Woke Up This Morning W/ This Fully-formed In My Brain [oc]

There's a Hole in the Bucket is more than just a fun little folk song. It's a warning about weaponized incompetence. In this essay I will

I have a theory.

The Right thinks that DEI/affirmative action/etc. elevates mediocrity because of the dismal quality of their own tokens.

Look no further than the fashion designers, musicians, filmmakers, actors, drag performers, and other, ahem, "creative" types who went MAGA for proof, especially the queer and/or non-white among them. They're tiny-ass, undistinguished fish in ponds so small and undisturbed by talent that they're not even qualified to be tempests in teacups.

maybe I'm just a cynic, but I swear, every progressive I know with a daughter or niece, especially if they are the dad/uncle, will claim that she will take over and run the world someday. and the kid is just a perfectly normal kid?

I'm old enough to where some of those kids are adults or close to it, and while they're certainly cool enough, they're not exactly taking the world by storm or whatever.

it's not that I don't love how loved and supported these kids are. more reflecting on what a weird cliche it is to me to make these grand statements about a child. it feels performative, like they're making up for past misogyny, where they suppressed a girl or woman. or maybe these men really don't know what girls are like before their inner fire is quenched by patriarchal reality. idk

Real talk re calling yourself an atheist vs. saying you're agnostic:

If you're willing to have believers preach at you because they think you're open minded and indecisive, say you're agnostic.

If you'd like to skip the preaching and go straight to the anger at you for daring to so shamelessly exist without belief in a deity, say you're an atheist.

Either way, they're going to be mad at you. I prefer to save myself the trouble, personally.

(For the record, I'm technically an agnostic atheist, but that is a concept almost no one gets, so I say one or the other when I'm not in the mood or place for giving a big philosophy lesson.)

You know what I find personally annoying about AIs?

Not professionally as a kinda-techbro. Not morally as a human being. Not ethically as someone who trying to be a decent person. Not semantically as a philosophy major. Just personally?

The same behavior y'all hate in people like me, you adore in a chatbot.

The two tupperware genders are spaghetti sauce/tamatar ki salan (reddish) and tumeric/haldi (yellowish).

My former foster kitty Mavis (née Duchess) was incredibly cruel with her affections. Every time I would bring a big strong paper bag home for her benefit, she would fall in love with its crinkly noises. Then, she would use it and use it until the bag had no crinkles left, at which point she'd become bored and leave it alone. There it would sit, reduced to a sad lonely life of uselessness.

Alas, poor shopping bags, destroyed by love and then abandoned.

I remain forever unconvinced that normality is normal.

Trans Life Hack

Take the average age that a cis child would start the puberty you are now undergoing. If you'd like, you can use a sibling or other relative's starting age to guess at what yours would've been. Keep in mind that hormonal shifts start a while before any changes are readily apparent, so the actual starting age is younger than you might guess.

Determine the amount of years you've been on hormones. Subtract any amount of time you weren't able to consistently keep up with it. If you went through a period of significant dose adjustment, you may want to set your starting clock at when you got on the right dose for you, not when you started trying it out.

Add Steps 1 and 2 together to get your True Gender Age.

Compare your changes to cis people of that age, not people your own age.

you know how I know you’re gay?

Went to Costco for my updated booster+flu shot. Pharmacist asks me if I've had any vaccines in the past 4 weeks. Yes, I reply. Which one, she asks? Monkeypox, baby 🏳️‍🌈