progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

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!

Anne Enright. I was slow to read her, I guess because whatever summary I’d seen didn’t stand out, but the execution is so, so good (and much bleaker than I’d expected).

Whereas this bit of Ashbery could be rolled out unaltered as a dril tweet.

Why someone chose to put a checkmark next to this line, out of an entire book of Ashbery poems, rätselhaft.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Innocence. This "party" scene starring a count, a monsignor, and three novelists is the funniest thing I've read in a bit.

food chain

Cercocarpus betuloides (mountain mahogany)

I was expecting many fine things from Reyner Banham’s Four Ecologies, but among them was not the 'basic Los Angeles dingbat.'

#tdor #transdayofremembrance

Finished The Story of the Stone, and I must say there's a real age-of-Musk vibe to the highly foreseeable dynastic collapse in the last volume:

What happens when a collision of crisis cascades, what happens when a casket of cholera goes critical, brekekekex koax koax

36 hours out and God just punted on one of His last best chances to avert this

This case came into English through D.T. Suzuki, who rendered it, "Think not of good, think not of evil, but see what at
this moment thy own original face doth look like, which thou
hadst even prior to thy own birth."

Yeats, the big kook, loved Suzuki's essays and made this out of them. (This was in his late sixties, around the same time he submitted to a "Steinach operation," aka a vasectomy thought to increase rejuvenating hormones.)

60 hours till the operating room.

Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate) case 23. What's translated here (by Blyth) as "Original Self" is 本來 "original" plus 面目 "face," a phrase also in the Platform Sutra attributed to the Sixth Patriarch. Google wants to translate 本來面目 from modern Chinese as "true features" or "true colors."

OMG the Soylent is versioned. Do they patch it for vulnerabilities??

Young Don's notes on Thucydides are more philological, but he wrote "cf. Nazi Germany" next to the Corinthians warning the Lacedaemonians about the Athenian national character:

"Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life... to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others." [1.70]

Young Don's notes on the Oresteia:

Woman like man
night like day
tragedy like joy
fire + darkness

Eumenides: Orestes saved because matter is not blood. Cf. Aristotle's idea of form & matter.

Orestes goes mad: the charioteer image p. 261

Appearance & Reality, p. 67
Depends upon assumption that there's a dichotomy.
Ulysses, p. 69, again, 123