nerdy-alto - Tumblr blog

nerdy-alto · 7 months

Text

I had a similar experience at a cello recital hosted in a very posh home. I arrived early and asked if there was anything I could do to help. The hostess told me to go down to the basement and get a few more chairs. Oh, and that the dog was also down there, but don't worry, he was friendly.

So I went down to the basement prepared to meet one of those Fancy dogs that Fancy people have, and all of a sudden a huge pile of what I had taken to be a bearskin rug lifted his head at me, and was in fact a full-grown, very much alive bear. I almost had a heart attack. And then he thumped his tail quietly on the floor and I realized it was actually a dog, and gave him some pets, and he both licked and drooled on me simultaneously.

And that is how I met my first Newfoundland. I was very disappointed that he did not attend the recital, but probably for the best that he was not weaving in, out, over, under, and through a bunch of cellos.

When I was like 12 years old my violin teacher owned this peculiar music shop, and I would go there weekly for lessons. It was a narrow old pioneer house whose ground floor had been converted into a storefront and lesson rooms. After a while, a luthier had also moved in upstairs and set up a studio for making violins.

So, one day I'm going into the shop for my lesson. I head in the front door, and before I turn into the living room area where the main shop is, I look down the dark hallway at the rickety wooden stairs that lead up to the luthier's studio. The air smells like sawdust and lacquer. Just a little bit of light filtering in from the window behind me.

Something's on the stairway. A huge black animal is making its way down these steep, narrow stairs. I've never seen anything like this, I genuinely did not know an animal like this exists, and it comes right up to me, click-click-clicking slowly over the floor, long and tall and dark. There are wood shavings peppering its coat. It lifts its head up and its massive beast-face is virtually level with my child-face and I realize this is a gotdamb bizarro dog of some kind. It looks impossible but it's real and it's there, staring at me in total silence with a face the length of my arm. Then it does a 3-point-turn in the tiny dusty hallway and goes right back upstairs.

Turns out this was just the luthier's dog Seamus, a black borzoi of incredible height and length. anyway i'm just trying to say it was a disturbing set of circumstances under which i discovered what a borzoi is and everything in my life has felt very complicated since then

#cello #newfoundland dog #but maybe really a bear

14K notes · View notes

nerdy-alto · 7 months

Text

Reblogging just so I have the recipe

51K notes · View notes

nerdy-alto · 7 months

Text

reblogging so fast!!!

reblog to violently explode a trans kid’s transphobic teacher

23K notes · View notes

nerdy-alto · 8 months

Text

I was raised in a religion that required marriage and having babies for women to get into heaven. By the time I was baptized at eight years old ("the age of accountability"), I knew I did not want to have children. Once I hit puberty and a third of the sunday school lessons were about Finding/Being Worthy Of A Righteous Husband, I realized I wasn't interested in having a husband. I still considered myself faithful. I assumed God would understand my heart when it came time to go to Heaven, which also involved being married and having babies, so he'd take pity on me and let me in the second-best heaven.

Basically, what I'm saying is if the threat of not getting into heaven didn't scare me into amato-normativity at 14, then a 14 y.o. virgin can in fact know she is asexual.

I like how teens are too young to figure out their sexuality unless its heterosexual

#aroace #high demand religion #yeah we know

352K notes · View notes

nerdy-alto · 8 months

Text

Honestly, give an actor or writer a week to shadow a CEO, maybe just PA or Admin for them. Hell, they could do it incognito and not even ask questions or anything - just observe - and I bet that actor or writer could be a convincing CEO. The opposite is 100% not true.

You know where they should use AI?

To replace the CEOs of the companies. No one would see a difference.

2K notes · View notes

nerdy-alto · 8 months

Text

I'm betting there are a lot of other buildings that AREN'T houses of worship for populations that regularly suffer from genocide that could be turned into luxury apartments. Maybe rehab them first?

this is so upsetting, PLEASE rb to spread awareness

100K notes · View notes

nerdy-alto · 8 months

Text

Curse you, AC/DC, Mormonism, and/or Laziness

(In honor of Twitter's continued death throes, I figured why not repost one of the favorite long-form things I've written.)

I listened to a lot of music growing up. As the oldest kid, most of what I listened to in my very early childhood was my parent’s music; Linda Ronstadt, Doobie Brothers, Barry Manilow and various classical composers. It was a mark of my growing independence when I got my parents cast-off hi fi systems and was able to find my own radio station to listen to. And boy, did I listen to it. When we ran out of Star Wars topics to cover during recess we talked music. My big favorites were Duran Duran, or at least any band that wore make-up and had keyboards. Beyond the obvious and well-documented prepubescent attraction to non-masculine dudes, what totally attracted me to certain songs was their utter incomprehensability.

Telegram force and ready I knew this was a big mistake There’s a fine line drawing my senses together And I think it’s about to break If I listen close I can hear them singers oh-oh-oh Voices in your body coming through on the radio-oh-oh The union of the snake is on the climb Moving up it’s gonna race it’s gonna break through the borderline

Seriously, wtf does this even mean? But it didn’t matter to me, because this wasn’t your ordinary, Barry Manilow type song about some girl named Mandy, or dead showgirls (1) – this was deep. And maybe I didn’t understand it now, but when I got older – maybe mature enough to have a boyfriend, or wear makeup, or have a boyfriend who wore makeup it would all become clear to me, and I would listen to these songs with a profound understanding. Yes, I’d surely cogitate, this is the Union of the Snake breaking through borderlines. Good thing I got that telegram force!

I can hear your cries of protest now – But surely you weren’t an idiot, nerdycellist, why did you just accept that kind of nonsense? To which I reply, Why thank you, no, I was of course a very smart child (2) but those crucial years of cerebral cortex development were marred by Mormonism. (3) Among Mormonism’s many fine doctrines and articles and rules and crap is the concept of “the milk before the meat”. Both the History and Theology of Mormonism is sometimes less than salubrious (mountain meadows massacre), and frequently insanely wacky (Adam-God doctrine). Since Mormonism’s also big on converting people, they try and keep the crazy shit from the new recruits until they’re far enough entrenched in the cult that they’re willing to suspend disbelief. The official party-line is the analogy that a baby must first learn to drink milk before it can eat meat – too much too soon and you’ll puke, I guess. So I figured that I can’t smile without you was like how Jesus Loved You and the reflex being a lonely child waiting by the door was the idea that my husband would have lots of other wives with me in heaven.

So I had a certain comfort level with not understanding stuff – hell, it may have been a superiority complex – and I listened to a lot of radio. Also kiddies, in those days there was no internet to look up song lyrics, so if you didn’t have the album, you didn’t have the liner notes which only sometimes had lyrics printing in them. I was quite willing to settle for my ear’s first guess when it came to songs.

The last piece of the puzzle here is my laziness; this has always been the bane of my existence. I learned to read very early and with that came a certain amount of knowledge in other school-related pursuits.(4) One of those was spelling, which is a terrible subject for english speakers and learners – it doesn’t make any sense! They only way you can learn how to spell is to be exposed frequently to the word. The other is just by rote repetition. My 5th grade teacher, Mr. Coombs, a favorite mostly because he tried to keep up with important pop cultural references (5), had developed a great strategy for lazy smarty-pantses like myself, who would normally get incomplete marks on take-home spelling homework that I deemed pointless busywork – he gave us 10 minutes on Monday morning to review our list of 20 words, then gave us a pre-test. You only had to do your spelling homework on the words that you missed and then you had the real test on Friday. I hardly ever missed any words on the pre-test, and so was able to skip the bogus busywork. I also pretty much aced the Friday tests. (6)

So let us combine these points into a final scenario: A Friday spelling test was always a nice way for me to usher in the weekend. I had aced the monday pre-test and not had to waste any time copying words out or using them in sentences. Mr. Coombs would always use them in a sentence anyway when calling out the test, which was good in this case, because I had been zoning out when he first pronounced the second to last word, but he used a song lyric to illustrate it! Rad!

I put my pencil to paper…

“… dirty deeds and their Dunderchief.”

huh.

I knitted my eyebrows. That was one of those words, like wah-lah, that I had only heard but never seen written down. And that was from a part of the song that I wouldn’t understand until I was emotionally prepared to deal with the consequences of the full knowledge of that song. I was just going to have to use the context clues of the lyrics to figure out how to spell it. Dirty deeds and their Dunderchief… like an Indian Chief, only because they were Dirty deeds (and not Indian Deeds), they had a Dunderchief. You know, like a dunderhead. Yes! Now “i” before “e”…

This made sense to me. Or at least enough that I scribbled it out in enough time to catch the last word on the quiz. It is to his credit that when Robbie Elmer passed back my corrected spelling test that he didn’t circle the word and write “stupid” or “what is this supposed to mean, idiot?”, but the big red (X) next to #19 was enough to shame me into blushing furiously while considering not turning in the paper at all so Mr. Coombs would never know that I mistook “Cheap” for a made up concept of a Leader of Dirty People.

Also, please note that any spelling mistakes in this essay were left in deliberately, as an excercise for the reader.

*******************************

Footnotes:

1. Holy crap, do I love this song. Also Manilow, but had to be closeted about that back in the day.

2. So smart in fact that I was used as a lab rat for some UofU grad students for their dissertation of kids who can pronounce all the words in Tolstoy but don’t really understand it, or doing stuff with mealworms or something. All I know is I got out of class for like an hour on the days I didn’t get out for orchestra practice! Score!

3. Man, is there anything that can’t be blamed on Mormons?

4. Manifested itself in Kindergarten, when I zoned out during reading because I was already done with Dick and Jane, and then zoned back in during math with the shock that I couldn’t make a 5.

5. He also brought his guitar sometimes and taught us Ghost Riders In The Sky – or was it Ghost Riders in Disguise? Also he demonstrated important scientific concepts by taking us out in his cessna two at a time to do barrel rolls and shit.

6. OK, I think I’m done bragging about my own clerverness now. But I will leave you with one final piece of evidence to my own brilliance – I was so smart I repeated 8th grade!

#way too long #exmormon #spelling #gen x #neurospicy #so many words #maybe some adhd?#dork shit

1 note · View note

nerdy-alto · 10 months

Text

Conventions!

To my Fellow Nerds:

If you're going to a con only to see That Famous Person From The TV, and That Famous Person is unable to attend due to a strike for fair compensation, you can still have a shit-ton of fun.

The best guests are usually the authors.

Comic book writers and artists aren't covered by WGA rules.

Go appreciate the cosplay! People worked for hours and spend hundreds of $$$ and a crapton of skill to make those outfits. Hit the masquerade/costume contest/whatever they're calling it. Practice giving compliments in a non-creepy way to those who did a great job.

There are usually tons of activities that do not revolve around sitting in the back of a convention ballroom and passively watching a performer you've seen a million times deliver a slightly different performance. There's often gaming, robot wars, music, film screenings, etc - not to mention after hours things like dances and concerts.

Not that I want to encourage rampant consumerism, but the dealers room probably has some pretty great stuff, not all of which is the same crap you can find online.

Artists alley also - get yourself some signed original art to frame and hang in your house like the Fancy Bitch you are. You deserve it.

Isn't just being in a place where there's no possible way you could be the biggest weirdo there enough? Bask in the warm glow of a whole bunch of other nerdlings and dorkenheimers, knowing you are at last among a mass of people who won't expect you to have an opinion about whatever sportsball tournament is happening, who will not make fun of you for your Koopa backback. And if they do, tell them to fuck off in Klingon and be confident in your status as one of the elite.

#convention #con #san diego comic con #dragon con #sag aftra #wga solidarity #sag strike #norma rae

7 notes · View notes