Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I emailed a baseball podcast about a linguistics thing and they read out my email!

I mean they read it on one of the mailbag episodes where all they do is read out emails. But still! I wrote it a while ago and had forgotten about it since, so it was fun.

At the end, one of the hosts said "whatever degree you got, hang that sucker on the wall with pride, man, because that makes a lot of sense." Super cute.

The next email was from a woodworker, who wants to make them an official piece of wood to knock on, because one of the hosts is someone who's always saying "knock on wood."

And this juxtaposition meant that they commented on how impressively diverse their patreons are, anything that comes up they can get an expert opinion on or "find someone that has devoted their life to this topic."

I've been thinking about this quote in relation to my own job since I first read it a few days ago:

Burnout, I’ve come to believe, isn’t just about time or tasks. It’s about purpose, alignment, and whether you believe the system you work in deserves your sacrifice.

(I've skimmed the rest of the piece it came from but haven't read it closely because it's about USian healthcare, so I can't speak for how sensible this person might be otherwise.)

That reminded me of something jesse_the_k shared a while ago, in a tab I also still have open. Jesse summarizes the MetaFilter quote with "The key point is: we must learn to identify pre-burnout signs. When you nurture sufficiently in advance, immolation is avoided."

Regularly lolling about and achieving nothing is vital for maintaining good health. There is no substitute for it. It's as necessary as sleep, from which it is quite distinct. We build and carry a lolling-about debt at our peril.

That panicky, squeezed, world-collapsing sensation is a super reliable symptom of a chronic lolling deficiency, as is the characteristic denial that I have no time for anything so frivolous. The correct internal response to that denial is: Bullshit! If I feel like I'm at the end of my tether then there has been something occupying my time that is less important than lolling about, and I need to identify that.

Maybe relevant because I am in the middle of a weekend where I have no plans and kinda worry about that (it turns to be both a cause and an effect of bad mental health} but also cannot think of anything I actually would want to do.

As I have mentioned, I accidentally made a baseball fan of diffrentcolours. (Accidental because all the other English dudes I've dated either hated all sportsball or hated everything USian so I wasn't expecting him to take an interest but it turns out he's the right kind of nerd for sabermetrics to appeal to.)

This afternoon, I introduced him to the concept of Remembering Some Guys (since the Opening Day PR always involves a lot of it; the Twins start in St. Louis so I read names like Jason Isringhausen or Scott Rolen) and used as evidence the thread on here a while ago where everyone listed the mediocre players they loved when they were ten or whatever. He asked me mine (probably Gary Gaetti), and then he said "Mine would be Jake Cave!"

It would. I'm so delighted. He's only been a fan for a few years and yet he totally gets this and has his own Guys already!

He also just told me he misses Sanó and Astudillo. Aww. I do too. And those Guys are perfect for Remembering.

I'm so proud.

I know that D has been reading an internet thread that includes references to "The Cask of Amantillado," so I wasn't that surprised when, as we ate our lunches in companionable quiet, he asked me all of a sudden "What would get you bricked up in a cellar?"

I was like, "My entire personality?"

He had to explain that he meant like what would lure me in there. I was thinking "What about me would make someone want to brick me up in their cellar."

"Oh, lots of things," I said matter-of-factly. Like there's no suspense about this.

The first thing that came to mind is "I have a stack of boxes of all the Lego NASA stuff and you can have them all if you get them out of the basement," like that'd do it. (You can open the payload doors on the space shuttle and there's stuff inside!)

Just that and the ISS and the Saturn V would be enough probably. I'm a simple man.

I'm also a ball of want, I want so many things.

D is like "You know you can just buy the Lego ISS, right."

Around the last mouthful of my food I replied indignantly "Fortunato coulda just bought the amantillado!"

Anyway apparently you can't even buy the Lego Discovery any more. Aww. See, I'd have to just get it from someone's basement! (D helpfully pointed out that Artemis is just a click away.)

I asked my fedi friends this question and I'm so happy I am surrounded by my people.

• my firend who's obsessed with laserdiscs and wants to start a laserdisc museum says "if someone said anything related to laserdiscs and all 'hey i got some cool laserdiscs in the basement yeah keep going back', i am so there. doesn't even have to be 'here's a rare laserdisc' it's just 'hey would you like to see my very common laserdisc' i'd be all YEAH LET'S GO!"
• "oh no, that one would catch me, too. Lego of any kind with 'you can look through it and put it together' would get me, honestly"
• "Listen, I'd do it if they said there was food down there. Like not even fancy food."
• "i think 'do you want to see my cool cellar' might work on me"
• "rocks, plants, weird collections of stuff, a problem to be solved, black raspberries… I feel like it’s a long list and I’m surprised I haven’t been trapped in a wall yet"

My mom reminded me today of how my grandpa, the farmer, used to say that the robin needs to be snowed on three times before spring will come.

Apparently they have been now. My mom is impatient for spring so I hope she gets it soon.

It's good to know that Paul Skenes (amazing professional baseball pitcher) and I (none of those things) have one thing in common:

We can't play video games.

(This is especially funny because he is being interviewed because he's the cover boy on this year's version of the Major League Baseball video game. Which I probably could play, if the text can go big enough.)

We're both in search of a hobby actually.

Last night my counselor said "it's like a perfect storm of things hitting you all at once."

And I was like "You keep saying that!" and chuckled. Always about different things. This one was a bunch of stuff on the theme of powerlessness. I can't remember the previous ones now but they've been similarly bleak.

She laughed too and said "I know!"

It's nice we can laugh about it. But I'm pretty sick of these metaphorical storms.

I talked about trying to facilitate mutual aid for disabled people today in the wake of this news, and she's like "okay, awesome! but is there anything you can do to take care of yourself?"

Goddammit I knew she was gonna say that. And I hate that question because I have no idea how to answer it.

I'd been talking about what a big deal a few quid could be when I was on the other side of the mutual aid. And now that I'm on this one...I dunno, I'm not used to this. What else nourishes me besides having my bills paid and food in the fridge.

I said something like "I've gone up a level on Maslow's hierarchy and I don't know what to do."

So today I actually looked it up, and I know Maslow isn't perfect but still. I've got the "basic needs" sorted now: food, water, warmth, safety, security... The next level is "belonging and love needs." "Intimate relationships, friends."

Sigh.

I have been working on this and I have been starting to succeed in making new friends, with trans gym and queer club and whatnot.

But I do feel like my need for attention and affection is very high and I get all tangled up about it very easily (blaming myself, doing counterproductive things, etc...rejection sensitive dysphoria stuff).

The level above that is "esteem needs," "prestige and feelings of accomplishment" and...that's precisely what I'm not getting at work any more.

Sigh.

I wanted some Springsteen to help get me through another day of writing a lot (another almost-thousand words today brings me up to almost-6000 in my last five days at work). But it went wrong and gave me a lot of emotions instead.

The Springsteen song "Wrecking Ball" (not the Miley Cyrus one) is perfectly designed to stir the hearts of middle-aged white guys (it's the only song of his I can think of that actually mentions football!) but it also still gives me goosebumps when I hear it, goddammit!

Yeah, we know that come tomorrow
None of this will be here
So hold tight to your anger
Yeah, hold tight to your anger
Hold tight to your anger
And don’t fall to your fears

His early-21st century albums are a balm to my soul these days.

He's of an age by that point to see patterns, the cycles of things ("hard times come and hard times go..." repeated over and over again). Not getting lost in despair, instead keen to bring people together, speak out against what is wrong ("American Skin" feels like the start not the end of this), eyes on the prize which is still ephemeral hope and dreams. But he's got high hopes.

And somehow I forgot, until it came up on shuffle, "Shackled and Drawn." I love "Shackled and Drawn"!

Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill
Up on banker’s hill, the party’s going strong
Down here below, we’re shackled and drawn

Shackled and drawn, shackled and drawn
Pick up the rock, son, carry it on
I’m trudging through the dark in a world gone wrong
I woke up this morning shackled and drawn

And its little gospel outro... This is definitely a "blues in the verses, gospel in the choruses" Springsteen classic.

Just found a draft of a post I was working on a while ago, a response to my friend Marcia's review of a movie I hadn't seen (still haven't!), but that's okay because it's not about The Substance as much as it is about bodies and what we embody: race, gender, age.

This film is really about white women’s insecurities and never did I have illusions that I would feel seen and heard. I think it affirmed that I am an object, and that I owe my gender or allegiance to no one; I create myself.

Feeling not female and trying to bend, cut, open and fold this body into female and instead of it being gender affirming, I felt more alienated from female, from woman.

Oof. Yes. So much of femininity is doing little violences to our bodies. I learned the word tribulation because of my grandmother, complaining about the awkwardness of buying clothes or the discomforts of jewelry, I can't now remember which, telling tween or teen me "these are the trials and tribulations we face as women" with a chuckle, but I wasn't chuckling. I didn't know what a tribulation was but it sounded scary. I was not looking forward to a lifetime of those!

I kept waiting for the little violences I did to my body in the name of femininity to pay off, and they never did. Surely this discomfort and pain, actual blood, sweat and tears, had to mean the payoff would be really good right?? And I mostly rejected even high heels and makeup, never mind plastic surgery. Never had to harm my hair and skin with relaxers or skin-lightening creams. So if even I feel such pain, when mine is a small fraction of the pain there is in the demands that femininity puts on Black and Brown people...

Once on Twitter, whilst I was defending Trans folks, a person wanted to misgender me by calling me a little boy. It was a weird sensation to process, someone wants to misgender me by calling me a boy, which is what I thought would make me most comfortable in the end, being boy, that would make life easier, but instead I work to be comfortable in girl.

I was fighting TERFs on twitter way back when they assumed absolutely anybody with pronouns in their profile was trans, so my "she/her" once got someone to tell me I looked like an ugly man and I'd never be a woman. I had never thought I was anything other than cis at the time, but I have held that in my heart for years and now am delighted to be an ugly man who no one would ever believe is a woman.

When I saw the monster, I saw my future without being honest with myself about what beauty really is, what it truly means to de-center the male gaze, to de-center white womanhood whilst being queer, of color and other identity markers; for me, the monster is the culmination of a wasted life...

I do feel like middle age has found me in the last year or so. I'm leaning in to it for the dadcore vibes and grateful that I get to age because to age is to live (I am twice the age my brother ever got to be, so I will never fear growing older). But my age feels so bound up with my gender because when I was in my 20s and first tried to imagine myself as an older person, I imagined a man. I couldn't imagine a woman at all. I never have been able to think of myself growing old as a woman, and I really want to grow old, so that's the thing that finally tipped the scales for me into I must be trans, I better take action accordingly.

I'd rather have had a trans childhood and a trans young adulthood like a lot of people, but what matters much more to me is having a trans middle age and hopefully old age. Maybe my beard will come in gray already, maybe my hair will disappear any moment, I don't care at all (or I don't think I do; maybe I will feel differently when these things happen but neither has so far). A friend of mine once said that second puberty in your 40s disrupts the usual narrative that the changes in your body after you leave your 20s are unwelcome ones. I think there are lots of ways that body changes can be more welcome, but definitely addressing gender dysphoria in middle age is one way to mitigate the "oh my knee hurts all the time now" etc. type of changes to the body.

I'm also struck by someone misgendering Marcia by calling them a little boy specifically; there's some age-related incorrectness in there too (as well as echoing the racism of Black men always being called "boys" by the kind of white people who still want them as slaves); it's setting up a power dynamic often levelled at women (and definitely at people who are incorrectly perceived as women).

I still want for us to want more than to appeal to the gaze. I want all women to want more for themselves beyond ‘beauty’, not because I think anything feminine is bad, but because I want them to consistently examine what they mean when they are reaching for beauty. Who is really defining what you deem beautiful? Who is paving that definition for you? Is it you? Is it white supremacy? Do these things matter? Yes, to a point I think they do. I want us to want more, and to imagine more.

Anyway, their writing and thinking are great; I'm so glad I can now afford to subscribe to their essays and also their DJ sets!

As V was going upstairs for their shower today, they said to me "oh, there's a letter in your LARP name here." Like it's a really normal thing to say.

(I can't remember if I explained here, but I call it a LARPname instead of a deadname because it's not dead, it's limited to certain...roles that I sometimes have to play in live-action.)