tree

the cloud appreciation society is looking for someone to write about clouds.

We need help writing content for the Cloud Appreciation Society, and we would love to give this work to one of our members. If you write really well (in English), you have a good sense of humour and you know your Cumulus from your lenticularis, we’d love to hear from you.

The work would be online (i.e. you can do it from wherever) and you could manage it in your own time. We would start pay at £15 GBP per hour (or the equivalent in your currency) – assuming that you don’t write a word an hour. You won’t be able to buy that yacht in a hurry, but it would be really interesting and flexible work for a cloudspotter. If you would like to be considered as a contributor to the Cloud Appreciation Society, please fill in the form below [here] to let us know more about you.

and here is a photo i took on my way home from work of a beautiful cumulous formation above central station.
( cut for bignessCollapse )

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the problem with passing is that it makes you feel hollowed out. invisible. you start to feel complicit, like you're intentionally wearing a disguise, like you're deliberately misleading people into believing that you're Like Them when you're not. and there comes a point when they make assumptions and you've been passing so long that to correct them would be incredibly awkward; it would require an extensive and very personal explanation. so you say nothing and feel ashamed. and people who don't pass call you a traitor.

the problem with being asexual is that almost no one—including much of the asexual community—treats it as a sexuality in and of itself. it's not enough to simply say: i'm asexual. you have to define what type of asexual you are. the unifying trait that defines our sexuality—the lack of sexual attraction—is apparently not enough. asexuality is treated as a subset of some other sexuality.

but it's not. not to me.

i've spent the last eight years trying not to care about the way in which the LGBT community tries to slice us up so we'll fit into the neat little labels that already exist. but guess what? i do care. i spent thirty years of my life wearing a label that didn't fit because i didn't know i had any other options. i refuse to wear one now so that i can be more palatable to people who are quite happy to treat me with the same ignorance and bigotry with which they've historically been treated. who squeeze and squeeze us into the narrowest possible definitions until our identity is all but gone.

i'm asexual. that's it. that's what i am. if that's not enough, too fucking bad. i don't want to come into your treehouse. i don't want to be part of your acronym. what i want is for you to stop trying to erase me.

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dear friands,

please refrain from using pejorative words describing mental illness as adjectives. your burrito was not "crazy" good. the price of those shoes is not "insane". if your sentence does not make sense when you exchange your word-of-choice with "mental illness" or "mentally ill" then do not use it in that context.

when you use these words in this way you are actively hurting me.

(using them in the context of mental illness has its own problems, but that is another matter.)

if you are also a mentally ill person and do not care about this issue, that's great. but i do.

and i do not want to keep being hurt. in the interests of self-preservation i've decided that i need to unsubscribe from individuals when i see this happening. it does not mean i think you're a bad person; it simply means that every paper cut hurts.

thank you for time,
tree

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whenever i start wearing a splint on a new—previously unsplinted—finger joint, it always feels uncomfortable for a while. i have the sensation that my movement is being constrained more than it should be. but then i look at my extended finger and see that the joint is level instead of concave and realise this is the range of motion non-hypermobile people have.

( plain, meagreCollapse )

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there was a girl named casey at my high school in the US. she was a senior (year 12) when i was a freshman (year 9). we were on the volleyball team together. i don't think we ever spoke at all—maybe just to say hi—but i watched her whenever she was around. i couldn't help it. maybe it was a crush; i'm not sure.

(whenever i tried to identify my sexuality as a teenager, i always ended up defaulting to heterosexual because at the time i knew of only two options and i clearly wasn't a lesbian because i didn't want to kiss girls. the fact that i didn't want to kiss boys either was chalked up to the (internalised) belief (of the standard line) that i was simply a late bloomer (emotionally/sexually speaking). why it didn't occur to me that i could be a lesbian late bloomer just as easily as a heterosexual later bloomer i can only explain by saying: i was 14. i had no idea. it was 1991 and the concept of asexual within the framework of sexuality didn't even exist yet. if it had i doubt it would have made its way into the consciousness of a small catholic school in baltimore, anyway.)

i just know that casey made me feel something remarkable that i'd never felt before. to me she had this aura about her. i wanted to be near her and i wanted to be like her. she wasn't beautiful, exactly. she was pretty, i think, but it was more than that. she was magnetic in some way. what i remember most is her hair and the way she seemed to have this light always around her. (the logical voice in my head says i romanticised the idea of her: that the light lingered in my mind because i mostly saw her in the gym, which had enormous high windows, and we were all surrounded by light. the rest of me says the reason doesn't matter. that's how she seemed to me.)

she was white, as 99% of the kids at my school were (this, despite it being baltimore), and while she was small, she was curvy. her hips were like my hips, but lovelier, in the way they gently sloped under her uniform skirt. her hair made me think of a lion's mane, the way it framed her. 'light brown' is too prosaic a description. it was so many colours: blonde and gold and honey and caramel. and it was a step up from wavy, but not quite frizzy, somewhere between her chin and her shoulders. she'd pull it back in a ponytail for games but at practice she usually left it down. i loved her hair.

it's kind of embarrassing, but this bit from all's well that ends well sums up how i felt.

[s]he is so above me:
In [her] bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in [her] sphere.

it's like i regarded her as a different species. i just wanted to be around her and bask in her presence. the only things i really knew about her were that she didn't have a boyfriend and she was kind. she was popular in the way that girls who don't have a particular allegiance to any one clique are. i had the sense that she was nice to everyone in a genuine way, rather than the fake niceness that so many girls performed.

why do i still find myself thinking about her from time to time all these years later? i don't know. i'm sure the memory of her is just as much a construct that i created as any fictional character. if i had actually gotten to know her i'd have discovered she was as flawed and human as the rest of us. i might've not even liked her. but none of that matters now because it didn't matter then. she was the first star around which i orbited. that alone makes her special.

so, casey, you'll never read this and truthfully i'm glad because it would be so very awkward for both of us if you did. i'd be surprised if you even remembered who i was. but a long time ago you gave a shy, scared, dislocated, terribly unhappy girl something bright and lovely to look forward to every day. and even though you didn't do it knowingly or with intention, i'm still grateful.

with nostalgic affection,
a little satellite

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DAILY AFFIRMATION
A Play in One Act

Setting: a room with a bed

Cast of Characters:

NARRATOR, the voice of reason
CHORUS, a multitude (off stage)
WHISPER, sly, vicious (off stage)
SUBJECT, a lone figure, mute

ACT 1, SCENE 1

[NARRATOR stands alone holding a sheet of paper.]
NARRATOR	[Reading from paper] The fine print. Item one: the other party is not responsible for your faulty inferences.
CHORUS	Grow the fuck up.
WHISPER	No one wants to be your friend.
NARRATOR	Item two: any resultant hurt or obscure sense of betrayal is caused solely by your own misguided attempts to form unsolicited connection.
CHORUS	This is the way things are.
WHISPER	Get used to it.
NARRATOR	Item three: your resentment and desire to inflict hurt in return are unwarranted, petty, and childish.
[Exit NARRATOR. Spot shines on bed where SUBJECT sits.]
CHORUS	Here is the bed you made.
WHISPER	Now lie in it.
[SUBJECT remains motionless for an unspecified period. Blackout.]
WHISPER	Lie in it, liar.
WHISPER	Lie.

(END SCENE)

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i wrote to my mum the other day that in person i can barely open my mouth most of the time but give me a textual medium and you can't shut me up. well. case in point. this came up on my dash:

My literature classes didn’t help. My professors stressed the importance of approaching a text with detachment, with a critical gaze rather than an emotional one. There wasn’t a place in academia for gushing or ranting. There wasn’t room to simply say, “I loved this and I don’t know why.” One had to use academic jargon. One had to be methodical and thorough. It was like listening to a song and wanting so badly to get up and dance, but instead of dancing, you have to sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song. And I didn’t want to fucking do that. I just wanted to dance. I just wanted to read. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to deconstruct lines of poetry or do a close reading of Faulkner’s usage of semicolons.

Jenny Zhang, ‘The Quiet Importance of Angst-y Art’, Rookie

so of course i spent an hour expressing my emotions about language and it maybe was sort of articulate, so i decided i wanted to keep it here for posterity.

( make way! english major comin' through.Collapse )

okay maybe 'articulate' wasn't precisely the word for it.

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there came a point when i accepted i was never going to "get better" — i was never going to be "well" — and that life would consist of "managing". but even then i was still fooling myself.

diagnostic criteria for various depressive disorders require the identification of specific periods of depression. but the concept of having discrete episodes of depression is completely foreign to me. i know that from birth to approximately the age of eight i was not depressed. and there were likely periods from ages eight to perhaps ten when i was not depressed. but since then depression has simply been the default. i am never not depressed. it's merely an issue of quantitative descriptors, of more or less. more or less since we last spoke; more or less than last week; more or less since yesterday.

i am always going to be depressed. not in the sense of a recovering alcoholic who no longer drinks; not asymptomatic; not in remission. not even in the sense of someone who monitors and controls their diabetes with insulin and/or diet. i am always going to be depressed in the same way that sisyphus is always going to be pushing that fucking boulder up that useless hill. actively and resentfully and without even the empty triumph of making it just once to the top.

okay, then, zeus
well
fuck you


*


do you ever love something so much that you can't
do you ever
do you sometimes just
do you


*


How can bone be changed?
By removing it.



*


[dialogue 1]

what is a heart?
four chambers, pumping
what is a chamber?
emptiness enclosed
what enclosing?
atoms and void
where is the ending?
never


*





*


[dialogue 2]

what are you picturing?
a landscape without me
is it beautiful?
it is


*


"To think logically is to be perpetually astonished"
said
the saint
before I destroyed her.
The mind is the body.
I hate this fact.
I love this hate.


*


[dialogue 3]

do you feel better now?
a little
why?
a volcano? a boil?
those are two questions
what is the reason?
what are you asking?
why don't you know?


*

Was it Ovid who said, There is so much wind here stones go blank.




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anne carson takes no responsibility for this message.
¹ "brain taps twice" — 'would be her 50th wedding anniversary today'
² "how can bone" — 'h & a screenplay scene 1, scene 2'
³ "if you're pushing" — 'seated figure with red angle (1988) by betty goodwin'
⁴ "to think logically" — 'decreation (an opera in three parts), part one, aphrodite's stroke and dye aria'
⁵ "was it ovid" — 'would be her 50th wedding anniversary today'

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my biological grandfather's nickname for my grandmother was 'nugget'. when he proposed, he said, "i love you, nugget. will you marry me?"

i think that is one of the loveliest, most delightful things ever.

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     aefry ember of hope is gan lic the embers of a fyr brocen in the daegs beginnan brocen by men other than us. hope falls harder when the end is cwic hope falls harder when in the daegs before the storm the stillness of the age was writen in the songs of men
     so it is when a world ends
     who is thu i can not cnaw but i will tell thu this thing
     be waery of the storm
     be most waery when there is no storm in sight

paul kingsnorth, the wake

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