The Reason I Get Nothing Done

Its weird how quickly stereotyping cats based on color has taken off online now

I'd say its just people wanting to lovingly tease their pets, but I've come across several conversations recently of people wondering what genetically causes orange cats "to be that way". I think it's because they are a cat.

It's even weirder because people act like "orange cat behaviour" is a long-standing cultural stereotype and not something that popped up in the last five years!

Oh some of my favorites include "my tortie loves to [insert normal cat behavior here], and only torties act that way!" and "I could never get a calico, they are mean!" Like bitch what? You think fur and skin color determines personality? You're cat racist. Make it make sense.

It's astrology for cats. Including people that are real fuckin weird about it.

Tortietude has been a thing for years, I remember reading people joking in my cat magazine when I was a kid many decades ago about torties being spicy, though they didn't use that word.

But the orange cat thing has been memed out. I shouldn't further it, I know I shouldn't. But the lighter fur and their open little faces do indeed make them look very very silly sometimes. There isn't much mystery to an orange cat. Just sunshine.

I'm lowkey bugged by it because they're also gendered sterotypes. Orange and black are carried on the X chromosome, so XY kittens with an orange X frequently come out orange, while XX kittens with one orange and one black X typically come out with the variable black and orange coat of the tortoiseshell or calico.

So effectively, this means that tortoiseshell and calicos are 99.9% girls and orange cats are 85% boys.

And then, totally coincidentally, people went in hard on stereotypes where the mostly-boy population are sweet dumb himbos, and the girl-population are moody, emotional, and prone to overreacting.

When these cats are not different breeds or geographically separated populations at all; this is a common coat colour for cats all over the world, and oranges and tortoiseshells are frequently brothers and sisters. Or parents and children. A tortoiseshell/calico mother will often have orange boys and tortoiseshell/calico girls; getting a tortoiseshell/calico cat requires one parent with an orange X, which is frequently an orange boy.

When assessing behaviour and personality, a major thing psychology has had to fight against is demand characteristics and confirmation bias. Having a preformed conclusion about how somebody is will lead you to interpret all their behaviour in a way that confirms your original theory, and your preformed concept of somebody can lead you to act in ways that unnaturally evoke that response in their behaviour. I have not seen any study on "tortitude" or "orange cat behaviour" that fails to rule out these two factors.

I normally shut up about this because people are entitled to their own silliness and having fun with their cats, but I'll be honest, the gender of it all just bugs me deep down.

I fucking HATE “tortitude”. Like it actually makes me disproportionally angry.

Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.

Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.

People love to say dismissive bullshit like, "oh, that's just the drugs talking" but actually, drugs can't fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet's mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn't stop being a person just because they took something.

Gonna nitpick a wording:

"Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing."

Mmmmm no, these are all interpretations you can draw out of it, and parallels and potentials that you can gather from detailed study of the house drawing.

It isn't knowledge, and this is where "death of the author" gets used in a shitty way: if the author is dead, the author is really dead, and you get to stop speculating on whether or not that's the reason that the child drew the house like that.

You don't know. The house might actually be a very specific portrait of a house that they saw, or even a reproduction of a piece of art they saw, which they drew purely because they wanted to reproduce the art or the image. If the author is dead you cannot know that, and you must accept that it is unknown.

What you can do is note what you see in the piece; you can engage with the fact that it exists within a tradition of art that is all the things you say, and that thus one can interpret it in these ways as well, and that it exists within this tradition which is obviously a tradition because of all these other factors.

You don't get (you really, really don't get) to decide you know what the author meant really, and then claim that this interpretation stands up against anything that the author says, and then say that what the author says doesn't matter because the author is dead.

If the author is dead, they are dead. Their reasons for creating are no longer part of the conversation; only the work as it exists and as you relate to it are relevant.

Now you can argue that there are hidden influences on an author without arguing that the author is dead; however at that point you do also have to take into account what the author actually says, because now the author is not dead. You may not accept or believe what the author says, but if the author is dead then nothing about the author's inspiration or background or anything else actually matters or can be referred to; and if all of that can be referred to, then the author is not dead, and their input matters.

You don't get to silence the artist and then use your understanding of the art to dictate to the artist (and the world) who they are.

So from what I understand, as remembered from nature programs and the zookeeper lecture, is that Old Bulls reduce the violence i young bulls by putting them through Elephant Finishing School.

This is better documented in African Elephants than asian ones because they're easier for elephant biologists to observe by the means of 'sitting on top of a jeep and taking notes' but the general scope goes like this:

Elephant herds are largely matriarichal as both a means of protection- elephants have a long childhood and it's easier to protect calves in a group, AND as a socio-political means of sexual choice.

An African elephant is pregnant for nearly two years, then she spends at least 3-5 years with that calf completely dependent on her, so she only gets a few opportunities to have babies before she hits menopause, and it's a lot of damn work so she is naturally EXTREMELY picky about who she mates with. And if she's younger, her mom, sisters and grandmothers will also be real picky about who she mates with and WHEN too- can't go around risking a teenage pregnancy, especially not with asubstandard male. Elephants also have a pretty clear idea of what they want out of a Male too: they have a marked preference for Large, Old, Socially Adept Males. Large males are HEALTHY males with all thier bones in place and functioning digestive tracts. OLD males are healthy, have good intelligence to stay alive, and have good teeth. Socally Adept Males can make friends, get along with her whole family, won't engage in dangerous behaviors like trying to kill her calves or grandmothers. It's a good system that produces robust, intelligent and helpful calves.

This means however, that most female elephants are into Dilfs, or even Gilfs. Which is extremely frustrating when you are a horny teenage boy elephant, so they go a bit nuts with hormones and social isolation and get involved in teenage elephant gangs and do things like murder rhinos out of sexual and social frustration.

BUT! If there are Large, Old, Socially Adept males about, they like being parents too, but are largely pushed out of the role by the matriarichal herds and their strict group politics that exist to prevent unsuitable mating. So They turn thier attention to these violent orphans and like your beloved Batman go "I'm gonna parent the shit outta that."

They mostly do this by herding the Lads around, pointedly demonstrating Behaviors like "How to dig for roots so you don't starve" or "How to knock over a tree" or "Greeting a Matriach Properly so she doesn't sic her descendants on you", and disciplinary behaviors like "Jabbing naughty Lads in the ass with a tusk" and "Hitting you in the face with a branch until you STOP THAT" . This is WILDLY beneficial for the young males under thier tutelage, who are less likely to die of accidents, and start mating earlier because they've had a Suitable Gentleman make introductions for them, like they are fancy men at a regency-era ball being intoduced to the debutantes.

Imagine some Fine and Respectable DILF wandering around adopting teenage delinquents and spraying them in the face with a windex bottle full of vinegar until they learn how to be proper upstanding gentlemen and you're getting close.

I have nothing to add except my favourite moment of watching this overall process on a zoo documentary show, where they were introducing a young bull who had just passed the point where the female herd would tolerate him around to their older male bull, and this was apparently a first-time for the zoo.

And initially the old bull did not entirely seem up with the arrangement, possibly because obviously some aspects of it were unavoidably artificial, and there was some noisy kerfluffle . . . .

. . . and then this EMPHATIC TRUMPET, like EMPHATIC, from the matriarch-herd's pen over a ways away in the zoo. Like not to anthropomorphize too much but it definitely SOUNDED the same tone as someone yelling HEY YOU BE NICE TO MY KID CUT THAT OUT.

After which the old bull sort of huffed and afterwards was Fine with the calf (who was very, like, Russel-from-Up! about this entire process) and subsequently things went well.

Imagine having been born in 1905... And all your life it doesn't fucking stop. The Great War, the Spanish Flu, and then you go out of your mind for 7 years. Everyone is traumatised and nothing matters. Then another crash. And then the rise of fascism, and the War to end all Wars didn't and it's 1945 and you're just about still there. You may have fought or ferried the boys from Dunkirk or sabotaged the Nazi occupiers or worked in the factories and put out fires during the Blitz and you're lucky to be alive, because not all your friends made it. But you are and finally, fucking finally, it stops. It stops. You are tough as nails and you can put that strength to work into building something and you do, and people have cars and can buy icecream and you have a pension fund and the kids have money of their own and no nightmares.

I want that for us. I so want that for us. I want to be the generation that has seen fucking everything and is like a MRSA bug and unfazed and when that Cheeto finally dies, I want us to. Plant the gardens and clean the seas because we can and we want to and we remember some joy, some time of trust even when it got broken and we can say to the 20 somethings "let us show you what we can build, how it can feel."

And maybe Gen beta will take it all for granted like the boomers did, but we can give Gen Z and Alpha some peace because we, and Gen Z and Alpha have seen the Dark Times and fuck that noise.

At the start of the Pandemic, my spouse’s grandmother was in an assisted-living home, and of course they were severely locked down, because with no vaccination available and we don’t really know how it spreads and no tests and anyone over 80 is deffo gonna die…. They couldn’t take the risks. So they weren’t even allowed to leave their rooms. Staff brought meals and left them outside the door, and they left dishes outside, and that was just their life for the foreseeable future.

So we tried to make sure someone called her every day, so she would have some kind of interaction, and one time my spouse asked how she was doing, and her attitude was basically, “Yeah, this happens sometimes.”

Because that was her life. She did live through the depression, she did lose three siblings to the last pandemic. She did live through WWII, and sent a son off to Vietnam, and made a family and a household and a career while knowing one slip of a button might wipe out all life on earth. And she lived through it; she survived.

And so 2020 wasn’t the end of the world, for her. It was just another thing. Because life is made up of sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, AND ALSO fascists and violence and rancid millionaires living high while people starve. And when you are in the middle of the shit times, you acknowledge that they’re shit, and also that they are not exclusively shit, because they still include spring days and new flowers and people taking care of each other.

And it was just… a really helpful perspective to get. You can survive it, you can become strong enough to live to 103 despite everything, you can become a source of strength and joy for everyone around you.

If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.

Oh hey! Haven’t seen this in forever! Didn’t reblog it when it came across me before, not gonna skip it this time, I need some good vibes.

CASH ME OUT, OLD SCHOOL TUMBLR!

This information and the Know Your Rights training pisses off First Felon.

Kindly share WIDELY and let's keep on pissin' this asshole off.

just an FYI for trans people in the US right now

[id: reddit post by user spaghettishoestrings titled "(UPDATE) Just lost my healthcare !" with the flair "Celebratory."

Post reads:

Original post is viewable through my profile. Apologies, since I’m on mobile, I couldn’t hyperlink. The TLDR: my doctor called me on Monday and informed me that their practice would no longer be providing treatment for gender affirming care as a result of a recent presidential Executive Order, even though the EO was for people under 19. Even though I’m 25.

Also, because it was asked a few times, this happened in Michigan, and I’ve been on HRT for 5+ years. It’s a practice that includes like 15+ physicians, and I think that the decision was made over my PCP’s head, given that she once told me that she literally moved states to be able to provide gender affirming care here.

First off, genuinely, thank you so much for all the replies and messages. I genuinely felt frozen after that phone call and didn’t know where to start, and you all really helped me get my feet off the ground.

A couple people mentioned contacting the ACLU, which, truthfully, I thought, “there’s no way that the ACLU will get back to me” but I sent a message anyway. They actually called me a few hours after my post and we talked about the Executive Orders and my rights. They offered to fax my provider a letter reminding them of my rights and some other legal terms. It’s crazy how a post on reddit resulted in my name being on the official ACLU letterhead.

Anyway, today my doctor’s physician assistant called me and shared that their practice is reversing their decision and they will continue to provide gender affirming care. I’m still keeping a bunch of the resources that y’all shared saved, including Planned Parenthood, Plume, and looking into a private endocrinologist.

This whole experience just reminded me how great this community is. I appreciate y’all <3"

[end id]

source

[id: reddit user copurrs commented:]

You should contact Chase Strangio from the ACLU, I believe he is looking for reports of folks being denied their GAC due to these EOs. He's @chasestrangio on IG and Threads.

[end id]

If you see someone with a really bad fandom take, I’m begging you to open your emails and write a strongly worded missive to your local government official about something bad happening in your community or country.

If you’re in Canada you could email a rep about concerns about Elon musk interfering in our next federal election.

If you’re in the US the list is endless.

If you’re in the UK you could email about trans health care.

If you’re in Australia, what about dental care in Medicare?

If you’re in Europe, look into some EU initiatives of particular concern. Perhaps something to do with nature and biodiversity? Idk

Just today I emailed my local mla about coal mining in the Rocky Mountains and tomorrow I’m going to pick something else and do it again

Don’t get me wrong I love a fandom wank as much as anyone but perhaps you can take an iota of the energy you’re spending on that and put it towards making sure your elected representatives hear from you on a regular basis

Honestly this seems like a legit mental health emotional de-escalation strategy. New grounding technique just dropped and it's going to revolutionize the world at the rate I see bad takes as a regular tag scroller

by kage-007

by Valentina Gatewood

I wish we could teach each other how to love the way we can teach animals that aren’t supposed to be able to feel it.

@kaijutegu is this cute? I know you deal with tegus and not iguanas, but I didn't know who else to ask

This is precious.

So, first thing you need to know is that is a very visibly healthy adult green iguana. Every part of the iguana is sharp. The claws evolved to haul a ten pound lizard up a tree. The spines are like tiny icepicks. The tail is a bullwhip. The teeth evolved to shred leaves, but they'll just as easily shred your flesh. Good luck making a healthy adult iguana do anything they don't wanna. That puts us on our first thing to look at- is the animal capable of defense and getting away, physically? Yes, definitely.

Next thing to know is what does a threatened or scared iguana look like? When an iguana is threatened, it doesn't stand on its hind legs like that; it stands on all fours and puffs itself up to look bigger, aggressively bobs its head (note: head bobbing is a behavior used for a LOT of things, it does need context- for example, they also head bob as part of mating displays), there is hissing, there is tail whipping- iguanas are not subtle creatures. None of this is the behavior of an iguana that feels threatened or is being a threat!

So what does standing like that mean? That's just simple reaching. The iguana sees something they want and is attempting to reach it, and what they want appears to be uppies, because they settle into the human's grip immediately.

Then, we see some GREAT handling from the human. There's really great communication happening between the two of them! The person picks up the iguana very securely- pelvis and pectoral girdles are well supported, and he doesn't grab. (Iguanas typically do NOT like being grabbed around the sides; many of their predators are birds and coming at them from above or gripping the sides is scary!)

As he goes in for the pet, he lets the iguana support their back half on his knee. The hold is secure but not tight; at any point, if the iggy was distressed, they could leave. But they don't- instead, you see them leaning into the pets, actively participating in the behavior. They're not even closing their eyes to block stimulus. They want this to happen.

This is the kind of bond that's possible when you can prove to a big lizard that you're trustworthy, and easily the best iguana video I've seen in a long time. Thank you for tagging me in!

Some green iguana body language resources under the jump!

The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz. 2016 edition.

The middle class husband was raping and forcibly impregnating the middle class wife and the law endorsed it until the 1990s but the left doesn’t like it when we talk about misogyny so instead we get to sit around and emphasise the relative privilege of these women while utterly erasing the fact that they legally weren’t allowed to leave, in order to teach a lesson to young Mormon women on the internet who were groomed into one of the West’s last vestiges of that society. “Protected” my fucking ass.

Edit: none of those women, including the middle class one, were allowed to vote. I hate libfems.

The Way We Never Were is a book written in 1992 by a well respected female historian about the dangers of American nostalgia and how it is ahistorical - a topic that should excite feminists I would think, and this is but ONE out of context paragraph out of an entire book that does discuss sexual assault. It is bananas to me to call yourself a feminist and be itching to sneeringly call out other, esteemed, educated women as, uhmm, "libfem" at any moment. What about this paragraph is "libfem"? Do you guys even know what you're talking about when you say "libfem"? It seems the issue is that, god forbid, Coontz used the word "protected" in this paragraph, despite us not having any previous paragraphs ready to understand what context "protected" is being used in. I really can't stand this shit, learn to respect female scholars and learn to google shit before yapping in the name of discrediting a woman over nothing, over imagined ideas you're projecting on to her.

Yeah I read this and I immediately got the point. We today are sold a certain picture of the past that working class women today imagine themselves robbed of living a life of no work and all glamour that was never theirs to begin with. I agree with the commenter about marital rape and other stuff, but it’s not relevant to the point of OP because sometimes we’re having a conversation WITHIN feminism where a straight WASP woman does in fact have power and privilege over the other races and classes of women. It’s not slapping that woman in the face to point it out, it’s being honest. These types of women clung to whatever privilege and power they could scrape together under patriarchy and wielded it against those lower than her by race, class, etc… They are not purely innocent in all this.

In fact, in context Coontz is being sarcastic about the concept of the "protected" family as envisioned by the conservatives who have never particularly studied the reality of American family history. This particular paragraph is taken from the first chapter, in which she is discussing the various faces of the "traditional American family" as envisioned by her students.

Incidentally, by the time this paragraph appears early in chapter 1 in my edition, Coontz has already briefly discussed marital rape and the beginning of its challenge in the 1970s in the introduction. The subject returns several times as she interrogates the difference between legislating in favor of real families and in favor of imagined families. Because this is a book, from which I excerpted one paragraph, there is mysteriously room to talk about lots of things without them appearing in this except.

ETA: mysteriously when I glance at unsentimentaltranslator's blog, it is soaking with TERF bullshit. who's surprised?

Slightly lateral but also: They are not purely innocent in all this.

Please, for me, for the love of any god you choose, let go of the idea that "innocence" is something that exists in history or in real power structures and that what's most important is figuring out which class of people are or aren't innocent enough to be the focus of concern, or whatever it is you're doing.

Because this is also what the TERF-y upset poster above is doing. This is the same logic they are using; it is the same perspective from which they are interrogating history and current systems. It's why they're so upset: because for them, they have already established a comfortable order where women (whatever their definition of women is) = innocent and that's the position they address morality from and so any information that threatens this as an absolute idea is an attack and must be attacked in return, regardless of what it is, because it can't be true, because they've already decided truth, and . . . .etc.

Because if the class/category of thing that is "women" is ever anything less than perfectly innocent, then (for them) the moral structure they've built crumbles around them.

Here's the thing: clung to whatever privilege and power they could scrape together

Every kind of human does this. Like you're absolutely not wrong! But this also happens within the world of the sweatshop girls, within the world of the boy mining along with the other men and boys, within the worlds of the racially segregated workers, servants and even slaves (depending where you were in the world) - hardship does not inculcate perfect generous hearts in mutual solidarity. Humans, by and large, cling to whatever power and yes even "privilege" they can scrape together to attempt to maintain what levels of comfort and security they can. Of course we do!

Sometimes that is amazingly, incredibly little. Sometimes the mechanisms of that power and status do not line up with those that operate for the dominant/more well known parts of society - different shit comes into play. But that doesn't stop the drive. It might be that the only bit of power and influence and whatever you have is that within the hierarchy of the abused domestic servants you are the one who gets to hand out the tasks and determine the conditions of work and maintain that ever so important line of rigid demarcation between the House Staff and the Outdoor Servants, but by gods has that been the fiercely defended patch of a domain for hundreds of years in some societies.

And within that generalization there are always millions of individual actual human beings whose specific lives and specific choices and specific interactions with that precarity and threat and shitty part of living as humans in an unjust system are going to be specific to them.

But much like there is no ethical consumption in an unethical economic system*, there is no innocent existence in a brutalizing society.

That doesn't mean "everyone is evil, we must all repent". It means "this is not a super meaningful or useful way to look at this problem, or thing to focus on when trying to erase the false, idolized image of shit being 'perfect' back then as opposed to 'corrupt' now."

It means going "huh look all the ways this system was Fucked Up and turned everyday living into this ugly mutual struggle that dehumanized everyone involved, even those supposedly living the good life out of it, so what do we take apart or reimagine, what effects is that having on us later, how do we actually fix this based on what actually existed, on what really happened and is happening?"

It means one of the most powerful things one can do is manage to get through a message of "has anyone noticed how this whole setup is fucking everyone and maybe if we managed common cause in solidarity of some kind we might make shit better for everyone?"**

But the faster that one stops thinking that you can dig around in human structures and find the "innocent" party or class or rank or whatever, and the faster the part where some group or the other has, absolutely, tried to maintain what security (and this is almost always synonymous with power/status/etc) they can with at the most a kind of solidarity with their immediately-recognized "we", stops being the point where we write them off as awful (and thus something we have to lie to ourselves about if we're not wiling to do that), the faster you can understand and work with, around, and in mindfulness of the pressures that drive actual scared human beings who are trying to handle existing.

In this context, when talking about large groups, the baseline human capacity for participating in abusive systems is limited only by our literal access to power. And by and large we will, as a general group, take as much as we have access to and be incredibly unwilling to take steps that to us, make us feel less secure and more precarious.

The good news is we can figure out how to deal with and work around and answer that human tendency, to widen the circle of "us" so that we're demanding more and more actual justice and mutual benefit out of our systems, but fixating on innocence vs whatever else is an impediment to that.

(*"capitalism", originally, but the reality is there are many more systems to which it applies equally)

(**I'm not saying that's EASY, nor am I saying that trying to maintain that idea of "no actually better for EVERYONE, not just you, $person/group . . . " isn't really really hard. That's why the first tactic of any group that wishes to keep the status quo or to insert a new power structure that just amounts to "also a brutalizing system, but with us at the top of it" is to find another group that they can split off by offering just enough improvement - or threatening just enough risk from letting the 'other' side win - that that group decides they're better off joining up against everyone else than taking their chances.)

'can we normalize this'

'we need to normalize that'

can you all shut the fuck up for a minute and reconsider how constantly demanding normalization only retrenches the moral position that weird = bad?

like no you're not actually going to be able to normalize a lot of stuff, because it's statistically unusual or aberrant. you can't normalize shit that is not by any definition normal.

what you need to do is fucking stand up for the weirdos, freaks, and deviants, and remind everyone who is normal that their position just makes them normal. not good, not right, not correct, not better, not perfect, not beyond reproach or improvement.

being weird isn't bad. stop normalizing that, already.

I think a lot of people are using the word "normalize" when they should be using the word "destigmatize".

Normalizing brings an idea into the circle of "acceptable" behaviour without questioning or deconstructing that circle.

Destigmatizing brings the walls of the circle down by un-making the distinction between what's in the circle and what's outside of the circle--its no longer a bad thing to be outside the circle.

Being a ranger I spend a lot of time alone in the wilderness for hours in the company of one of four co workers.

One such worker for the purpose of this post we shall refer to as Dave.

Dave is a very quiet man. He confesses that if conversation happens too quickly and for too long he gets tired so we often work in silence. He's very polite and good natured but it's obvious that he would happily live and work alone for the rest of his life given the option.

He's very much in the previous generation of ranger, a practical man in his fourties or fifties happy to be kept physically busy for a day and then be sent home with some pay. I had to show him how to use a work issued smart phone.

Meanwhile the rest of the team is made up of the current generation of rangers; openly nurodivergent queer women in their twenties or thirties who work this job because it's the only setting where we can vaguely look sane.

So Dave sticks out a bit. It's really nice when he opens up though because he's an impulsive individual when left to his own devices and has plenty of stories to tell if the mood takes him. I really like working with Dave.

Anyway, one day we've got a job that takes a three hour hike to get to and early on the topic of deer comes up.

I hadn't realised this was the first time we had discussed deer, but blatantly it was. Dave's entire demeanour changes, there's a bit of passion in his voice, but it's also hushed as if he's talking about something sacred.

"Deer are my favourite animal." He says.

I'm also eager to hear Dave talk about himself, so I encourage him to say more.

"I'd love to be a deer myself."

And more

"If a genie offered me the opportunity to become a deer I'd take it. I wouldn't even stop to ask what the price was."

And more

"Sometimes I feel like I'm a deer having a dream about being a human.*

And there I am, a long time commuter to the therian/otherkin community keeping up the encouraging face of someone being politely interested, knowing that this man is straight up a therian with no frame of reference.

And I decided that I wouldn't push the subject outside of the bounds of what Dave is comfortable with, I wouldn't try to teach him the terms "Therian" or "Otherkin" but absolutely I would talk with this man as if he's a deer.

And it's a bit magical really. He's an impulsive individual so I have to talk him out of some risky choices every so often and "this is why deer like you keep getting stuck in fences" has become this magical phrase that allows him to step down from a mistake with a bit of a smile on his face.

This is wonderful

I am also seeing a significant line of continuity between the generations of rangers here, just a divergence of masking techniques/isolation from likeminded other people.

an imperfect ally is better than a perfect bystander

the old boomer who "doesn't get the gays" but still votes blue every election is still a better ally to you than every well-spoken, woke millennial who says all the right shit but didn't vote because they "didn't like either option"

the lady who voted for trump but has changed her mind since and is calling her senator every day is a better ally to you than anyone very politely apologizing for how awful things are and not doing anything to actually help