Latest Posts by 7fff00 - Page 3
art by tracy walker; preorder here :)
get ready to see these guys on every envelope i ever mail until i die
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!
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…
Some pen sketches/bird studies from a couple weeks ago (except that little griffin critter on the first)
These were just meant to be loose and fast, so some might look a little wonky
just having one of those little upswell-of-gender-despair moments, you know how it is
specifically of the nonbinary variety where like. you know you don't really like how you look¹ or how other people react to you but the Opposite Version wouldn't really be better, really you want something in-between or ambiguous or nothing at all but that isn't actually a real option you get to have in real life, in real life you either get to be a mannish woman whose real gender desires are a painful secret or you get to become Pronoun Pin Guy and then are still effectively seen [and treated!] as a mannish woman, just, you know, a crazy, annoying one
i mean obviously part of the problem here is that i don't really have nonbinary/agender/&c people in my life, i'm super isolated and then even my internet circles have historically been comprised of like. trans people μέν who care about medical transition but not about the language other people use for them (which to be clear is perfectly valid but like. unfortunately my maybe-deepest identity is 'poet (non-practicing)' and i care so much about language. [i may or may not also care abt (some aspects of) medical transition but like. i don't atm have any health insurance or income and also due to the ongoing cptsd frozen-rabbit psychological situation it's a bit hard to tell what ""i"" might ""want"" so. question mark there]). cis+ people δέ who basically are like 'well the real practical, adult approach is just to accept that one's Basically Materially Cis unless one's strongly motivated to medically transition, but, like, your special-snowflake baby sensitivities are Valid or whatever…'² which, again, you have to let people frame things for themselves and pretend it doesn't imply anything abt you, because if nothing else, your differences of inclination wrt how to frame things make your situations different! but unfortunately, even though i do genuinely intellectually believe that, emotionally it hurts my feelings every time, because i really resent this idea that like. cis is the box everyone starts in + stays in unless they kick hard enough to get out of it. bodies shouldn't mean anything by default!!
⸻ ¹ i think this gets worse every time the season changes and i have to re-figure out how to walk the extremely narrow sartorial line i can actually bear, is part of what's going on here ² to be clear and fair to the people in question the level of superiority i've portrayed here is entirely my projection onto them, it's not on them that this stance makes me feel this way, it just does :/
the problem with being fair-minded is that when something is hurting your feelings but it's something you've previously done yourself you kind of just have to be like. welp.
This sheep tablet woven band might be the cutest thing I ever did. Probably because I don't do cute things often. But now I get the appeal.
spent some time this afternoon attempting to restart the sock project i ragequit in march, which was frankly a major triumph purely on the Overcoming Psychological Inertia front, even though in practical terms i didn't really get much forrarder?
for context: i taught myself how to knit in like january and knit one (1) thing, which was a giant neon cowl with giant yarn on giant circular needles, and then was like, ok well i have one million hats so. maybe not one of those next, even though it wld otherwise probably be logical. …sox r also basically tubes, right? which was, uh, a pretty hubristic leap in difficulty—i mean, 'tinier' isn't really conceptually more complicated, and in theory dpns are just, like, if a circular needle were segmented instead; but in practice 'tinier' is trickier and more stressful, for me at this stage in my knitting non-career anyway, and dpns are. very extremely not my friend so far.
i of course haven't been helping myself by attempting to do an italian tubular cast-on, which in fairness to me i didn't actually find prohibitively difficult to do flat when i originally tested it; but since it starts out as just, like, a series of twists that aren't actually locked in until a row or three down the line, i wasn't confident that the stitches wouldn't just unravel on me if i twisted the dpns the wrong way while attempting to get set up…
anyway i do think i learned some things today and tomorrow [or maybe more realistically friday, bc tomorrow i gotta play chauffeur] will be another day, on which i will perhaps have more success! hoping at that point to arrive at an understanding of esoterica like 'how to arrange the needles that form the tube relative to one another' (i think it shouldn't actually matter which ones top, but i sure felt today like i was Doing It Wrong, lol) and 'how the fifth needle actually interacts with the other ones in order to, you know, actually knit anything…' :)
Erich Dieckmann Bauhaus Development of a Metal Tube Chair.
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' 👍
it really is true, i think, that no matter where you fall on a moral spectrum you'll be shocked at some things other people are willing to condone, and will seem sanctimonious to them if you disclose as much; and that in turn other people will be shocked at some things you're willing to condone, and will seem sanctimonious to you ditto…
for context this post is brought to you by my genuine (and unexpressed, ftr, except here!) startlement at seeing a blogger i've historically considered conscientious admit to not recycling their cat food cans
baby's first attempt at mending sox any other way than by needle felting¹! as with all my very amateur attempts at mending we'll see how they hold up going forward,² but i had fun experimenting and so far they seem comfy?
⸻ ¹ an approach which ime works pretty okay on thick hiking sox, ftr, but which didn't seem likely to be well-suited to thinner ones like these :) ² i imagine that if i'd, say, used one long strand boustrophedon-style, that probably would have had a little more structural integrity than this more piecemeal approach. next time maybe!
Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (April 25, 2021).
one of my more unhelpful qualities is that i kind of genuinely prefer getting zero response to a ~bid for connection~ over getting one that feels, like, dutiful and abbreviated and rote
because like. at least in the absence of a response you can kid yourself that a matching enthusiasm will eventually arrive, you know?
(this is of course very much a lesser-of-two-weevils thought exercise because of course really what one always wants is engagement that's both enthusiastic and prompt. however one must recognize that in the adult world Other People Have Lives, &c.)
it also doesn't help that like. i'm very primed Due To My Upbringing to interpret neutral cues as negative and so am very much that stereotype of the young person who wants an exclamation point and can't stand a 'sure,' which—is objectively just a neutral cultural preference, but since i'm not actually gen z or whatever, i always end up excoriating myself for being too much of an immature baby to be appropriately chill about other people's Offhanded Working Person stylings. which is rather a disproportionate pile of bad feelings to be stacking on one maybe-not-even-intentionally snubbed bid!
Gute Sheep/gutefår. Värmland, Sweden (April 24, 2020).
more mending :)
this was a bigger hole so it may ultimately make sense to join the two patches together with some sort of little double-sided embroidery or something, idk—in my mind's eye there's a very charming vision of three little tulips—but for now it can rejoin its fellow grubby little urchin in circulation 👍
And here it is: the bluethroat in all its glory.
Eurasian Red Squirrels/ekorrar photographed in Värmland, Sweden (April 18-20, 2025).
