Hi Tumblr, long time no see! I’m not sure who still hangs around here, but figured you might enjoy some things I’ve shared over on twitter too. :)
This is my new “Sacred Heart” flute, a quadruple Native American-style drone flute by artist Craig Paterson. He’s named it so as it has 4 chambers, like the human heart. To debut it, I wanted to perform an improv of his that first enchanted me. No overdubbing necessary, just lots of air!
Hope it can offer you a moment of calm…
ok enough is enough. whichever one of you virgins invented instagram starbucks recipes, die 1000 deaths. I had a customer come in today holding out their phone (full brightness) and looking all shy and Im immediately like 🙄 fine ok, what does the instagram user want me to make for them this time. well this time it's a cringe harry potter themed frappucino. excuse me??? "can you make this for me?" I said excuse me??? -- I mean *customer service voice* "yeah it looks like I have all the ingredients, haha sure!"
ok cringe instagram harry potter frappucino drinker. ok. die. "Ive never had this drink before" yeah I can tell due to the fact that it didnt exist until someone posted a #aesthetic photo of it to instagram 14 hours ago ok. ok,
but whatever, Im paid to put up with this shit. so I add the ingredients all up on my computer and congrats! ur harry potter cringe social media drink has $10 worth of syrup in it. are you happy??? is this what you wanted??? a $10 frappucino??? $10. for a drink. you doubled the price of this drink for ur off-brand "harry potter and the legend of the overpriced starbucks drink" drink. you doubled the price!!! is this how u imagined spending ur day? is this what u wanted to do when u woke up this morning? $10 for a 24oz drink?
and u know, you KNOW the influencer making this recipe doesn't even work at a starbucks cause when it was all said and done the drink looked like shit. my blender was straining against the weight of your sins (and syrups) and Im sweating, Im an animal, Im losing my mind and my blender is getting watered down frappucino syrups everywhere -- u put so much shit liquid in this blender it doesnt even fit in the cup btw. it's making a huge mess. but is it instagramable? no, its fucking ugly. #trending #foryoupage #cringe $10 harold potter drink for adult children,
so are you happy? is ur social media influencer bestie happy? I made ur stupid $10 drink for u. does it taste good? no? well I hope instagram shuts down tomorrow. I hope you read a different book. I hope I never get sober. there is no sign of land. I hope you die. I hope we both die.
["I finally realized that confusion and embarrassment are onramps for fear— fear that we don't know what's going on, fear that others will mock us for that ignorance, fear that we'll embarrass ourselves by incorrectly gendering someone and have to deal with their anger or the derision of our peers. My androgyny didn't threaten them physically, but the confusion it caused translated into an emotional threat. For people who cling to their worldviews like life rafts, having that world view challenged is a threat. And I have found that people who cling to biology-based binary gender are very threatened by those of us who cross gender lines or don't believe in those lines at all.
Fear is a strong emotion and it does a good job of keeping us out of mortal danger. It also does a fine job of directing us to avoid discomfort, confusion, embarrassment, and a host of other nonfatal outcomes. I wonder where I'd be now if my mother hadn't been fearful of my masculinity, or if I hadn't been fearful of rejection. Where would I be now if I'd responded to my desires rather than my fears?
It's easy to fall into second-guessing about what I would do if I could go back in time. I now have a vocabulary and understanding that were nonexistent when I was a child. Back then, I was marooned on an island of misfit gender with nowhere to turn for validation or support. Certainly, if I were experiencing my childhood now, in the age of trans activism, Gender Odyssey, and the Internet, things would be different. I do sometimes imagine what it would be like if I had taken hormone blockers to keep my breasts from growing and if my parents had called me "son" and used he/him pronouns. What would my body feel like if I had taken testosterone earlier, when it could influence my skeletal structure as well as my muscles? Where would I be mentally and emotionally if I wasn't still battling the demons who were born during the years when I had to masquerade as a girl in order to survive?
As appealing as that fantasy is, I can't rewrite my story at this point and I'm not sure I would— at fifty-three, I know I've benefited from the whole journey. I think about all I've experienced and learned by being a woman— lesbian culture (fraught as it was), learning about sex as something other than penis-in-vagina, experiencing sexism firsthand, pregnancy and childbirth, building an authentic understanding of misogyny and feminism, and the ability to step into male privilege with that knowledge.
Is my identity a destination waiting at the end of a long journey? Or is it more like a shopping trip where I try on different looks and styles until I find one that fits? Each time I made a new discovery about myself, I breathed a sigh of relief because if felt as though I was finally "there". Each time, without fail, I would get to the point where I was questioning my identity again.
When we are asked "What are you?" the only true answer is "This is what I am right now." Everything I've been through and all the identities I've embraced have been true to me. Right now, I am at a unique intersection of identity that includes what I wear, whom I love, my current passions and fears, my deepest held secrets, hopes, and dreams. Right now I am a writer who is polyamorous and a parent who is trans and nonbinary. Right now, I can simultaneously feel good about the work I've done to discover and honor my authentic self and also acknowledge that I'm not nearly finished with the job of answering the question, "What am I?"]
CK Combs, from What Am I?, from Non-binary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane, Columbia University Press, 2019