Ceramic Gryphon Wall Hangings, Based On An Early 16th Century French Ceramic Tile I Saw At The Met Cloisters.

cracked open the glossaire érotique (1861) and was immediately floored by the very first word in the dictionary being "abailardiser" (verb). definition: "to leave someone in the state the canon fulbert left abailard" (castrated)

the biggest epistemological gap between me & 95% the rest of the world is literally just how much i love to look things up on the internet and how much it baffles me when other people don't like to do this. we live in the information age. like i'll google anything i'll read this bmj paper on the toilet i'll look up words i don't know i'll append pdf free to any possible phrase. i don't know how anybody is voluntarily turning this down. sometimes i get so tired of searchinf for something physically inside a store i pull out my phone and google like silken tofu aldi what fucking aisle while im standing right there. otherwise what is even the point

continuing my research into "what is the most bullshit thing you can call a 'book'", i present: one sheet of paper and three pinback buttons.

pretty excited by these, i've wanted to do a turkish map fold zine for a while and the little case is cut from the same sheet of paper so the whole zine can be printed on one 8.5x11 page. i'll have these at seattle art book fair at washington hall next weekend!

i do wish my experience of having feelings (this isn't me being Vague, i do very generically mean 'having literally any feelings at all about anything ever') didn't automatically involve a meta-layer of feeling viscerally humiliated by the fact of my having them

like any time i get irritated or upset about anything it almost immediately tips into 'well okay but probably i'm the problem here bc i'm Oversensitive and Irritable bc i've failed to construct a life for myself which makes me happy in a way that would cushion me against being bothered by these irritants, which in the philosophical scheme of things i recognize i should Rise Above' (in this framing i am apparently an oyster and happiness = nacre). and it's not that there's no potential truth to this line of thinking but it also feels a little like i imagine having one's emotions blamed on one's menstrual cycle would feel (disrespectful & humiliating)

with things like sadness-about-everything-and-nothing-in-particular or, idk, private delusional romantic hopefulness abt people (nothing recent in this category but i have been known to experience it from time to time) it's slightly different bc there the meta-feeling is less about my failure to respond appropriately to other people and more about, like, why am i not advanced enough to have evolved beyond these feelings. like 'i understand intellectually how unfounded and ultimately laughable i look right now and yet. despite my ability to observe myself i still continue to experience this (unpleasant, humiliating) experience. why can i not think my way out of it.' and of course this is more or less equivalent to saying 'why can't i think my way out of the human condition' which. hello. and yet!!

anyway i think none of this is helped by the fact that my nearest and dearest are largely deeply phlegmatic, pragmatic people, at least in terms of the affect they present to me, and so by comparison i feel deeply histrionic and stupid and childish at essentially all times: Local Man Secretly Dancing Bear (unlike aubreyad where dancing bear secretly man). the answer is presumably 'don't compare yourself! you are a different variety of Creature! #IDIC!' but unfortunately the comparative impulse is i think. again. pretty deeply human (for feelings on which, see above)…

i was just thinking earlier in vague terms about a specific but weirdly prevalent thing which consistently bugs me, namely: when cis men attempt to be self-deprecating about their unfamiliarity with feminine things, except that of course it's not actually self-deprecating to bring up how categorically distant you are and have always been from a stigmatized practice…

and then ran into this post, in which a presumably-white anon attempts to be self-deprecating about their unfamiliarity with the racialized genres of hip hop and rap (specifically by characterizing themself as a[n implicitly uncool] 'blorbo enjoyer,' which of course—as @‍batmanisagatewaydrug correctly points out—has the knock-on effect of framing fandom as Not For People of Color, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is racist), which illustrates exactly the same dynamic along a different axis…

anyway i guess my point here is just (1) to note that yeah, this really does seem to be a pattern! and given that, (2) to underscore in my own mind that this is probably something for nerds vel sim. in particular to look out for, because we often have insecurity modifiers that makes us feel like we're not ~really~ solidly part of the privileged group, which seems to make us feel like disclosing our ignorance can somehow constitute a self-deprecating self-own, rather than an offputting humblebrag about the privilege that made it possible…

thinking back to the time i realized i'd been practicing such scrupulous politeness abt [bodily feature i actively wasn't attracted to] that my bff had come away with the impression that i was, like, very actively into it, which was like. wow, wild to be so deeply misunderstood—

however it turns out that after putting an enormous amount of energy into Accepting that feature, well, now sometimes i am actively into it, so like. guess i'm the one who was wrong about me after all!

genuinely wild how often i realize i’ve taken an interpersonal situation where the information i actually have is ‘i’m not having a good time’ and turned it into ‘i’m worried they’re not having a good time with me’

probably ultimately very straightforwardly traceable back to a childhood in which i wasn’t having a good time with my mother and the only variable in the situation that i actually had the power to alter was myself, so that now when as an adult i’m having a bad time with someone my instinct is still to fix myself instead of, you know, removing myself? or alternatively checking in with them about how things are feeling to them and attempting to arrive at a meeting of the minds, or at least a mutually semi-satisfactory compromise?

anyway like. this failure mode probably implies a particular menu of followup actions that i ought to be identifying and instituting, but i’d frankly settle for just ‘recognizing this particular self-abnegating reframing when i’m in the process of committing it’!

like, okay, this clearly would have been a better post with excellent hires photos to illustrate it, but like. i'm still thinking about the beautiful rich black-tipped chestnut of the (huge!!) tail feathers and the bronze-and-verdigris of the breast and the way the down trailed up the back of its mostly-naked little neck and head like a tiny turkey mohawk, and the smooth sudden grace with which it flew up to perch on the railing, like a cat gathering itself and then in one smooth sudden motion: transit! only the creature is a zeppelin; and how facing away from me with the wind ruffling its feathers up in great soft ridges it looked like nothing so much as an enormous, astonishing pinecone…

holy shit turkey on the deck. god they’re SO beautiful and SO shockingly large. junoesque

just really mourning a sense of natural secure connectedness to, well, anyone at all today/lately. and ultimately it's like, well, lord knows people haven't felt connected to you in the past, kiddo, so very arguably you're just reaping what you've sown… and in any event maybe the entire notion of 'natural' is as overrated in a social context as it is in food/gender/&c contexts, and i just need to accept that the path forward involves a lot of awkward attempts at (re)connection, and that it's unavoidably going to be a very unhappy road for me because of how miserable any interaction that isn't Overtly! Positive! immediately makes me feel, because [RSD/chronic post–social rejection stress disorder/however you like to frame the Sudden Disproportionate Flood of Misery phenomenon].

it's just hard because usually the slow, laborious, only-intermittently-rewarded slog is how it works at, like, the edges of your comfort zone, you know? but unfortunately my entire social comfort zone has turned into edges, even the loadbearing bits, and whether or not that's entirely ""my"" ""fault"" (often not a particularly good way to look at two-way social streets in any event: self-righteous isolation isn't gonna keep you warm!), it's unquestionably going to require some active effort from me to improve. just, you know, the eternal cruel irony that things so often require more work precisely when you're already operating at a deficit…