The above image, from my Tumblr and now on my LJ and DW profiles, is my personal sigil. Okay, it's not really a sigil, just a collection of symbols. Here are their meanings:

The flag background is the Demisexual pride flag. I'm only demisexual where men are concerned. I don't know if there's another term for that subset or not, though. Probably is, but I don't know it.

In the black triangle you will see two symbols: the pentagam, a religious symbol that represents the five elements (earth, air, water, fire, and spirit).

Also in the black triangle is the transgender power fist symbol. I use it because I'm transgender and to show solidarity with trans people of color (especially black trans people) and to show solidarity with black people in general.

In the top white stripe there is... okay, I think the many circles in a pattern thing was a symbol for multiplicity. Ah yes, I was right.

The seven-pointed star next to it is the primary Otherkin symbol (five of our collective's members are non-human sapients.)

The infinity symbol inside the heart is a symbol of polyamory. Because I am polyamorous.

The funky looking P-shaped symbol is the symbol of pansexuality, because I am a pansexual.

On the far left of the grey stripe (bottom) is the 8-rayed star of chaos magick, because I'm into that as well.

The red and white striped heart inside a half pink half blue circle is the ageplay symbol. I am into ageplay as a "little." It's mostly Molly Elizabeth who's into that; she's one of the people that live in this body, and in our mind's eye she takes the form of a 7 year old girl with blonde pigtails and blue eyes.

The next symbol there is the Greek letter Psi, but I don't remember why I put it there. My guess is it's a reference to my empathic ability, which is a psychic ability, but I'm not sure.

And of course the rainbow flag with white wheelchair person cutout is a reference to my being an LGBT disabled person, though my disability is largely an emotional/mental one. (Chronic depression, chronic anxiety.)

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1345770.html
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I sometimes communicate with animal sounds. With that in mind, a text conversation my friend Brooke and I had with each other the other day:

Me, in lieu of asking if I could come over: Mrow?
Brooke: Hisss
Me, thinking it was a cat hiss and not knowing the appropriate word in Cat: *Sad puppy noises*
Brooke: *Snakey hugs*
Me: (I don't remember, but probably something like *Scared puppy whines*)
Brooke: Puppies are *loved* by snakeys
Me: *Speaking in Parseltongue* So can I come up?

I don't remember what she said after that, but it was affirmative.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1338939.html
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OMG everyone, check out this site! Put in some text you've typed, and it analyzes your writing and tells you stuff about your personality! It was pretty accurate, the parts I could understand. It thinks I'm more open than I am, probably because I am more open on the Internet than in person. And I do volunteer, even though it thinks that unlikely for me.

My results, with commentary (in parentheses):

Summary
You are unconventional, (yeah, totally) somewhat inconsiderate and skeptical. (That bit must be Alex.)
You are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself. (Amen!) You are reserved: you are a private person and don't let many people in. (Aye) And you are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes. (So true!)
Your choices are driven by a desire for discovery. (Yeah, sounds right.)
You are relatively unconcerned with both tradition and achieving success. (Yeah.) You care more about making your own path than following what others have done. (Amen to that!) And you make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents. (I guess so.)


You are likely to______
prefer resale value when buying automobiles (LOL! When I had cars I drove them til they wore all the way out, resale value is the last thing on my mind.)
volunteer to learn about social causes (Got me there.)
prefer style when buying clothes (My own, but yeah.)

You are unlikely to______
prefer safety when buying automobiles (WTF? No, that's wrong.)
have spent time volunteering (I totally do.)
be influenced by social media during product purchases (Depends on the social media, the people, and the product. But essentially right.)

( More under the cutCollapse )

Some highlights from Alex's, that we did for comparison: "You are a bit indirect, somewhat inconsiderate and can be perceived as insensitive." LOL yeah. "You are solemn: you are generally serious and do not joke much." Mostly accurate. His humor tends to be insults, sarcasm, or puns. Sometimes all three at once.

Let's see... Alex is apparently less susceptible to stress, at 81%. (???) Also less self conscious (87%) and less prone to worry. (81%) Also, he got a higher percentage for "taking pleasure in life," at 29%.

I don't really trust the results for "Fiery," because it gave a calm, thoughtful entry by Fay a 76%, gave one of Alex's rants a 64%, and another, angrier Alex rant a 43%.

I want to finish by reminding everyone that with our form of multiplicity, these kinds of tests are bound to mess up. Internal stuff fluctuates so often and so randomly that there's no telling for sure who's thinking what when, and how those thoughts will influence behavior. So that the fact this test is even this accurate with us is a minor miracle.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1327508.html
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So another problem with my brain that's possibly related to my partial face blindness is... well... if I binge-watch an anime series or other cartoon, and then try to imagine someone's face, all I can see is a cartoon. It takes up to several hours to fade, though I can make it fade faster by watching regular faces for a while.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1325338.html
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Sometimes I think about things that happened days or even weeks ago. Last night I was thinking about something kengr asked once, maybe a week or two back. I don't remember the exact wording, but she basically asked how I manage to function with queunliskanphobia, IE fear (or rather extreme disgust/revulsion, in our case) of saliva. My answer at the time was something that amounted to "compartmentalization." I think specifically it was "I try to imagine it just doesn't exist," or near enough. But I was thinking again about this last night because I'd had my finger in my mouth and looked at the spit on my finger and didn't have a problem with it before wiping it off.

This isn't the only time something that usually bothers us hasn't bothered us. Like, the thought of blood can quickly make me feel weak and shaky and have to lie down for a while. But when I get a cut, the blood doesn't usually bother me. It's like, a cut happens and the practical part of our brain is like "Well this has to be dealt with." But there's more to it than that, even, because Pi (svaenohr) is aroused by blood, thinks about consuming it sometimes when zee¹, er... you know... *waves hand dismissively.* (Zee was going to call it by the phillia name for it, but then we realized the word hemophilia is used for a disease, a somewhat misnamed disease at that. Pretty sure hemophiliacs don't like blood, unless it's staying put in their body. I would think hemophobia would be a better word for it. But that's a different disease.) When zee does this, the rest of us have to shut down and wait for zeer signal to return. We have to do this with quite a number of Pi's fetishes, to be honest.

Anyway, so several things came together in my mind last night, including what I'd mentioned above, and basically... the different people in our collective have different likes, dislikes, phobias, philias, etc. Which is something we never really realized the full implications of. But yeah, this means queunliskanphobia is Alex's problem; dunno who else in here has it, but at least one of us does not have that problem. Or, at least, not to the same degree. Just thinking about... the thing... can set off Alex's phobia. And it's impossible to predict when his influence is going to wane enough from the system to make it alright. So yeah, we try not to think about it.

So pretty much all of us have a revulsion response to blood, not sure what to call it now that they've stolen the only term I could think of for another disease (and I was astonished at all the various blood diseases that put philia on the end of the word, in the short time I dared try to find a word to replace hemophobia. Did the people naming those not know what the word "philia" means? And honestly, I wouldn't call what Pi has hemomania, either. It's not a mania, it's just a kink of zeers, one of many. A kink that the rest of us would rather forget about... along with most of zeer other kinks. If you're curious, you can pop over to zeer LJ/DW and look it up. Thankfully it is all in zeer mind only. Most of zeer kinks are pretty much impossible anyway, and zee knows better than to try the others. Pretty sure if zee tried the blood thing, even with someone known to be disease free, the rest of us would freak out and vomit and probably curl into a ball in the corner and cry.

But yeah, there's others. Alex and some of the others have cynophobia as well, a distrust of and fear of dogs. (Not sure who else, aside from Alex and Pi.) But Molly's reaction to dogs is "Puppy!"

That's all we can think of for now. But there may be others. It's hot right now, and we were tired anyway, so thinking is not a strong suit at the moment.


1 = "Zee" is our spelling of the genderless "ze" or "xe," to make the pronunciation more obvious. We also change "zer" and "xer" to "zeer." These are Pi's preferred pronouns, as zee identifies as agender (without gender).

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1315730.html
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I've never really understood this whole "masculinity = fierce" thing. You know, the strong, fierce, scary warrior type? Because:

A. My masculine side, growing up and now, was always the meek and gentle side. (Even Alex, who has a strong masculine aura about him and a lot of anger and aggressiveness, is the way he is because he's gentle and sensitive at heart and everything wounds him, and he can only deal with it by vacillating between anger and apathy. Though he's improving. And Ian, the only other boy in the collective, is so shy and sensitive and fragile that he never comes out of hiding anymore.) It's my feminine side that's fierce, strong, and occasionally terrifying.

B. My main deity is a Goddess of Chaos, and at least two others in the system identify as avatars of Her. While She does have Her softer side, I am empowered by Her fierce, terrifying side. Djao'Kain, in Her fierce and terrifying side, could face any masculine warrior type and make him shit himself in terror, even before She started turning him inside out and showing him his own beating heart, with Her eyes like amber lanterns, Her many arms (with clawed fingers) wielding many weapons, the look in Her eye challenging people to try to hurt Her or the ones She loves, and Her Chaos Fire.

I get a thrill of power when I access one of Her even fiercer Aspects, like Shao'MaHK, covered in blood and grinning like a madwoman, fire roaring out of control behind Her.

Yeah, you can keep your masculinity, thanks.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1313760.html
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It happened again today. It doesn't happen often, but it happened again today. What happened? Well, that takes some explaining. See, I'm partially face blind. Only partially. Also I have a shitty memory. What this means, for me, is that I have trouble recognizing people unless I know them well enough, and it takes me varying amounts of time to memorize faces, anywhere from a few hours (or a few instances of seeing the person, with some reason to memorize their face), to weeks or months. Once I have a face memorized, I can usually recognize them later. Not always; context plays a big role, and someone being out of their usual context can make me a lot less likely to recognize them.

Also, if I don't have any reason to memorize a face, it's not likely to happen. Since I don't really care one way or another about most of my neighbors, and never have, there's still a number of neighbors at my apartment complex who know me by name, and I have no damned clue who they are still, even after living here for a couple years, and then once before for another year. I live in concern that one of these days, someone who lives here, someone I should be able to recognize, will need let into the building because their hands are full or something, and I'll accidentally piss them off by not letting them in because I have no clue who they are. But in this neighborhood, it's not a smart idea to let in people you don't know.

Anyway, what happened today was the occasional thing of being out and about (specifically I was walking from one place to another), and someone starts talking to me like they know me, saying my name and stuff, talking about how long it's been since they've seen me, and I'm just standing there nodding and making noncommittal sounds and words, because as far as my memory was concerned, I've never seen this person before in my life. And worse, I know I was letting that confusion into my face; I didn't intend to, but that's what happened. If she noticed, she didn't give any sign of having noticed. Of course, thinking back on it, the two most likely possibilities are either that she's a member of the pagan meetup who doesn't go very often, or she recognized me from when I used to go to the Unitarian Universalist church. Although, we were on Hawthorne, so it's also highly likely she knows me via Lily, and I just forgot, because to be honest Lily knows a lot of people, introduces me to a lot of people, and I doubt I could recognize more than a handful of them.

Until that happened, my big post for the day was going to be how I thought I recognized one of my pharmacists while waiting for the bus. It was probably him; same height and build, same bald spot, same race probably, and I think it was the same face, but he was out of his usual context; if it was him, he wasn't in his uniform, and thus was out of context.

At least, I think he's Asian or part Asian, but I'm not sure. My ability to discern race is one of those things my partial face blindness messes with. About the only way I have to be sure someone is Asian, due to the similarity in skin color of many of them, is the eyes. And his eyes don't match what I know of Asian eyes, but they look different from "Caucasian" eyes, too, so I don't know.

But yeah, race is a weird thing for me. I mean, black people are kind of obvious, usually. But there's enough overlap among whites, Latinx people, and Asian people that I sometimes get those three confused; there are whites I mistake for Latinx, vice versa, and so on. And trying to determine the subcategories of races is pretty much impossible for me. Unless someone is one of those Hassidic rabbis, I pretty much have to take people's word on whether or not someone is a Jew, for instance, because most of them look either white or middle eastern to me. And I might be able to tell the difference between a Greek and other middle eastern people if I viewed some side by side, but otherwise, I can't tell. Again, if it weren't for the eyes, there's a lot of Asian people I would classify as white because their skin tone looks identical to the average "white" skin tone, to me.

Though to be perfectly honest, given my feelings toward humans in general, and the way I was lost in my own world growing up, it's pretty impressive I can discern that much. If things had gone just a little different for me, my partial face blindness might have made it so the only thing I could tell about race was three categories: Black, white, and in-between. And given that I already make a fair number of mistakes vis-a-vis race, I would be making far more in that case.

And since I don't pay a lot of attention to strangers, I'd be kind of useless if I needed to describe some stranger for the cops, if I witnessed a crime (or was the victim of one, possibly). About all I'd be able to tell them, I think, would be whether or not they were black, and their presumed gender. Like, for instance, "Well he was probably white, and probably male, but I don't know for sure on either count." "What about his height?" "Um... average, I think?" "Weight?" "Average?" "Hair color?" "No idea." "Eye color?" "To be honest, officer, I wasn't really paying attention. He just looked like a possibly-white male. But he could have been Asian or Latin for all I know." (Secretly thinking: 'Partially just playing the odds here.')

Bleh. Make this one more in a long list of things that make me feel like an alien from another planet stranded on this backwater rock with a whole species of crazy people.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1313071.html
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Months back, I got irritated with Dad for deadnaming me, so I explained it to him. He wrote back saying he couldn’t think of me by another name, and I got more irritated, so I went off on him a little, as politely as I could manage, but still firm. He finally wrote back, not acknowledging our previous disagreement. However, he didn’t deadname me. Though his solution towards this was to not call me by *any* name at all. (Sigh) Oh well, progress is progress. :-)

By the way, though I’ve had the papers for changing my name legally for some time, I’ve been dragging my feet on that. But I recently had a thought that might make me stop that and go through with that. I am known by everyone these days as Fay, short for Fayanora (my Traipahni name), but the name I’d been wanting to change to was Tempest Alexandria Arts, so I’d have the same initials as my deadname. But that didn’t feel right. So now I’m thinking I want to change it to Tempest Alexandria Fayanora Arts.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1299416.html
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I don't know why, but the last few weeks I've been noticing myself do a strange sort of typo where I type words or - more often - parts of words backwards. Like instead of "instead," I type "nistead" or something similar. It's weird. I'm sure I could come up with a better example if I could remember any offhand, I know some of them have really made me stare at the screen going "huh?"

Then, too, I find myself also missing certain letters, but it's not the fault of the keyboard, at least not usually. Because paying attention, I've noticed sometimes I just don't hit the letter very hard or, other times, I don't hit it at all. Also weird.

Oh yeah, and I just got reminded that sometimes I get ahead of myself and type whole words before they're supposed to be there, or part of the words. Like above, I was trying to type "I'm sure I could come up with," and typed "I'm sure I come could up with" instead. Makes me wonder if more than one of us is typing, and one of us is ahead of the other and types a word before we switch back to whoever was slower.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1286112.html
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Yesterday (Thursday) at 8 AM I went to the DMV with everything I needed and got my new ID card. Included my gender marker change form, and now I have an F for my gender marker! YAY!

Now to look into changing my name to Tempest Alexandria Arts.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1284324.html
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