Experimenting With Wax Resist On This Cute Little Fellow

i do wish my experience of having feelings (this isn't me being Vague, i do very generically mean 'having literally any feelings at all about anything ever') didn't automatically involve a meta-layer of feeling viscerally humiliated by the fact of my having them

like any time i get irritated or upset about anything it almost immediately tips into 'well okay but probably i'm the problem here bc i'm Oversensitive and Irritable bc i've failed to construct a life for myself which makes me happy in a way that would cushion me against being bothered by these irritants, which in the philosophical scheme of things i recognize i should Rise Above' (in this framing i am apparently an oyster and happiness = nacre). and it's not that there's no potential truth to this line of thinking but it also feels a little like i imagine having one's emotions blamed on one's menstrual cycle would feel (disrespectful & humiliating)

with things like sadness-about-everything-and-nothing-in-particular or, idk, private delusional romantic hopefulness abt people (nothing recent in this category but i have been known to experience it from time to time) it's slightly different bc there the meta-feeling is less about my failure to respond appropriately to other people and more about, like, why am i not advanced enough to have evolved beyond these feelings. like 'i understand intellectually how unfounded and ultimately laughable i look right now and yet. despite my ability to observe myself i still continue to experience this (unpleasant, humiliating) experience. why can i not think my way out of it.' and of course this is more or less equivalent to saying 'why can't i think my way out of the human condition' which. hello. and yet!!

anyway i think none of this is helped by the fact that my nearest and dearest are largely deeply phlegmatic, pragmatic people, at least in terms of the affect they present to me, and so by comparison i feel deeply histrionic and stupid and childish at essentially all times: Local Man Secretly Dancing Bear (unlike aubreyad where dancing bear secretly man). the answer is presumably 'don't compare yourself! you are a different variety of Creature! #IDIC!' but unfortunately the comparative impulse is i think. again. pretty deeply human (for feelings on which, see above)…

a showcase of roman-nosed horses!

[ID: Wiktionary screenshot that reads:

Etymology Borrowed from Spanish burrito, diminutive of burro (“donkey”), from burrico (“donkey”), from Latin burricus (“small horse”), from burrus (“red-brown”), from Ancient Greek πυρρός (purrhós, “flame-colored”), from πῦρ (pûr, “fire”).

/end ID]

this burrito is fire

found out about inupiaq baleen baskets today. i really like them! a lot of them remind me of animals popping their head out of the water

Nicholas Makalik, Barrow, Alaska, 1963

Coiled Baleen Basket by Abe Simmonds Barrow, Alaska, 1954

by Andrew Oenga, 1981.

the Guardian

Trump signs executive order on water pressure to ‘restore shower freedom’

White House says order will ‘make America’s showers great again’ and ‘end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure’

somehow this is not an onion article.

gotta say tumblr's little pro-cursive revival has really reactivated early middle school memories of being forced to write up assignments in crabbed horrible cursive and hating it more with every letter whose setup i failed to properly anticipate far enough in advance to connect it smoothly (possibly bc adhd but like. hashtag guy who's only ever had adhd so what do i know.)

Gute Sheep/gutefår. Värmland, Sweden (April 24, 2020).

little pig made of glass and his brother, little pig made of glass made of paint

Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (March 16, 2025).

the thing about this post is that, in my experience, people don't complain about so-called smith college problems (which was always itself an awfully snide coinage) because they don't understand that they're localized problems; they complain about smith college problems because said problems are cropping up like caltrops in a subcultural space to which they belong, and rendering it hostile to them.

and obviously one can come up with examples of this dynamic it's very easy to portray as ridiculous and entitled, like the first two in this reblog: 'support women who shave their legs and wear makeup every day' and 'let's hear it for masculine men.' absurd! but the thing is, it's also very easy to imagine the sort of subcultural toxicity that would produce complaints like that: criticism of compulsory femininity, while hella justified, can very easily tip over into an anti-femininity that's liable to leave a lot of femmes feeling as though they're being sneered at, because, well, they are! similarly, a lot of this website is sufficiently misandrist¹ that it leaves very little room for eg trans men looking to lean into a masculinity that broader society tried to deny them. and then there's this reblog of the smith college problems post, that rolls its eyes at bisexuals who object to other-gender attraction being framed as necessarily straight, and the first reply to the more recent post, that says snidely 'normalize not transitioning,' as if there weren't plenty of queer spaces in which sneering at 'bihets' and 'theyfabs' is a nastily common pastime.

i don't, personally, think it's an accident that all these examples affect groups who exist in a liminal space between hegemonic acceptance and outgroup acceptance, and in practice end up feeling alienated by both types of space. and personally, i think we can and should do better; i think we have to disarm broader societal inequality by working towards actual equality, for everyone, and firmly refusing to indulge this persistent, pernicious urge to revenge that wants, so very badly, to just tilt the social seesaw in the opposite direction…

⸻ ¹ no, misandry does not per se count as oppression. it does, however, combine with other axes of oppression like Blackness, transness, queerness, &c, in complex ways. it's also just tar pit behavior, imo, when indulged in with any serious frequency.