Raven, Drying In The Sun

unrelatedly changing seasons is always kind of a brutal renegotiation with the mysterious rules of dysphoria but i WISH i understood why like. the exact same tank tops will have been totally fine with certain bottoms and then with others it's suddenly like 'agh nooooo we're doing a bad job of Man AND of Woman, time for death 💀💀💀'

Some pen sketches/bird studies from a couple weeks ago (except that little griffin critter on the first)

These were just meant to be loose and fast, so some might look a little wonky

so i pretty clearly fully broke my poster's instinct, lmao

i've been turning over the problem and i think it comes down to two things: (1) i don't do enough, so i don't have enough to report on; (2) i stopped wanting to weigh in on Discourse, partially bc a lot of it feels petty in the face of rising fascism but mostly bc i started feeling abashed abt having such predictabl(y wearisom)e hobby-horses (this concern can be boiled down to 'i probably shouldn't be Too Myself in case it annoys people,' which objectively is no way to live but subjectively is a tricky little eel trap to wriggle out of!)

and if one isn't creating unprompted content, and also isn't responding to the commonest sort of prompt—well. a content shortage becomes somewhat inevitable.

(there remains of course the other subset of personal content i didn't address in point (1) above, namely mining not projects but the (non)workings of one's own psyche for material; and obviously i used to engage in a great deal of that and find it satisfying! but at this point i'm sufficiently ashamed of the fundamental structure of both my life and my self to find the prospect of public dissection aversive—which may well mean the abscess needs lancing, but. ow.)

and then on top of all that there's the conceptual-stylistic problem that too often these days i'm working with such a clogged brain that wrangling my thoughts into even half-understandable order becomes. very hard. like even on a good day i tend to think and write in nested clauses, such that you have to be able to suspend a series of unfinished parentheses in your own mind for a little while and then circle back and connect the closures; and when my thinking gets muddier my writing too gets muddier, and i find myself floundering in syntactic quicksand that even i'm struggling to parse, only moments after having extruded it…

[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

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)…

Doing really great so long as I don't think about anything

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.

also. as long as i'm telling you guys silly little things. look at my absurd gluttonous beast who shoved her face into my tomato-y lunch leftovers and now has. well.

anime blush only orange.

I made this!!