Pianos in the Wild

All things to do with acoustic Piano and improvisation; Most genres of music from Hildegard of Bingen to last week; Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction; generally wildly eclectic. Numerous fandoms. Gay – Queer as fuck since long before it was a TV show. Pronouns he/him.

[x-heesy]

Even the smallest animals have their own ways of keeping clean. 🦀🕷️

For crabs and spiders, grooming is an important part of their behaviour. Keeping sensitive areas like their eyes and sensory organs clean helps them stay aware of their surroundings.

These cleaning behaviours can be observed across many small species and are part of their daily care.

📸: @viralsnare

#travelingwithoutmoving#naturephotography #naturelovers #naturelover #natureshots #naturegeography #naturephotographer #nature_perfection #naturephoto #natureaddict #naturegram #nature_brilliance #natureonly #naturephotos #naturelove #naturepic #naturehippys_ #naturepics #naturebeauty #natureperfection #natureshooters #naturelife #naturephotograpy #nature_of_our_world #natureporn #natureseekers #nature_lovers #natureinfocus

[pianosinthewild]

Except in Australia. I mean, you’re not wrong, but mudcrabs and sandcrabs are tasty, so it’s good of them to keep themselves nice. But mostly they’re just really tasty. Of course there’s a fuckton of other species which we mostly don’t eat.

Oh fuck. This is probably horrifying you, in which case, sorry about that chief…

BUT SPIDERS? Spiders can just fuck right off. The little fuckers in Oz can bloody kill you. We have an I thin it’s common name might be “wolf spider”. I have honest to deity of your choice seen one catch and kill a mouse and then start eating it. Well, sucking out its bodily fluids I presume.

I could go on forever but yes I do have a WELL EARNED phobia. So forgive me please.

[sidewalk-cracks]

I'm sorry, I really am, but as a non-shipper and a found family truther, Donna Noble will always be the queen of companions for me. Rose is genuinely an icon and I love her to pieces and Martha will always be a badass, but there is something so refreshing and freeing about how Ten went "please don't be in love with me" and Donna went "I literally could not want you less" and then they went and had the most epic friendship ever seen in all of time and space. There's no angsting about if secretive feelings are reciprocated, there's no getting jealous when a third party shows up, there's no tense, charged atmospheres. They're able to have the most carefree fun in each other's company and are able to wholeheartedly support each other. There's something beautiful about how there are no strings attached with them. When the Doctor smiles at Donna there's no thought of "i want to kiss her". There's "she doesn't believe she's important but she's my closest friend and she's important to me". When Donna smiles at the Doctor there's no thought of "i want to kiss him", there's "he believes he deserves to suffer but he's my closest friend and I want him to be happy". After two companions having romantic tension with the Doctor it is a blessing to have Donna, and it's a blessing that the narrative never disparages them for being "just" friends. No character ever acts like they're weird for not being interested in each other. The "actually we're not married" is always accepted.

The only strings attaching them are the threads of fate that say these two lonely souls will find the most pure comfort within each other, and they will be the DoctorDonna.

[pianosinthewild]

Yes. Thank you for this. I never really, I guess, bothered to actually analyze their situation. But I completely agree. I was saddened that the whole DoctorDonna thing meant Donna had to forget everything to survive, but screenwriters are so addicted to being arseholes, sometimes.

[velvetcloak]

[velvetcloak]

[velvetcloak]

👏👏👏

[fox-bright]

So--when I was in my mid-twenties and the Disaster Ex tried to make me kill myself, the local mental hospital didn't have any beds open in the usual ward for attempted suicides.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

That was in 2009. Things are worse now. I think about them still. I hope that they're all right.

[likorys-shimenawa]

And in case some people aren't aware: anorexia is deadly. There is a point at which your body looses the ability to digest food and you are no longer capable of improving.

[pianosinthewild]

I worked in a University Dance Department for 30+ years. The first 5 years or so the Dept Head wasn’t even a dancer. In her heyday she had been a top level diver. Missed the Olympics because of an injury, or so the story went.

Probably wouldn’t have won a medal (she was sincerely good, but the old Eastern Bloc countries were still hyping their athletes up on illegal drugs so she didn’t have a chance…)

Anyway, the stupid woman weighed all the girls (not the boys!?!?) every week. There were CONSEQUENCES.

Anorexia IS contagious. Not like bacteria & viruses. It’s a head game. With death as a frequent outcome. Note the previous entry about the young woman inappropriately ( though perhaps temporarily essential, I can’t possibly judge) placed in the anorexia ward. But her story absolutely rings true. Back then, the almost exclusively female issue, but media images are affecting some young males for several decades now, oops sidetrack.

These young girls & women absolutely almost flock together and “feed” (not eat. Never eat) on each other’s warped views of how they look (obese) and how they really are (literally starving to death).

When I first started playing for dance class I was more or less the same age as them, maybe a couple years older. I wasn’t obese. However, I was about 15 pounds overweight, but at 6’2” and barrel-chested , I could carry the few extra pounds. These poor kids — some of them actually would REGULARLY tell me, who was too cuddlesome to pull a bloke in a gay bar (the whole bear thing was at least 20 years away at that time, skinny boys only need apply; so no random hookups for me. Plus I was horrifically infected with the desire for true love. My Handsome Prince never did turn up. Bugger. Or in fact, not…)

When I first started playing for Dance class, our most beautiful dancer (Absolutely International Class professional career ahead of her) ended up so thin she could no longer stand on pointé. She shook like a leaf in a storm. Honestly I could write thousands of words about this.

Important point is really, once the Admin Bureaucracy was sued for the damage caused by this unqualified fool who got the job through seniority and a quirk of stupidity that put Dance under the umbrella of the Physical Education Dept, instead of the Arts (large vibrant Visual and Fine Arts, Music, etc) is how she destroyed so many lives.

I randomly ran into the beautiful beautiful EXQUISITE dancer – a ballerina – and I’m not a fan of ballet but I could watch her drink a glass of water and be enthralled; but my specialty was Modern and then Contemporary Dance (things evolve, unless they’ve been ossified into Museum-type “ART”).

Anyway, happy ending. Ish. She had to quit ballet — you just CAN’T spend 6 to 10 hours a day staring into a goddamn mirror looking for perfection and only hearing & seeing imperfection and surrounded by other girls all doing and seeing the same falsehoods and as the woman above said, YOUR BRAIN LIES TO YOU, and unless you have a truly solid sense of self and hopefully your mother isn’t a failed Ballerhino (yes, people, they really did call their own daughters that if they weren’t starving and becoming progressively thinner…).

Anyway, she recovered. It is possible. There are no large mirrors in her home – she does her makeup, perfectly I will add, using the tiniest compact mirror I’ve ever seen which she found in one of those old junk shops that like to imagine they’re really antique stores. She paid stupid money for it. Worth every cent as far as she’s concerned. I completely agree. She was gorgeous. A totally healthy weight. 3 fantastic beautiful kids and a wonderful husband. She said he was perfect for her, but if that changed, she’d hogtie him and leave him on my doorstep. Which, that’s both friendship and class. Don’t flip out about consent. She said he’s bi and once said that if he hadn’t fallen completely for her, he would have chased me all over the city. I didn’t kill her on the spot because I’m just that good a friend. Also really really restrained.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By the 1990s there were some Dance lecturers who had often been through the anorexia roulette And survived it to come out the other side WITH successful careers who’d only retired because of that one too-fucked-up injury that they couldn’t quite recover enough from (Hi Shaz who almost certainly doesn’t have a tumblr); and they would refuse to let the anorexics even audition. Just send them home and then deal with the screaming usually mothers, and explain how and why their children were GOING TO DIE, if they didn’t get their (the mother’s) insanity under control. They were given resources, links to information, Names of Appropriate Specialists, etc.

Don’t panic, health care is free or heavily subsidized in my occasionally civilized country, so treatment was possible and affordable. I did start noticing the advent of anorexia in some of the boys auditioning around the end of the 90s, but again, sent home with no audition, given health advice and/or directions, recommendations etc. I had to retire for health reasons around 2014, so I’ve totally lost touch with things in the dance world. But one hopes.

[themurdochmemesteries]

i think people should be required to read up on fandom history of censorship and why ao3 was founded in order to use ao3. too many people going "ao3 shouldn't allow certain things!" nowadays.

[pianosinthewild]

YES. THIS!!! FFS !

[zibaldoni-elzapoppin]

[pianosinthewild]

I want to be this when I'm his age !!

[thereddestglass]

So I had to return a book to the library today and I came straight from the horse farm. I went to the front desk because it was an item on loan from another library and I wasn’t sure if it had to be checked in differently. The librarian said no, it could get returned in the normal slot but she could take it and check it in right away.

It was only when I got back to the car that I realized I had walked into the library covered in dirt from head to toe and handed back a book about grave robbing.

[geobrarian]

I guarantee you that was the highlight of their day.

[pianosinthewild]

My best friend is Head Librarian. She said she may have to take up a religion so she can pray for someone to do this at her library

[xiaq]

Anyone who thinks em dashes are a sign of AI is welcome to go look at my decade plus of AO3 history.

[pianosinthewild]

I used hyphens, en-dashes & em-dashes in my HANDWRITTEN English essays in high school – 1975-1978. I did have to explain that I was using them, what they were, and what they signified to two of my English teachers, because their less than adequately educated selves had never even heard of them. But I was particularly fortunate to have had teachers with Master’s degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Universities, and I was able to appeal to the English Subject Mistress (spare me, it was ‘70s in country Queensland, Australia; YES, I WAS incredibly lucky) to have them recognised and accepted and she made the ignorant Australian educated teachers give me back my marks. Two teachers had marked me down for “spelling and punctuation errors”, given they had no idea what the difference in usage and meaning and so forth was between hyphens, and spaced and unspaced en and em dashes.

So. A little (a lot) off Xiaq’s point, but really my point was just about the fact that shit was happening longer than 5 minutes ago, all you youngsters!

I have embraced the old codger æsthetic!

[destielette]

Spn Officially ended four years ago, and Destiel but also Cockles is spreading like a pandemic 😁

That’s the Jenmish effect, you can embrace it or reject it, love it or hate it but you can’t escape it.

Meanwhile the CW and Amazon has yet to realize the power of Jensen and Misha’ Chemistry, such a waste!

[pianosinthewild]

Hey Rav, y’all see this?

[estrogenesis-evangelion]

you are 16. you are talking with a gay man in his 50s or 60s, a friend, huge and gentle with a scarf and short fluffy curls of gray hair, who has directed you in two plays staged in your mid-size artsy town. (he has not yet asked you to be in his production of The Laramie Project which will change your life. this conversation will also change your life.)

he is talking about theatre. he is talking about theatre when he was younger. he says, "of course, it was AIDS then." in the pause, you ask him. clumsy and quiet and 16 and "straight," you ask him. what was it like.

he takes a moment in which his face is not like a person's face. "there was a time," he says, "i'm not sure how long, years. when i went to a funeral every weekend." he tells you about two funerals in a day, and choosing between friends when you couldn't make it to both. he does not look at you, he looks at them. his wet grey gaze is so clear that you start to see ghosts. it will be years before you understand why it feels like your grief too. why the ghosts call you family.

[estrogenesis-evangelion]

happy pride, family. i love every single one of you

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

when i wrote this post, i didn't expect very many people to read it. i figured it wasn't the kind of thing people liked to read and reblog, but it was late at night, and i was remembering this person, and i was crying, and i had to write it out. so i did.

to this day no other post gets sent to me so often by friends who have encountered it as a repost on some other site. the idea that more than one hundred thousand people have read these words, and know this story now, and maybe feel as i did, is tremendously humbling and unbearably beautiful to me. even by accident, even just passing on a story that is not my own, i often think that it is the best thing i have ever done.

happy pride, family.

[tvandfilm]

The Golden Girls | 6x14 "Sister of the Bride"

[pianosinthewild]

Keep on scissoring girls, women, however you call yourselves

[its-where-the-wild-things-are]

[pianosinthewild]

My Favourite Cartoon When I Was 4 Years Old – 1964

[x-heesy]

michelgaubert Good Morning

https://song.link/s/0UtPeRkuXVccJ8oP9xjADx

[correllian]

[srsfunny]

It’s all laughs and jokes for now.

[fiddlepickdouglas]

Remember the rules of chronic pain:

1. Don't sit

2. Don't stand

3. Stretch

4. Don't stretch like that

5. Movement is key

6. Lay down forever

8. Get funky (another chronic pain issue) with it!

9. The effects of pain meds will wear out

10. Just think of the original Little Mermaid and how she had to feel the loss of her tail, so it felt like her feet were constantly stabbed by knives and they bled when she danced. And then she died and turned into sea foam. Think about that.

[fiddlepickdouglas]

Just realized I fucking skipped 7. I think that's just another part of it though

[fiddlepickdouglas]

Really hit the nail on the head here

[pianosinthewild]

THIS. SO MUCH THIS.

Beware — there’s a major bitching to follow:

Just had to explain TO MY GODDAMN DOCTOR about Invisible Disability. FFS. I mean, today was a good day, so I was carrying my walking stick rather than leaning on it. I quite often can stand and walk and look completely ‘normal’ — for a given value of normal. But even on a good day standing usually peaks out at 10 minutes. Walking for 500 metres is possible. So long as I can sit for 10 minutes every 50 to 100 metres. So that walk that he can do in, say, 10 minutes, may take me between an hour to an hour and a half. But unless I’m completely fucked (in which case I probably won’t try to leave the house), I appear fine. I haven’t touched the floor or below my shins (on a good day, otherwise knees are the limit) in over a decade. And he knows this. He’s seen all of this. But he sees me standing and walking ok for the first time in months and suddenly there’s nothing wrong, no disability. If I could pick up and hold the weight of a chainsaw, and actually manipulate it through space, I’d find it difficult to resist giving him an enema. Or a high colonic…

(Whinge, whinge, whinge. But y’know, let it out and bear/bare the “shame” or keep it in and bear the pain). Fuck ’em all, some days. Here endeth the rant. One begs pardon.

[writtengriffin]

I got inspired by this post

[mythologian]

@xiaq

[xiaq]

YES. I mean. The phrase I prefer is “piss on,” but dancing is good too! And legal, in most cases.

[pianosinthewild]

Breaking the tradition that ALL Dad–jokes should be unforgivably awful (and truly, my father’s dad-jokes were otherwise entirely criminal), he did endlessly repeat one along the lines where ‘one friend would ask another to pour a bottle of single malt whiskey on his grave, and the friend would agree, but ask if it would be alright if the whiskey passed through his kidneys first. Funny the first time, not so much by the one thousandth repetition. Joy…

[sandushengshou]

The Golden Girls | 7x17 "Questions and Answers"