Made It To The Transfer Station Before It Closed (task I Have Been Failing At For A Week) AND Nothing

"A growing number of people are and have been questioning the more usual representations of gender. Some have had chemical and surgical enhancement, and many have not. Inhabiting a less static gender identification than that of typical transsexuals, they are exploring and experiencing a fluid range of gender embodiment. My own intimate partner, Kayt is one such individual. Ironically it has been through knowing and loving her that I have gained an even deeper understanding of the mutable soul. Her flexible consciousness has encouraged me to be generous in my thinking, and less rigid about the way others self-define, or in fact, when they choose not to" - Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996) by Loren Cameron

Eurasian red squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (May 9, 2024).

Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (April 25, 2021).

I'm not gonna lie, after I walked around the corner and saw the stork, I was only able to express my surprise through a series of expletives.

Weißstorch (white stork) im Rosensteinpark, Bad Cannstatt.

[IDs: (1) Nine brands of butter substitute with increasingly desperate names:

is it butter?

isn't it butter

Could it be Butter?

I Think It Tastes Like Butter

You'd Think It's Butter!

What, not butter!

Unbelieveable… This is not butter

who needs butter!

Memories of Butter

and (2) a tag by Tumblr user @‍stripedtabbycat that reads:

#the emotional journey evoked by reading these in order is beautiful

/end IDs]

This is one of my favorites hand down

genuinely wild how often i realize i’ve taken an interpersonal situation where the information i actually have is ‘i’m not having a good time’ and turned it into ‘i’m worried they’re not having a good time with me’

probably ultimately very straightforwardly traceable back to a childhood in which i wasn’t having a good time with my mother and the only variable in the situation that i actually had the power to alter was myself, so that now when as an adult i’m having a bad time with someone my instinct is still to fix myself instead of, you know, removing myself? or alternatively checking in with them about how things are feeling to them and attempting to arrive at a meeting of the minds, or at least a mutually semi-satisfactory compromise?

anyway like. this failure mode probably implies a particular menu of followup actions that i ought to be identifying and instituting, but i’d frankly settle for just ‘recognizing this particular self-abnegating reframing when i’m in the process of committing it’!

A Brazilian opossum being presented to Queen Isabella of Spain in the year 1500 from The Zoogoer v.15:no.1 (1986).

Full text here.

Maxfield Parrish, The Young King of the Black Isles, 1906. Reproduced as a frontispiece in Collier's: The National Weekly, vol. 39, no. 8, 1907, p. 8, and as a full-page illustration in The Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales, edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909, between pp. 74 and 75.

The image above was sourced from the latter publication and has been straightened.

i was just thinking earlier in vague terms about a specific but weirdly prevalent thing which consistently bugs me, namely: when cis men attempt to be self-deprecating about their unfamiliarity with feminine things, except that of course it's not actually self-deprecating to bring up how categorically distant you are and have always been from a stigmatized practice…

and then ran into this post, in which a presumably-white anon attempts to be self-deprecating about their unfamiliarity with the racialized genres of hip hop and rap (specifically by characterizing themself as a[n implicitly uncool] 'blorbo enjoyer,' which of course—as @‍batmanisagatewaydrug correctly points out—has the knock-on effect of framing fandom as Not For People of Color, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is racist), which illustrates exactly the same dynamic along a different axis…

anyway i guess my point here is just (1) to note that yeah, this really does seem to be a pattern! and given that, (2) to underscore in my own mind that this is probably something for nerds vel sim. in particular to look out for, because we often have insecurity modifiers that makes us feel like we're not ~really~ solidly part of the privileged group, which seems to make us feel like disclosing our ignorance can somehow constitute a self-deprecating self-own, rather than an offputting humblebrag about the privilege that made it possible…

A tiny oasis of spring