WittyProfileName2 [she/her]

There was this bloke who used to sit at the train station close to the uni I was attending at the time, he’d drink cans of alcohol and do a little trainspotting. We talked a couple of times and he gave me some advice that helped me get out of my shell and talk to people a lot more. I must’ve only chatted with him, like, once or twice but I think it made all the difference in pushing me into making friends in what would otherwise’ve been a very lonely and isolated part of my life.

Not sure if I’d class it as the craziest moment of my life, but it was like a scene out of a sitcom:

When I was a teenager I briefly worked part-time at a place that refurbished various household appliances. Donations came in through the front and ended up in back with very little looking over. We took all sorts in and the workshop floor was split into various departments based on what appliances they dealt with. I was a new hire and they were still cycling me 'round various departments, my least favourite one was when I was assigned to cleaning out used ovens.

One day this box came in and, like, we opened it up and there were various electronic massaging gizmos. So, my supervisor is pulling 'em out, he passes some of 'em to me to give a lookover to make sure they’re clean and do, like, PAT tests and stuff.

I’m plodding along and he gets to work on the rest himself. I’m doing the tests on this thing that’s like a plastic plate with this piece on the top vaguely shaped like a pair of cupped hands, when my supervisor calls me over to lend a hand. He’s got this black tube that goes a bit wider on one end, about as thick as my wrist. It looked kinda like a torch but with a cap screwed over the bit the light’s in.

His hands are a bit slippy so he’s having a hard time unscrewing the cap, so he asked me to have a go. Wider end pointed away from me, I wrapped my hand around the cap and gave it a good twist. The first clue I had that something was amiss was that my supervisor went bright red. I asked him what’s wrong and just told me to see for myself, so I turn the thing in my hand and see this silicone orifice looking back at me.

That was how I learnt what a fleshlight is.

NO

Tankie has been shifting way beyond its original meaning to just be a vague leftward stab, but being an anarchist and everything I don’t think it applies to me just yet

When I was still in the closet, I grew and maintained a big beard as part of my attempts at performative masculinity.

Not saying that this is what’s happening with most men who’re growing 'em out, but sometimes I see a bloke with a well maintained set of facial hair looking absolutely miserable and my egg radar starts shrieking.

• Favourites

• artsy (for sorting all the pretentious crap)

And then the rest are sorted via genre tag.

It’s a split between two things:

Firstly, I finally got my degree. People in my immediate surroundings got tired of the confirmed bachelor jokes after the first week of me making them.

And secondly, after a year and a half of waiting I got to talk to a gender service doctor back in February. Now I’m well on the way to get the bureaucracy part of my transition out of the way. And I’ll be getting my hormones soon.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and then try to envision everything my body just did to take that breath.

The intercostal muscles expanding an’ the diaphragm contracting to make a vacuum in the thoracic cavity.

The air rushing down my trachea, into my bronchus, then into the bronchioles.

The alveoli swelling individually as the air fills 'em.

My lungs filling the vacuum that the muscles created.

It’s a lot of things to keep ahold of all at once, so there ain’t the space in my mind to keep thinking of what annoyed me (until some daft bastard goes and does it again mind you).

I operate on the assumption that the overwhelming majority of people are nice, though I’ve run into more than my fair share of strangers that are complete dickheads. It feels like I’ve run into way more people who treat me kindly than cruelly (but that just be my own biases affecting my recollection).

Problem is, interacting with other people is tiring and after a long day I just want to curl up and stop existing but people waiting for the bus want to chat and strangers stop me in the street to make small talk.

Was added (yesterday I think), so now you can!

Might suffice.

Allegedly, when William the Conqueror first landed in England he tripped in the sand.

I’d’ve left a land mine where he was going to fall, turning the future king of England into a fine mist and a scattering of viscera.

Probably Sound of Thunder meself out of existence, but it’d be worth for the immediate chaos it would cause.

• the cape sundew I keep on my windowsill. As someone with a lot of house plants, it has been a godsend for keeping flies and other pests out of the house.

• my first aid kit. You never want to need one of these, but I’ve been glad to have it close to hand a fair few times

I don’t know how you walked away from The Shape of Water with such a shallow reading, but eh, not everyone’s taste in films is the same.

I have a great dislike for the sorts of horror films where horror is conveyed entirely by long drawn out tension into a jumpscare. It bores me and then I stop caring about what’s going on in the film. The Woman in Black is one that immediately springs to my mind, ironically because of how bland I thought it was. It’s what you’d get if you told chatGPT to write the script for a horror movie. Just a bloke stumbling 'round a house at night being scared by random shit punctuated by daytime exposition scenes. I know it was trying to trying to say something about grief but I just couldn’t care enough about it after the spooky violin lead up to the protagonist being startled by a tap making a loud noise when he turned it on.

Y’know, I’ve never thought about that before.

I guess, I would.

• Eager to discuss the cool things they’ve read.

• Able to make me laugh.

• Cleans up after themselves (I know, low bar).

• Communist of some stripe.

Superficial but:

• Physically stronger than me.

For what it’s worth, I do find this somewhat reassuring.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to where you are, but to hear that it could get better does make me feel a little less shitty.

Thank you.

I might have to try that, thank you.

I miss the silence of empty rooms.

I developed tinnitus earlier this year, and now I’m never gonna be able to just sit somewhere quiet and far away from everyone else and be alone with my thoughts. This ringing will follow me everywhere, drowning out the distant sounds of cars disturbing puddles in distant streets on a rainy night, obscuring all the subtle little noises that danced on the edges of my perception. But most of all robbing me of any truly quiet moment for the rest of my life.

It has its flaws, but imho Dark Souls 2 has some of the best moments in the series.

I’ll never forget riding the lift to Dragon’s Aerie for the first time.

Long story short, the next day I finally worked up the courage to talk to my GP about a gender service referral.