Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The best reason for a knitter to marry is that you can't teach the cat to be impressed when you finish a lace scarf." -- Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

"My therapist just said 'kids are very resilient' and I said 'why do all adults need therapy then?' And she just looked into the middle distance for a bit + seemed to reassess quite a lot of things" -- Amy Mason (AmyCMason), 2022-03-01

"I am annoyed with myself. I really thought I'd caught the ciabatta rolls soon enough and put them in the freezer but when I got them out again tonight I saw I had not in fact put them in soon enough :(((( fucking ADHD tax. It's like being compelled to appease a capricious god

"I hope the Folk enjoy those mildly mouldy ciabatta rolls

"All it needs is for Spouse to leave the half-and-half out by accident again and their traditional meal will be complete

"You know what actually this is a really good way for me to trick myself into not feeling awful about accidentally wasting food. Nah man I didn't waste it; it was a gift for the Folk and by that we'll have bought ourselves another month of peace and safety"

-- Edgar Allan Bitch (Saf) - Tea-Fuelled Vampire (edgar_a_bitch), 2022-02-26

"Imagine there's a pill you could've taken when you were 12 years old, that meant you would have been ten times more happy, attractive and mentally stable than you are now.

"And now imagine being told you're not allowed it because less than 0.1% of the people who take it regret it.

"Because that's what's happening to transgender teens right now.

"And this is probably the only way I can get many non-transgender people to understand this concept."

-- Caitlin Spice (CateSpice), 2022-02-23

"My kid is constantly asking me questions about other adults misogyny.

"'Why is dad so appalled when a little girl swears but doesn't seem at all offended when little boys do it.'

"Y'all need to know that kids notice this stuff, way faster than you think they do."

-- Bebo (BoldBebo), https://twitter.com/BoldBebo/status/1485344143178027009"> 2022-01-23

"In times of crisis and despair, Christianity sounds like, 'my heart is breaking with yours and I'm grieving with you,' not 'everything happens for a reason.'" -- Rev. Benjamin Cremer (Brcremer), 2022-03-05

[Yesterday was the first Sunday in Lent for Western Christians. Today is Clean Monday, aka Ash Monday, the first day of Great Lent for Orthodox Christians. The two are counted slightly differently in that Great Lent is forty consecutive days, and Lent is forty not-Sunday days. Thus they wind up starting on different days of the week.]

"I don't want Ukraine's history to be a legend about 300 Spartans. I want peace." -- Volodymyr Zelensky, 2022-03-03

"C is a language with many useful functions: strtod converts your string to a double, strtol converts your string to a long, and strtok converts your string to potassium" -- hikari (hikari_no_yume), 2022-03-04

"Many animals that live in societies cooperate with one another to ensure the health, safety, and survival of the group. In fact, cognitive ability and social cooperation has been found to correlate. Animals living in larger groups tend to have an increased capacity for problem solving, such as hyenas, spotted wrasse, and house sparrows." -- Dominique Potvin (silvereyedoc), "Scientists Attached Tracking Devices to Magpies. But Nobody Asked The Magpies", 2022-02-21

[While it's not the point Dr. Potvin was making, at least not directly, this made me think of rugg^H^H^H^Hstubbornly individualist, social-Darwinist types, versus we're-all-in-it-together, stronger when we protect each other, governments should help people types. Cooperation is part of our strength as a species. Anyhow, the rest of the article is more entertaining than the one paragraph that jumped out at me, so go and enjoy reading about magpies rescuing each other from scientists' attempts to study them. (And if Dr. Potvin did intend that message between the lines, so much the better.)]

From Edgar Allan Bitch (Saf) - Tea-Fuelled Vampire (edgar_a_bitch), 2022-02-26:

1

In Flanders the flowers in the bloodsoaked earth
Stirred by the march of war & the silent foot of Death
Were living bloodstains, romantic, sad

In Ukraine a woman stands bold in the street
Tells invaders to grow sunflowers from their bones
Bright, full of strength & hope

2

Humanity yearns for meaning in the midst of chaos
Hope at the bottom of Pandora's fated box
And sometimes that hope looks like flowers

Today is
Gregorian: 2022 March 04 -- second day of Lent
Roman: 2775 AUC, Ante diem quartum nonas Martias (4th day before the March Nones)
Julian: 2022 February 19
Hebrew: 5782 Adar II 01
Islamic: 1443 Rajab 30
Persian: 1400 Esfand 13
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.9.6.0
Indian (civil): 1943 Phalguna 13
Coptic: 1738 Meshir 25
Discordian: 3188 Chaos 63

"Remember that lent and ash Wednesday is not just about putting away the bad things. It is about creating good things and helping the poor and the needy, being kind to people and much more." -- Jacob Winters

[A good Ash Wednesday to everyone observing Lent on the Western calendar! (Orthodox Great Lent begins 7 March this year.)]

"'back to normal' + refusing to change after a disaster literally always means normalizing mass death and suffering. period.

"the idea that we have to completely preserve our lifestyles no matter how many die is some really scary ultra- conservatism and lowkey a [red flag] for fascism"

-- kevita 'kombucha' hate account (pr0nan0n), 2022-02-17 [context (15 tweets) starts a few tweets up]

"It shouldn't be lost on anyone that the strategy here is to focus on going after the parents of trans kids and on the other adults in their life: teachers/therapists/social workers etc bc there's been so much negative press resulting from having trans kids testify in Congress.

"But the end result is the same: the targets are not ultimately cis adults, they're just the means to an end to hurt trans kids. This is a crucial thing to remember and to understand; the goal hasn't changed, only the methodology of the cruelty.

"This way they can claim they aren't going after the kids directly, they get to frame it as policing child abuse which is a much more popular and easily defended framework, and it dovetails nicely with their evangelical 'hate the sin not the sinner' pious garbage

"The goal isn't really to mass prosecute cis people for supporting trans kids (or at least it's unlikely to get to that point); it's to cause so much fear of that potential prosecution that trans kids are categorically told 'no' and shut down in any attempt to seek help.

"It's not too different from the way they've gone about dismantling abortion rights; not through an outright ban but by chipping away at the margins and creating a chilling effect which creates a de facto culture of prohibition. They would love to do this with gay marriage too btw"

-- della (della_morte_), 2022-02-23, regarding the governor of Texas declaring affirming care for trans children to be 'child abuse'

"Jean says to it's ok if things get a little messy sometimes. Just keep your conscience clean and your claws sharp" -- Jorts (and Jean) (JortsTheCat), 2022-02-22

"To say a tiger is an 'outside' animal is an understatement that is best appreciated when a tiger is inside." -- John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story Of Vengeance And Survival

"There's nothing like trying to sort through your parents' house, your childhood home, when they've both gone, to make you think: wait, I'm not ready for this - I'm a kid. And then you realize they probably thought that too, until the end. There are no adults. We're all just kids." -- Michael Marshall Smith (ememess), 2022-02-10

"My mom tells me sometimes that in her head, she's still 25, she just wonders why all her friends are old people." -- tkingfisher (UrsulaV), 2022-02-10

"The law moves slowly, and bad ideas can travel around an industry like a virus." -- Cory Doctorow, "The Worst Timeline: A Printer Company Is Putting DRM in Paper Now", 2022-02-15

From "Why many of the 'open everything' COVID-19 arguments are so dishonest" by Parker Molloy (ParkerMolloy), 2022-02-14:

He just wants to have his dinner parties without feeling sad about it. It's really that simple. He wants the government to tell people to go out and have dinner parties and for others not to judge them for it. The truth is that quite literally nobody is stopping him from having dinner parties. He wants the government to intervene specifically to tell people how to feel. How sad and, dare I say, snowflakey is that?

My biggest question is why someone would frame an article around "opening everything" then you admit that things are, in fact, open? Is it because the actual argument being made -- that people need to pretend that COVID-19 doesn't exist, that they need to pretend like long COVID isn't something to be concerned about -- isn't actually one the author can support?

[...]

Of course, people "prefer the old normal." Nobody is sitting around chuckling to themselves that a couple of thousand people a day are dying from a virus that didn't exist 2.5 years ago. But "old normal" vs. "new normal" is a false choice. It cannot be 2019 because it is, in fact, 2022. I can't be 20 years old because I am, in fact, 35. Time moves onward. If I could make COVID-19 disappear, I'd do it. But I can't. It's here. Hopefully, its future mutations make it weaker, but nothing I say or do will affect it. "Normal" is, and will always be, a state beyond our personal control.

When I graduated college in 2009, thrust into an economy in free fall, I didn't get to go, "Ummm... I actually preferred the 'old normal' where 'entry-level' jobs didn't say, 'Needs seven-years experience,' on them!" (I mean, I certainly could have said that, but I don't think The Atlantic would be running out to commission a piece on it from me.) Sometimes the world deals us a bad hand.

"There is so much emphasis on gender dysphoria that it's easy to forget that gender euphoria is just as vital and present for us. If gender dysphoria is the dark cloud over our heads, gender euphoria is the sunbeams that warm our skin. It's the rosy light inside us that we feel when we are seen and loved. It's the invisible rainbow over our heads that glitters when we own our true selves. Gender euphoria is the psychological state of bliss and comfort that happens when our gender expression is aligned with our identity. (This is one of the reasons that Pride is so wonderful, especially for those of us who feel invisible or marginalized in other areas of our lives.)

[...]

"Some people say that gender euphoria, not gender dysphoria, should be the diagnostic requirement for transgender people. Not all of us experience the negative aspects of gender, but all of us know what it's like to feel 'right' in our bodies. All of us are free to try out different names, pronouns, gender expressions, and modifications on our journey. The 'click' when something feels authentic is the best-truly, a sense of coming home."

-- Plume blog, "What are Gender Dysphoria and Gender Euphoria?", 2021-09-22 [Plume appears to be a subscription-based provider of trans-related health care via telemedicine. Beyond having stumbled across the blog post I quoted from, I know very little about them.]

Ten years ago today, I started HRT (just estradiol and spironolactone at first -- I added progesterone later). It was going to be an experiment: "I don't have to make any permanent decisions; I'll try this until Easter and then evaluate how I feel about it." (I figured the day after my birthday would be an easy date to remember, plus it was Ash Wednesday, which made using Lent for timing kinda tidy.) At Western Easter, I said, "Um, I'll try this until Orthodox Easter." At Orthodox Easter I was like, "I'm not managing to fool myself about this still being an experiment. I feel more mentally 'together', more able to cope with all the stresses that are still there, with estrogen instead of testosterone dominant in my brain, and I'm looking forward to seeing outward physical changes. This is right for me." Before I started, my gender had shifted from the non-binary I used to be, dysphoria was increasing, and I knew I had to Do Something. So this was what I did. Ten years later, I still experience a lot of dysphoria, but less of it, and there's gender euphoria -- that feeling of rightness, not constant but reliable enough to know it'll come again -- that makes the dysphoria easier to handle.

These are life-saving medications. I did not wait until I was in crisis to start, because I knew what direction I was heading in (and because HRT was something I'd been contemplating and wondering about for a long time). Some trans folks don't start until they're feeling desperate. Some figure it out way earlier. And as that passage I quoted mentions, for some of us it doesn't have to be dire first. But it's worth noting that my one extended suicidal phase (not counting short medication-induced ones^[1] much later) was around the onset of male puberty. And a few years ago when a Medicaid glitch interrupted my supply of spironolactone (anti-androgen) was when those feelings came back (except this time I knew what they were, and I knew my situation was temporary and I just had to hold on for a month or so, so I wasn't actually suicidal, just feeling all the same things that had made me suicidal back in middle school). These are life-saving medications.

I wish I'd been told about twenty years earlier than I was, that one test for whether a patient should be on HRT or not ... is to start them on the hormones, and before long they'll either report that the hormones are making them dysphoric and stop^[2], or they'll go, "Oh, thank God." If I'd known that, I would have started much earlier. Anyhow, I'm glad I eventually found out for myself how much easier it is to smile when I've got the right mix of hormones.

[1] It turns out I have a paradoxical reaction to antidepressants. Which doctors kept trying to prescribe to help with sleep or fibromyalgia or both. What I didn't find out until last year when a therapy intern's supervisor was sitting in on a therapy session, is that a paradoxical reaction to antidepressants is as much of a sign of ADHD as a paradoxical reaction to stimulants. So gosh, I could have figured that out about myself a couple decades earlier if any of the many doctors I mentioned the paradoxical reaction to had connected the dots. Oh, and also benzodiazpines like Xanax make me angry. Apparently also a clue.

[2] In fact, not too long ago, a male cisgender doctor who mixes very small amounts of estrogen into a skin lotion as an anti-aging thing, made a mistake at some point and gave himself much more than his usual dose ... and basically gave himself dysphoria for a while.

[Oh, right, it's also George Washington's 290th birthday.]

"when you tell queer kids they're too young to know that queer people exist you're really telling them they're too young to love themselves, but never too young to be bullied, ostracized, isolated

"the idea that students should only learn that queer people exist at 18 is rooted in the completely homophobic belief that queerness always = sex (and scary, scary sex!) while being straight is just being a person

"i knew i liked boys when i was in elementary school. the same way straight kids know who they like. it was not about sex! it's straight adults who are sexualizing queer children by talking about queerness as ONLY about sex. it's always a 'lifestyle' and not a life

[...]

"of course the idea you can't mention that queer people exist to children is rooted in the idea that queerness is a learned behavior while straightness is 'natural'... when straight ppl enforce gender norms from before kids are born

"homophobic parents who don't want their kids learning about queer people and history say they're 'protecting' their kids when really they want their kids to grow up to be just as homophobic as they are

[...]

"it's just so telling that talking about anything LGBTQ-related is 'brainwashing' but talking to your son in primary school about how he's going to marry a girl in his class is not"

-- Chen Chen (chenchenwrites), 2022-02-09