(no subject)

I feel like a bad person when I criticize well-intentioned memes. But when memes accidentally undermine important foundations on which parts of my self-validation are constructed, it's hard not to.

I want to just live in a house with my partner, a few good friends, and 37 dogs for the rest of my life. Can I do that?

Or maybe I could just go back to that abandoned UFO along Route 66 and set up shop as a mystic.

"Come on in, climb the ramp. Watch the dog fur. What should you do with your life? That's an easy one. Here, pet these dogs for a while. No, no; not while you wait for an answer. That *is* the answer."

(no subject)

I'm feeling the confusion of an existential pronoun quandary again. Let's assume the pronouns I prefer for myself (ze/zir) are valid simply because they are my pronouns I have chosen for myself. But I choose them because they are better known than just about any gender-neutral pronoun set than they/them, which I do not like for myself. If some of the reason I choose them for myself is because of existing recognition, and that recognition provides them an inherent sense of validity to myself and others, then the validity is sourced externally. If I act independently of external sources of validation, I could use any set of words or non-words I'd like and they would be validated by my use of them.

It's impossible for me to be the sole source of my own validation because if I do not recognize and respond to expectations of society, I will be unable to communicate with them. My messages of self-expression will be incomprehensible. But if external validation *is* important, then why would I not choose to use they/them pronouns, which seem to be the best known, and perhaps best accepted, set of non-binary pronouns in mainstream society? Should it matter that I don't like them? And why do I even like zie/zir? I can think of no other reason than it's level of existing acceptance in both queer society and mainstream society, which means that I have not accepted that validation comes solely from myself. To be honest, I reject that idea as unworkable.

I do not see any way of resolving this in a logical, consistent, satisfactory way. How do people just stop thinking about things like this?

(no subject)

I wonder if the archetypal mystic is someone who just became so disenchanted with the world, and who came to feel powerless to make things better, and chose to withdraw entirely from a society they felt is fundamentally broken and unfixable. Then, when people hear about this person living by themselves in complete self-contentment and they go to ask them how they did it, the mystic tells them to stop worrying so much about everything and let it be as it will be because that's what the mystic did. If *everyone* did that, the mystic might reason, the world would be better, so acting as an inspiration for other people to do that is a way to make the world better even while refusing to actively engage in it.

Or maybe they're just people who want to go live in an abandoned UFO (or cave, or mountain top, or desert, or...) with 37 dogs. Who knows?

I feel kind of emotionally unstable today. *sighs* I get to take care of dogs tonight though!

(no subject)

This will be my hermit canyon. But it's ok that there are other people there. The canyon does not belong to me and I do not control other people's actions. They are welcome to visit and talk. If I don't want to talk I can just lean back against the canyon wall and close my eyes and listen to the voices and the animals and the water and the wind and it will all kind of blend together into something that seems to be coming from somewhere else entirely that I'm just overhearing from my existence as part of the canyon.

(Pictures behind ( the cut. )

(no subject)

I can no longer see headlines like "Elon Musk gives over $400,000 to buy laptops for Flint students" without seeing them as symptoms of how broken our system is.

Why the *fuck* do kids need to wait around in the hope that a millionaire savior will swoop in to buy them things that there is not a single valid excuse for them not having access to in the first place in this country.

Good for Musk for wanting to help a bit. But if you think the answer to systemic inequality is just waiting and hoping that the money fairy will sprinkle us with equality, fuck you.

*sighs* I appear to have left my hermit canyon. I miss it already.