The Thing About This Post Is That, In My Experience, People Don't Complain About So-called Smith College

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…' :)

sketchbook page of european badger

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 :/

Braun T52 // transistor radio (Germany, 1961)

オオルリ若鳥

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

saw a family tree template were you marked family members as male, female, or deceased. so glad we're finally recognizing a third gender (corpse)

the biggest epistemological gap between me & 95% the rest of the world is literally just how much i love to look things up on the internet and how much it baffles me when other people don't like to do this. we live in the information age. like i'll google anything i'll read this bmj paper on the toilet i'll look up words i don't know i'll append pdf free to any possible phrase. i don't know how anybody is voluntarily turning this down. sometimes i get so tired of searchinf for something physically inside a store i pull out my phone and google like silken tofu aldi what fucking aisle while im standing right there. otherwise what is even the point

A tiny oasis of spring

"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