Topics: consent, respect, feminism

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Sometimes I feel a vague discomfort, or even a burning rage, in certain situations, yet I have great difficulty putting my feelings or rationale for my feelings into words. Then someone else puts it into words, and it makes me happy. Or at least relieved. I feel that they have released my pent-up frustration, by explaining why such-and-such-a-thing was so upsetting.

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Some recent instances:

• a tiktok polyamory joke that went something like:
  (poly person): hey, do you want to go on a date sometime?
  (other person): i'm actually in a monogamous relationship, i'm here with my girlfriend
  (poly person): ooh, so you and your girlfriend?
  , and someone's comment saying "well i thought it was pretty obviously a no"
  , and another commenter asking "how so?"
  , and the response "because it wasn't a yes"

• a blog post about unwelcome body comments
  , which dictates the appropriateness of physical assessments from intimate partners
  , but frankly life in general would be better if everyone thought twice

• a moment in Tuca and Bertie where:
  Bertie's coworker comments on her breasts
  , subsequently a sexual harrassment seminar is held
  , wherein Bertie announces why the comments were unacceptable:
  "you made me think about my own body at work! that's DISGUSTING!"

I hate eleventy as much as I hated jekyll...how terribly predictable of me.

UPDATE breaking news breaking news ... breaking news ... breaking news ...

I just didn't realize that .liquid ACTUALLY USES RUBY and .njk ACTUALLY USES JS. Like I thought they used magical Eleventy magic language. ogawd it's so good to have figured it out, this has taken 3 days 😂

nothing like re-reading my blog to remember that i am hilarious. (and strange, and prone to randomly become very interested in a topic for 6.3952 days, and i miss sandwiches, and i wonder who my role models were?)

i avoid people from my past because i am embarrassed about the person i was, but then i am also embarrassed about the person i still am, so maybe i should just hide permanently from every everyone?? idk up to suggestions

I have to give meds to a rat in a syringe and I spent the first day trying to restrain the rat and force the syringe into its mouth. After two very squirmy, unpleasant attempts (unpleasant for me, probably terrifying and horrible for the rat 😦 ), I thought "There has got to be a better way." So I asked the internet, which delivered the easy way - put the meds in food, duh. Just make yourself a delicious tiny plate of: oatmeal, ketchup, watered-down peanut butter, mashed whatever, a single cheerio...the options are endless (don't poison your rat tho), empty the syringe onto the plate and mix it up (or let the cheerio absorb it up!), and give it to your lil chubster in the cage where they will feel comfortable eating it. DUH. I feel so stupid for not having tried that. I'm sorry baby rat!! But now we have a better way! That makes us both happy - baby rat climbs all over the plate because he is so eager to eat his treat 😂, and I get to watch him being happy and silly. 😍

I updated my blog from jekyll to 11ty! I had constant battles with jekyll to build my blog, my ruby installation is dysfunctional, whatever whatever. I wanted a js based framework to make my static site and 11ty / Eleventy is pretty cool! I still have a big ol to do list but most of the work is done and now I will finally be able to write blog posts and publish thoughts again. YAY. : )

I love the idea of food parties, where there shall be a theme, and all participants may contribute to variants on the theme. My ideas have included:

• plant milk party: i bake chocolate chip cookies and everyone brings a different non-dairy milk for sampling. because there are so many! like havernut i mean hazelnut, and pea, and yumm. of course, i bake the cookies because they must be standardized in order to properly pit the milks against each other without confounding variables. 😎
• ice cream sundae partae: this should take place on a sunday. because there is nothing more important when planning a party than to maximize puns before even beginning. guests bring a topping of their desiring, like chocolate sauce and bananas and cherries and pecans and brownies. the problem with this party is that i only want vegan ice cream which is eXPENsive. maybe i can get an ice cream machine and then make my own... 😎
• sushi party: i, the esteemed host, prepare sushi rice and nori for rolling, while the hungry invités bring their preferred vegan sushi ingreds. (sorry, i am not down for flopping a bunch of dead fish around my house. 😜) then, we have an adventure attempting to roll and slice the aforementioned components into..i suppose into maki rounds (rolled up) or sushi blobs (oblong blobs of rice with a topping draped delicately over them).
• ramen party: inspired by a dear friend who missed a particular brand of indonesian instant noodles^[1] and suddenly chanced upon them while in the wonderful city that is NYC, he bought a billion packages to share and we all happily slurped up our noodles. this plan was originally stymied by my lack of sufficiently high-sided bowls. but if i had the bowls i wanted, party peeps could bring corn and green onions and tofu and greens. ramen party memory reminds me of:
• salad factory: an ingenius invention of a person who came before me, wherein all participants bring various salad components - nuts, dressings, leafies, fruits.. - and each member mixes and matches to their heart's content. i adore this because salad needs too many ingredients and to be too fresh for me alone to be bothered to eat many of them.
• hot pot party: my latest dream, based out of an inability to ever go out for hot pot due to my avoidance of meat. i dream of a beautiful spiced broth bubbling on my stove, with plates of greens and mushrooms and tofu puffs. apparently i can maybe even find vegan fish puffs?! see, i do have the significant obstacle of not having any hot surface to maintain the hot pot hot on, but a girl can dream. and dream she does.

Since no food parties (or other parties) may occur until the post-covid era, I am free to cook up (heh heh) ideas of any proportions. Also since no parties may occur, I am free to be as enthusiastic as I want about hosting them, all while experiencing none of the dread and anxiety that accompany actually doing so. I get anxious about hosting parties because I want everything to be perfect because if everything is perfect then people will like me and if people like me then I will feel temporarily relieved. (I have decided it is a good idea to fully verbalize the explanations for any unfortunate aka nonsense-and-self-defeating mental habits I may have, so that I may see how nonsensical they are, and eventually let go of them. Ah see, it feels less constricting already. 😃 )

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So, what do you think? Don't those all sound so fun and appealing?! drooling See you at the party!

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I HATE NEEDLE THREADERS

on writing opera (being a librettist): "Something I’ve learned from other librettists who are well-accomplished in writing things to be sung: if you can shout it, you can sing it. That’s a good test, if you want to run around your room shouting things to see how they come out." —Charles Wuorinen

i imagined myself doing this and ...it sounds fun. 😂

i really love sandwiches. they are really the best food, except i cant' mske-ahead a batch for convenient any-time turn-of-a-dime consumption. also excuse the typos in this post, beacause i am typing with one hand so that the other hand neVERn EVER has to [ut the sandwich down. 😍 SANDWISHES i wish for themmmm even while i am eating one sometimes i get sad that it will be gone so soon. hnnggg

Hello friend, it is a new thought of a new day. Treasure the world!

How not to convince me to buy something: "Start your FREE trial! ...or regret it tomorrow". Lemme tell ya, I doubt I am going to regret staying away from your bullying!

Mot du jour: tigidou. (En fait, c'était le mot du jour il y a une semaine, mais je n'avais pas vraiment appris la définition ce-jour-là, donc nous voilà. 😂)

Tigidou les amis ! 😘

There is a left-hand trill E-D#-E at the start of Bach Invention 7 which I am learning, and I have been playing with fingers: 1-2-1. My teacher today suggested 2-3-1, which turns out to be UNBELIEVABLY natural and way faster. It's like unbelievable. I'm so impressed. Cool 😍

the universe may have worked things out for me in the most perfect way...and here i am with my head under the pillow, too scared to take the opportunity 😂

Why I'm not impressed when people are pleased they use phyiscal force and intimidation to make their dog behave: (think: dominance theory, cesar millan..)

Do you think you could physically force and/or intimidate this creature into behaving?! i doubt it. 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnzymv7gxXw

The beginning is cool, and at 37 seconds is even better. (The end is blurry photos, just fyi.)

Train with kindness and empathy, and science. 😃 Then you can train anything from chickens to polar bears!

I find it nice to have role models. People around me who make my life nicer, and other people's lives nicer, and then I try to think: how can I be more like them? And what would make them think I am a good person?
Then I do nice things like:

• Smile kindly at mistakes
• Forgive more easily
• Use diplomatic language
• Help others
• Be positive and curious
  ❤️
  So, if you are my role model, keep being great 😃
  Do you have role models, dear reader?

Looky who is translating their resumé into FREMCH?! Also wow it is so exhausting; turns out I don't know, like, any of these words. D: I need another long weekend already. 😂

Don't believe everything you see on TV, ladies and vegetables.

Humans love stories.

Inspo:

1. BS medicine podcast said it in an episode. I forget the context. Something about how people believe silly stuff as long as there's a nice story to carry the silliness.
2. Something else happened in here. I forget.
3. Indigenous studies course from University of Alberta/Coursera starts with a story about turtle island, which you live on. (Amazing course so far, I totally recommend it! My friend invited me to join him in taking it, and I'm so glad.)

Scratchy backwoods Québec voices sound like home. ❤️

This banana bread tastes too much like bananas.

Dr. Robin DiAngelo discusses 'White Fragility'

everyday racist language: calling a situation "black and white", as in, "it's not so black and white", or "the rules are there in black and white".
alternatives: simple, straightforward, (crystal) clear, evident, unambiguous, one-dimensional, formulaic.

do i or do i don't not do enough?

no mangoes, only blueberries...NMOB.

today's experiment: dressing salad with coconut milk yogurt. result: do not repeat.

have you ever considered that all of life could just be an experiment? like "i wonder what will happen if i date this person" and "will it be good to squeeze an entire lemon into this salad?" and "i hypothesize that sharing this thought will have little-to-no impact on my life". the end result is rather irrelevant; it just means you learned a thing. or a different thing. how nice!

people had many thoughts about my blog, and while at first these thoughts were upsetting, in the end i feel oddly strengthened by them. they force me to define who i am to myself, and accept that only i can know me. 😃

to me, i want it not just this time, but every time. your mileage may vary. 😃

it is always nicer to be nice than to be not nice.

do nice things for other people, and expect nothing in return. accept nice things from other people, and be glad to do nothing in return.

quotes of the day

"it's okay to feel shitty when you do a shitty thing."

(ok this one isn't from today) "is that something the kind of person you want to be would do?"

q: "why doesn't god care about any of my problems?"

a: "he/she is busy deciding when and where fiddleheads should grow"

"it's a mental barrier heather you can't just ignore it!"

I did it all in a panicked whirlwind and now I don't know what to do. I guess I can always do something else in a panicked whirlwind.

these are ALL IN THE WRONG ORDER just so you know ok thanks

todo:

fix dates and sorting

fix dates and filename generation, here and for posts

echo filename for new posts

git add the new thought right away

why don't you go ahead and delete any thoughts you don't need anymore, right away.

it's imperfect but it works.

it's imperfect but it's bedtime.

it's imperfect but it's mine.

it's imperfect but it shares love and shines light.

The beginning of thoughts

There is a super cool thing a friend of mine did, which I wish to emulate: have an adorable page of random thoughts. It seems super low pressure, fun as a reader to get a glimpse into someone else's head, and fun as a creator to just collect a mish-mash of glorious tidbits.

The original implementation shows how to do it if you have a specific website setup, or something, I don't know, I was too lazy to figure it out. 😂 So first I did a most lazy version; turns out that doing the lazy version was enough to motivate me to do the real version! Cool. Here we are. 😃

Stop optimizing