1.5 socks, i am delirious with affection for self-striping sock yarn

i’m @ LAX and first i bewildered the pre-check person by saying i was traveling with [chinchilla]— she looked between us a few times in confusion and then said to him “oh, you want to travel with your brother!” which is a new one
then i had to go through the scanner twice because apparently they read me as male, noted “chest anomalies”, and then heard my voice, asked if i’d wanted to be scanned as male or female, and then sent me through again when i said female to avoid a pat down
so uh on the one hand just the barest glimpse of the gnc travel dystopia in which people evaluate your body for Danger and Categorizability
on the other hand i “”pass”” “”sometimes”” and getting read as [brothers] instead of [relationship word static] feels very uh gay rite of passage and is kind of hilarious since of course we look nothing alike

i’m really struggling with days of awe because i’m not sure i’ve been in a situation recently where 1. i was aware that i did something that hurt someone else and didn’t try to apologize/clarify/fix it in the moment, unless 2. that person eventually turned out to be actively hurting me in a long-term systematic probably-intentional way and i no longer talk to them for my own psychological safety

which means that my days of awe experience is mostly just repressing the urge to go around to everyone i know and ask them if there happens to be anything they’d like me to repent

#is the biology crowd awake atm i have a question #is there an actual reason for the general assumption that all life forms have to be carbon based or #is that just an earth-centric approach to extra terrestrial life??

@vidvilts this is a day old post but:

well, first off, carbon is particularly important/useful because of its specific properties, incl that it has four valence electrons and can form four stable, flexible bonds, which allows for a lot of the specific properties of biological molecules that allow them to be versatile, changeable, highly complex, and therefore replicating, which is to say, alive

i mean i do think there’s a lot both of sci fi and scientific speculation that deals with the question of e.g. silicon based life forms (silicon specifically because it’s right below carbon on the periodic table and they share some properties). the chemistries would have to be incredibly different but it’s not inconceivable, and i would actually be interested to know more about what you’re referring to when you say that’s a general assumption, because i think there’s a decent amount of very serious scientific discussion/research based on the idea that life isn’t necessarily carbon based. not to mention that it’s pretty heavily discussed in sci fi, at least ime, though that might be because i have a limited and probably biased sci-fi experience.

also uh i mean at the moment we assume all life forms are carbon based on the i think not unreasonable grounds that we’ve never met a life form that did anything else. while this is of course because of the common origins of life on earth, it is worth noting that e.g. the chemical building blocks of some essential molecules like DNA have been found on rocks from space, so it’s also not ridiculous to imagine that other life would at least be plausibly carbon based, given that such molecules seem particularly… inclined, to form, or whatever, though this last is just me being speculative with no background, and not actually evidentially supported by me doing any kind of research