Life and Times of an Eclectic

It's not that she never says it. It's not that she uses the wrong name for you. It's not that she addresses a face you hate with all the love for what's in her mirror.

It's that she does not talk. Ever.

Your mother is action, reaction, agony. She is nails on a chalkboard, on your soul, across your face. She is a face in a mirror and eyes that you wish never met yours.

She wants you to look at her when she wants answers of you. You can only guess at the questions, but you know every bit of you isn't what she expects. You will never be her answer.

When you first dared to ask questions of your own, you were naive enough to voice them out loud. Your mother didn't know what to make of this. (Your mother never made anything, anything real. You didn't know that then, when you were still making yourself.)

What your mother does not know, she ignores. What your mother cannot ignore, she adores. What your mother cannot ignore, she devours.

In your mother's tongue, adoration and consumption are synonyms.

Your questions were never answered, so you made your own, became your own.

Then she really hated you. And for the first time in your living memory, she wasn't silent anymore.

(Your dead memory recalls lullabies.)

(Your dead memory says that you sang them to her.)

You wore dresses, you sang, you spoke out. Your mother screamed fit to deafen you but that wasn't enough to blind you to her loss of control. You had broken her mirror and so she cursed you with your old name and bound you with your dead body in prayer that you would rot.

Your corpse had been your prison for longer than you'd been alive.

For me, it's because, as a child, I was incredibly cranky, and as soon as caffeine-free Coke was introduced, Mom had me start drinking that, and, hey, I got a lot less crabby, so that made me want to avoid caffeine. I also never really cared for the smell of coffee, either, so had absolutely no interest in drinking even decaf.

Fast forward to when I was thirteen staying with my Nana and Papa for a few weeks in the summer and they had little coffee flavored candies in a dish. "Candy??" my intrigued brain said. Papa told me I could have some and lo, I discovered that coffee, when paired with cream and sugar, had a complexity that hit the same itch as good chocolate.

1 note: I quit being a sheriff

10 notes: I start a rebellion

100 notes: I take over the dynasty

1,000 notes: I start the first golden age of China

@archetypal-archivist So. You picked the number that the RNG decided is first in the character archive. And I find that very funny.

Well, this wasn't the whole that I had in mind but MMD was throwing a hissy fit and trying to delete my work, so this is what we get for now.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.