This is the letter I will send my grandparents as soon as I have enough money to print some photos.
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This is the letter I will send my grandparents as soon as I have enough money to print some photos.
_____________________________________________
My navel piercing was exhilarating. I got it the last time I was in Miami, surrounded by my Miami friends who had no idea why I’d just signed up for such a feminine-coded body modification. Having friends there made the event exciting; having Ania made it safe. I faced the needle with enough nervousness that I had to fill out the “I’m the right age” form twice.
Ania has a picture of the face I made when it went in. I’m not sharing it.
Afterward, though? The soreness commingled with a heady endorphin rush that I should have expected but most definitely did not. I was giddy with delight. If we weren’t already at our financial limit, I might have signed up for another piercing then and there, in that euphoric haze. I’m looking forward to that feeling again.
For those who don’t know, Dungeons and Dragons is, crudely, the tabletop board-game version of games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, and I’ve played it for many years. The enjoyment I derive from this game is so thorough, through the several editions that I’ve played, that I’ve written my own campaign setting. Those who know what that phrase means know that this was no small undertaking, and the world’s current, approximately finished state is the culmination of a decade of effort and countless revisions.
There’s an alarmingly easy trick for figuring out which of your friends have been mocked about the things they enjoy. There’s hardly any effort involved, and they might even accidentally insult your taste in the process.
CN: Allusion to past emotional abuse and suicidal ideation
I rarely tell my partners that I love them.
Well, that’s not true. I rarely tell them uninitiated. It’s easy for me to say “I love you, too,” sincere yet mechanical, in response to “I love you.” Once a relationship reaches the point where “I love you” is a thing we’re saying to each other, that exchange becomes commonplace: the affirming background hum of two people who care deeply for one another. It’s easy enough that just having my love for a person on my mind when a totally different person, jokingly or accidentally, tells me they love me is sometimes enough to bring it out. The mortification that follows is rarely worth the laugh.
But starting that trade is much harder.
This year is my last year teaching the Animal Form and Function dissection lab at the University of Ottawa. I’ve done a lot for this lab over the years, and I want to do one more thing.
The course is a survey through the animal kingdom with a particular emphasis on body plans. A creature’s “Bauplan” (in the original German) is the basic structure of its body, rid of peculiarities that disguise the similarity between the animal and its relatives. The more deeply these plans are explored, the more the ancient relationships and divergences that link animals to the entire kingdom’s common ancestor can be illuminated. Animal phyla, if the term still has any value, are often best understood as groups united by sharing a bauplan that distinguishes them from other groups, and these structures are important for an aspiring student of animal anatomy to recognize.
Below the fold…
CN: Discussion of masturbation and pornography. Links whose destinations you don’t recognize are definitely NSFW.
I wrote recently about how I recognize the importance of the media that made me the atheist I am today even as I acknowledge its glaring flaws, because it filled the particular void I had. I meant that discussion to be a lead-in for this one, but it took on a life of its own.
There are a lot of reasons to point out media that fail this or that marginalized group. The euphemism “problematic” acknowledges media that traffic in stereotypes, show gut-wrenching physical or emotional violence for shock value, discuss the mere existence of marginalized groups as though it were funny enough to be the punchline of jokes, or otherwise promote the deadly ideals of kyriarchy. It’s largely a matter of public record that it’s not really possible to totally eschew “problematic” media. Our ability to even recognize things as problematic is dependent on the axes of oppression of which we’re aware, so one person’s seemingly innocent pleasure is another’s dehumanization-for-entertainment. Additionally, many problematic tropes are so entirely because they are pervasive, dominating depictions of members of the groups in question, rather than because they are directly insulting or damaging, and so can only be redeemed by other depictions becoming common enough to offset their impact.
There’s something that gets lost in discussions of problematic media, however, and that’s how they can be a necessary stepping stone for people on their way to better things.