asking the internet for suggestions

[rax]

I have a few problems/goals I want to ask the internet for suggestions regarding. So, hi Internet! There are a jillion things I could be doing, but these particular things are taking up a bunch of space in my head, so I want to get them resolved or at least in progress so they won't do that anymore. These issues include the emotional and the logistical.

• I'm making awesome friends in Tucson who do not share the value with me that you should refer to people by the pronouns that those people prefer. This is obnoxious. I don't want to not be friends with them, and occasional requests for correction are doing jack all. I've been trying to present more neutrally with them so that there is some kind of physical cue, but everything I do just codes feminine or butch to them as far as I can tell. Is there something clever I can do here? If I say "I prefer they and would appreciate if you used that pronoun," they sort of nod and say yes and then just don't, and they aren't really open to talking about it. I don't expect to get it 100% of the time and that's fine, but I'd feel more comfortable with it if it happened sometimes, or if I felt I'd exhausted my options. (Maybe I'll ask Zury to pull them aside or something? I don't feel like it's done much good coming from me.)
• I have this water feature --- a little circulating pond and waterfall thing --- and it's full of nasty plant gunk and algae and whatnot such that the thing is kind of clogged and also gross. That's fine, I can clean it! But... how? My current plan is to drain it, let it dry, sweep it out, pull stuff out with gloved hands if necessary, and then fill it back up. This feels pretty reasonable, but how do I drain a pond? I am considering some sort of shopvac, but I don't know what kind to get --- I probably want something where I can just suck up the water and let it go into the ground, not have to fill the tank, empty it out, fill the tank, empty it out a billion times. Who do I even ask this question? A hardware store? (I can't redirect the pump I already have elsewhere because the piping is all underground... I think. I should doublecheck that when it's not dark out.)
• How stupid of an idea is a king-size bed? (I have a lifestyle that occasionally but not often calls for three people sleeping in a single bed, or I would not evenbe considering this.) If it's not stupid, how expensive of an idea is it? I'm used to platform beds with futon mattresses, and knew how to shop for those mostly, but then Dream On Futon in Cambridge closed and it turns out all I know how to do is buy things from them that are good and buy things from Amazon that look good but are actually kind of shitty. It's not even that I expect the Internet to have the answer to the question "what bed do I want, if any" --- that's a synthesizing-information thing that I'm good at --- but I don't even know where to start. Bonus points for things that aren't "go somewhere where people will try to sell me something," although I guess at some point if I decide I want to upgrade I will need to patronize an establishment and disburse funds.
• I think I answered this last one with a duckduckgo search, so nevermind.

Thanks for reading, even if you don't have any suggestions. :)

Comments

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this. "Awesome" and "disrespectful of pronouns" aren't synonymous.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree, but that's a value I hold and not a value they hold? And while if they're still doing this in five years I'm not going to have the patience, I don't want to give up on cool people just because we don't share that. It's not even that they care that I'm trans --- they know and don't care --- but they don't get gender-neutral pronouns, it's outside their experience, and it's not something they were taught or believe in strongly.

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Among my current group of friends I'm the only one who can even somewhat consistently use gender-neutral pronouns and I still have trouble sometimes, despite working to incorporate them into my vocabulary for more than a decade. I just don't stop to think when I reach for a pronoun in every day conversation. Swapping to "they" is easy for me in a way that "zie" or other options aren't, but I know for other people it isn't. (I grew up in a place where, for some reason, people routinely used "they" as a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun.) However, for other people who didn't hear it used that way, it isn't going to be in the "bucket 'o pronouns" when they reach for a pronoun.

I do think exposure to other people using the correct pronouns helps, and possibly helps more than corrections. Corrections don't necessarily lead to internalized "this is how that word is used". That is, I don't think it's necessarily personal to them. Obviously it is personal to you, and reminding them of that may provide the motivation for them to figure out some way to add this pronoun to their vocabulary, but they might not know how to do that and if they don't have some technique that works all the reminders in the world won't succeed. On the other hand, if there is some way to immerse them in a world where "they" is a 3rd person singular pronoun it will eventually start sounding normal.

I do think language learning and modification is a skill. When I was learning German, my German teacher had us recite conjugated verbs over and over in a sing-song voice until they just started to sound right. That's the approach I took with zie, practicing using it until it stopped sounding notable. If I don't use it for a while, I lose that sense of normalcy, but if I hadn't had experience with a technique that worked for me I don't even know how I'd have gone about it in that first place.