A Window to my Boring Life

I'm Mindy, a 29 year old married lady and mother to 2 wonderful daughters. I'm an open book, if you wanna know something, just ask

[clarz]

35 Truly Inspirational Ways You Described Your Gender Presentation on the Autostraddle Reader Survey

1. Stoner Femme, Gender Confused

2. Insufficiently organised to have a consistent presentation

3. Exhausted college chic/professional physics human

4. Uh. Librarian? What’s the one with no makeup and just regular clothes?

5. Whatever Brandi Carlile is

6. Glitter Queen

7. Fancy Pony Boi

8. Cozy femme

9. I just like docs and dresses ok

10. Hypermasculine camp

11. Softest of butches

12. Executive dysfunction closeted makeup-scared femme?

13. So uncomfortable

14. Femme in the Summer, Butch in the Winter: A Seasonal Fluidity

15. A small cluster of stars

16. 14-year-old boy

17. Leg hair don’t care but actually cares a lot

18. Sloth femme

19. Gay adjunct professor/goth librarian

20. Aunt Dad

21. Granola, self-sufficient, utilitarian, rural spinster

22. Laid-back lesbian farmer

23. DOIN MY OWN FUCKIN THING

24. Athleisure meets sea-witch

25. Comfortable baggy-clothed person

26. My girlfriend likes to (very accurately so) describe me as “pastel butch”

27. Bunny dyke

28. Muppet

29. Low Femme

30. Lab Chic

31. Geek? I don’t know, I’m wearing a Wonder Woman shirt and Mickey Mouse shoes, so make of that what you will

32. Exhausted

33. FUCK I HAVE NO IDEA? USUALLY PEOPLE DON’T RECOGNIZE ME AS GAY, SO FEMME?

34. Lesbarian

35. This whole labeling thing is very American, isn’t it. I’m a woman who owns pants, chucks, skirts and mascara. Now what?

[clarz]

tag yourself i’m lab chic with a side of executive dysfunction

[ej-otter]

I’m sloth femme

[ardentdelirium]

ATHLEISURE MEETS SEA-WITCH OMG *DED*

[lireavue]

Who knew the Luidaeg was taking this poll.

[violent-darts]

Small cluster of stars.

[star-anise]

SLOTH FEMME

[mama-dandelioness]

Stoner Femme, gender confused

[glumshoe]

I feel so betrayed… I read ‘Mile 81’ last year and found out about ‘Christine’ today. Stephen King wrote TWO stories. Two stories. About evil cars that kill people.

[glumshoe]

DAMMIT STEPHEN

now I want all of King’s evil vehicles to fight

[thereissuchathingasatesseract]

Guy was almost killed in a really terrible car accident (it’s also where “Misery” came from) so can you blame him?

[gordon-freeman-official]

All his evil car short stories are part of his plan to get everyone to hate cars as much as he does

[glumshoe]

but ‘Christine’ was written almost 20 years before his car accident, so were the chapters of TDT featuring Blaine the Mono, and 'Trucks’ was written in 1973

dude’s has a lifelong obsession with malevolent, murderous vehicles long before he got hit by one, and somehow, the scene in 'The Dark Tower’ where he fictionalizes the actual incident DIDN’T feature the car itself being evil

[mama-dandelioness]

No wonder the car hit him. He's been casting them in a bad light for decades. It was only a matter of time before one stuck up for itself.

[sicklygrl]

kink: people with kind hearts and good intentions

[mama-dandelioness]

Saaaaaaaame.

[micdotcom]

[profanefame]

Thank you, John. <3

[anxietyproblem]

Follow us on: Facebook

This blog is Dedicated to anyone suffering from Anxiety! Please Follow Us if You Can Relate: ANXIETYPROBLEMS

[mama-dandelioness]

@unicornsandpopstars

[mama-dandelioness]

Finally figured out words to accurately describe my particular flavor queerness and expressed it to 2 people yesterday for the first time ever and even tho it changes almost nothing about my life, it's nice to understand myself.

[copperbooms]

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

[rodimuss]

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

[prismatic-bell]

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

[sussexbound]

i love this post

[willowgrovecreates]

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

[sanerontheinside]

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

[obaewankenope]

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

[adora-korra]

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

[tomjacksonservo]

It’s really depressing how Labor Day has gone from “give laborers a day off” to “give white collar office workers and executives a day off but make retail laborers work so that executives can get a latte on their day off”

[stinkfight-deactivated20190822]

was cruisin my tl & this is so fucking important

[jumpingjacktrash]

i think the moment i was disillusioned about life was when i was maybe 7 years old and realized the reason all my friends had become assholes was because boys aren’t allowed to have any physcial contact that isn’t fighting

my parents were hippie feminists so my brother and i could play clapping games and sleep in puppy piles and give each other weird hairdos, but all the ‘normal’ boys just up and stopped knowing how to touch anyone without hitting sometime between kindergarten and first grade

and my little kid mind briefly saw the vastness of life stretching out in front of all of us, and all the hugs everyone would need and not get, and for a moment i was just like

maybe life is not such a good idea after all

[comradesepsis]

I grew up around a Russian ballet school. Let me tell you something about Russian men: They touch each other. Especially dancers, who are in my experience almost always super tactile people. They rough house like Americans, but they also hug each other, and sit on each other’s laps, and share blankets when it’s cold backstage.

So I grew up knowing full well that the whole Men Don’t Touch thing was puritanical bullshit.

What I was absolutely not prepared for, however, is the super intense effect it has on straight men’s romantic relationships.

Because when you are literally the only person it is okay for your boyfriend to touch, Jesus fucking Christ, that changes the game.

I strongly suspect that a lot of Str8 Dude feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of their wives and girlfriends, is a direct result of those women being the only non-violent physical contact they’re allowed to have.

I know for certain that the framing of any and all platonic physical contact as un-manly has been directly responsible for a lot of sexual dysfunction (and then the attendant misery of trying to get that treated at the ripe old age of 22) with at least one of my exes. It’s a mess when you can’t get it up because you’re depressed and want to be held but you’ve been brainwashed into thinking what you actually want is sex because being held is for girls.

Amazing how the erectile dysfunction went completely away when he learned the difference between feeling horny and feeling cuddly. /sarcasm

[fierceawakening]

“I strongly suspect that a lot of Str8 Dude feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of their wives and girlfriends, is a direct result of those women being the only non-violent physical contact they’re allowed to have.”

Omfg

No wonder the worst of them seem crazy… profound isolation does exactly that

[guynewyork]

A Bit of Kindness

Frank asked me a while back which virtue I thought was the most important. We talked for a long time before he confessed that he put kindness at the top of the list. And then, to make it clearer to all of us, he listed out the others and tried to picture them lacking kindness. It was somewhat amazing to consider:

If you’re honest, but not kind, you can end up cruel.

If you’re generous but not kind, you can end up sanctimonious and belittling.

If you’re intelligent but not kind, you can build atom bombs and claim it’s for the greater good.

If you’re ambitious but not kind you can end up climbing over others on your way to the top.

If you’re brave but not kind you can end up hurting others without thought.

If you’re loyal but not kind, you can end up controlling and jealous.

And if you have faith but no kindness, you can start a thousand wars.

There are a hundred virtues, but when you remove kindness they begin to lose their power to transform.

The conversation happened years ago, but it’s stayed with me and I’m grateful to him for the insight.

[glumshoe]

Holly Black’s writing makes me feel like I’m 13 years old, the Dresden Dolls are playing on my stereo, I’m trying on clothing my mother doesn’t know I own, and also I have a pissed-off goblin locked inside my bedroom closet that I’ve been feeding leftover sandwich crusts for a week and making it do my homework for me.

[mama-dandelioness]

This is so accurate it hurts.

[mama-dandelioness]

In 3 weeks, I will be a Floridian

I was offered a job in Clearwater today. We're going to continue our tiny home life in our camper down there. This is not where I saw my life going a month ago, but now I'm pumped and ready for the new adventure. Seriously, what even is my life this year?

[staff]

[mama-dandelioness]

Farmer of merry ice cubes?

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

“What did you do, Ray?”

[profanefame]

I only laugh to keep from crying

[missiur]

Reblog if you’d be okay if your friend came out as transgender

let’s see how many transphobics we can weed out

[jaywayup-deactivated20150620]

if you can’t reblog this unfollow me right now

[drunkwario-deactivated20210407]

Anon hate from the late 1800’s.

[airspaniel]

What I love most about this is that this person was SO INCENSED at the recipient that they couldn’t even wait the days/weeks it would take for the mail to go through. No, they had to say “FUCK YOU” as soon as fucking possible and, AND, let the recipient that they were not done with the fuck you, nay, this was merely the first volley in what would undoubtably be a dressing down of Biblical proportions.

[sixyearsofcollegedownthedrain]

i will gleefully reblog this every time i see it

[girlbossjodiarias]

My #brand

[tiersein-deactivated20201008]

Dear weather, and forest fires.

[pervocracy]

Massachusetts Driving Gothic

You don’t know what street you’re on.  Every intersection, there’s a street sign, but it only tells you the name of the other street.  Perhaps your street has no name.  Perhaps it doesn’t exist.

The road has two lanes.  You thought it had three, but suddenly there are two.  Now three again.  Now one.

Construction workers close down a street.  They work for years.  No one says what they’re doing, but machinery moves back and forth and great clouds of smoke go up into the sky.  When they finally leave, the street looks as if they were never there.

Roads were named, back in the old times, by the city they went to.  A road that went to Boston was Boston Road.  But many roads lead to Boston.  So there are many Boston Roads.  They do not connect to each other.  They are all Boston Road.

You have forgotten what a parking space looks like.  You have forgotten what it means to park.  You simply drive forever, in circles.  It feels natural enough.

Blue lights flash in front of you, the street swarms with police; an accident?  A crime?  Some kind of disaster?  But at the heart of the blue-clad swarm there is nothing but a single man in a yellow vest, digging a small hole by the side of the road.

You have to be in the left lane to turn right, the sign says.  You have to be in the right lane to turn left.  The sign that explains this is hung directly over the intersection.

The pedestrians lurch out in front of your car, heedless of the danger, of their own soft bodies and the hardness of steel.  They may think your car would simply pass through them.  They may be right.

You are on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  You have always been, and will always be, on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  In the neighboring cars, babies are born, old people are dying, small tribes are forming.

You are on Storrow Drive.  Somehow, you do not die.