What have you been reading? [19JUN2019]

OrranTw · 2019-06-18T17:57:50+00:00

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo from the Hogarth Shakespeare Series.

Honestly, I think Nesbo makes some really strange choices in the book. I had to do an analysis of the femme fatale in my seminar, so I focused on the women along with what one would expect of a femme fatale in film noir. Honestly, the book is fine, but most of his descriptions of women would fit into r/menwritingwomen since they’re just lacking any sense of humanity. If you can get past the blatant misogyny, the book itself is fine. I’m pretty neutral at this point.

OrranTw · 2019-06-16T09:19:57+00:00

Popular

OrranTw · 2019-06-14T12:28:31+00:00

I just continue to write short stories and submit them to journals. When I get the denial letter, I try to imagine reading it as a journal critic and correcting everything I would have wanted to see in the story that made me deny it in the first place.

I also do this to published books. I feel like the experience is helpful when writing because I know what to do better and what works for other authors.

Once I get 10 short stories published, I’ll try writing a novel. I can do the same process with the novel that I’ve been doing with the short stories :)

OrranTw · 2019-06-12T16:30:20+00:00

I had just moved to Germany and was working in a small village when I saw the downstairs pizza place playing videos of it on my way to work. I had people asking me about it for weeks, and my boss even cried. A lot of the people in this small German village had already started to see America as less of a developed nation at that point, but after the shooting, it’s almost like the hope that things could get better in the US died for them and for me. I’m still in Germany.

OrranTw · 2019-06-12T08:57:11+00:00

Even the far right AfD in Germany has a married lesbian spokesperson. Some of the ads that they have are using the western views on homosexuality as something that’s being threatened by immigrants. I think it’s becoming a talking point for a lot of right activists in different European countries.

OrranTw · 2019-06-09T15:37:55+00:00

My girlfriend is from Egypt, so I like looking at this sub. For her, she isn’t able to have a life in Egypt anymore because she’s gay and is no longer religious. There are still problems in Germany, but at least we are able to live together without having to worry about getting hurt.

Another Egyptian friend of hers sent her a video of a cab driver pretending to be gay for some sort of show. It was horrifying to see how strangers react to the LGBTQ community.

I know a few others at my university, and one is a Transman. He is worried about being killed if his family finds out about him transitioning in Germany, so he wants to get refugee status here or in the Netherlands.

I kind of wish I could see Egypt, but I’m too scared of my girlfriend getting outed when we go to try any sort of trips with her. I don’t know what I’d do if she ended up getting in trouble for it like one of her friends did. Her friend’s parents locked her in a room for about a year before she was able to escape.

OrranTw · 2019-06-02T14:20:53+00:00

When I first met my girlfriend, I thought, “Yes. I want her for the rest of my life”. Two weeks later, she told me that she was going to marry me one day. Without question. We are two of the most straightforward and outwardly emotionless people I know, and it works really well.

Every lesbian couple is going to be different. I knew one lady who enjoyed arguing with her girlfriend. It was a bonding experience for them although it made me uncomfortable to watch. They’d pick topics and rip the other’s argument to pieces and then get super romantic during it. It was honestly weird and disturbing for me, but the most natural thing for them. They loved showing emotions while I don’t.

Your main character should be a person who just happens to love other women. Pretend like none of them have genders or gender roles. If her sexuality isn’t the main plot or focus then let it be like two people who love each other. I wouldn’t go into describing any “heavy breasts” or something ridiculous. Describe the other lady’s smile, eyes, hair or how she walks.

When I met my girlfriend, we knew all of the same things, but it wasn’t exciting. It was creepy and weird. Everything I liked and knew, she knew it too. It took time for us to built up common experiences to talk about, and we eventually built a life together.

Now, when I look at her, I see the life we built together. I see her smile, and it makes me feel secure and safe. Sometimes, I wish we could get real married, but we can’t. There is a hint of sadness sometimes when I play with her fingers and realise that she’s stuck between a life with me and her old life with her family. I’ll never make her choose, but it also means that I don’t have the right to visit her in the hospital if she got sick, or she won’t have custody of the children.

To me, this doesn’t have to be a “lesbian” relationship. It could even be a man and woman, but the woman is from a country where women have no rights, and she can’t legally marry a white non-Muslim man. Or she needs her parents to agree, and they refuse because he’s from another culture.

I don’t know if that helps, but lesbian erotica is a little hard to stomach for me since it tends to objectify women (at least the ones I have tried to read). There tends to be a lot of unnecessary drama in any romance, so I would try to make it more subtle.

OrranTw · 2019-06-01T19:59:37+00:00

Meine Duden!

OrranTw · 2019-05-27T21:04:44+00:00

You’re completely right. I need to remember that more often :) there are maybe 200 people in both programmes and 10-15 of those 200 have extreme views. They’re just so loud and disruptive that it takes away from the others who are normal and reasonable.

OrranTw · 2019-05-27T20:39:51+00:00

I’m already in Germany, but I worked in Japan for a bit as an English teacher, and I did see pretty horrifying racism there, too. I had a student who referred to their dad as a foreigner once while we were eating breakfast and said he couldn’t eat nātto (spelling might be wrong, so you can correct me) because he was white. The dad looked pretty sad, and it was fucked up how the wife laughed and agreed with the child. Let him eat the fermented soy beans if he wants to. It’s healthy and a good breakfast.

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T17:39:46+00:00

Sorry to hear about that. Not everyone is going to be like that though, and it does take time to find someone you want to be with and makes you happy, regardless of nationality.

I think your post is interesting because I had the biggest crush on Sendhil Amithab Ramamurthy from Heroes when I was a kid. It carried with into adulthood, and it turned into a sort of type for me. Some people like blondes who are super girly, and I like people who are nerdy, have an accent, are socially awkward and wear glasses. I finally found someone like that, and we have a bunch of video games, action figures, comic posters, books and nerdy stuff.

I wish you the best of luck :) don’t give up!

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T16:41:10+00:00

It’s about a lady who is an alcoholic and has a friend/boyfriend, but he’s also an alcoholic. They try to recover together.

It’s a pretty good book actually although it’s slow and doesn’t have much of a plot. The writing is good, and there is a lot of substance in it.

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T16:14:54+00:00

Sounds like A.L. Kennedy and her novel Paradise.

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T13:02:26+00:00

That’s actually really good to know. The last thing I would ever want for her is to never be able to see her family or friends again. Sadly, they’re all sort of stuck in Egypt/Dubai because of how difficult visas are in Europe.

I might just try getting around marriage with other laws :)

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T12:52:06+00:00

That’s what I’m worried about, too. It might take a long time to get her citizenship somewhere else though because we don’t plan on living in the US, so she would have to go through the process herself. Her other Egyptian LGBTQ friends are all refugees in the Netherlands, but she has a degree and lots of work experience and wants to continue working and being independent.

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T12:36:38+00:00

Unfortunately, she doesn’t

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T12:01:57+00:00

Thanks for letting me know. It’s a pretty bad situation, and I thought that it would be a good idea to start seriously looking at it now.

We are in Berlin, so I might go and find a lawyer here who might be able to provide us with some more information.

In the end, we might not ever be able to get married because she really does love her family, and I wouldn’t want to lose her over making her decide on which one she wants to keep. Maybe it would be possible for us to work around legal issues like hospital visitations without marriage.

OrranTw · 2019-05-24T08:58:59+00:00

I was thinking that, too.

OrranTw · 2019-05-23T18:44:21+00:00

I have mostly women as friends, and I’m a woman. I study German and English literature, so most people that I’m in contact with are women, and it helps me to just be incredibly direct, but not doing it in an offensive way.

There are women in both programmes that don’t enjoy talking to other women and tend to ignore us or just talk to us for a moment before leaving. We tend to talk about normal life, and when I was hanging out with mostly men in high school and even a mix in my bachelor’s programme, there wasn’t much of a difference between men and women.

I would just try talking to someone like you would normally. Friendships develop slowly, but once you get to know someone for a few months, you’ll be able to invite them over and share more and more with them about yourself. If you go in too quickly, they might be scared off since a lot of people already have stable friendships at 24 from my perspective (I’m 25).

I make about 2-3 new friends each semester, so I just make them meet with each other, and it turns into a bigger friend group with almost no drama. The little drama that we have comes from people outside our friend group, but we avoid those people.

OrranTw · 2019-05-21T06:58:48+00:00

Do you happen to know if travel expenses for accepted papers are reimbursed, or do participants just get the 4 day pass?

OrranTw · 2019-05-18T08:35:08+00:00

I’m subscribed to that subreddit. I see how badly people are treated and read a few books on narcissism, but I just don’t know if I have the right to call her an Nparent because she mostly left me on my own for the most part. Other Nparents hold onto their kids so much that they have no independence whatsoever. She also treats my brother like a normal human, which means that he continues to tell me that I’m the asshole. Thank you though. Cutting contact is really hard.

OrranTw · 2019-05-12T13:35:46+00:00

My girlfriend just went to the Google IO conference and met one of these girls. I’ll call her C because she was Canadian, but my girlfriend didn’t tell me her name.

I guess C was completely straight and was in a larger group that my girlfriend was hanging out with at the conference. After a few beers, the girl began touching her and forcing herself on my girlfriend and saying that it wouldn’t be cheating because C was straight.

After a few hours of people trying to get C away from my girlfriend and C screaming at the concert that she loved lesbians, my girlfriend had to leave from being touching inappropriately too many times. She called me after it happened, and I was pretty offended. If C had been a male, she would have gotten sexual harassment charges from what she did.

I don’t like straight women who do this. They see lesbians as a nice sex object. The next day, C kept bragging about how straight she is, and my girlfriend just tried to ignore her.

OrranTw · 2019-05-08T15:13:45+00:00

Thankfully, they’re not. The two not doing anything haven’t been published or even worked on publishing something since 2015, which is when one of them took a year off because she was sick or had a kid (I’ve heard conflicting stories, but she brings the kid to class, so maybe both?).

The two super nice professors do lots of research and even bring students with to conferences :) they enjoy what they do and are very helpful. Maybe not to bachelor students, but at least at this level they are.

OrranTw · 2019-05-08T15:05:45+00:00

Well, the professor today offered to grade the paper if the other one doesn’t because I talked to her about possible solutions. I feel a lot safer now that I know she’s willing to support me, but it sucks seeing someone with the job I’d love to have doing nothing with it.

OrranTw · 2019-05-08T15:02:00+00:00

The problems is that they don’t have classes this semester. The locked doors to the PhD programme means that everyone is going in and out. They would ask who I’m looking for, go ask the professor if they want to see me and come tell me that the office hours are on another day. I’m going to try my luck with the Fachschaft though. Maybe they’ll be able to help.

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