oh! worm!!

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

I've been thinking recently about the song "Life is a Highway" because I like the mental image of life as a journey. And as part of that, I've been really pondering on some of the experiences I had on my mission. Among the most common of all experiences shared by LDS Missionaries is the experience of trying to find someone or something that's really weird and out-of-the-way, and on the journey of life any time spent searching can feel frustrating when compared to the relief of finding, so I remember people often being annoyed at how long it took to find things as a missionary.

In Mexico City, for example, some neighborhoods do not have uniform house numbers (i.e., 1, 2, 3) and instead the inhabitants of the house pick their own house number (i.e., 42, 67, 69, 80085, etc) and that made it tricky to locate specific people. In one neighborhood I remember seeing 11 houses in a row all with #47 painted on the side because that was the jersey number of a very popular soccer player in he area. In some neighborhoods they'd skip house number 13 and have either two 12s or 2 14s. It was kinda fun and added some personality to the areas we were exploring, and that always felt very cool to me to just see how people lived in such a big and busy city, but I also wanna reaffirm that tracking people down was hard even if they wanted to be found. Which to clarify, most people don't want to be found by Mormon missionaries. But for us as missionaries, finding people was a regular challenge, and I developed a patented Lizardho technique for it! (for legal purposes that is a joke, it is not patented). The technique, called the "Figure It Out While We Go" technique, is one that I will teach you here:

It starts with getting a clear idea of where I'm heading. Not just the people I'm looking for, but how I'll know I've found them. If I only have some of the information, that can cause some challenges. For example, one time I was tasked with finding "Maria" and when we found her she had named her daughters Maria as well as a second name that was all theirs - for example, Maria Esperanza, Luz Maria, Maria Guadalupe, Maria Inez, etc. - So when we asked for Maria at the door, this kid, who was like 7, rolls his eyes and says "Maria, te tocan!" (roughly translated to "Maria, it's for you!" and cue my surprise when like 5 women all show up at the door and introduce themselves in a clearly well-practiced manner with all 5 of them in unison saying "Hello! I am Maria." Which was fun and silly and they clearly had practiced that for years as a family. But it also meant it took forever to figure out which one of these women had accidentally made eye contact with an elder 7 months prior in such a way that it convinced him to document her as a "investigator." So it was a largely unhelpful trip for everyone involved.

So if I could, I'd try and get an idea for what I was looking for and what I could see around it. Not just, for example, "Busco a Marco de la familia Gomez" but "Marco de la familia Gomez en una casa rosada por el centro de Nicolas Romero en casa 67, calle Alborada." And I would start by searching for the broadest part of that description by asking for directions from anyone who'd give me the time of day:

"Excuse me, do you know where Nicolas Romero is? I'm a bit lost..."

And with some simple directions I'd be on my way. It always started off vague. "Oh, yeah, go that way a bit and you'll get there, but it's a bit of a walk" but that was enough to start walking, and walking was usually getting me closer to where I was going. Sometimes we'd get bad directions and it'd take longer, and sometimes we'd get weird imprecise directions that slowed us down, but it was at least a vague direction and we could always course correct along the way.

The closer we got, the more specific we got, and the more helpful people were, until eventually I'd hear "Well yeah, you're in Nicolas Romero now!" and I'd be like "Awesome! Can you tell me where the town center is?" and start off that way. Once we got there, we'd start asking if anyone knew where Calle Alborada was, and then we could start looking for a pink house numbered '67,' which may be one of 4 houses numbered 67, and one of 5 houses that was pink, but only one of two houses that was pink-ish and numbered 67, which meant we could find the people we were looking for pretty quickly. It also made it easier to know when directions were unhelpful, such as if someone said "Oh, yeah, there's a guy named José who lives on Calle Alborada that's interested in hearing from y'all," where we could be like "Well, there's like 200 houses on that street and if all we have is a guy named José to look for then tracking him down is not a worthwhile endeavor."

This was a fun way to get directions and learn the area I was assigned to "work" in, but it's also applicable to others areas of life. For example, I a intimately familiar with feeling "lost," "stuck," and "confused." I know I seem like I've got my shit together at the moment (I don't but that's whatever", but I lived a lot of my life in a sort of quasi-permanent state of what I can really only describe as derealization (even though that's not quite accurate) and just looking, always, forever, for some way out of it. And the harder I looked, the harder it seemed to be to find. I read books, I thought about everything I did all the time, I even talked to other people who knew me and could give me advice, and all of it still felt insufficient for getting myself unstuck. I didn't know what to do, so I stayed stuck for a while before I realized that at a certain point I had to put down the map and just start walking. That at some point I just couldn't be expected to realistically navigate the tangled mess of streets and alleyways and thoroughfares and whatnot that cannot possibly all be accurately mapped in Mexico City, but I could just start walking and figure it out on the way.

Despite how I depict myself now, there was a point where I didn't know what gender dysphoria was. I remember asking a friend at church once who said "Oh, those are gay guys who cut off their dicks to trick straight people into sleeping with them!" He said it genuinely and in good-faith, not knowing any better because he was a victim of the Arizona public school system, same as me, but at the time that told me "Hey, that's not the right way, so don't go there," and I followed that advice tragically well.

A few years later at BYU I asked a professor of psychology what gender dysphoria was, and he described it as, and I quote, "a kind of physical schizophrenia where people hallucinate body parts they don't actually have" and I was like "Huh, weird, since the DSM-5 seems to define it different, but I guess you'd know best!" and left it at that to keep exploring options for another month until I met a transmasculine enby while hanging out with some friends who told me what gender dysphoria was and it all kinda clicked. From there, I knew I was likely, in some vague way, involved in the LGBTQ+ community, so I began to explore.

This exploration meant considering a lot of options, and that looks like taking a lot of weird, meandering paths while I try and get to the general area I am looking for. This meant defying gender roles in some important ways (like learning to cook, something I always knew wasn't gendered but had always been kinda treated as gendered in the church; like going camping with guy friends and opening up to them about how I'd been feeling, like reading and talking to people whose experiences mimicked mine in some way, anything to keep moving towards something). Finally, after some digging around, I started investigating gender dysphoria again and figuring out if it was a label for me.

Y'all know how this story ends, but at the time I did not. When I decided to transition, I was mostly treating it as an experiment. In other words, now that I had an area of identity that felt close to what I was looking for, I could explore it and see how close it was. I figured if I was off, I still wouldn't be off by much - the equivalent of arriving at a house across the street from the one I'm looking at - it's not where I wanted to be, but it's close enough the difference is minimal and the time to course-correct is equally minimal.

I remember, though, when I came out to @inbabylontheywept, that he said he felt comfortable supporting me in-part because he knew I wouldn't have come out unless I knew for sure. And that was the pit I had dug myself into for most of my life, so it was really wild to have to stop him and say "Actually, not to burst your image of my twice in a row, but I'm only about 75% at best, most days it's closer to like 66% sure." He, obviously, asked why I'd come out then if I didn't know, and I said it was because I knew enough to knew that even if I was wrong about being trans it wasn't by much. Maybe I'm not trans, maybe I'm gay and have fallen for the trap of confusing gender roles and sexual orientation. Maybe I'm just very feminine and being thrown off by rigid gender roles in the church. Maybe I just really like crossdressing. But, much like when I was a missionary, I picked trans as the area to begin investigating and decided to move towards it and course-correct on the way.

I started with the stuff that felt easier. Since I was 11 years old I've been plucking my facial hair instead of shaving, since seeing the shadow made me feel like I was dying. So when I came out to my family, the first thing I did, before starting HRT, before buying clothes, before trying anything else, was get electrolysis. The first day after I had my appointment, I woke up and took some ibuprofen and iced my face to help with the swelling while I ate breakfast, then looked at my face in the mirror and my knees nearly buckled. Seeing myself without facial hair made me feel better than I ever had about myself, and that told me I was on the right track towards something, even if that wasn't a new gender identity.

The next thing I did was try wearing gender-affirming clothes. It felt awkward and scary at first, so I did it alone in my apartment during the COVID quarantines and it felt OK. Not like...exciting, but like a relief, like something heavy had been taken off my back, and that was another sign that I was going in the right direction, another metaphorical guide on my way towards my destination telling me to keep going the way I was going.

I started HRT next and within a week I realized my suicidal ideation had all but entirely disappeared, something I never thought could happen. I genuinely thought everyone thought about suicide all the time until estrogen made that part of my brain quiet down. That's how I really knew that I'd arrived at the right place, but I didn't know that until I had tried a few other things that had helped me know I was on the right path. In fact, I don't think I could have ever brought myself to start HRT had I not already experimented with electrolysis and wearing literally just *A* skirt.

So to tie these two things together: There is a point in everyone's life where we find ourselves in a metaphorical "Mexico City," a real-life metropolis filled to the brim with so many ways to fit human life into it that it's impossible to map. When we find ourselves in that kind of place, that does not mean we need to spend more time making a map before we go - it means that we have reached the point where we can set down the map and start walking. Where we can begin to explore the options available to us on life's journey. It's where we find that the journey of life is not, in fact, a highway only populated by distant towns and fast-food joints, but is in fact a journey through an endless world full of life. That means food, stores, roads, houses, all of it. That means we treat our life like an odyssey, not a road trip. The destination is not the goal, since we all end up in the same place eventually, it's the journey that matters. It's how we get to the end of our journey, it's the sights we see along the way, it's the detours we take just to see if that path is better or more convenient, it's the pitstops for rest and respite at places we may never be able to return to, it's the flow, it's life.

Happy Pride! ~🏳️‍🌈

Here’s a selection of pride flags designed as medieval banners!! Unfortunately due to the massive amount of individual identities we have in the queer community, i could not illustrate all of the flags, so if your flag is not here i am very sorry!

Stay proud this month gays, we’re gonna make it through <33

Flags included:

Bisexual

Lesbian

Gay Men / MLM

Pansexual

Intersex

Asexual

Aromantic

Genderfluid

Polyamorous

Butch

Femme

Transgender

Genderqueer

Nonbinary

Two Spirit

Progress Pride: BIPOC

Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨

TO EVERYONE ELSE:

A series of ten reblogs is about to follow, since you can only have one poll per reblog. Please answer all ten polls. If you don't see them all, check the notes (this shouldn't take me long so if it's more than like, fifteen minutes since I posted this one they should all be there.)

 Let’s say you’ve got a city where there’s tame white doves everywhere. They’re not pests, they’re regarded as sacred, holy protectors of the city, and the whole city cares for them and feeds them like they’re pets. They’re so tame because it’s a social taboo to hurt or scare one. Nice pretty doves :)

 Then someone points out that even if they’re not seen as pests, doesn’t having a completely unchecked feral pigeon population - that not only isn’t being culled, but actively fed and cared for - mean that there would be bird shit absolutely all over the place?

 A part of you wants to say no, because these are your nice, pretty doves. To explain that there’s a reason why they’re not shitting all over the place, maybe they’re super-intelligent and specifically bred and trained to not shit all over the place. The logistics of how, exactly, could anyone breed and train a flock of feral birds go unaddressed.

 An even worse solution would be to not have those birds, editing them out of the world. No, they spark joy, you can’t just toss them out!

 Now, consider: Yes, yes they would, but the city also has an extensive public sanitation service that’s occupied 90% of the time by cleaning bird shit off of everything. One of the most common last names in the area actually translates to “one who scrapes off dove shit”, and it’s a highly respected occupation. And thanks to the sheer necessity of constantly regularly cleaning everything, the city enjoys a much higher standard of cleanliness, and less public health issues caused by poor public sanitation.

Oooh, yippeee yippee yippee! Yes i do!

bonus doodle under cut

You know how in the game it just looks weird that they animated Piers singing but like….no words come out? (save for a text box or two but c’mon it’s still awkward) 

well, i think you're beautiful <3

[art by me - neonscrapyard]