journal entries and the cutting of trees and killing of life

I was going through some of my old online journal entries which I don't keep online anymore, and got the idea that perhaps I should post them back on my website. It doesn't matter if hardly anyone ever looks at them; they are a part of my history, and some are quite poetic. But it would be nice if they were tagged, so that I could easily find all posts related to various topics. But I could do that! Instead of just posting the original html files on my website, I could post each entry into a journal system like my dreamwidth account, and tag them at the same time! I haven't even managed to find the time to tag all of my old LiveJournal entries though.

I'm not poetic like I used to be. Out of pain came poetry. Nowadays I avoid writing when I'm feeling bad. There's no point in making other people feel blue too. If I write about pain nowadays, it seems embarrassing, whiny, and repetitive. Not that I completely avoid it.

*
i want
my words
to be
beauty
*

I've been pruning and cutting down some small trees in my yard; trees growing in places where I don't want them to grow. I don't like doing it; I feel bad for the trees I'm killing and/or mutilating; I feel bad for the insects and animals that may have lived on or played on them. I sort of feel like an emotionless killer. It's so easy to cut down living branches. So easy to saw through a 3 inch trunk. Killing things, simply because I don't want them where they happen to be.

There are ant mounds in my yard. I may end up putting down bait to kill the ants. I haven't yet decided... if the mounds didn't get bigger and didn't multiply, they wouldn't bother me; but they do, and I don't want my yard to end up full of fire ants. So I may try killing them. I don't like doing it, but in the end, it is a simple matter to do. I don't have to think about the hundreds or thousands of dying ants... just like I don't have to think about the trees. Emotionless. Easy. I wonder if that is what serial murderers feel when they kill people. No, they get some kind of pleasure out of it, right? So not that. But then, I wonder if that is what hardened criminals feel when they victimize and murder people. Nothing. Expendiency. You don't want the person to be alive, or you don't care about their pain, so you hurt or kill them, for your own benefit.

The particular post I was looking for was one in which I voiced sadness and anger at FF pruning/cutting the trees which grew in front of my bedroom window, when I lived at her house. It's so ironic, that now I'm doing the same kind of thing. No sadness; no anger; it's just what one has to do, to keep things from getting overgrown and overly shady.

Irony.
Not who I used to be.


Oh. There are these very cute little insects that live on the trees around here. They are camouflaged to look like little bits of bark. But they have white fluff/feathery stuff on their tail ends.

(no subject)

Apparently, nipples may retain sensation and even the ability to become erect, after top surgery. Sometimes they do, and sometimes not. The nipples are more likely to retain sensation if the "pedicle" technique is used during the surgery.

Now I'm curious about how or if the actual nipple can be made smaller during surgery. Not just the areola - that sounds easy to make smaller. But the actual bumpy part. Guys don't have as big bumpy parts as females, so surely FTMs would want their bumps smaller too, not just the areolas. If they still have the bumps, that is. If there's no erect tissue, there's no bumps, I guess.

I don't like it when my bumps are visible through my shirts. That is one reason I wear bras or vests or shirts with pockets. Even if I had top surgery, if my bumps were still prominent, I might still not be comfortable wearing thin shirts in public because of it.

Retaining sensation seems better than losing it, even though I don't have any erogenous sensations in that area. And retaining erectibility seems desirable, because I'm used to it. But I guess either outcome has its pros and cons.

update:
Just reading about top surgery and looking at photos has been making my nipples ache somewhat like they do in very cold weather. At times like this, I think that it might be preferable to lose sensation in them.

(no subject)

I like how this Canadian guide on FTM surgery includes mention of non-transsexuals who may want surgery:

We use “FTM” as shorthand for a spectrum that includes not just transsexuals, but anyone who was assigned female at birth and who identifies as male, masculine, or a man some or all of the time. Some non-transsexuals in the FTM spectrum (androgynous people, butches, drag kings, bi-gender and multi-gender people, etc.) may also want some of the surgeries described above, and may not identify or live as men. For this reason we use the term FTM instead of “trans men”.
...
For FTMs, the goals of SRS are to reduce “female” characteristics and make the body look more “masculine” or androgynous (depending on how you identify).



This youtube video by videokidsam also has some good info on top surgery vs reduction.