#connundrum

Are you an ice cream, or a cupcake?

ICE CREAM, OR CUPCAKE!?!?!

WHAT IS IT?!?!?!?

Soldiering has always paradoxically attracted me.... I have always admired the military virtues, courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline, and I like the look of soldiering. I like the lean humped silhouettes of infantrymen, and the swagger of paratroops, and all the martial consequence of embarkation or parade.…

I invite my women readers to imagine how they would themselves have felt if, successfully disguised as a young man, they had been admitted to this closed and idiosyncratic male society in their late teens. For this is how I conceived my condition.…

You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting. Like a spy in a courteous enemy camp, or perhaps a dinner guest at one of the more traditional London clubs, you would find yourself caught up in the fascination of observing how the other side worked. For myself, I think I learnt my trade [as a journalist] largely in the 9th Lancers, for I developed in that regiment an almost anthropological interest in the forms and attitudes of its society; and sitting there undetected, so to speak, I evolved the techniques of analysis and observation that I would later adapt to the writer’s craft. I felt myself to be, as you would, totally separate and distinct: for I realized by now how deeply a male sexuality lay beneath their conduct, and how profoundly I lacked it.

—Jan Morris, Conundrum, excerpts from chapter 4, “The Colonel’s Greeting · As To Soldiering · Impostor In The Mess · Otto · Nonpersons”

Jan Morris underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1972. She was stationed with 9th Queen's Royal Lancers in the closing months and immediately after the Second World War, when “still only a boy.” From the sound of it, it was a wonderful experience, “thoroughly domestic.”

Tumblr has put me in this weird predicament. If I keep tagging stuff as “N*FW” my days on this platform will be numbered. So I try to use different tags (“ennesseff-double ewe”) in order to keep under the radar. But even that ends up not being searchable on my blog.

Like I see the world hufflepuff and immediately freeze up because of one bad person in my life

Or the name Malik

Or the taste of peach tea