Ace Moments

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple, and today we are just going to have a casual little chit-chat, toss around some stories, because a few of these moments have been haunting me. But they are in fact, to me at least, classic ace moments. And I’m hoping that for our ace listeners, there will be some of you out there who find some of these stories relatable. Or if nothing else, for our allo listeners, you can get a little peek into the little moments of mortification that we so often live with. The first story I have today, is it an ace moment? Yes. But it’s also a not very online person moment. I’ve gotten a little better. I’ve spent more time online. I’ve learned the ways of the internet, sometimes far more than I would prefer. And this was years ago now. I’m thinking like, old school website. How do we explain like the old ’90s websites to people who weren’t on them?

Royce: What aspect? Let’s start with what site you’re talking about.

Courtney: It was a fandom website. It was like, the screen was black.

Royce: Did it have like little animated twinkling things in the margins and text that was almost impossible to read?

Courtney: Very much that vibe, yes. And this wasn’t in the ’90s, it was just an older website. And I mean early 2000s as well. This was maybe mid-2010s I came across this relic of a website. And it was for the Lemony Snicket fandom for A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I am extraordinarily fond of. I love those books. I was really pleased with the Netflix adaptation TV series of it when that came out a few years back. I am a big fan of Edward Gorey, and I love how heavily influenced these books are by Gorey’s work. And mind you, I found myself on this website as someone who had never written fanfiction before in my life. But because I woefully misunderstood the call to action, I was so excited by the prospect, I was fully prepared to sit down and write my own fanfiction for the very first time ever, because I just happened to pop in during Ship Week. Now, in case any of you are not familiar- Royce is already grinning at me.

Royce: I was trying to figure out the context for this story, and I, I’m on board now.

Courtney: Aha! All aboard! So for those of you who are not familiar with A Series of Unfortunate Events, each novel has a very drastically different setting. One is set in a reptile house, one is set in a boarding school, like, there is a distinct new flavor of place where all of these unfortunate events are taking place. One of them is in a submarine also! So when I- and this is the way, this is the way this website stated things. The way they explained to poor ace, not very online Courtney, they said this is a week to write your own fanfiction of A Series of Unfortunate Events that has to do with a ship. And I was like, of course, of course there could be a fanfiction book where they’re on like a pirate ship.

Royce: Of course.

Courtney: Of course.

Royce: Your favorite pirate ship.

Courtney: Your favorite pirate ship. I was like, wow, the possibilities are endless. And I was so excited. I was like, I’ve never written fanfiction before, but I like A Series of Unfortunate Events and I’ve been handed a prompt: put them on a ship.

Royce: How far into this did you get before you understood?

Courtney: I was explaining this concept to someone the next day and how excited I was to get started and how I already had ideas. Turns out that’s not what ship means. And I had already known by this point that, like, shipping is a thing. I was familiar with that. I just hadn’t ever waded into like the deep dark depths of online discourse concerning ships in fandoms, so it wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind. And concerning a ship, like something that has to do with a ship, I was like, what other ship is there? Put ’em on a big boat. That is very much in theme with this series of novels. I can do that. So needless to say, I have still never written a fanfiction to this day. Classic ace moment. Another classic ace moment that I find myself falling into time and time again, less so these days, but for a strong majority of my life, and far later into life than one might expect. And I’ve talked to other aces who have had this same thing, like, innuendo in music, especially like song lyrics, and just not registering that the song is about sex.

Royce: Yeah, that’s an interesting one. Because sometimes those can fully be ace things. And sometimes it can just be a, you heard the song in the background, and you never really listened to the lyrics, or like, maybe you heard the clearer parts of the chorus, but not the rest of the song. And so you, you were thinking about it without context.

Courtney: Yeah. And I think just about everyone can relate to this, because I think most people, ace or otherwise, have stories of like, hearing an inappropriate song as a child and not knowing what it meant, and then later in life being like, ohhh. Like, that, that is a thing that lots of people can relate to. But to, to really drive home how bad it can be for me, a few years ago, a song came out called Chaise Longue by Wet Leg. And it was so catchy, and I was for a week going around the house chanting, on the chaise longue, on the chaise longue, on the chaise longue, all day long, on the chaise longue. For a week. For a week I was going around the house singing this, chanting this. It was so stuck in my head. And one day it just came to me out of nowhere. I was like, oh no! This song is about sex! But before, before that, I was like, yeah, we’re just gonna be lazy.

Royce: Yeah, what an anthem for being lazy.

Courtney: What?

Royce: Yes. I don’t want to do the work today.

Courtney: Exactly. Just yeah, let’s just lie around on a chaise longue, a dramatic article of furniture by the way, all day long and do nothing else. But that I have come to learn was not the original intention of those song lyrics. And that was not that long ago. When did that song come out?

Royce: ’21.

Courtney: Yeah, so not that long ago. Now, another song that I cannot listen to without thinking about this phenomenon is It Wasn’t Me by Shaggy. That was an older song. I was younger when I first heard it. It took still an embarrassingly long time for me to actually click what that song is about.

Royce: Didn’t you have like, a different interpretation? Like, you knew the song?

Courtney: Okay, so when, when the line, picture this, we were both butt naked banging on the bathroom floor, I was always like, what a weird thing to have me picture right now. And I like, I quite literally was picturing two full-grown adults on their hands and knees, like, slapping the floor, having like a toddler temper tantrum, like literally banging on the floor, not banging each other, never registered. And so when it’s like, oh yeah, she came in and caught me, she saw us doing that, I’m like, yeah, that would be a weird thing to walk into.

Royce: That would have been so embarrassing for you.

Courtney: You’ve got some explaining to do.

Royce: I had a delayed reaction to that song too, but it wasn’t quite the same. I remember being aware of the song, hearing it on the radio periodically, but just kind of passively listening to the tune and not really hearing the words. It wasn’t until one day when my mom was driving us either like to or from our grandparents’ house on the weekend, and the song came on and got a little ways in, and my mom like reached over and very quickly like switched the radio, which she- was abnormal behavior. And I was like, why did you do that? And she like brushed it off very quickly, like said something about that song, you know, not being good or something like that. And I said like, oh, what was it? And she said, well, did you hear it? And I was like, no, I was just listening to the tune. And so she flipped the radio back to the song and then I actually listened and I was like, oh.

Courtney: See, that, that’s just- I’m being oblivious to the lyrics of this, but now that someone made it weird and called it out and like called attention to it, now I’m listening.

Royce: Yeah, yeah. Which I feel like that’s- I don’t tend to have the I missed an innuendo part of the ace experience, and maybe that is something sort of just learned through you know, masking through social situations, or it could be like, there are some aspects of sex and sexuality that I think I, at least logistically, took as like a special interest, like, I want to understand these things.

Courtney: Let me study the ways of the allosexuals.

Royce: So yeah, a lot of the innuendo didn’t- it was oftentimes more oblivious for me than just completely misinterpreting the meaning of something.

Courtney: Yeah, which is interesting because this is something where I fear sometimes online, out of context, out of immediate community, there are some aces out there who never miss an innuendo. There are some aces who make innuendos of their own. There are some aces who enjoy a good sex joke. I’ve never been any one of those, and I know lots of aces on both sides of things. And I will very often, ’cause there is, you know, sort of an assumption that a lot of people might have that like, oh, aces are innocent, like they won’t understand your innuendo, they won’t like your sex joke. And some aces who are very much the contrary will vehemently push back on that and be like, aces are not innocent! Aces write the dirtiest smut you’ve ever seen in your life! And they’ll go like to the furthest, furthest extreme, just trying to drive home to the fact like, not all aces are innocent.

Courtney: But also like, I was always the innocent friend in any given friend group. Even before I actually came out as asexual and said that word to other people, I was the innocent one. I was the one missing innuendos because my brain never goes to sex first. That is not how I’m wired. It is never going to go to context first. And that is just how my brain works. So if someone uses the word ship, if it’s out of context, like I’ve dropped into a community I’m not familiar with, and someone says, write a story about a ship, I’m gonna be thinking about pirates. If someone says the word banging, I’m gonna think you, you know, have a hammer or you’re using your fists and you’re banging on something. Context obviously helps. And I’ve gotten much, much better about this over the years. Like, in the average group of people, I’m not missing most innuendos anymore. Some of them I still do, but I don’t want people to see the like, aces actually are, you know, aces make a lot of sex jokes and aces aren’t innocent. I don’t want anyone to see those comments and think that that is a universal experience either, because I know plenty of other innocent aces just like myself. And I’ll admit, like, innocent is not a good word to use. I wouldn’t consider it innocence because that sort of implies that sex is not innocent. And so we do need better language for what that is, but I’m using the word that society by and large uses and has used in this context.

Royce: Yeah, the word innocent is a bit infantilizing there because it’s also like synonymous with youth and the idea that it’s something to grow out of.

Courtney: Well, that’s a very good point because that’s the other reason why there’s so much pushback to that narrative. In discussions because ace people are so often infantilized. And that is a genuinely harmful societal phenomenon. So of course, when you hear the word innocent being applied to aces and you know all of the baggage that often comes with that word when you’re talking to a full-grown adult, for example, then it is that stigma that you’re wanting to push against. So I am very much in favor, like, oblivious, I think, is the word I tend to use for myself. Like, if someone does make a sex joke and it goes right over my head, I’m like, oblivious. Or to me, in my experience, I will just say ace moment. I mean, just about anyone I ever talk to at this point in time knows that I’m asexual. My people and my community know what I mean to my experience when I go, oh, ace moment.

Royce: Going back real quick to ship out of context, it is kind of funny that this was specifically with A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is a longish-running book series that you had read entirely to that- at that point. And there is, like you said, a submarine and an island and a book that all revolves around a lake. They are on some small boats. There’s a point in time when the main antagonist’s big disguise is a ship captain. So I can, I can see how you’d be like, well, they never went on like a proper ship adventure. They were around situations like that.

Courtney: Yes, yes. All of the characters are there. The, the history of disguises, the like, it’s perfect. I, I could picture it so clearly in my mind. I was almost inspired to write a fanfiction and yet ruined, ruined by shippers.

Courtney: So I guess I do have one more innuendo story. And this one kind of got both of us. It got me first, and then I had to consult you because I know you don’t miss innuendos as often as I do. So when, when I do, I tend to come to you to consult, like, would you have gotten this? Is this just me being absurdly oblivious? Or was there a gray area here? Or context needed? So we’ve got a very close friend, talk every day, gay man has a shirt that says top bunk. And I thought this was the weirdest thing to have on a shirt.

Royce: Oh yeah, yeah, completely out of context without a corresponding bottom bunk shirt. I mentioned that I wouldn’t have assumed that right off the bat.

Courtney: Well, that was exactly the conversation we have because I looked him dead in the eyes. And I said, is Top Bunk a brand?

Royce: I wouldn’t have thought of that. I would have just thought that I was like missing a joke or a cultural thing. Like, I mean, there are so many movies or TV shows or just general pop culture references that I don’t watch or remember enough to really get that. I, I would have, would have left it ambiguous without seeing the other half of that joke.

Courtney: Well, and that’s, that’s the thing. So he, he cracked up a little bit. He said, no dear, it’s a sexual innuendo. And I went, oh. And he says, yeah, my husband has one that says bottom bunk. And I’m like, well, if he was standing right here and you were both wearing those shirts, obviously that’s what it means. Obviously. But you took it out of context, and you can’t do that with me.

Royce: Yeah, when you mentioned that one, I had to ponder it a little bit, and I was thinking about the aspects of gay culture that I have seen the most of, and I feel like I’ve heard a lot more people making jokes about themselves being bottoms than tops as well.

Courtney: Well, because when I came back home that day and I was like, Royce, if you saw this t-shirt, do you know what it would mean? And you confirmed no. And when I explained it, you thought for a minute and went, huh, I guess I just don’t know that many tops.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: Which, by the way, he was tickled with that commentary. He’s like, yeah, there aren’t a lot of us out here. It’s rough. But no, I, I still hold that that was a contextual issue. I needed the corresponding shirt side by side, and then there would have been no question about it. That would not have gone over my head at all. But it does haunt me a little bit that the first thing I thought of was, this must be a brand I’m not familiar with, because why else would the words top bunk be on a shirt?

Royce: The reason why I jumped to maybe there is some kind of pop culture reference to this is just because if you think about bunk beds and camp retreats, or just, you know, activities where there are a lot of children, like over a summer activity, sometimes the top bunk is something that people get excited about.

Courtney: It’s aspirational.

Royce: I feel like I would have needed less context with bottom bunk because no one out of context prefers the bottom bunk.

Courtney: Honestly, yeah. If I saw his husband just wearing a bottom bunk shirt, I would have gotten it. I- and, and that also- this is the problem. We need to diversify our friend group. We only have one close friend who is a top, therefore we have not gotten nearly as immersed in the culture of tops. But you’re right, I mean, top bunk, like, that’s kind of a- that’s kind of a king of the mountain kind of a thing.

Royce: I- it is plausible to me that that would have been a reference to something that I was not privy to.

Courtney: So I, I do want to tell everyone when we accidentally got our neighbor’s package delivered to our door.

Royce: Oh, that was- this- so I feel like this is gonna be- this would be embarrassing for anyone. It would make it worse because Ace. But one day many years ago, we got a package on our doorstep, that happens often enough. It was a small box.

Courtney: I, I recall it being a medium-sized box because I think it was way too big for its contents.

Royce: It was larger than its contents, but it was like- the largest dimension of the box was not longer than my hand, like base of my hand to my fingertips, like maybe that size. But it was also around a time where I think we had a pending order, like we were expecting something. We were. I wasn’t expecting something on that day, but something was coming soon enough that I just grabbed the box and I didn’t look at the label, and then I grabbed a box cutter and opened it, and I saw a mostly empty box with a single, like, travel-size bottle of lubricant. And then I went, huh, I didn’t order that. And I-

Courtney: This isn’t mine.

Royce: I closed the box and it’s like, oh, the address is two off. It’s our neighbor to this side. I went, well, I just cut right through the label. There’s no- it wasn’t like- this is one of the boxes where they put the shipping label on top, so there’s no like taping this back up.

Courtney: Well, and this is a neighbor who we had never had a proper conversation with.

Royce: I spoke to them for like a minute or two when we moved in.

Courtney: And there was maybe one instance where like their pizza got delivered to us, so we had to like run it over and knock on their door and say like, hey, here’s your pizza. But with a bottle of lubricant, we aren’t exactly going to do that. When they know we’ve opened it. So you called me down, showed me the situation, and we were like, fuck, what do we do? Yeah, so we hatched a scheme to drop it on the doorstep in the dead of night.

Royce: This was before doorbell cams are super common.

Courtney: Yeah, so there was maybe less than a 50/50 chance that he had a doorbell camera. So we’re like, if we just, in the dead of night, run as fast as possible, drop the box off, run back home, then maybe he won’t know that we’re the ones who opened it. And then maybe we can make eye contact next time we see him mowing his yard. And it was like a whole mission. We had a time planned out. I stayed at the front door. You were like, I’m gonna run, ’cause I can’t run. So you’re like, I’m gonna go as fast as possible. We’re hyping ourselves up. It really- it could have been an overly dramatized, like, slice of life scene in an anime. Well, I think it really could have been.

Royce: I think you’re overdramatizing the retelling right now a little bit.

Courtney: No, it- that is not my recollection of it one bit.

Royce: Well, it became- as soon as I saw what it was and shared it with you, it became a bit of a joke. Here’s this absurdist situation. There’s another-

Courtney: And that’s why we were acting absurd, because it was like, okay, I’ll open the door and go, go, go.

Royce: Yeah, and I mean, that situation was already awkward, but the fact that we didn’t really know this person, didn’t really know necessarily their, like, orientation or lifestyle or anything like that- they lived mostly alone but were divorced.

Courtney: Yeah, and that’s the thing too, because it actually- if it was someone we happened to know really well or be friends with, then that you know, awkward uncomfortableness wouldn’t have been a problem. We’d probably just text him and be like, hey, we got your lube, if it was like someone we knew. But we did not know this guy at all. We did not know anything about his situation. So it’s like, well, because I have to imagine, not everybody, but I have to imagine that was probably pretty awkward for him to see, oh, here is my lubricant opened. With my name and address on it. So I’m sure that was not a pleasant day for him either.

Royce: I’m trying to figure out the time for that. I think it might have been before Amazon had standardized taking pictures of packages on doorsteps too.

Courtney: Oh, probably, because I don’t remember that being a concern of ours.

Royce: Yeah, because sometimes we have gotten pictures of a package of ours that has the number for the house in the picture and it’s not the right delivery address.

Courtney: Yes, well then you know whose house to go to when they don’t drop it off at your doorstep. So I talked about songs that I misunderstood, but there is one song that I understood perfectly and was mortified several months ago. Going away party, for a friend I met through the local business community. She was a sex coach, very queer-affirming, and after meeting me, very ace-affirming also, which is great because we have also talked about some of the horribly offensive, like, PR pitches we get about sex coaches, which seem like a little too close to conversion therapy, uh, to be anywhere near appropriate, talking to us. But she was moving, went to the going away party, got invited to that, and we ended the night with karaoke. And I heard a song that I did not know existed. Never heard it before that time, and now someone is singing it live just a couple of feet from me. And that song was called At a Medium Pace. A song so obvious about what it’s singing about, there is no room to misconstrue it whatsoever.

Royce: Oh, that is an Adam Sandler song.

Courtney: Yeah, I’m just gonna say you listeners are gonna have to look up the lyrics on your own because I’m not repeating these on microphone or ever.

Royce: So I can think of one big ace moment for me, but it wasn’t like a social misunderstanding or like song lyrics or anything that we have talked about. It was just something that felt really jarring while dating, and I was probably late teens or early 20s at this point. It was before asexuality was really on my radar, at least by a few years. And this moment has stood out to me quite a bit when I try to, like, think back to figuring out why dating felt the way that it did to me and, like, how it may have differed, because that’s something that people by and large don’t really talk about, or they talk about in very vague terms. When- that’s why it’s so difficult sometimes to explain asexuality to people who haven’t heard about it, because you try to break down like romantic attraction or aesthetic attraction or sexual attraction, and you just get like blank stares.

Royce: But there are aspects about meeting someone new that you’re interested in and getting to know them and the whole process of courtship that was exciting to me in a way that is difficult for me to explain oftentimes. I’ve said- I believe I’ve said before on the podcast that there are some aspects of, I guess, roleplay is maybe a good way to describe it? Where I theoretically understand what I’m supposed to do in this situation, and the combination of demonstrating that I understand that well enough to get a, you know, good feedback, and also, I guess, viscerally feeling someone else’s emotions or excitement if, you know, the two of us are communicating well in that vein. Like, that is exciting.

Royce: And I think there’s also something akin to, I guess, the way that like visual novels or video games work, where there is an objective and a progression. I think that I found myself early in relationships, sometimes accelerating things because it’s like, oh well, we’re at this point in the relationship, and so this is the next stage of the relationship that society has dictated is supposed to come. And then there’s this after that.

Courtney: Ah yes, the socially mandated relationship escalator, right?

Royce: And like, the feeling of change, the feeling of progress, and of, you know, getting to know someone better through that, that was also exciting. But I found myself one day talking to someone who I’d been talking to for a while. This was someone who was remote. We were texting, and the texts were getting sexual in nature, and this wasn’t the first time, but this was the first time that she mentioned sending pics back and forth. And I remember being there and being excited about, again, the change, the progress, the variety, the new information. And this was old flip phone time period, T9 texting. If you got an image, it would load progressively from top to bottom, and it would take a while. And I remember this whole process leading up to actually receiving the picture. I remember feeling excited and then I remember the picture loading and it- I could have been sent a video of paint drying or of like grass growing. It wasn’t disgust, it wasn’t repulsion, it was just the least interesting thing I had ever seen.

Courtney: All this hype and for what?

Royce: The contrast of it. Like going from having this exciting back and forth with someone to just like nothing. It was such a stark contrast that I had to like pause and go like, wait a minute, what? Hold on. Like, because I had, I had seen pornography at that point. I know that that had some kind of effect, not in the same way that like relationships and other like actual people that I’m communicating with. So I was going through this process and it’s like, it’s- it’s not just that it’s, you know, an amateur photograph on a poor phone camera with bad lighting. Like, that’s not what it is. I inspected that. It’s not the image itself. It’s that, like, whatever this process is of communicating with another person-

Courtney: You determined she just wasn’t a terrible photographer?

Royce: Like, it wasn’t- a better photo wouldn’t have mattered in this situation. It was this process. It was the, you know, the sharing of images was not something that I actually cared about. And- and that was jarring enough that I think that was the first very distinct time- From both an asexual and an autistic perspective throughout my whole life, I have had little situations where I- it’s occurred to me that: wait a minute, I’m not like a lot of the people around me. That was a very blunt, like, I am not experiencing what most other people are in these situations sort of thing.

Courtney: Was that one of the defining moments that actually led to you learning about asexuality? Or did that come later yet?

Royce: I don’t have a clear progression track. I don’t really remember how asexuality got on my radar, where the word came from. I know that I thought about that moment periodically from time to time. So it definitely stuck.

Courtney: It is really interesting to hear you talk about that past experience and liking the roleplay of texting. Because now we play so much D&D, we’re getting into other TTRPGs, and you’ve recently said things like, you know, playing a roleplaying game with people and developing a story together is like the peak of mental stimulation for me.

Royce: There’s a lot of creativity that goes into storytelling, and situations where you’re choosing your words very carefully. And I think it’s that aspect of thought or like thinking through a situation that is often very stimulating. But it’s also just variety. If you are talking to an individual person or a group of people and the conversation spins off into its own unique thing, that is going to be very different than, you know, a lot of other things you’ve seen before. And I think there’s a fundamental need for varied stimulation, or I think that I burn out on things that are too similar too frequently. And so roleplaying is a good way to get into situations that are different enough from what you’re commonly experiencing.

Courtney: So do you think up until getting the picture, it was really just the novelty? And you use the word creativity in terms of roleplaying games, but was text roleplaying kind of the same? Stimulation and you just hadn’t figured out what about it was interesting to you?

Royce: It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say uniquely because this was a romantic interest and there were some of those feelings mixed into it too. So it wasn’t solely just the, um, writing aspect. Like, there, there was something else there. There was interest in the person there and also in the activity, and it’s kind of hard to- for me to draw a line. Distinctly between those things.

Courtney: And as soon as you get a picture, you’re like, nope, don’t like that.

Royce: Not even “don’t like that.” It’s like the lead-up was interesting, but the actual thing didn’t do anything. And now what do we do?

Courtney: This was supposed to be good. I was supposed to like this. See, that, that’s what I think is so interesting about the entire spectrum of asexuality, because you could get someone’s nude, I assume it was a nude, you didn’t say that word, and you’re like, this is the most boring thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Anytime I’ve ever gotten a nude, I’m like, oh, disgusting, why did- no, stop, why did you do this? And so those are two very different reactions, but they’re both still pointing to the fact that we are fundamentally experiencing a lack of sexual attraction to other people, and that is why people talk about asexuality as a spectrum, and that’s why it’s important to talk about different facets of the spectrum.

Courtney: And even though you and I are in different places of the spectrum as individuals, we’ve been quite compatible as a relationship also. Which we probably should do an episode at some point about just ace dating in general, maybe give some dating stories or some common experiences in the community. Because it’s very obvious that I, on the sex repulse side of the spectrum, have struggled to find healthy relationships with allosexual people. Not to say it couldn’t ever happen, but it is extremely difficult. There is sort of, I think, a general sense of if you’re more on the sex-neutral or even favorable side of the spectrum, that having a relationship with an allo should be super easy and no big deal because you can just basically, you know, be allo-lite. You can just perform allosexuality because it’s not gonna bother you, and then everything’s all well and good. And that’s not how that works either.

Royce: In my experience, it was pretty easy for a few weeks, and then problems started to arise. But that’s again, hard to differentiate sometimes, the issues that hit more of an ace-allo relationship and the issues that hit more of my flavor of autism, potentially with a neurotypical person or a different area of neurodivergence that we didn’t have the language to talk through. Because I think I’ve mentioned before that I feel like meeting a new person and entering a relationship felt very special interest-y, and when that special interest would sort of ramp down, trying to resolve that was very tricky.

Courtney: Yeah, I think that would be definitely worth talking about more at length, because in, in both of the cases you mentioned, both asexuality and neurodivergence, those are a deviation from what society has decided is the norm, the standard. And mixed orientation relationships can work, interabled relationships can work, but so often society will look at whoever is further from the norm and say, make yourself a little more normal to make this work. Very rarely is there a concerted discussion about the quote normal person- again, I’m using society’s words, not the correct words- very rarely are they looking at the normal person and saying, hey, why don’t you do some work? Why don’t you make some compromises? Compromises, or really interrogate what it is about these things that work for you or don’t work and sort of do all of the emotional work that’s needed to get to that point.

Courtney: But while we’ll get into that more in the future, I think that is going to be all for today. Hopefully you enjoyed and perhaps related to some of our funny ace moments. And we are going to send you off as always with today’s featured Marketplace vendor: Celtic Dragoness Arts. You can find artwork, jewelry, and merchandise designed by a disabled biromantic tattoo artist. I’ll put a link to their shop in the show notes on our website and the description box if you’re listening on YouTube.

Courtney: But we have a lot of cool designs here, a lot of animal-based designs. I see some snakes. It looks like a ball python smiling. Very adorable. Obviously we love snakes. We’ve also got some prehistoric creatures. I have like a rainbow pride Liopleurodon, which, this being a Redbubble shop, you can get just a print of, you can put it on a t-shirt, you can put it on all kinds of merchandise, so whatever you are looking for there. And some other various pride things. We’ve got, for example, a pansexual pride dragonfly poster. Or there are just a lot of cool word-based designs. I really like this sticker that says be bold in a very bold font. It looks like Celtic Dragoness is based out of the UK, so if any of our UK listeners are in the market for a tattoo, maybe do a little searching and try to find them and see if you can get some work done. I love our ace tattoo artists. We’ve got a couple of them here on the Marketplace.

Courtney: So, as always, thank you all so much for being here, and we will talk to you all next time. Bye-bye!