Sketchbook Page Of European Badger

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.

this is from january but i felt like it should probably be on this blog somewhere?? baby's first knitting project, will probably end up frogging and redoing it at some point bc really i like a tighter cowl, but it's extremely Color and extremely cozy and i made it myself :)

Weevil (Pachyrhynchus congestus), family Curculionidae, Philippines

photograph by Frank Deschandol

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.

a showcase of roman-nosed horses!

Raven, drying in the sun

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 :/

The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, from Up One Pair of Stairs of My Bookhouse by Willy Pogany (1920)

Tricycle Gang in Brooklyn, New York City (1930s)

ok i put on my dorky lil light-up vest & went for a long walk with my thermos of tea in the gloaming & saw the ocean (<3) & a bat (!) & sang deh placatevi con me & nur wer die sehnsucht kennt quietly to myself, & now i'm home again & nefret cat is lying in my lap like a warm heavy sandbag & purring—

in a bit i'll probably go get in the wet box & then reheat the last of the curry mee we made earlier in the week, & all manner of things shall probably in fact be well, actually!