yesterday i went to HELEMs(queer lib group in lebanon) christmas pot luck dinner. it was really fun. i am surprised i enjoyed it so much. i never ever ever have fun at these things. it always invariably ends up in a meltdown but it didn't this time even though the place was loud and smelt like cigarettes and full of people and had weird christmas lighting. i sat with another socially awkward penguin and we had awkward conversation about music. we both like stuff on the rock spectrum and were not pleased with the selection of christmas songs, remixes, arabic and rnb being played and got excited when an evanesence song came on and we started headbanging. by head banging i mean nodding our heads because we were in public. he likes mashrou' leila too. (my favourite band. indie arabic music) and he understood what i meant when i said that headbanging makes you happy. then the volunteer i talk to most and another person came and tried to get us to dance so we reluctantly got up and were spun around by various people which i admit was fun. one of the more pumped up people was throwing me around in an alarming manner. i liked dancing with the volunteer better- i don't know how to dance and he leads.
i liked it as well because it was a nice break from the rest of lebanon. it's good being in an environment where homophobia doesn't exist and there were straight people there but also because the rest of lebanon is so sectarian and this event had christians, athiests and muslims chilling together and celebrating a christian holiday. the same happens at muslim holidays at HELEM. was nice.
only down side was that i live far away and one of the volunteers dropped me off and i felt guilty because it took them ages. and also it was a car pool and a couple of the others got annoyed which made me feel guilty but one of them started joking about raping me. i don't like rape jokes ever but now even less so. it made me really uncomfortable, especially since we were in the area i got raped. on the plus side they all hate the army. actually they were really freaked out when we had to ask for directions, especially the transwoman since they would have picked on her the most, especially if we had to show ID. the army are homo/transphobic facists.