I Set Metal On Fire For A Living

Okay. Y’all want explainations? I’ll tell you all the things.

Testosterone makes you warm. With young men especially it can actually get really uncomfortable while their testosterone levels are at their peak. Often times coats and winter pants will keep in all their heat and it gets uncomfortable. So it makes sense to pick a part of the body to be exposed to help them stay cool. The legs tend to be the least uncomfortable part of the body to feel cold on. The arms are uncomfortable, the face hurts when it gets cold, and the torso is where all the important stuff is. It doesn’t actually hurt that much to have your lower legs exposed and there’s no important organs there so that’s what they go with to keep themselves from overheating in their winter jackets. Along this same vein, they might take their shirts off to jog or just have a naked torso in general during the summer because they’re in more danger of overheating than estrogen dominant people. Older men, children, and estrogen dominant people tend to do this stuff less because they have less testosterone and are therefore colder.

The axe thing is because of testosterone as well. Early on in puberty especially and into adulthood as well boys and men will stink no matter how hard they try. People often complain about how men don’t shower enough and while there is some truth to that testosterone makes you sweaty and it makes your smell last longer. It doesn’t smell worse than women’s BO, but it is harder to get rid of and easier to get. Before I started taking T I could get away with taking a shower every other day or even every three days. Now I have to take a shower every day. And some days when I shower, put on deodorant, put body spray on my clothes, avoid heavy physical activity, I still end up smelling awful. I just smell bad and there’s only so much I can do about it and that bottle of axe starts looking really tempting.

With crying? Testosterone just makes you cry less. You still feel all the same emotions. You just don’t cry as much. Men are often socialized to not cry, yes, but even those who haven’t been taught that still cry less. That’s just how testosterone works. They hit puberty and then it’s just harder to cry. It doesn’t necessarily mean they feel less than estrogen dominant people or that they’re repressed. They just have a different physical reaction to emotion.

They accidentally break things because testosterone makes it easier to gain muscle. Sometimes you even do it without meaning to. I already accidentally grabbed or slammed things too hard. Now I have to consciously be gentle. Some people forget about being gentle for a split second. Then things break. Sometimes I look at my hands now like what the hell did I just do. Relearning how to know my own strength. It’s a learning process.

Trans people on hormone therapy, finally in a culture that sometimes lets them talk a little bit: “OH HEY SO IT’S STILL ALL SUBJECTIVE AND COMPLICATED, BUT WE HAVE SOME VERY PRECISE POINTS OF INFORMATION FOR YOU.”

Definitely doesn’t work here. Just…hangs out, sort of.

Apparently Egyptian but raised in Japan or something? Speaks perfect Japanese and Coptic but basically no Arabic. Speaks to Dr. Ishtar in a bizarre amalgam of the former two (Where did Dr. Ishtar learn Japanese?)

Must be some kind of expert because he knows literally everything about ancient Egypt in perfect detail, several details so specific it half feels like he has to have made it up, and is happy to talk about it at any time, sometimes seems to jokingly suggest he lived there.

Except he doesn’t exist on google. Surely a guy who’s done this much research has published a paper somewhere, right? Made some speeches? Listed as a contributor, or as a professor somewhere? But there is nothing. Not even a facebook profile. Man is an internet ghost.

In fact, he barely seems to know how computers work at all. One time someone showed him that you could play solitaire on one of the laptops and not only did he not know this already but was really excited about it.

Did I mention he’s like, 25, max? What? The intern is older.

I: here?

A: no more to the left

I: i see

LAUGH (nothing wrong with me)

So you don’t have to watch the video every time you need one of these hacks immediately:

1. If you feel nauseated, smell rubbing alcohol.

2. If you feel like throwing up, start humming.

3. If you have a runny nose, put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and press your thumb to your forehead for about 20 seconds.

4. If you have a headache, pinch the webbing between your fingers and rub it back and forth for about 1 minute.

5. If you’re lightheaded from standing up too quickly, clench your butt cheeks.

6. If your arm’s dead/has the pins and needles feeling, rock your head back and forth.

7. If you need to pee badly, think of sex to trick your brain and relieve the pressure.

8. If you have a migraine, stick your hands in ice water.

On a hike, you decide to settle for the night on a nice place. You set up a little shelter from materials at hand, and as soon as you've piled the last of the branches and moss on it, a little zero appears over your humble shelter. You turn to fetch water from a nearby river.

As -10F hits area’s of the US who’ve never seen such temperatures in living memory, I wanted to give some tips from a Minnesotan who’s lived with these temps as a part of my life for 37 years.

1) Don’t Get Cocky. People used to these temps may laugh at our southern neighbors freaking out about the cold because yes, some parts of the US get such temps regularly every year. These people are being ignorant assholes. Our houses are mandated to have insulation that few of your homes will have. We pretty much all have huge puffy coats, and have well established winter weather gear drives for homeless and poor folks every year. We have expensive, well equipped infrastructure for cope with these temps and with large amounts of snow. You don’t. When it comes down to it, Minnesotans know to respect the cold temps- it’s just that a lot of the ways that do it are so commonplace as to be invisible to those who already have these habits.

2) Don’t go out wet. Dry your hair or stay inside. You will loose a lot of heat if you’re wet. Same for sweat, and wet diapers. And clothes with snow on them are now WET CLOTHES. Change into dry clothes as soon as possible.

3) If you have a shitty car battery or a car that sometimes struggles to start, then try not to use it. You’re unlikely to get the kind of temps where it’s impossible to start an engine (I’ve only experienced those temps a few times. Once my eyelashes froze shut and I almost froze to death in my own back yard. Don’t be like young me. Respect the cold.) If your car doesn’t start, you could be stranded somewhere, and realistically your area’s emergency services may be pretty overrun. 

4) Very cold air doesn’t hold moisture well. Plan for extra hydration for people, pets, and plants. Even if your staying in- most home heaters pull cold air from outside, then dry it out even MORE in the process of heating it. Dehydration is a thing. Even if your home’s heater has a humidifier attached to it (if you’re not sure, then it probably doesn’t.) it’s a good idea to drink extra water. Right now I have a few pots of water just left out by heaters to evaporate as much as possible. My mom used to just heat huge camping pots on the stove all day in cold temps. Remember, dry nasal passages really muck up your bodies ability to fight airborne illness. This is not a great time for that.

5) Help out homeless folks in your area in any way you can. These temps can and do kill. And since we have more evictions than any society can conscionably defend this year, we have high numbers of homeless people. Which means area supports for unhoused folks are often underfunded and over-taxed. 

6) Let your faucets drip. I know nobody likes to waste water but if your pipes freeze they will literally explode. Your home will flood. My mother’s kitchen got completely destroyed and it traumatized my childhood dog. Justa  bit of moving warm water will safeguard you from that.

7) Do. Not. Burn. Propane. Indoors. 

8) Plan for potential power outages. Ice on the lines can cause this and again, your infrastructure isn’t prepped for this. Unplug anything in your home you’re not using to do your part to help prevent rolling blackouts.

9) Driving on ice is a SKILL. Your roads may be filled with people who do not have that skill. Please please, stay off the roads if you can- even if you have this skill these roads will not be prepped and will, again, be full of people who don’t know how to do this because it just hasn’t come up that much in their life.

I KNEW I COULD COUNT ON YOU TO ENABLE ME.

So, Dalmatians are at their core a stagecoach guardian. That’s what they were initially developed as.

(This can take people by surprise when they get a Dalmatian as a pet, sometimes. Mind you, some show-line Dalmatians are bound to perfectly nice pet-quality dogs who don’t have much of the actual breed instinct left; but these are not meant to be low-energy dogs, and they’re not at all programmed to be super friendly toward strangers by default.)

So, they’re stagecoach guardians; a well-bred, breed-typical Dalmatian was meant to run alongside a stagecoach for…basically ever, and to snap at anyone who got close enough to threaten the coach or risk getting in the horses’ way.

A brief digression away from dogs for a second, to talk about pre-automobile fire departments.

The essential detail here is that we’ve had fire departments since basically ever (and they were….not infrequently straight-up protection rackets of the “nice place you got here. shame if it caught fire and nobody was willing to come put it out for you” variety, but that’s another story). And we’ve had fire engines for much longer than we’ve had automobiles.

These fire engines (here’s one example) would be drawn by a team of horses, as fast as they could manage in the streets, to the scene of a fire once the alarm was raised, same as today. They’d have bells clanging and alarms going off, same as today. And, same as today, once they got to the fire, all the firemen on board would pour off, throw on the brakes so the engine didn’t roll away, and, you know, focus on fighting the fire.

At which point, because people have always been people

There was a very real problem in which bystanders would steal the fucking horses.

Like…these were powerful, fast-but-strong, extremely well-trained coach horses! They were valuable as hell! And it’s not like you’re stealing the fire engine, after all, right? It’s parked, taking the horses doesn’t mean the building burns down or whatever, you’re just….gonna walk off with them all casual-like.

So obviously, fire departments would prefer to not have to constantly purchase expensive horses and train them to be safe around fire all the time. So they needed guard dogs to watch the horses while they were distracted by the burning building. And the dogs needed to be nimble–no big slow heavy mastiffs–and able to keep up, and have an intrinsic instinct to guard horses. And if they were easy to (haha) spot coming, even better.

So yeah.

Dalmatians are firehouse dogs because opportunistic thieves were doing the 1800s equivalent of stealing fire engine hubcaps and putting the pump up on cinderblocks while everyone was looking the other way.