my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

so i think i (at least, the part of me talking to other people most of the time right now [0]) might be a lion. i love foxes, and i'm not _not_ a fox, really, i don't think that's a thing i could simply stop doing or being! just. i think of foxes as tricksters or trickster-adjacent, finding clever ways around work and problems or avoiding getting ensnared in problems to begin with, or talking their way out of jams. i have done that many times in the past! it's really cool! but at the moment i feel called to things in my local life and in the world around me that can't be outclevered, that are really about just doing the work. and with my fox mask on i kind of chafe a little at that, tbh, i keep looking for a solution that isn't there to a puzzle that isn't really a puzzle. the work is scary! the work is too big to do alone as a slinky forest creature who dodges traps and answers riddles!

( image cut in case it fucks up your reading page because dw is kinda like that sometimes )
and maybe it's weird that i see being a lion as being about _doing the work_, given the sleepy/lazy/&c. image of "lion around," but i think especially for a lion whose maleness is deeply contingent, who is not the leader of a pride, who's not the patriarch and has kind of intentionally set any chance i might have to be the patriarch on fire and watched it burn itself out floating away down the river of bring aggressively and openly trans... wow this sentence also went down that river, bobbing up and down, losing whatever clause was supposed to go here as it went. that's fine. the estrogen in the water supply will wash away prescriptive grammar and/or give it hips. it's fine.

because here's the thing: lionesses do the work, individually and collectively, managing raising children and hunting and social organization at the same time. inasmuch as those are things that lions do, at least, as opposed to human concepts being mapped imperfectly onto lions, which is kind of what furry identity is at the best of times: taking the ways we've anthropomorphized animal behavior and turning it back on ourselves in a way that lets us learn more about both ourselves and the animals who are not us. and i'm not a lioness. i'm a _boy_ lion. but in a way i can only be after having chosen irreversibly not to be a man and to forcelose the possibility that i will ever be seen as a man, so that i can and must do my share of the work. that could be its own entire thing i write about some other time i guess.

and let's be frank: a regal lion from the savannah, coded with some sort of implied Naturalness is maybe not a thing in my right of way, anyway. [1] But a white lion --- not even a pure white lion, a beautiful pastel disaster with funny-colored rosettes, a copy of a copy with weird body issues who was raised in an environment divorced from the originary [2] as an entertainment [3] rather than a hunter or a warrior or whatever? yeah that's kinda me. like i feel like my upbringing kept me in isolation from my _own_ culture let alone any culture i might try to appropriate based on a furry identity. that is also probably a different post than "hey i got a new fursona look at it i'm pretty" but. hey i got a new fursona. look at it. i'm pretty.

i also wanted to like... really reflect my actual material body in the way this fursona looks. this isn't _exactly_ me in a couple of ways, but i recognize myself in it in a way that is sometimes hard when more of the detail of my body shape is abstracted away, while still thinking i look _damn cute._ the artist did an amazing job and was very helpful in making that happen and if you like to look at or commission furry art i really recommend kresendoe for both of those things!

( footnotes )

Hi all! Today I am leaving Seattle to go up to Vancouver for the Pokemon World Championships. I mostly won't be answering texts or my phone, since it will cost me money, though I'll try to keep people posted about how I'm doing. I'll post updates to Twitter (@raxvulpine) --- which I otherwise don't use --- and here when I can. The main reason to follow Twitter would be to see if I'm going to be in a featured match --- some matches will be streamed on www.twitch.tv/pokemon and if I know I'm going to get featured I will let people know. You can also see standings once the event starts Saturday at http://www.pokemonworldchampionships.com/2013/standings/ ; I am in the TCG, Masters Division.

I also got some positive press going into the event, being picked as part of a fantasy draft:


So that's pretty awesome, although pronouns argh. Expect a post about gender, Pokemon, and competitive gaming in general when I get back.

Random things:

• This morning Krinn convinced me not to write a mail client with the most effective threat I have ever had made to me. (Recently our office mail server upgraded, and while in theory getting new webmail and access to Apple Mail and Outlook 2012 should make things better, each of those three clients has some critical flaw I can't chase down that makes me have to run a minimum of two of them at all times. I now understand why people write mail clients.) She said: "If you try to write a mail client, all of your Shaymins will stop smiling." I think I actually gasped. The image is SO SAD. Good work, Krinn. <3
• I dreamt last night about being part of a band that did abstract process-as-performance shows where we dragged beanbag chairs on stage and had shitty rehearsals at various venues. It was awesome. I think the other members of the band were punk kids from our Pokemon league and from Albuquerque's. If no one has done this schtick yet, someone should. *finger on nose*
• rushthatspeaks 's blog (and in particular this book review) got me thinking about generation ships --- which, if I understand correctly, are giant spaeships meant to serve as a habitat for many generations of human as they go off to colonize some new planet. I mean, I have never actually read a book or really consumed any media that used generation ships, because I'm a very sporadic consumer of science fiction, but the idea in and of itself makes sense and has some plausibility benefits over AND THEN THEY WOKE UP FROM CRYOSTASIS ON "EARTH, BUT WITH CAT PEOPLE" or what have you. What it did get me thinking about was Lyotard's essay "Can Thought Go On Without A Body?," which I am pretty sure is in The Inhuman. He talks about the difficulty of producing machines capable of thought, with the idea of sending them outside of the sphere of influence of the sun so that  thought will persist after the sun explodes/implodes/whatever. The reason he thinks it wouldn't work is that machines don't have gender --- that is, some difference between some fo them that has an almost religious inscrutability and implies the imbrication of the other with the self. Or something, I'm butchering his argument. The point is, if I take that argument at face value, I actually think generation ships could be the cure for gender, if that inscrutable difference as expressed in the people on the generation ship was the difference between the people who did and didn't stay on Earth. Maybe? I dunno. Been chewing on it, figured I'd share. (Also: Does gender need a cure? "Curing gender" is not unproblematic, but boy are there some interesting thought experiments and maybe stories in here. Haha. "Boy." GENDER WHY)
• It turns out I can make fairly spicy lentil curry by just milling good black pepper into it until my arms are tired and then asking someone else to do the same. :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D I have been trying and failing to make reasonable curry since losing nightshades from my diet, and apparently the trick was to start from an Ethiopian recipe and modify, rather than starting from an Indian one? Once I've got it at "I know what I'm doing" I will post a recipe or something.
• I hate to do anything that even comes off as complaining about weather when I know a number of my friends are still stuck under snowdrifts, but on Sunday Rik and I walked for five miles or so and it was cold enough with the wind that my legs were covered in hives. Stupid cold allergy, and arguably, stupid me for walking five miles in shorts in February. It seems mostly better although my calves are still itchy as all get out, and while this is mostly not a huge deal I scratch in my sleep. :( I think as fashion disastery as this is, the best solution I have without spending money might be shorts, leg warmers, and sandals. ... ... ... how does one go about selecting good hiking pants? I don't know how to garment.
• There's still a long-form life update email... coming... soon... ish? Hope y'all are doing well!

This document describes the proper procedures for referring to rax using third-person pronouns. It supersedes all previous such documentation.

The correct pronoun for referring to rax is now "they." This is true whether you are referring to them as rax , Rax, Rachel, Rach, Kitty-Fox, or any other approved appellation. The pronoun "she" from pronoun release 2.0 is deprecated but still supported; there are not currenly plans to cease supporting this pronoun because the tech industry vertical maintains support for the 2.0 reference API as a requirement. Calls to the 2.0 system may occasionally produce warning messages encouraging you to update your pronoun usage, depending on the context of your statement. Use of the 1.0 pronoun API is explicitly unsupported and may lead to erratic and unexpected results; it is not recommended. If you find old documentation or legacy code that refers to rax with legacy pronouns, please inform them so that the situation may be remedied.

rax offers limited support for other gender-neutral pronoun calls; while "ey" and "xie" are not explicitly supported, these pronouns have been successful in limited field testing. If there is interest, a patch release may be offered in the future supporting these alternate pronoun sets. Please contact your sales representative for more information.

This change to the pronoun API does not constitute a change in the core rax gender identities module; no such changes are planned, although all things are possible. For more information about the core gender identities module, please contact Customer Support.

So, gender!

For a while now I've been mumbling about maybe using gender-neutral pronouns or something because I have this discomfort with gender. My name is Rachel, and I present myself as female, and you might think I'd be reasonably happy about both of those because I picked them. And in some ways I am! Because damn, are they better than the alternative.

Except that "the alternative" is a false choice; I don't have to choose either or. I could pick preferred pronouns of "they" or "ey" or "hir" or "xyzzy" and most of you would respect it and a lot of you would even use it most or all of the time. That's pretty awesome! I could say that my gender was "neuter" or "other" or "awesome" and that would be great. It's something I appreciate about my friends and even some of my family that this is true. I appreciate it a lot, and I work to extend the same courtesy to everyone, though particularly those folks who ask me for it.

Problem is: I can't get that from strangers, and that's who I actually want it from. I don't care that much if my friends treat me as female, because I think it has way less impact on how they treat me overall; sure, there's some amount of ingrained gender bias and I did notice people treating me differently before and after transition, but people who know me well think of me as more than a gender, even though they do think of me as having a gender. And I am OK with that. I did pick it, after all, even though I picked it from fewer options than I realize now that I might have had.

What really bothers me is when strangers and acquaintances and use gendered language for me. I don't want to be Mrs. Dillon (which I've been called like ten times today) and I don't want to be Ms. Dillon either. Mx. Dillon is tolerable, at least; I'd rather not have a title at all, but if I have to I would like it to not be dependent on my vagina. [0] I feel similarly about pronouns and social expectations and all manner of things. But at the moment I don't really have any desire to declare my gender other or change my pronouns or change much about my presentation, because I don't think it would change the situations I really care about. I want people on the phone who I will never talk to again to not use sir or ma'am, because it shouldn't matter, and they make it matter and I don't like it. I don't care if people I know well use that kind of language, though. Usually. [1]

I don't really have a point here, other than this is more formed than my usual pointing at gender and going "Urgh! Meh!" and so I figured I would write it down. I realize that I could ask random people on the phone to not use gendered language, and I could enforce that in all social situations, but it isn't worth it for me right now; the effort threshhold of saying "I prefer you not refer to me as ma'am or sir" to the clerk at the store is higher, to me, than just dealing with it. I recognize that not to be the case for some people and I totally support that! It's just not me, right now.

This comes up in part because I've had people in my new department ask me pronoun preference and I said "she or they, whichever" and they were like "...whichever?" and I was like "Yeah, basically." Because that's where I'm at, right now? It's a moving target, who knows where if anywhere it is going. If you wanna call me "they" and "Mx." I am neutral to vaguely positive on that. "male pronouns are still wrong, thanks"

[0] Or more correctly the social expectation that I have a vagina, and thus a particular set of social obligations, based on the way I am presented and present myself.

[1] There's one coworker who calls me darling, who does not accept correction on this (when I asked him not to, he started calling me sir, which is worse). In basically all other ways I really like working with him. I'm mostly used to it, but it's kinda frustrating.