nicole @nicole@myna.social

Reviewing my film reviews from this year’s Sundance, I have coming to realize that I can be one catty bitch:

“Woman follows her absentee partner to nicely color-graded Bucharest and takes up the hobby of janitor harassment. Her neighbors mostly hate her. Partly because her Romanian barely extends to polite conversation about carrots; mostly because she’s boorish and rude. The janitor tries to kill her in the end. Cause and effect are so hopelessly muddled; I’m not sure what the lesson here is—if you harass your neighbors, they might want to kill you?”

https://boxd.it/2vvTl1

My New Year’s Resolution: top that.

“That” being an 8x10 photograph I captured in Japan in 2019. The subject matter was a waterfall blessing of (or by?) a portable Shinto shrine.

It’s probably my best photograph (a moment of motion). But I was boymodding at the time, so I don’t feel authorship the way I want to. Maybe that’s an impossible goal to reach for—feeling authorship the way I want to—but that’s the goal just the same. 🥳

#photography #japan #shinto #teenwitch #film

@PanicButton Reading transmasc blogs was hugely influential to my struggles with inward-facing transphobia. I didn’t trust my own perceptions of myself, but, I know men very well. And these transmasc bloggers were guys, through and through.

@courtney@mstr.cloud @danirabbit @rooster @Tattie Right. Life at Soulsborne difficulty levels is what we crave.

@mjohnharrison Speaking of hats … I feel like this opens the door for a hat montage. 🥰

Speaking from experience, testosterone should be a controlled substance.

Ten years of meditation and reflection in a mountaintop temple should stand between people and power.

But also, on the eve of 2023, I find myself wondering if a global reduction in muscle mass and prettier collarbones all around might just be good medicine for us all. 😘

Who decides the answer to this question is probably more important than the answer itself. I’m pretty sure it’s me. 😇

But the first hand is the dominant one: when I see myself in the mirror, the new prominence of my collar bone, the gradual, gradual, too-gradual thinning of my neck, it makes me happy. I am happy to be reduced in this way under these circumstances.

But should I be? 🤓

I’m 17 months into my #transition, which (for me) means just as many months of hormone replacement therapy (#HRT). Every so often, I head into SF and lie down on a giant scanner bed, and have my body composition analyzed.

The most-profound change has been the loss of lean muscle mass. For the first sox months, muscle held steady; over the next six, ten pounds evaporated.

Right now, I’m losing more than a pound of muscle a month. 🎢

I have such mixed feelings!

On one hand: goodbye and good riddance. I’ve always been tall, broad-chested, and muscular, and I’ve always hated it. I well remember my friends encouraging me towards sports in high school—“you’re a beast!!”—and how much it fucking hurt when they did.

On the other hand: this rhymes with aging—an accelerated enfeeblement. For the first time in my adult life, I can be physically overpowered by nearly half of the species. This is humbling. It sponsors nightmares and late night pepper spray purchases on Amazon.

🥺 Okay, _fine_.
🥹 Cue the waterworks.

“This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren’t the person you were before you got trapped; you weren’t the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren’t someone entirely different either.”

😭 #NovaSwingMadeMeCry

@TheSpaceshipper bravo 😂