A Cyborg Kitty

They/them. Latinx boricua. Artist. Elder queer millennial. Disabled. www.acyborgkitty.com

[catchymemes]

[flufflecat]

almost time

[readyset-id]

[ID: an edited manga panel from Fullmetal Alchemist. Darius, Heinkel look at Ling Yao, who looks quite sick. He says “it’s Pride.” The background is edited to be the rainbow pride flag with a black and brown stripe at the top.]

[semiprecioussideblog]

Happy Pride!!

[14-opossums-in-a-trenchcoat]

I need to remember to reblog this in june

[totally-cis-offical]

June

[acyborgkitty]

Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness & Disability

Field Notes by Sally Huband

"pain becomes airborne, drifts away with the willow down."

"The awe that I feel, when I contemplate my bodymind, is a constant state of flux between fear and wonder."

"...had already dismissed the symptoms of autoimmune disease to the point that I had begun to lose words."

"Imagine another type of pain as reassuring, the comforting familiarity of a favourite tree. When this pain is present, everything is as it should be."

"In an ableist society this constant rebuilding of shelter is the heavy work of the disabled and chronically ill."

"If we centred the needs of the chronically ill and disabled, we would create contours of flow for everyone."

[acyborgkitty]

The Body In Pain by Elaine Scarry

Introduction

[feelings] are "a consistent affirmation of the human being’s capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world."

**can this relate to Donna Haraway's porousness?

"physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language."

"if pain had a goal, it would be to be felt and known exclusively in its intensity."

Five sources for ways of knowing pain:

Individuals in pain themselves

Doctors attempting to diagnose and treat pain

Public, non-medical contexts of accounts of the pain of others (e.g. Amnesty International documents on torture)

Courtroom documents ("the lawyer, too, becomes an inventor of language, one who speaks on behalf of another person (the plaintiff) and attempts to communicate the reality of that person’s physical pain to people who are not themselves in pain (the jurors).")

Art

"the assumption that the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain."

"even the artist—whose lifework and everyday habit are to refine and extend the reflexes of speech—ordinarily falls silent before pain."

"the relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented also influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented."

"It is not simply accurate but tautological to observe that given any two phenomena, the one that is more visible will receive more attention."

Part I. Chapter 1 is about torture ("uncovering the perceptual processes that permit this misdescription" of torture as information-gathering). Chapter 2 is about war.

"To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt. But we will see that the relation between pain and belief is even more problematic than has so far been suggested."

"The failure to express pain—will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power;"

"Because the existing vocabulary for pain contains only a small handful of adjectives, one passes through direct descriptions very quickly and (as V. C. Medvei noted in his 1948 treatise on pain11) almost immediately encounters an “as if” structure: it feels as if . . .; it is as though. . . . On the other side of the ellipse there reappear again and again (regardless of whether the immediate context of the vocalization is medical or literary or legal) two and only two metaphors, and they are metaphors whose inner workings are very problematic."

Part II. "The discussion of civilization’s ongoing modifications of “agency”"

"Physical pain—[...] is language-destroying."

"because “the structure of war” and “the structure of unmaking” are not two subjects but one."

"Chapter 3 attends specifically to “mental imagining” (or what was a moment ago called the phase of “making-up”), and Chapters 4 and 5 together examine the action of creating verbal and material artifacts..."

"The vocabulary of “creating,” “inventing,” “making,” “imagining,” is not in the twentieth century a morally resonant one: “imagining,” for example, is usually described as an ethically neutral or amoral phenomenon;"

** the politics of imagining**

"what is quite literally at stake in the body in pain is the making and unmaking of the world."

[strawberrydraw]

It's my Fearday 🎂

[acyborgkitty]

Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness & Disability

Foreward by Samantha Watson

"In periods of illness or pain, the body's silence would be the greatest release."

"...it is not the world, but the body that is too much with us."

"Producing work that dwells with pain, discomfort, and struggle also demands that readers are willing to go to those places and to confront the reality that we are all only temporarily able-bodied."

"pain... is ... actively destructive to language..."

Introduction by Louise Kenward (?)

"I have since been learning to live in this body anew, grateful to have travelled when I did and more knowledgeable than I ever thought possible about my body and medicine's failings."

"Sometimes viable restoration is not possible. ... I want us to tend the unrestorable places and ecosystems that are ugly, stripped down, full of toxins, rather than considering them unnatural and abandoning them. I want us to respect and embrace the bodies disabled through environmental destruction, age, war, genocide, abysmal working conditions, hunger, poverty, and twists of fate, rather than deeming them abnormal bodies to isolate, fear, hate, and dispose of." (Eli Clare, "Notes on Natural Worlds")

"We cannot poison one [the environment] without also poisoning the other [our bodies]. The two are inextricably entwined, we cannot talk about climate crisis or environmental destruction without talking also of illness and disability."

"...had not even considered the access needs for the Isr*eli energy minister ... a wheelchair user, who was shut out of proceedings because the venue wasn't accessible."

**She should be shut out of proceedings, because of the genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine and how much climate damage the occupation causes.**

"Themes of 'conquering' permeate through illness as well as the natural world, a nod to colonialism and species supremacy."

"...the world around us, like our bodies, cannot be returned to what was, following illness, accident and injury."

"Themes of time through seasonal change and transformation, of mirrors between the 'before' and 'after,' so acutely felt in chornic illness and acquired disability ... along with a very clear sense that we are all a part of something much larger than we can ever know or fully appreciate."

"There is a palpable sense of being more than, and a part of, humanity, when living with illness and disability, that makes tangible our interdependence and connectedness with one another."

** does being disabled, in some way, make one more-than-human? Haraway's cyborg, eg.? Kafer maybe on this

"At a time when the world around us is showing us it is sick and at risk, the voices of people who live similarly with risk and vulnerability are able to offer different narratives and new knowledge to those who do not have to regard or question their own bodies in the same way."

"...it may be that it is precisely because we are livingi n bodies that remind us of our own vulnerabilities, of decay and mutability, that identifying with and experiencing the more-than-human can become all the more significant."

"The rocks that appear entirely stationary above the ground, beneath the earth are able to move and defy gravity. The rocks that are the debris and sediment of the glaciers, similarly known for their slow movement, that had moved across the centre of Canada, which had been ocean before it was prairie, and prior to that, mountains. In time, geological time, the mountains that were created by the movement of tectonic plates blew and washed away."

** can I write something similar about the geological formation of Finland? the glaciers? indigenous knowledge of the land?

** is there a name for the non-fiction technique of going into the definition of a word? this seems to parallel the movement to geological time as a technique.

[distinguishedbaloney]

[eilooxara]

Non cooking spray stick

[eilooxara]

Non spray stick cooking

[that-house]

Non cooking stick spray

[kingdionra]

non stick spray cooking

[catasters]

[panpteryx]

[video ID: an orange tabby cat lies next to a plasma ball. Voice 1: "yeah?" Voice 2: "[inaudible name] touch it" hand reaches into frame and touches the plasma ball, causing lightning effect. Cat is visibly curious. Hand pulls out of frame. Cat investigates and sniffs at plasma ball. Voice 2: [giggles] "he's tapping his nose." Cat sits up and, clearly mimicking the human's action, pokes and then places his paw on the plasma orb, creating a lightning effect which outlines his paw pads against the glass. Voice 2: [suppressed laughter] "you can perfectly see the little beans!" Cat removes paw from orb, sits back, and sniffs curiously in the air. Voice 2: [through laughter] "oh my fucking god" Voice 1: "that's the best thing I've ever seen." Cat reaches to sniff off screen. Voice 2: "oh now he's just going to eat my lamp." End video ID]

[tartrazeen]

Quick correction! The cat wasn't reaching to sniff off-screen. It was sniffing the translucent ends of an LED lamp :)

[acyborgkitty]

My brother, who is DMing my first time playing DnD, told me today that my playing last session reminded him of Emily Axford and I have never been so proud.

[thechronicpaingame]

my grandmother said something that’s resonated with me. she said “people don’t understand that when they’re ill, they go to sleep knowing they’ll wake one day soon feeling better. you have go to sleep every night hoping, and it never happens.”

[starrhunter]

That is a very powerful message. And hard for people without illnesses to comprehend.

[acyborgkitty]

I disappeared when I got sick. Literally, I disappeared. I stopped being able to leave my house except for absolute necessity. I stopped being able to talk or have phone calls for a long time. And of course I lost 90% of my friends, my partner, and my career.

But I disappeared in a less literal sense too: my brain changed. I could no longer read, much less write. I am, fundamentally, no longer myself. I didn't even know that was a possibility until it happened to me. And I miss my old brain, and my ability to write poetry, to think poetically and deeply about things, to feel intensely. All of those things are gone now.

Sometimes on good days I think I could start again to build a voice. To read and write the way I used to. But then I try and my brain feels like it's being electrocuted. I can't think, I can't understand, I can't feel. It's like there's an electric fence around who I used to be, somewhere still inside my brain, and I keep trying to get through, to rejoin myself.

[homunculus-argument]

If you've ever seen a stranger on the street physically flinch or jump because you sneezed so loud that you startled them, you've got to work on that. Like I don't care if it's involuntary, figure it out. Find a way to make it stop. Doing that shit is a character flaw at this point. It's obnoxious.

[homunculus-argument]

oh boy

[starswingsandtrivialthings]

Read this to my sister and she told me to shut up. She then preceded to sing at me as "punishment".

(Our mom sneezes so loud it sounds like a bullet going off, she's unfortunately picked up the habit. We've theorized she does it for attention, but she insists it's unintentional.)

[homunculus-argument]

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but there is a significant overlap between people who shout when they sneeze, and people who are obnoxious on purpose.

[acyborgkitty]

I had a similar conversation with a friend recently because I get so frustrated at people who come to classical music concerts and cough through the quiet parts. My take was that if you know you have a tendency to cough and can't absolutely can't go for 45 minutes without a coughing fit maybe have a lozenge with you or something. She said people can't control when or how loud they cough. I said I definitely could and had learned to specifically as a young person attending classical music concerts so as not to disrupt the performance. I know cough isn't the same as a sneeze much less a scream sneeze but I do think a lot of people aren't aware of how they impact others and the ones who aggressively don't care are just kind of obnoxious in both cases.

[acyborgkitty]

I'm designing a new edition of a book I designed 11 years ago, and just having so much fun. I love designing poetry books, and I love working with Jorie Graham. We talk about how the silence of the page holds the poems, where the page breaks interfere with the rhythm of the poem, how articles can shift a whole phrase into something more fully expressive or meaningful.

Jorie one of the only one of my poetry friends that didn't disappear when I became ill in 2016. She has continued to work with me, to support me when she can, through her own illnesses and difficulties, and I am so so grateful for her.

Book design is one of the few things from my former career I can still do. And I get to do it with such an incredible poet.

Anyway, just feeling really grateful to get to work on this book today.

[acyborgkitty]

Murph's voice for Sebastian's ghost in Eldermourne ep. 4 is literally making me nauseated. I have to skip it. Ugh I hate having such a sensitive brain sometimes. Hope I didn't miss anything super important. I usually love his voices but jeez.

[acyborgkitty]

I'm doing a sensitivity read on a book, can't say much about it but it's a historical fiction piece set in Alaska in the mid-twentieth century. And just... I keep thinking about how the narrative of "homesteading" is so rooted in settler colonial violence. The essence of the act of settling indigenous lands is violent, and yet in this kind of nostalgia cum propaganda it is treated as heroic, "honest" labor.

I wish I were better read in American Indigenous narratives of settler violence... I think that would help me give feedback here.

[selenophobic-werewolf]

"Disabled people can do everything abled people can!1!1!!" I'm gonna have to ask you what you think disabled means

[stuckinapril]

Has anyone figured out what’s so viscerally wrong with this woman yet

[stuckinapril]

She’s so one dimensionally evil you guys 😭😭 how is she real

[mintedwitcher]

read this and remember it. read this and remember that she is going to use the profits of her fucking ego-stroking reboot to decimate trans rights. read this and remember that every time you pay into her IP, you are emboldening her to hurt us more.

our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.

trans lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.