The Mirror and the Mask

I searched the internet for "how to rig a cup holder" and "my car has no cup holder," in the hopes that I might be presented with a magical solution to my need for consciousness-giving sugar on my five-hour drive tomorrow.

LOTS of BMW owners and all complaining of the same problem (my car's German from the early 80s, so it antedates the advent of cupholder concessions on part of the European car makers.) Basically the argument runs that the Germans and their neighbors believe you should be driving when you're driving and not eating, drinking, whatever. Lots of people getting snippy about it, and it took me some effort to see what put me off about it, because frankly I can kind of agree with a lot of that: you drive better when you're not trying to sip your 120° hazelnut mocha latte. I dislike distracted driving. But it was getting on my nerves, somehow, getting me defensive.

And then I realized, yeah, well, there's a reason I'm willing to drive while eating and such myself.

I live in a state bigger than all of France.

Crossing it tomorrow will be a matter of more than half of the daylight, going more than a mile a minute for the vast majority of the trip. Fortunately, I have a cup of young coconut juice and some venison jerky to keep me awake.

The fading honey-light of autumn's giving way, now. This is the early evening of the year.

Soon, the light will grow pale, and thin, weaker and starker, and the green will at last collapse and twist into dry browns. The sunsets will lose color until they're just a strip of copper and a pool of blood at the very last light.

The moon has been stirring and waking, growing solemn and watchful after the resting summer.

I am intimately aware of the season. I made preparations for killing come tomorrow's dawn. And that has all gone out the window, and instead I am sitting in the too-comfortable too-warm luxury of the indoors with food close at hand and revolting and water good to drink but with an already oversatiated thirst.

I very much hope I get a job out of this. It feels like a tremendous sacrifice, when there was no festival in spring and summer was spent hiding from Taiwan's rains and Halloween fell by the wayside. This is the beginning of the slaughtermonth.

My boyfriend got to go; he's no obligations to keep him here and every reason to go. The promise of venison doesn't quite carry the same effect, though; it's not in you the same way until the blood is on your own hands. When it is your act, your responsibility and your gratitude, the flesh becomes a relic; it's the vessel of tremendous power, of Life and Death, and you're almost hesitant to touch it lest you profane it in some way.

Which actually, on a side note, has clarified something I've struggled with a long time - a lot of people would assume that the high that comes from predation is from a sensation of power. For some people, I'm sure it is, and those people worry me tremendously. The high as I've known it, and as described by most ethical hunters I've known, is not from being the wielder of power, but the instrument of it; you are not causing death - rather, Death is your cause. You are meeting, very personally, that which enables you to be.

I had the wonderful experience of stumbling across Temple Grandin's blog the other day when searching for people describing these experiences; she's a fascinating woman, a very high-functioning autistic with some very unique life experiences, but the part of her personality that interests me most is how her keen interest in death and empathy with animal life led her to some of the conclusions she's drawn and the applications of those. Go look her up; if you've ever eaten any U.S. beef, you owe her a debt for making the slaughter humane.

At one point she describes the attitudes - the coping mechanisms - taken on by slaughterhouse kill-floor employees, those who actually do the killing or who lead the animal directly to it. One attitude is mechanical; the animals are merely part of a process. One attitude is sadistic; cruelty distances one from the animals and prevents empathy.

One she termed as the "sacred ritual" approach.

Religion figures; at one point she posits that religious rationalization for slaughter distances the killer from the sacrifice because it is the gods who then take on the blood-guilt of demand. This is fascinating - something I had never considered, that in the long-gone days there might have been those who did not regard death as the law of life, at least when it came to animals. Generally I assumed that most (not all)cultures reserved their death-fears and anxieties over killing for their own species.

What than of those like me? All flesh is flesh, their blood is my blood. I will go to my own death in time and join them. It is the way of things. Is that line of thinking rationalization? I certainly cope through ritual - I inhabit the feelings of life's joy and death's grieving as totally as I can, attempt to take on all responsibility for the good and the ill that comes of my relationship with the deer. Most of us, untrained, given no ceremony by tradition, will sit with the animal, stroke its flanks, whisper to it, lay bundles of grasses or sweet-smelling juniper by its face, avoid touching the killing wound as if it might hurt the animal further. Once presented with the pools of blood we often mark ourselves with it; one of the few traditions I was given was to mark the face with the blood of one's first kill, with the rite of passage acted at the taking of one's first deer.

I went the rest of the day with rust smudges across cheeks and brow because it would have been sacrilege to wipe it away for so trivial a reason as some layperson's comfort. Think of a Catholic brushing away the ashes of the palms from their forehead in order to avoid stares - the ritual is, at its absolute core, the same. "Remember, O man, that thou art Dust, and to Dust you shall return" - this is getting at the closest parallel truth, but naturally the blood is more of a tangible truth in my own eyes. Remember, O man, that thou art flesh… we are in my eyes not made but born, and all things are born to die. To kill for oneself, rather than to shy from the inevitable blood-guilt in having someone else do it for you, is to acknowledge that you are part of the natural order, and that you shall go the way of all flesh.

For now, I will have to try to honor my debt in some other way.

I don't think you have to know me long to realize that I have generally enjoyed flaunting the various ways in which I violate the gender roles I was brought up into, preferably while flirting just so as to be more contradictory about it.

This morning I apparently woke up with a brief domestic streak, or more likely was feeling kind of indebted after the absolutely awesome meal my boyfriend cooked last night. Not that it was technically complicated, exactly, so much as that it was delicious and I didn't have to cook it. (Fettuccine and sage butter has got to be the shortest road to culinary win ever - but don't forget to salt it or the flavors will seem restricted to the aromatics. Salt brightens it all up and brings those flavors to front and center.)

I've been on a french toast kick lately - I'd been making a lot of eggy fried rice in order to offset what has become a sadly meatless diet (no worries, here comes November, the slaughtermonth.) One day we had some bâtard heels left over and I was feeling more energetic than usual and I've made it three or four times in the last month. So I begged the boyfriend on our grocery trip the other night to acquire some maple syrup (ah, it never would have been the same if the French hadn't come through Canada) and eggs and I'd make him some french toast.

I made decent french toast. The whole wheat turned out to be full of whole grains in place, which gave it a strange and less fluffy texture, but the basics were all there and it had a decent crust. Unfortunately I offered him a third piece - I had a bunch of egg mixture left over.

Only my attempt to make breakfast for my boyfriend would ever end in french toast burns on said boyfriend's foot.

He ate it anyway, though, so maybe I did something right?

In other news I'm redoing my resume to be more general so I can apply to some temping agencies. No word from my first application yet, I should probably call in or maybe just show up at a preferred location and introduce myself and ask about applying. But then one other thing came up - the boyfriend has produced a marvellous suggestion for a possible income and something rather more ambitious than the end-user retail-box positions I'd been considering, so I'll be looking into that. If I get it, I'm fairly sure my father will be laughing his head off, and my grandmother will be claiming she knew it all along.

Monster, here I come...

Halloween plans still vague and Faire still sounds almost like effort. It'll probably be great once I get out there, I'm just kind of depressed lately, what with my favorite holiday gone out the window. Hopefully between friends visiting the city and friends in the city we can cobble something together, and once I have a job I'll feel like doing craftswork again. I had to turn down a phenomenal commission recently due to my current location and lack of supplies - fortunately the artist/ client is part of a large network and may be able to tap another brilliant maskmaker on her own continent, because she had a brilliant idea and I'd love to see it done. The boyfriend has a masquerade day at work tomorrow, so I'll probably send him with the Greenman, which means I need to REPAIR it before then - boxes are not the friendliest environment for masks, but it's much worse when they have to share space with thirty or so of their kind. When we get the time to finally make a rack to put up on one of the nice big empty walls of this apartment, I will hang them like they've always deserved.

...is knowing there's somewhere better and that you're heading there soon.

( I'm whining a lot, lately, and while this is less extreme than some of my moody posts, it's still distinctly unhappy. )I have no idea how to relate to these people anymore.

So in reference to the title of the post, I'm headed down to visit my boyfriend in a couple of days, Thursday-Fridayish. Probably Friday, as it means I'm less likely to be stuck sitting outside an empty apartment wondering when I'll be let in. Maybe I can make it down between the rush hours?

I've been cleaning my room. Finally got to the wire shelving unit that so helpfully had been made inaccessible when the furniture was so helpfully switched without warning from the old furniture in the room to the bedroom suite I inherited from a great-aunt. So helpfully. (I adored the great-aunt. I didn't so much adore having every one of my things moved without so much as forewarning. Lamps. Clothes. The contents of drawers. Many beloved things went missing and many private things were left out.)

But this shelf was full of old binders from school, mostly, with a few diaries and journals and sketchbooks and most of the tangible evidence of my relationship before college. It also housed disposable cameras and a mug made by a friend with my own art on it and videotapes of favorite shows and a shawl from a quinceanera and an Easter basket and a Catwoman action figure I've had since I was about six that I salvaged from my room at my parents' house a few years back. (I never really wanted or needed the Batman one. I'm inclined to think Catwoman would have felt the same way.)

A lot of this stuff was disinclined to be slipped out in the four inches between the shelf and the dresser. The vertical dividers didn't leave the possibility of slipping them along the shelf to an open space, and the heavy textbooks didn't allow for lifting the shelf. So it was very, very slow going. I inhaled a ton of dust and will be sneezing black all my long way south.

I think I'll lend the shelf to the new apartment, along with a lamp, some household supplies, a couple of chairs and the wall scrolls I bought for him. The state of furniture is not so great for the moment, but it's probably better to live on camping chairs until you can buy permanent, comfortable, nice ones than to buy cheap and uncomfortable nicer furniture straight off. Hopefully I can convince him of this, because I'd rather use my old dish chair than lay out money I didn't have for something I'll have to replace within a couple of years. Some of the permanent collection is being purchased already, though, like the sofa. I can get behind that.

I think I'd better take some groceries, too. I know he's moved in his kitchen already, so anything that cooks on hot water alone should be fine. I'll bring the old wal-mart bowls, my pyrex, the rest of the permaware utensils. (This is a college kitchen I'm describing: the cheapest microwavable heat-safe bowls available, utensils that can't be broken and cost $4 for a full set of 32 pieces, and a splurge on a sturdy Pyrex measuring cup, 16oz capacity. All you need to make ramen and hot chocolate, except maybe a drinking cup. I also cooked boba, milk tea, instant oatmeal and cream of wheat, quinoa and alphabet pasta in those. Microwaves are awesome. Too bad he doesn't have one yet.)

The reason that groceries are a good idea is because he's not living there yet, and to be honest I don't really expect him to have stocked much of anything in the fridge. Unless he decides on a celebratory dinner the night I get in, I'm probably gonna be hungry - and I plan to spend the week down there, and I don't know the area yet. Basic supplies are prudent.

I guess I can bring some videogames, too. I haven't been comfortable setting up any of my consoles here (that sounds like so many... I have two, mostly because I haven't had the heart to give up my now-redundant but hardly-used gamecube) because I've been jobhunting and wanted not to waste time, not to be criticized for wasting time, and not to be anything less than ready to pack up and go. Which I am; if the call came in, all it would take would be a day's notice and some clothes and I could run.

I really wish I'd had console games to turn to, though, when I needed to destress. Applications have always made me tremendously anxious, and with the paper and TV news discussing hardly anything aside from unemployment rates (and the Balloon Boy, and the latest celebrity breakup, but those are easier to ignore) I can hardly get my head off the work long enough to regain sight of what I'm trying to actually say and do.

I am not good at selling myself. I know I'm supposed to be valuable, I'm multilingual and at least relatively eloquent in English, I can use proper punctuation and grammar (although in blogging I often flaunt run-ons that would make Maurice Sendak roll his eyes - oh, did I mention I stumbled back across my family's original copy of Where the Wild Things Are?), I'm rather book-smart and not entirely lacking in basic sense, I'm resourceful, I'm personable (except, apparently, when it comes to my immediate family?) and I'm not exactly physically repulsive. There's got to be somebody who'd want to hire me.

If nothing else, I don't steal, deface property, or scare children (except, of course, at Halloween, and then only gently) and that's probably more than can be said of a lot of employees. I'm ridiculously careful with other people's things, I seek approval, I don't think of companies as impersonal repositories of money, I'm turning this blog entry into a peptalk at myself and should stop and go to sleep now as it is.

Oh, heaven save us all. If I were only funny I could get a job in entertainment at the ren faire or something. I've got the looks, the contortionism, the enthusiasm, the mouth to run for miles, and the masks and costumes. I just really need a paycheck and something to do for eight hours a day. Or, y'know, just a paycheck, 'cause if I wasn't poor I'm pretty sure I'd populate those lonely hours with maskmaking and creative writing and painting or whatever. I'd be a regular freaking Martha Stewart, planning my friends' weddings and hosting parties and discovering new uses for crepe paper and dried Peruvian cactus spines, but since that's never gonna happen and nobody would be willing to put up with my creative craziness I'm content and even eager to sell computers for a living or install people's home entertainment systems. Give me SOMETHING to do with my hands, mind and mouth and I can probably leave your customers happy and inclined to return, sound good?

Crap, I've been doing most of the stuff I'm applying to do professionally for free for years, anyway.

( Wow, I did not expect this to turn into a hurricane of bitching. You have been warned. )

I cannot wait to move.

I'm glad Reid's happy about his new apartment; he moved in his kitchen things last night and we spent most of our morning phone call talking about it. We're both looking forward to when I can come and see it. The current topic of debate is whether to get a sofabed or just a regular couch (I'm on the side of the former, all else being equal.) There will also be need of a vacuum, a bed, and a bedroom suite of furniture, not to mention a table or two, but I think that's all that's pressing given that dorm life leaves one equipped for much of the rest. I hope I'll be able to assist somewhere along the way; I'm now considering, for reasons expounded upon above in the cut, going down rather earlier and for a longer span of time than I'd been expecting to regardless of my employment status, although I have the sneaking suspicion that being in the city will help me in getting a job sooner.

But on that note, it's been a whole two days since I checked the listings, so I'd best be off and back to that again. Hopefully I won't shoot myself before I find one.

I know this is common knowledge. It just bears repeating.

He finally found a response to Nintendo's core gaming community's complaints that gaming going mainstream meant that the new games were too easy - which has some validity, I would argue, especially for the story-oriented games I love best, like Zelda. Twilight Princess was lovely but... actually, yes, despite being rather terrified as I usually am, despite having my eyes open so wide through the dungeons that my contacts actually dried up and fell out mid-gameplay (seriously BAD time for your pause button to quit working, by the way) - it was easy. Or rather it felt easier than it should've. The puzzles were often less than intricate. I DID get stuck twice - missing a switch in an obvious location, once, as People Never Look Up, and actually getting stuck on a puzzle solution the other time because I didn't recognize the puzzle as such when I saw it. I admit to looking up a guide after giving it a good-faith effort and spending over half an hour searching fruitlessly. And yes, I did feel dirty.

Some people want hard games because the challenge is the key to them; they want to "beat" the game. But the downside of easy gameplay when it comes to story-oriented players like myself is I never felt the true and abject terror that I should have when Link - who always struck me as not being terribly tall, I suppose because the OoT Hylians mostly dwarfed him - when Link, alone and armed with little enough, stood before each new monstrosity. I was anxious, to be certain, I shook, I squeaked, I was pathetic, but Twilight Princess never inspired in me the same sense of Terror of Ultimate Evil that Ocarina of Time did. Not to say that the bosses weren't awesome. I was most impressed by the Water Temple boss (yes, I'm still wary of spoilers) in terms of new mechanics and design, as well as the nature of the arena and the massive scale of the entire battle. The best boss music probably goes to second-stage Final Boss. (While we're there, the temple music for Hyrule Castle was just... genius.)

Of course, if you create hardness levels for games, aside from being a massive technical headache, it creates a different experience for each level in terms of other things, like story. Game mechanics and story need to flow together, and to throw extra rooms or puzzles or what have you onto a fully-fleshed-out modern epic would destroy much of the artistry. I can understand the opposition to this. And again, it's a massive waste of resources.

So Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of all beautiful gaming and author of much of my earthly joy, has graced us with his solution. People are bitching, naturally.

He's developing a demo mode - get stuck, and you can tell the game to play itself. Resume when you're ready. Yep, it's basically cheating - but it allows the developers to make the game as difficult as the core audience wants it and yet the game remains accessible to newbz. Cue fanboy horror. "Ohnoz, wut if i tak 2 sum1 who playz my fav game evar n then i find out they used teh demo mode & they actully didnt play it at all by themselfs!!!!1!2" Clearly, because casuality in gaming is transmissible by proximity alone. And games should be reserved only for the truly l337 and hardcore. And if there's a hard game for which they have an easy mode then when you go to school and talk about games with your friends nobody will know that you are truly a gamer and not just some loser - because you could have used the demo mode!! ...Oh, wait. If you're basing your reputation on whether you've got l337 5kILLz on a one-player console game you're a loser by definition and you probably don't have friends.

....Wow, that was far crueler than I actually intended it, but the message I'm trying to seek out is in there somewhere amidst all the chafing. Sorry, all the testosterone on Kotaku's forums is making me bitchy. Go listen to Palette Swap Ninja's "Halo (All I Play O)" if you need a humorous break and/or a lesson in the truth of console gaming as a Test of Your Manhood - single-player is only a proving grounds for people who are afraid there really ARE bigger fish in the sea. Video games should be a lot more than a pissing contest.

But seriously. If it's an OPTION, if it's something you have to ENABLE just like baby mode - and you already have to TELL your multi-hardness game that you want to play on Legendary, anyway.

If the game's producers are making the game for the sake of entertainment or story, having such a mode allows them to bring their story to the masses.* The one story-driven genre I don't see this working for is horror - I can watch any horror flick you want with little more than a twitch, if that, at the "Boo" moments and a tendency to turn on lights for the next day when I'd usually just fumble in the dark - but Fatal Frame leaves me a quivering, jumpy, paralyzed mess for a week. The horror impact is something they're striving for, which is largely not the case with battle-difficulty, and I doubt many designers would want to make it an optional part of the experience -- but I might be wrong.

Now, go enjoy this wonderful article on the horror genre by the illustrious Ben Croshaw.

*(I also can't help thinking that once you've finished a game, Demo would be a nice way to relive much of it while doing the dishes, or the laundry, or your leatherwork, without driving your SO up the wall with your Zelda cravings and need for them to entertain you when they'd rather be playing Fallout anyway. Or maybe that's just me.)

The whole population of the order Blattaria could drop off the face of the earth tomorrow and I'd have a hard time caring. Even knowing how important they are to piddling things like the ecosystem.

Also, while I definitely have some moral twinges anytime I pull out the Red Canister of Doom on some hapless arthropod I don't really think twice about how bad I want that sucker gone. Especially when I've been having phantom twitches all evening that, upon visual investigation, turn out to be absolutely nothing, and in the midst of delicate surgery on an errant follicle on my hip, half-naked, I hesitate to look into the tickling at my ankle only to discover belatedly that this thing's about to crawl up my leg. Dead-gone or a-thousand-miles-away-gone matters little, but the latter is impractical.

It saddens me in a perverse way that it appeared to be a male and therefore I'm not doing much to reduce the potential population. After waiting for the spray to kick in I scooped it up on a fly swatter (I need to remember to thank whoever decided to give that particular model a good two foot handle) and dumped it in the toilet. Couldn't but look, and - yep, still hideous, revolting, stomach-turning disgusting. I cannot account for the irrationality of phobia except that once upon a time it did us some good to develop truly compulsive fears.

In other news, found myself contemplating V for Vendetta again when Amazon recommended the graphic novel to me. (I know, and I need to read Watchmen, too. I know.) The shipping fandom runs wild on this one - I blame the movie, as for one it's the only version I've experienced, but secondly because apparently the classical romantic imagery of the black and white and red was upped heavily (for one thing, Scarlet Carsons don't exist, the roses mentioned in the graphic novel were Violet Carsons, and confusingly those are pink), and because they cast Hugo Weaving. It's got some serious UST potential, depending on your reading; Evey's devotion post-processing is rather reminiscent of Stockholm syndrome, but devotion it is, and whether that's to the idea or the person could be nebulous if you chose to see it that way. And it's easy to take V's emphasis on himself as an IDEA, his rebellious image of who he should be, and interpret that to mean he neglects himself as a PERSON. Maybe all the trappings of the hideout, a shrine to the joys of the past, are just props to the further development of his persona. Whatever. The point is it makes him a classic Beast to her Beauty, in a disturbingly real-world-plausible way.

Which brought up something in my mind I haven't enjoyed considering, although it's nothing new. These stories were created for a purpose - fairy tales, I mean - and that generally can suggest some nasty truths about the real world that created them. Well, yes, Beauty and the Beast in historical context, to very loosely paraphrase something I read years ago from the estimable Ursula Vernon, tells impressionable young girls that "sure, we're marrying you off to a monster, but if you love him enough you can turn him into a prince." But why would the story hold its appeal today, aside from the potential for cool costumes? Is it the danger aspect, the tired bad-boy appeal? Maybe, but I wonder if there's something else that V fandom and this classic share in common: the girl's kept in a gilded cage, made much more a guest than a prisoner to a gentle, sophisticated and noble recluse who just so happens to also be a murderer and have some serious shame issues as regards his appearance. This is where Phantom of the Opera takes on potentially romantic qualities, too.

The trouble is, apparently a large number of women are attracted to this theme, and I kind of number in there. PotO and V are both a little too far out there for me to really dig the romance, but Beauty and the Beast in its French incarnation (and various derivatives thereof) takes top spot for my favorite among the well-known tales we commonly get as kids. (French tellings take up the bulk of that list, actually - there's something about their 18th-century wittiness that makes light of even the darkest among them. Funny that I'd want to hear the tale from a jaded tongue, but so it is - myth is often impassive, anyway.)

So what on earth does that say? Well, among other things that we like the notion of having power over a man. Cleolinda here on livejournal explained it as being "an exception to his very nature," although the idea that there's a prince underneath all that does SOMETHING to counter that idea in the fairy tale. Maybe it has more to do with healing; we'd like to think that we're socially powerful, that we can make them whole as people - and this is important - not by filling in the holes of their need with our own selves or efforts, but by undoing the damage that society wrought upon them in the first place. All three of these male figures can in some way be justified by their situation - it doesn't make what they are good, but it makes it all make sense, and (arguably) suggests that some rehabilitation might take place.

In a modern context, and I can also project this with some comfort on a historical one, I can see the draw.

Face it - men don't have a lot of places to go. Macho stoicism has been the ideal of men for centuries in our culture, and if there's one thing that's bad for people it's being emotionally isolated. So we have a tendency to view ourselves as potentially able to aid them that way - they may not be able to open up to the guys about certain issues, but we're practiced in the role of sounding board. We know how to vent and how to help others do it. We see vulnerability and we want to see it used to good, to the end of becoming a more open, free person. And the suggested visual contrast in the fairy tale's common name is a factor. Real-life men, at their worst (and when "overestimating the differences between one woman and another,") are often mystified that some such angelic creature would stoop to giving them their time of day, let alone their heart or body. Beauty's a powerful element in the equation, because we give it tremendous social power. That shame, too, is vital - and probably exacerbated by the traditional gender role; shame is a vulnerability, and vulnerability is shameful, thus creating a vicious cycle. It's the dance between dignity and nobility - all these characters exude an air of superiority to the unwashed masses - and their shame and sense of inferiority that's the principal dynamic in their character makeup for the purposes of romance. They may seem too perfect to be real, but they have to be able to think the same of the Girl In Question.

Trouble is, in the real world, people have to heal for themselves. If he's broke, y'ain't gon' be able t'fix 'im. How is it that millenia of domestic violence haven't weeded this out of us yet? Probably because it's sad and idealistic and exactly the way a teenager thinks, and generally teenage romance came with marriage and babies in those days, as why else would she have landed herself with the Beast? So it probably made the ugly facts of life more bearable, in the end.

Nevertheless - heaven help the compassionate stupid.

I was in a great mood. I'd spent afternoon goofing off with my very very early Christmas present, playing Phantom Hourglass. I hadn't put down the system in four hours and when Reid called I realized I'd not eaten or used the facilities in all that time. So I decided to take a break and spend a little time off. I searched the kitchen, singing happy Wind Waker themes, looking to see what sounded good to eat, and then discovered one of the potatoes more resembled a garden in a grocery bag, and went to ask my grandmother what she thought of it. And then I realized what I'd nearly stepped on.

We have the cutest little pink leopard-spotted geckos around here. Most of the time when you find them inside it's because they're small enough to slip under the door, so the only ones you ever see in the house are quite young and quite small and exhibit a very high degree of cuteness with their relatively huge heads and gigantic eyes. My grandmother doesn't like them because they're more than a little see-through, which is often a mildly creepy attribute in something with a small enough body size for the heart to be visible. Unfortunately this one was emphatically dead, his little head crushed, and split down the belly. At least I know it wasn't me that killed him - he'd already developed a good case of rigor mortis by the time I found him.

I'll flush an ex-goldfish and I'll throw a deceased spider in the trash, but this little guy just looked like a tiny chunk of dead meat, and it seemed too much a waste, so I scooped him gently off the floor and decided I'd do the best I could for him; I'd put him out in the grass so he could be food for somebody else. And so I did, and I wished him the best of luck next time around, if he got another turn, and I found I wasn't singing after that.

Oh well.

that I can be pleased at the sensation, for once, of being unquestionably hungry, and delighted that I know precisely what would be the perfect thing to eat, and having that thing available. How many people on this earth get to say that even once in their lives? Get to be pleased at having eaten half a meal in two days or more and the sensation of persistent but not-quite-uncomfortable appetite, get to enjoy the sensation of eating just the right amount of just the right thing and then turn to something else? I forgot to eat most of the day before yesterday; I was hungry when I woke, late, yesterday but had too much to do before I thought I'd have to run out with family, but then my afternoon was canceled and I had to wait. Two more hours and I forgot to be hungry, again - it's not as if I'm using much in the way of calories, cooped up in the house, laying on the bed or the couch, in front of one screen or another. Dinner and I ate half, with a seeking of sensation but not much hunger; I went to bed and couldn't sleep, and didn't eat all night. Now it's five in the evening, today, and it's finally time for a little pasta, and a root beer if we have it (I haven't checked), and eventually the leftover fish from last night.

I hope I can hold onto this luck.

After all this time, after i...................

We interrupt the scheduled blog post to bring you a typo that resulted in the writer's learning that Firefox 3.5.2's icon for Privacy in preferences is a masquerade mask. Not a particularly fantastically-well-rendered masquerade mask, but a masquerade mask all the same. There was a double-take involved.

...Anyway.

After all this time, after majoring in Chinese, and going to Asia twice...

I'm still soft on my own ancestral European culture. I'm just not much of an orientalist.

So when I stumbled across a traveller's language primers tonight, I leapt upon the Italian and shortly thereafter on the Spanish and devoured the conjugation of typically-irregular "to be" with an appetite I NEVER would have forseen in myself back when I was a French student.

Someday, when I get through the massive debt hanging over my head, or when I can use a socially convenient excuse like marriage to get other people to foot the bill, I am totally going to Europe.

Being vehement doesn't make you an extremist, does it?

I was told yet again today that "I'm pretty sure we can both agree that you're a radical feminist." Well, no, I don't agree. Radical feminism would be idealizing an extreme point of view. I endorse the notion that women ought to make as much money as men for doing the same work. I endorse the notion that men and women ought to be able to choose themselves what they'd like to do and how they'd like to behave rather than following some preassigned social script. I don't think that's very radical. I want sexual and gender equality, and that's by definition the most moderate you can probably get on the situation.

Kinda dovetails into how I believe that everyone, regardless of sex, gender, orientation, race, class, nationality, age, health, or bodily configuration is entitled to the same measure of human dignity and shouldn't be shamed for what, where, when, or how they were born or treated differently as a human from others on the basis of these.

But as for reality, suffice it to say I'm really fucking OPTIMISTIC when I hope that women of the generation after mine won't be the everyday emotional dumping grounds for their male relatives for hours on end only to be mocked and derided an hour later for TALKING at DINNER (cue the groans - we all know how annoying it is when them womenfolk talk over the food.)

Eh, screw protecting the guilty, I'll leave that as written.. It's not like they think there's anything WRONG with that, so they couldn't possibly object to my publishing it, could they? Seriously, shit like this makes me ashamed of my family, my hometown, my state, my culture. And all this after having to deal with my aunt needling me and making all manner of really catty remarks all day; I'm really getting sick of it.

Everybody keeps asking if I'm dead-set on moving, if I'm moving to ______ because I want to be in the same place as my boyfriend, if I wouldn't be better off saving the rent and living at home.

How about, I'm moving because I'd rather be there than here??

I started typing this the other night and just never hit publish, but the actual time of writing doesn't really matter for the bits I'd already written.

I saw this used in the description of this lovely image.

It's rather more upbeat than the rest of the poem. I think I prefer it all on its own, as like most things I feel the modernity eats at the classicism, in the rest.

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen

In other news, I've been on a Sabriel kick again. I think it's that my mind jumped from coming autumn to coming winter and perhaps TWO of those have passed since I was twelve without my reading or rereading one of Nix's lovely books. They're built into winter for me the way that the smell of roasting jerky and the lattice-wood of my grandmother's house and the smell of warm bulbs are.

I caught a praying mantis the other day. It had been sitting, sad and conspicuous, on the window, and I didn't want it to get itself eaten. So I picked it up on a stick, deposited it in a cricket cage with remarkably little trouble, and fed it a moth. It's been much more active since; I suspect it hadn't eaten for a while and is less mobile than usual as one of its wings is broken and sticking off at an odd angle. I'm fairly sure based on the shape of the abdomen (v. slender) that it's male.

I wanted to release it that evening, but it rained heavily. The next day I slept until six PM (I'm still jet lagged, not to mention some other physical demands and complaints). I wanted to feed him again before letting him go, but he's only halfheartedly struck at the beetle that I set in there. I'll be releasing it in a couple of hours when I have to leave for the lease with my father and brother, for a work day.

But I've been keeping it in my bathroom at night. It's by far the warmest and least drafty room in the house. I had to go in there just now, and when I looked at my local bug he'd gone and changed colors on me.

Its body has always been a remarkable grassy silver-gold, over more cheerful green legs. Its eyes were the typical, expressive type, uniform in color with the body, huge compound eyes that due to an optical illusion always seem to have a "pupil" looking in a particular direction.

Now they're solid black.

It's unnerving, honestly. It's a lot less pretty, and a lot less relatable, and I'd be lying if I said that I'm a little glad to be rid of him in a couple hours, now. I've seen mantises with black eyes before, but I figured they always just were, that a particular mantis either had black eyes or didn't, and it was one of those minor mutations that might be more useful some years, or that might be mildly troublesome but not so much as to weed it out of the population.

Apparently they can change, and it's effin' freaky on a bug more than the length of your index finger in size and which has that eerie semblance of higher-order intelligence that comes with animals that are predominately visual.

So I just tried a sixth google search with some different keywords - "mantis black eyes change" - and found a site that explains that this is a normal development in low-light conditions, which I suppose makes sense as that dark color would absorb more light. It's still creepy-looking. In fact, as the site points out, they're not so much black as they are chocolate-brown.

That particular, buggy kind of brown that you see most often on mankind's favorite arthropod, the cockroach.

I've done whole tirades, in the energy rush that follows a nasty scare with such an insect, on how it's the COLOR that really wigs me out. I've seen images of leaf-green cockroaches and they're kind of cute. Quite pretty. They're a horrible invasive species in Florida, but at least they're attractive. I might not like them, I wouldn't want to touch one, the form-factor is still that of a cockroach, but that bug would not utterly terrify me. I'd enjoy observing one from a nonthreatening range of a few inches, the same way I might enjoy watching the delicacy of a carnivorous green lacewing. I've also heard they're slow, and that goes a long way with me, although "strong flyer" does not.

But that brown - that sort of warm, yellowy brown, that fades into tan at the soft joints - that color all alone makes me shudder, and I certainly did observe that that's the color my little buddy's eyes had gone. And it wasn't appealing.

And now I have to go and bathe under his unnerving glare. Good-y.

Or at least it feels like some sort of violation.

I'm in Taipei, still, and I've made a habit of using my more family-friendly journal (still a bit of a stretch, as I've openly contemplated my own death over there, but it at least tries.) The reason I originally created that journal was to have somewhere to write up my adventures in Shanghai, which necessitated using a service that - unlike livejournal - could bypass the Great Firewall. And from doing this I realized I could censor my writing for my audience as well as my host government, and pass the URL along to my family for their amusement.

I don't like censoring myself, as you might just have guessed. I've written before about my young life and my childhood reflex training to lie by default. And there I was in the bed I'd made in the attempt to be inclusive - I spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding whether it was appropriate to post my musings on my experiences with atypical loss of consciousness. More striking I was ambivalent about posting certain of my dreams - striking and lovely though they were - because, unlike the general audience of the internet, I knew that certain of my familial audience would have the knowledge to potentially turn that beauty into a weapon.

How perfectly revolting.

So I'm here, instead, when I haven't updated to my travel-journal in close to a week, here to let off what's really been on my mind. Partly, because I have the option, because I can access this portion of my written life, and partly because it's merely safer.

Sometimes I feel like I traded brains for beauty.

When I was young, I was absolutely the lowest rung on the social ladder most of the time. I had twin braided pigtails to my waist - or older a single braid to the knees - hand-me-down clothes from cousins and the preference for comfort over style - glasses with frames to dwarf my face and a prescription to miniaturize my eyes. I was gangly and skinny and strange, and reveled in flaunting nonconformity even when it meant my lunch usually came pre-picked-through and that my classmates didn't seem to know what to do with me. But I was very bright. I shocked, usually with good insight or relevant knowledge. I was ahead of things, on top of things.

To be fair, it was around the same time that I abandoned lying about my life that I began to place social prospects on the same level of importance and fulfillment as academic ones - when I was yanked out of one school and placed in another for the last time, right at Halloween during eighth grade. Unfortunately, I'd have just one year to enjoy the newfound balance.

I still excelled in high school. But I had to give up the use of that which had kept me ahead all those years - I'd had to quit reading to stay on top of my studies. Or maybe I gave up reading to be social; I suppose I could have used those lunch hours to read. But I had no time at home, and homework kept me so busy as to almost quelch what was a budding relationship. So I'd blame it on the AP classes. But I had more friends than ever; I had a fluid network of people who seemed almost shockingly comfortable with me, people who came to tell me their secrets and ask for advice whom I might not have even known by name. I suspect, though I do not know, that at least some of this had to do with the fact that I was finally able to lose the glasses for contacts and quite suddenly filled out. My hair grew back, long and longer; my figure suddenly recalled my childhood length only in that my flesh seemed lush rather than excessive as it would have on anyone with sturdier bones. People became friendlier and more conciliatory. I've always had a great ambivalence toward it; I don't want to be cynical, and I don't want to discourage kindness when there seems to be so little of it anyway. Benevolence is a rare commodity. But I fume (or is it bitterly, triumphantly, scornfully wince) when I think of the boys who'd been nothing but foul until my figure changed. Maybe I'm not being charitable; maybe they grew up. Or maybe they're still abusing their 'inferiors.'

College was easier than high school. And I didn't work as hard. I didn't care as much; or rather, I was less motivated in any particular direction. I'd begun to float; I lost the sense of control I'd had when I was younger, the directly proportional relationship between my input and academia's output. (Some of this had to do with high school calculus, a long story I've explained elsewhere and don't want to reiterate at the moment.) I don't have the focus I once did. And so much more often I feel so incredibly blocked; thick and dull.

And that floating feeling has an inertia to it. It's lovely when the current brings you lovely things; when four a.m. rolls around and suddenly the mask etches itself into the page and you know what has to be done, or when the perfect song kicks up on the "radio" of a convenient website and it takes you where you needed to be, or the assigned reading turns out to be something phenomenal, dancing on the ideas you've been hanging around your bed for weeks. But far less often than in my childhood do I feel the sensation of any control over where I'm going or the world I'm living in; I choose even less often what I produce - be it an essay, a poem, an artwork - than I did then. A lot of people would say it's an increase of inhibition, but that doesn't seem to be it at all; it's more as if I have nothing to push off of, that I simply touch less. And less touches me.

I'm not in it as often, anymore. In a lot of people it manifests into the loss of the moment - reflecting on the past or projecting into the future without realizing that you could be now. It's not that way for me, either. It's a sense of losing grip - with ability to propel myself, with less substance with which to interact, a depression is less profound but lasts longer, and is more likely to sink into malaise and inactivity than to seek out a remedy or an escape.

I don't think this obtuseness is permanent - pervasive as it's been, affecting even my social interactions - but I suspect the intellectual impact is irreversible. I used to have a mind dexterous enough to pluck intangible abstracts from the current and manipulate them in the same way that I used to have a body light enough to carry itself easily even lacking strength as it did. Now it seems an idea has to have something of solidity for me to slowly, gently envelop lest it slip between overeager fingers like mist, and only then can I even observe it in any detail, and only then slowly, plodding. It's as if all the surfaces of thought have the tension of water, and this clumsy ghost-in-the-world will simply pass through if careless.

Strange, to feel so heavy and so insubstantial at once. It's compounded by the weather here - it's constantly hot, and always so very humid that the experience is stifling. My already unfit body - pretty, maybe, useless - hasn't handled it well. The upside is it's left me very, very ready for autumn, for winter, for cold's breathlessness rather than this tropical heat's smothering. Running starts out heavy and ends lightheaded with swollen limbs as the heat, rather than the air, overtake my body's ability to cope.

Autumn - with its sensuality, its olfactory promise of leaves and decay and musk and blood, the plump moon of October, the frenzy of Halloween, the coming slaughtermonth and vivid life and death of the woods, all begging body and mind into the world - if it's already half to ending August, if I'm losing my holiday for the new troubles of work and an apartment and the crushing weight of debt and obligation and the inkling of future and change - well, so be it if I can have the fall to wake me up and bring me back.

But the rising sun and the five-o'-clock bell of the workday's end are both calling, and it's probably a good thing to end on such a thought.

Like when you're angry, and need to discharge something, but doing it in public could be stupid.

On the other hand I suspect I may have a sympathetic audience.

A week ago, my aunt overheard me talking to my boyfriend, trying to coach him through Chinese syntax. (He got it, might I add, which rather impressed me in terms of speed.) But I didn't want him getting ahead of the point I was trying to communicate, so I told him to let me lead and I'd take him where he was trying to go.

"The woman never leads," my aunt commented. "Woman was created to help..."

Small victories are delicious. I chose the retort which she couldn't refute.

"Some of us are evolutionists over here."

Of course, this is why I'm hiding upstairs during the Father's Day preparations - my brother's quite welcome to sleep in, or sit on the sofa playing video games or watching TV while drinking a coke, but as a girl I'd be dragged kicking and screaming to peel vegetables.

I cannot wait to get out of here.

Half full, no matter how negative people seem to think I am.

Before my first night in weeks of fully wonderful nearly mindless self-indulgence (not so much mindless as imaginative rather than solution-oriented) I have one note to make, based on an entirely trivial inspiration.

So, a decade or more ago, there was an episode of "Friends" in which the sardonic Joey and the innocent Phoebe are debating whether there can be a totally selfless act, as any altruism results in joy returned to the originator.

It's true. And isn't that a lovely thought.

"Everything is good."

...the Digger archives are all free, ad-supported. Go and return changed. [Link]

I cannot handle the concentrated cute-stuff that is Shadowchild even at the best of times, let alone when I've had a rough day...

I always experienced a degree of synesthesia as a child, mostly between tactile sensations and colors, but every now and then I get it for words, as an adult.

The word "sacred" has a comparatively smooth, quiet, cool, white feeling to it, rather like unglazed porcelain, or moonlight.

With the murder of George Tiller constantly in the news, I've got religion on the brain again - specifically, what sort of religion could create a contingent of people to whom God is all-powerful and His plan is expressed in an anencephalic child, and yet don't believe that God is powerful enough to intercede if the mother opts for a less dangerous or less (emotionally) painful dilation and extraction abortion than to carry the child to term and bear it lifeless, or utterly nonviable.

What does this have to do with any of the above? What on earth kind of weird and cluster of ideas is that "above," anyway? Well, this isn't a political blog, it's an utterly personal one, and so I'm going to pick my own brain a little bit. This was actually brought on by someone's book review, on a text attempting to explore and give the clarion call for the revival of masculinity.

That's another subject I'd like to touch on, and maybe I'll come back to it when I'm done with this one.

Once upon a time I was about fourteen and listening to NPR around the time of one of the new Star Wars films. And someone got to discussing why Star Trek and Star Wars tend to have very strictly defined fanbases that overlap far less often than you'd expect given that they're both very big, very well-funded, often very well-written sci-fi franchises in an otherwise barren environment. The guy explained that, among other things, Star Trek looks to the future. It's an egalitarian society. It's about democracy and development of new technologies and a world in which each person has their place and role and potential. If the new Star Trek film is in any way representative of the franchise, I'd agree; I have no other experience with the series, really, because I'm in the other camp.

Star Wars, this guy explained, is about the past. It's romantic, nostalgic, it tells the story of an elect few who happen to be born heroes. It's Homeric. It's the struggle of a handful of gifted powerful who study ancient arts in order to go out and do battle with the other handful of gifted powerful on behalf of all the faceless millions, and who will individually slaughter hundreds of faceless pawns on the way to the Evil King, because it's also essentially very hierarchical. It tends to play not only to humans fairly exclusively (and mostly white ones at that) but to the boys.

And while there's a lot of unfortunate backwardness in that, I sympathize with it more. It's not rational; it's purely emotional. People have come up with thousands of expressions for this sort of thing; romanticized notions of chivalric codes and white knights and good vs. evil aren't the half of it. All whilst recognizing the world as very complex and knowing that no thing has ever been simple since we went from primate-individuals to people, I've always been nostalgic for the "old days" - do what you need to do to survive. I sort of wonder if more of us are nostalgic for this sort of animal condition than let on - I somehow think the proliferation of therians and otherkin and furries probably has to do with human existence having become too complicated for human animals themselves. We didn't evolve all this way to fill out paperwork all day for a petty wage deposited into a largely-theoretical bank "account" so that we could go to the grocery store and buy plastic-covered heated cooled chunks of Gallus domesticus (that's chicken) to eat and then return by a long commute in a big chunk of combustion-powered iron to the cubicle the next morning - did we??!?

How horribly depressing.

We came all this way, clambering up to the top of the food chain, to tool use and domination of our environment (for good or ill), to a time that so ought to be utopian, to a time when those in this culture largely have enough to eat, and can turn their attentions to idle pursuits unrelated to food, shelter, water, and safety, the immediate, the present, to the future and the past, to dream and to remember and create art and music and develop a democracy in the hopes that all might be heard and participate - we came all this way --

so that we could mourn our lost ignorance? So that we could wish that life were simple? So that we could wish that the constant tragedy of choosing between lesser evils at every moment were unknown to us, and we could simply do what was unquestionably, safely right? This has been the era of the antihero - trying desperately to cling to a code of honor in a world where there are always, always negative consequences to every action, where nothing you do won't hurt someone where every step you take is upon the backs of your fellow man and fellow beast and the very earth itself, and where the epitome of Goodness in the long flicker of human history - those who defend their people - do so in grieving guilt and shame. Western society has figured out, at least subconsciously, that great truth that the Buddha taught twenty-five centuries ago: life feeds on life, all existence is at the expense of another, that suffering and the infliction of harm is a simple fact of being.

No wonder. No wonder we also turn to black-and white codes of ethics from times when the world was simple. No wonder there's a surge in religious fundamentalism as communication improves and globalism churns forward and we, the privileged, just as Gautama Buddha in the old story, are forced to see those whose suffering is the ransom of our good lives. And even we suffer, even we feel unrest. The world looks sick, terminal, hopeless to these people; if all good is at the price of ill, where is the good in good? All is as nothing - which the Buddha taught it was - illusory, the snares of the demon Mara.

Buddhism and Christianity both teach that the world is temporary, that we will move beyond it into contact with the divine. In essence, both abandon this world - and often demand sacrifice and asceticism (careful, I get biased here) such as to make this world the hell they insist it is. The big difference is that extreme forms of Christianity don't bother with trying to reduce the suffering of others by their own; instead the suffering is largely for the self - the effort to keep oneself pure. Instead, the attempts to reduce suffering tend to be somewhat paradoxical - kill people to keep them from self-condemnation to Hell (think witches, think Inquisitions), or conquer and subjugate nations (and kill people on the way) to keep them from self-condemnation to Hell (think every aboriginal culture whose lands are now occupied by Europeans). The main difference has been that Buddhists believe that they don't generally have to force people to convert, as there's all the time in the world - literally - for them to perceive the error of their ways, evolve as people, and eventually attain enlightenment. Christians only believe in one life, so if you don't attain salvation in whatever span of years you get, you are bereft of salvation, the love of God, and any hope for eternity and one's immortal soul. Naturally this tends to mean that Christians are a little more militant on the whole, and a lot more ruthless in fundamentalist particular. Some of the same of this goes for Islam. Judaism has enough of the elements of elect salvation - in my very very limited experience - that there's not so much need to proselytize, and is generally less fundamentalist to date to begin with.

Christian fundamentalism, as I've constantly lamented, seems to have taken all of the above and built up a scorched-earth, with-us-or-against-us policy in which there's a need to salvage, or loot, the world and its souls of everything that can possibly be taken in the name of Heaven and the Saved, because the world's going to fall and burn anyway, and what's the use of assuaging the suffering of those who don't join us, anyway? Mine, hack, harvest, consume it all. Use it up. Alienate those who won't be converted, because they've done wrong in their obstinacy and there's no reason to put up with those whom you won't be living with much longer. The Rapture is coming. The world is at its end. The earth was given to us to use and throw away, because that which we are is not of the world and will live beyond it.

And this brings me around to something.

How to combat this sort of fatalistic, destructive, harmful kind of thinking? The same way they're trying to propagate it. Do hate and teach hate and the world will be hateful.

Look for the good in the world, the beauty, that which redeems. We come into the world seeing it. Ari Berk has a marvellous lecture online in which he discusses his young son, who sat poking sticks into the soft earth, playing in the woods one day, and talking aloud. "I am making a beautiful forest," the father wrote down at the end of that day. "Everything is good."

Realism is advisable. I'm not calling for the wild and complete idealism (reborn, pristine, with each cookie or trip to the park) of children; realism lets you cope with the bad and still celebrate the good. It allows you to be happy. And people, when they are happy, are kind, and propagate this happiness to others, or at the very least mitigate their pain.

And to those Christians who, should they read this commentary, take offense or exception: this world is of God; if created by God it is to be revered. Look on those who see the good in the world, and you may see the nature of salvation. What they delight in, in worldly goodness, is at its very essence the love of God. I'm going to do something I've never done before right here: close on a Biblical quotation and reflection. Matthew 7:7 - "...seek, and ye shall find..." You always find what you are looking for; seek then the love of God, and you will discover it certainly in this world and its peoples.

In the usual course of clicking link after link that tends to ensue after reading one of Ursula's posts, I came across this journal entry on the APA's report on the sexualization of girls.

And while I wanted to agree with some of what she said - especially that girls and young women are different cases, I can't agree with the idea that young women who dress sexily are consciously making the decision to be seen as sexual objects. It's likely that she just didn't clarify, and meant that SOME who dress this way are doing this, but something in the wording made me buck.

While there are a number of situations in which I don't mind being perceived as sexual, or where I actively encourage it, there aren't a lot of situations in which I'd want to be sexualized in the APA's definition - that is, seen as a sexual object, to the exclusion of the rest of myself as a human being. I generally want my identities to be integrated. There are exceptions - I'm not such a good, forward and fearless person that I don't shy away from presenting that part of myself in a professional or educational setting. I recognize that my sexuality as a woman is seen by a lot of people as a Bad and Scary Thing and that in their eyes anything but a passive and delicate flower is a dirty adulterous whore. I'm not brave enough to live without identity modulation. I do the same when I want to be seen for another aspect of my personality in exclusion of my sexuality: even a person who might not condemn me for being sexual might not pay attention to my brain if there's something else to look at. But when it's possible without damaging societal sanction I do like to have my sexuality as part of my identity.

I don't believe Descartes had it right. He tried hard, and he had good ideas, which were solid and plausible given his available information. But mind is body. Mind is brain, and brain is part of body. And my body and body image are part of who I am. We like to accentuate the best parts of ourselves - whether it's to put emphasis on our kindness, or our intellectual cultivation, or our full mouths or our long legs. And it's unfortunate that people will see the latter two before they see the former - and that often they aren't even looking for the former. It positively sucks that people are shallow and sometimes look only for the positive aspects that are immediately apparent. But within reason demonstrating what you have - both in physical attributes and personal style - is self-expression; it says something about you, and usually what it says is good.

For that same reason, I would become frustrated if the only part of me regarded as important was my artistic skill. Or my knowledge of folklore. Or my experiences in a foreign country. All of these things are regarded as part of who I am, and regarded generally positively, and if someone looked at me as a walking repository of knowledge (I was a dweeby and unpopular middle schooler, so I've got personal experience) I'd be frustrated. Being only that which is readily useful - being an object - is frustrating innately. Being seen as a PERSON with a great deal of knowledge, with the full awareness that this PERSON has a life and friends and pets and other interests, is a different matter entirely - and that's why my early teen years spent online, with only my imagination and intellect on display for caution's sake, were an ESCAPE from school, where my imagination and intellect were the only things people valued in me. Online, the general assumption is that you are a complete person, somewhere, despite the fact that your expressed mind is all they ever see. I wish it worked that way in real life. I wish that we could celebrate beauty without objectifying people. I wish that our standards of beauty weren't so narrow.

I don't want to be made or to pretend to be a sexual object. I don't even want to be sexualized according to the layman's definition, because that renders me passive in the process. I want to be able, as an adult and healthy human being, to be sexual, without stigma, and there is a very big difference. I want to set the terms. I want to decide what that means for me. I want to be able to dress in whatever fashion I choose without anyone perceiving it as in contradiction to my relationship status; I want to be able to wear a low cut top without anyone seeing it as a sexual invitation, and this is something I want in the same way that I want to be able to wear a long skirt and long hair without anyone seeing it as a statement of my religious beliefs. I want people to see me as a person without prejudice, and it will never be completely possible, but I want people to try, to make an attempt to perceive others as complete beings who cannot be summed up on appearances.

I got into a conversation while writing this, as I often do, and have burnt out, but so it goes.

Found this when poking around for an image I used to have. It's interesting to look back on.

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