I Do Wish My Experience Of Having Feelings (this Isn't Me Being Vague, I Do Very Generically Mean 'having

Chameleon by Mansur Mughal, c.1612

cracked open the glossaire érotique (1861) and was immediately floored by the very first word in the dictionary being "abailardiser" (verb). definition: "to leave someone in the state the canon fulbert left abailard" (castrated)

"Fig. 44. Butterfly" from the Priscilla Irish Crochet Book No. 2" edited by Eliza A. Taylor

[h/t @‍elodieunderglass]

just having one of those little upswell-of-gender-despair moments, you know how it is

specifically of the nonbinary variety where like. you know you don't really like how you look¹ or how other people react to you but the Opposite Version wouldn't really be better, really you want something in-between or ambiguous or nothing at all but that isn't actually a real option you get to have in real life, in real life you either get to be a mannish woman whose real gender desires are a painful secret or you get to become Pronoun Pin Guy and then are still effectively seen [and treated!] as a mannish woman, just, you know, a crazy, annoying one

i mean obviously part of the problem here is that i don't really have nonbinary/agender/&c people in my life, i'm super isolated and then even my internet circles have historically been comprised of like. trans people μέν who care about medical transition but not about the language other people use for them (which to be clear is perfectly valid but like. unfortunately my maybe-deepest identity is 'poet (non-practicing)' and i care so much about language. [i may or may not also care abt (some aspects of) medical transition but like. i don't atm have any health insurance or income and also due to the ongoing cptsd frozen-rabbit psychological situation it's a bit hard to tell what ""i"" might ""want"" so. question mark there]). cis+ people δέ who basically are like 'well the real practical, adult approach is just to accept that one's Basically Materially Cis unless one's strongly motivated to medically transition, but, like, your special-snowflake baby sensitivities are Valid or whatever…'² which, again, you have to let people frame things for themselves and pretend it doesn't imply anything abt you, because if nothing else, your differences of inclination wrt how to frame things make your situations different! but unfortunately, even though i do genuinely intellectually believe that, emotionally it hurts my feelings every time, because i really resent this idea that like. cis is the box everyone starts in + stays in unless they kick hard enough to get out of it. bodies shouldn't mean anything by default!!

⸻ ¹ i think this gets worse every time the season changes and i have to re-figure out how to walk the extremely narrow sartorial line i can actually bear, is part of what's going on here ² to be clear and fair to the people in question the level of superiority i've portrayed here is entirely my projection onto them, it's not on them that this stance makes me feel this way, it just does :/

spent some time this afternoon attempting to restart the sock project i ragequit in march, which was frankly a major triumph purely on the Overcoming Psychological Inertia front, even though in practical terms i didn't really get much forrarder?

for context: i taught myself how to knit in like january and knit one (1) thing, which was a giant neon cowl with giant yarn on giant circular needles, and then was like, ok well i have one million hats so. maybe not one of those next, even though it wld otherwise probably be logical. …sox r also basically tubes, right? which was, uh, a pretty hubristic leap in difficulty—i mean, 'tinier' isn't really conceptually more complicated, and in theory dpns are just, like, if a circular needle were segmented instead; but in practice 'tinier' is trickier and more stressful, for me at this stage in my knitting non-career anyway, and dpns are. very extremely not my friend so far.

i of course haven't been helping myself by attempting to do an italian tubular cast-on, which in fairness to me i didn't actually find prohibitively difficult to do flat when i originally tested it; but since it starts out as just, like, a series of twists that aren't actually locked in until a row or three down the line, i wasn't confident that the stitches wouldn't just unravel on me if i twisted the dpns the wrong way while attempting to get set up…

anyway i do think i learned some things today and tomorrow [or maybe more realistically friday, bc tomorrow i gotta play chauffeur] will be another day, on which i will perhaps have more success! hoping at that point to arrive at an understanding of esoterica like 'how to arrange the needles that form the tube relative to one another' (i think it shouldn't actually matter which ones top, but i sure felt today like i was Doing It Wrong, lol) and 'how the fifth needle actually interacts with the other ones in order to, you know, actually knit anything…' :)

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.

Black Sun (1) - Denmark/Germany, 2025

Last Saturday, I had the chance to see the natural phenomenon known in Denmark as "Sort Sol" (Danish for "Black Sun"). Thousands of starlings flock together to create swirling patterns across the sky. This happened right after the sunset in the cold and windy marshes around the border of Denmark and Germany.

The starlings were quite far away from us and stayed low on the sky, flying just above the marshes. Hopefully next time, they will rise higher into the air, so there will a better separation between the starlings and the ground.

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.

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