sciatrix

Last night while proctoring a final, I constructed perhaps the phrase of which I am most fond, ever in the context of lobbing an insult at fascists using bad Classical history to justify their politics:

reperiant vissīre cūlīs; sed pēdunt ōribus.

If only they would discover how to fart silently using their assholes; instead they fart loudly using their mouths.

I'm giggling to myself. It's the little things.

So I asked Metafilter about class and socioeconomic status yesterday. Not theoretically, either: I was pretty direct about where I was coming from and openly curious about other people and their thoughts.

( thoughts behind the cut )

So. I don't know. I'm sitting thoughtfully right now and putting my thoughts here rather than there. I'm not feeling much in the way of personal emotion, just intellectual interest. But I had thoughts, and I figured this was probably the place to have them without distorting the entire conversation around me.

I opened my mouth today and found myself saying, rather emphatically: "I don't want the same job but with a better salary and a better boss. I want the job to have a better salary, but I want to be the boss."

In other news, I get to see Captain Marvel tonight so expect comments in a later spoiler post.

so I'm commenting on the aromantic community again.

It's not...

I have such complicated feelings about it! It feels like the people who are continuing the conversations I had ten years ago are also erasing me and the context of those conversations, and I admit I get so bitter at the way that I only ever seem to hear from aromantic community and spaces when they're expressing derision at people who associate them with asexual communities, like there was some kind of cadre of aromantic allosexuals who came up with the whole thing.

And then the older I get and the less I'm convinced romantic orientation is a useful metric for talking about the way that people navigate the world of attachment, because I think the thing people are often talking about is more about limerence and less about the way you find people to grow together with and make families, but limerence is only really relevant when you're starting something new and not so much when you're moving together along a path.

And I worry about the endless hyperfocus on beginnings and not on journeys. Because I think that's what connection with people is, and at the end of the day, I think that the best things that aromantic community discussion has to bring to the table is to really emphasize the concept of chosen journeys that we take with other people.

today I learned that Latin had a verb meaning to fart silently, which just seems like an overarching achievement for any language--and it's even onomatopoeic! (vissire, for the curious).)

Ishka has never, not once in her entire life, received either food or affection.

never.

Writing proceeds apace on the manuscript. It's also my turn to work on the same-sex sexual behavior in animals collaboration I'm playing don't ask, don't tell with for my PI: I've mentioned it on Twitter (where I met the collaborators I'm working with on it, actually), but it's totally unrelated to my thesis work and I try not to talk about it too much where he can hear, in case he's pissed off at me that I'm being distracted from my main thesis stuff. Which is a fair thing, so I don't get too mad about it.

I love my collaborators, though, and it's a nice little oasis of this work is mine amid the infuriating slog of my thesis paper, so I'm excited to set some time aside to think about it. We're talking about hanging out at Evolution--Evolution being what is clearly going to be my home conference, of course--and maybe making a poster for this project as a team, so that'll be cool. I know two or three of us are aiming to go.

First, though: I gotta do the table I promised to do today. Yay.

staranise is looking for help finding a survey that asked fans "What do you mean when you say you ship two characters?"

cbrachyrhyncos has some useful thoughts about self-care and other mental health care strategies, along with a link to a related discussion on Russian Doll.

lovepeaceohana has some interesting thoughts about the role of reassurance in response to self-doubt and self-hate. I have a complicated relationship with reassurance, in that I both crave it and find it embarrassing and hide from it, so I am sitting with this and thinking about it for a bit.

kore has a really good discussion going about the recent spate of power grabs and cancellations of Disney/Netflix collaboration shows. I loved JJ, and I'm sad, but even if you didn't, the post is worth reading for the commentary on cinema and television history, and the changes we're likely to see as studios and streaming services try to forcibly return viewers to a model of "we make the content and you buy it direct from us at whatever the hell price we say." (And changes to actors' contracts, etc, which is also not... great.)

cimorene is thinking about replacing plastic-based textiles with wool for environmental reasons. Given as poor T is stuck in an ethics class right now (theoretically intended for business majors and healthcare professionals, for whom it is required) that has gone all in on demanding that students agree that veganism is the only ethical approach to life, this one resonated with me.

From mcu_cosmic: Let's talk about Asgardian colonialism!

shadaras has some very, very relatable feelings about butchness and gender shit, and I kept meaning to chime in and forgot.

elf has a roundup of Pagan terminology for non-Pagan writers.

That set of photos of the "rescued" puma who lives like a "giant housecat" is less cute than you might think. In general I appreciate Why Animals Do The Thing, and this pretty well explains why I see those photos and immediately freeze and get uncomfortable. It's not cute to see people setting themselves and an animal under their care up for a heartbreaking accident, but that's what is happening here. (I also appreciate WADTT for being careful to also talk about cute animal things that are totally cute (link to cats helping with calligraphy) and good for everyone and wonderful, and making room for people to find animals cute and interact in an ethical and safe way with both wild and domestic species.)

thingswithwings's vid Gettin' Bi has given me a ton of joy this week. Ironically, it was actually slated for a FPP the day after the one that made me lock up for a bit. It'll keep, though.

So has thingswithwings and eruthros' lovely tribute to My Cat From Hell. Seriously, I watched it, and then I went home and watched it with Ishka. (Ish will watch TV with me with every evidence of fascination, at least if she's close enough to stare at the screen. She used to come running home to watch Doctor Who with me when I was screening episodes with H.)

terezis sketched out an Adventure Zone Taakitz catfishing AU that had me giggling to myself all evening.

in media res i think there’s a lot of tension leading up to the confrontation, because at this point taako’s, like, pretty sure he’s being catfished? so he’s freaking out a little bit! he’s pissed! he’s ready to throw down. wait, no, he changed his mind, actually, this is stupid. he’s just going to ghost kravitz. magnus, turn the car around.

kravitz receives a lot of very confusing texts that week.

The Denver teacher's strike is over! The teachers won. I'm happy with that.

Relatedly, workers in Europe and the UK have been successfully deploying "mindfuck" striking tactics against employers, like secretly ending the strike a day early so that employers have to pay both the scabs and the rightful workers on the same day, or like coordinating strikes from different parts of the workforce at different times so that workers are doing 20% of meaningful work at 80% pay. Useful to keep in mind.

Birth of the cool guy: what lies beneath the surface of his performative feminism? A discussion about a certain kind of pro-feminist gentleman that I imagine we've all run into at one time or another. h/t opensummer.

The anxiety weasels have returned, but I should manage a linkspam this week. It has not been a great mental health week for me, but I think I have identified the issues with my sound chambers for now (need more base-line microphone amps, peering at the chambers I )

Made the mistake of accidentally kicking off my own exclusionist trauma issues on a Metafilter post, and will be taking a break from there (have locked myself out of my account for the rest of the week). I am reminded why I tend to view lesbians with guarded suspicion until they demonstrate that they don't hold with the TERFy and SWERFy corners of queerpolitik, and regret bringing up both that particular article and tensions in queer-female-and-adjacent communities more generally.

No, seriously, the word lesbophobia is a dog whistle, and doubling down on it when I go "are you--are you intending to communicate this?" and insisting I'm speaking in bad faith is, ah. Fun.

Also today, I had a horrifically-ill student attempt to isolate his own DNA with a cheek rinse and fill it with so much phlegm that I couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing wrong when he showed me his sample. I did not, however, find this out before that student helpfully tried to dip a micropipette with no fucking tip into his cup of filthy sick spit-water and draw up a milliliter of fluid, and then get confused when the tip didn't fit on the micropipette afterwards. I think I got it dried out enough not to bleed everywhere, but I'm not sure. I definitely went back and splashed ethanol all over that sucker after he left.

I can only hope he had the same nasty bug I did a few weeks ago, so maybe I can fight it off before he infects everyone else.

I have been very tired and very discouraged and very frustrated, lo these past few days. It was T's birthday on Monday, and they had to cancel their planned party this past weekend because Sick, got diagnosed with bronchitis on Monday itself, and then got rear-ended on the way to pick me up. (This is the third car accident in three months.) I don't think I've had much uninterrupted sleep for two nights now--T coughing apparently kept waking me up night before last, and Dent (god bless him) kept waking them up last night first by repeatedly thieving Cheetos out of their backpack in the night, and then repeatedly thieving them out of the trash can, and finally crawling inside the entire bag in search of more Cheetos.

Eventually I physically hauled him up, marched his furry ass out to the living room, re-organized the ripple rug and the cardboard box full of ping-pong balls, and scattered cat treats everywhere so he could satisfy his urge to forage on something he could actually eat and not disturb anyone. We've been slacking on entertaining him that way lately, and it's showing.

I just want to go home, but my sound chambers are not functional and I just want to curl up and go to sleep and not worry about this experiment. Nrghahg.

The main thing giving me joy today is discovering the existence of Ross' seals, which are related to leopard seals but way, way more cute. Have a Ross' seal.



Mood.