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At least I've successfully managed to make online contact with both the organiser of the munch I'm fully signed up for (who seems super-nice) and the organisers of the party (who actually also seem super-nice). So it's a bit less intimidating to show up now. But only a bit less.

(Me to my partner the other day: WHY IS EVERYONE I WANT TO TALK TO SO INTIMIDATING??? Her: Have you considered that might be because you like being intimidated? Me: Yeah, but not before the first conversation, please???)

Oh god, what am I even doing with my life? I was crying with anxiety over a board game meet-up the other week. Now I'm signed up for a munch, semi-signed up for another, and have RSVPed for an actual play party because APPARENTLY THIS IS THE KIND OF THING I DO????

This is going to end in disaster.

Or be amazing.

Likely somewhere in between, tbh.

Oh god, I'm a person who yearns. I don't know if I'm even ready to be a person who does things. ESPECIALLY THINGS LIKE THAT!

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So when I was getting dressed today, I very quickly put on a lab coat and some cat ears, not even trying to have something coherent, just wanting to have some kind of costume, and then I used some eyeliner to draw some whiskers on my face, so, yeah, that's my costume, cat in a lab coat, does it make sense? no. who cares. Still wearing the same skirt and striped knee-high socks from yesterday, but that's just my work clothes.

But then when I got to my office in the physics department, one of my colleagues was immediately like, "Oh! Schrödinger's catgirl!"

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Oh god, what am I even doing with my life? I was crying with anxiety over a board game meet-up the other week. Now I'm signed up for a munch, semi-signed up for another, and have RSVPed for an actual play party because APPARENTLY THIS IS THE KIND OF THING I DO????

This is going to end in disaster.

Or be amazing.

Likely somewhere in between, tbh.

Oh god, I'm a person who yearns. I don't know if I'm even ready to be a person who does things. ESPECIALLY THINGS LIKE THAT!

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Some witches skating

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A spooky and snakey little short I've been working on! 🧡 Happy Halloween!

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By the way, in case anyone was wondering: I am boopable!

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AHEM. *leans on doorway* I would like to know about that time you led a strike in preschool.

Okay, storytime. Both of my parents worked full time, and the woman who ran the family daycare across the street “went away for her health”- a charming euphemism for her family having her institutionalised because they couldn’t cope with her schizophrenia, but that’s another story for another time- so I went to preschool for two years. The preschool I went to was a good one. Still is, actually. My brother and his wife have their little sprout on the waiting list already, and he’s not two yet. It’s built onto the side of an ex-church, and it has great play areas, a sandpit, ducks, the works. Nice. We did all the usual preschool stuff; craft activities, storytime, naptime, playing with toys. To help us learn to be responsible and cooperative human beings, we were expected to clean up after ourselves, and put things away when we were done with them. Being small children, this had mixed results, so at the end of every day, there’d be a big group cleanup, where we went through and picked all the toys and books up off the floor of the main room and put everything in order.

All very nice, right? Trouble was, about half of the kids got picked up at 5, 5:30ish, and the other half, whose parents worked later hours, would be there till 6 or 6:30. The cleanup usually happened around 6, so the kids whose parents could pick them up early never had to clean up, and I noticed pretty quickly that the kids who never had to clean up at the end of the day didn’t seem to pick up after themselves during the day, either. They knew they wouldn’t have to deal with it, so they didn’t care.

I feel I should mention that my mother was, at the time, the secretary of a large public sector union. She’d been a unionist for some time (we’ve got a great picture somewhere of baby me on her lap at a Women In Leadership conference) and sometimes she had people over for dinner, and they’d talk about union business. I knew what was going on, here. This was a discriminatory practice. It targeted kids whose parents couldn’t afford for one of them to stay home with the kids. It encouraged unfair behaviour in the kids who didn’t have to clean up. This had to stop.

I went to the staff first. Mostly they laughed at me- in their defense, please picture a tiny blonde four-year-old in a princess dress squaring up to you about “dithcriminatory practitheth”- and told me I should set an example for the other kids by being tidy. Well. That wasn’t going to change anything. Having been knocked back by the administration, I took the struggle to the people. While we were cleaning up, I talked to the other kids who had to stay late, and we came to a consensus that things had to change. Look, to be honest, I don’t remember this happening with any kind of clarity. I was very small. Mum has told this story with great pride for some years, though, and most of the details come from her retelling. I don’t know if it was me who first suggested strike action, but I know it was me who led the sit-in protests; I’m told it was me who made an inspiring speech about fairness and division of labour, and it was definitely me whose parents got called.

Upshot was, we went over to a system of shorter clean-up sessions throughout the day- one before lunch, one after naptime, and one at the end of the day- and my mother has never let me forget that four-year-old me was a rabble-rousing monster child.

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This black car looks so funny 🤣🤣😺

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lesbians at the brisbane lesbian and gay pride festival 17/06/06

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I know people mean well when they say it but hearing the phrase “you know your body best” as someone with chronic illness is so funny, like man no I don’t I ain’t got no clue what that fucker’s planning and I’m scared to find out

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The Eyes of God, 2023, Digital Painting by myself, Liz Pence

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Anon has only ever personally heard it used within LGBT+/queer communities, but there's lots of discourse on whether or not it should be used due to its history. Anon is curious if others have personal experience with hearing "queer" in an explicitly negative, insulting, or hurtful way.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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Skara Brae Buddo, human figure carved from whalebone, dated c. 2,900 – 2,400 BC. Discovered at Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement located in the Bay of Skaill on the Mainland, an island in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland.

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@octopuscato !

Zelenogorsk the Pallas’s cat is undoubtedly the main hedonist in the manul world 👌🏻. He knows how to enjoy life and effortlessly makes everyone around him happier. Look, what bliss! 😄

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For the record, I dragged myself to the board game meet-up, it was great and I have been floating on a euphoria hype cloud since last night because I got actual people interactions. There's a few more intimidating things in my future that I also want to go to but at least currently I'm feeling significantly less "AAAAH" about them.

I hate being extroverted in the "needs people - and plenty of them - to actually function" sense while also having the social anxiety levels of a toddler first introduced to the concept of daycare.

There's a whole BUNCH of interesting looking events that I really, really, really want to go to these next few weeks and here I am at the edge of tears about the concept of ACTUALLY FUCKING GOING TO THEM, because of how miscalibrated my brain is. This will very likely be fun or at the very least not a total disaster, I might actually get some of the connections I crave, I can literally feel my nerves fraying from not having those connections... and yet, "BUT NEW PEOPLE ARE SCARY AND YOU WILL EMBARRASS YOURSELF!"

I have yet to take permanent damage from going to a fucking event. I have, however, gotten a spouse and multiple friends from them, as well as some really fun experiences. And. Fucking. Yet. I just can't deal with myself today, I really just cannot.