This is not required reading

When people ask me the well-meaning question “What did you do this weekend?” they usually haven’t prepared themselves for the answer.

This is their fault. Reasonable people should always be prepared.

So it occurred to me this time to document EXACTLY what I did this weekend, with pictures, as if people cared, so that I’ll have a baseline for comparison when I am elderly and need to remember exactly what Kids Did Those Days. I will hit people with my stick and tell them tales of the Awkward Army, in those muddled golden days when we all knew how to handle exploding cars, and we made our hellhounds by hand, dammit.

This is not required reading, contains little of educational value (except instructions on how to sew a hellhound) and will not be on the test.

FRIDAY NIGHT

We had determined to go to the pub, by virtue of me running around and barking at my coworker’s heels like a demented border collie in desperate need of a drink. Sadly, there is no efficient way to herd scientists; we just get confused and flustered, and start defensively making balloon animals.

Worse, the One True Scotswoman (OTS), whom I am nicknaming Merida for the purposes of this post, was all “oh deary me I can’t go out, I absolutely must marfle warfle farfle and so forth. But it is making me sad and when I am sad I get panicky and perhaps I will just explode my heart instead.”

For some reason, I said “Well then, the best way to cheer you up is to get you a balloon animal!” so I went and asked my colleague Haverford for a balloon animal. For Haverford you must picture a larger-in-every-dimension British version of Aziz Ansari. Haverford kindly dropped the very important work he was doing and showed Merida and I how to make balloon dogs, which are the only animals he knows how to make. As befits a surgeon, he was extremely patient and condescending, and told us repeatedly that the balloons were not going to pop. We did not believe him. Making balloon animals is a very strange sensation; it feels incredibly naughty, and your socialization rebels against it. It’s like the first few times you snap a piece of glass on purpose. The squeaking is weird, and it all makes you feel uncomfortable. My balloon dog looked woobly and hallucinogenic. I put some worried-looking eyes on him with marker, which helped.
Eminently Sane Kathryn came and watched us in a kind of long-suffering way, like a kindergarten teacher looking at her most remedial students. Haverford’s pink dog was upsetting in the way that pink balloon animals always are, with their connotations of twisted weenises. But Merida’s dark blue dog looked like something you could cuddle.  I held up my pale-blue, slightly mutated balloon dog.

“Very nice,” ESK said, radiating patience.

“He’s not very doggy, though,” I said.
“He’s transcendental,” she said soothingly. “He’s transcended the spirit of weaselness.”

“Dogginess,” I corrected.

“He’s a transcendental dog, yes,” ESK said, and started trying to mind-control us into fucking leaving for the pub by staring at us intensely.

“I’m naming him Mohandas,” I said lovingly. Nobody got it. “Like Gandhi?”

“Mahatma,” Haverford said.

“MOHANDAS,” I snapped. “Gandhi’s first name is Mohandas.”

“AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT BECAUSE I AM BROWN,” said Haverford.

“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW IT TO BE A DECENT HUMAN BEING, WHICH YOU AREN’T.”

“Pub pub pub pub,” ESK said intensely, so we went.

“Are you taking Mohandas to the pub?” people asked in a tired kind of way and I was all, “Peasants, I’m takin’ him everywhere.”

As we walked, ESK invited me to a zombie walk.

“I’m sorry,” I said, really meaning it, “But I have a fear of zombies. It particularly affects me here in the city, because the Shit-Goes-Down-Plan doesn’t really work in a neighborhood that can only be left via a very narrow Victorian bridge, in a city crammed full of people, in a country that doesn’t allow weapons more dangerous than a loaded hamster. It was different back home,” I went on, “when we had a shotgun and a rifle under the bed – and a small Sig Sauer, for company. What would I have here, Eminently Sane Kathryn? I could only defend myself with the block of wood we use to keep the window open.”

ESK nodded compassionately. “We have a crossbow,” she offered. And then, “Yes. Yes, seriously. Of course it’s real.”

But they only had one, so I decided not to go on the zombie walk. I’ve developed this quiet dread that on a zombie walk, some of the zombies might be real, and how could you tell?

In the end, ESK urgently had to buy toothpaste, and everyone else had fallen behind, so Haverford and I were the only ones to make it to the pub. We propped ourselves up attractively and discussed life until somebody stopped guarding their table, at which point Haverford bulled his way through the crowd and sat on it, to discourage further colonization. ESK avec toothpaste dropped into a chair and distracted me, and so for a good while I did not notice that -

MOHANDAS WAS GONE.

I ran back to where I’d propped him, only to find him gone from there too! I looked around the pub for his bright blue self, and saw … that some people … had stolen Mohandas. He was leaning against their pints of beer and his eyes looked worried indeed. But the people looked loud and obnoxious and a few sizes larger than me, and the last time I’d tried to stand up for myself under British pub conditions, I’d almost gotten Drs Glass and Frackland into a brawl. I had no protocol for this situation.

I went back to my table, confused and upset.

“I’d be a little flattered.” ESK offered an artist’s perspective. “If somebody liked my art enough to take it home…”

“Yes,” I said, striving for strength, “I am flattered. Mohandas will understand. He is simply ascending to a higher level of… of…”

“That’s bullshit,” Haverford declared, and stormed off.

He returned a moment later bearing Mohandas like a goddamn god of victory. I am not kidding when I tell you that this moment made my night; he was crowned with glory and light, and the crowds parted before him like the sea before a prophet. Even Mohandas looked pleased.

“What did they say?” ESK asked.

“They said morfleforfleumph,” Haverford said, “Their mouths were full.”

Then everybody in the world showed up to the pub and we spent most of it shouting at each other and drawing maps.

However, there was a difficult moment where Mohammed spotted Mohandas and decided to practice his own balloon-animal skills, which … got away from him:

He got the front part okay, but after that he just kept making butts.

I slouched home, handed Mohandas to Dr Glass, and proceeded to consume about 3000 calories.

Thus spake Elodie: thus endeth the Book of Friday.

SATURDAY

On Saturday I had to go into work because there were rumors that something had exploded, and also, I had to feed some cells. I looked at everything, made soothing “Hrrm” noises so that everyone would know that The Situation Was Well In Hand, and dusted it all down with unicorn dust and pixie wishes. My work complete, I ran to -

THE FIRST EUROPEAN CAPTAIN AWKWARD MEETUP!!!!!!!!

For which I was late. C’est la me.

It was really lovely! Rachel had made a big friendly sign that said “AWKWARD ARMY,” which made everybody feel at home. (And she left it behind! So I stole it.)

They were terribly cool people! I started talking to a guy who wasn’t actually a member of the Awkward Army, but who had come along to support a friend, in case we were all weird people from the Internet. Which we were, but he felt safe leaving her. Anyway, it transpired that he paints these little figurines, and people play wargames with them. I was utterly charmed by this. I had no idea that the little figurines, which I only knew of vaguely, weren’t just… made. THEY ARE HANDMADE! It was pleasantly like discovering a lost, but compatible, tribe. I wanted to understand this career at a molecular level.

He did not believe me.

“You are one of the most worryingly sincere people I’ve ever met,” he said. “Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. Every fiber of my British programming is telling me to run away and hide under the table.”

“Is it my teeth,” I asked.

“Partly,” he said, “It’s partly your teeth.”

Rachel was amazing and I secretly harbored the hope that she would be my best friend in a 1940′s girl-detective story and we would solve mysteries together, mysteries mostly involving cupcakes, but sometimes involving plucky dogs.

TWO OF THE PEOPLE THERE had heard of microRNAs, a fiendish little class of molecules that my life has revolved around since I was a teenager, and not only that, but they studied them too, which made me feel like less of a molecular-biology-hipster. I don’t think anybody reading this blog will properly realize what a terrifying coincidence this is. But I don’t like to talk about work, since when I talk about science I get excited and stammer and might poke somebody’s eye out, or get defensive and weird, or suddenly start talking through a sockpuppet, or using ridiculous literary metaphors, or something. This comes across really well with non-scientists, who think that I’m sociable, but really badly with scientists, who slowly realize that I’m not very good at biochemistry and am doing it completely by accident, and then they look at me with pity. (I studied evolutionary biology with a pinch of neuroscience and a side order of English, but then I realized how much I like money.)

Also, while we were there, I finished knitting a sock, and used it as a sockpuppet, which is a memory that we’ll all just have to live with.

We all talked about our zombie apocalypse survival plans, and the conversation flowed like wine.

Three of the people there were Lurkers, meaning that they don’t participate in the community, mostly because of Nerves. I understand this on an abstract level, but I’ve gotta say, Guys, if you’re reading this, I dare you to comment. Double-dog-dare you.

COMMENT ON THIS POST RIGHT NOW AND I WILL GIVE YOU A BIG HUG AND THEN YOU WILL WIN.

And nobody believed that my real name isn’t Elodie.

ETA: Somehow I forgot that after everybody had gone home, and I was still sitting nicely by myself, Dr Glass appeared in his very own special ray of light, and he took me out to a movie, which was showing a few feet away. The Watershed is a pub-cafe as well as a large indie cinema, you see. He wore a blazer and riding boots and everything.

We went to see “Beasts of the Southern Wild” which was very good and we didn’t cry. And then we went home and had fajitas. THIS WEEKEND, YOU GUYS. SO GOOD.

SUNDAY

In the afternoon, Dr Glass decided that it was time to take Scootaloo for a run. Scootaloo is our car. I named her; Dr Glass doesn’t really understand that she’s named after a My Little Pony. But she is so very tangerine-colored, you see; and she’s about the size of a loveseat, but sideways. Her tires are the size of salad plates. She’s actually an errant cousin of the TARDIS family, though, because you can fit most of a lifestyle inside her, including pieces of furniture that are actually larger than the car.

Anyway, she is very old and a bit rattly, and anyone over the height of 5’9″ cannot physically drive her. If we don’t take her out every week, she pretends that she is dying, and ends up costing a lot of money. Her last trick was to create a giant cloud from her exhaust so that anybody tailgating us would find themselves enveloped in a dense and eldritch fog. I think it’s a defense mechanism. Like a squid with ink. But more carcinogenic.

This time,  Scootaloo waited until we were in a very awkward place before she started flashing lights and smelling weird and emitting festive clouds. She was overheating. And the House of Glass Protocol for an Overheating Car clearly states that one should:

• maneuver car into a safe and comfy place to leave her
• allow engine to cool for at least half an hour
• soothe Elodie’s twanging nerves with hot cocoa or something
• pour water (hopefully mixed with emergency coolant supply) into reservoir
• drive on
• if lights come on again, stop and repeat, as needed
• get home
• forget about it.

It’s a very good plan. And, as Dr Glass pointed out innocently, we were within striking distance of IKEA. We could easily make it to that hallowed Valhalla, pick up a few things, and drive our nicely-chilled car straight home without taxing our strength.

And I had promised to make him a three-headed dog.

It was very true. We’re going to an underworld-themed party, and he’d liked the idea of having his very own Cerberus; I’d foolishly admitted that it would be very easy to make with a few cheap stuffed animals, like they have at IKEA. I replayed this conversation in my head, clawed hands clutching frantically at my seatbelt as Scootaloo bucked and snorted her way towards IKEA.

But IKEA always calms me down. I think they pipe in a drug, like how casinos pipe in extra oxygen. Otherwise you’d probably start ramming people in the ankles with your Ikea-cart. We acquired the requisite cheap stuffed dogs, after a lot of intense puppy-related debate that appalled some pearl-clutching Brits, and toddled home in our steaming car, which appalled some car-driving Brits. “It’s not smoke,” I mouthed loftily at them, “It’s steam.“

We got the dogs home. One large one and two puppyesque ones. Since I always have to do the dirty work, I assembled them appealingly for their photographs and then got to work with scissors. BEHOLD! How to Sew A Three-Headed Dog!

step one: assemble dogies

step two: question life choices

ARE LIFE CHOICES AWESOME, Y/N?

step three: life choices are awesome. continue. cut off puppy’s head.

This part was a little disturbing. We’ll add it to the List of Things We’re Strongly Socialized Against Doing:

• Breaking Glass
• Twisting Balloons
• Engaging In Conversation With Elodie
• Cutting Heads Off Stuffed Puppies

Good job, team! We’re breaking down those barriers.

step four: make a cruciate (cross-shaped) incision across the shoulders of the larger dog, with the arms of the cross extending across the haunches. sew a puppy head to each arm, turning the seams inward so that the fur will blend.

Infernal Anatomy is a difficult subject, so just do your best. A certain element of unnaturalness will only help the effect.

step five: blah blah do the rest, it’s boring to write about sewing and at this point your husband has fallen in love with the Golden Cerberus Retriever and wants to play with it. (note: large dog comes with closable mouth for serious occasions.)

step six: lulled by cuddliness of hellhound, husband abruptly takes a nap.

step seven: after nap test, experiment to make sure that your Cerberus will fit in with your home decor.

GOOD SEWING EVERYBODY!

Next time on “Crafts from Hell,” we’ll demonstrate Six Uses of Sulfur and talk about my Pomegranate Costume! Why a pomegranate, you may ask? Because… Persephone… ate six seeds… andthatswhywehavewinter. Er.

This is why I need a sockpuppet to talk to scientists.

And that is how I made a Heavenly Dog and a Hellish Dog in the same weekend.

So how were your weekends? What have you been up to, guys? Also, is my smile really that scary?

P.S. If you are a lurker, come out and we will throw you a party.

Sometimes it worries me what people search for.

Sometimes it worries me more that they actually find this blog.

Here are some search terms from the past month, illustrated with helpful pictures, so that you can share in my fear, distress and delight.

“your awesomeness can’t possibly be described.”

Try anyway.

“The green knight without color”

surely you could have imagined this for yourself?

.

“dodo master tutorial”

step one: dodo. step two: shading. step three: extinction.

.

“koennen rosa beeren schlecht werden”

this phrase is nowhere on my blog. how did this happen?

.

“I am trapped in bad science”

SCIENCE MONSTER SYMPATHIZE SO MUCH! HUGS TIME.

.

“how much do hamsters cost at the marmot pet store”

if you have to ask, you can’t afford them.

.

“boobs are not spheres”

well done. this is sterling evidence that you have seen – and even touched – an actual boob in real life.

/

“she has bit of belly fat”

this makes her prettiest dinosaur.

.

“how to cut rounded glass cleanly”

is this what you meant?

.

“black and green knights black and green knights black and green knights”

i don’t think you understand how google works.

.

“can you spot the marmot”

hint: he’s somewhere on this page

.

“in the book king arthur, why was the black knight dressed in all black?”

seriously who are you

/

“things you don’t know about Charles Darwin”

In case you were wondering: yes, I’m cracking up.

STAND BY FOR AWESOMENESS

I am really excited to announce that I’m going to be a regular guest blogger over at Captain Awkward! Captain Awkward is an amazing lady, the Internet’s favorite advice columnist, and pretty much the only reason I have this blog at all. This will be a great way to interact with the Best Internet Community in the World, as well as hopefully being somewhat helpful to people in need.

If something is making your life awkward, if you’re wondering if your partner is a Darth Vader, if you find yourself making FEELINGSART in your FEELINGSGARRET, if you need to know if this House is Full of Evil Bees (or Velociraptors), or if you just need to get your poetry on, you can ask the Captain to fix it for you.  If it’s something that you’d like to directly ask me (or the other guest bloggers, a stellar cast of characters including Internet Crushes like Sweet Machine and Cliff Pervocracy) then you can specify that as well.

“But Elodie,” you may ask, “Aren’t you a little overcommitted?”

“And what life advice could you possibly give to other adults? This evening, in the absence of the steadying influence of your husband, did you not purchase and consume an entire banoffee pie? “

“Wait, an entire banoffee pie? WHAT ARE YOU MADE OUT OF?!”

whipped cream, mostly. we’re gonna be fine.

P.S. I’m on the prowl for more science post ideas – let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see!

My guest post is up at Captain Awkward! Look out for the fantastic Rageasaurus poetry in the comments; it has almost undone me.

In the absence of my usual wit and beauty, here are some silent-film-ladies kissing.

Dear Readers, I’d like to share a small kernel of realization with you. Here it is: Sometimes, being tired is a good-enough excuse.

It’s okay to be tired! Sometimes you just can’t write a blog post for two weeks. Sometimes that’ll happen because you’ve got depression, or a cat is sitting on your keyboard, or you’re blogging from the bottom of the well. Forgive yourself.

Because in the two-ish weeks since I updated, I’ve covered a lot of ground. Stained-glass-gingerbread cookies, knitted Fairisle mittens, many ceramic Fish-With-Feet, several jars of apple-rosemary jelly and a distressing number of PCR reactions were made by these two hands. I got a haircut. I’m wrapping up my laboratory duties, winding down the tutoring, developing a book pitch, and am still paddling placidly into adulthood, while the Holiday Season continues to happen all around me, like explosions happening on a separate-but-visible plane of existence.

Neatly sidestepping the question of whether to spend Christmas in America or England, Dr Glass and I have opted to square the circle, resolve the theorem, nail our colors to the mast and nip that shit in the bud – we’re spending it in Morocco. TAKE THAT, MOTHERFUCKERS. No wibbly tantrums about Whose Family We Value More, or Where We’ll Put The Fucking Tree. No Sad Christmas Orphans for us.

Plus, this will be lovely for us both – we have such wildly diverging notions of Christmas.

Dr Glass is a child of the Picture-Postcard English Village, where he is traditionally expected to deck the little medieval stone church in little candles for Midnight Mass, and his father rings the bells. In this freakishly idyllic hamlet, carolers come to your door, there are twinkly candles in all the windows, and woodsmoke lingers over the thatched cottages; there’s an honest-to-god Boxing Day Hunt in which children ride tiny ponies wearing reindeer antlers. BOTH THE CHILDREN AND THE PONIES WEAR THE ANTLERS. It’s madness. They put bunches of holly on their picture frames, which is apparently a very necessary English thing, and make a pudding and set it on fire, and other things that people do in movies. Last year I was bewildered but charmed, and neatly prevented the vicar from setting herself on fire. But I don’t think I can do it again. I wore myself out looking for the hidden cameras. The theme song was this:

Compare and contrast with my own family’s Christmas tradition, which usually consists of cat/tree battles, power outages, unintentional fires, minor-yet-refreshing car accidents, at least one wild animal in a place where it shouldn’t be, shouting, cigarette smoke, and everyone going “oh for fuck’s sake” a lot; a cat will steal some of the Chinese food and barf it into a shoe, a creepy ex-boyfriend’s mother will appear bearing badly-timed holiday cheer, and we will pretend that we are actually doing Munion Day instead, in honor of my family’s made-up God of Bearable Disasters. My mother and sister will sneak off separately to chain smoke cigarettes (or more medicinal things) while pretending that they aren’t. At some point my father will perform his famous Cat Band, in which he will use various cats as musical instruments, including the fateful Catcordion. He may sing Christmas carols with references to Christ replaced with “Munion.” Nobody can even pretend to be Christian, not even for a day, but my mother will summon up a bracing rail against The Patriarchy upon request. The theme song will be this:

I think you’ll all agree that going to Morocco is a much better solution all around.

LINK ROUNDUP

Friend-of-Blog Foz Meadows wrote a great piece in response to the belief that fantasy should be oriented around straight white men.

As exhaustive as this information might seem, it barely scratches the surface. But as limited an overview as these paragraphs present, they should still be sufficient to make one very simple point: that even in highly prejudicial settings supposedly based on real human societies, trying to to argue that women, POC and/or LGBTQ persons can’t so much as wield even small amounts of power in the narrative, let alone exist as autonomous individuals without straining credulity to the breaking point, is the exact polar opposite of historically accurate writing

This essay contains a butt-ton of cited sources demonstrating that reality is full of real-life Characters of Color, Strong Female Characters, and Queer Characters who made their mark on history. (Including a link to my piece on Knights of Color! Foz is sweet.) Read it here: PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical.

Friend-of-Blog Alice has written a really good post in response to a comment left here by Katz. Get Fit Or Go Home: Natural Selection 101.

So why are we so keen on fit meaning ‘fit as in goes to gym and goes rrrawr like Hulk’? Well, I’m guessing it has something to do with that old nut, sexism. As a society we’re pretty invested in the idea that maleness – traditional muscle-bound, feelings-light – maleness is superior to wishy-washy feelingsandcuddles femininity. What we’re missing is that all the variants in between have worth. Bindweed is about strength and out-competing the others by brute force. Equally successful, though, is moss.

After an eight-month hiatus, Goats on Stuff has returned. If we ever have to hit the reset button on the Internet, this Tumblr is probably the only thing we should save. We’ll warm ourselves with it on the cold nights, huddling closely against the void.

MOST HILARIOUS COMMENT ON THE BLOG:

Oh my god, it’s the lady from the Indifference of Pets post!

Thank you for including my Porn and Puppy card on your blog. My cat and dogs are, indeed, indifferent while I am having sex, but the vintage porn and puppy card inspiration came from making a gift for my good friend- her two favorite things are porn and puppies, so I put them together in a giant collage on a hand built dresser for (guess what) her roller derby gear. I thought about porn and cats “pussies and pussies”, but like the “bitches and bitches” instead. Nothing tones down pornography and makes it more general audience than adorable dogs.

COME BACK ANYTIME, LADY.

MOST WTF COMMENT ON THIS BLOG:

Brian stopped by on the Hunter-Gatherers & Fat post to leave these pearls of WTF wisdown:

I’m sure this is mostly right but it does seem to stumble into some of the same types of mistake as some of the bad science, namely the idea that there is something called a modern western ideal of beauty, that this consists of having very low body fat, and that this ideal has more than a tangential relationship to sexual attraction. In fact the idealisation of total thinness is rather specific to parts of the media and fashion industry. Real people are attracted to a variety of body shapes and all-round skinniness is a minority interest (do I need to give references?) I would guess that the most commonly presented single ideal of female beauty in recent western culture involves large (therefore, technically, fat) breasts, small waist, and small hips, although there’s plenty of variation around this theme (as the Queen video demonstrates). Media aimed at women (including the entire fashion industry) often presents skinny and androgynous female models while media aimed at men presents much curvier types (I refer you to a newsagent if you want me to back up that claim). You equate the vaunted waist-hip ratio with fat-phobia, yet at least the ratio-ists recognise that the distribution of fat on a person’s body might be key to sexual attraction rather than the overall quantity.

The paleolithic art also includes quite a variety of body shapes, e.g. one of the figures you present has a narrow waist but big hips and breasts. As far as I know, we don’t really know that the paleolithic figures were about sexual ideals or more to do with fertility and so on. Aesthetics extends well beyond sexual attraction though it might play on sexual attraction in all kinds of fascinating and non-scientifically-predictable ways.

So what? I’m not really defending the way that bad bits of science get passed down as popular wisdom, just trying to suggest that the starting point for these debates should involve a bit more careful thought about what we (modern western societies) are like before going on the attack. The problem with the evolutionary science here is the difficulty it has in taking on board (immense and path-dependent) cultural variation while retaining predictive power about modern human behaviour

Brian wins the Award for Not Actually Reading My Blog Or Understanding Its Content Before Getting Angry About My Tone. He’s basically just repeating my content, in a different voice, while criticizing me for not coming up with these Pearls of Wisdom in the first place!

My favorite part is how he’s carefully telling me – a curvy queer Western scientist lady – what the sexiest lady-body is (curvy), how ladies are portrayed in the media, how the distribution of fat makes ladies hot, how I need to think carefully about what Western societies are like, how men and women are targeted with different advertising strategies, and how I don’t understand the basis of sexual attraction. He’s also telling me that I need to take culture into account with my evolutionary science.

On a post about how people need to take culture into account when separating evolutionary psychology from evolutionary science.

From a series about how modern culture is actually responsible for many things that are mis-attributed to evolutionary biology.

On a blog about “science, feminism and the media.”

Brian, if you didn’t exist, I would have had to invent you. You are an instant modern classic; I salute you, tongue-tied.

MYRIN:

Thank you for being so consistently lovely. Don’t worry, we’re all fine here.

LIFE SNIPPETS:

=
A gentleman and a scholar as always, Dr. Glass courteously inquired if I required anything from Boots The Chemist tomorrow, in preparation for Friday’s journey to North Africa. I considered the question carefully, but the sum total of my Earthly needs was a single item. I wrote it down.

travel sickness tablets

It looked lonely.

time-extending fluid, I wrote helpfully.

cat-stretching paste.

And I realized, with a pang, that if my sense of humor is any indication, I will always be my father’s daughter.

=

In the drafts folder of posts for this blog, there was a post consisting of a single sentence:

Realizing that the sum total of your earthly accomplishments in the past week resulted in a mouse’s armpits turning fluorescent pink.

=

I went bra-shopping with Foz. Current bra size, as interpreted by the Vestal Maidens of Debenhams who spin the Oracular Wheel: 32E.

They’re making this up.

That’s it. I’m going to record my boob volume every month with a Socratic water-displacement protocol.  EUREKA, MOTHERFUCKERS. We’re getting to the bottom of this.

Actually, that’s a point, we don’t seem to have a deep enough bowl.

=

I made a new friend! She is super lovely, and I was able to win her over by proposing an Introvert Friend-Date in the format of  a Jam Date. I strongly recommend Jam/Friend-Dates if you wish to befriend cool people when you’re both introverts.

A Jam Date consists of meeting at a coffee shop, poking through the River Cottage Guide to Preserves, and picking out the necessary ingredients at the greengrocer’s. Jam is made while a movie is watched and lunch is consumed. The resulting jam is divided equally at the end of the Jam Date! This is a great way to make friends and participate in social activities when you’re the kind of person who always leaves parties awkwardly early.

=

Historically, I have remarkably surreal and detailed dreams. In a recent one, I was being chased through the bowels of a futuristic spacecraft by humans who had been converted into automatons. I had discovered that if they caught you, they killed you immediately, but if you confronted them directly and Used Your Words, the automatons  would pause momentarily to recite a menu of options; you could select ABORT, RETRY or CANCEL. I selected RETRY, and the automatons recited a menu that suggested I “take up a more peaceful hobby, such as pigeon-breeding.” I was able to defeat them by asking them to define pigeon-breeding, which they were unable to do.

However, a far more disturbing dream was the one where I had delivered a baby, but had cleverly Opted For Having All The Drugs In The World, and was in a drugged stupor. In my absence, the dream-Dr Glass named our baby Sid-Vicious Glass. The doctors wouldn’t let him change it. I woke up very angry at him, as you do, and then asked him who “Sid Vicious” is. Apparently he’s a dead British punk singer. This clarifies nothing.

Beloved Coworker Haverford had a dream in which Dr Glass was the new James Bond, and by virtue of their association Haverford had been able to obtain tickets to the premiere. Dr Glass was notable for being the first Bond to wear eyeglasses, keeping them on during “all the fight scenes, Aston Martin chases and gun battles.”

Sounds legit.

=

I had something else that I was going to write here, but it has been completely knocked out of my mind because Dr Glass, rocking backward in his chair at his desk, somehow fell so elegantly that he trapped his chair under the dining room table and his arm between the table and the casing of the sash window, so that he was suspended on a floating diagonal chair, completely unable to move.

I completely take it back about the James Bond.

That dream was not legit at all, Haverford.

=

I think, all in all, this post has been an excellent summary of my state of mind. I hope that you all are doing as well, if not better, and I look forward to hearing from you all.

Here’s to another dazzling, dizzying year – here’s to 2013.

“A lady on the internet had a Thought about a Thing! THIS ANGERS ME DISPROPORTIONATELY!”

“AND FURTHERMORE, she used a critical tone when speaking about the thing, which happens to be a Thing That I Have Strong Opinions On!“

“HOW DARE THAT BITCH TALK SHIT ABOUT A THING I LIKE AS IF SHE HAS ANY AUTHORITY!”

“Actually, as a professional evolutionary biologist, I’ve got the authority to call bullshit on your claim that ‘humans will stop rape once we all evolve beyond sexual reproduction.’ So far, there has been no evidence to suggest the existence of an inherent biological drive to rape, and further, evolution simply doesn’t work that way. You’re really quite wrong, and you’re coming across as frightfully ignorant.”

“OH YEAH, WELL, EDUCATE YOURSELF”

“Also, how dare you accuse me of being sexist.”

Thanks, Guy from 12 Angry Men! Thanks, Smokin’ 1920s Lady Chemist! (I love your shoes. Call me.) You have provided a fantastic demonstration of testostifyin’.

What are some examples of testostifyin’?

“YOU STUPID IDIOT, SEXISM IN POPULAR MEDIA IS JUSTIFIED BECAUSE KING ARTHUR ISN’T REAL!”

Yesterday I got a pingback on my blog, so I went to check it out. On a blog called The Passive Voice, fans were discussing that feature Foz Meadows did on overlooked women, POC, and queerfolk in history and legend. Because Foz is nice, she cited my post on “Knights of Color” in her feature. Anyway, this guy, Richard Forrester from Birmingham, had a problem with both of us. The quote he starts with is a sentence of mine:

“Never mind that no less than three Arthurian Knights of the Round Table – Sir Palamedes, Sir Safir and Sir Segwarides – are canonically stated to be Middle Eastern”

Canonically stated? Way to confuse history with fiction. Sir Palamedes, Sir Safir and Sir Segwarides were fictional characters, appearing first in the Tristan poems then reinvented by Mallory; both works of fiction. There is no evidence for their historical existence, nor for that matter is it likely Arthur existed. Robin Hood too for that matter.

This whole article is nonsense. European history is full of powerful female figures, Joan of Arc, Boudica, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, in fact you can go all the way back to Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to find powerful female figures. The same is true of non-white historical figures: The Moors, Moguls, Mongols, history books are full of them.

Yep. There you have it: “STUPID WOMENS! THERE IS NO SEXISM IN FANTASY LITERATURE BECAUSE KING ARTHUR ISN’T REAL. Also, there were at least six women in history, so this article is nonsense [train of thought needed?]“

…

Right.

Anyway, when I saw this, it blew all other blog-post-ideas out of the water, because it is such a sparkly example of a wild testostifier in his natural habitat: getting overemotional and wildly offended, while lacking the facts and getting everything spectacularly wrong. I thought it would be a really useful test case to demonstrate how to spot a testostifier in the wild. Perhaps something like a birdwatching guide!

(Another lovely example of a testostifier was the remarkable Brian, who took offense at my statement that “culture, rather than nature, dictates beauty ideals” and proceeded to write 400 words scolding me “because culture – RATHER THAN NATURE – dictates beauty ideals!” Sadly, he hasn’t come back.)

What is testostifyin’?

If you are a gentlemanblogger with wildly progressive opinions, or a ladyblogger with any sort of opinions at all, you are sure to cross paths with someone who takes offense with your opinions. These characters feel very sensitive and defensive about something that you’ve said. Further, they think it is your responsibility to take ownership of their feelings -  even though most reasonable people would not take offense with your work.  Under the weight of this onslaught you are expected to crumble, to apologize, to STFU.

Instead, you, the gentleman-or-ladyblogger, will be left asking yourself, “Quoi the fuck?”

You’ll spot testostifiers coming out in force when you criticize things that they identify strongly with. Critiquing popular media like Game of Thrones or The Hobbit will bring out hordes of fans who insist that the media in question is perfect, and anyone who criticizes it is stupid; they’re reacting this way because they believe that liking Game of Thrones is a huge part of their personality, and anyone who talks about racism in the show is calling them racist. Another dead horse is evolutionary psychology – point out a flaw in their favorite pop-sci theory, and the testostifier believes that you are personally attacking him.  Talk about how you distrust men, and a furious man will assume that you are talking about how much you hate him – and he will attack you accordingly.

Why is it called testostifyin’?

To testify is to bear witness; it’s a Latin word that shares its root with testicles. The original meaning of the word testify was based on “the act of swearing upon one’s testicles.” This is annoying, since people with all kinds of genital configurations can swear in a court of law, and honesty has nothing to do the presence or absence of testicles.

This gif demonstrates how to testify.

The use of “mansplain” can be a problematic term, since it can be gender-reductionist and can make male-identified dudes feel bad, but it also has some value as a term to clarify privileges in communication (see also: whitesplaining, straightsplaining, and general ‘splaining.) This comment, posted on the article “Why You’ll Never Hear Me Use The Term Mansplain,” is in line with my feelings:

Basically, it all boils down to “do we use this concept as a tool for exclusion, or one for the discussion of privileges”?

Unlike ‘splaining, which is where a privileged person talks over a non-privileged person, testostifyin‘ comes from a place of defensiveness: the privileged person equates “general critique” with “a personal attack,” and thus responds disproportionately.

Can those without testicles testostify?

They can and do!

Dr Frack-Land, a geophysicist friend, is regularly pestered by lady-testostifiers who are enraged that he supports sustainable fracking. They write furious letters to local newspapers, questioning his credentials. There is absolutely no reasoning with them, even if you speak their language (“The author of the Gaia Theory supports sustainable fracking as the best way to harvest clean renewable energy from the bountiful bosom of Mother Earth!”) They have unanimously decided that Fracking = Evil, Therefore Dr Frack-Land = Evil Government Plant Sent By Martial Aliens. Nothing can be done about this.

To his credit, the good Doctor has remained a gentleman and a scholar and has not taunted them by unzipping his skin to reveal the evil velociraptor lurking inside.*

* Note: Dr Frack-Land is not a velociraptor.

Basic Anatomy of Testostifyin’

Testostifiers are hard to deal with because they deny you the authority to speak, yet they themselves get everything wrong. In this study case, I don’t believe Forrester actually read Foz’s article, or my post, and is therefore reacting without having all the facts. This is a common opening gambit, and it’s rather disarming! How can you argue with someone who’s making up what you’re arguing about? On what ground can I logically engage with someone who dismisses my entire research article because he thinks I believe in King Arthur?

Perhaps we could fight a duel on the moon?

In our study case, Forrester is reacting this way because he feels an emotional investment in his part. Testostifiers react on an emotive level, rather than approaching debate logically; first they decide that you’re wrong, then they try to find evidence of this.

Why is this? Well, the article, and the extracts our subject has read of it, discuss the idea that the lack of historical female heroines is probably due to biased record-keeping rather than lack of female motivation. The tone may place some readers on the defensive, because the class they belong to is being blamed for something. Further, the extracts play up the political side of Foz’s article – the assertion that politically powerful people (in this case, comfy white guys) have ignored or erased the historical contributions of those who were politically marginalized.

Here, therefore, is the emotive train of thought.

An uncritical reader typically reacts by reading this as “Comfy white dudes are racist and sexist?!”

They then go on to think, “But I am a comfy white dude!”

Then, “Racism and sexism are bad things!”

“But I am not a bad person!”

“Well, then, I simply cannot be racist or sexist, and nobody who is like me can either.”

“Clearly, this person is WRONG! And everything they wrote is also wrong.”

“Now I just need to find out how they’re wrong, and I’m not a bad person. Whew! What a relief!”

This is the basic process that is common to all testostifiers. In Brian’s case, it was something like:

“Elodie says that there’s nothing inherently wrong with fat people…

but I don’t want to fuck fat women!

But Elodie’s saying that viewing fat people as less-than-people is bad!

Since I’m not a bad person, Elodie is clearly wrong.

I know this because of the supporting evidence of my boner.”

Keep an eye out for this train of thought! It’s a gut reaction, pure and emotional, provoked by the belief that you’re attacking the testostifier in some unjust way. If you can spot this train of thought, lay down your weapons; there’s no fight to be had here. Your Earth Logic will not reach the testostifier; their anger comes from the Imaginary Moon of Insecurity.

Fixating on a single piece of vocabulary is another  common derailing tactic of the testostifier. In our study case, the poor gentlemen has gotten  terribly offended about my use of “canon” to refer to… well… the Arthurian canon. (“Canon” is a phrase used to include a body of literary or religious work, and I used it correctly here.) I don’t know why testostifiers think that we can’t use words?

“SIX WOMEN! SIX WOMEN IN HISTORY! ARE YOU NOT SATISFIED?!”

The testostifier denies you, the writer, the  authority to speak on the topic that you love; he gives himself authority because he’s read “history books.”

And he usually expects you to be impressed with the length and depth of his classical education, sad to say.

The testostifier usually responds to your perceived attack on them by violently attacking you – and that can be tough to deal with. There you are, innocently writing an article about Tolkien or shale-gas extraction, and suddenly someone’s on your blog howling insults at you and possibly getting their friends to join in. They’re implying that you’re stupid and unfuckable and that your university degree is scrawled in crayon on the back of a damp beer mat. Surely you should respond, right?

Well, no.

Because of their defensiveness, they are usually too emotional to engage in rational argument.

I try to remember the advice given to me by a sage old mentor with an English accent. “People who attack your work on an emotive level cannot be reached by logic. They are being reactive; they are speaking from their visceral feelings, feelings you cannot argue with or change. You cannot have a productive debate with them. In some cases, it is dangerous to try.”

What he meant is that people who fundamentally disagree with your scientific research may try to bomb your car, but I think the point stands when discussing things on the Internet. In some cases, it’s dangerous to try. In all cases, you can’t argue with how people identify themselves. You can provide evidence for one thing or another, but people’s identities are their own business. You can’t tell a person what their sexuality is; you can’t tell someone to stop idolizing horrible people; you can’t argue with deeply held beliefs. That’s why they’re beliefs.

Unfortunately, this means that the testostifier doesn’t get much education from your work. In the study case, Robert Forrester doesn’t decide to read more about the role of marginalized people in history: he decides that “only racists or sexists care about this stuff,” and therefore he doesn’t have to learn any more, because he isn’t a bad person. In fact, it would go against his principles to add another interesting historical woman to his roster of six.

It’s also possible that Forrester’s emotional issues stem from the fact that he’s from Birmingham, a sad city ruled by savage fog and giant crabs, where hope is a thing long-lost and all the remaining cats have been eaten. But I won’t testostify about  Birmingham here: see, instead, this Guide to British Cities for Foreign People. In the end, we cannot judge the people who come from Birmingham; we can only strengthen our walls against them, and commit our souls to the Light.

I’m a testostifier; what should I do?

Well, first, recognize that you’re not being the Tower of Logic that you think you are – you’re a Swamp of Emotion and Steaming, Irrational Anger. This is not very high moral ground to occupy. Like any well-cultured person, you should recognize when you are being emotionally triggered, and handle yourself accordingly. It is perfectly fine to be angry, passionate and emotional in discussions, online or in real life, but you’re simply coming across as aggressive and reactive. You’re trying to shut down the debate because of your hurt feelings; no wonder you’re not welcome!

You might try learning to have a conversation. In the long run, it will serve you well. I’ll direct you again to this interesting column in Bullish Life; pay particular attention to the author’s example of a productive debate between two women.

No one interrupts anyone. Harris-Perry says, “As an academic, I love nuance.” Eltahawy acknowledges that her goal in talking about oppression against women in the Muslim world is to “go for the jugular.” Ahmed argues against giving fodder to people who simply hate Muslims. Around the 17 minute mark, things get a little heated. Eltawhy is speaking and Ahmed says, “Can I just give you an example of some of the complications?” Eltahawy says “Sure, please!”

I mention the actual arguments in this debate to point out that EVERYONE GETS TO SPEAK IN COMPLETE SENTENCES. Can you tell me somehow that this is inferior to a bunch of men shouting at and interrupting each other? It isn’t.

Instead of howling each other down, the women say things like “I see what you mean, but have you considered X, Y and Z?” I forget where I read this, but I learned somewhere that even when women are disagreeing with each other, they tend to try and continue the conversation by saying things like “Yes, but…” While men are more likely to shut down the entire block by saying “NO, BECAUSE.” One continues the debate, the other stops it.

Finally, dudes, it’s not the end of the world if people call something you like racist, or sexist, or anything else that you recognize as a Bad Word. For all you know, you could be. Everyone’s got unexamined privileges, and everyone can learn about these and start fixing them; if you need to start this work, wouldn’t you rather hear about it now  from an Internet stranger than your future boss?

There are lots of benefits to enriching your life perspective.  Forrester, for example, appears to be an author. Maybe I’ve been a bit hard on him, but he’ll surely benefit from improving skills like critical reading and literary analysis. Learning to recognize things like racism and sexism in Western history and popular media improves your ability to appreciate the perspectives and experiences of others, which is a valuable way to form relationships, network, and generally improve your life. Plus, Forrester’s outright dismissal of things he doesn’t like (“This is nonsense!”) shows that he would do well to work on his empathy. Empathy is a great thing for a writer to possess; otherwise, the only world you can build is a pale shadow of the rather limited one that you live in, and the only characters you can create are thinner versions of yourself. Angry Birmingham Writer Stumbles Angrily Around Fog-Land Where There Are Only Six Women In History. Who would want to read that book?

In conclusion, why would you testostify when you can learn, instead?

Garner, Kathryn. Fluorescent Fibroblasts (2012). Fluorescent microscopy.

Friend-of-Blog Kathryn is a molecular biologist and fine artist, and she’s kindly sharing this beautiful image of cardiac fibroblasts with us. (Thank you, Kathryn!)

Not sure what we’re looking at? Well, each of those structures is a highly magnified cell. The black circles at the center are the nuclei of the cells. The fluorescent green dye illuminates the strand-like structures which give these cells their name. Fibroblasts: fibrous cells. They form connective tissue, patching wounds and holding other cells together.

The image is scientifically, aesthetically and metaphysically appealing. Scientifically, it’s a really nice image that shows that the cells present are largely fibroblasts, and it demonstrates their characteristic stringy nature – what scientists call “morphology.” Aesthetically, it is pleasing, with the drifting cells resembling jellyfish or nebulas or -

O HOLY MOTHER OF DARWIN

DO YOU SEE THAT

DO YOU SEE THAT GHOST?!

IT IS HAUNTED IN HERE. THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.

Pareidolia is probably my favorite cognitive bias! Broadly, it’s the charming human tendency to see meaning in random data. We particularly like to see faces in things that don’t usually have faces! The face of the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich! Not only that, but we can invent stories to justify random patterns. For example, we really understand this faucet.

You probably made an emotion-face to react to this faucet. Think about that for a second.

Wow, faucet, it’s  – it’s gonna be okay, little buddy. Wow. Can we, uh, get 50 cc’s of joy in here?

Oh, chair! You always cheer us up.

I love this cognitive error. It’s something we have to look out for when analyzing scientific data or forming religions, but when we’re not doing that, how lovely to find this humor and empathy in the shapes and patterns of everyday life! How great that our species takes such pleasure from taking white-circles-with-black-dots-in-them, and finds it so amusing to put two of them on a thing. Like this.

Googly eyes. WHY ARE THEY SO GOOD.

NOW THE POTATOES HAVE FEELINGS. And I love this. It makes our experience of the world better, and Jesus-Toast brightens any day. (Of course, people who don’t see pareidolias are good too. Some people don’t!)

The Fibroblast Ghost is not just a pareidolia, though. Remember, I said this image was satisfying Biologically, Aesthetically and Metaphysically! You see… this ghost is actually the Ghost of Experiments Past, a.k.a The Gremlin of Nonspecific Fuckery. If you are a scientific researcher, you may recognize him in these following guises:

Do you see him now?

Yes, I’m sure we’ve all seen this Ghost before. We thought we were making him up! We thought that there was NO WAY that a turned-off piece of equipment could turn itself on at 3 am, self-destruct, and burn all the evidence. For years, we were convinced that our problems were somehow human error, and that the problem was us.

“Nice data. It would be shame if… something HAPPENED TO IT!!!!! WOOooooOOOooooo”

Now you know, Scientists. We can relax; Kathryn has photographed the Ghost. Now it’s only a matter of time before we chase him down, characterize him, and write a paper about him. “Errata on the Metaphysics of Experimental Labwork.” I can taste the Nature paper now.

Rumpelstiltskin, motherfucker.

UPDATE February 5: We are pleased to announce that Dr. Micol M has slimed our ghost.

From Kathryn: “It’s ok, a colleague on the fibroblast project exterminated it. We ain’t afraid of no ghost!”

If your experiments start working better now, you guys know who to thank….

Cover of “Heart Matters,” Jan Feb 2013, vol 47. A woman must be an angel in the kitchen…

Disclaimer: This is a personal blog that is not affiliated with any research institution, funding body or charity. The British Heart Foundation is a very nice charity that does amazing things – donate your used goods to them today! This piece has not been endorsed by Professor B. Casadei or any member of her research group, and should not reflect upon her or her opinions in any way. As someone who writes frequently about sexism in science culture, I believe that criticizing the following article from a gender-egalitarian perspective will move the field forward, reduce the levels of sexism in science, and possibly improve reporting quality in the future.

       The British Heart Foundation is a popular and beloved charity in Britain, funding over half of the cardiovascular research performed in the British Isles. Non-academic readers may be surprised to learn that charitable funding is how a lot of scientists pay the rent.

   For me, this is one reason why consistent, trustworthy, high-quality science communication is so important. The public pays our wages, whether by charity or by tax dollars. Public interest and public trust is vital if we want to cure cancer, heal hearts, save the environment, fight off meteors, survive climate change and understand the meaning of life. None of this can happen without you guys. Thank you so much for your help and support.

    So when I see really terrible, sexist science reporting occurring in the pages of the British Heart Foundation’s magazine, well … it breaks my little heart. (Which is ironic.) I believe that science communication at every level is charged with moving the field forward, and I believe that it should be held responsible when it breaks that trust.

   The BHF’s circular Heart Matters is supposed to reach out and reassure people in waiting rooms that their health is well in hand, that research is chugging away to make their lives happier and healthier, and their charity dollars are being well-spent. Most recently, it stuck a prominent female professor on the Jan-Feb cover and wrote a puff piece about her recent BHF award.

    The piece, “Lady in the Lab,” is jaw-droppingly sexist.

When girls outgrow cooties, they catch the Science Bugs.

Professor Barbara Casadei is a great role model for young women in science: successful, intelligent, dynamic, generous, happy. She is a full professor at Oxford, leading a powerful and impressive cardiovascular research group. She is highly involved with the Athena Swan Charter, which works to promote women’s research careers in the STEM fields. If you’ve been following my Girls in Science series, you’ll remember that I believe that providing  career support is the only solution to solving the gender gap. Well, Professor Casadei is working on that very problem, as well as developing new treatments for atrial fibrillation that will hopefully reduce the danger involved in heart surgery!

How does the BHF choose to introduce this remarkable scientist?

Barbara Casadei doesn’t exactly fit the traditional stereotype of a science professor.

Slim and elegant with long, blonde hair and oozing charisma, she’d look just as at home on the society pages of Tatler as in a lab.

no, this is the opposite of what we wanted

And of course, as a woman, she’s still sadly a rarity in the higher echelons of academia.

Well then.

That’s how: by opening the article about her life and work by objectifying her and claiming that she belongs in a driveling fashion mag… and then acting surprised that there aren’t too many women at her level… while apparently missing the fact that the BHF gets to pick those who get swept into those “higher echelons.”  After that, it gets better (worse) as Casadei’s remarkable life and work are overshadowed by awful reporting. Because nothing inspires young women to do well in science more than seeing that a Professor – the highest scientific position attainable – can be given a platform from which to explain that salt makes one bloat. Yes, if we climb the highest mountain, we too can answer questions about whether or not our lifestyle allows us time to prepare healthy family meals from scratch!
What else is terrible? Well….

• The article opens – and closes – with borderline-insulting references to Casadei’s physical appearance. The insulting tone of surprise and astonishment (“Phwoah, a sexy scientist!”) at once suggests that scientists are not supposed to be attractive women, and that non-sexy women will not be welcomed as BHF covergirls.
• “Slim, blonde and elegant” – really? Really.
•  Likewise “oozing charisma.” Ladies don’t ooze, darling, they radiate.
• The article has a special feature of “Barbara’s diet tips” to “stay in shape.” While this is to some extent expected in a cardiovascular health magazine geared towards the public, the radical idea that one can control calories by ordering salad dressing on the side is not exactly what I would pick an Oxford professor’s brain over.
• How does she stay so slim and elegant? Grilled 30-minute meals, apparently. How does she cope in a culture where even a complimentary puff piece about her drips with sexism and condescension? The reporter doesn’t care.
• The reporter calls Professor Casadei “Barbara” throughout. As Casadei is, by her own merit, a Professor, a Chair and a Doctor, by marriage a Mrs and a Lady, and would by most journalistic standards just be referred to as Casadei (as I’m doing) this reporter calls her Barbara. Even if Casadei politely asked the reporter to call her Barbara during the interview, respect and standards dictate that the scientist ought to be “Casadei” in the actual piece. Men interviewed in Heart Matters are referred to by title. Casadei’s husband is referred to as Professor Sir Rory Collins, Chair. There is literally no excuse to continually refer to Casadei by her first name.
• The reporter claims to be intimidated by Casadei’s academic accomplishments; she states that the professor’s 14-page CV has given her “an inferiority complex.” Men with lesser accomplishments in Heart Matters are treated with respect and their CVs are regarded as impressive.
• The reporter states that Casadei’s home must be a “motivating environment” as her husband is also successful.
• An actual interview question: “Being so busy all the time must be exhausting. Does it ever get [to be] too much?” (This may be a bit more subtle – the  reporter possibly doesn’t realize that the “Don’t you think she looks tired?” gambit is a popular way to undermine the achievements and positions of middle-aged women, who only need to publicly demonstrate wrinkles or grey hair to be perceived as unfit leaders.)

In the popular British tv series Doctor Who, the Doctor promised to bring down a female Prime Minister’s government with six words: “Don’t you think she looks tired?” As promised, the middle-aged woman was quickly agreed to be no longer fit for her position and was forced to resign.

Hillary Clinton, the former American Secretary of State, suffered from rumors that ill health and tiredness made her unfit to hold a political position.  During the 2008 presidential campaign, conservatives circulated photos of 61-year-old candidate Clinton looking weary, implying that nobody wanted a tired/old woman in power. Rush Limbaugh asked, ‘‘will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?’’

• It’s possible that the reporter was blissfully unaware that describing a successful middle-aged woman’s schedule as “punishing” and “exhausting” undermines the perceptions of the scientist in question. But that’s no excuse for her to follow it up in the style of: “with your punishing lifestyle, how do you still manage to cook fresh, wholesome meals for your family? With your exhausting commitments, how do you maintain such a motivating home that nourishes your husband’s career so well?”
• Emphasis was continually placed on the professor’s domestic abilities.
• The closing of the article notes that Casadei was patient and capable throughout the photoshoot, and uses that as evidence that her students couldn’t have a better role model.
• This, combined with the Tatler allusion, makes it pretty clear that Casadei is being valued for her model-like looks.
• The tone of the article treats Professor Casadei as a superlative woman, while pretending that it is difficult to understand why she is the only woman in the position of BHF Chair. The 49 other Chairs are men.
• Absolutely no recognition was made on the part of the BHF that they are at least partially responsible for their promotion practices – as one colleague put it, “I was especially surprised by their highlighting that she was indeed this one [superlative] woman to have gotten the chair, without any reflection whatsoever on their own practices in awarding said chair mostly to men!”
• The very title – “Lady in the Lab” – carries unfortunate connotations. (Angel in the kitchen,  whore in the bedroom, etc.) The phrase “Lady” is hardly ever used respectfully, and when it is, it is in reference to perceived social class and submissive feminine qualities that are no longer complimentary. Now, I’ve looked it up, and Casadei’s marriage to a Sir makes her eligible to be referred to as a Lady – which begs the question of why the BHF is titling an article about her with a reference to her husband’s status? As I’ve said before, the title of full Professor is the highest status that an academic scientist can achieve – and it’s one that Casadei has earned and fought for. Why not just finish it off and call her “Hausfrau in the Halls” or “Hot Mama Heart Scientist.”

When Casadei speaks for herself, her voice is powerful and inspiring. Read the article to appreciate it!

“There’s no question that women can do science as well as men,” [Casadei] says. “But there’s a lot of subtle messaging that implies science is for boys and the arts are for girls. As a result, girls aren’t encouraged in the same way.”

But she’s only allowed a passing reference to the Athena Swan Charter – cast as her “New Year’s resolution.” Anything else that she says that’s interesting is quickly tacked back to the safe script of Sexy Domestic Lab Goddess: the journalist has a structure that she’s gotta stick to, people have to walk away from this HEARTWARMED! They need to hear about SALMON RISOTTO! They don’t want substance, they want to hear about EATING LESS FAT and BIKING TO WORK, because people have never heard about those things before.

I believe that this is a disrespectful way to write about a female role model in science, although I am sure that no overt offence was meant on the part of the Heart Matters reporter, Madeleine Bailey. Bailey, a freelance journalist, probably did not realize that in the social context of academia and the greater cultural context of British society, stating that a successful, top-of-her-field professor would look “just as at home on the society pages of Tatler as in a lab” is incredibly sexist and discouraging. Of course, the fact that a journalist with 20+ years of “experience” has less keyed-in cultural savvy than @Horse_ebooks is almost equally discouraging.

You know, if you remove Casadei’s quotes and biography from the article, this is pretty much what remains – WAIT A MINUTE.

I take it back. It is entirely possible that the BHF has hired a fake horse’s Twitter spam feed to perform all of their Science Journalism.

Insert joke about Tesco’s lasagna and typing with hooves.

Dr Glass hopefully suggested that I create a character called Professor Brock “Rowdy” Badcock and write fake BHF interviews with him.

Rugged, manly and elegant, oozing charisma like a masculine cologne from his earthy pores, Brock “Rowdy” Badcock would be equally at home ropin’ steers or pleasin’ ladies – but instead, he chooses to break hearts. Which he FIXES, with sexing and sometimes punching. For his sterling service in the field of servicing weak lady-hearts, and his controversial “Punch Heart Disease in the Face” campaign, Brock received the BHF award for Manliest Scientist, which he recently celebrated by chewing a steak from the flank of a live wolf.

“There’s no reason why all scientists can’t be as manly as I,” he enthuses. “As a child, I grew up eating raw bear hearts, which infected me with a passion for cardiovascular research, as well as some interesting parasites and the tendency to sprout even more grizzly chest hair at the full moon.”

Brock is one of only forty-nine male BHF chairs, though he states that the other forty-eight are hardly what he’d call men. “I blame the lack of punching,” he says.

Dr Glass initially suggested that he pose for pictures in the role of Rowdy – smouldering against his lab bench wearing nothing but cowboy boots and hat, a labcoat and a smile – but he suddenly decided against it, leaving us all bereft.

Anyway, I’ve  had the opportunity of corresponding with Professor Casadei, and she is a really generous, inspiring role model indeed, who acknowledges that there are indeed problems to solve in science culture, and feels confident that future generations of female scientists will achieve greater parity. She has a lot of hope – and the Athena Swan Charter is a great institution.

Casadei’s life and work continue to inspire. This article does not. I am dismayed and saddened, and I intend to write to the BHF with these concerns, hoping that they may revise the article in a more positive, empowering light that does not detract as much from her accomplishments. Hopefully this will be more encouraging for junior researchers who may not wish to see a scientific role model compared to a literal fashion model.

The passages about Professor Casadei’s life, work and inspirations are lovely; the framing sections describing her looks could be changed with a few words to become more positive. After all, if it is important to the BHF that their cover scientist be recognized as Traditionally Pretty, the woman’s beauty can speak for itself – on the cover of the magazine and in the multiple photographs provided with the article.

And it’s not just me. Six female and three male coworkers have reacted negatively to the sexism in the article. I think this is an easy one. The article doesn’t need the framing bits that lavishly describe a role model’s physical assets – they’re an easy thing to edit out. Reducing sexism in a charity’s promotional materials will hopefully inspire more positive reporting in the future, as well as keeping potential donors charmed.

Would it amuse you to help me? You can reach the BHF on Twitter, Facebook or by contacting the Heart Matters staff.

Let’s lighten the mood in here with another Illustrated Compendium! All of these search terms are 100% genuine reasons why various people found my blog. What were they looking for? Did they ever find it? What do they want? Who are they? The following illustrations are my attempts to solve these mysteries. (For the interested and confused, partake of Elodie’s Illustrated Compendium of Search Terms Part One)

“A wild animal shouting is also tired”

wild animals get cranky!

“marmot stares at boy”

.

.

“large animal covered with feathers and has sharp teeth”

WHY ARE YOU GOOGLING THIS INSTEAD OF RUNNING

.

.

“my husband’s boss removed my bra and drank my boobsmilk”

The House of Glass was upset about this for the whole day.

.

“hunting buffalo that are dead”

not the oddest request we’ve gotten

.

“children don’t like science”

SOMETIMES THAT CAN BE UNDERSTANDABLE

.

“Balloon dog made of glass”

I CAN DO THAT

blowing it up was the difficult part

.

“tale of a little dinosaur”

the little dinosaur had come to a big new place.

It had never seen such a fine pot of chocolate.

unexpected results! Yet entirely understandable…

.

“flatchested women who breastfeed nose”

got halfway through drawing this, then got sad

.

“letter of application of knight of the round table”

and

“how to write a letter of application of knight of the round table”

This is a very important question, so I am producing a sample letter.

Dear Sir or Dame,

Enclosed please find my completed application for the position of Knight of the Round Table. It would be my great pleasure to be considered for this position.

I am an excellent candidate for this position, as I have a B.Kn in Rough Combat and a Master’s Degree in the Finer Arts of Chivalry, with a special concentration in Lute-Playing and Courtly Romance. I also possess my own equipment, including a high-quality customized helm and suit of armor. I have excellent interpersonal communication skills, as demonstrated by my research project on Damsel Wooing. I would bring also bring significant questing experience to the Round Table, as well as useful carpentry skills – my work-study program focused on the Construction and Repair of Various Tables. My extensive CV details the responsibilities I have taken on for each project, and my attached letters of reference will testify to my strong leadership abilities.

On a more personal note, it has always been my dearest ambition to be the first Knight of the Round Table who is also a Dragon or Saurus. As a female Lesser Salamandrasaurus, a bipedal reptilian who can withstand enormous amounts of heat and flame, I am aware that interspecies tensions have existed between my kind and the Knighthood dating back to the Misunderstanding of St George. As a scholar and warrior, I believe that the time has come for a female Saurian in a position of power and responsibility, and I am strongly convinced that my abilities will be recognized by the Round Table. My experience and attributes would be incredibly useful to the Round Table Quests, as well as promoting diversity and fostering peace.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Safa ba Salamandra, Knight

.

“why is color so important to knights”

Because knights are fashion-forward.

.

“science of the silly people”

have you MET scientists?

.

“the life of elodie”

.

Feel like this on the inside….

dress like this on the outside…

and then just

make it look natural

Some search terms I’m not going to address:

Figure One.

What did you do this weekend, Elodie?

Nothing much. Met the Awkward Army, put the world to rights. Learned a bit of materials science and inadvertently created a new kind of polystyrene plastic in my kitchen.

Made a rainbow.

In the aftermath of the unicorn dissection…

The richly glowing skein in Figure One is a sumptuous, hand-painted rainbow yarn that I dyed myself. With food coloring. And SCIENCE. You won’t find colors like that in a store…

And at the risk of becoming a craft blog (SCIENCE CRAFTS!) I’m going to tell you how to do it.

.

Knitting is an exhausting hobby. You’ll knit a few hats and socks, and then suddenly nothing will do but you have to make a Loch Ness Monster, a colony of plushy starfish and a squishy dinosaur hat for every baby in your social circle that you vaguely like. Then you start accumulating yarn, and so you start looking for patterns to make with it, and suddenly you find yourself in the corners of the Internet where people spin their own wool out of otters and hand-dye it with berries foraged from fairy forests. (I am exaggerating slightly because I am jealous.)

Now, the idea of hand-dyeing raised my eyebrows, because I love bright colors and handmade things, and who wouldn’t want to have beautiful yarn in their very favorite colors? After all, most commercially available fibers give the impression that their dyes were picked out by half-blind woodlice, paddling vaguely at a color chart with their uncoordinated paws.

“Yaaay! More bum-colored yarn! In acrylic! For reasons!”

So when I heard rumors that animal fibers can be dyed safely and effectively with simple food coloring, I perked up and took notice. The creative Earth Mother in me immediately decided that this was the best idea since homemade apple-and-rosemary jelly. The scientist in me itched to test new protocols and optimize chemical reactions, while the businesswoman quietly drew up plans to create a finished product that would appeal to others. The researcher in me lunged to the fore as she usually does, plunging eagerly into descriptions and definitions, learning about medieval terms like mordants and intriguing techniques like breaking black, diving into ancient manuscripts from various cultures and learning about cochineal and amphoteric materials. Eventually, she emerged with what she’d determined to be a good starting point, a nice blog post entitled “How to Dye Yarn with Food Coloring and Small Children.”

The principles of home-dying yarn are simple. You need a heat source, like a microwave, but presumably other things will do just as well. Get some wool – pure, pale wool is best; superwash wool is even better. Synthetic fibers won’t dye permanently with food coloring. Grab some acid (acetic acid, in the humble household form of vinegar, will do.) Snag some food dyes, preferably nice chemical-y American ones that haven’t gone all European and “natural” – the hippie-dippie kiddie colors available in British supermarkets simply won’t do. You need unnatural food dye – as American as possible. I used it as an excuse to buy a nice pack of high-quality Wilton gel, since I can keep using the materials, worth their weight in rainbow cakes. (You can also use Kool-Aid, but since I’ve never touched the stuff in my life and don’t think that it actually exists on this side of the Atlantic.) The Wilton arrived in the mail, filling me with all of the joy that young Elodie used to feel upon getting a new box of paints. Shiny. Colorful. Bursting with possibilities. AND MINE, ALL MINE.

Hypothesis: I can make something more beautiful with these colors than I could ever buy. I can make something more suited to my taste than anyone could ever design for me. And hopefully, I can dye yarn with food coloring.

Dr Glass insisted that the packaging of the Wilton Icing Colors was meant to evoke the artistic works of Damien Hirst. I refused to believe that a paleontologist could know more about art than me. I, whose first degree was in Humanities! I, who was raised by a tribe of Fine-Arts-art-history-and-humanities-majoring wolves!

… But after a long discussion that involved a lot of Googling, I began to see his point.

Most of the dyes that professional fiber artists use are acid dyes, which latch readily onto the fabric. Food coloring, which is intended for gentler purposes, needs to be set with acid. Luckily, our home kitchens are stuffed full of acid. Vinegar will do the trick. The only pale non-staining vinegar we had in the house was apple cider vinegar, which I sloshed into a bowl, adding water to a random dilution, and admired the effect and the smell. After a quick test skein indicated that the overall protocol created a permanent set dye, I was ready to run with the big dogs. Wolves.

I skeined and tied my yarn, fifty grams of a beautiful creamy Merino superwash, and arranged it attractively in the bowl of acid.

Craft blogs always include dreamy macro close-ups with the objects in the distance being really blurry. Here’s one of those.

The BATH OF ACID gentle soak in vinegar was meant to soften it up a little, you know? TO MAKE IT READY TO TALK To create the ideal chemical conditions to bond permanently with the sweet, gentle cupcake dye.

Pour your yarn a nice bath and seduce it a little.

Then I laid the yarn out on plastic, over a floor that I didn’t mind cleaning.

Most craft blogs suggest that you laminate your entire kitchen before doing this project. I half-assed with a posh bag.

Thankfully, Dr Glass keeps the household in lab gloves, so the next steps caused minimal damage to the kitchen. Using a butterknife like a palette knife, I took slabs of concentrated gel paste, mixed a few of them to create my absolute favorite colors, and set to work rubbing them into the skeined yarn.

This is one reason why it’s great to pick superwash yarn for hand-dying. As everyone knows, the long, rough, jagged edges of animal protein fibers love to cling to each other, and if you heat and agitate them they’ll felt, or become a solid material. Superwash yarn can be machine-washed and rubbed without felting.

Parts of this project looked disturbing.

I wanted a rainbow with lots of variation and variegation, and beautiful transitions between colors. My favorite colors are deep jewel tones, so I decided to err on the side of Too Much Paste rather than too little, aiming for a saturated, rich product. For the transitions, I combined the colors I’d mixed as well as rubbing and blending the colors together where they met. I didn’t end up with much yellow in the end….

DELICIOUS RAINBOW!

Now it was time to permanently set the dye with heat. Unfortunately, Dr Glass wandered off so we don’t have pictures, but basically I wrapped it in clingfilm to prevent the colors from bleeding, arranged it in a bowl and zapped it on high heat for five minutes at a time. I kept the yarn slightly damp so that it wouldn’t burn. After a few rounds of this, the kitchen smelled faintly of damp sheep, and I proclaimed the yarn done.

I rinsed it in cold running water to finalize the setting of the stain. And let me tell you, food coloring + acid + heat creates a beautiful permanent dye… but a hell of a lot of unbound color still rinsed out. I went pretty wild with those super-concentrated gel pastes, so if you ever try this experiment at home, you can probably use a lot less.

But you know what? Fuck it. I didn’t want pasty-ass pissant colors on my rainbow yarn. I wanted life, vibrancy, saturation. Hold too much passion and ambition back and you’ll crumple in on yourself; your inner pilot light will go out; you’ll lose your chin and your mouth will pucker like a cat’s butt. SLAP ON THE PASTE, DARE TO FAIL! BETTER TO FAIL GLORIOUSLY THAN TO WIN AT BEING BORING. Colors take more work than beige, but they’re worth infinitely more: it’s the only way to live.

This will tell you a lot about my personality, and also about just how much dye I forced into that yarn. It bled beautifully for several minutes. The jewel-colored water ran through my fingers like child’s magic. I felt like I’d slaughtered a unicorn, or performed some kind of splendid alchemy. The color was more pleasant than paint; clear and pure, the light went right through it, and it didn’t stick to my hands.

And the dye held fast.

When I held the finished product up, it looked like something too bright and lovely to be real.

Look what I caught!

The camera actually couldn’t deal with it. It’s a brand new camera, specially purchased for such purposes, and it almost couldn’t manage these colors.

I laid the skein flat on a radiator to dry and went to bed on it. In the morning, it was even more beautiful. My most beloved colors – rich autumn oranges, wine reds, deep teals, passionate purples – were all so lovely that I only regretted not owning a dress in each perfect shade.

I was particularly pleased that I got some good variegation in the different strands of yarn for each color. When knitted, this will produce a lovely depth and texture, adding complexity to the knit. Plus, it looks handmade. Why bother spending your love and labor on something that will look perfect – mass-produced, homogenous? Make something that’s got you in it.

Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose….

Results: I declare this protocol a success.

Now I just need to make something out of it.

References:

1. Tips for Handpainting Fiber with Dye

2. “How to Dye Yarn with Food Coloring and Small Children.”

3. Dye Your Yarn

===

ETA March 26 2013: This post got Freshly Pressed! How exciting! It will probably go live in a few days.

New visitor? Stopping by for the first time? Welcome. I am a revolutionary scientist princess and this is my personal science/humor blog. Popular posts include “Cups Runneth Over: Love, Lifestyle and Clothing Tips for Large-Busted Ladies” and the ever-humorous Illustrated Compendiums Of Search Terms (Part One/Part Two.) I have guest-blogged on Captain Awkward (Here and here). I am currently collecting anecdotes and experiences from women and minority groups in STEM fields – if this is you, please share yours – and I can always be reached at the Contact! form, Facebook and Twitter.

Spammers, I warmly encourage you to stop by my first Freshly Pressed Post, “You’re a Strange Man, Charlie Darwin.” You must be aware that when one gets FP’ed, one is swamped by a howling swarm of insincere folks who wish to spam one with links to their profoundly uninteresting blogs. One is supremely uninterested in spam, and considers it only fit for target practice and revenge. Please keep this in mind.

Love,

Elodie

Filed under: Arts Is Serious Business, Blogging, By Cunning and Craft, DIY for Science Princesses, Life In General, Science Tagged: a day in the life, art and science, art is serious business, color, crafts, creativity, D.I.Y., diy, DIY for ladylike woodland creatures, Elodie what did you do this weekend, fiber, getting your shit together, handmade, inspiration, knitting, rainbows, the fine and delicate art of unfucking yourself, yarn

Three Places where I’ve Written This Week That Weren’t Here:

1. The first Logbook entry at “Oh! Sweet Cleo,” my experimental narrowboat blog. The Grey Forest.
2. A New Guest Post at Memetic Drifting. Illustrated Compendium of Search Terms: Memetic Drift Edition.
3. A new Guest Post at Captain Awkward. Muddling Productively In Search of Romance.

Perhaps, if you are interested, you may enjoy partaking of them.

Dear Elodie:

I ask this of you because you wrote the Adulthood Is A Scary Horse post, and I thought you might have some insight on Adult Things. I need some help with developing Consistency.

I am good at doing things in three-month runs. Examples:

I can give up drinking diet Coke, which is slowly eating my esophageal lining and the enamel on my teeth, for three months at the most.

I can find internships for three months, but I have never found a job (now on either my sixth or fourth internship, depending on how you look at it.) (I am not sure if my continuing with school is related to not wanting to settle down, or if my inability to find the condition in which to settle down made continuing with school a good idea.)

I do well with my schoolwork (just finishing a master’s, will probably do a PhD, am twenty-five) for one semester, and then the next semester is gray and dull and mediocre.

I rode my bike for 30-40 km every week for three months during the spring/summer, and then somehow I stopped.

This pattern has stretched over the past eight years. I pick up new hobbies relatively frequently (maybe two or three a year) but I don’t maintain them — I circle back to them every so often. Three years ago I started painting, and I’ll do a rush of 6-10 paintings in a couple weeks, and then I won’t paint for three months. I did linoleum prints until I developed hand cramps, then stopped and picked up something else. I just started knitting; presumably I’ll do that for a bit then stop. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Same for writing short stories. It seems like I can work hard in one area for only three months, and then I have to take a break with that thing and focus hard on something else for three months.

My theory is that Adulthood is directly correlated to Consistency. I have done some reasonably cool things, on both personal and professional levels, but I don’t think I will ever get all the things I want to get done DONE unless I develop Consistency — i.e. the ability to put in the same amount of work every day for years at a time.

I have some mental health issues of an ambiguous nature. I have had two major, crippling spates of depression in my life, and my emotions are not well regulated or proportionate — they tend to either be numbed or violently over-the-top. I struggle with something like Seasonal Affective Disorder as well. This has predictable consequences, but it seems to me that many people who struggle with mental health problems still develop Consistency. No, my moods are not predictable, but many people with problems far more severe produce a much greater volume of work.

As a person who seems to have many interests, both artistic and scientific, how do you balance them and give them each enough attention? How do you achieve Consistency and Reliability, even though on a given day you might feel like a piece of asphalt? How can you both manage to be kind to yourself and take good care of yourself while saying, “No, self, you do NOT need ten hours of sleep tonight, just because you feel weird and sad. You should do Other Thing for a couple hours so that you feel a sense of accomplishment!” Many times I feel that Self-Care and Productivity are directly at odds, and while I realize Productivity is not the measure of a human being’s worth, I want to make a living doing things I love, and that will never happen without Productivity, which will never happen without Consistency.

Thoughts? Help? Squawk?

[A. I think I am pretty silly for sending this to you, but everything you write seems so wise, so maybe you have some spare wisdom lying about, however

B. you have a longboat and a job and skeins brightly colored yarn and jam dates and a Dr. Glass, so maybe just regard this as a random paper airplane that landed on the boat, without necessarily thinking of it as a thing that needs be answered.]

–

Dear Friend:

Thank you so much for writing to me! I love getting mail. You sound like such a cool person, and we’re in such similar places in our lives right now, that I just want to grab you by the face and tell you “YOU ARE SO GOOD. YOU ARE DOING SO FINE.” Thank you for writing such a beautiful letter and putting it out there.

I know you wrote to me ages ago, and I’ve been thinking about you for a long time.

Firstly, you mentioned Adulthood is A Scary Horse, a guest post I wrote for Captain Awkward. And so I began to write a response to you, which became ridiculously long, and sort of stopped being about you. It ended up being this Guest Post at Captain Awkward on the Low Mood Cycle.

That was meant for you.

Last month was this blog’s two-year anniversary.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a big Finisher of Things either. The large “drafts” folder of this blog, compared to its infrequent and oddball posts, is a kind of testament to that. Each post tends to take me about a dozen hours of work. Yet, I’m a relatively fast writer – given the usual artistic breaks for blank staring, rocking and crying. I can bang out press releases for work before my eyes have properly opened for the morning, and was known in my university days for frantically vomiting essays onto scrap paper just before handing them in and somehow winning prizes for them. So why does it take me literally months to write a blog post?

You

know

why.

You and I, my love, have to learn that “done is better than perfect” – that “good enough, and out there in the world” is better than our perfect, anxious fantasies.

I’m sure we’ll learn that together, you and me – we are the same age and in the same place, and somewhere ahead of us are our forty-year-old selves, holding out their loving lived-in hands to us, their beautiful eyes sweetened by laugh lines, their beautiful heads crowned with silver and gold. And all this frantic mess of the twenty-something life and the thirty-something life will be so beautiful and precious to them, and they love us so much.

But here are some things that I’ve learned to get us there:

The first short answer is that I don’t do these things.

I enjoy writing for my blog, but a look at the date stamps on the posts will indicate that my blog does not reflect this in the usual way. Most of my life is spent in flailing, with occasional interludes where I impose a nice narrative onto the episodes and set them up as Teachable Moments.

Really.

The first step is to know yourself. The second step is to set yourself up for success.

If you know (like me) that you’re bad at Balancing Things, but you also know (like me) that you like having diverse experiences and interests, then you can set yourself up to get them. If people offer you gifts (“what would you like for your birthday?”) you can ask for experiences, or raw materials with which to make other things, such as “a box of beads” or “animal skulls” or “paint.” Go inside art stores when you see them. Tell everyone that you’re doing a Handmade Christmas – then you’ll have to do it! When you have an intersection of spare time and cash, pay for a course to learn something. Say “yes” when people say things like “could you watch my bookshop for me?” and “could you chair this radical underground boater’s meeting?” and “would you like to do standup at the Royal Society?”

I do notice that when I sit on my butt and demand that an interesting life be delivered to me, it’s less effective than when I put myself in the way of Stuff Happening.

If you know that you are always the person who forgets your keys, tie them permanently to your handbag/messenger bag/traveling pack/interior of this week’s jeans or jacket.

If you know that you are always the person who forgets to eat and then becomes too hungry to figure out a healthy meal, then purchase a huge case of non-perishable snacks, and secrete them in stashes around the house.

There are many small problems that you can set yourself up to avoid. The reason why it’s difficult is often because you don’t want to admit that you’re the Bad Person Who Does The Silly Thing. (“I’m not a LATE PERSON. Late people are awful and have no friends. I’ve just been late four or five times.”)

I am currently working in an office. Before I sit down in the morning, I put several glasses of water in front of myself, because I don’t remember to drink much water in the day. The concept of thirst – a recognizable state of being – and the process of fixing it by standing up getting more water – seem to be completely disabled in me. But if somebody has put some water in front of me, I drink it, and realize to my surprise how thirsty I am. Yes, I look very strange, like I’m about to start playing a tune with my scale of musical glasses – but I’m hydrated, which is a good state for a biological creature to be in.

To break a habit, replace it with something else that fulfills that need.

I have occasionally decided to stop biting my nails. The thing is, I’ve been told all of my life by loved ones and strangers: “Don’t bite your nails.” Of course that never worked:

“Don’t bite your nails – because I hate the sound / it grosses me out /  it makes your hands ugly to me / it makes you look nervous.”

I mean, what? What the fuck does that have to do with me? It’s you, you, you all the time – what you want, what you want to fuck, what you want to look at. If I’m biting my nails, it’s because my nails are enticing, and biting them makes me happy. That is literally it. If you are anxious, or worried, or bored, and you are a nailbiter, then you do not give any fucks about how sexually attractive your nails are – they get sacrificed on the altar of Feeling Better. They’re yours. That’s why you bite them.

Don’t bite your nails because something comforting for you is annoying to me – oh, fuck off. There is no planet on which a smoker will quit because you ask them nicely, or shout at them, or ask them to consider your tender precious feelings. There is a multiverse of planets where smokers quit because they can’t breathe anymore, or they want to get pregnant, or they have PANTSFEELINGS for someone who hates the smell of cigarettes. People are selfish about their bad habits – honestly, for good reasons.

I don’t bite my nails when I’ve decided not to paint my nails, by following these habit-breaking behaviors:

1. I decide not to bite my nails because I prefer them unbitten. (You can’t break a habit for other people.)
2. I paint them, so that I notice them as pretty colorful entities, and not invisible snacks. (You can’t break a habit if you don’t realize when you’re doing it!)
3. I note the situations where I bite my nails the most. (You can’t break a habit if you don’t know why you do it.)
4. I get other displacement activities. (To break a habit, you need to replace it with something better and less destructive that feeds the same need.)
5. If I bite a nail, I go “Eh” and fix the paintjob. They’re my fingernails; it’s not a problem if one of them doesn’t match. (To break a habit, you can’t punish yourself for dipping back into the habit. Especially if it’s an anxiety/comfort habit – you’ll go “I’m a piece of shit!” and feel awful and then bite all of your nails and then you’ll feel like the pits and you’ll have no fingernails. Why feel awful and have no fingernails?)

I became a nailbiter when I was five. For twenty years, people shouted and cajoled and screamed, slapped my hands from my mouth, held them down, painted me with bitter things, made disappointed faces, and compared my hands to sexier ones. For twenty years, this utterly failed to work. It made me more nervous (I hid my nailbiting behavior, and perversely wanted to do it more) more deceitful (I tried more subtle and damaging nail picking/biting behaviors) and less respectful and trusting of the authorities who tried to force me to give up a nervous habit.

Lovingly and intelligently training myself to grow my nails, for my own pleasure, works time and again and again.

We really ought to treat ourselves as gently as we would treat those anxious younger selves, don’t you think?

Be Nice to the Self Who Grew Into You

Building on that, a lot of the habits you hate about yourself were developed by your younger self.

Your younger self was only doing the best they could with limited resources.

Maybe when your younger self wanted the instant bubbly comfort of Diet Coke, they were often denied it, because young’uns have practically no control over their environment. Now, the You Today can have ALL THE DIET COKE. Immediately. This is still something your younger self gets excited about. Why not?

You buy Diet Coke because it makes you happy. You don’t go running or biking because sometimes they don’t please you. You stop doing lino prints when they begin to bore you. If you were complaining about these behaviors in a young child, you’d probably understand where they were coming from!

To make a habit, train yourself kindly, or: HOW DO YOU EVEN.

While I was working part-time and Dr Glass was technically working two full-time jobs, in a funny piece of Time Lord trickery often performed by academics, the agreement was that I would do more housework. Or rather, all of the housework. Or boatwork, really. The problem was that I don’t care much to do housework, and Dr Glass feels that it is important to be Clean.

And as we know, you can’t logic yourself into doing something that you find inherently unreasonable, just as you can’t logic yourself out of doing something that seems completely reasonable.

But it’s a Good Habit to be Clean. It is known! People are very serious about it. Apparently there are folk who find an organized cutlery drawer to be incredibly satisfying, and who can feel more than one feeling about putting stuff away. I decided that Cleanliness would probably be a good habit to try out.

So how to be Clean?

Well, I know how to clean – I was raised by the most hygienic of wolves. But knowing how to do the Thing does not a good habit make. You need reward; you need motivation. Motivation comes after action, but…

…You have to give just the tiniest fuck. And to make yourself give a fuck when previously you gave none, you have to be kind to yourself and train yourself well.

For me, housework got easier when I decided to put on podcasts while doing it. That absorbs the “oh god oh god I HATE HOUSEWORK WHY AM I DOING THIS, CAN I JUST NOT?” part of my brain, while my hands can move and work. Plus, if you put on a half-hour podcast and finish the basic work in fifteen minutes (because the basic stuff always takes exactly fifteen minutes for some reason) – well, you’re halfway into your podcast and don’t want to stop now, so why not do the fancy tiddly extra stuff?

For me, a lot of routine/necessary work is awful because I’m way too used to being Intellectually Stimulated and Mindful and Engaged – too used to labwork and sciencey stuff where you really have to pay attention or you’ll end up with an exploded mouse and far too much blood on your clothes for socially acceptable purposes. I always see the Point in Science, but I rarely see the point in moving dishes around, or using the vacuum cleaner attachment that Dr Glass believes is more efficient for dusting the gunwales.

Yes. This has been the focus of many, many fights.

Housework and officework baffled me a lot until I figured that music and podcasts can occupy that “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS/WHY ARE WE SITTING DOWN FOR SO LONG/WHAT DIFFERENCE IS THIS MAKING TO THE FUNCTION OF THE UNIVERSE” portion of my distractable brain. Most people can use clever little hacks like this – they’ll depend on you and how you work. Soaking up that excess energy can take the seduction out of procrastination. Other tricks involve setting timers – doing as much as possible in fifteen minutes. Also, having guests over always motivates me to present my home well. If we have guests over for dinner once a week, our home remains clean and organized. It’s a good trick!

Next, to make a good habit, train yourself – wisely, kindly, with resources.

If you want to eat more vegetables, step one is not “eat some vegetables.” Step one is thinking of your favorite tastiest vegetables and the nicest recipes involving them, and step two is acquiring them and keeping them in the house, and step three is cooking them up deliciously. But that’s not how we do it, is it? We grandly resolve to eat vegetables, and then immediately punish ourselves for not being more herbivorous when we didn’t even get the vegetables! or we got ones we don’t even like! I know; I’m the worst at this too. I have whole conversations in my head like:

Me: ALL YOU’VE EATEN TODAY IS DRIED FRUIT, YOU SAD SACK, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.

Me: But… there was a bag of dried fruit! CONSIDER THE FRUIT. It was inherently logical!

Me: But you should have eaten THE VEGETABLES OF MORAL PURITY.

Me: What vegetables? Where are they?

Me: EXACTLY. YOU SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN THEM ALREADY.

Me: Have you considered dried fruit, though? It’s real nice.

But this is the kind of argument you have with puppies and toddlers – and you don’t kick them in the head and scream at them for eating Logical Fruit instead of Moral Vegetables.

Like Anne Lamott puts it so beautifully:

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.”

We’ve gotta stop doing that to ourselves, my dear friend. We just have to keep bringing our puppies back to the newspaper.

Seek Your Creative Replenishment

For me, it’s things like the book the above quote comes from: Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. I read this book when I was young and hungry – still developing – and in turn I grew to resonate with it. If you want to accuse me of harboring any wisdom, it’s all been stolen from Anne. Sometimes I’m in a Low Mood or my Grey Dog is lying on my chest and I just open it up and it’s like Anne is slapping me around the face and shouting

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

And I’m like, God, Anne, thank you! You’re absolutely right! And then I go away and write.

Bird by Bird makes me want to run circles around the room and then sit down and write for two hours regardless of mortal things like bedtimes. That’s the state that we go into when we do Productivity, the feeling of being the pivot point around which your environment turns, the knowledge that you are slightly on fire but too engaged to care. Technically, the state is called “flow,” and it’s the result of directed focus and attention. Flow usually occurs when you care about something, and dries up when you’re being overly critical of the thing you care about.

Sometimes you can jump-start this with 50ccs of Bird straight to the heart. Or you’ve given up on painting, and then something comes up on Tumblr that’s so gorgeous it makes you want to run around the room screaming, and it strikes sparks off your competitive instinct and your love of painting and you’re off again. Sometimes you’re jaded by cooking – a good prescription is to go out to dinner and order something that you can’t cook, that will make you jump up and down in your chair, because now you want to cook it. Sometimes you’re jaded by science – then after winning an argument with a colleague, you’ll be doing victory laps, lit up from within by the love of what you know.

I don’t know what the Serious Exercise equivalent of this is, because I regard most sweat-making activities with disturbed suspicion, but I think it’s probably like when you’re running and the good part of the music is playing and you are pretending that you are a magnificent racehorse. That.

Our great deep loves come from somewhere, and when the lustre of love has faded, there’s no shame in tapping straight back to the source. Where did you get the love? Go get it again. You’ll find it in things that you read once, and you put the book down, and went “ARGHH!” and then picked the book up and went on. Read that book again. Get back into that Flow.

Everyone takes a different path.

“Ooh, you were such a Gifted Child, but we can’t help but notice that you’ve reached an Age, and you haven’t unlocked the required babies and car achievements for that level. Whatever happened?”

Ritualized panic about Achieving Life Milestones at Certain Life Ages is pretty common. I understand that it is hard to shake yourself out of these constant comparisons to what people in your cohort “should be doing.”

But working yourself up about how you compare to this fictionalized cohort makes about as much sense as “caring too hard about whether your taste in clothing makes you more attractive to Percy, the King of the Pangolins, whom you will never meet.”

“Come back, your Majesty! I can change!”

King Percy ain’t never gonna care about the color of your bra strap, and it won’t ever come up in any life situation whatsoever. Worrying about whether you match up to an imaginary calendar is just as helpful as worrying about a fictional pangolin’s opinions.

That’s all I have to say.

End Result Fallacies

“I feel like stuff is wrong because I should be happier, I should be doing more, I should be wanting more things – and getting them. My life, as a narrative, looks unsatisfying.”

Have you noticed how people rarely talk about their failures and insecurities? You and I talk frequently of them, Letter Writer, because we have that kind of close and intimate and safe relationship here. But outside, in the big mean world, people talk only about their successes, slapping them down like winning cards and daring you to raise to them. We see the people we respect and admire – our heroes and role models – and the accounts they have told us of their lives, and we see them as a planned and directed stream of Goals, Successes and Adventures. It’s confirmation bias: we see successful people as people who have achieved Success, and only Success, probably because (as they are happy to tell you) they wanted it so hard, and worked so hard to get it.

(Now, with the Internet and Twitter, we can bring our heroes that bit closer, and can experience disproportionate outrage when they fuck up publicly. “How dare you be a person when I demand you be a metaphor!” we can shout. But generally, when you think about your heroes, you’re not thinking about the worst books they wrote, the racism they endorsed, and the ridiculously wrong scientific ideas they supported wholeheartedly: you’re fixating on their success.)

So you’re left going “Well, I’m twenty-six, and my life is okay – but I suppose they’re right; I don’t have X, Y, and Z. I guess I just don’t want them enough – maybe I don’t know anything that I want enough. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that I’ve found my Passion yet. I don’t even think I HAVE a Calling. I must be a failure. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. They’ll throw me out when they find out – I’ll just desperately work harder, I guess. I’ll just hope really aggressively for Success – granted, I’m not really clear on what that is.”

It’s a mindset that is nicely encouraged in graduate school, where you’re expected to show up each day with the stated intention of working yourself to death to Get Success. It’s encouraged in the workplace, because belief in Goals is supposed to be linked to Productivity. It’s also crystallized in the self-help zeitgeist, where positive thinking is viewed as necessary to health, and lack of motivation/success/health is probably due to negativity and general lack of Belief in Oneself. It’s supported entirely our by unchecked capitalist economies, which state that poor people probably want/expect to be poor, and simply lack the mindset to get rich. It’s very much a feature of the previous generation’s thinking, because they were the first – and possibly the only – modern generation to be raised in a cocoon of stability, entitlement, and certainty, with every expectation of achieving Success.

It isn’t particularly reflected in either science or magic or faith, though – three great paradigms where you’d expect Humanity’s Influence Over the Universe to be a stated truth.

But not even magic demands and expects as much control over the environment that we young Western adults believe we should have. Not even witchcraft – which is often about “focusing your intent” and “imbuing spells with your will” in order to bring about changes in the Universe – demands an instant return in exchange for this display of willpower, for this stated intention of Wanting Something Hard Enough. Witchcraft has a structure and a tradition, and includes an inbuilt expectation that the Universe will occasionally interpret your demands differently, handing you something other than what you asked for. Christianity accepts this too, assuming that the uncertainty of the end result is because God has a bigger plan; you can pray for Him to look kindly on your efforts, but it isn’t within your power to rearrange God’s game. And science? Half of all experiments fail, most papers get scooped before you publish, the rest get rejected in peer review, and most funding bodies hate you – your only hope is to try to turn this mass of failure to your advantage more quickly than your colleagues. Most mining operations turn up lots of rocks and dirt, with occasional bits of gold. But we do it anyway! We do it, and find great joy and fulfillment in doing it. Scientists write papers despite knowing that they will not necessarily result in Jobs. Christians pray whole-heartedly despite evidence that it has limited effect.

Most real-world effort is rewarded in unpredictable ways. In fact, it’s often given in unrecognizable currency: we expect to receive payout in the form of Secure Fulfilling Jobs and Stable Safe Homes and a Constant Glow of Achievement and Serene Happiness, and then get upset and frustrated when they aren’t in the envelope.

This uncertainty is accepted as inevitable in even the most goal-oriented science, magic, faith and resource-collection – but somehow, in your own life, you are expected to develop a habit of Consistency that allows you complete control over the Universe?

In Studio Ghibli’s “The Cat Returns,” the Heroine falls from a great height, but is saved by a flock of crows. The birds form a living staircase that allows her to walk downwards safely.

A lot of our internal stress and unhappiness comes from this belief that if you do everything correctly – if in your twenties you ride your bike three times a week, receive positive feedback from your boss and keep a clean home, then in your thirties, you’ll get the envelope with the Stable Job and Shiny home in it. Instead, think about this quote by Anne Lamott:

I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Now note that in your life, there have rarely been stepping stones. Instead, your life has been more like the girl in the gif above; teetering above disaster, you are held aloft by a thousand unexpected crows, who each break your fall just a little bit at a time. Embracing this uncertainty, rather than fearing it, is how you get your Balance.

Knowing that we have no job security and that all of our efforts might see us unemployed next year, with our life path run out from under us, and Science not wanting us anymore, and our employment opportunities in our city drying up, Dr Glass and I bought a boat. It is our stated acceptance of this uncertainty. If the Universe offers us jobs in another city, we will take our boat to it. If there are no jobs, we will take our boat around the country and write a book about it. If we don’t like it anymore, we will sell the boat and move back to the States. If the States are consumed by fire, we will buy a larger boat and live on the sea. There is no real point in planning for any certainty but uncertainty; you have to embrace the uncertainty. At any point you might be thrown into the sky with no parachute; but hopefully you have read your fairy tales well, and befriended the King of Cats and a murder of crows.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you don’t ride your bike for three weeks, you’ll probably be okay.

Experiere

It takes me a while to write a blog post, partly because these discrete and scattered thoughts don’t tend to make sense until I have a Moment of Epiphany that ties them together. You can’t force these Moments of Epiphany; you just have to sign up for them, and then wait for half a year in constant uncertainty, knowing that they may be delivered at inconvenient times (I was brushing my teeth) and that they might be pretty crap.

Here is this one:

Experience and experiment and expertise are all the things you’re writing about, all the things you want to obtain, and they all share the same root word: experiere.

 Experiere doesn’t mean “success.” It doesn’t mean “something you’ve done a thousand times” or “something you’re a genius at.”

“Expert” doesn’t mean “someone who has it all figured out and makes lots of money while making you feel bad about yourself.”

Experiere means “try.”

It has an extra flavor added; it means “try” in the sense of “test.” But note that there is no flavor of “excellence,” no presumption that trying will lead to success. These word sisters don’t mean “instant competence” or “constant mastery.”

An experience is something that you’ve tried, and when you’re experienced, you’ve tried a lot. An experiment is only something that you try.

And experts? They’ve just accumulated a lot of trying. Probably a lot of failure. Probably a lot of unfinished experiments, stuffed in the backs of their closets.

Try it for a bit, see if you like it; call yourself an experimenter, an expert, a collector of experiences. To acquire these acclaims, all you need to do is try.

Caveat Emptor: Elodie Knows Nothing

But the thing is that I don’t know – I don’t know anything. It took me, like, five months to write back to you.

I wish you the best, in the knowledge that one day we will both meet our older selves together, and that they will be proud to see us there.

Until then? We will try.

I wish you every joy, person of my tribe, member of my species, new friend of my heart.

Figure 1. Let’s open the floor by demonstrating how to be a Fool on the Internet. REVEL IN THE BELLY FAT!

SO

YOU ARE A PERSON WITH BOOBS

AND THEY ARE EXTREMELY LARGE.

THAT IS FANTASTIC!!!! WE HAVE SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT!!!

I HAVE WRITTEN YOU A LOVE LETTER.

Part I. Calibrating the Mirror.

Actually, there’s something we have to do first.

We have to see what you look like.

Luckily, here at the House of Glass, we have an amazing, incredible, revolutionary, magical new piece of blog technology. It is a patented, highly clever BLOG MIRROR! This will allow us to determine what you look like. Scroll down, please, so that the Blog Mirror can acquire your image.

BLOG MIRROR ACQUIRING: 10%

BLOG MIRROR ACQUIRING: 35%

Let’s see your three-quarter view. Show it to us.

BLOG MIRROR ACQUIRED.

Hm. Let’s see what the mirror has to say.

Oh my god, you’re totally hot. You are beautiful. You are gorgeous. Where have you been hiding, you astonishing human being? This mirror is at a loss for words. It chokes on them. It can’t stop looking at you. You are a universe.

This mirror loves your eyes, like polished stones, and the way they catch and hold the light; the way they lie about their exact color, shifting and flickering like fish in a river, and the sweet way that they sit in your eyelids, like jewels in a fine setting. They sparkle with your intelligence, gems of the highest clarity.

This mirror loves the map of your skin. It loves the textures and travels, the lines of joy and movement and sorrow that it reads in your skin. It loves the story that your mouth tells, and it loves the secrets hidden in the corners of your lips, which give you so much of your beauty. It loves your beautiful human teeth, the hardest and toughest part of your body, because they are so perfect, so useful, so strong and fine and good. It loves the clever, architectural way that you’ve put together your curves with your angles, straight lines and swoops, in the presentation of this lovely piece of art – how intriguing, the shadow that lies under your eyes, and the line that runs down your nose, and the effect of the overall sculpture. What witty ears you have! And what interesting contours! This mirror also really gets your eyebrows.

Oh! This mirror loves your breasts! And this mirror loves your fat. Your lush, plush fat, whether it is hidden in little pockets at your hipbones, or worn all over like the costume of a queen. Is that a little softness under your chin – a layer of richness under your skin? The mirror loves that most of all. Do you know what that fat is? It is love, protection, warmth and wealth. This mirror values that. Those are some of the words it uses to define beauty.

And you are so beautiful. You are such an interesting and lovely story, sorrowful and strong, with notes of humor and desire…. But you don’t really seem to believe this mirror. If I had installed tear ducts in it, tears would be springing into them. How could you not believe something that loves you so much and speaks to you so truthfully?
How this mirror loves you! In order to calibrate it properly, I have shown it many beautiful things. I took it to a museum and showed it the most lovely things that human hands can create. I took it to work, and let it look in my microscope; I took it around the laboratories and offices of my colleagues and friends, and it saw fossils and lasers and jewels and planets and the feathers of parrots, and the slow dreaming of the lungfish, and the piece of the fallen star. It thought they were all very pretty. I took it around my city, pointing out the way the light catches the bellies of the seagulls, and all the nicest bits of architecture, and the beautiful people in their expensive shoes. I carefully instructed it on the notions of beauty prevalent in Western society, by showing it magazines and movies, and it took them all in solemnly. I showed it my husband, and it agreed that he is very fine. I am confident that its taste is good, as pitch-perfect as it is possible for a mirror  to be.

And it has never seen anything as gorgeous as you, sitting there, looking at it, with your splendid eyes.

If this contradicts what your own mirror at home tells you, then your mirror is lying, defective or faulty. It may be eligible for a refund. Have a talk with it – see if it’s something you can fix? My mirror has been carefully calibrated, and it is completely correct. I am a scientist, you know, and I have no patience for faulty equipment. And furthermore, now that I’ve found you, I won’t have a cheap piece of stupid glass insult my beautiful new friend. Are people in your life agreeing with your broken mirror? Fuck ’em. It’s not polite, but neither are they. My mirror is smarter and more superior. Did you not see the motto of the House of Glass? In vitro veritas! In glass, there is truth. My mirror uses the most truthful glass in the world.

We can fix your broken mirror at home, if you like, with a careful process of recalibration – but you’re always welcome to come back and look in this one. How it loves to see your beautiful face, your fascinating body.

How happy it would be to see you again.

Part II. The Society of Women With Boobs Welcomes You.

RIGHT! Now that we’ve finished looking in the Blog Mirror, let’s feast our eyes upon the mighty prow of Christina Hendricks.

Figure 2. A figurehead for our times.

RIGHT! Now that we’ve done that, we’ve… forgotten what we were saying. It can sometimes be hard for us as curvy queer ladies to write clearheadedly about body positivity, what with all these distractions.

Right, for the third time! Okay, here’s the thing. Whether your base figure is slim or fat or in-between or athletic or fluid or not really definable, once you added big breasts to it, you became, for this blog’s intents and purposes, a big-breasted person. We love you. Welcome.

Welcome, because now we are going to rant. This is the ranting portion of the article, and if you don’t want to read it, skip to Part 3.

Western culture is not kind to big-breasted people. Sure, it says “BOOBS!” all the time in a really annoying voice, often like this: “HURR DURR, LOOK AT THAT WOMAN. BOOBS!” but it never seems to have anything helpful or valuable to say on the subject. It will tell you repeatedly that the only attractive woman is one with giant ladyknockers and a small waist. Small-breasted women get insults like fried eggs and mosquito bites; it is widely implied that they are un-beautiful and inferior, and that they must get implants to mimic the Correct Female Figure. But it’s not like big-breasted women get a lot of support, either – not from our societies, and sometimes not even from our bras.

Do you know what type of figure you have? Oh god, you probably do. There’s the Apple, the Pear, the Ruler, The Strange, the Charmed, the Snail that Overturns the Nougat… the Hourglass. Because women love identifying themselves with fruit and objects! Pick up any magazine with Clothing Tips. It’ll rhapsodize on the natural, feminine beauty of the mythical Hourglass, probably saying something like “lucky bitch!” before going back to how Rulers can make their breasts look bigger, and Apples can make their everything look smaller. Let’s get rid of those notions now – let’s throw them out the window. You are a large-breasted person, yes. You are beautiful, yes. But fuck those magazines. Fuck ’em. They don’t know you.

They don’t have to get dressed in the morning, in an entire culture that venerates bouncing breasts but has no interest in producing nice clothing to cover them. A culture that demands busty women and then makes them the butt of jokes; a culture that considers the sight of the gentle swell of the top of the breast to be an invitation to sexual assault, and the shadow-line between nestled breasts – the cleavage – to be a flashing banner ad that shouts “DO NOT RESPECT THIS WOMAN! SHE IS NOT A NICE, VALUABLE, OR PROFESSIONAL WOMAN! HOW DARE SHE HAVE CLEAVAGE!” Our culture also thinks that large breasts are coarse, vulgar, comical, brashly sexual, trying too hard. Sweet Machine put it very well in a good article about this ambivalence:

“The problem is that her article perpetuates the distortions about the female body that are so prevalent in our culture. Big breasts are gargantuan, improper; small breasts are elegant and let you wear pretty clothes. 34E is a “massive” size, but 34B looks like a 12-year-old. The range of acceptable racks, like the range of acceptable dress sizes, is shockingly narrow. On either size, you’re not “really” a woman at all: you’re a transvestite or a prepubescent, unwomanly, unnatural even if what we are talking about is your natural body.”

And oh, yes, we know the pain of simply Getting Dressed in the Morning. We, the Society of Large-Breasted Women, love this comic by GingerHaze:

Figure 3. We love big boobs! JUST NOT YOURS, HAHAHA.

Later in the article we’ll cover some delicious bra stores that will probably have your size in scrumptious styles, but yeah. Go into a normal store as a normal human woman with a rack that a magnificent stag would envy, leave a lumpy, undressable freak of nature with un-classy cleavage. Lucky bitch, the magazines gloat, good luck getting dressed, Hourglass, when nobody will sell clothes to you! HAHAHAHA!

Oh, we hear you. We are standing right there with you, in front of the stores that only sell sundresses with spaghetti straps, looking at pretty things that we can’t have.

Figure 4: Maudie, from Brave. The large-breasted woman in media.

Here in the clubhouse of the Society for Large-Breasted Women, we’ve got a lot of thoughts about Society, and we know that you, a large-breasted woman, aren’t exactly going to be able to hide your light under a bushel. We love your light. We think it’s grand.

We, too, live in this world, where every article that mentions the beautiful Christina Hendricks mentions her mammaries, where reporters are incapable of speaking about her acting work without bleating about her breasticles. She is certainly welcomed as masturbatory material on the magazine covers that she graces; she is laved over; people call her a Role Model – how daring, how racy to be a large-breasted woman in public! We, the Society of Large-Breasted Women, know that your feelings about all this are complicated.
We know that your relationship with your breasts may be complicated.

We know that your perceptions of beauty – your own, and that of other people – are complicated.

We know that the society that we live in is complicated, and that that is where these problems come from.

So fuck it. Fuck it all. There is a trash can over there. Throw your bad, mixed-up feelings about breasts into that trash can, and then kick the trash can. These feelings are big, and they’re not going to go away, but they can’t control how you view your body any more. This is how we start. 

You are not inherently a pin-up, although you can be one.

You are not inherently a busty bar wench, although you can be one.

You are not inherently the default object of male desire, although you can be one.

You are not inherently the awkward girl with her shoulders hunched protectively to minimize the size of her chest, the girl who is not comfortable in her body – although you may have lived in her skin for a while.

Your breasts are amusing, comical, hilarious. Of course they are. They’re bags of fat. BAGS OF FAT. And they are also yours, which means: they are of value.

Even though everyone in the world wants to take ownership of your mammary glands, to judge them and juggle them, to compare them to your belly fat, to weigh them and weigh their opinions – those opinions do not carry weight. They do not carry water. They can be damaging opinions, or pleasant opinions, or opinions that make you evolve. You may agree or disagree with them, and you may change your mind. But you are not inherently anything because of the size of your breasts, except for the fact that you are inherently human, and the fact that the Blog Mirror thinks you are beautiful.
You are inherently you, with a pair of breasts stuck on the front. You’re beautiful. They’re great.  People doubtlessly appreciate them. But they don’t define you any more than your eyebrows do. Nobody owns them but you. Your lovers don’t own them, and neither do strangers, or your well-meaning mother, or wolf-whistling men on the street, or the artists you inspire; not even the children you may feed with your breasts own them. They’re yours, a part of your beautiful body, something you can look down at and smile.

We, the Society for Large-Busted Ladies, understand this, and we are happy to talk about your feelings, and to sit with them, and with you.

One thing we don’t want you to say is things like “REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES” and “GENTLEMEN PREFER BOOBS.” Real women come in all sizes, you see. And it doesn’t really matter what gentlemen prefer. Bodies are beautiful. Yours just has boobs.

There are so many great things about being boobtacular. And that’s the attitude we’re going forward with, now.

Figure 5: by Busty Girl Comics. Rock on.

III. Optical Illusions and You!

See Figure 1 (top of article) for a demonstration. You’re not going to look the same in a candid photo with a soft jersey top and skinny jeans as you do in a posed photo wearing a fitted, structured dress. YOU’RE JUST NOT. And why should you? You’re an organic creature. Fat has shape. You have shape.

The picture on the left, with the soft jersey top, shows a pair of straining knockers that resemble the tethered balloons of airships. (In the background, a tiny friend in a blue jacket is almost completely eclipsed by the burgundy magnificence of the Looming Breasts.) The phrase that springs to mind is BOOBS. And then, “Skinny jeans look good on nobody.” <strike>(Elodie why won’t you learn this)</strike>

The picture on the right doesn’t really evoke snide thoughts. It looks good, if bland. The person looks balanced, has good legs – might even be slender. Boobs are don’t look big, so there aren’t those connotations of “coarse” or “trashy” or “look at that WOMAN, out in PUBLIC with her BODY!”

They’re the same person at the same weight, of course. Same breasts, same weight, probably the same bra. Admire how one person can be simultaneously “skinny” and “overweight.” Cameras lie! Mirrors lie! Your own damn head lies! See the following experiments with Schrodinger’s Dress:

Figure 6: Posture lies. On the left, Fat Before Picture Posture. On the right, Rob Liefield.

Figure X: Belts lie. Sometimes a waist can speak for itself.

Large-Breasted Woman, you are a chameleon. You can be Apple, Pear or Hourglass with the snap of a belt; you can be Ruler with a sports bra or binder; you are Woman, you contain multitudes. You can be fat or slim or both at the same time – look at Schrodinger’s Dress.Yours are the realms of witty belts and tall boots. Yours is the sex appeal, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.

You deserve a good bra and good clothing.

III. How to Get Dressed in the Morning: Buy More Shit! Hack What You Already Own!

Here, finally, we are talking about Shit You Can Buy. The bras and the fitted shirts and the quirky dresses. Also, how you can manage the things you already own. And then how to wear it.

The Bras:

Freya – up to K cup; they do good swimwear and underwire-free options.

Bravissimo 

Sierra Trading Post is where I get my sports bras. For DD+ cups I recommend the zip-front options – they’re actually magical.

The Clothes:

Fig Leaves , recommended for jersey knits in larger bust sizes. UK BASED.

Pepperberry, recommended for button-up shirts (shown below) and the dress in Figure 1. Have bought new and liked, though apparently earlier incarnations had issues with quality. UK BASED. Limited plus sizes. Read the reviews carefully.

Figure 8. maybe: a pintuck Pepperberry shirt.

AJ Rumina , has button-up shirts by bust size. US BASED, haven’t tried them.

This Page at Hourglassy has a great compilation of more places to shop, with reviews!

Stuff you can buy to work with what you’ve already got:

Modesty panels. These fake camisoles come in different colors and clip onto your bra, so you’re not adding an extra layer. Great for v-necks, and for converting former too-sexy-for-this-shirts into modesty work wear. Buy them online or make your own – there are plenty of tutorials.

Figure 9: Modesty panel, covering a gravitational well of cleavage

Bosom buttons. Pin necklines in place with a little clothing pin. Again, easy enough to make your own, once you’ve seen one.

Chunky belts – within reason. If you have big clothes that fit your chest and shoulders but billow at your stomach, use, with caution, the Chunky Belt. Similarly, the waist nipper worn over the clothes.

Fluffy scarves with pretty brooches. Drape artfully over your neckline to add that professional, feminine thing that women at work are supposed to go for. Business casual? Is that what that is? Same goes for shoulder scarves/continuous scarves/infinity scarves/neckwarmers.

Bra strap converters/holders pull your bra straps together at the back, making a normal bra into a racer back. This increases support in a bra that has lost faith. It’s also a good trick to extend the life of your bras, shoring up weary elastics and sagging straps. Bra sellers tell you to replace bras every six months, and this is doubtlessly good and true, but if you’re between paychecks, use a converter.

When shopping, look for:

Whatever the fuck you like to wear, for starters.

1950’s styling. Retro dresses, in the style of clothes from the 1940’s-1960’s, favor wide built-in waistbands and full skirts.

Soft jersey knits that stretch, with accessories (note the lessons of the Schrodinger Dress. Admittedly, the Schrodinger dress is skintight and funny-looking.)

Stretchy, drapey knits with structure, like this nice neutral Evan Picone dress:

Figure 10: Ruched waist and a wrap top that doesn’t unleash the Breasts of War! You go, Evan Picone.

The material in that dress is a strange stretchy-slidy polyester. Seek out tops and dresses made with this fabric.

When I say “structure,” I mean sewing details that add support. The waist in the above dress is structured with ruching, a sewing technique that gathers folds of fabric together. Look for ruching under the breasts or at the waist – it flattens your belly. The button-up shirt has darts, those lines down the front of the shirt that add curves. In a stiff fabric, like button-up shirts usually are, look for darts – if the doesn’t have them, it will hang on you like a square. Pintucking (also present on the button up shirt – those flat pleats of fabric, close together) also adds structure, but frequently needs ironing. Boning is the most literal way to add structure – it’s how a corset slims you – and sometimes you can find shirts and dresses that have it built in. Boning can be uncomfortable. Fitting and tailoring in general are good keywords to look for; in a catalog, it usually means that the pieces have multiple darts to add curves, while normal clothes are made to fit squares.

Some details break up structure, like ruffles, flounces, giant collars, and large lapels. AVOID THESE on your top half. But hell, you’re big and beautiful, wear them if you want to.

If you want to learn to sew for yourself, learn about Dynamic Bust Adjustment – most patterns are for B-cup sizes, so you’ll have to develop them to your own measurements. It is easy to add darts to things, though, particularly t-shirts.

At home, do this:

Go through all of your clothes and unfuck them. Release yourself from the tyranny of clothes that don’t fit, clothes that have never fitted, clothes that you expected to grow into or out of. (Unless you’re pregnant, in which case, CARRY ON.) Get rid of the stuff that makes your boobs look bad. NOBODY NEEDS THAT SHIT. You have enough problems in your life. Get rid of jackets that don’t button across the top.

Get rid of bras that are older than two years old. Get rid of tired bras. Get rid of the ugly ones, and the ones that don’t fit.
Get rid of the button-up shirts that gape open at your breasts. You’re not fooling anybody. You can do better.
Get rid of bras that don’t fit, even if they’re totally sexy and you intend to only wear them provocatively for a few seconds before your lover tears them off.

Get rid of the clothes you never felt comfortable in. Get ones you like, instead.

And remember this:

Remember Schrodinger’s dress? You know another optical illusion? SIZE. Especially the little numbers that are written inside labels.

The Evan Picone dress above is, bafflingly, an American size 4. The burgundy top in Figure 1 is an Extra Large. The Pepperberry dress in Figure 1 is “UK size 10 Really Curvy,” while the button-up shirt is 8 Super Curvy. I’ve got clothes that say “14” and clothes that say “small.” Sizes lie. There’s money in it. Wear what fits, and don’t be upset if you want to think of yourself as a Large and all that will fit you is an XXL. Get what fits you. Cut the labels out. Better yet, don’t bother looking.

I own bras that are 30F and bras that are 34DD. Neither are “wrong.” There is no “wrong.” You’re you, and you’re not wrong. You are not a square. Your breasts are not spheres, stuck at perfect right angles to your chest. Sometimes you’re going to be a different size in a different brand, or on a different day.

Yes, a proper bra fitting can change your whole outlook. Get one! I beg you! But your bra fitting will vary by store, and the size you want will vary by how you want to wear your bra!

Bravissimo, recommended above, just tells you to wear what fits. Their website has a good list of what to look for, but essentially:

– underwire should NOT dig in. If it does, get a bigger size. Congratulations!

– boobs should not muffin top, or runneth over the cup. They should not be split by the cup. Go up a cup size. Congratulations!

– Adjust the Bra Settings when you try stuff on – shorten or lengthen straps, settle yourself in properly, and see if you clip the back on the tightest or the loosest. Bras do lose elasticity as they age, getting looser, so if you can only wear it on the tightest setting, go smaller in the band size.

– The band should be a straight line across your back, not hiked up or bowed down.

If you’re ordering online, get a constellation of sizes, keep your favorites and release the rest back into the wild. Aren’t you dynamic, being so many different sizes? Go you!

IV. Required Reading For the Joyfully Breasted

Blogs:

Shapely Prose

Laci Green

Busty Girl Comics

Books:

Making it Big – chicklit, suggested by a friend. This one is set in a universe where fat women are considered the beauty standard. Unfortunately the heroine is vapidly white/blonde/straight, but the descriptions of fat beauty are very charming.

Okay, this is an emergency situation. I really want some more reading recs, if anyone can help out here.

V. Suggested Activities!

Belly dance. There is no wrong size to be a belly dancer. In fact, every woman’s body is perfect for it. Slim women can be graceful, swaying like snakes. Plus-size women swing their hips like the rise and fall of empires. There should be a good mix in every class, and if your teacher isn’t body-positive, drop her like a stone. But she will be. Belly dance can be empowering.

Art modeling. Nothing like a woman with mass to inspire fine art. If you think your personality can handle getting naked in front of twenty strangers, holding still, and being a Muse, this is a great way to redefine yourself and your body as art/subject. And when you walk around the room and see all the different visions and revisions of You as Art, maybe you’ll start to agree with Blog Mirror.

Horseback riding. Put on a sports bra and let a big gorgeous animal do the running around. Horseback riders use their bodies to communicate with gigantic, dangerous beasts, building a relationship with thigh-squeezes and gentle hands. That’s a good thing to know. And good thigh-squeezes to learn. For, you know, stuff.

Yoga. The only stuff I understand is dance-warm-ups, but I’ve… I’ve heard that it’s a thing? That people do?

VI. Conclusion

OH SHIT I FORGOT TO WRITE A CONCLUSION!!!!

Figure One: Oh my god, I am so glad to have this on my blog. Isn’t it perfect?

One thing that I’d like to do with myself is to teach The Public how to describe how to spot and mock Bad Science. Since I don’t actually know any Public, my poor little blog will have to bear the burden as I practice.

Bad Science! I love it so much. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to pick up a newspaper and get worked up about Bad Science Journalism. Oh, how I love stomping into comment threads, snatching the toys out of people’s hands, and destroying them, so that they can never take pleasure in Psychology Today again. ELODIE SMASH EVO-PSYCH! Delicious. Such delicious smashing.

ELODIE WANT SHARE JOY OF SMASHING WITH FRIENDS! So welcome to Smash Bad Science, Issue Number 1: The Bizarre Case of the Doubling Marmot.

We’re going to start with a lovely easy one: this article. (Warning: Link leads to Daily Mail.)

Figure Two:  Widdle moist nosicles. This is perfect for my blog.

This article is perfect for this, really. It’s one of those heartwarming cutesy stories that feature a small child bonding with adorable animals. So many mammals! Who wouldn’t love it?!

Now, if you read through the article, there is a piece of Bad Science Journalism that you should be able to spot without any fancy degrees or special marmot-loving status. See if you can find it! The answer is behind the cut.

I’ve highlighted it below – did you get it right?

Figure Three: Spot the Bad Science!

“Bizarrely, the animals are heavier in the autumn, when they DOUBLE THEIR WEIGHT.”

“BIZARRELY, marmots gain weigh in the autumn.”

Run this through your head a few times while I draw your attention to this scene. This is the Daily Mail newsroom on August 26, when this sad little article was brought forth into the world.

===

“RACHEL,” an Editor howls at Rachel McDermott, the perpetrator of this article. “COME IN HERE FOR A MOMENT.”

Rachel stumbles in, glassy-eyed, poorly-animated. She is not bright-eyed or bushy-tailed, because she is, in fact, a small colony of frightened and exploited hamsters, piloting a broken-down human suit. “Yes, Ma’am,” the Lead Hamster shrills.

“RACHEL.” The Editor is not capable of speaking without depressing the CAPSLOCK BUTTON, as she is actually a long-dead consciousness trapped in a decaying mortal form whose vocal cords have long since rotted away, such that she can only communicate by hunt-and-peck typing, like a grandmother on the internet. “RACHEL, THERE IS NOTHING BIZARRE IN YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE MARMOTS.”

“Oh, Editor,” the hamsters pipe sadly, “There is nothing bizarre about the marmots at all. They are sweet and cuddly and full of plush. Humans like them. See how the human child frolics with them, as if he was one of their littermates! See how they accept him as one of their pups.”

“PUT IN SOMETHING BIZARRE,” the Editor intones. “IT IS FOR…” The corpses’s eyes roll unanchored in their staring sockets. “HUMAN INTEREST. HUMANS LIKE INTEREST. YES. IT IS REMEMBERED.”

The Rachel’s hamsters sweat, under dozens of tiny hamster armpits. They cower in their fragile shell. “We are only little hamsters,” they think desperately, “We should never have left the pet shop. We know nothing of marmots! None of our articles are bizarre enough! How lonely we are.”

The Editor’s jaw gapes vacantly. “THE SMELL OF YOU EVOKES THE HUNGER. BURIED MEMORIES STIR. I MUST HAVE FLESH.”

Thinking quickly, the Rachel removes one of the hamsters from her gut area and tosses it into the rotting maw of her Editor. Another piece of her soul squeaks as it dies, and the other hamsters sigh in tiny unison. This happens every day. There is no mourning any more; this is the Daily Mail.

“RACHEL MCDERMOTT,” The Editor says. “YOU MUST ADD MORE MARMOT FACTS TO YOUR ARTICLE. MAKE IT… BIZARRE.”

The Rachel McDermott rocks unsteadily back to her desk, her feet-hamsters seizing with fear. She pulls up a Wikipedia article and stares blankly. Her hamsters struggle to comprehend. The article is full of long words like woodchuck and hibernation. The hamsters whine with trepidation.

“Bizarrely,” The Rachel McDermott types laboriously, hamsters trembling, “the animals are heavier in the autumn.”

====

THE ANSWER:

Marmots, also called woodchucks, groundhogs and whistlepigs, hibernate in the winter. They live off their fat stores, which they gain by munching from spring until autumn.

This is a Known Fact. It is as fixed, obvious and constant as the fact that bears poo in the woods. In fact, it is MORE fixed, MORE constant, because some bears don’t live in the woods, and ALL MARMOTS HIBERNATE. It is not bizarre – it is not remotely bizarre – unless you are a colony of frightened slave hamsters, a small child who still finds “Peekaboo” to be a Russian roulette of existential uncertainty, or the average target audience of the Daily Mail.

Great! Now I want to draw your attention to this article by the Daily Mail Online, published today (September 12.)

Figure Four: COINCIDENCE? CONSPIRACY?

What a bizarre scene, indeed! How absolutely wacky. How darling the marmots are! What excellent reportage! Chris Parsons of the Daily Mail, a gold star for YOU. You, sir, are a Journalist of the highest caliber. Nellie Bly has nothing on you.

But dear Chris Parsons, we are slightly concerned, because in your article we spotted this:

Figure Five: NOOOOOO CHRIS PARSONS NOOOOO!!!

CHRIS PARSONS! THAT IS PLAGIARISM! PLAGIARISM OF THE STUPIDEST CALIBER!

CHRIS PARSONS…. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO RACHEL!?!?

…

Figure Six: We apologize for the inconvenience. It gets very silly in here.

Anyway.

It appears that the extent of the Daily Mail’s research extends only to dragging themselves over to the Science Desk, where “Bizarrely, the animals are heavier in the autumn, when they can weigh up to 8kg, in comparison to 3kg in the spring months” is scribbled on a single damp Post-It note. This is where the rest of the shared Marmot Information file is kept. This is why all mentions of the marmots in the Daily Mail wax rhapsodically on the shyness, demureness and secretiveness of these rare Alpine creatures, displayed directly under a picture of a marmot draped with adoring squirrels, holding up the award for Most Extroverted Rodent.

Further comparisons between the articles reveal a rich seam of information. Interestingly, the marmots in both articles live in the same place, indicating that the little boy probably isn’t actually a marmotmaster- the animals seem to be quite well-socialized, casually mugging a 67-year-old two weeks later for his expensive camera equipment. In one of the pictures in the second article, they are actually seizing and tugging on his khaki pants, like children demanding a story.

“The 67-year-old from Germany watched on helplessly as the notoriously shy creature approached his camera,” Chris chuckles.

“They are notoriously shy around humans,” Rachel agrees, “beating their tails and chattering their teeth to try to warn us off before emitting loud whistles to tell other members of their colony to flee.”

Is this a love story after all? Did I have this completely wrong?

Chris stares into Rachel’s eyes. “Normally, when seeing an intruder, a marmot will become defensive and try to warn them off by beating their tail and chattering their teeth.” He leans closer.

“You know so much about marmots, Chris,” she whispers.

“Isn’t it bizarre?” he growls. They kiss like rodents emerging from hibernation…

But this isn’t entirely a case of a symbiotic love affair. Rachel called the Marmot Mountain the Groslocker area, but Chris more correctly identified it as Grossglockner; indicating that Chris’s hamsters are of slightly higher quality (although not averse to a bit of light plagiarism.) This, folks, in conclusion, is why the Daily Mail is not a Reputable News Source. Although I love the cute pictures of marmots.

Verdict: SMASH WITH ME, FRIENDS!

And also, do me a favor? If you spot any Bad Science in the news, please let me know! It doesn’t have to be as egregiously bad as this. Send me things that smell a bit off, or make you uncomfortable, or arguments about evolutionary biology that sound right except for the fact that they don’t seem to fit into reality.

Marmot kisses,

Elodie

Figure 1: Use images to attract and astonish strangers in a dynamic way, and also make up stories about them. Equine skeleton with fine hat, 2012. Called “The Hollow Horse,” this entity comes alive at night and orders chips and cheese from the late-night snack van.

THE FIRST LINE OF THIS POST IS EXTREMELY INTRIGUING! But not as good as the ones that come after it…

So after carefully mulling the lessons of the Writing Workshop, I realized that clearly, there is an enormous need for Excellent Blogging Tips. Folks were literally crying out for ways to get more blog traffic, wringing their pleading hands at a professional Science Blogger in the hopes of aid. She suggested Twitter and reading other people’s science blogs. Those are great ideas, and I’m going to go one step farther by adding to them, because the only person who likes to shout privately into the abyss is me.

Which is why I’m the perfect person to write these tips! I don’t actually understand blogging, nor do I know what to do with traffic. This blog was completely unintentional, and it only seems to work because it contains its own momentum – I think it’s powered entirely by the awesomeness of its readers, because I can’t explain it. I am not an expert. That’s why I’m writing this for people who are Too Cool for Traffic.

1. WRITE GOOD STUFF.

On the surface, this looks like part of the Printed Newspaper’s philosophy of the Cutting Edge – like, as a tip, it should probably rank up there with “don’t put soap in a vagina” or “never hide from a velociraptor in a kitchen.”

However, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a Creative Person. Actually, I know you are, because all of my readers are attractive and brilliant, with incredible stories to tell. And there is a very big mistake that Creative People make over and over again.

Writing badly.

I am guilty of this. You are guilty of this. Sometimes you write badly, and you hope that nobody will notice. Because normally when you write, you hold something back. You don’t give it all you have. Why would you, you may reason, when it’s only a blog post?

I’ll tell you now: always write your little heart out. Always give it the very best you have, even if you only have something small to say. Write like you’re trying to hold the world together. Write like you’re trying to hold wounds closed with your hands. Write like you’re trying to save a hatchling that’s fallen from the nest, and its heart will keep beating only if you tell the truth. Write for your life, for your lover’s life, or for God and apple pie, if you like those things. Ideally, write like you’re trying to get a stranger to fall in love with you. As Dear Sugar says: Write like a motherfucker. Read that linked post and then come back here, and sit down on the floor with me, and let’s talk about your writing:

The second heart inside me beat ever stronger, but nothing miraculously became a book. As my 30^th birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have to suffer. By which I mean work.

Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like A Motherfucker

Of course, your writing often has a workaday purpose: you write to inform, to please, to make someone laugh or to make them angry; to sell something, to inform someone of a death, or to acquire a new scientific grant. This doesn’t mean that you can coast along  by writing something bad. Not everything you write will have a Heart of Gold or a Sting in its Tail, but even a story about trendy colors of nail-polish or the most delicious sandwich can have heart,  humor, teeth, and kick.  Even a scientific grant needs to get its readers excited, standing up and saying “Yes! Fund this fine researcher! Pay them a living wage!” as they fill out blank checks with a flourish. Even an obituary needs to look forward, though it may only be towards the place to send the flowers. Every press release must contain the seeds of its own momentum.  You may not be champagne-cool and sparkling with every perfect word, but you have no excuse to be lazy and dull.  This is true of you, and of your blog.

Don’t trouble your reader with a pussyfooting bloodless post when we all know that you can write to stop the stars in their orbits. I know you better than that, and I’m calling you on your bullshit right now. I’m fucking tired of looking at articles, hoping for connection or instruction, and finding only some pissant saying something pre-recorded and unexamined about marmots.  There’s enough of that in the world. There are plenty of people writing to please the dying elderly. Give the rest of us a piece of candy, or a piece of heartbreak, or a piece of truth.

The root of your fear is that if you spend yourself on a piddling little blog post, then you’re spending a finite resource, your Writing Ability. Then, when you reach into the well to write a book, all of your writing will be gone. You’re scared that you’ll use yourself up, burn yourself out by writing small good things. This is actually the opposite of true. This is how you work yourself into writer’s block.

And you hoard your good ideas. I know you do. You need to stop doing that now, by the way. Spend them as soon as you have them. For one thing, good ideas are tricksy and unfaithful, and they love to share themselves. It is a given that as soon as you have a good idea, somebody else has it too, and the winner is the one who writes it down first. Get them into the world and keep moving! You’ll only get more if you use the ones you’ve been given.
Spend the currency of your creativity – spend it fast, spend it joyfully, pass it along as soon as it comes into your hands. This is the only kind of money that works this way, so make the most of it. As soon as you stop, your muscles will cramp up and the well will run dry. Spend all that you have, every time. I promise you that it is the only way to get more. It is like any other magic: you only get more of it if you are deserving.

Horcruxes and hoarding always seem like good ideas at the time – but as investments for the soul, they provide diminishing returns.

2. GET A MORE SOPHISTICATED BULLHORN.

I do want to clarify that there are lots of different reasons why someone might want to make their blog popular. The first reason is More Raw Eyes on Pages, which is something that people seem to regard as the Magical Talisman to Success. It’s a beautifully cloying fantasy: the thought of becoming suddenly famous for scribbling away in your little blog. First the spotlight switches on, and then the lit staircase is revealed; awestruck and modest, you begin to climb; then the benevolent grandfatherly editors descend, petting you and complimenting you on your X-hits-an-hour. “We hear you’ve been making a stir on the Internet,” they say warmly, and then you get passed ever upwards until you are standing at the top of the stairs, the Pinnacle of Achievement, looking down at your book deals and wondering if Amy Adams will play you in the movie. “How glad I am that so many people look at my blog,” you think, graciously accepting some golden award from the fair and whimsical hands of Amy Adams herself.

Figure Two: I call dibs, by the way.

Unfortunately this fantasy comes from the same place as “The One Where You Are the Sexy New Companion on Doctor Who” and “The One Where David Attenborough Narrates Your Life Like A Nature Documentary.” These are awesome fantasies, and sometimes I act them out in front of the bathroom mirror, often while naked and gesturing with a toothbrush. “Girl and chipmunk communicate in a rare moment of communion,” David Attenborough says in hushed tones. “This behavior has never before been observed in the wild Elodie. What a fleeting glimpse of natural wonder. Is that a zit on her chin?”

Believe me, I understand. But these are fantasies. Just because we have the Internet doesn’t make them suddenly three-dimensional. The Staircase to Fame actually takes work to climb up, and it isn’t the same Staircase as the one to Success or even to Fabulous Wealth or Love. Eyeballs staring at your page don’t make you prosperous – life just doesn’t come that easily.

If you just want More Raw Eyes on Pages, well, then, by all means, take to Twitter and Tumblr, and spam comment threads, and enclose a link to your blog in a letter to your auntie.  But what you’re doing is advertising. People are pretty good at spotting advertising, and they don’t usually want to hold still to have things forcibly sold to them. Do you watch the ads before Youtube videos, or seriously consider that why, yes, indeed, you would like some Cash for Gold? Do you ever pause a program in the middle – “QUICK, HONEY, I MUST BUY THIS PRODUCT! IT HAS AWAKENED A NEED INSIDE ME, A HUNGER FOR QUALITY GARDENING TOOLS. LET US HIE TO THE B&Q POSTHASTE AND PURCHASE THEIR FINEST RAKE, LIKE THE LADY IN THE MOVING PICTURE HAS.” No. Nobody does. If the only thing you have to Tweet is “Look at this blog post!” then the end result will be that nobody looks at your Twitter anymore. Eyes on Pages won’t cure poor content.

I don’t like Eyes on Pages. It makes me feel itchy to think about them, and the people who want them seem a bit weird. But because I love you and have faith in you, here’s How To Quickly Get More Eyes on Pages:

• make your friends look at your stuff – YES, your real-life friends, what are you writing about that’s so awful that they, who love you, can’t see it? Don’t be coy, you’re the one begging for MOAR VIEWS.
• Twitter, used sparingly (2x tweets or less to advertise a post) or you can’t be my friend anymore.
• Effectively Tagged Posts, so that you show up on Google searches and possibly get tapped by the WordPress Fairy Wand for a feature.
• join a webring, blogging group or conspiracy consortium
• understand where traffic comes from and why – and accept that statistically, most people who read your blog will probably be bored Americans on their Monday lunch breaks.
• refer to unusual erotica somewhere on your page; I get a small but entertaining group of people who show up in the hopes of finding misspelled porn, and all they find is the link to Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn. I can only hope that they learned a valuable lesson about Google.
• put links on Facebook – actually quite effective, as most of your Facebook people love you and genuinely want to know what you are doing.
• get naked, paint yourself with your url, photograph yourself and put the pictures on Tumblr.

• legitimately advertise, with a fine upstanding purveyor of clicks such as Project Wonderful!
• purchase advertising with a blogger who is similar to you but cooler and more famous – for example, if you like to write about atheism, consider buying an ad on Freethoughtblogs; if you like to give your cat manicures, then advertise with the Bloggess.
• use interesting pictures at the top of your article (see Figure One) and open with an intriguing first line (see First Line.) Not only is this good practice, it means that when the article is shared on Facebook or Twitter, the preview will look attractive. Or terrifying. Both are good.
• Pursue a blog award in your field of interest.
• update frequently but erratically. This is supposed to bring in more viewers because they’re never quite sure when you’ll update your page, so they’ll keep checking back.
• Link to other people in your blogroll, and hopefully they will link to you.
• Carve your blog URL into the skin of bananas at the supermarket. It will be invisible at first, but as the bananas age, the message will turn black, and then the abyss will open and the darkness will come again a͟r̷̀a̷͞gk̨͟͠b͜l̵à͢͟ś͘kj͡ḩ̴̀ ̧͘B̢L̴̷OG͝B̢҉̡LO͝͏GB̷͠͡L̵̸O̵̸G͏. (Note: Do not actually mess with fruit at the supermarket.)
• Get business cards with your blog url on them. Attend conferences, workshops or conventions in your field of interest! Pass them around like STDs in a small conservative town.
• wizard trickery.
• Put up fliers advertising a lost pet dinosaur, and have all of the little tear-off tags at the bottom be links to your blog (awwwwww.)
• If you can afford it, and you really really care, pay your blogging engine for a unique domain – as in arglebargle.com rather than arglebargle.blogspot.bloggedy.co.uk , which is impossible to remember and doesn’t look  pretty in links.
• Learn what Tumblr is.
• Produce content for another website (such as Cracked or the Guardian) and link your profile back to your blog. (Note: if your blog simply consists of cross-posts from the more famous website, please take your left hand off the keyboard, hold it a foot away from your face, and then slap yourself briskly until you become a better person.)
• When in doubt, add more butts.

Figure Three: Source cited.

I do not do most of these things, except for the one with the butts.

3. LEARN THE LESSONS OF TRUE FRIENDSHIP AND CONNECTION.

The other reason that you might want more traffic is to meet Engaged Readers.

Perhaps you’d like to run an academic advice blog, or a forum for crowdsourcing renewable energy ideas. Maybe you’d love to form an online writing workshop for grownups, or to find or create an enclave to meet Your People. Maybe you think it would be quite cool if your blog brought you to new friends, experiences and ideas. Perhaps you are just writing for the love of the craft, and you would like to share it with other people who do the same.

In my opinion, the nicest part of blogging is also the most frightening. You are part of a community, and you cannot guarantee that everyone who comes over to your blog is a nice person who wishes you well. The world of blogging is at once huge and tiny; I just had the loveliest brunch imaginable with a blogger who is so much cooler than me that I completely forgot that we’d just met. We’d unknowingly brushed up against each other in a series of bloggy-coincidences, and then discovered that we physically lived within shouting distance of each other.  To put yourself on the Internet in this way is to invite this kind of uncontrolled, synchronistic energy into your life. It can make it richer and scarier. You might not enjoy it or seek it out. But you cannot deny that as soon as you log in to your blog, you are a part of something larger than yourself, contributing to a body of work that is vast, unknowable, intimate and inescapable.
If you want to blog, it helps to be an engaged member of the community yourself. (Note: I am very bad at this.) Find  communities that you like to participate in, see what they’re doing right, and make friends – without hope of clicks, ad revenue, personal gain or whatever bullshit might have brought you here. Increasingly, an active and dynamic Internet Social Life is an important part of people’s lives. Celebrate that. Become a part of it.

• The best way to learn is to listen. The best way to be heard is to listen. Don’t listen in that way where you’re just nodding time and thinking about what you’ll say when the other person stops speaking.
• Bloggers are told to ask a question at the end of their posts, to invite commentary from lurkers and regulars. If you want to do this, make it a good open-ended question.
• Try your best to engage. If you are naturally introverted, and find this to be difficult or draining, note that self-care comes first; try low-impact online socializing like commenting on blogs. Seek out spaces where you feel comfortable – and take a look around while you’re there, see what makes that community so pleasant.
• If you produce content, make it beautiful, in the way that only you can.
• Whatever you write about, make your place a good place to be; a place that you would invite somebody back to.
• When writing content, assume that your readers are as clever as you, if not more so.
• Try not to say stupid things. If you must say stupid things, try not to hurt anybody. And when you have said a stupid thing in public, try to acknowledge it, and prepare to be called out. Take responsibility and apologize for the stupid things you have said.
• When you tear down something that is bad, that is good and true, but you must raise up something in its place – even if it is only a way to be better.
• Celebrate. Elevate.
• BE CONTROVERSIAL. Nobody else will tell your truth.
• BE CONTROVERSIAL. Anybody can review a sandwich, but I don’t read anybody’s blog.
• BE CONTROVERSIAL: it is how you know you’re doing it right.
• There are things that you have to say that nobody else does.  Trust that the people who need to hear your words will find them.
• If nobody else wants to hear them, I will. If you want to put a link to something here, then I will look at it with great joy.

4. THOUGHTS AND A BLESSING TO WALK AWAY WITH

Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, or who said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

Attributed to Siddhārtha Gautama

 

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

– Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird

 

 

May you be blessed on your brave search for the truth.

May your soul lead you to pools and rivers and oceans of wine.

May you drink and be intoxicated by love;

May you swim and be strengthened by life;

May you grow bolder and kinder;

May you be grateful.

-Elizabeth Loesser

 

This is not required reading

When people ask me the well-meaning question “What did you do this weekend?” they usually haven’t prepared themselves for the answer.

This is their fault. Reasonable people should always be prepared.

So it occurred to me this time to document EXACTLY what I did this weekend, with pictures, as if people cared, so that I’ll have a baseline for comparison when I am elderly and need to remember exactly what Kids Did Those Days. I will hit people with my stick and tell them tales of the Awkward Army, in those muddled golden days when we all knew how to handle exploding cars, and we made our hellhounds by hand, dammit.

This is not required reading, contains little of educational value (except instructions on how to sew a hellhound) and will not be on the test.

FRIDAY NIGHT

We had determined to go to the pub, by virtue of me running around and barking at my coworker’s heels like a demented border collie in desperate need of a drink. Sadly, there is no efficient way to herd scientists; we just get confused and flustered, and start defensively making balloon animals.

Worse, the One True Scotswoman (OTS), whom I am nicknaming Merida for the purposes of this post, was all “oh deary me I can’t go out, I absolutely must marfle warfle farfle and so forth. But it is making me sad and when I am sad I get panicky and perhaps I will just explode my heart instead.”

For some reason, I said “Well then, the best way to cheer you up is to get you a balloon animal!” so I went and asked my colleague Haverford for a balloon animal. For Haverford you must picture a larger-in-every-dimension British version of Aziz Ansari. Haverford kindly dropped the very important work he was doing and showed Merida and I how to make balloon dogs, which are the only animals he knows how to make. As befits a surgeon, he was extremely patient and condescending, and told us repeatedly that the balloons were not going to pop. We did not believe him. Making balloon animals is a very strange sensation; it feels incredibly naughty, and your socialization rebels against it. It’s like the first few times you snap a piece of glass on purpose. The squeaking is weird, and it all makes you feel uncomfortable. My balloon dog looked woobly and hallucinogenic. I put some worried-looking eyes on him with marker, which helped.
Eminently Sane Kathryn came and watched us in a kind of long-suffering way, like a kindergarten teacher looking at her most remedial students. Haverford’s pink dog was upsetting in the way that pink balloon animals always are, with their connotations of twisted weenises. But Merida’s dark blue dog looked like something you could cuddle.  I held up my pale-blue, slightly mutated balloon dog.

“Very nice,” ESK said, radiating patience.

“He’s not very doggy, though,” I said.
“He’s transcendental,” she said soothingly. “He’s transcended the spirit of weaselness.”

“Dogginess,” I corrected.

“He’s a transcendental dog, yes,” ESK said, and started trying to mind-control us into fucking leaving for the pub by staring at us intensely.

“I’m naming him Mohandas,” I said lovingly. Nobody got it. “Like Gandhi?”

“Mahatma,” Haverford said.

“MOHANDAS,” I snapped. “Gandhi’s first name is Mohandas.”

“AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT BECAUSE I AM BROWN,” said Haverford.

“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW IT TO BE A DECENT HUMAN BEING, WHICH YOU AREN’T.”

“Pub pub pub pub,” ESK said intensely, so we went.

“Are you taking Mohandas to the pub?” people asked in a tired kind of way and I was all, “Peasants, I’m takin’ him everywhere.”

As we walked, ESK invited me to a zombie walk.

“I’m sorry,” I said, really meaning it, “But I have a fear of zombies. It particularly affects me here in the city, because the Shit-Goes-Down-Plan doesn’t really work in a neighborhood that can only be left via a very narrow Victorian bridge, in a city crammed full of people, in a country that doesn’t allow weapons more dangerous than a loaded hamster. It was different back home,” I went on, “when we had a shotgun and a rifle under the bed – and a small Sig Sauer, for company. What would I have here, Eminently Sane Kathryn? I could only defend myself with the block of wood we use to keep the window open.”

ESK nodded compassionately. “We have a crossbow,” she offered. And then, “Yes. Yes, seriously. Of course it’s real.”

But they only had one, so I decided not to go on the zombie walk. I’ve developed this quiet dread that on a zombie walk, some of the zombies might be real, and how could you tell?

In the end, ESK urgently had to buy toothpaste, and everyone else had fallen behind, so Haverford and I were the only ones to make it to the pub. We propped ourselves up attractively and discussed life until somebody stopped guarding their table, at which point Haverford bulled his way through the crowd and sat on it, to discourage further colonization. ESK avec toothpaste dropped into a chair and distracted me, and so for a good while I did not notice that –

MOHANDAS WAS GONE.

I ran back to where I’d propped him, only to find him gone from there too! I looked around the pub for his bright blue self, and saw … that some people … had stolen Mohandas. He was leaning against their pints of beer and his eyes looked worried indeed. But the people looked loud and obnoxious and a few sizes larger than me, and the last time I’d tried to stand up for myself under British pub conditions, I’d almost gotten Drs Glass and Frackland into a brawl. I had no protocol for this situation.

I went back to my table, confused and upset.

“I’d be a little flattered.” ESK offered an artist’s perspective. “If somebody liked my art enough to take it home…”

“Yes,” I said, striving for strength, “I am flattered. Mohandas will understand. He is simply ascending to a higher level of… of…”

“That’s bullshit,” Haverford declared, and stormed off.

He returned a moment later bearing Mohandas like a goddamn god of victory. I am not kidding when I tell you that this moment made my night; he was crowned with glory and light, and the crowds parted before him like the sea before a prophet. Even Mohandas looked pleased.

“What did they say?” ESK asked.

“They said morfleforfleumph,” Haverford said, “Their mouths were full.”

Then everybody in the world showed up to the pub and we spent most of it shouting at each other and drawing maps.

However, there was a difficult moment where Mohammed spotted Mohandas and decided to practice his own balloon-animal skills, which … got away from him:

He got the front part okay, but after that he just kept making butts.

I slouched home, handed Mohandas to Dr Glass, and proceeded to consume about 3000 calories.

Thus spake Elodie: thus endeth the Book of Friday.

SATURDAY

On Saturday I had to go into work because there were rumors that something had exploded, and also, I had to feed some cells. I looked at everything, made soothing “Hrrm” noises so that everyone would know that The Situation Was Well In Hand, and dusted it all down with unicorn dust and pixie wishes. My work complete, I ran to –

THE FIRST EUROPEAN CAPTAIN AWKWARD MEETUP!!!!!!!!

For which I was late. C’est la me.

It was really lovely! Rachel had made a big friendly sign that said “AWKWARD ARMY,” which made everybody feel at home. (And she left it behind! So I stole it.)

They were terribly cool people! I started talking to a guy who wasn’t actually a member of the Awkward Army, but who had come along to support a friend, in case we were all weird people from the Internet. Which we were, but he felt safe leaving her. Anyway, it transpired that he paints these little figurines, and people play wargames with them. I was utterly charmed by this. I had no idea that the little figurines, which I only knew of vaguely, weren’t just… made. THEY ARE HANDMADE! It was pleasantly like discovering a lost, but compatible, tribe. I wanted to understand this career at a molecular level.

He did not believe me.

“You are one of the most worryingly sincere people I’ve ever met,” he said. “Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. Every fiber of my British programming is telling me to run away and hide under the table.”

“Is it my teeth,” I asked.

“Partly,” he said, “It’s partly your teeth.”

Rachel was amazing and I secretly harbored the hope that she would be my best friend in a 1940’s girl-detective story and we would solve mysteries together, mysteries mostly involving cupcakes, but sometimes involving plucky dogs.

TWO OF THE PEOPLE THERE had heard of microRNAs, a fiendish little class of molecules that my life has revolved around since I was a teenager, and not only that, but they studied them too, which made me feel like less of a molecular-biology-hipster. I don’t think anybody reading this blog will properly realize what a terrifying coincidence this is. But I don’t like to talk about work, since when I talk about science I get excited and stammer and might poke somebody’s eye out, or get defensive and weird, or suddenly start talking through a sockpuppet, or using ridiculous literary metaphors, or something. This comes across really well with non-scientists, who think that I’m sociable, but really badly with scientists, who slowly realize that I’m not very good at biochemistry and am doing it completely by accident, and then they look at me with pity. (I studied evolutionary biology with a pinch of neuroscience and a side order of English, but then I realized how much I like money.)

Also, while we were there, I finished knitting a sock, and used it as a sockpuppet, which is a memory that we’ll all just have to live with.

We all talked about our zombie apocalypse survival plans, and the conversation flowed like wine.

Three of the people there were Lurkers, meaning that they don’t participate in the community, mostly because of Nerves. I understand this on an abstract level, but I’ve gotta say, Guys, if you’re reading this, I dare you to comment. Double-dog-dare you.

COMMENT ON THIS POST RIGHT NOW AND I WILL GIVE YOU A BIG HUG AND THEN YOU WILL WIN.

And nobody believed that my real name isn’t Elodie.

ETA: Somehow I forgot that after everybody had gone home, and I was still sitting nicely by myself, Dr Glass appeared in his very own special ray of light, and he took me out to a movie, which was showing a few feet away. The Watershed is a pub-cafe as well as a large indie cinema, you see. He wore a blazer and riding boots and everything.

We went to see “Beasts of the Southern Wild” which was very good and we didn’t cry. And then we went home and had fajitas. THIS WEEKEND, YOU GUYS. SO GOOD.

SUNDAY

In the afternoon, Dr Glass decided that it was time to take Scootaloo for a run. Scootaloo is our car. I named her; Dr Glass doesn’t really understand that she’s named after a My Little Pony. But she is so very tangerine-colored, you see; and she’s about the size of a loveseat, but sideways. Her tires are the size of salad plates. She’s actually an errant cousin of the TARDIS family, though, because you can fit most of a lifestyle inside her, including pieces of furniture that are actually larger than the car.

Anyway, she is very old and a bit rattly, and anyone over the height of 5’9″ cannot physically drive her. If we don’t take her out every week, she pretends that she is dying, and ends up costing a lot of money. Her last trick was to create a giant cloud from her exhaust so that anybody tailgating us would find themselves enveloped in a dense and eldritch fog. I think it’s a defense mechanism. Like a squid with ink. But more carcinogenic.

This time,  Scootaloo waited until we were in a very awkward place before she started flashing lights and smelling weird and emitting festive clouds. She was overheating. And the House of Glass Protocol for an Overheating Car clearly states that one should:

• maneuver car into a safe and comfy place to leave her
• allow engine to cool for at least half an hour
• soothe Elodie’s twanging nerves with hot cocoa or something
• pour water (hopefully mixed with emergency coolant supply) into reservoir
• drive on
• if lights come on again, stop and repeat, as needed
• get home
• forget about it.

It’s a very good plan. And, as Dr Glass pointed out innocently, we were within striking distance of IKEA. We could easily make it to that hallowed Valhalla, pick up a few things, and drive our nicely-chilled car straight home without taxing our strength.

And I had promised to make him a three-headed dog.

It was very true. We’re going to an underworld-themed party, and he’d liked the idea of having his very own Cerberus; I’d foolishly admitted that it would be very easy to make with a few cheap stuffed animals, like they have at IKEA. I replayed this conversation in my head, clawed hands clutching frantically at my seatbelt as Scootaloo bucked and snorted her way towards IKEA.

But IKEA always calms me down. I think they pipe in a drug, like how casinos pipe in extra oxygen. Otherwise you’d probably start ramming people in the ankles with your Ikea-cart. We acquired the requisite cheap stuffed dogs, after a lot of intense puppy-related debate that appalled some pearl-clutching Brits, and toddled home in our steaming car, which appalled some car-driving Brits. “It’s not smoke,” I mouthed loftily at them, “It’s steam.”

We got the dogs home. One large one and two puppyesque ones. Since I always have to do the dirty work, I assembled them appealingly for their photographs and then got to work with scissors. BEHOLD! How to Sew A Three-Headed Dog!

step one: assemble dogies

step two: question life choices

ARE LIFE CHOICES AWESOME, Y/N?

step three: life choices are awesome. continue. cut off puppy’s head.

This part was a little disturbing. We’ll add it to the List of Things We’re Strongly Socialized Against Doing:

• Breaking Glass
• Twisting Balloons
• Engaging In Conversation With Elodie
• Cutting Heads Off Stuffed Puppies

Good job, team! We’re breaking down those barriers.

step four: make a cruciate (cross-shaped) incision across the shoulders of the larger dog, with the arms of the cross extending across the haunches. sew a puppy head to each arm, turning the seams inward so that the fur will blend.

Infernal Anatomy is a difficult subject, so just do your best. A certain element of unnaturalness will only help the effect.

step five: blah blah do the rest, it’s boring to write about sewing and at this point your husband has fallen in love with the Golden Cerberus Retriever and wants to play with it. (note: large dog comes with closable mouth for serious occasions.)

step six: lulled by cuddliness of hellhound, husband abruptly takes a nap.

step seven: after nap test, experiment to make sure that your Cerberus will fit in with your home decor.

GOOD SEWING EVERYBODY!

Next time on “Crafts from Hell,” we’ll demonstrate Six Uses of Sulfur and talk about my Pomegranate Costume! Why a pomegranate, you may ask? Because… Persephone… ate six seeds… andthatswhywehavewinter. Er.

This is why I need a sockpuppet to talk to scientists.

And that is how I made a Heavenly Dog and a Hellish Dog in the same weekend.

So how were your weekends? What have you been up to, guys? Also, is my smile really that scary?

P.S. If you are a lurker, come out and we will throw you a party.

Sometimes it worries me what people search for.

Sometimes it worries me more that they actually find this blog.

Here are some search terms from the past month, illustrated with helpful pictures, so that you can share in my fear, distress and delight.

“your awesomeness can’t possibly be described.”

Try anyway.

“The green knight without color”

surely you could have imagined this for yourself?

.

“dodo master tutorial”

step one: dodo. step two: shading. step three: extinction.

.

“koennen rosa beeren schlecht werden”

this phrase is nowhere on my blog. how did this happen?

.

“I am trapped in bad science”

SCIENCE MONSTER SYMPATHIZE SO MUCH! HUGS TIME.

.

“how much do hamsters cost at the marmot pet store”

if you have to ask, you can’t afford them.

.

“boobs are not spheres”

well done. this is sterling evidence that you have seen – and even touched – an actual boob in real life.

/

“she has bit of belly fat”

this makes her prettiest dinosaur.

.

“how to cut rounded glass cleanly”

is this what you meant?

.

“black and green knights black and green knights black and green knights”

i don’t think you understand how google works.

.

“can you spot the marmot”

hint: he’s somewhere on this page

.

“in the book king arthur, why was the black knight dressed in all black?”

seriously who are you

/

“things you don’t know about Charles Darwin”

In case you were wondering: yes, I’m cracking up.