progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

I never thought leopards would eat MY face

My sister just got this tattoo (cute!) and named it Jinchou, which I didn’t know was Japanese for penguin (also cute!) but when I looked it up I found it’s written人鳥, that is, person-bird. The bird just out there doing its business like a person. That’s the jinchou, that’s the penguin. Now you know.

In other news, Zooey Zephyr knows how to spell "principles," the Washington Post doesn't

The whole family. (Middle years were trouble.)

Relieved that Katherine Mansfield never saw me eat fruit.

The presence of the body pillow in some sense convinces her that even after we all get up, she’s still sitting on someone.

With extra “Barns of Iowa” content. This hallway of ours is really narrow.

#trans #selfie #transtuesday

Gilla Band killing it in Berkeley last night. It was a pretty male crowd (because Noise Rock is Serious?) but a respectful one; once the good-sized mosh pit got started, a group of small women near me took turns going in, got bounced around for a minute, came out wobbly and giddy.

They didn’t do their breakout hit titled after my deadname but it all pleases without concepts.

Openers Pure Adult did some good work too. Haven’t had this much fun of this sort since Namba Bears in Osaka.

selfie with floral attributes

Today risks being a bothersome day but a) all the magnolias are flowering; b) new shoes!

(the website called them “tan” but obviously it should have said “rust” and I love them)

The London Review of Books writeup for this went and spoiled the ending, and even if it’s not much of a surprise I’m annoyed with myself for not having known better than to read it, and to find that it actually does change the reading experience.

I guess the rationale was “why does it matter, it’s a long modernist novel where nothing happens,” but it’s not, it’s a long modernist novel where like two things happen, and dude, you can’t just yank the curtain.

I think this one is a good pairing with Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex on the constructedness of desire (for any of us who get perplexed around how desire gets constructed).

This novel, a sweet one, made me feel warmer about the possibility of recuperating old confusions and errors—though I didn’t get into it with the guy on BART who wanted to know about my reading habits and told me I looked like a librarian.

#books #bookstodon

For @nicole

Core curriculum. It’s urgent about what it is and really uninterested in pretending to be anything else. The main character is on-brand in dismissing Joyce as patriarchy, and yet the book’s got exactly the same arc as Ulysses: building up expectations for a surrogate filial relationship that finally converges, sadly, in a deflationary missed connection.

(Also, why is it so funny that the book’s Joyce booster is a manic trans guy named Kieran? It’s just funny.)

The afterword, on what Binnie learned/received permission to do from Joanna Russ, Gloria Anzaldúa and others, is an actual inspiration.

#trans #books #bookstodon

I enjoyed reading Am Fluß, but why, a few chapters in, did I start responding to it with the kind of aspirational envy one associates with social media?

The book is about a woman who spends her life walking around the margins of cities and having complex thoughts. Family is alluded to; in one chapter she looks for a job, though it ends up being more an allegory than anything else. She has some happenstance meetings. Otherwise it's pretty much all elective solitude.

The depth of the prose, and the implicit relation it bears to all this idle time, is what makes it seem like walking around and having thoughts is now a luxury good.

#books #bookstodon

Eight weeks post #ffs , no longer much swelling to speak of and nerve sensation making its slow return, but the most surprising thing about this mug has been the immediate and total cognitive overwrite of how I used to look. Unless my phone pops up with an alarming surprise from the photo library, it’s already very hard to recall that things were ever any other way.
#trans #transgender

Can’t believe he passed up the easy win of “queers over QAnon”

Esther Kinsky is my informant that London has mini tornados? Frequently? Had no idea God was this angry with Albion.

You know the planets are lined up when #transappreciationfriday falls on #TwelfthNight.

I'm Pauline (she/her). I spent my youth getting kiln-fired in #Tucson, #Arizona, now in the #BayArea; used to be an academic in the humanities, now write code during the day and fiction in the off hours, also some songwriting and home recording with guitars, but there's this whole ongoing struggle to get my singing voice repitched.

My most remarkable life stories all involve other people, and one of the most amazing is that my oldest and dearest friend is also a trans woman. It's been something to figure this all out alongside her as an other half to her Gemini.

Fig.1: restaurant washroom selfie, Fig 2: some hot gender-bent flirtation from Twelfth Night (Viola dressed as Cesario is supposed to be a proxy for the Duke; Olivia has other ideas).

Appreciation to all!