#daggertext

[valentinedagger]

wholesome representation will kill the patient. she needs to torture fictional characters to live

[valentinedagger]

today, i have learned something new.

i was editing a scene of a character focusing. i wanted to put in a small sensory detail, so i decided to have them chew on the inside of their cheek—specifically on one of the small lumps we have at the corners of our lips.

you know. the two symmetrical, small, painless lumps on the inside of your cheeks, just beside each corner of your mouth? you know... this standard piece of anatomy, which we all, of course, have in our mouths? the cheek lumps. you know of the cheek lumps well. i wonder what they are called? it will be much easier to reference them if i look up their proper name.

as you may be able to guess, this is not a typical part of human anatomy, and there is no name for it. some people just have small, painless cysts on the inside of their lips and cheeks. the location can vary. i feel as though i just got told i was colorblind.

[valentinedagger]

i think frequently, when you want to say "are you normal about this?" what you actually want to say is "are you chill about this?" the normal and socially acceptable ways to act and think about things are often not chill. exactly the opposite, in fact.

[valentinedagger]

when i was a child, once it had become obvious that spanking was considered gauche and extreme among their early-2000s drum-circle-attending hippie friends, my parents moved to a new default punishment: standing in the corner.

it was very simple. when told, i was to stand facing the corner, not moving, until i was told i could stop. in retrospect, the standard seemed to be to leave me until i had entirely stopped crying, then to start counting down some short, arbitrary block of time (maybe 5, 10 minutes) once i was silent and still. at the time, i didn't know this; the corner was a limbo state, it was a place i was suspended indefinitely til my parents considered me appropriate to deal with once again.

i wasn't to fidget, to sit down, make noises, sing or talk to myself. theoretically, i was supposed to "reflect on what i did wrong," although that never happened. i was, what, five? six?

frequently, i would get a cold, nauseating sensation that crept its way up my back. i would feel stiff and tense, the muscles in my neck and shoulders growing rigid, goosebumps prickling. i would feel as though i was being watched. i would sneak a peak over my shoulder at those times; when i saw i was alone, i would shift and stand on one foot for a bit, then the other, in order to take the weight off the other and ease some of my aches. sometimes i would start whispering to an imaginary friend, or lean against the wall. anything i knew i was not allowed to do, that i could immediately stop when i heard one of my parents approaching.

one specific time, i got that sensation. the creeping dread, the deep bonesickness of feeling watched. i snuck a peek over my shoulder.

my father had crept into my room, and was watching me silently.

"face the corner," he said.

i did.

almost as an afterthought, he told me i had earned myself more time.

the horror this evokes in me can't be described; it's a sheer, yawning precipice of paranoia, buttressed by the casual, uncaring authority of a parent-god, the architect of the childhood panopticon so utterly foreign, so removed from your world, that they not only do not, but cannot comprehend the pain and fear they're inflicting on you. my feet hurt. my legs hurt. my back ached. i was itchy and damp, utterly helpless, bound by rules i didn't understand and at the mercy of beings whose feelings and responses were utterly unpredictable and incomprehensible.

my father wanted to go play a video game.

i write a lot of horror that i don't think most people would automatically classify as "horror." most of it is an attempt to capture this feeling: the shaky, racing terror of survival without knowing the rules, the stakes, even the consequences. the understanding that anything could be a wrong move, that self-preservation can be punished. or it can be rewarded. or it can go entirely ignored. i want to capture that nauseating, paranoid dread and bottle it. every room is an escape room, the win conditions are up to the gamemaster, and he will change them. he always changes them.

maybe he's watching. maybe he went to the bathroom. maybe he forgot about you. you could always try looking over your shoulder to see.

[valentinedagger]

house md 2020 COVID season. princeton plainsborough is the epicenter for covid research for some contrived reason. cameron is extremely pro-mask. foreman isn't anti-mask but he thinks it's personal choice to wear one or not and if you decide not to wear one you deserve to die off anyway because something something natural selection. chase is just trying to clown around and start shit in the workplace. wilson has a very special episode dedicated to convincing his immunocompromised cancer patient to mask. early on in the season house gets hyperfixated on trying to find a cure for covid and starts to forgo his vicodin in favor of the best puzzle he's ever encountered. everyone tells him he can't do it and it can't be cured and to wait for the CDC to distribute vaccines but he keeps going with an insane obsession. towards the end of the season cameron gets irrationally attached to a covid patient who's on a ventilator. she tries to join house on his obsessive journey but he spurns her because she's doing it for sentimental reasons. her patient dies and gives her covid. in the season finale house is trying to save cameron but can't find the cure and starts to believe it's impossible. he enters her room without PPE in some insane patented gregory move to try to cure her that doesnt work. he catches covid as a result of this and passes out with a fever of 104. he hallucinates arguments with his coworkers and friends in an extended dream sequence that eventually culminates in the realization that he's been subconsciously blocking out the answer to curing covid this entire time because he doesn't want to give up the best puzzle he's ever encountered and go back to vicodin. he struggles with this moral conundrum and eventually decides to cure covid and also cameron. the season ends on a shot of him popping a handful of vicodin dramatically. covid is never brought up again.

[valentinedagger]

it's been long enough since the original online transmedicalist wars that i think we, as gender criminals and binary perverters, could reapproach the possibility of re-incorporating two depreciated pieces of vocabulary:

trans*, with the asterisk representing identities that aren't transgender, but share certain experiences of violating the gender and sex binaries (i.e. intersex folks, crossdressers who go on hormones, drag performers, etc), and

genderqueer, not as a specific identity, but as an umbrella term for any person, whether trans or cis or both or neither, who queers gender.

the depreciation of this vocabulary was pretty bad-faith and wrapped up in the aforementioned online transmedicalist wars -- hell, dropping "genderqueer" as an umbrella term was specifically pushed by radfems (both trans-exclusive and -inclusive) on the premise that "queer is a slur."

any subsequent attempts to create or use new vocabulary to mean similar concepts has been met with ridicule and bad faith. many mainstream media outlets use "nonbinary" to replace "genderqueer," but are met with rejection because nonbinary is a specific identity, not an umbrella term, and calling someone who does not identify as trans, or who does identify with one or both binary genders, "nonbinary" is considered misgendering to many.

but it's a new decade. we are currently, right now, struggling to articulate our shared struggles as gender-variant peoples under this new wave of worldwide fascism. as a medically transitioning person who fits the oldschool use of "genderqueer," and who doesn't fit into either "trans" or "cis" categories, i've been struggling to articulate my experiences using any of the current popular trans vocabulary. maybe it's time to revisit these words and assess their use through new eyes.

[valentinedagger]

come to think of it, some of my obsession with sentient environments is probably related to my disabled positionality. when you're even partially housebound, when you spend that much time in a place, you start to intertwine in some ways. because it becomes the apparatus through which you interact with the world, in some ways it becomes an extension of your body.

the way i interact with the world, often, is by bringing it into my home; if my home is unable to receive company, it's one and the same as myself being unable to go out. a sickness causing isolation. the alienation of injury. i have to care for her in order to care for myself; i have to care for myself in order to care for her.

if a section of floorboards fall through, my mobility becomes limited, my world fragmented, slow, confusing, as if i'd sprained an ankle. faulty wiring feels like my tachycardia, like clammy night sweats. she shudders and blood drips from my nose; i go to pack towels into the doorjambs and set her faucets to drip.

[valentinedagger]

the more social media websites implement content guidelines that would outright ban discussion of lolita, the more i have to laugh. 70 years and counting and nabokov still has everyone crying and pissing their pants, eh?