progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

@nicole Also when she said, “I’m going to miss your face,” and I said, “Don’t worry, the change won’t actually be that dramatic,” and she said, “For that much money, it had better be dramatic!” 😆

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

Mom says: "When you started this transition I was worried that someone was going to smash your face in, and now you're doing it to yourself!"

So I'm Pauline. I've written a couple volumes of #fiction, the last a counterfactual #novel starring a not-dead-at-25 #Keats in Italy. My diss at #Berkeley (where I persist in a job doing things to computers) was about the #modernist novel (#Joyce, #Woolf, #HenryJames) as #Romantic lyric, with help from #Wittgenstein and such.

I live with my excellent family in the #EastBay and mess with #guitars.

Also bound to post #trans stuff, including freakouts about the facial surgery I'm having in, um, two days, behind CWs if alarming or gross.

(#introduction to ease those awkward moments at the water cooler)

@megaherb @lexipenia Lots of Romantic irony in our house

@megaherb @lexipenia (full disclosure; one of those former UChicago people I'm now married to)

@megaherb @lexipenia When I started grad school at Berkeley I met a couple former UChicago people who ran an informal version of that workshop in a cafe, and it did more for me intellectually than any official seminar I ever took, bar one. The Realistic Spirit was an important book for me in those years too.

@nicole If it makes you feel better, I learned “opsimath” ten seconds ago and I’m 44!

@nicole nooo! Um, at least we don’t have a limit on chlorine?

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."

@zunguzungu That’s right, it’s Paolo and Francesca really early on. He has no idea what bummers are coming!

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

@nicole My house is full of bagels, every time I walk past the fridge they lean out and say “yoo hoo” 🙁

@zunguzungu Does Dante actually get a nap at any point in the Commedia? That’s like a really long day