The Problem, Of Course, Is That I Very Badly Wanted A Clean Slate On Here, Because The Old One Had Started

Chameleon by Mansur Mughal, c.1612

the Guardian

Trump signs executive order on water pressure to ‘restore shower freedom’

White House says order will ‘make America’s showers great again’ and ‘end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure’

somehow this is not an onion article.

Eurasian red squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (May 9, 2024).

what is your eye color. what is your favorite color. what is the color that appears most frequently in your wardrobe. what color is your favorite blanket. what color is your water bottle.

experimenting with wax resist on this cute little fellow

Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (April 25, 2021).

nefret cat hopped up to sprawl very adorably and affectingly in my lap (just, of course, as i'd been contemplating getting up) and it's just precisely warm enough today that my feet were bare but also tucked up against my thighs to keep them cozy, which has resulted in the extremely luxurious sensation of 'fur against exposed ankles' 👍

and this is where i'm reminded of an unrelated conversation i had a while back, in which i was expressing a desire for better data on things like the actual correlation of pelvic width to assigned gender (coming as i do from a narrow-hipped mother and wide-hipped father), and the friend i was talking to was like, why even cede that ground, though? like, even if wide hips are generally a Woman Thing, well, (a) there's nothing wrong with Woman Things and (b) i thought we'd established that gender isn't sited in the body? and at the time i was like, fair enough! and let it go, because i agree with both those points—but i was never entirely satisfied with how the conversation had gone, and my thought process today helped clarify for me why: because wanting better data about actual quantifiable things that we tend to just handwave with (cis)gendered assumptions isn't, actually, about wanting to validate my gender by establishing that i got my hips from my dad or whatever; it's about the fact that letting gendered stereotypes gaslight you about the actual reality of the world we inhabit makes you—me—a sloppy, stupid thinker!! and like. i aspire to be compassionate. i aspire to be consistent. but—by the god i don't believe in—i aspire, maybe above all else, to be precise.

so i’m friends on strava with Baby Sister’s extremely sweet, extremely earnest nerd-jock boyfriend, right, because i’m trying to Behave Welcomingly towards the partners of important women in my life despite being, if we’re being honest, the world’s most defensively shriveled social prune, and today that normally-very-incidental fact rubbed my nose hard in how much sexism i still gotta unlearn—

so i went for my stupid dinky little run, right, and dutifully logged it, and found myself looking at my dash or activity feed or whatever they call it over there, and realized Baby Sister’s bf had also just been for a run, which had taken him about the same amount of time; but the thing was, i’d actually run, like, 15% longer than he had, it was just that my pace per mile had also been, like, a minute and a half faster than his. which was really startling to me, because i absolutely reflexively assumed that a tall mid-twenties cis guy, who i know for a fact cycles and rock-climbs on the reg, was going to be a faster runner than me, a medium-height estrogenized couch potato!

and like, obviously i have no idea what relationship this kid's pace today had to his actual capacity, and also quite frankly in my experience running is a sport where, sure, your fitness matters or whatever, but it’s also just radically easier the less you weigh?? so i’m not particularly priding myself on a (decidedly non-elite) pace that has a lot less to do with my current fitness level (rusty) and a lot more to do with currently being underweight bc i’m bad at feeding myself bc adhd. but it just feels like. pretty fuckin telling that i was so taken aback!!

went 4 a run / saw a snail & a red-winged blackbird & a tufted titmouse / cut off some more hair / showered / am now back in my trusty armchair flopping the flop of the virtuous, with a Beverage on one side & a Cat on the other (well ok technically she's up behind my shoulder lounging on the increasingly-squashed back of the chair, like a very lazy angel or parrot).

wild 2 be a sack of meat whose most morose electrical impulses r fully redirectable via extremely basic interventions!

unfortunately every time i contemplate perpetrating a text post i get a sentence or three into it only to experience agonies over the hideousness of my own prose styling

which is putting something of a crimp in this whole 'what if i started blogging again' experiment