Hi, How are you today? There's not enough of this in the world, and I'd like to change that. The Internet seems to be exactly the wrong place to talk about it, because it taps into a need for things to be black and white, and to battle things that are complicated in the simplest terms. But we have to use the tools we have, so please, be a little kinder today.
Posts
I don't really have anything to say at present, but also want to keep the blog active. As a result, I've decided to post some pictures of red pandas, because they're extremely cute. I mean, they're up there with cats for me on those terms.
Recently I wrote a post where I admitted that I'm questioning my gender identity, and in this post I thought I'd try to talk about that a little more. To begin with I don't think I was a very masculine child. I cried a lot, and was scared a lot, and was a very imaginative child often in the worst ways. I still swear I saw a woman fly past my window in a basket one night, and that on another a crone's voice came through the curtains. I wasn't sporty or tough, nor particularly academically gifted, outside of reading. In fact I got bullied a lot and hated sport from an early age because I was well aware of how weak I was. One of my memories of prep school is the games teacher pulling my head out of a rugby scrum by the hair and telling me to "get your head in properly, you girl". I had few friends, and the ones I made quickly seemed to default to picking on me, and calling me names. At the same time, my parents tried to "toughen me up", though I d...
The world feels as if it has shrunk since I was a child. I don't just mean that in the sense of growing up, nor in the sense of transport being faster and more ubiquitous. I think, in part its because of the Internet, which has meant so much in breaking up traditional communities and the adoption of broader, looser, and more transitional ones. In many ways that's been a boon, of course, it lets people talk to each other across the globe, and cuts down those feelings I recall from my childhood of being alone in a small town with no friends because I was a misfit. There's no doubt that for LBGTQQIAA people, women, and disabled people, the Internet is a lifeline allowing them to seek support and get a sense that their concerns and problems are shared and common. That's so important, provided what they find is support and not just an opportunity to sell them products or love bomb them into making foolish decisions (by which I mean that they may be preyed upon, not that thei...
Last year, I found a word for the way I feel about myself: agender. For years I'd struggled with the feeling that I didn't really fit among men and felt a goodly amount of time feeling repulsed by masculinity - all while feeling like there are some men who are very attractive and who, although I've identified as straight, I wouldn't really mind having a long kiss with. Folks like Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings films (and I'm afraid that it is Aragorn, Viggo Mortensen isn't at all attractive to me, but I do appear to have a thing for beards and long hair... on a guy that is!). I've never enjoyed the trappings of masculinity, and the social aspects of the male world - cars, drinking, football etc, leave me cold. I don't like saying this, but at times it feels like if men ceased to exist the world would only get better. There are times when it feels like all men do is damage things, and fuck up the lives of women and children. At the same time, I'v...
Hi, I thought I should do a post about Bournemouth and how I'm finding the town, now that I've been down here for a couple of weeks. I've done a fair amount of walking around the place, exploring it on foot and getting lost regularly, and there's a lot to love. The town's commitment to green issues is evident in the wild flower verges and wild, overgrown, graveyards, and that makes me happy. Admittedly there are a lot of cars on the road, and some of the drivers down here are complete bastards, and seem to hate pedestrians, but that's not a unique Bournemouth issue - you find those guys everywhere. It's fair to say that there are two Bournemouths, the tourist town and the other one. I'd say that the town centre and the front firmly belong in the former camp, while the rest of the town is terra incognita, a strange mixture of the two. With an economy that seems as reliant on barbers, tattooists, dog accessory shops, and little antique stores, as on the...