Superfast jellyfish,

Baked summer squash with cream and parmesan bread crumbs, Dining In by Alison Roman - I think the absolute ease of this recipe offsets the pain of turning your oven on during the summer. So yummy and decadent, I just eat this as a main for dinner bc I live alone and I can. Gonna be making this all zucchini season

Stilton & Walnut Crackers, Barefoot Contessa - Absolutely addictive, no one in my family fucks heavily with blue cheese except for me and my mom and yet I still know for a fact I am going to be busting this recipe out as a Thanksgiving snack. I love making my own crackers

Chocolate chip brioche, Red Currant Bakery - I found the dough hook attachment to my stand mixer so I'm about to go crazy on enriched doughs. This one couldn't have been simpler and was great to gift to my sisters. If I wasn't baking for a crowd/gifts, I would halve the recipe or use a different one. (Also one sister traveled with hers by plane and it held up)

Cabbage & miso butter noodles, Zoe B. Soderstrom (from her Cooking in Season series) - An absolute 10/10 for me. So easy, an elevated buttered noodle girl dinner, + cabbage is a total nutrient bonanza. I added tinned salmon to my leftovers, and I could easily see tearing up some rotisserie chicken if you needed to bulk this up

Torn Plum Browned-Butter Cake, Nothing Fancy by Alison Roman - got great reviews from my friends, I do think the marzipan-esque dough brings something pretty unique to the table and would love to try this with other stone fruits this summer.

your identity, your dignity and your worth as a woman have absolutely nothing to do with how or why abusive people lash out at you. the insidious narrative that survivors should feel special on some level for having been worthy of their abuse is battered wife rhetoric. it's the perpetrator-system of violence grooming you to accept, and even shamefully yearn for, violence it always intended to inflict. and women are so often complicit in repeating the narrative back to each other. sometimes it's very well meaning and springs up out of the solidarity of shared experience, trying to reclaim power from situations where power was wielded against you, but sometimes it's lana del rey sadgirl coquette I need a man who'll slap me around so I know he cares. sometimes it's eating disorders and self harm. the twinning of femininity and female worthiness with suffering, associating the scars of misogynistic violence with acceptance of one's femininity by somebody who hates you, is profoundly unhealthy and profoundly unfair.

bottom line: trans women have never needed to be identifiable by their abusers at a glance to be subject to misogynistic violence. they have never even needed to be out. remember the early days of the internet when online culture was so outspokenly misogynistic as a baseline that most women just never disclosed their gender, never went on mic, never posted pictures? would anyone ever seriously argue that women weren't subject to misogynistic abuse online until they broke anonymity? and that being the case, would it ever ever seem appropriate to hear someone had been doxxed or sexually harassed for disclosing her gender and respond "heh, proves you really are a woman"?

i decided to try a romcom i somehow missed i the 2000s 'head over heels' and i got 3 and a half minutes in and we're introduced to the lonely MC with bad taste in men as evidenced by her extremely short list of ex boyfriends, including her first boyfriend when she was 11 or something because i guess that's still relevant in her adult life.

so she's resigned herself to never finding love and prefers to ignore men to focus all her energy into her career.

this job is immediately presented as though it's for spinsters with no hope of ever finding a man.

the mc's lesbian bestie (whose first line involves her being scolded for being too sexual in the workplace, but moving on) points out their colleagues as evidence that they're doomed to a romance-less, sexless life if they don't switch up their shared career path. the colleagues are three old women, so-dubbed "the menopause triplets":

these women are presented as if they have no idea what's going on at any given moment. this is 2001, and presumably this is an entry level job requiring low effort and no experience.

then their boss bursts into the room, unceremoniously bumping a large painting into the door jam and walls, announcing that it's a new project for our MC.

our MC is thrilled to see the painting. apparently it's a light in the daily slog at her dreary job for loser women with nothing going on in their lives.

And that job is? Conservator of paintings (specializing in Renaissance) at the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The painting being handled like an old couch on its way to the curb?

The Bacchanal of the Andrians by Titian.

Her lesbian colleague who is presumably also a a highly trained & skilled curator finds it depressing that the MC is so excited about the painting.

so here's a super long post about strokes in general, and mine in particular/what I went through.