The hawk flies up and perches near me when I’m outside, seemingly just to listen to me and maybe receive some feed.

My Kiwi accent (despite not being in New Zealand), my abnormally dark irises, my teeth (nothing particularly unusual except a few have an odd shape), my honeymoon rhinitis, my distinct snoring when I sleep, my semi-snorty laugh, my uncanny ability to quote my favorite media, my asexuality (supposing someone were to try to tempt me in ways that would tempt anyone else), my talent in cryptography (or rather certain kinds), my art style, and how I elaborately express myself all come to mind.

That depends. The reason the gesture exists is because people in antiquity caught on to the fact a raised middle finger looks like a full wang and balls, and so it became a sign of contempt and later something people could insult each other with. Which is funny because, if my younger self is anything to go by, I’d much rather moon someone. On the one hand, a middle finger carries a storm of testy implications, but on the other hand, it’s not a very elaborated-upon visual. So maybe a three.

One tanuki or raccoon dog that belongs to me, one ringtail/miner cat I help my first mate with, and a hawk that lives in my backyard that likes me.

New Zealand because it has the most going for it in terms of community.

I fittingly listen to the SS Anne one a lot.

Welp, there goes anyone’s claims here of being an authentic political theorist/scholar/analyst.

Perhaps, based on that, the issue is expectations. One expects a certain outcome from how someone is explaining something and is thrown off-guard when it takes a twist. Though that’s not really anyone’s fault. I relate too well to the other perspective, as a non-native speaker who is, in some way, also neurodivergent, as well as a writer immersed in mental exercises. I just have had a kind of faith that one might say it’s a universally trainable skill (think math or jigsaw puzzles) rather than seemingly innate. I may read The Wheel of Time and War and Peace just fine if I don’t establish my own upper limit to complexity. Interactive AI, through their lack of the issue we discuss, implicitly show us that “unintelligible” and “complex” may overlap but don’t necessarily have to.

But that just means its issue is it’s verbally unfamiliar, no?

Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.

Pokémon Blue. That’s the stuff dreams are made of.

How could anyone perceive it any other way?

And yet it’s both grammatically and semantically correct.

It’s not near where I live now (I haven’t been to enough places here yet), but if you’re ever in New York and come across a town called Fillmore, treat it like the plague.

My work barely overlaps with peoples’ attitudes, but I wouldn’t say I don’t have my own reaction to this observation.

At most maybe half an hour. People here are quick about that.

Now getting there is another matter.

When it comes time for the dolphins to sleep, have the dolphins sleep in designated places in a certain position corresponding to the candidate they want. To sleep facing East means they want Candidate A to be their leader. To sleep facing West means they want Candidate B to be their leader. Then have trusted individuals count the sleepers. They will wake up to their new president.

The only actual slur I know of is that North Koreans call Americans “white devils”. Which is ironic if you know North Korea’s racial demographics compared to America’s.

*they, not they’re

Well there goes my Judge Judy idea.

My earliest memory is from when I was five because my memory isn’t very reliable, but I can tell you a bit of what happened before that based on the things I was told.

There was some kind of medical condition that would run in my family. My birth parents, which included my mom who was in her 20’s and my dad who was in his 60’s, met because they were nuclear testing refugees and settled in a separate territory. They wanted kids but every time they’d have one, they’d notice the medical condition (which is said to be what later manifested in me in another way) take hold and got paranoid and probably had all seven of us because of that out of fear that too few would mean everyone would succumb to it, me being the youngest of seven sisters, a trait my birth mother also had. After me, they succumbed to the (still unclear) medical condition, it was some seemingly uncharted strand of the Epstein-Barr virus and it would manifest similar to the sleeping sickness. They’re didn’t die, just became not responsive to everyday contact.

There were different circumstances surrounding me and my sisters, so while I was adopted by a single adoptive mother, who is the foster sister of my birth grandfather (she actually wasn’t even from the same culture so it counted as an interracial adoption) and took advantage of his unisex name to rename me after him (many people don’t get the unisex memo though, they hear my name and wrongly automatically think “male”), they were adopted by a single adoptive father who then married my adoptive mother, making them my step-sisters as well (the reason I have one last name and they have others), something I’m simultaneously super grateful for as well as regret feeling distanced due to. We then moved to the US because there were no schools in the area in the Pacific where we were and because the same grandfather (whose home I inherited two years ago and who I had the biggest bond with) lived there.

As someone without friends, I hear a lot of “if you want friends, get a job.”

Plot twist: I actually do have a job, many of them don’t.