuality, and pretty much anything else that we just don’t understand.
KAYLA: On today’s episode: bi-ace solidarity.
ALL: — Sounds fake, but okay.
SARAH: Welcome back to the pod!
KAYLA: B’ooga. Wait, b, what?
SARAH: M’argarine?
KAYLA: I started trying to use a b instead!
SARAH: I went straight for m’argarine and you had a brain dysfunction.
KAYLA: I was going to say “booghetti” because I’ve been calling Billie a “little booghetti boy” for no reason. Well, I started by calling Billie a “little spaghetti boy.” She’s not a boy and she doesn’t even look like spaghetti but it just started to happen and then that morphed into me calling her a “little booghetti boy” so I started saying booghetti but it doesn’t really start with m so I’m not sure what has happened today.
SARAH: Okay. Okay, good.
KAYLA: Anyway.
SARAH: Excellent. How’re we doing? Do we have any updates this week? Who am I? Where am I?
KAYLA: We were featured in a Slate article.
SARAH: Oh we were!
KAYLA: We were featured in Slate in a care and feeding column, it’s like an advice column, and we got to help answer the question of a 16-year-old ace person. So that was pretty cool, if you want to read that.
SARAH: Hell yeah.
KAYLA: I will try to remember to put a link to that in the episode description. Other fun stuff—
SARAH: There’s another thing coming that is not out yet but it will be this week.
KAYLA: It’ll be out on Monday, but today is Sunday, so you can’t know can you?
SARAH: No, you can’t know.
BILLIE: *Meowing in the distance.*
SARAH: Ohh, Billie can’t know either.
KAYLA: You have to choose one. Anyway.
SARAH: Okay. Kayla, what are we talking about this week?
KAYLA: This week is another request from a $15 patron.
SARAH: Leila.
KAYLA: Yes as a reminder if you become a $15 patron you can tell us what to do for an episode. So Leila wanted us to talk about the history of bi-ace solidarity. So, that is what we are doing today.
SARAH: Yeah, we’re going to talk about bi-ace solidarity cause why the fuck not? So, Kayla do you want to start us off because you found the stuff that we kind of based this off of.
KAYLA: Leila found this and sent it.
SARAH: Leila found it.
KAYLA: Yeah, so when Leila sent this idea for a podcast episode, they also sent this Tumblr post that is, they were like, “Oh, maybe a good jumping-off point.” They were very right. This is what we’re going to use the whole time because there is not a whole lot of information about this out here. So, basically this is a Tumblr post, I will link this Tumblr post in the episode description.
SARAH: It’s from autismserenity.tumblr.com.
KAYLA: Yes. So it’s basically a long post with quotes from other posts or other documents talking about bi-ace solidarity. So the title of the post is “the aces/aros were part of the bi community until they very recently chose to split off so stop telling them that they have never been queer or that they don’t belong in the LGBT community masterpost.” So essentially these are a lot of quotes from “older aces” or older bisexual people that are talking about how integrated the aro and ace communities used to be with bisexuality and how that has led to what we currently see as bi/ace solidarity I guess.
SARAH: Right and this references older documents as well. You know, where you can extrapolate from these documents, like “oh I can see where the overlap is, I can see where this came from.”
KAYLA: Yeah so it’s very interesting. I feel like, history of the ace community is very hard to find because it’s all online and no one really thought to document it I guess. So, just reading this is super interesting. It’s also, I think always just interesting to read the experiences of queer people that aren’t in their 20s. Like especially people that are in their 40s and up, who have been in the queer community for a long time, it’s just very interesting to hear how things have changed.
(5:00)
SARAH: Yeah, cause they certainly have changed.
KAYLA: Yeah. Like I said, there are a lot of different quotes in here. I don’t know. Sarah, if you have any specific quotes that you wanted to get into. There was a couple that I found most interesting I guess.
SARAH: I have one that I wrote a small manifesto on but I just have the one so why don’t you go first?
KAYLA: Well it might be the same one. I was then trolling around to read the full posts. The quote that I found most interesting, let me see how it was actually quoted in this masterpost. So basically what the shorter kind of quote that the person who made this masterpost, autismserenity.tumblr, it’s basically saying. So this is the quote: ““During a time in which being aro or ace (or aroace) was even less intelligible to the mainstream — or even the mainstream queer community — than it is now, where were the ace and aro bi people? Where did they organize under when trying to deal with monosexism? Where did they vent their frustrations over LG exclusion?”— so lesbian and gay exclusion I’m assuming. “Where did they openly talk about their attractions? Who were they fighting alongside? “Bisexuals.” “They were with the bisexuals.” And I can’t remember if it was in this post or in one of the other comments that was talking about how until very recently, everyone who wasn’t straight or gay was just lumped in with bisexuals. So, even ace and aro people were just lumped into that community because they weren’t a gold star gay or a gold star straight person.
SARAH: As a note, that quote was from atomicbubblegum on Tumblr.
KAYLA: Yes. Then there’s kind of this talk about in this post and other posts how once the ace and aro community started getting bigger, they split off and started doing their own thing. Not that obviously, bisexuals have been abandoned or that there were necessarily hard feelings or anything. But it’s just very interesting that historically when asexual and aromantic people were having this conversation about their place in the queer community and how they were feeling, it was with bi people that they were having those conversations.
SARAH: Yeah and it’s also interesting, at the beginning of this post, the poster of the post quotes Paula Rust from 1995 from this essay that’s called “Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics.” And Paula says, “Many bisexual respondents described bisexuality as a potential or as an essential quality that many people possess, but that only some people express through actual feelings of attraction or sexual behavior. According to this definition, people can be – and are – bisexual without ever experiencing an attraction to one sex or the other and without ever having sexual relations with one sex or the other. In contrast to lesbian respondents, most of whom define a bisexual as a person who feels attracted to or has sexual relations with both sexes,” or we would say now, any or all genders. “Very few bisexual women define bisexuals as people who necessarily have these actual emotional and physical experiences.” So, it is really interesting to hear how it’s discussed there about how there was seemingly a lot of overlap with the bisexual identity and the asexual identity and there are a lot of things that read as very ace to me in the way that some of these bisexual people were describing themselves in 1995.
KAYLA: I feel like since the 90s, bisexuality has become much more mainstream. It is, not that it is not that it’s not a struggle to be bisexual, but I would say the majority of people have heard of it, it’s relatively more accepted. It feels like bisexuality was launched into the mainstream and then asexuality was still down here struggling. I think there’s a lot of different reasons for that.
SARAH: There’s multiple different levels. There’s white gay men at the top of still face discrimination, but doing the best out of all the queer identities. And then it’s kind of a list of going down from there.
(10:00)
KAYLA: I just think that, how similar our struggles are to bi people, like there obviously is modern bi-ace solidarity, but it’s obviously not as strong as living in the same community as a way to say it I guess. I feel like now that there’s more separation, it’s easier to forget just how similar the experiences can be.
SARAH: And you know bi-ace-pan, those are all considered the invisible identities and I think, I don’t want to say that the relationship between them is being forgotten because I don’t know that that’s true, but I think it remains relevant that those were the invisible identities and we should be thinking about why they were considered the invisible identities and what we can do to make sure that stereotype, that understanding, or the lack of understanding about them, to make sure that that doesn’t continue.
KAYLA: I found several Tumblr blogs that were like, specifically the whole theme of that Tumblr was bi-ace solidarity and it’s something that we’ve probably mentioned before I have heard people talk about. I just feel like it’s not as active of a relationship I guess. I don’t often see ace people reaching out to ace people or bi people reaching out to ace people to be like, hey let’s band together to try to get this problem fixed. Or, to try to fight against this stereotype, you know what I mean? It’s just less formal. That might also be, when I think back to these posts talking about the 90s, in my mind, it feels like people were meeting somewhere and having like an actual club about it. Now, most of the communities are crowding on the Internet. So, thinking back it feels like there was more in-person connection, and maybe it’s also because of COVID. It just feels different.
SARAH: I think there was less fragmentation of the broader queer community and I think, what I mean by that is, sure there were bi folks and there were ace folks and blah blah blah, but they weren’t necessarily seen as separate, distinct communities and I think on one hand it’s good that we have these places where we can feel safe and talk about things and discuss our life experiences. But on the other hand, the fragmentation of the broader queer community can be harmful in some ways because we can forget what we have in common.
KAYLA: Yeah. It’s hard as the community keeps growing, as with any community, it’s just hard to keep a singular—not that we should be keeping a singular focus at all—I think segmentation is very good for sexuality so people can talk about their individual experiences. It’s just harder to organize and make relationships that way.
SARAH: You know as they say, queer people attract queer people and your group of friends in high school, oh it turns out they were all queer. That’s just how it works. I’m thinking about my own relationships now. I know a lot of bi people. I would say I’m friends with more bi people than I am with just gay people, which I had never really thought about before because you know, in my head, they’re all under the umbrella of queer. But when I think about it, I believe there are more bisexuals in my life. We attract each other.
KAYLA: We really do.
SARAH: I had a, as I told Kayla, I had a bit of a manifesto that I wrote after reading this one part. I’ll just read the whole beginning of this post. This is also from the atomicbubblegum post. And this person says, “When I grew up, heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual were explicitly not specifically sexual. “It’s not about sex!” was a battle cry. This was emphasized frequently as people would sit there trying to come up with some gotcha that meant that you couldn’t be gay and a virgin at the same time. Or — and this is important: that you couldn’t be queer if you weren’t interested in sex. While it’s not necessarily the same as explicitly affirming asexuality, this was a way in which the asexual experience was made intelligible under the mainstream organization of sexuality. There was a lot of rhetoric that emphasized this point. In particular, that the fixation on the sexual part of homo/bi-sexuality was actually a form of heterocentrism in which hets would try to strip queers of the capability for romantic attraction.” And this person goes on to say like, yes that is problematic, specifically in regards to aro folks, but I wanted to hit on that because this idea that there was this heterocentrosm where cishets would try to strip queer folks of the capability of romantic attraction, it’s so interesting to me because it just enforces the idea that all of these problems that other queer folks have with aspec folks is informed by heteronormativity. It’s the expectations placed on romance and sex by the cishets that make other queer people hate us, that make other queer people see us as a barrier to acceptance instead of an ally in crushing heteronormativity and I think that’s all the more reason to welcome and accept aspecs into the queer community because we hate heteronormativity as much as you do. And in some cases, we hate it for reasons that you haven’t even grasped yet. And that’s not to say oh we’re so enlightened we’re better than you. It’s just to say that this problem, this harmful rot of forced and enforced heteronormativity is so deeply ingrained that even you or I don’t know the full extent of it. And anyone who exists outside the space of cishets is queer, or they can choose the queer label if they want to. And embracing the aspec lens will help the entire queer community, not just us, because invasive heteronormativity is hurting all of us, and to be honest, it’s hurting cishets too. So what the fuck are we doing still arguing about this?
(15:00)
KAYLA: Yeah, I mean, I feel like this is something I say a lot is just like the potential that asexuality and aromanticism have just to like shake shit up. We last week did an Instagram live with the folks from Forbidden Apple and I was explaining during my part of the interview that you know, asexual people are still very interesting even though they might not have sex. And we were kind of talking about being gay, and Pelayo was talking about, you know, oh I’m gay but I don’t want to be defined by who I have sex with and you know, the queer community is trying to get away from being defined by who you fuck. And if that’s something that the queer community actually cares about, like being defined by other things, then we are so valuable in that fight.
SARAH: Right and I think obviously as a person who is both aromantic and asexual, I look at this statement and say, yeah that’s a real problem with aro exclusion, in terms of they would try to strip queers of the capability for romantic attraction because that made them less human or whatever. That’s the way that that went about is a problem. But I think just this heterocentrism, the fact that queer communities to a certain extent, unintentionally are accepting the cishet talking points of well, if you’re not capable of the talking points, you’re lesser. In saying no, I do experience romantic attraction, I’m just different, because whatever, is exclusionary to the aros and you’re accepting their terms and you don’t have to do that. It’s hard to kind of deal with that at the same time as saying you know, it’s bad they’re trying to strip you of your capability for romantic attraction while at the same time, say, but also that’s not necessarily an inherently bad thing. I get that it’s difficult to do both. But, I think embracing the aspec lens would on both fronts and you can say fuck heteronormativity, fuck what the cishets want. Changing our point of view can help everyone, including, cishets. That was just my small manifesto.
(20:00)
KAYLA: Smally off-topic I guess to bi-ace solidarity. It just proves why solidarity like that is important and why getting back to a place where not where we are considered part of the bisexual community—I don’t know that it’s going to be helpful for us to be lumped in with bisexual people—it seems like aces used to be maybe, but having those connections, there’s another—this is a quote from someone @wetwareproblem linked in part of this masterpost. ““[A]s a bi trans woman who was there and actually saw aroaces being part of the bi community and putting in the work and dealing with the oppression… The bi community was actively rejecting definitions beyond ‘not gay, not straight’ into the mid-90s, because every definition offered excluded some of its members.” That quote says to me that there was active coalition-building between ace and bi people and aro people to fight against the same problems. We are constantly going up against exclusionary hate online, lack of education, with more communities involved. Not that there aren’t bi people involved. From a whole, it just makes everything easier.
SARAH: And I think, the bi and ace and pan which I think in a lot of sense falls under bi when we’re talking about this questions like this but these identities, they represent the spectrum of queerness in a way that gay or lesbian doesn’t. And I think over time, some people view bisexuality as a more binary into men and women thing, whereas I would say that’s not really the definition that I embrace, it’s more so more than one gender, right? But, I think, in general, all of these communities have really embraced the spectrum and the fact that there’s an in-between, it might be a little bit confusing to be in the in-between and that’s okay and I think that that’s something that we all have in common and teaching not just the straights but people who also identify just as gay that there is a spectrum here and wherever you fall on it is wherever you fall on it and that’s okay. I think that’s something that we can do together as two communities.
KAYLA: I always say this. There are so many people who are confused about their actual sexualities which no one is going to solve so it’s fine to be confused but so many bi people that are like, well I only like having sex with men but I women better or I only like whatever, I’m spicy straight whatever—
SARAH: What does that mean?
KAYLA: I think that’s straight people that either don’t want to admit they’re bi or just want to be part of something, I don’t know. No offense I guess, if that’s how you identify.
SARAH: If that’s how you identify I’d be interested to know why you identify that way.
KAYLA: I would be interested to know more. But, once again I always say that having an understanding of the split model of attraction those are things that we can teach each other. Bi people have a lot of experience being part of the community, we have so much that we can teach each other, you know.
SARAH: If you go back to episode 30 something, it was the episode where I had seen some ace exclusionism from a fellow queer person I knew. At this point it’s water under the bridge, it’s fine. I mean it’s not fine, but we talked and I don’t have any issue with the person at this point in time.
KAYLA: Personally, it’s fine.
SARAH: Yes. But that person identified as bi and still does as far as I’m aware. So I think it was harder to hear that from someone who was supposed to be kind of in the same boat as me as an ace person, which you know keeps, bringing me back to the whole all of us benefit from using the aspec lens and saying fuck heteronormativity. Bi people, ace people.
KAYLA: Yeah I think that’s kind of what I was talking about. You always look back on things with rose-colored glasses but just reading these posts of people who are bi and so supportive of aro/ace people almost gives you the sense that like every bi person loved aro/ace people and knew who they were which is obviously not the case.
(25:00)
SARAH: It’s an oversimplification.
KAYLA: It’s not like that there was an amazing community that everyone was part of and it’s only recently that we’ve drifted apart. I’m honestly saying that to tell that to myself because it’s hard to wrap my mind around that because, I don’t know.
SARAH: It’s hard to not romanticize the past because we’re not in it.
KAYLA: These quotes do seem very, for lack of a better word, romantic, right? It’s like, you picture these people in some meeting room, like near where Stonewall happened talking about these things and supporting each other, right? It just seems like a very beautiful idea. But it wasn’t always like that. I’m sure there’s been bi people who don’t understand asexuality and aromanticism and stuff. I don’t know what the point of any of that was.
SARAH: I don’t either but I mean, that is a good point though. It’s important to not say that bi people or that the bi community has never had any part in causing harm to the aspec community. Or, to be honest, the other way around. It’s not like we’re absolved of fault in something because at one point, the two communities were kind of one and then they kind of split off when asexuality came into its own a little bit more. It’s worth thinking about it and realizing that it is a complex thing.
KAYLA: I think the connotation of the two communities splitting and them not being in the same little chunk kind of gives the connotation that there was some kind of disagreement I guess. Bi people aren’t currently doing anything for ace people or the other way around. I also don’t want to make it seem that way. It’s also obviously a different relationship and the community looks a lot different now than it did in the 80s and 90s. I think it’s just, the mindsets have changed I guess.
SARAH: Yeah and I don’t think it was like a we got in a fight and we broke up sort of situation as far as I’m aware. But yeah, I mean, the bisexuals are like our sister sexuality.
KAYLA: I do always see it that way. It’s interesting to watch because I was trying to look up some other posts about bi-ace solidarity and like I said, there’s a lot of Tumblr blogs dedicated to it and I’ve definitely seen people on Twitter and stuff talking about it. It almost feels like people are re-discovering that there is that solidarity. Obviously, in the 80s and 90s there was this very tight bond and the communities kind of, you know, went their separate ways and grew on their own. And then people are almost just restarting to realize or each person who joins the ace community kind of has their own realization of like, oh their thing is really similar to ours. We don’t—I don’t know—this is something about the queer community in general, that if you don’t know other older queer people who can indoctrinate you into the culture, it’s very hard to learn history. I’ve also, maybe it was in a class, because of AIDS, a lot of those older queer people who would have then passed on that knowledge, ended up dying. Which is just very sad. It’s very interesting now that everything’s online, people aren’t making as many personal connections. It is harder to document and learn this kind of historical information. It’s not like you grow up necessarily with a queer grandma who’s going to teach your “family history” or something like that.
SARAH: And I would love to see some sort of formal, published paper or—
BILLIE: *meows in the distance once more*
SARAH: so would Billie, Billie would love to hear that—I would love to see more formal work done on this. Like this is a really excellent Tumblr post. It references some very good stuff, but it is a Tumblr post and y’know there’s some part of me in the back of my brain like, well if Wikipedia’s not a good enough source. I would like to see it validated, I guess, so that other people can look at and say oh this is an essay, this is a book, this is a whatever, that outlines the history of bi-ace solidarity and people who aren’t part of the community can look at it and they’ll view it as a legitimate thing, not just people digging up anecdotes on Tumblr, you know what I mean?
(30:00)
KAYLA: Yeah. And I think that’s going to be a struggle that everyone in every realm of the world is going to struggle with in the years to come. If you think about it, people spreading ideas like this back in the day, you would have to publish an essay. You would have to get it published. Or like, put it down on paper and send it to someone.
SARAH: You would have to either have the means to distribute it yourself or you would have to get someone else to distribute it for you. Which meant that there was another pair of eyes on it.
KAYLA: Right. And it mean that there was so much less content, like less people had the means to make it. So now it’s amazing we have places like Tumblr and Twitter where things can happen very quickly and history can be made very quickly.
SARAH: I’m so sick of living through history, Kayla. It’s exhausting.
KAYLA: I know but I mean this in like a good way.
SARAH: I know.
KAYLA: Big things can happen that aren’t “formally documented.” So years from now, it’s just insane to think about like how are we documenting things like this. There isn’t an in-person Stonewall for everything. The hard thing about the ace community being so online is we don’t have any cornerstones of our history like that.
SARAH: I hate to bring him into it, but if you look at Trump tweets, those are official presidential statements, but they’re also tweets. We’re going to have to have some reckoning where we figure out how to take this less formal stuff, this sharing of ideas on platforms that are very universal and figuring out how do we record this, what’s worth recording, is it even for us to decide what’s worth recording. Existential crisis.
KAYLA: It is. I think me and Sarah have realized recently that our position in the community kind of places us at a point where we could be part of that history which is terrifying and makes me sound like an asshole to say. It’s so weird about, first of all, how will that be documented? And then, like, we are publishing a book, Angela Chen has published a book, but very obviously there are a lot of people making huge impacts on the community. Like Secretladyspiral, Elle Rose, posts amazing articles on Medium that are so explanatory, deep dive into a lot of things on asexuality, are just like so good. But they aren’t published in a book, so 20 years from now, is that like not going to be remembered?
SARAH: I hope they are.
KAYLA: It’s so bizarre, the Internet age that we’re in. This is getting very off topic and existential but it’s thinking about—
SARAH: Quality and quantity are not the same thing and sometimes I figure that people who provide the most quantity will be the ones that will be remembered. It’s existential crisis hour here in the bi-ace solidarity podcast.
KAYLA: It is. It’s just like, because the ace community is so young and the aro community is so young. We are very much so living through the early days of history of the community growing.
SARAH: It’s the adolescence.
KAYLA: It is. I just think it’s going to be fascinating to see years from now what comes out of it, you know.
SARAH: Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t mean to turn this into an existential crisis and here we are. Okay. Kayla do you have anything else that you want to add?
KAYLA: I mean I would just highly recommend looking at this Tumblr post. There are a shit ton of quotes that we can’t cover.
SARAH: And some excellent things.
KAYLA: It’s just so fascinating. Because, like I said, there was no one to teach me this history. So I’d highly recommend looking at that and just like modern bi-ace solidarity very much so exists and it’s around the things we’ve been talking about, being the invisible identities, being the people that a shithead gold star gay isn’t going to like—there is so much there, it’s already amazing but it can get so much better. I don’t know how but it probably can.
(35:00)
SARAH: I believe in us. I believe in our ability to make it worse but I also believe in our ability to make it better. Excellent. Kayla, what’s our poll for this week?
KAYLA: Oh god. That’s what it is.
SARAH: Oh god - the poll. I mean, we could be like “is bi-ace solidarity something you have known about, something you have experienced?”
KAYLA: Have you ever experienced the power of bi-ace solidarity?
SARAH: So powerful.
KAYLA: If so, what was your experience like?
SARAH: Great, okay. Kayla, what is your beef and your juice this week?
KAYLA: I gotta add the obligatory third option to the poll. My juice, I started my new job this week and I just like it a lot. It’s going very well. It’s very tiring to try to get into a full-time work schedule. I’m not used to having to focus for this long. But I very much so enjoy it and it’s been fun. My other juice is the moderators of our Discord, they’ve been working so hard recently. They implemented way to do pronouns in the Discord server, colors and stuff
SARAH: I haven’t even known what’s been going on. I’ve seen them having these conversations about things, I have no idea what’s going on. At one point I just popped in I was like, guys do whatever you do. You’re great. I don’t know what’s going on but I’d like to appreciate you.
KAYLA: At this point we have no idea what’s going on there, they are fully running it. Which is how it should be because they use it more than we do. We are hardly ever in there.
SARAH: And yet we see everything.
KAYLA: Yeah they’re just very good.
SARAH: Excellent. Do you have a beef?
KAYLA: Oh I didn’t do a beef. I’m sure I do, don’t I always?
SARAH: I have several, does that help?
KAYLA: Yeah, you can take mine.
SARAH: Okay, I wrote a very very long beef a couple days ago. Should I read the whole thing?
KAYLA: What is it about?
SARAH: It’s about the fact that I don’t have a handwriting in Korean.
KAYLA: Oh my god. Every week it’s a Korean beef.
SARAH: I don’t have a handwriting in Korean—
KAYLA: I’m sure Korean has been your beef for the last 15 episodes.
SARAH: I haven’t been learning it that long. My handwriting in Korean is neither good nor anything remotely close to consistent and it pisses me off so much because I take great pride in the fact that I can have good handwriting. As a child, I would intentionally change the look of my handwriting every year, when I was little, when I first learn to write, I would capitalize one of the a’s in my name but not the other just for the variety you know, not show favoritism and prove that I could do both. I still have multiple fonts essentially of my own handwriting. They’re not perfectly neat all the time but they can be nice looking if I want them to and I take great pride in my handwriting so the fact that my handwriting in Korean is ass because it’s a different set of characters and sometimes you stack them on top of each other and sometimes you put them next to each other and sometimes you do both which means in order for my characters to look good the shape and the proportions of any given letter can change word to word and I’m very inconsistent—and mmmm anyway. My other beef is—I didn’t read my whole notes, I wrote more than that, Kayla.
KAYLA: I’m sure you did.
(40:00)
SARAH: For your reference. I hate Spectrum, the internet provider. This is not news. I have never met anyone who liked Spectrum, but just putting it on the record.
KAYLA: Does anyone like any internet provider?
SARAH: Or like cable provider—no. I’m just mad at Spectrum, again, at this time. My other beef, this is more so a joke rather than a beef because I knew this was how it was going to be. My mental health in Michigan not super great, my mental health in California, also not super great. Almost as if, it’s just that my mental health is not super great.
KAYLA: It is crazy that—
Billie: *Meows a third time*
KAYLA: Um, I was speaking. My beef is that the other day, Billie did poop a piece of string. That was annoying. Apparently she ate a piece of string. She’s been very active during the day recently and I think it’s cause she likes to sleep in my office and I used to not talk at all. But I have been having meetings all this week so I think it’s waking her up and so she’s been very rowdy and screaming and I love her, I’m glad she’s feeling well but shut the fuck up.
SARAH: She has things to say. My juice is that my mom got scheduled to get her vaccines. So did my grandpa.
KAYLA: I have like 3 or 4 family members are vaccinated at this point.
SARAH: It’s all just very exciting. It’s going to be quite some time before I am vaccinated but it is good to see that people that I know who are working in the medical field, who are old, who are educators, are at least getting in line and getting appointments and that’s good. I think that’s good.
KAYLA: Okay.
SARAH: You can tell us about your beef, your juice, your bi-ace solidarity, your bi-ace vaccine getting idea on our social media @soundsfakepod. We have a Patreon. patreon.com/soundsfakepod. We have a new $2 patron, it is Jackie Rubashkin. I think that’s a fun name. I said that about someone’s name recently but honestly, I very much like names, it’s a thing. Kayla knows.
KAYLA: Sarah’s obsessed with names.
SARAH: Our $5 patrons are Jennifer Smart, Asritha Vinnakota, Austin Le, Perry Fiero, Dee, Quinn Pollock, Emily Collins, Bookmarvel, Changeling MX, Simona Sajmon, Jamie Jack, Jessica Shea, Ria Faustino, Daniel Walker, Livvy, Madeline Askew, Lily, James, Corinne, AliceIsInSpace, Skye Simpson, Brooke Siegel, Ashley W, Savannah Cozart, Harry Haston-Dougan, SOUP, Amanda Kyker, Vishakh, Jacob Weber, Rory, Amberle Istar, Rachel, Kate Costello, John, Ariel Laxo, Ellie, Tessa, MattiousT, Chris Lauretano, Sam, Kelly, Scott Ainslie and we have two new $5 patrons, it’s Orla Nieve Eisley and Julianne. And yes I did look up how to pronounce Nieve because it’s Irish and I know I’m going to butcher it. So I looked it up. But thank you both of you for joining the party, we appreciate you.
KAYLA: Hello.
SARAH: Our $10 patrons are Arcnes who would like to promote the Trevor Project, Benjamin Ybarra who would like to promote Tabletop Games, anonymous who would like to promote Halloween, Sarah McCoy who would like to promote Podcast From Planet Weird, my Aunt Jeannie who would like to promote Christopher’s Haven, Cassandra who would like to promote their modeling Instagram @liddowred, Doug Rice who would like to promote "Native" by Kaitlin Curtice, Maggie Capalbo who would like to promote their dogs Leia and Minnie and also H. Valdís, H. Valdis, Purple Chickadee, who would like to promote figuring out one’s gender identity and the non-binary community, great, wonderful, yes, Barefoot Backpacker, I’m promoting something for him, which is I believe in his ability to something for us to promote at some point, I believe in you. Ashlynn Boedecker, who is @shlynnbo everywhere, The Steve who would like to promote Ecosia, Ari K. who would like to promote The Eyeball Zone, Mattie who would like to promote The Union Series by T.H. Hernandez, Derek and Carissa who would like to promote the overthrow heteronormativity and Andrew Hillum who would like to promote the ADHD, Neurodiversity and ace and aro communities on Twitter, and we have a new $10 patron, Aaron who would like to promote free forehead kisses.
KAYLA: Yes.
SARAH: That’s very soft and delightful.
KAYLA: A very good thing to promote.
SARAH: Thank you Aaron for joining the party. Our $15 patrons are Nathaniel White - NathanielJWhiteDesigns.com, my mom who would like to promote Free Mom Hugs, Sara Jones who is @eternalloli everywhere, Andy A who would like to promote Being in unions and IWW, Martin Chiesel who would like to promote his podcast Everyone’s Special and No One is, Miranda Denton who would like to promote Casa Q, Leila, thank you for this episode, and Leila would also like to promote taking a moment to breathe. Let’s all do that together guys, just take a second. Good. Did we all do that?
KAYLA: That was a very hectic breath. You do these names so quickly, gotta be honest, it was not calling to me.
SARAH: Take a longer moment to breathe than I did. Shrubbery who would like to promote the Planet Earth, Dia Chappell who would like to promote their Twitch channel twitch.tv/MelodyDia and Dragonfly who would like to promote hydrating? Thanks for listening. Tune in next Sunday for more of us in your ears.
KAYLA: And until then, take good care of your cows.