nicole @nicole@myna.social

An uniformed opinion is just a guess.

I’m not sure why I thought the right way to kick off 2023 was by rescreening Ugetsu (1953); I have no one to blame but myself. 🙄

#TheTearsMustFlow

This is my idea of #beachwear.

Okay, 2023. Let’s see what Outside looks like. 😎

It’s not that I’m hungover, it’s that I’m still drunk. 😵‍💫

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

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.