When “personhood” is decided by the Big Five My partner and I recently moved states in order to benefit from lower rent and a more affordable living environment. We found a place on Craigslist for the winter that was not only scam-free, but extremely cute. We visited it in person, met the landlord, and agreed to tenancy until April after the threat of frost. The process, despite its rushed quality, was rather straightforward. Read more...

And Opinions on Yurts in New England The last six months I took a break from writing in order to transition myself to off-grid living. Of course, this post and many others I have waiting in the wings would have been written much faster if I didn’t have such demand avoidance…even demand from myself, doing something I want to do. Thanks to folks on Merveilles that have been pushing me to write this one in particular. Read more...

I want to tell you a story. It’s a story of three laptops assigned to me from work. But it also might be a story you know because you might have been the main character at one point or another, laptop or no laptop. The first laptop was a Chromebook, which was a whole kind of hell I didn’t realize even existed. It had ChromeOS on it, which “allowed” me to enable Linux development tools, but then promptly froze after it couldn’t connect to the virtual environment. Read more...

This is a word vomit after finishing Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. My hope is that it opens a discussion around transmasculinity in general. Yes, I know. I’m late to the game. It surprised me how many of my queer friends have read Stone Butch Blues, knew of its existence, and yet until I came across it in someone’s bookshelf, it was never talked about. As if the presence and influence of this book, especially in a transmasc’s life, was assumed. Read more...

Except… That doesn’t work. I started writing this post last year in February. I was recovering from a hysterectomy during one of the bigger surges of COVID in the U.S. The surge made sense: it started picking up steam right after the holidays when everyone went home to marvel in what it was like to have a “normal life” again. I’d had dodged COVID at a 30-person superspreader during Thanksgiving, which later informed my decision to forego family gatherings all together. Read more...

On Thursday, instead of celebrating with family and friends, many people recognized a Day of Mourning. This is not new. The generations of genocide is not new to those who’ve suffered, are currently suffering, or are tuned into the suffering others are experiencing (often by the hands of their own ancestors). I am in the lattermost category, as a great grandchild of immigrants from countries like Italy, Lithuania, and Greece. One of my grandfathers did not hail from any of these places, and instead used to take pride in having family that was on the first ship to this so-called country. Read more...

There’s nothing more harrowing to me than being asked “why” when I’m asking someone to restructure a relationship. It’s immediately personal, deeply painful, and at some level, an inquisition. And it’s not the tongue-in-cheek inquisition in Monty Python. It’s not arguing about how dead the parrot is, either. Because, often, I find that I don’t know the parrot is dead until it stops squawking to be fed. The parrot in this case is my sexuality and my connection to romance. Read more...

I’ve had two people reach out to me in the last month about posts they’ve read on my blog. It’s been heartening to know that there are folks out there who are engaging with the material, and it also is motivating me to be more intentional when I post. Usually what goes here are unformed thoughts and ideas that I send out without much editing - and often don’t return to what I write. Read more...

How can we continue like this - vaulting over increasingly larger cracks, now too large to merely step around? Will we need to rappel down one side, climb up the other, before more people feel moved to do anything? Or will massive swaths of bodies need to fall through these cracks, will the chasms need to become bottomless? Someone responded to a Mastodon post I wrote about disaster thoughts that thinking like this gets them caught in a loop. Read more...

My mind spills off of rest like oil jumping from a hot pan. When I think about napping or stopping so-called productive tasks in the name of more relaxing activities, I am instinctively re-routed to something I “have” to do. Even if it’s empty or busy, I somehow would rather do it than, say, reading or drawing - even going on a bike ride in my neighborhood. Basically anything I find pleasurable is off the table. Read more...