metaphortunate son

I know, I know, you wonder what FFA is even for, but I am here to tell you: for the Great Woobie-Off.

And best of all: skygiants informs us that the winner, the Woobiest of all the Woobies, is, of course:

Vanyel Ashkevron. Search your feelings: you know it to be true.

On a similar note, would you like to have your heart broken, and then fixed better than it was before with gay porn? Damn, son, cesperanza has still got it: "All the Angels and the Saints", Captain America/Bucky Barnes. Yeah, I know this is like a year old; this isn't even my fandom, I haven't been reading in it, I ran into this randomly, and whoa.

Twitter is like a machine for keeping me emotionally confused. It's like reading the following paragraph, but all day for 5 minutes at a time:

Oh god, my friend has cancer. The world is more peaceful than it has ever been in history. Here is something so offensive or insulting that it actually hurts to read, retweeted by a friend who wants to expose the fact that people say that sort of thing. Here is a picture of a cat riding a Roomba! More people are enslaved right now than ever before in history. My friend who has been trying to have a baby for ages is pregnant! Yay! The California drought is reaching epic proportions. My other friend sold one of her short stories! Another state is making a well-funded and well-organized effort to take away rights from women, gay people, trans people, and/or ethnic minorities. There is some jewelry for sale to benefit another sick person in the community who has no health insurance. My friend who was sick is better! A different country is being really brutal to their refugees, that sounds horrible. Here is a picture of my one friend's new dress. That's pretty cute, she looks great. Income inequality in the U.S. is steadily rising with no end in sight. Aw, my friends are taking a trip together and talking about it. Here's a really funny Night Vale joke. Here's an article about how fucked education in the U.S. is. Now a funny, sweet toddler story from a comrade-in-parenting. Now a story about animal abuse. Now a rec for some hot fanfic. Now a fun hashtag game with my friends. Now a surprisingly emotionally harrowing cartoon about sexism in comics.


I love keeping up with my friends, but I never know how the fuck to feel.

lovepeaceohana asks:

Predictable, possibly, but - what has been the most surprising thing about parenthood?

For me, personally, the absolute most surprising thing was the way I shifted my gender presentation identity way, way the hell over to femme.

I used to do most of my clothes shopping in the men's section. Before the Junebug was born, I hadn't carried a purse for maybe 17, 18 years. I had no interest in wearing makeup outside of Halloween; I had one tube of lipstick, grudgingly bought basically at random, which I would maybe wear on Valentine's Day, I'm not really sure why. Superstition, maybe. And now I wear dresses, and read beauty blogs for fun.

That's part of it; there's also the way that I've become way more invested in the house being tidy, which has coincided disastrously with having babies, which means that I started getting more upset that the place is a mess at the same time as I produced two tiny, yet incredibly powerful, MEGAMESS-O-TRONs.

My Republican friend, of course, suggests that having kids has brought out the innate gendered-ness of me & Mr. E's characters. I think this is bullshit. I think what it is, is a couple of things. First, I have a longer maternity leave: that means that I am home right now while Mr. E is not. It is way easier to not give a shit that the place is a mess if you spend an hour a day there, versus if you spend all your waking hours there. But also, we were not raised by wolves in the forest: I think that we will never know what is innate, but having kids has stripped away some of our veneer of civility. Leaving our deep programming. And having kids is way easier if things are clean and put away. You don't have to pick the old garlic pieces out of the crawling baby's mouth if there's no old garlic pieces on the floor for him to find. When one of us is chasing the naked toddler, we are equally likely to angrily say "Is he entirely out of clean pants?" But in me that translates to a mental note to fold the fucking laundry so we can find the clean pants when we need them, and to go by the local baby consignment store sometime and buy more pants. Because we've both been trained that that's my job.

The difference is that, with kids, the stakes are higher. I long ago made the decision that some lady of the house jobs are not my job. I will not do thank you cards for Mr. E's side of the family/friends. It is not my job just because I am the girl. This mostly means that they don't get done, and Mr. E's side of the family probably thinks that I'm an asshole, because I doubt they would blame him, because he's a guy and it's not his job. And y'know what? I can live with that. I would rather have that than taking on yet another job.

However. If I don't buy the Junebug pants as he grows out of them, he doesn't get new pants. And I can't live with that. So I take that on.

About the makeup and clothes and so on: that, I suspect, is to do with how unattractive I started to feel after having the Junebug. And pretty is a skill: I don't have the time/freedom to exercise much, (although I will more as Rocket gets older and more on a schedule and strong enough to go in a jogging stroller) but I can go by the Walgreens and buy some red lip balm. And I know they say pretty isn't the rent you pay to exist in the world as female. I do think that's true….as long as you're not existing in the traditional, i.e. dependent, female role. If you're paying for yourself, be as ugly as you want, I say. But now that my kids are living in a neighborhood, going to a daycare, that I could never, ever, ever afford except for Mr. E's money, I guess I feel like I had better up my appearance game. Because we know what happens to kids' standard of living when their parents get divorced, you know?

(I know that Mr. E loves his kids deeply and would never let them go wanting, no matter what happened with us. I am also pretty sure that everyone who ever had kids with someone they were in love with at the time thought that exact same thing.)

I should make it clear that I didn't really make a clear-eyed analysis and decide to care about lipstick because it might affect my kids' financial future. I just found myself becoming interested. This is an attempt to figure out what might be going on in my head. The results, however, are a matter of record.

I'm loving the December question a day meme everyone is doing! Only I can't post anything like once a day, and December is half over.

So I'm not putting up a list of days. But if there's anything you think it might be interesting or fun to ask me...ask me! I might even be able to post an answer, no promises.