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The Water Fountain

I was only three or four years old or so at the time. It must have been at our place of worship. I was playing with the other children out in the hall, while most of the parents were gathered in another room. There were a few mothers nearby keeping watch while talking among themselves.

There was a water fountain in the hall. There was a small stool in front of the fountain, so that even the littlest who were capable to operate it could get a drink of water when thirsty. Predictably, we all started getting thirsty around the same time, and converged on the water fountain.

But there was this one girl. The self-appointed princess. The girl who thought that everything was about her, and that everyone was beneath her — leastways that’s how she usually behaved.

I don’t remember if anyone else got a drink or not before Little Miss Princess stepped up for hers. She drank, and drank, and drank – and drank again. And then she proceeded to drag the stool several feet away from the water fountain — and sit on it. She proclaimed that it was her throne, and that nobody else could have any water. Then she stood on it, and began to address her subjects.

One of the youngest children (who had definitely not had a drink of water yet) started crying. I was one of those very well-behaved children who tried to play nice with pretty much everyone. But I started seeing red.

This wasn’t something I had any time to think about; Justice demanded that I close the short distance between us, and forcefully oust the tyrant from her pilfered pedestal. I complied without hesitation.

She didn’t have time to see it coming, either. Or maybe it was simply because I didn’t show my anger outwardly. I might have been smiling almost conspiratorially when I marched right up to her and looked her in the eyes.

My hands spread out and my palms made firm contact with her center of mass. I threw all of the force I could muster from my tiny frame into giving her one good SHOVE. She landed squarely on her butt on the floor – startled, and crying in sudden indignation; dethroned and defeated.

I dragged the stool back over to the water fountain, and all the children drank.

I’m NOT Psychic, BUT…

I see things.

I know things.

I have no understanding of the mechanism, and I have no control over it. 

I can’t brag that I have some kind of special power or talent in my repertoire.

I can’t read thoughts, and I can’t project them. But the regularity with which I have accurately foreseen various events and gleaned insight into certain truths which were hidden, is fairly staggering. Do I ever get to see what I’d like to see? Do I ever get to choose? Of course not.

When I was younger, I explained this away as “having a really powerful supercomputer in my brain, constantly running predictive/probability algorithms.” Pair that idea with a nice tall glass of Assumed Confirmation Bias, and there you go.

That explanation calms people down when they get spooked by my predictions and insights, and it calmed me down for a while – but in reality, it does not account for what I have experienced.

There are so many specific stories that I want to tell, but don’t – because honestly, while they are small and humble stories, the specific details of them are unlikely enough that some hypothetical deranged person might be able to use them to triangulate my identity. Maybe someday I won’t care so much – but right now I still like hiding. I’m a nobody anyway. I promise you’ve never heard of me. Being a nobody is quite delightful.

The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I believe that the things I see and the things I know (inexplicably) are more of a curse than a gift. I’ve often wished I could simply stop doing this. To stop receiving those visions, or signals, or bouts of hyper-intuition or whatever they are.

It’s not as though the soundness of my mind has never been tested or proved; it most certainly has been, many times over. I have a great deal of discipline, and I do not allow the things I “see” to dictate my course or my actions. I’ve never hung my hat on dreams or visions. Rather, I wait – and I watch – and I see what happens. And my heart sinks a little further into my stomach each time I see something “unlikely” come to pass in exactly the way I’ve foreseen it. Sometimes I’ve spent years waiting to see that I was actually right; that’s the most creepy.

It’s exhausting. I don’t like it.

That’s all.

OTOH – IT’S AN ELECTION YEAR

I’ve spent ALL of this year, so far, being a good girl, playing along, and exercising an abundance of caution in the face of this “novel virus,” even though it all smelled fishy from the get-go.

At this point I’m ready to say: did I call it, or what?

“Now there’s this whole COVID-19 Pandemic going on. I don’t even know what to think about that. On the one hand, we’re due for a good pandemic. On the other hand – it’s an election year. *shrug* Just saying.”

Back in MARCH. That’s how obvious this garbage is, to anybody who is paying attention.

https://kittytantrum.com/2020/03/16/contemplating-mortality/

NOT APPLE PIE – RECIPE

This is not apple pie.

It’s something that maybe is a little bit enough like apple pie to subdue a craving for the real thing. This is how I eat, when what I wanna eat is apple pie, and there is not a special occasion in sight to justify all that flour and sugar.

No I’m not going to write up some gay ten-page story about how I came up with the recipe and how much my husband loves it. But just so we’re clear, he fucking loves it. Okay?

Also, to be clear: you have to eat this while it’s still hot. Or at least warm. It’s made with gelatin as a thickener, which will set. If you don’t have plain gelatin in your house to add to soups and things like that… you probably should. I like grass-fed beef gelatin. The Knox stuff is smelly.

Here’s what you need:

– 2 slices of bacon, cut up
– 1 large apple, sliced fairly thin
– handful of pecans
– 2 tbsp plain gelatin powder (mix with abt. 1/2 cup water)
– tiny drizzle of honey
– tiny pinch of salt
– sprinkle of nutmeg
– sprinkle of cinnamon

– heavy cream for topping

1. Cook the bacon in a pan. I didn’t get a picture of the bacon in the pan, but you can see I cooked it nice and crispy in the picture below. Set aside to cool.

2. Toast the pecans in the bacon fat. Take them out before they burn! Lightly toasted is better than dark. They are delicate. In the picture above, they are done. Set aside to cool. Ooh, look: my stovetop is dirty. Dirty, dirty stovetop.

3. LEAVE ALL OF THE FAT IN THE PAN. Now cook the apples in it, with the nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt. Add a little water here and there and let them simmer until they get soft.

4. Add your little drizzle of honey. I guess this is optional if you’re a REALLY special snowflake who absolutely cannot have any added sweeteners ever. Let everything cook down and get a little caramelly.

5. Add gelatin (pictured here mixed with water in a cup). Make sure you get any lumps out BEFORE you do this; it’s easy to work them out when they’re cold – not when they’re hot. You don’t want hard lumps of gelatin. Keep cooking until the gelatin is completely melted and the sauce is nice and thick. If it seems too thick, add a little water. Think “syrupy.” That’s when it’s DONE.

6. Dump that mess in a bowl, top it with heavy cream (I like mine whipped, always unsweetened), chop up the bacon and toasted pecans and throw those on there too – and if you can handle it, drizzle just a tiny bit more honey over the top. I drizzled half a teaspoon in while cooking, and another half teaspoon at the end.

7. EAT IT WHILE IT’S HOT.

Note about cookwear: I used my brother’s shiny new nonstick pan for these pictures, because it kinda shows what’s going on with the colors of the things – but I don’t generally recommend nonstick pans. I would typically make this in my big cast iron skillet, and I like that a lot better. Those newfangled nonstick things are so lightweight, they slide around all over the place when you try to stir what’s in them.

It’s not apple pie, but it’s p. good.

Early Girl

My husband and I planted a garden this year.

It’s been a bit of an experiment to see what all will actually grow in the space we have with the amount of sunlight we get (or, rather, don’t get). Some of our plants have certainly been more successful than others, and I’ve learned a lot from the process.

The biggest surprise for me is that my tomatoes, of all things, have consistently been the “happiest” out of all of them. Tomatoes don’t usually grow well where I live. It stays fairly cool and damp for most the year, and it can be difficult if not impossible to keep the blight away.

The very first tomato start my husband and I bought this year was an Early Girl… which broke in the wind overnight after a couple of days – something I could have seen coming  (and kind of did), and certainly could have prevented by covering it. I had the tomato cages and the fabric; I just didn’t do it.

It wasn’t completely snapped-in-two-dead, just all split and bent over, so my husband staked it up with some bamboo skewers and twine, and it actually lived. It put out some new leaves, and some flowers – but was much slower to grow, and stayed a lot smaller than the other tomato starts we bought and planted around the same time.

Days and weeks passed, and I noticed it looked like the stem was trying to grow thicker than the skewers and twine would allow it, and it seemed pretty sturdy, so I carefully snipped away the twine and gently pulled the skewers out. It seemed fine.

Until the next day. The next day it looked very, very sad. And for the next couple of days, it just drooped and drooped.

I guess I must have learned to do this as a kid, even though I don’t necessarily remember it per se, but somehow I knew that what I ought to do was to pile the soil up around the stem, up past the break, and give it extra water.

After a few days of that, the plant had perked up a little, but still looked pretty sad – but I had a hunch that I knew what was going on – so I grabbed another pot and some lighter soil to transplant, and started carefully digging and brushing away soil to lift out all of the root matter.

Sure enough, the stem came apart where the break had been. It had decayed right below the break line after being buried and watered, and the upper portion of the stem just popped completely free of the little clump of soil and tangled roots I was holding, and rolled into my other hand, all stem and leaves and flowers; not a lick of dirt on it.

But at the new “base” of the stem, there were roots! Not long roots, but THICK roots, radiating out in all directions. So I put it in the new pot, in the lighter soil, buried nice and deep and seated in most of its old root matter so that the new roots would have a little more to grab onto.

I had the sad realization over the course of nursing this poor little plant back to something vaguely resembling health, that this is basically the story of my life in the tiniest nutshell.

I don’t like to think of myself as having been “broken” in childhood, and I’ve denied it to myself for a very long time (because I have so many GOOD memories, and because who wants to think that about their childhood?), but I know better now.

But, much like this sad, stunted little tomato plant – I am also putting out new roots. It’s possible. It can be done. And you know, I always knew that – but this was a very pertinent and timely reminder.

I have this idea in my head that might sound a little bit crazy, partly because I can’t necessarily explain it very well, but it goes like this: everything is a microcosm and a macrocosm. Everything scales, principally, from the lowest to the highest. This popped into my head years ago, when I was about as far away from God as I’ve ever been, but I believe this idea to be the first glimmerings of my understanding of what tradition would call The Natural Order. God’s order.

I’m not the sort to write cutesy stories about God as a gardener, but I understand now why someone else might.

And check it out:

Not only did this plant survive: in spite of never catching up to the other plants in size, it is sturdier AND has produced – indisputably – the BEST tomatoes. That may be owing a lot to the variety (our other plants were a “Celebrity” variety and a couple of Red Cherries), but we’ve been quite impressed regardless.

In fact, here we are well past mid-October, and I’m STILL harvesting tomatoes here and there. Tomatoes from the other plants have started to turn a little mealy and less flavorful since the weather has turned cooler and cloudier – but the Early Girl is still putting out fruit that is firm and sweet. I picked these just last night for burgers:

I’m no master gardener. It’s been so many years since I’ve worked the soil, I really stumbled (and Googled) my way through this experiment. Most of my garden is ready to be torn up now.

I did a lot of things wrong this year, in choosing locations to plant and in caring for the things I planted. A lot of things didn’t thrive. All of my kale has been completely devoured by critters long before I could harvest it. Absolute kale massacre. All of my squash and cucumbers got weird mold and died (my neighbors have said this happened to them, too, and was unusual – so maybe that’s not my fault).

It has been impossible, over the course of my little gardening endeavor, to NOT draw parallels between gardening and mothering; raising plants vs. raising humans. There are too many principle similarities.

Lots of people have the wacked-out notion that children benefit from early exposure to all of life’s elements.

Hey! I’ve been there. I got broken. Kinda like that tomato plant I neglected to properly shelter.

I have nevertheless healed and I have also borne good fruit.

But, you know, it would have been better to have not been broken in the first place.

Just like the Early Girl, I’ll never know how much taller I might have grown – figuratively speaking – or how much more fruit I might have borne.

Not that I’m going to try to stack quantity up against quality.

But I’m astounded at how many people understand the importance of sheltering and protecting the newest and most vulnerable of lives when it comes to plants and beasts – but not humans. I’ve known lots of women like this. Women who would have shed tears over my silly little broken tomato plant, and cheered with joy at its eventual victory… but would criticize me for “coddling” my children, for being protective, for keeping them as far as I can from all of life’s storms, until I am confident they can weather them like capable young men.

They point to the possibility of healing and call it a good reason to encourage the kind of carelessness that leads to brokenness in the first place.

Like pointing to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and calling it a very good reason to indulge in all manner of sin.

Those people can go get bent.

❤

The Worst F-Word: FASHION

I have a bone to pick with the fashion industry.

Not with regard to any particular trend or style; no.

THE. WHOLE. DAMNED. THING.

What is “Fashion” anyway?

I’ll tell you: “Fashion” is when you take a useful item, garment, piece of equipment, etc., and copy it’s stylistic elements over to an “updated” version of the original design – without including any of the practical elements that made the original thing useful – and THEN proceed to manufacture the “updated” product out of literal refuse and industrial runoff.

“Fashion” is about fabricating appearances.

You think you’re buying a dress. Instead you’re buying industrial waste plastics that have been spun into filaments and fashioned into something that looks like a dress.

You think you’re buying a pair of boots. Instead you’re buying industrial waste plastics that have been melted and molded and layered and fashioned into something that looks like a pair of boots.

“Fashion” is the antithesis of usefulness and durability.

It is also the antithesis of actual style and good taste, because it is by design and by deliberate intention always changing. It doesn’t seem to matter if the “new fashion trends” are hideous; they only have to be different.

“Fashion” is also a tool of cultural subversion which is being used to propagate widespread “androgyny”(read: faggotry) among men and women alike.

For decades, the Fashion Industry has been churning out “women’s fashion” that is increasingly masculine, and “men’s fashion” that is increasingly feminine.

The majority of new “women’s clothing” available for retail sale in the U.S. are essentially made to fit men: wide shoulders, very little room for boobs, no waistline, and enough room in the crotch of every pair of pants I’ve tried on in the last ten years to smuggle at least a pound of salami without raising any eyebrows.

The majority of new “men’s clothing” available for retail sale in the U.S. has been trending in the opposite direction: narrower shoulders, “slimmer” fits, shorter rises, higher hip-to-inseam ratios, etc.

Pretty soon, most women will have to shop in the “Men’s” department, and most men with have to shop in the “Women’s” department.

They want us all to be trannies, soy boys, and bull dykes.

Those of us who cling to our respective masculine or feminine aesthetic, and depend on large clothing manufacturers to supply our daily wardrobes, will soon have a critical decision to make: wear the clothes that were made for the opposite gender and be “comfortable” – or try to dress like your actual gender, and put up with the discomfort and inconvenience of poor fit and restricted movement.

Footwear is a big problem, too.

We can start with the fact that most of it is engineered to fall apart within about three months of regular use (even when you’re spending extra on footwear sold on the premise of ruggedness and durability) – this should be criminal.

But there’s another problem: the shift of shoe-makers away from the art of cobbling – and on over into the craft of hobbling.

Most modern footwear is designed to absorb a portion of the energy of every step. This “shock absorption” is touted as something that is better for your joints – but the truth is that this design necessitates greater energy expenditure for every step taken, because the energy is absorbed instead of being transferred. Most shoes make each step “clunkier.” Your feet, ankles, and calves have to work harder to sustain locomotion.

Combine this nonsense with universally poor fit due to all footwear being built on lasts which represent an average of shapes instead of actually being built for any of them…

It’s a problem. It’s a big, huge problem – and a lot of people don’t even see it.

WHY?

Because people don’t really do anything anymore.

I have to chuckle a little under my breath when I hear feminist criticizing the “fashions” of yesteryear as being impractical or restrictive.

These same women have bought into a model of fashion which doesn’t even allow their arms to have full range of motion. Even MORE surprisingly, they’ve bought into a model of fashion that actually makes it harder for them to spread their legs. And which makes it all but impossible to, for example, quickly and easily take a pee in the woods.

In their desire to achieve a sleek, chic, boxy, curve-less, masculine silhouette – they shackle themselves.

Many years ago, I wised up to this – and I bought myself a collection of cute but very practical and well-fitting dresses. They’re all-cotton, they’re fitted (but also gathered and elasticized) through the shoulders and the waistline, and they have big, flared, knee-length skirts. These dresses afford TOTAL freedom of movement unlike anything else I’ve ever worn. I can run, and jump, and climb, and kick, and flail my arms around wildly, and nothing gets stuck or slips down or rides up.

I can do anything, and my clothes stay put. This comes as a surprise to most women.

Half a decade or so ago, I showed up for my first day at my brand new dishwashing job, wearing one such dress. You wouldn’t even believe the looks I got – or maybe you would. Lots of smugness and smirks, like “this girl can’t be for real.”

Turns out all those gals in their tight jeans and button-downs can’t even keep up with me.

It turns out that having your armholes positioned where your arms pivot, and having your waistline lined up with your waist, and not effectively binding your legs together, does quite a lot to improve mobility and efficiency in the workplace.

It turns out that if you actually spend a good portion of your life doing productive things, you eventually realize that you need clothes that move with your body.

“Fashion” is made for people who do nothing but sit, stand, or gently recline – all with their arms pinned down to their sides and their knees held together. If you do anything more than that, you run the risk of busting all the seams on your flimsy plastic frocks.

I don’t see “Big Fashion” ever turning around and reversing this trend of squeezing people into strange, anatomy-defying, movement-restricting clothing. I think “Fashion” was always a tool of social engineering, and always will be.

I suspect the only way forward, for those of us who don’t want to be faggots, is to reclaim, restore, and preserve the model of small-scale, domestic apparel design and manufacture. Functional, sensible garment design. Tailoring. Cobbling.

And I’m not talking about dumb hipster shit from retards who think they’re so special that their product transcends calculations of time and materials.

We need people who are willing to see themselves as micro-factory-workers – not people who peddle the same old garbage wrapped in words like “artisan,” “handcrafted,” and “one-of-a-kind” (which almost never means the design is unique – just that the workmanship is sloppy enough that two of the same thing will always end up looking different).

Otherwise we all gonna catch the gay.

DIE (with a T) – Part II

As promised, I’m gonna talk a little bit about the EXCEPTIONS I’ve built into my diet, as well as the supplements I take.

This is what I came up with for the backside (lolol) of my handy-dandy diet reference sheet:

SUPPLEMENTS:

You’ll notice I haven’t included anything about dosage with regard to the supplements I use. I can’t honestly or accurately tell you how much of ANYTHING on (or off) this list you should (or shouldn’t) be consuming. I CAN tell you why I’ve decided to take these things.

Vitamin C: The long and short of it is that one day, I discovered, incidentally, that a large dose of Vitamin C is highly effective in clearing up my persistent allergy symptoms (sneezing, itchy/watery eyes, runny nose, etc.). Much more effective than the OTC antihistamines and decongestants I’ve used in the past. Faster-acting, too.

I decided to do a little digging into this, and found that this is not uncommon at all. Shortly thereafter I learned that, as someone with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, I probably ought to be taking a larger-than-typical dose of the stuff on the daily anyway.

Now I find that if I make sure to take at least the minimum dosage recommended for my condition, my allergy symptoms are minimal, if not entirely absent. So I’ve bought myself a small pail of pure l-ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) crystals, from which I measure out my dose, then dissolve in a small amount of water. Cheap and easy!

Vitamin D: I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference since I’ve started taking it, but apparently my condition (compounded by my location – we don’t get a ton of sun in the PNW) puts me at higher risk of deficiency, so I take a standard daily dose.

Zinc: this one is purported to “boost” the effectiveness of the first two (Vitamins C and D). I’m not totally sold on taking it long-term, because I find that it upsets my stomach a little – but I’m giving it a fair shake.

Local Bee Pollen: this is about as hippie-dippy, crunchy-granola as I get. I’ve had this one recommended to me by a lot of folks I know personally, as something that helps with seasonal allergies, so I decided to try it. The label recommends easing into it, so I’m only taking a few granules per day at present.

EMERGENCY CARBS:

Some will argue with me, but I think that sometimes you just. need. carbs. I believe, in the simplest of terms, that what we eat ought to be conducive to what we DO, and vice versa. Me, I don’t usually need carbs, beyond what I get from my usual rotation of fruits and vegetables. But there are those occasions when carbs are the most suitable option – and I like to be prepared for that.

What I’ve put together here is basically a list of all the really concentrated carbs that I actually like – AND that don’t make me feel like crap when I eat them. They’re NOT appropriate for my everyday diet, but they ARE safe for occasional use.

Having this list to reference helps remind me, especially, that I always regret just eating a piece of bread or a bowl of pasta or something like that, on those occasions when I find myself trying to justify it as the quickest and easiest option.

THINGS TO AVOID:

These are all the things that are precluded as a general rule – either because they make me feel like garbage when I eat them, or because they promote gluttony (which in turn makes me feel like garbage), or because avoiding these things is a quick and easy way of disqualifying foods that are best regarded as garbage regardless of what else they have in them.

A note about non-sugar sweeteners: yes, this includes stevia. And sucralose. And xylitol. And, and and. Yup. If it IS sweet and ISN’T a sugar… it’s garbage.

EXCEPTIONS & INDULGENCES:

Holy Communion: obviously, Holy Communion is exempt from dietary restriction. The caveat here is that I don’t get to sit at home and eat a whole loaf of bread or a box of crackers on Sunday and call it Holy Communion. It has to be the real deal. That SHOULD go without saying, but you’d be surprised what my brain can try to justify (“on principle”) if I don’t keep it in check.

Special Occasions: birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter… as long as it’s not more than once per month, I let myself eat pretty much anything I want on holidays and special occasions. I don’t find that this sets me back at all.

Indulgences: this is the short list of sweets I’m allowed to have – but only two small bites per day. This typically works out to no more than 10 grams of sugar and about 50 calories. I limit the variety of what is permitted, and only allow myself to choose one sweet per day – never one bite each of two different things. I find that novelty and variety stimulate the appetite, whereas a bite or two of something tasty and familiar is much more likely to abolish stray cravings for other things.

EASING IN:

Like I said in my previous post about being FAT, I don’t force myself into strict compliance with all of these guidelines all at once. The point is to do it this way pretty much permanently from here on out. As of today, I’m still eating quite a bit more sugar than I ought to be, for example – though I’ve strictly cut out all of the grains, legumes, and dairy that were really bothering me, and I feel a LOT better for it.

BUCKLING DOWN:

This diet, as I’ve outlined it so far, is NOT a diet that will inherently lead to weight loss, such as a much more carb-restricted/ketogenic style of eating would.

In a nutshell: I don’t do that.

What I will do in the coming days and weeks, once I’ve got myself nicely settled into the broader parameters of my diet, is bust out the kitchen scale – and start counting calories.

❤

Thoughts on Marriage

The Preamble:

I grew up on the internet, in an era when there were “no girls on the internet.” I don’t have sisters. My own parents were never married, split up when I was 6, and my mother moved a couple states away when I was 9. Although I’ve always made a point of embracing my femininity, people have long accused me of being a tomboy, having a “male brain,” etc. Wearing pretty dresses doesn’t fool them.

I do not share the modern female perspective. I never have.

Whether that’s more because I grew up in a nearly all-male environment, or, as my father suggests, because high-testosterone runs in the family (TBH I see more and more evidence for this as I get older), or because my mother’s shining example (of what NOT to do) turned me into something of a young misogynist – or some combination thereof – it is entirely unsurprising to me that https://www.rooshvforum.com/ is basically my favorite place on the internet. No, I don’t post there – but I read every. single. day. I hardly get news from anywhere else at this point; I hardly have to.

One of the things I love so much about RVF is that the guys over there, collectively, have an iron-clad track record of giving voice to my own thoughts on just about everything. If I see a news story that compels me to wax poetic about MY perspective, against the popular narrative – literally all I have to do is wait a few days and someone on RVF will post exactly what I was thinking, and usually say it better than I could have. Every. single. time. I don’t have to worry my pretty little head over it.

The Gripe:

All the same, there remains an overarching anti-marriage narrative (on RVF and in the “manosphere” more broadly) that I just can’t get behind.

Now, I KNOW there are already at least a handful of men who have taken up “my side” of this argument “for me,” if you will – lots of good men out there defending marriage in the face of “Black Pill” ideology. So maybe I really don’t have to.

But there is this one particular thing that grates on me.

And since absolutely NO PART of this modern world has EVER honored my femininity in spite of all my efforts to cultivate that femininity for the benefit of my community and the world at large – I do feel, to an extent, that I have been simultaneously granted the right and saddled with the responsibility to speak up and say something about it. Not gonna keep my mouth shut on this one.

The thing that grates on me is that these “Black Pilled” men have a tendency to deride marriage as an institution and a sacrament – on the utterly myopic basis of their own failed relationships.

VERY OFTEN these men have themselves wasted the most prime years of their lives on fornication and adultery and other assorted debaucheries. Then they hit the “wall” (which doesn’t necessarily show on a man’s FACE and BODY – but absolutely shows in his attitude), and they scramble to lock down the “best they can get.”

These profoundly broken men go on to select women based on the same criteria they employed to secure fornication partners: they select women who appeal the most to their physical senses. They select women whom they perceive as being able to indefinitely extend the qualities of “hotness” and “excitement” over the course of a monogamous relationship. They choose a wife with their penis instead of with their brain.

That is IF they make a choice at all. Many of these men go on to marry whichever woman they accidentally impregnate, possessed of the apparent delusion that gluing together a few of the components of a “traditional marriage” with the adhesive of secular law, will give them as good a shot at a healthy marriage as anyone else.

When it all implodes on them, these men refuse to acknowledge the practical errors in their methodology, and instead choose to blame WOMEN.

If you listen to these guys, they’ll convince you that the world is absolutely BRIMMING with eligible, marriageable bachelors who want nothing more than to find a sweet, traditional, motherly woman to marry and raise a family with.

It’s WOMEN that are the problem, they insist.

“Women don’t…”
”Women can’t…”
”Women never…”
”Women always…”

These “Black Pilled” men hold marriage out as dangerous and too risky. It’s a “bad deal,” they say. No matter how objectively “good” a man is, and no matter how objectively “good” a women seems, these men INSIST that “all women are like that.”

All women are “hypergamous.” All women cheat. All women will demean, disrespect, and eventually divorce-rape their husbands, because they are women and that is all women are capable of.

Now, I despise women just as much as the next guy, with very few exceptions. I am not going to defend women as a demographic against much of anything, TBH. I acknowledge that most of these complaints have a very firm basis in reality.

Where these guys become disconnected from reality is by neglecting or refusing to take a look in the mirror – as individuals, and collectively.

Because lemme tell you something, gentlemen:

If YOU can use one or two spectacularly failed relationships/marriages to support the idea that marriage is always a bad deal for MEN, specifically…

I can do the same. damned. thing. on the other side of the fence.

The Backstory:

At 19, I was damn near EVERYTHING these “trad” manosphere guys say a woman ought to be. Homeschooled, sheltered, highly domestic, virgin (handful of very tame kisses when I was 17-18, but that was IT), good relationship with my father, teetotaler, feminine, demure, cared about my appearance but never bought into whorish beauty standards – and absolutely dead-set on traditional marriage and family life (including saving my virginity for my future husband – NOT something I was pressured into; MY choice. MY priorities.).

According to the guys in the manosphere, I should have had it easy. I should have had traditional, conservative, religious men flocking to try to court me – because most men are not degraded to the same level as most women in modern society. This market imbalance should have guaranteed a steady stream of appropriate suitors from which to choose.

So why didn’t it?

Oh, there were plenty of interested men, don’t get me wrong.

None of them wanted a traditional wife.

My lack of academic and career ambition, my refusal-on-principle to set myself up to be a long-term secondary wage earner in a dual-income household, while also raising children, was the nail in the coffin for the vast majority of my budding romantic interests.

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me “it doesn’t work that way anymore,” I probably actually wouldn’t need a man.

And this was AFTER I had gone running into the arms of the Mormon Church – where the vast majority of men claim that traditional marriage and family is exactly what they want. Turns out they want all of the perks of that – they want the submissive, feminine wife who keeps a beautiful home and changes all of the diapers – but, by and large, they’re not willing to shoulder more than exactly half of the financial and legal responsibility for the household.

THAT, my friends, is what we call a bad deal.

It turns out – if I am to extrapolate from personal experience in the same way so many of the guys on RVF like to do – that a man who actually and truly values family more than he values money and material success, and who is willing to work hard for those things himself is a very rare man indeed.

My own father happens to be such a man – and fiercely protective throughout my youth, to boot. So it was easy, when I was younger, to imagine that these sorts of men were as plentiful as the self-selected manosphere crowd seems to think they are.

They are, in fact, not.

Finally – out of dozens of potentials that had piqued my interest (and I was never exactly picky, I had soft spot for the nerdy boys) – I found one. Or so I thought.

And no, I didn’t fall for a “jerk” or a “bad boy.” I married my best friend’s big brother. I was just shy of twenty when we married, and we’d known each other since I was twelve. Ostensibly he wanted all of the same sorts of things I did. Shared values as far as I could see. This was easy to believe, because he grew up in exactly the kind of family I hoped to have: rural, religious, conservative, homeschooling, DIY mentality, frugal,  family-centric, etc. My father approved of him. The only reason my mother DISAPPROVED of him was because he was from conservative religious family and she’s a raging feminazi.

So we married (less than a year after he returned home from his two-year stint as a door-to-door Mormon missionary). We attended church faithfully together. We were sealed in the Mormon temple “for time and eternity.” I taught Sunday school for years.

I gave him heart, I gave him my virginity (a little prior to the wedding night, but fighting against the prevailing culture all my life, I thought holding out until engagement was a pretty solid victory at the time), I gave him my hand in marriage, I gave him my absolute uncontested loyalty/fidelity/devotion, I gave him two beautiful sons. I served him three home-cooked meals from scratch every day. I treated him like a king and kept a beautiful, comfortable home. All I asked was that he provide for us and wear the pants – and he needn’t scarcely lift a finger around the house.

I did all of this, and steadfastly supported and helped him in every way I could throughout the marriage – including working full-time until our first child was born, and thereafter maintaining a small but legitimately profitable home business, which paid the rent at least once when we were really hard-up.

Through every single bump in the road we faced together, I stood by him. Even when the bump was that he was unemployed for long stretches and not even looking for work, and really kind of just being a big gay baby about it. I STOOD BY MY HUSBAND.

I heard plenty enough murmurings to know that pretty much all of his friends/co-workers/male family members/etc. were envious. People would straight-up ask him, right in front of me, “where did you find one like THAT?” I’m not looking for a medal for that or anything – the point is, I DID MY JOB. I took pride in doing it well.

What did I get in return for my wifely submission and devotion?

Well, I found myself with a man who, frankly, worked harder at shirking responsibility and foisting it off on me – than he would have had to work if he’d just accepted it.

I found myself with a man who had grown increasingly emotionally volatile over the course of the marriage, in spite of my every attempt to facilitate calm and keep an even keel.

Sometimes it really seemed like he was doing EVERYTHING IN HIS POWER to make me leave him. It seemed like he had no interest in me or in our family – although at the time, I still could not fathom how that could be the case, given all the conversations we’d had and dreams we’d shared prior to and in the earlier days and years of our marriage.

He didn’t want me sexually, either – even though I was (supposedly) his “first” too, my novelty wore off pretty quickly. After two children, I was only up 10 or 15 pounds from what I weighed when we married (and most of that was boob, because I was nursing) – and I’d learned to take much better care of my appearance, and always made an effort to dress and “do myself up” in ways that he liked.  OTHER MEN leered at me. And he would just ignore me. Once I decided I was tired of trying to initiate sex and being brushed off, and that we would just only do it when he wanted to for a while. He didn’t so much as TOUCH me for six whole months.

When he started becoming increasingly aggressive and borderline violent with our older son (who was then just a toddler), I insisted that he speak to our “bishop” (local Mormon Church leader) and pursue some counseling, at least for himself and preferably for us as a couple.

And what came out of THAT? SO many revelations:

The Bombshells:

– He had never actually wanted to marry or have children. Why he did it anyway was halfway between being pressured into it by his family, and (delusionally) seeing me as some kind of meal ticket. His words: “if I hadn’t married you, I’d probably still be living with my parents.”

– He had a raging pornography addiction since long before we married, which he went to some lengths to keep hidden from me, considering that by HIS OWN ESTIMATION, he spent more time masturbating to pornography during the first 2-3 years of our marriage than he spent gainfully employed during ALL. SEVEN. YEARS. OF. IT.

– He felt like he had “missed out” on something by settling down young. HE WANTED AN OPEN MARRIAGE. He didn’t come out and say it like that all at once, no. It was baby steps into it, from suggesting first that we could watch porn together (it would improve our intimacy and spice things up, he said – carrot dangled), and on down into Hell from there.

– He then proceeded to take every single weakness I had ever laid before him, as his wife – imploring him for help, support, protection, etc. as my husband – and he used these things against me (including what I shared with him early on in our relationship of my vaguely-remembered childhood trauma).

Looking back on it, I find myself in the awkward position of not being able to say that he “made me DO” anything – but also being shocked and appalled and dumbfounded that I went along with what he wanted.

Men try to say that “only women use sex as a weapon” or “only women refuse sex in marriage so they can use it selectively to get what they want.”

Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to my ex-husband. He was as manipulative and ill-intentioned as the WORST feminist harpy divorce-rapist. And I was the virgin bride with oneitis SO BAD – I wanted HIS approval and validation, and I wanted HIM to desire ME, so badly – that it never even seriously occurred to me to leave him when all this came out.

Even though it took me a whole YEAR to get comfortable with what he was asking of me. In my mind, it was better to stay with my husband. It was better to give him whatever he wanted to try to keep my family together. It was better to try to change myself to please him, then to have to try to start over from nothing as “used goods” with a divorce under my belt. By the end of that marriage, he had me actually believing that nobody else would want me.

I went into that relationship an idealistic virgin, and I came out the other side with a “notch count” of nearly 30 – no, NOT because I was “hypergamous,” NOT because I strayed – but because my “husband” bartered my body to other men for the “privilege” of screwing their fat, ugly wives and girlfriends. Because he wanted “sexual variety” and didn’t want to have to put in any of the work to get it on his own steam.

I finally left him when his “jokes” about literally prostituting me for money started turning into semi-serious requests that I take up whoring to replace his income so he wouldn’t have to suffer the “degradation” of being forced to work a regular 9-to-5.

The Aftermath:

I can’t even count all the times thereafter when *I* had to stand stone-faced, unshakeable, while this “man” – who had 6+ inches of height over me and about 70 lbs of mass to his physical advantage – got in my face and yelled and screamed and threatened me.

I took nothing when I left, aside from my own clothing and personal items. The children even stayed living with him, and I would watch them at his house while he worked, until we reached a point where we could work out a custody agreement between ourselves.

I spent THREE WHOLE YEARS oh-so-gently extricating myself from that entanglement, easing and coddling him through the separation and eventual divorce process entirely outside of the court system (aside from the state-mandated meeting with a clerk and online co-parenting course).

We’d been on food stamps nearly the entirety of our marriage – but I withdrew myself and the children from ALL welfare programs in advance of the divorce, so that the State would have no legal standing to pursue him in collecting all of the child support that I knew he wouldn’t pay.

I didn’t have a bunch of money or material assets sitting around for him to take half of – but that does NOT mean I didn’t lose everything I’d spent the previous 10+ year of my life building. Doesn’t mean I didn’t get the short end of that stick – and I’ll venture to say I took it standing like more of a man than a lot of the overgrown boys out there fearfully complaining about how dangerous marriage is for those poor men who might suffer a setback to their material enjoyment of life (oh, heaven forbid).

Loads of people have asked me WHY. Why didn’t I throw the book at him? Why didn’t I take him to the cleaners? Why didn’t I shoot him down and nail him to the wall with all the ammunition he gave me through his volatile and unhinged behaviors (and there were many)? HIS OWN FAMILY has asked me these questions, as they’ve come to realize what REALLY went down.

I guess HIS story (which he called around and told to EVERYBODY, even my own parents) was that *I* left him because *I* wanted to run around and party. HIS story was that ONE DAY I just woke up and decided that *I* wanted to sleep around.

The truth of the matter, that these accusations were actually outrageous projections, became pretty clear as time passed, and as I pulled a 180 from the degeneracy I’d followed him into, and poured all my spare time and energy into providing for our children without his contributions… and HE was the one going to sex parties, orgies, BDSM events, etc. And trying to convince his family they should accept him and applaud him for this “progressive” behavior.

CAN YOU BEGIN TO SEE why a gal might question all of the “hypergamy nightmare” stories that are shared on the internet?

CAN YOU BEGIN TO SEE that manipulating and using people for resources and behaving reprehensibly in marriage is NOT exclusive to the female sex?

CAN YOU BEGIN TO SEE that not all women are like that? And that perhaps, in fact, some men are like that?

The Gist:

So why DIDN’T I try to throw the book at him? Why DIDN’T I take him to the cleaners? WHY DIDN’T I “destroy” my ex-husband when I decided to divorce him? If he was so clearly in the wrong, and given every opportunity to do so? Given a system that would have made it EASY? A system that ENCOURAGED ME TO DO THIS? How is it that I did not do this – if this is all women are capable of? If this is the only tactic we have at our disposal, to employ for survival?

How is it that I have chosen, at every opportunity he has given me to punish him or extract resources from him in some way – to instead bite my tongue and stay my hand? To WORK HARDER instead of making demands – even though it was and is absolutely my legal right to do so?

Part of it stems from a deep-seated sense of honor and obligation – something women are apparently not supposed to have.

But it is also because I know something most people apparently don’t know.

What I know, what I understand absolutely, profoundly, and without question to be THE TRUTH, is that our culture is not steeped in a battle between men and women, masculine and feminine.

If you think that’s what this is, you have sidestepped or have been blinded to the truth entirely.

This is a battle wherein the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve stand together, united, against the demonic progeny of Samael and Lilith. Godly men and women united against the Satanic and Jezebel spirits. This is and has always been and always shall remain a battle of Good against Evil.

And I know that if a man is not my father or my husband – he is my brother.

The Conviction:

I cannot briefly summarize all of the thoughts and feelings and reasonings – and, I believe, divine revelations – that went into my youthful decision to pursue marriage and family above all else.

There do certainly exist righteous and godly alternatives to marriage and procreation. When I was a little girl, I seriously considered being a nun. Even though I was quite ignorant of what all that entailed, I always had the innate sense that this was the only suitable alternative to physical marriage, childbearing, child-rearing: spiritual marriage, spiritual motherhood, the fostering and uplifting of souls – in Christ.

What I can say is that I went into the endeavor with my eyes as open as they likely could have been. All of the arguments I see the “MGTOWs” throwing around are arguments I had considered at length, long prior to seeking or entering any kind of courtship. My own father warned me against marriage entirely, employing all of those arguments and then some.

What if he’s a liar? A cheater? A scoundrel? What if he abandons you? What if he abuses you? What if, what if, what if…? All of these arguments intended to convince me that the only viable way forward in life, the only path that could possibly lead to the all-desirable outcomes of “success” and “happiness” – was to turn my back utterly on the path of godly living; that the only safe thing to do would be to embrace the modern lifestyle of remaining legally single and self-sufficient, relying on nobody, because ultimately nobody can be trusted.

I recognized all of these possibilities going in. I jumped headlong into the labor of marriage and family not because I didn’t think these things could happen to me. Not because I had leveraged myself into some kind of materially advantageous position where I could be reassured that their potential happening was unlikely.

I went into the endeavor of finding a husband for the purpose of having children, for the purpose of raising a family. For the purpose of the bringing up of souls in the light of God’s Truth. I did this even though I understood quite well, having not been raised Christian at all, that I had (and still have) a long ways to go before I really and truly know what that means.

I undertook this labor with the FAITH that I did not HAVE to have everything perfectly figured out and lined up from the get-go. With the FAITH that, insofar as I do my best, it will not be beyond me to raise my children correctly – that, even if my husband were to DIE inexplicably and leave me with nothing and no man willing to step in – God would fill in where I fall short.

NOT NECESSARILY TO THE ENDS OF MATERIAL SUCCESS –

BUT OF SPIRITUAL SALVATION.

I undertook this labor with the understanding that it would be easy to fail in every material sense. With the understanding that the very culture I was steeped in from the moment of my birth would fight and rail against my efforts at every turn.

I undertook this labor with the understanding that it was more likely than not that I would necessarily be, at some point, for whatever reason, in whatever fashion, required to sacrifice a great deal of myself for the sake of my children. The thoughts and possibilities and speculative visions that crossed my mind were those of agony and death so horrific I don’t care to explicate.

I never truly thought that I could be a nun – though I’ve often wondered if those might not have been the devil’s whisperings. The most profound hallmark of the abuse I endured in early childhood was a tragically premature awakening of the passions – of those feelings of sexual desire and frustration. I was surprisingly good at keeping those desires in check while in my youth, but I never had the sense that I could ever overcome them completely – though I dearly wished I could.

And so there was never any question in my mind that I would accept every suffering and every hardship of worldly marriage and motherhood – a determination which I now recognize as an intuitive understanding and acquiescence to the will of God as made abundantly clear in Genesis, with regard to the consequences of Original Sin.

I understood in a way that I could not articulate at the time, that “figuring out how to do it all on easy mode” was a seductive lie. Easy Mode is the Devil’s Mode.

The TL;DR of it all is that I always knew mothers in fields with their children look a whole lot more like this:

than this:

Full stop.

The Kneejerk:

And look at what happened! OH MY GOD, MY FATHER (who seemed to think I had a snowball’s chance in hell of finding an honest-to-goodness traditional man ANYWHERE) WAS EXACTLY RIGHT.

Clearly, all men are like this.

All men are liars.

All men are porn addicts.

All men are lazy slackers who want a woman to provide for them.

All men are secret degenerates and debauchers and whoremongers.

All men will strategically withhold sex in order to psychologically manipulate their women into engaging in whatever perversions are necessary to excite them in their sexually-numbed-and-jaded condition.

All men bully, intimidate, yell, and scream at their women.

All men care about money and material comfort more than they care about their family.

All men, given the requisite opportunity and influence, will prostitute their women – for money or personal gain, or likely both.

Basically all men are faggots.

The TRUTH:

Based on my personal experience, supported by countless stories I’ve heard which I find agonizingly relatable – as well as accounts from men who have bragged about exploiting the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of women – I could write many convincing arguments to the effect that marriage is a terrible deal for WOMEN – excepting the very privileged few. From a material standpoint, from the perspective of someone who cannot abide or tolerate material loss, austerity, suffering, etc. of any kind, this seems quite obvious.

Any wayward daughter of Eve, turned loose, unsupervised and unprotected from the nature of her own femininity, has a better chance than not of being exploited for it – and the devil is throughout all times and in all places and in all guises lying in wait for this opportunity. This is one of the oldest stories in the book.

But to decry the institution, the union, the sacrament of marriage itself – in light of the many corruptions and failures of the world – is to be so seduced by those corruptions, so firmly under their power, so enslaved to the cycle of sin and vice and fear, as to act unwittingly in the body, in all the things you do and don’t do, as a militating force against goodness and against godliness – against family.

Setting about to extract as much as I possibly can from the world in terms of material resources and pleasures would not be a godly or righteous purpose, no matter how you spin it. 

THAT is the alternative that is so popularly proposed to the “bad deal” of marriage and family, and I reject it utterly.

No matter how much pleasure the self-serving path might in truth afford.

No matter how much pain the righteous path might cost me.

Because the truth is that a person can do everything right – ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING – and yet receive no material reward for it. The only true example of “doing everything right,” Christ himself who lived and died without sin, was betrayed, tortured, and crucified. That was the material reward the world gave him, and God did not spare him from it on account of his sinlessness.

Conversely – a person may, in fact, do everything wrong and not suffer anything worse than a stubbed toe or bruised ego until they’re long dead and brought to reckoning.

Doing the right thing was never supposed to be easy.

If I had allowed the suffering and the hardships I faced as a result of becoming entangled with and influenced by a dishonest and ungodly man in the naivety and vulnerability of my youth to color my perception of all men, and of the institution of marriage as a whole – if I instead adopted the popular mindset that marriage is a bad deal and that I’m better off looking out for myself, well… we all know what that sounds like, don’t we?

Buncha pansy-ass milksop feminist codswallop, that’s what.

I know I’m not buying that.

The Question:

Why do you? ❤

DIE (with a T) – Part I

I’m a big fan of simplicity, and food is no exception.

I can cook nearly anything if I have enough BTU’s, but complicated recipes and gourmet foods are not my preference for everyday fare. People generally expect me to be a “foodie” just because I can – but left to my own devices, if I were only feeding myself, I doubt I’d eat anything requiring more than a knife and FIRE for preparation.

But it’s not just me. I have children to feed, and their nutritional needs are different from mine – as are their tastes. I’m not SO far removed from childhood that I don’t remember exactly how foul a lot of the foods I love today tasted back then. My husband likes most of the foods I like (at least, he likes them the way I prepare them) – but dietary variety is more important to him than it is to me… and he does have a little bit of a foodie streak. 😉

I have a personal philosophy that diverges a bit from what “conventional wisdom” seems to dictate, when it comes to feeding my family. I see no reason – short of dire need, or having no actual choice – to EVER serve a dish to somebody when I know they won’t like it. Kids included.

TBH, while I think eating together is important, I don’t really buy into the idea that the entire family should sit down and eat the exact same things, either. Part of living very frugally, as I prefer to do, is having a steady stream of odds and ends and leftovers and things of that variety. Sometimes these bits and pieces can be combined or transformed into something that will feed the whole family – but sometimes it just makes more sense to feed people different things, so that all of the food that ought to get eaten, gets eaten – while it is still fresh and appealing. Sometimes things get divvied up based on who likes what – and sometimes based on who needs more of what.

So, in spite of my penchant for minimalist eating, I spend quite a lot of time in the kitchen. I cook a whole lot of food that I can’t or won’t eat. And you know, I don’t really mind. Because it also gives ME the freedom to eat what I want to eat. Or, as is the case now… what I need to eat.

I said I was going to put together a bit about my diet, so here goes.

I learned years ago that in order to feel healthy and fully functional as a human being (which I am, btw, just so we’re clear), I have to keep my diet pretty tightly under control. There are a lot of ways to lose weight, which is a biiig (lolol) part of what I aim to do by revising my diet. But I don’t want to do it like a retard.

This means no shortcuts. No gimmicks. No unsustainable eating. And I don’t mean the LEETLE GRAYTAH TUUNBAERG  eco-nazi kind of sustainable. I mean: no subjecting the body to a diet that is not suitable on a permanent basis. There is not “going on a diet.” There is: changing how I eat, period.

I will start counting calories eventually, but my first step is to simply pare down what I eat to a relative few basic foods.

How do I decide which foods make the cut – and what gets cut?

Well, first I keep the foods that make me feel good – and I cut out all of the ones that don’t. A food doesn’t have to make me feel bad to get the boot. For me this means: no grains, no legumes, no uncultured dairy protein.

Then I eliminate all of the foods that contain added sugars or added starches of any kind. I ALSO eliminate all of my favorite, starchiest, sweetest fruits and vegetables (think potatoes and dates). It doesn’t matter that these foods make me feel good in small quantities – because these things tempt me to gluttony, straight-up.

Finally, I eliminate anything that is too exotic or expensive. If I’m not going to make it a staple of my everyday diet, I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist. You might balk at this, but I’ve found that my “austere” ways have made my life orders of magnitude better when faithfully implemented.

I very nearly crossed a handful of things off the list on account of the fact that they’re always imported – but then I got down to “coffee” and I scrapped that whole silly misguided idea right then and there. It might not be totally “sustainable” if (when?) global supply chains are ever seriously disrupted, but I’m not crossing that bridge a moment sooner than necessary.

This leaves me with a VERY PRACTICAL list of foods that I know I can eat pretty much whenever I please. I’ll add that this time around, I also gave the list a once-over and nixed anything that I know my husband doesn’t like, because he told me he wants to try this diet with me. The only thing that got the axe was beets. Kale barely made it. In most other things, our tastes our blessedly similar.

Once I have my list (I usually do this sort of work in a spreadsheet so that I can easily drag and drop and shuffle things around), I sort it into categories and break it out into what I should be eating more of and what I should be eating less of.

Then I throw it into a format that is easy to digest visually, so I can print it out and subject myself to looking at it regularly.

Here’s what I came up with:

Note that I also added “fasting hours” down there at the bottom. This is not hardcore “intermittent fasting” – 10 hours between dinner and breakfast is the absolute minimum for me. In reality, if I were not so partial to cream in my coffee, I wouldn’t have any interest in calories until early afternoon most days.

That’s it. That’s all there is.

Kind of.

In order for this diet to be sustainable, it needs a handful of provisions for occasional exception.

Those will be on the other side of the page, along with guidelines for supplements and medicines. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by how much easier it is to remember to actually take these things, when I ought to, when it’s written down like this. And yet, I am.

I’ll be sure to post a picture of what I come up with for the other side, too, as soon as I’m finished nailing it down.

❤