I forget where I read that revolutions tend to occur in the spring/summer because that is when state policy reveals failures at the time of harvest, there’s not enough food, and people lash out at the their rulers.
I have been wondering a lot about my career path, lately.
Started as a biologist, then a lab techie, then a biostatistician, and eventually an IT person. I recently left (was pressured out, essentially) a soul sucking job at a mediocre healthcare IT shop and I have zero desire to go back to that field.
We have a plethora of high quality data available to make important decisions... But as we've seen with at least COVID, the bottleneck seems to be more cultural than technical 😒
Just thinking about how wrong the phrase is, "You have to earn respect".
No, you have to earn disrespect. As a human being, I'm naturally going to respect you if I don't know you. It's when you earn my disrespect, that I'll stop showing respect.
I give people respect freely, until they prove to me that they don't deserve it.
I miss when packages took like a week to arrive and there was no overnight postage nonsense (unless you paid a lot for it). Now it is industry standard and I need to be ready to get my package the next day, like...I need at least few buffer days to prepare emotionally.
Also the tracking system is not great and telling me it can come between 8-16 is NOT HELPFUL.
I an up at 8 only in case it arrives now.
Madness, I tell ya.
I really do have a soft spot for 80s heavy metal like Iron Maiden and Dio. I don’t listen to it very often, but occasionally the mood strikes.
There is something about it that feels grandiose, almost naive, and a bit playful compared to the dark assault that much of the genre seems to be these days (though tbh I don’t really have a wide knowledge of contemporary metal).
It’s also partly nostalgia and a connection to my teen years.
So, I've been working on hatching a theoretical structure to address the quandary of MAGA for a long time. I think it is almost impossible to combat it unless one can identify grasp the causal factors of the eruption of a mass psychosis. This is going to be a really long thread and I'm developing it slowly. Please feel free to mute me if this irritates you - I'm thinking aloud here. And most of my ideas aren't original, I'm just sometimes gathering them together in novel ways. #musings
Sometimes it's hard to live out here, and winter is especially isolating. As we all retreat and focus on inner work and reprieve from the often constant movement of other seasons, we tend to reach out less, travel less. This is true for both us and our friends we see often, usually, and so since the Solstice it's been quiet here at the Ranch. We've really not gone anywhere, and no one has really come to visit.
However, I'm reading "The Independent Farmstead" by Shawn & Beth Dougherty, and feeling renewed and inspired. Sometimes this path feels too difficult, and I reminisce on the period of my life where I was ignorant of the depth and multitude of the issues that plague our species and where I just lived in the way that society dictated. In a way, ignorance really is bliss. In a way, it was just easier.
But I think back on the suffering I experienced then: the suffering I experienced at jobs, at the hands of others abused by our society, the suffering I experienced feeling like I was drifting along without a purpose, and the suffering that came from seeking purpose in careers that I could never attain because of my chronic inability to engage in personal politics. In a way it was easier to work many hours a week, eat out, go to parties, and move through life unthinkingly chasing the next thing that made me feel alive, connected, loved, despite that those experiences never lived up to my memories of them and despite that they were always so fleeting.
So it's not that we don't suffer now, of loneliness or of hardship or of our own interpersonal shortcomings. But we feel guided by purpose and by duty, and in so many ways that eliminates suffering. Though we don't always have other humans here to feel connected to, we do often, and in their absence we are connected to place, and to other living things that help sustain us and which we sustain in return.
My social #class is a bit difficult to pin down. I don't have enough money or an impressive enough CV to count as middle class, but I probably talk too much like a middle class person and generally come across as too much of a middle class person to count as working class or underclass. #musings#sociology#SocialScience
Learning that the voice in your head is a parrot of what you've been told & experienced in similar situations, rather than your actual brain is probably the wildest thing I've learned so far about mental health.
Ngl, as somebody who could disassociate at the drop of a hat - I seem to have lost that ability. I don't think I'm any less creative. But I used to watch whole movies in my head and now with proper therapy and meds, it's feels uninteresting? Boring? I don't really know how to describe it.
Has anyone else had this happen? Not sure if it's skill regression or just learning to be more present.
I know I probably sound incredibly naive, but I have a core belief that the vast majority of people are trying to do good. My evidence is that as shitty as things are, society still runs. People care about friendships & families. Lots people want to get into fields of helping, nurturing, the arts, entertainment, gardening, animal care etc. You can have thousands of people on a highway all driving at incredible speeds with only a handful of accidents.
Finally got out of the flat to visit Japan Weekend Madrid. Saw one full fursuit so far, but I'm doing the cat thing and hiding.
Seeing lots of Naruto, one piece and bleach cosplayers. Lots of amazing art as well! These folks would do well at a furry con of they drew furry art XD
Also noticing the lack of super robot art. Too niche I guess XD
Anyone else's attempts at a 'girl' voice end up lapsing into a faux-British accent without even thinking? It wasn't exactly what I'm going for, but I kinda like it.
1/x #zeroone is a fascinating platform and phenomenon. If you want to collect there, you have to create and upload.
I took this as an opportunity to turn some of my amateurish physical drawings and sketches into art—not simply by uploading them there, but by adding AI elements to make them pose a question:
Is this art already? Which impact has the use of AI on their perception as art?
Recently did some work on this alternate altar that lives in our bedroom.
Some bones foraged from our land, some foraged back in Michigan by an old friend. The human teeth belong to the same friend (one of their baby teeth & wisdom teeth, given as a gift).
The altar in our public space is a really wonderful artistic display, a story of us, blending a lot of cultural elements that we share and some that we only share because we're sharing a life together. It's full of offerings to this land, but also pulled tarot cards, sculptures, gifts from friends, palo santo & copal incense, stones and offering plates from my side of the family. Bundled pine, bundled sage, and blessed rosemary. It's public, interactive, and beautiful.
This altar, though, is very personal. Some elements have been in my possession for years, before I began this journey into spiritual practice, before I knew what their purpose was (or my own). Some elements have been added over time: the fossilized lizard tail and heart, for example, I found after opening the first studio I had on this land. The rat femurs I also found on the land, while cleaning trash when we first moved in, and all of these little things that have found me I've felt compelled to venerate and offer back to the space. The display in our living space is public: it invites guests to add to it, and sometimes they leave offerings for us there, too. But this space is in our private area, and it feels like it contains little secret pieces of us and the land. Things that people only really see if they spend enough time here to become privy to them.
To me this parallels the reality of working with such a space: many people come and enjoy the superficial aesthetic beauty of the land and the home, for a time. But they don't truly understand what it is we're doing here, or what it really means to be here. They have respect, but lack full awareness and veneration. But there are some who know what this land means just by virtue of having been here -- some needed to come often to feel it, some stepped foot on it and knew instantly that it was special. But that kind of awareness isn't common, and it's something that we hold very dear. We keep very close to us those who share our recognition of this space as liminal, as straddling time and place, of its constantly repeated history, playing out over and over each moment, and the responsibility we have to honor the spirits that exist here.
So I'm at the point where I'm pretty aggressively promoting the #Algorythms#podcast across various avenues of social media.
Even (reluctantly) used that bluebird hellsite. Probably the only reason I still occassionally bother with it.
Also, while one of my co-hosts is taking a trip to Japan, me and Duke (my other co-host) plan on doing a short episode. Either a punk act (The Clash; 6 albums) or a hip-hop act (Beastie Boys; 8 albums). Ideally, I would have Run-DMC or Public Enemy as a first hip-hop act, but as the co-host that is on the Japan trip is a fan of both of them, it'd be a dick move to do it while he's away.
Also, the #SpermBankSaga of mine has concluded. I know what I did wrong last time and I followed the instructions closely this time.
It is done. And if I still get rejected or have a problem there, I'm just going to say "Fuck it" and continue #transition . Bio kids would be neat, but there are other ways to have children (if I want them in 10-15 years) if bio kids just aren't in the cards.
I listened to my body when I realized that I am #trans . So that serve me well.
I made my decision. I'm going to go full-speed ahead on transition.
But as soon as I the GoFundMe pays me out, I am buying a Legacy kit. And if all goes well, it'll take less than one week from today.
It's a gamble, but I'll see if I still produce viable sperm when the kit arrives. And after the preparations, I'll walk down about 15-20 minutes to the post office with the mail-order package. Then I walk back home.
This will be the first time I take a long walk in femme attire. But it's also walking down to around the area of a Planet Fitness. So if I can do this well, I can hit a gym and make this a habit.
If it turns out I am non-viable, I won't care. I'll take it as a sign it wasn't meant to be. And I can still adopt, step-parent, or use a partner's frozen sperm (if I date #T4T ).
I can't handle trying to hold back transition anymore.
Now I'm like the #HRT so much that I'm wondering --in theory--that if I called the sperm bank in the morning for a meeting in a couple of weeks at most, would I still have viable sperm if I took regular HRT?
Or would it depend on stuff like the dosages or taking it every other day instead of every day?