I got a text from the gender clinic a while ago saying "You are due a mandatory in person annual review appointment," so that's what I'm going to this morning.
I asked D to come with me, which he kindly has taken off work for, and on the bus in to town he said "So what do I need to know about this appointment?" I said I had very little idea myself and read out the text: mandatory, in person, review.
I did this on the phone last year, but all I remember is that that's when I was first told that I'm too fat to get top surgery. I think otherwise I'm very straightforward: I take my T, I don't forget, my GP is good at prescribing it, I'm not too unhappy with any of the side effects. Last year I could say I was doing counseling from them and I was told I was getting near the top of the voice coaching waiting list (though, another year on, I've still heard nothing about that...)
I told D "I think it's just, like, a meds review but for the whole real, not just meds."
"A boy review," he said.
I grinned. "Yeah!" I rested my head on his shoulder and asked "How is your boy?"
"Pretty good," he smiled. "Could do with more sleep."
Moonpie started to get super hyped up, as usual, and so did they, so I picked her up... and ended up with two huskies eagerly jumping up on me to say hi to their best chihuahua friend!
Well, at least my feet were firmly planted. Before we saw the huskies, on our earlier walk, we bumped into a friendly yorkie (?) - no collar, no people. But well-fed and groomed, this isn't another Finn. He eventually disappeared under a fence, but I've been asking everybody I saw if they know whose dog he is exactly, because I was that worried. Was he outside alone in the heat? That's no good.
Anyway, I asked the guy with the huskies, and he had no idea, but he told me something else - the day before, he thinks he saw a fox! I'm not sure he wasn't just mistaken, but if he isn't - wow! I know we have bunnies on the South Shore, and coyotes in the Bronx, and whatever the city says we definitely have a full time population of deer mid-Island, so maybe a fox isn't so strange.
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Maybe you can help me figure out something that’s been baffling me for days?
“Trippin'” is very straightforward, a bubblegum rap song in which three charming young guys flirt with the same pretty girl. It’s as wholesome as a song could possibly be while including the line “I’ma knock the coochie out.” Great chopped up Fergie sample, strong performances by a trio of young rappers, fun energy. It’s super easy to love this song.
That’s the context, here’s my question.
Midway through the song, Zeddy Will drops this verse:
If you tryna stay the weekend, let me know, girl it’s alright
Pretty in the face so you definitely my type
And for that, I’ll book your flight
So where you tryna go?
She said, “Let’s go to Turkey”, say no more, case closed
Turkey? Of all the two syllable destinations on planet earth, why Turkey? Is this totally random, or is there some Gen-Z cultural significance to Turkey beyond it being where guys go to get hair transplants? Why not, say, Toyko or Bali or Paris or Dubai or London or Fiji or Rio?
Is there some kind of Turkish tourism campaign aimed at girls under 20 on TikTok that I’ve never heard about? Is the girl in this song just a big fan of Erdoğan’s far right wing government? Are they big Eric Adams supporters?
It’s such a bizarre choice of destination in 2025, but it is funny to imagine this young dude booking the trip and arriving there with her and just being like….????
And here’s another one from Zeddy Will, all by himself. And once again, it’s an ultra horny song that somehow seems wholesome if just because it’s not misogynistic. There’s nothing profound going on here, it’s just a song about being excited about giving and receiving head. But here’s a positive energy and cool attitude in this music, and it’s not calling attention to being a Very Good Boy relative to anyone else, or it’s not dorky. It’s just flirty, fun, and overflowing with lust.
... this being the style I have already sacrificed one of to The Endless Woodchip. Attempt at loss the first occurred while putting up tent; attempt at loss the second occurred late on Saturday night, when I was rushing from A to B to provide a roll-mat to a player and lost a fight with the bunting we use to discourage people from walking into the tent in places we don't want them to.
It was dark. Nonetheless I spent several whole minutes searching before giving up and resolving to try again in daylight. Consequently I got up good and early to start hunting before the team started carting all of the Objects back out of the storage ISO (all of the in-character valuables get locked away overnight while the tent's unstaffed...) and... discovered it really wasn't going to need much hunting after all.
Tragically the brass hair stick I pulled out of "freecycle" before letting the players at the aged-out lost objects... wound up getting dropped in a known fairly well-defined location, and vanishing utterly into the ether, despite a good five people having a hunt for it. Ah well; maybe it'll show up next time, and maybe it won't, and either way I am likely to have future opportunities to Acquire More Hair Adornment.
Ringer is not interested in the perceived glitz and glamour of big top spectacles. Rather, she presents the golden age circus as a site of working-class labor, where both humans and beasts toiled from day till night under the near-constant gaze of thrill-seeking visitors. .... _Circus World _is the sort of book that will captivate (and, in some cases, horrify) a great many readers. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the modern circus; the same is true for historians of animal entertainment and industry. Gender studies scholars will appreciate Ringer's fresh insights into the ways circuses amplified colonial and patriarchal notions of race, gender, and family. Plus, the book's short length and bite-sized chapters make it ideal for classroom use. Above all, _Circus World _succeeds as a work of labor history, one that takes nontraditional work and nontraditional workers seriously.
Weary of the insistent demands and disappointments of online life in the early 2020s, Dominic Pettman turned to a very old practice: Rather than commenting on current events by posting for his followers on social media, he would tell the bees instead. The record of this experiment is _Telling the Bees: An Interspecies Monologue_ (2024). "Indeed, this time-honored activity--practiced in villages all over Europe, for centuries--seems much healthier to me than confessing things to the digital ether, the anonymous world via social media," he writes early in the journal (p. 2). .... In Pettman's case, as a resident of New York City, he doesn't have much access to actual, in-the-flesh bees. The apartment co-op won't let him have a hive on the roof, for one thing. At the start he makes do by talking to "wild" bees he encounters on his walks in Central Park, but as the seasons change and the threats of COVID-19 force ever smaller spaces of interaction, Pettman conjures and speaks to virtual bee--"the memory of bees," as he calls it, prompting a wry rejoinder from a waggish colleague: "These bees ... Are they in the room with us now?" (p. xi). Readers seeking a journal of material human entanglement with physical bees will not find that here. Pettman's virtual bees are much more akin to the "virtual animal totem" [.]
Patten then combats history and myth with a series of case and site studies in Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, and California, and interviews with mountain lion experts of every stripe--from trackers, hunters, and houndsmen (people who hunt with dogs) to wildlife biologists and conservation management specialists. Along the way, Patten nimbly debunks so many myths about cougars--that they are isolate, cold-blooded killers who need to be managed to keep them from pets, livestock, and small children and that legal hunts are an effective way to manage and stabilize populations.
In the UK, hedgehog conservation is both necessary and supported by the public: Population numbers are in steady decline, while the animals themselves occupy a fond place in the British consciousness. The second section details her fieldwork in New Zealand at pest-control initiatives, including outreach events and community pest-control groups, conservation initiative Zealandia (a completely fenced ecosanctuary in Wellington dedicated to restoring native flora and fauna), and her own "guerrilla" care for local hedgehogs. In New Zealand, hedgehogs are thriving despite their status as an invasive species, provoking widespread public animosity.
Memory is a funny thing. We all have them, and yet, even when we all have the general same set of memories, each of them is different from the memories of others. Author Mia Tsai has been thinking about memory a lot, and how they come to inform her novel, the very appropriately-named The Memory Hunters.
MIA TSAI:
“You can’t prove [historical event] didn’t happen. Were you there?”
What if we could say yeah, actually, I was? And then we could share the memory of being in that place and time with anyone we chose? What if there were people who could slip back into the genealogical record, pull memories from centuries past, and show definitively that something happened? And then, how would we deal with the fact that memories are not as reliable as we believe them to be, especially eyewitness accounts?
I’ve been fascinated with memory for decades. When it comes to music, I memorize repertoire quickly, and the few times I’ve had trouble with memorization have turned into crisis-inducing moments. I wondered what predisposed me and others like me to memorization and what made it difficult for others to know a piece by heart. Still, we work to memorize deeply in classical music, which means memorizing not just notes on the page, what the hands look like as they play, or what the music sounds like, but the theoretical analysis of the music and the feel of the piece in your body.
I took that fascination with me to college, where I jumped into psychology and cognitive neuroscience and learned how fallible human memory is. The brain is incredibly suggestive, and mistakes happen at every stage of the memorization process, from information gathering to memory retrieval (the infamous selective attention test, also called the invisible gorilla test, wasn’t created to test memory, but it serves as a good example of how someone can be an eyewitness yet not remember critical aspects of the situation).
So, with that knowledge as a foundation, I imagined how retrieving someone else’s memories would work. My own memories aren’t fully realized scenes from a movie; the same holds true for many people. How could someone truly understand someone else’s memories?
And if those memories could be understood, how would they be reframed and shaped as exhibits in a museum?
About ten years ago, I watched a video on Janet Stephens, the hairdresser-turned-archaeologist who now specializes in ancient Roman hairstyles. She’d interpreted the word acus not to mean a hairpin, as others thought, but a needle and thread, and it broke open her understanding of how the hairstyles were created.
In the future, with no real documentation on how to use our everyday items, like self-sticking wall hooks or decorative toothpicks (or 8-tracks, floppy disks, and manual transmissions) we might need our own Janet Stephens. How would anthropologists and archaeologists write about us in museums? This cast-iron hook I had, which was supposed to be drilled into a post and used to hang pots, an object I thought was simple enough that it could not be misconstrued as anything else—would it get misinterpreted two hundred years into the future? Would its placard in the museum read like this? OBJECT OF UNKNOWN FUNCTION, EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. CAST IRON. Wouldn’t it make research easier if, say, an anthropologist with the ability to pull memories from DNA fragments could take specimens off said hook hundreds of years later, say yes, I was there, then write more accurately about it?
But it’s not enough to magically pull a memory and present it. Our lives are rooted in culture and context at increasingly micro levels thanks to social fragmentation, and so the people doing the memory work would also need to be well versed in the historical context of the memory. Much like how “acus” mystified archaeologists until a hairdresser came along with the right knowledge set, the memories gathered by my fantasy anthropologists would need someone to interpret them—perhaps someone living who would have a tangible, contextual connection to the memory, someone who might be looking for lost ancestral knowledge or needed a reference to how things used to be done.
None of that personal connection would have a place in a museum. Thus, I created the memory temple as well as a system of ancestor worship for the everyday things that have great personal impact but much less impact when weighed against the rest of public history. I took inspiration from Taiwanese ancestor worship as well as the practice of people going to the cemetery to speak to their loved ones. And The Memory Hunters continued to grow.
There wasn’t a part of society diving didn’t touch. In effect, the characters in the book would always be beside their ancestors except for those who had been sundered from family heirlooms or relatives. I turned that over for a bit, not really able to get my jaws around it, until one day I heard someone say she’d love to sit with her ancestors for five minutes. Suddenly, it crystallized for me so many of the book’s issues that had been hovering just out of reach. It put me back in first grade, living half a world away from the rest of my family, when we were tasked with bringing in a family tree (I could not).
The Memory Hunters takes place in a world where distance and lost knowledge can be overcome, and I think that’s the biggest speculative aspect of it.
Dear Readers: I’m away on my last reconnecting-with-family trip of the summer. This column originally appeared in 2018. Back with an all-new, action-packed Savage Love Quickies column next week. — Dan I’m a professional dominatrix, and I thought I’d seen everything in the last five years. But this situation completely baffled the entire dungeon. This middle-aged … Read More »
While tidying up after some Airbnb guests, a gay man discovered a vibrator left under the pillow. Should he message the couple and offer to send it back, or would that be too embarrassing? One year ago, a woman called the show about her boyfriend, and Dan advised her to break up with him. But … Read More »
2) working from home. Started early so I can stop early and take a little longer lunch break with hubby and daughter
3) Ordered new manga online, seeing I'm already through all the first and second volumes of all the new series I started while being on holiday in France *grins*
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