So today we have a guest post for the first time in a long time… maybe 3 years (I’m leaving it to my editor to find out how long it has been because I’m making it his job :D [Editor’s Note: Actually it’s 2 years and 29 days sir; we must always be precise!]) Anyway back to the introduction; the person writing today bothered me all week to get this post up - I may lose my life for mentioning that. I’ve known him for the the last 8 years since high school. He was a classmate and quite literally my wingman during those years. He’s annoying, funny, clever and very big. When he’s not pestering me he also blogs at The Spectator. I’d like you all to put your hands together for the writer known as Ron!!!

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. For the next week,every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll be featuring a number of posts that I read a long time ago from Rainbow Amoeba’s Petri Dish . She called it Questioning Week.  They really inspired me, so much so that I started my very own Questioning Week inspired by the series of post I’m going to share with you during the coming week

 So this is another guest post by another firend of mine! Actually the girl I told you about here and here. Yeah Mich, that awesome awesome girl I told you about. Well she wrote this for my a long time ago and I was supposed to put it up back then but I’ve been busy and lazy! So anyway here it is now…

So I’m sure that not many of us know that this is Kid Cudi’s 2nd LP that is to be released later this year. I’m sure someone knows what Man on the Moon means, and I used to at a point, but since I’ve forgotten, pardon the meaning I’ll give it today.
We all know our brains have two sides, just like the moon, a bright side and a dark side. So taking the brain to be a moon, we’d say that there’s a man on my moon right now, and his story is quite like Kid Cudi’s, so its the legend of Mr. Rager.
In the dark side of my brain, Mr. Rager is a guy who’s gone through quite so much in his life, he should be as dark as the universe without stars, but in the bright side, he’s just reflecting sunlight off him to everyone who cares to get warm.
But there’s something about this guy, he’s just sticking on the moon, without any plans of getting down to earth, he’s getting comfortable on the moon, because its like he’s forgotten that even though people will always disappoint him, he’ll run out of oxygen one day….
Now that I’m running out of metaphors… I guess I’ll stop there, because this is not my kinda thing, and I’m not wont to say things just like that…so I shall talk about man on the moon 2…
He’s the guy who constantly runs around the moon, trying to stay in the light, as the moon rotates alot, and he’s always there to brighten up my nights. I’ve gone to the extent of building castles in the air for this guy, hoping that he’ll find it, because he’s trying to get off the moon, and I wouldn’t want him to get hurt on his way to earth. Soon enough, he’ll catch his flight on Cloud Nine, and he’ll become real to me….because he’s just a figment of my imagination. But I’d have him anyday over my first man on the moon…who for now is the only man on the brain.
I don’t know if that will make sense to anyone but me,but everyone should get a copy of The Legend of Mr. Rager, and actually listen to what he has to say, because I think there’s a lot going on beneath his cheesy smile.

This is a short story written by one of my best friends. It’s my very first guest post so I look at it as part of the growth of my blog. You know showing that other people don’t mind their work appearing here and actually might appreciate it being put up. Look out for another guest post soon!! 

Sunsets always brought out the beauty I wanted to see. Every day, the sunset looked different to me. That day, I had been looking at the sunset for a really long time. As the sun continued to set, I saw everything in a new light. It was the most beautiful blend of colors ranging from orange to pink and just the lightest touch of purple. It reminded me of him and what he meant to my life.