Derek (he/him/his)

“But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.”

“while I don’t want to speak on behalf of all trans men everywhere, I have noticed that sometimes we seem to enter into the project of transition with the following assumption: “I’m going to transition into something bad, that will make my life actively worse, make finding community more challenging, abandoning the moral project of being a woman, but there’s nothing to be done about it, so here goes.” This leads to, among other things, Glumness and Bad Affect, neither of which make suitable bedfellows for the Joy of Embodiment or Autonomy. I wonder sometimes if at least part of what that assumption does for us is protect us from having to defend our choices on the grounds of desire – Obviously I don’t want to be a man, I simply have to be, and must resign myself to being the least worst type of man possible. Sorry! Sorry. I’m trying to delete it.”

I love the song "Scarborough Fair" because it follows my favorite poetic structure:

turns out i did actually do that.