Stunning. Here’s hoping the elite university faculty member will sheepishly dismiss everyone after an hour after slowly coming to grips with the fact that they can’t figure out how Skype works.

no, it’s worse

they’ve made it kind of work now

now we have to keep doing it

hgksfjhs i have the first meeting for my fellowship cohort today and we have each recorded a ten minute “podcast” discussing a seminal paper from our labs and are supposed to listen to each podcast and then discuss it for five minutes

and for the past month and a half of knowing about this i’ve just been like “yeah, ok, a silly activity, clearly not designed for the people who’ve already been in their field of research for a while, but sure, i’ll suffer thru it for money, maybe it’ll even be interesting”

except that i just finally counted how many students there are and mathed it out and i will be in this meeting for AT LEAST FOUR HOURS

FOUR

HOURS

IT STARTS AT 7PM

WE ARE MEANT TO SPEND IT LISTENING THROUGH EACH PERSON’S RECORDING AND THEN DISCUSSING IT

and that’s if there are no technical difficulties! not only does it require successful audio file playback– fifteen separate instances of successful audio playback– but the majority of the other students will be skyping in from hong kong

so there will ONLY

be technical difficulties

it will be a one-technical difficulty-per-minute

skype call meeting

with hong kong

lasting AT LEAST

AT LEAST

FOUR

HOURS

self harm cw

couldn’t focus in class, annoyed about it bc i like the material, finally figured out how to stay focused a bit better….. through digging my nails into the skin on the inside of my arm

there’s a post in my drafts that i don’t remember writing and don’t know what it means and i just keep staring at it in bewildered awe and debating whether i should post it

i probably will. i just…. what…… did i mean

doing a hideously-pointless-but-satisfying/nonarduous assignment for my fellowship that basically just boils down to recording myself verbally flexing about my own science communication skills/the Central Importance of the Questions of My Narrow Subset of the Field, etc

so that’s not all that bad; and i spent rather longer than i should have this evening with someone i like a great deal, consuming the bubble tea of inevitable sin and talking, which is not good for my work schedule but was excellent for my emotional well-being

and i’ve finally sketched out a viable plan for the large and terrible assignment for the class i don’t care about, such that i will have something to actually latch on to in order to write it tomorrow afternoon, in the span of time that just opened up from the cancellation of my 3-hr work meeting; it boils down to a few thousand words but i can definitely manage that in that span of time even though i still have a lot of the research/source assembly ahead of me as well (”in that span of time” here meaning “in that span of time, plus the whole evening before/after Pointless Fellowship Assignment Discussion Activity, because i will need at least half of those three hours to go on tumblr in.” but that’s still workable.)

so that’s all fine. i thought maybe i was going to be totally fucked at this point in the week, but it’s okay, it will all be okay, i will get through to the other side of the week surviving it

also uh on a different note my therapist thinks i have adhd??????? which. i’m not. unsympathetic to, as an interpretation of my chronic, constant, and inevitable procrastination, and incredible difficulty paying attention to anything uninteresting without active outside pressure making me do it and often not even then really? also i need constant sensory stimulation to focus on things and can’t stay on one task for any length of time longer than half an hour to maybe an hour, and have never continued to own a piece of paper for more than a day in my whole damn life unless it goes in the Only Notebook and i never ever take it out until the exact moment it is needed again after which all bets are once again off

on the other hand i almost always eventually do things, and am good at calibrating my expectation of time needed for tasks to avoid working past ~1am, and can keep track of things in a calendar now. and it all causes me much more internal distress/inconvenience than it does actually disrupt my ability to deliver on my responsibilities anyway, w limited exceptions such as uh…my job, and also like, i am maybe just lazy and possessed of inherent moral rot and unconsciously gamed the diagnostic questionnaire on which she is basing part of this belief out of a desire to find a semi-external/treatable locus for my points of personal weakness. so you know. who’s to say

had an extended self-consistent dream in which i was in a ttrpg group in which all the other players were late-teens high school or first year college students (none real people to my knowledge) and in addition to playing i was acting as, basically, assistant to the GM, my favorite math teacher from high school. what this meant was that, as the other person in the room with extensive roleplay experience, i cued up appropriate music for entering the atmosphere of jupiter and helped set scenes and explain rules and so on.

the twist, however, was that we were playing WTF (wisher theurgist fatalist), but that i was the only one in the room, including the GM, who had ever actually read the rules or knew anything about the premise of WTF; everyone else i guess was just playing an exciting but not mechanically unnavigable fantasy + space exploration game. the entire arc of the dream was me excitedly waiting for the correct narrative opening for me to reveal to everyone that I, Too, Had The Powers Of The GM. this reveal, when it came, was surprising and triumphant and immediately thwarted by a visiting professor taking dramatically sick and causing several of the players to rush out of the room in terror of catching his illness.

in conclusion: i have been sent a divine omen that i should start playing tabletop games again, but only with people who understand disease transmission.

unopenablebox:

lmao i’ve literally had like four days of strangers vaguely indicating they’re reading me as male (not even for the whole interaction! just initially, for the first three seconds, before they hear my voice/know my name/see my hands) and im already like Okay That Was Good But Time To Femme It Up A Little More I Guess, Can’t Have Anyone Thinking I’m Possessed Of Some Kind Of Coherent, Potentially Non-Gay, Binary Gender Or Anything

i am just fucking doomed to bounce back and forth between gender presentations/ways of connoting directions of gayness fucking forever aren’t i

i mean, re that whole tag essay you should actually feel free to. um. gently explain to me that i am appropriating the lesbian and/or gay male experience or anything else, or ungently, gentleness is not an actual prerequisite to pointing out that i’m doing bad things. “feel free not to yell at me” is not accurate. feel free to yell at me from any position other than being cisheterosexual or a transphobe.

whining more under the cut, whatever, sorry, i’ve tone shifted from manic to sad but that’s probably appropriate

i don’t, uh– i mean i simultaneously still inhabit a lot of lesbian social positioning and can only possibly, if i’m being read male which i guess sometimes/transiently i am, be read as a very effeminate man who [context context context life stuff secret perblog blah blah blah] would at least sometimes be specifically read as gay by like, strangers, anyone seeing me from a distance.

but like, i understand why i maybe shouldn’t really use either of those terms bc they’re both supposed to mean [thing, and specifically not the other thing]. [thing, to the exclusion of other thing]. bisexual is a word for a reason; i shouldn’t be struggling so much with the ways it feels to me like it connotes “same and other” like there are genders that are specifically the same as or other than mine, like it connotes that i can coherently be in either a straight or gay relationship in a way that would be acceptable for me to say, and that some relationships i’d be in would be consistently one of those and some would be consistently the other.

and maybe i’m supposed to be able to get there– like, i need to settle on some of what i do being straight so i’m not hurting other people by claiming an experience i’m not actually having. but i genuinely don’t know how to frame myself that way without hurting myself or making statements about what gender identities are allowed/acceptable in ways that i don’t think are supposed to be true about other people. not that i think it “has” to be ok for me to be ~~gay in both directions~~ or whatever, something doesn’t have to be okay just because it hurts me for it to not be okay, lots of people hurt more all the time, lots of people who are more vulnerably/authentically/materially [gay/trans] are being hurt lots more for worse reasons that i might unintentionally play into by being careless with language, that’s the whole point, that’s why this is a problem for me, because i don’t want to do that to the extent that it’s possible to not do that.

i don’t know. i’ve never felt like i was any good at being a girl or at least just and always a girl, i never managed it properly, one way of explaining it was “oh i’m a lesbian”, one way of explaining it was “oh i’m nonbinary”, one way was, hideously and genuinely, the alison bechdel joke about just being smarter, though in my defense i was twelve. but if i have to leave– whatever, i’d end up back there, as a woman who is a lesbian, because i’m too much of a coward and too attached to my current (already-androgynous-to-me-but-whatever) body to properly Binary Transition and also i’m definitely not a man full-time or most of the time so i should just go back to the thing that i already was out as and that isn’t extremely $$$$. but there are some things if i were a lesbian again that i’d have to give up, that i can’t possibly give up. i can’t escape; i don’t want to escape; i should learn to use the word bisexual and just accept never figuring out which actions are supposed to be the straight ones (except it’s [transphobia directed at myself that might hurt others redacted]). why. i’m going to sleep now but– i’m sorry about all of this, genuinely, and also, why can’t i…. not.

lmao i’ve literally had like four days of strangers vaguely indicating they’re reading me as male (not even for the whole interaction! just initially, for the first three seconds, before they hear my voice/know my name/see my hands) and im already like Okay That Was Good But Time To Femme It Up A Little More I Guess, Can’t Have Anyone Thinking I’m Possessed Of Some Kind Of Coherent, Potentially Non-Gay, Binary Gender Or Anything

i am just fucking doomed to bounce back and forth between gender presentations/ways of connoting directions of gayness fucking forever aren’t i

raisedbyhyenas replied to your photo “ok i’ve actually wronged you all terribly by chickening out of posting…”

THAT SHIRT?????

THAT SHIRT!!!!! oh it is SO good wtf

💕💕💕thank you, i’m so glad you like it. honestly you and your short-sleeve floral button-down activities have bolstered & inspired me as i explore the concept of “warm weather fashion” and also “buying menswear on purpose” and i am infinitely grateful to you for it