Livin'

Genderqueer Butch ~24~ They/Them

[pyrrhiccomedy]

so judging by how astonished people are by it every time we explain it to anybody, it seems like my wife and I might really be onto something here

during the pandemic, we invented something we call "astronaut time."

when it's astronaut time, it's like we are two astronauts wearing the big helmets, moving around the station on totally separate tasks. one of us is outside the space station and one of us is inside the space station. our radios do not work and we have no way of communicating with each other. we might see each other through the lil porthole windows, but we ignore each other because we both have different things to do.

"astronaut time" is how we get total privacy when we live in the same apartment. I will pretend you don't exist. You will pretend I don't exist. we have a nonverbal, zero-contact signal for when astronaut time is over (usually "I'll draw a smiley-face on the whiteboard in the kitchen when I'm done"). No talking, stay out of each other's line of sight, we are actively avoiding each other, unless you are currently experiencing a medical emergency goodbye.

it has been. a godsend. imagine living with your partner and being able to close every single tab in your brain related to social interaction. no fear of being interrupted by a "hey, quick question--" or "sorry to bother you, but do you know where the scissors are?" or "did you want something to eat, too?" Once or twice a month, we look at each other lovingly, hold hands, and say "baby I think I need some astronaut time tonight," and the other person goes "okay cool. bye! have a nice night!" and nobody's feelings are hurt and we both go and have a lovely evening completely by ourselves.

like idk it's a small thing but it's made our lives so much nicer, so if you and your partner/roommate are both people who sometimes need total privacy in order to recharge, maybe try it

[wizzard890]

I'm the wife in question and I cannot recommend this enough. When I told my therapist about astronaut time, she asked if she could share it with the couples she councils, so even the professionals give it two thumbs up.

[its-a-gold-song]

How To Draw A Horse - a comic by Emma Hunsinger

[genderqueerdykes]

i'm glad it finally feels good to admit that i'm a butch lesbian. after all the years of being called that hatefully by others, it finally feels good to say, yeah i am a butch dyke, what of it. it's awesome. i love being a transmasculine lesbian. i love being a genderqueer boydyke. i love loving other lesbians. i love other butches. it's great, i'm glad i'm a butch lesbian, it's not a bad thing to be, at all. it's just who i am

[the-sappho-of-lesbos]

[herecomestheboon]

I know I need a job to LIVE. But I also need a job so I can buy my femme all the things I want them to have

I'm not used to being unemployed and THEY NEED THIS NECKLACE AND LIPSTICK AND BOOK AAHHH

[herecomestheboon]

Update: Got a job. Lipstick, book, and bracelet have been purchased :)

[shymagnolia]

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

[shymagnolia]

okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post

[flagellant]

…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment

likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post

[coffee-or-hot-cocoa]

i need all the help i can get for finals

[finnglas]

Hey so

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

This might be the real one, y’all.

[actualverso]

Give salary increase and wfh plz

[catandcrown]

Would really enjoy work stability

[classycookiexo]

[capricorn-born]

Oddly specific. Got a deposit for 6,837 today

[weaselle]

fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes

May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love

[vmohlere]

May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love

[heavenslittlemachine-deactivate]

yknow, i used to be vers. a vers bottom, even. sure, i'd flip fuck every once in a while *crowd raucously cheers and claps* -- thank you, yeah, thanks -- but the catcher's mitt was my home turf, know what i mean ? that's where the magic happened. but nowadays -- now that, yknow, nobody wants to work anymore -- i happen to be a vers top. that's how the cookie crumbles, folks. i tried to take it slow, changed my grindr profile to Vers, but yknow what happens when you tell people, when you put it out there to, yknow, these puppygirls and catboys and all them, that you're versatile, you say you swing both ways, and all they hear is Top. they say there's a top shortage, right ? *crowd boos and sneers* that's right. so i don't even bother anymore. what they don't tell you, alright -- what they don't teach you these days is that it takes some real vulnerability to be the top. yeah, that's right. when you're a bottom, you think, yknow, this is as vulnerable as it gets, right? to have someone inside of me ? *crowd erupts with laughter* but through that same mechanism, the bottom experiences desire internally, that's the secret. and for the top, it's external-- the top has to extend desire, has to make desire known -- to reach out there, hands exposed to the void between hearts, and say: i want you *crowd gasps, shuffles nervously in their seats* and that's it, folks. that's all she wrote. tops- topping, from that precipice, is the endless enumeration of ways to want. and that's why nobody wants to do it anymore.

[the-sappho-of-lesbos]

Source: Sublime Mutations - by Del LaGrace Volcano

[kragehund-est]

no more "in my humble opinion", from now on it's "from my grandiose and objectively correct deductions".

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

this little freak keeps sneaking into my garden and rubbing himself all over my flowers??Hello?????

[james-silvercat]

Real, male bees don’t go after flowers they stay home, that freak is a herself

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

googling ‘bee genders’ as I dictate this post

[lierdumoa]

The more you google bee reproductive biology the more absurd it is that we’re applying the words male and female to them. Their actual genders are worker, drone and queen. The queen is capable of both asexual and sexual reproduction. Bees born of unfertilized eggs become drones that are capable of fertilizing eggs. Bees born of fertilized eggs become workers, but can also potentially become a queen depending on how they are fed during the larval stage.

Use whatever the fuck pronouns you want to describe bees because they’re all equally incorrect projections of human worldview onto an insect species. Bees don’t experience mammalian sexual dimorphism in a biological sense nor do they experience human gender dimorphism in a sociopolitical sense.

[lastoneout]

diversity win, the freak sneaking into your garden and rubbing themselves all over your flowers does not fit into a human biological or sociopolitical framework of sex and gender!

[luthienne]

Maya Angelou, from Letter to My Daughter

[Text ID: I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias. We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.]

[horrormuppet]

I think i met an angel on the train

[horrormuppet]

This older man moved my skirt aside and I absent-mindedly said "oh sorry" for being partially in his seat and he said "dont be sorry, this is new york" and then showed me all his poetry about observing the world and living as a restaurant worker during the pandemic and we talked about how i worked in a grocery store and as a bartender so i resonated with his work and he told me "i may never meet you again but it's nice to meet someone worth talking to. I might sound like a world class idiot sage, but you can't be afraid. That's no way to live. You have to trust your humanity." Then he shook my hand and got off the stop before me. Hello. Hello . Hello.

[quasi-normalcy]

I really cannot emphasize enough the mental health benefits of abandoning the idea that you're special.

[quasi-normalcy]

This goes both ways, both "You don't have to do everything singlehanded" and "You're not uniquely awful."

[saathiray]

This is something I came to grips with as part of years of recovering from PTSD and it was so, so important. Realizing that the worst thing in my life has also happened to so many other people was at first disappointing because I wanted to be special to give my suffering meaning. Then I realized that my suffering isn't what makes me special or interesting. And once I let go of needing to be special, I started paying attention to all the ways other people enrich my life and just became happier.

[missroserose]

I came at this from the other side. I was the child prodigy who was constantly told how special and smart I was and how I had so much potential, and all it did was give me a crippling case of perfectionism since I was convinced that everyone was watching and judging me all the time. Being a pretty average adult has been freeing—I can suck at something and not feel like it’s the end of the world, because I know nobody gives a shit but me. Which means I’m much more able to learn new things than I was twenty years ago, when failing at something meant failing everyone who’d invested their time and energy in me.

[quasi-normalcy]

It also means that I can approach things with humility instead of a compulsive need to be the smartest, specialest person in the room.

[when-it-rains-it-snows]

There's also a lot of moments-in-the-life that get much less scary if you've trained yourself to think "this situation wasn't designed by karma to be my personal perdition; it's happened many times to many people." Overdrawn your checking account? Got lost in a strange place? Got in a wreck in a company vehicle? Got your purse stolen at 1am in Manhattan and how the hell do you get home on an airplane without your ID?

Depersonalizing the issue makes it easier to get away from yourself, the point being you can shift into "who can help me?" rather than staying convinced that it's all on you to solve a situation you have no tools for.

[elucubrare]

one of the reasons why “what if people went on a road trip and it was weird” is one of the oldest story types is that a lot of sense of personhood has been, historically, tied to place. the weird road trip says “what if we went somewhere else, where no one knows us, and tried out being a different person”.

Odysseus, the famous liar, goes on a weird road trip & over the course of it becomes several different people, and then comes home & is all those people as well as himself, wearing the echoes of those other people

[toli-a]

What’s that quote? There are only two kinds of stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.

[likeadevils]

so i have a mildly popular “reblog and put in in the tags” post going around and its. very clear how many people don’t know how to interact with a tumblr post

so, first of all, tumblr’s culture has changed a lot in the past couple years. there’s a genuine community effort to not start any drama, and ironically a lot of the current hostility is an effort to keep things calm. there’s also a change in how people interact with posts, so if you haven’t been here in a while please skip down to the tags/replies/reblog with text section.

for newcomers: you should be reblogging posts about as liberally as you would like something on twitter. if you only like stuff, people will think you are rude/a bot. you’ve probably heard people talk about “cultivating your dash,” and thats because this platform is 100% centered around your dashboard. trending matters less, unfollowing and blocking in order to shape your dash into it’s best form is widely accepted, the majority of the content you’ll find and interact with will be because of your dash, and the only way to put things on your dash is to reblog them. tumblr users are deeply distrustful of algorithms and have largely turned off the “see posts your friends have liked” function (i recommend you also turn of the various algorithms in settings → general settings → dashboard preferences).

so, once you’ve reblogged a post, there’s three ways to add content to it. the tags, replies, and reblogging with text. all of them have different connotations

the tags: an inside voice. originally they were meant for organizing your blog (and they’re still used for this), but they’ve also morphed into a way to share thoughts that aren’t funny/insightful enough for non-followers to be interested in. when in doubt, put your comment in the tags

replies: basically talking to your friends in class. your followers have no way of finding your replies (they don’t pop up on the dash, nobody gets notified except for the original poster) so chances are, only the person who made the post is gonna see your comment. it’s for quick one-offs that you’re okay with other people overhearing, but really is only made for one person. they’re like a public dm

reblog with text: an outside voice. you’re getting up on a stage in town square and entertaining people. make sure it’s funny or insightful— bottom line, add something new to the conversation. you should use this the least

general rules of thumb: 

when in doubt, reblog. people will judge you if your blog is only personal posts and you only interact with other content by liking it.  

the only things people will judge you for reblogging are personal vent posts. leave a like to give a little virtual hug

if a post is asking about your personality/opinions (i.e: tell me what’s the last tv show you watched, that kind of thing) put it in the tags 

also if you see a nice edit, gifset, or art, reblog and say something nice in the tags! it’s that nice sweet spot of common enough that no one will notice but uncommon enough to make the artist’s day

[dovewithscales]

Finally real advice for new users. This is a solid guide for how to make the transition from Twitter to Tumblr.

In particular, artists need you to reblog. A reblog helps them get seen. A like doesn’t help them at all.

[princesspearl]

i dont want a 9-5 i want to drive a butch mad with lust