Basic Language Etiquette

Basic Language Etiquette

If you wouldn't call someone an "it," you shouldn't call someone a "they."

Attributing sex to an individual is giving him the dignity of not being a mere thing.

Only inanimate things are entirely unsexed and ungendered.

I am not an inanimate thing. I am a woman. I am a woman by birthright. And I don't have to tell you what pronouns to use when referring to me, because you already know.

I think pleasure is best understood as a sign of something else, not an end in itself.

Assuming one takes pleasure in good things (which would be the definition of "normalcy") then pleasure would be the delicious moral flavor that comes with the nourishing steak of substantial goodness.

Perhaps the most devastating perversion of pleasure happens when we allow someone we love to hurt us. The pain comes to be desired, even while it anguishes, because we have been forced to incorrectly associate it with love.

No one is more vulnerable to this distortion than children who are told by their parents that, "I'm hurting you for your own good, because I love you."

Unless it is women whose lovers grieve them in bed.

My daughter's rather feral cosmology:

"I think turtles are God's apprentices.

They have long life-spans like him. And they take things slow and have good judgment, so he can trust them. They don't really smile a lot, so you have to earn their smiles. They are very serious."

I asked her, "What makes you think you have to earn God's smile?"

She showed me a pleasant-looking facial expression and said, "Most of the time God's face is like this. If he smiles at you, that means you are doing really, really well."

She went on to describe the turtle's corner in Heaven, which sounds very wet, but rather lovely.

Antithetical Collapse: when a pair of ostensibly opposite terms are proved invalid as a pair, because they both turn out to mean the same thing IRL experience.

Example: "I cringe every time I see the word 'based'. What's wrong with me?" ~~~ "Nothing, you're just experiencing antithetical collapse."

How do you go from making lovely unique art to being lovely unique art?

Or wait - was it the other way around? Is this the secret?

Tasha Tudor from Miss Moss

Do not delete description.

When I woke up and went out to the living room, I saw a little brown bird with a finch-type beak fluttering against the window panes. We had the windows open the day before, and she must have come in then. I thought I heard strange noises in the night!

After we mutually discussed things with the Holy Guardian Angel in a our High Gentle Voices, the bird settled on my finger tips and I put my hand out the window. She sat looking at me with her head cocked for a few seconds before flying away.

I felt:

One thing I learned right away is that the scariest thing for birds is to have their wings pinned. So they don't want to be grabbed from the back, however gently. The animation here is actually correct: the bird is far more comfortable if you bring your hand up from beneath and offer a perch.