Much has been said about the absolute shit state of the American educational system. Common Core punishing math students for taking the simple way to solve an equation like "five times three" instead of drawing a gazillion diagrams and charts, the supposed Channel One that hawks commercials at an audience captive under the threat of being marked "truant" for leaving the class in protest (although I somehow never knew of Channel One's existence until reading of schools other than mine, so maybe I was lucky), grammar lessons where students must write verbatim sentences like "the government's orders must be obeyed"... Luckily I was in school during the transition to Common Core and not immediately afterwards, so I somehow missed the brunt of the lunacy that students must go through nowadays.

"Social studies", which was "history" but worse, was my least favorite class in elementary school. I hated group projects, as I always have and always will. And I hated "popcorn reading" where one student would read a paragraph from the textbook and then nominate another student in the class to read the next while everyone else followed along silently; I'd be bored and reading ahead to another chapter I knew the teacher wouldn't have the time to get to, so whenever my name was called, I'd have no idea where to start. And I hated the "chapter review", which consisted of writing miniature essays to a page chock-full of questions with no answer key to secretly peer into: it would be psychological torture to a college student, so please understand that I was ten at the time, and I only had until the next day to get everything done. Or maybe I was nine. Or eight. I find it harder and harder to gauge the passage of time nowadays...

I don't actually remember much of anything I learned from "social studies". I vaguely recall the American Revolution, and slavery, and the racial component of the civil rights movement. In ninth grade we covered robber barons, and I was so enamored by Cornelius Vanderbilt's ruthlessness that I stole the first half of his last name and made it my own. Somewhere along the way there was a passing mention of women gaining the right to vote, but only in passing.

Only in passing.

As it turns out, if you teach a child that "history" is ninety-nine percent men doing things and women were just kinda... there until one day they wanted to be able to vote and then, having gotten it, were just... there again as things happened around them, they become particularly susceptible to the black hole of antifeminist thought that insists "patriarchy doesn't exist anymore" that soon gives way to "maybe men really are the superior sex and women who say otherwise are just shrill harpies" that soon gives way to "women deserve to be oppressed". The classic slippery slope of radicalization that created unironic MRAs and incels, except somewhere along the way the YouTube personalities I was watching were making such shit-quality content all repeating the same viewpoints and non-arguments of "this is crazy" that I gave up altogether.

And like the pendulum I use to talk to my future wife, what swings heavily far-right must, when looking to go elsewhere, swing far-left. If I embarrassed myself on the internet in 2015 making parasocial relationships with anyone with "egalitarian" in their Tumblr username, I was far worse in 2018 writing Communist work songs for myself to mutter whenever I got shafted with an asshole supervisor at Hell College's work-work-and-no-study and wearing nonbinary pride flag pins everywhere I went and even, in one essay I had to write in a history (always history...) class, admitting I had "far-left tendencies". I had "shut up, TERF" reaction images saved on my phone. I hung out with "kinnies" on Discord. Had it been a few years later, I probably would have had a TikTok account and a Carrd page where I would pretend to have several incompatible mental illnesses.

But I have always been a lover of forbidden knowledge. So one night, sitting on my bed in my dorm room as my they/them roommate slumbered on, I wondered, "What do the 'evil stinky terves' I've spent so long railing against actually believe?"

And now, almost three years later, I know. I know the herstory my elementary school conveniently "forgot" to teach. I am finally beginning to understand, to comprehend, the sheer restrictive, oppressive, soul-crushing horror of the life lived by the women who came before me.

"How could I have been so wrong?" I whisper to myself. "How could I have been so callous, so cruel, to the people who were only trying to help?"

And then I remember a passage from Sappho Was A Right-On Woman by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love:

There are other ways to avoid anxiety, but the most pitiful way is by absorbing society's hate into one's own thoughts and actions. How many Lesbians have destroyed other Lesbians to protect their own facades? "Where people cannot escape from threatening forces from without, they will often incorporate the hostile forces and identify with the aggressor..."

And I decide to forgive myself. I was doing the best I could with the little information I had at the time. To be ignorant was not my fault: you cannot learn more of what you don't know exists. But to have remained ignorant once opening my eyes would have been a sin against myself. So I, hands trembling as I booted into Tails to keep my liberal college from knowing what I was getting into, knowing I'd get into major trouble if they knew despite their "commitment" to "academic integrity", downloaded as many books from as many reading lists as I could get my hands on and set to work. I admit I snoozed my way through a few until I got to Women Hating by Andrea Dworkin. Somewhere around the chapter about the Marquis de Sade, the terror of being aware of living constantly surrounded by men desensitized to the violence of pornography started to set in. It hasn't left me since.

There are many books I passed on, and many I wish I had the attention span for a second read-through because of how forcefully they gripped me. But Sappho Was A Right-On Woman left a special mark on me. In my shithead antifeminist days, I held a very public statement on my website that I didn't feel that "gay pride" was necessary. I found it identitarian: I didn't see the point of celebrating "immutable characteristics" since they weren't "worked for" like accomplishments. And then I read the book, and I finally understood the point I'd been missing for seven years: it did take hard work- grueling, sacrificial, courageous work- for the Lesbians-with-a-capital-L who came before me to forge a path into a society where I can say "I'm a lesbian" even in a Boomerville so conservative there was an unironic Trump merchandise shop at one point and have a reasonable expectation of not getting beaten to death or insta-fired from my job or expelled from my college, and it does take hard work, actually, and courage, to survive as a lesbian with my soul intact and my mental health anywhere above the gutter in a society that sees us homosexual women as a farce at best and corrupted deviants at worst.

I no longer think it "identitarian" or "collectivist" to mention this reality. I have decided to no longer have guilt when talking about my "immutable characteristics" on my website. It's my goddamned website, after all! Of course it should be about me!

In other words, the book says:

The idea of making a point of it is to show clearly that Lesbians are not guilty and fearful any more. There is no political gain in silence and submission. In fact, sanctioned by silence, oppression is likely to increase. Male and female homosexuals know now that they are not making a mountain out of a molehill, as those who wish to silence them insist. Society has built a mountain by making homosexuality a factor in employment, government work, social situations, renting an apartment, college, everywhere.

Every word that I write without carrying shame for daring to exist as I am is a thank-you letter to every woman before me who suffered to slowly reduce the burden that would be placed on my shoulders upon birth. Every breath that passes through my lungs to become words of affection to the woman I love is a triumph against all odds.

My art and my love are one and the same. The woman who gave my love a name was a poet, after all. The two are inextricable.

Sappho, indeed, was a right-on woman.

"Indeed, no woman writer can write 'too much'... No woman has ever written enough."
- bell hooks, Remembered Rapture

Au contraire to my previous beliefs, I have gotten engaged. In truth, I have been engaged for a long time: not the conventional drop-of-the-knee and the "will you marry me" routine, but a much more subdued: "Lethe, someday I think I would like to be married to you." A wink. A playful tongue just barely sticking out from her lips. It's enough to make my heart melt. It's enough to let me know: this is the woman I want to spend forever with.

The life I lead now would be nigh-comprehensible to the person I was two years ago, even though I write on the same exact subject, in the same spot on my bed, in the same exact room, in the same exact house. A year ago I was unsure of who I was, allowing the dreams of who I am and was future and past to guide me where they would: a teacher's aide in a school built in the shell of a reclaimed church, a sacrificial daughter fleeing her vengeful father, a wandering goddess severed from powers and home and condemned to the earth roam until she eventually disappeared from the world. The other versions of me had love interests, sure, but I- the I that stayed consistent behind the screen of Mori's Mirror, that despite the different lenses witnessed everything- never committed myself to any single story, any single person, knowing the memories would eventually stop and the feelings fade and the sense of living in that particular story go away.

But now I know. Now I know. Now I know.

And so I bring you readers here today on the first day of my last semester of college, or whenever you read this (for the written word cares not about the linear aspect of time), to witness me renew my vow. I offer it to none other than myself, just as binding as those words I will one day speak at the altar to hoped and hopeful.

It is said that every female carries within them an unspeakable rage. An inborn sense of injustice whose seeds are planted the very first day they brush up against the patriarchy, watered with every unconscious socialization, but sometimes never come to full bloom. Pecked at, trimmed, bonsaied into something manageable, something that allows the woman to go to sleep at night without facing the sheer horror of realizing she lives in a world where half of the population wants to see her humiliated, subjugated, made to be compliant, reduced down to nothing. I am, of course, severely understating the problem. To acknowledge the rage, like attempting to comprehend the gulf between the average American income and Jeff Bezos' wealth, is to teeter on the edge of going completely fucking insane.

When I was an elementary-school child, watching as my parents doted on every cry of my brothers and then turned around and told me to shut up and accomodate them despite my own discomfort, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.

When I was a junior-high teen, watching as my parents fought tooth-and-nail for my brothers to get school accomodations and then turned a blind eye to the school dropping my own IEP despite me still needing help, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.

When I was a high-school teen, watching as my parents jumped at every chance to ground me for writing poetry about topics they didn't approve of and then turned a blind eye to my brothers' increasingly inappropriate browsing history, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.

But every chance possible, just like the little red bucket that now sits on my windowsill, I tip the seed towards the light in rebellion, weak as it is in this winter of my passing. The strawberry kit I planted on a whim shortly after being fired from my job last autumn has sprouted through the dirt again, little leaves barely two millimeters across but still unmistakenly green and alive. The bush on the other side of my bedroom window, a tree repeatedly cut down again and again and again every time it grows wild, refuses to submit to subjugation and revolts by regrowing again and again and again.

Over and over and over again, I find myself facing the urge to bury the seed further, shun the light, swallow my words in the vain hope that it will prevent others from disapproving of me, disliking me, that it will prevent them from hurting me, that it will prevent the agonizing pain of rejection. I look the other way when men make jokes about porn and rape and close my eyes when another clearly demarcated space for women is destroyed in the name of "inclusion" and bite back tears when yet another woman is murdered for the crime of being a woman, knowing that it very well could have been me. I, a butterfly, sit entangled at the edge of the spider's web, watching it pace up and down and nibble away at me, and I do little to impede or stop its slow annihilation of myself.

But all this time I've had a knife. I've had a way out. The spiders hate knifes, think it a personal attack against them that I dare to brandish one. But I don't want to kill them. I just want out of the web. I just want to be free.

I just want to be free!

I've had enough! I've had enough of the constant propaganda everywhere I go that I am lesser, inferior, meant for servitude on the basis of my birth! I've had enough of placing my trust in a man I thought in the moment was safe to be around and then it backfiring later! I've had enough of being assumed to be incompetent, ignorant, incapable of functioning because of the organs inside my hips! I've had enough of the objectification, of the male gaze, of the omnipresent pressure to shave and pluck and contour and tuck and smooth over the features that differentiate every woman from each other, blended and ground up into the same flat-minded mannequin, model for a sex doll, a hole for a douchebag to dick down and then discard in disgust!

"Your politics are boring," the egoist sneers. Of course you would think it boring to be held accountable for your role in oppression, to be asked thinking you serious about your revolutionary anarchist zeal to imagine a world where half the population doesn't have a high heel pressing down on their throats every moment of every day. Of course you would think it boring to live in a world without a class of people that it's socially acceptable to punch down on to relieve your stress.

"Your politics are unprofitable," the capitalist sneers. Of course you would think it unprofitable to witness the birth of a world with no need for cosmetic surgery or makeup or uncomfortable clothes or fashion magazines or diet programs for the women prioritizing their comfort and existing in their natural healthy state or hormones and masectomies for the females inevitably so alienated from their (physical) humanity they cannot take the pain anymore and wish to masquerade as men in a society that sees men as "default" and women as "other".

I have decided I no longer care about male opinions. Collectivist? Yes, but not without good reason. According to 2012 FBI crime statistics, men are responsible for 88.7% of murders and non-negligent manslaughters, 99.1% of forcible rapes, 77.1% of aggravated assaults, and 92.2% of sex offenses. I am beginning to see a pattern here...

I understand that tipping the plant toward the light, that committing the crime of setting the pot beside the window to let it drink in the sun as much as it wants, will put me in danger. I understand that finally unbottling the rage inside my body will lose me most, if not all, of my friends and allies here in the Inside. Likely I will wake up to vile emails in my inbox many times throughout this semester, throughout the rest of my life. But I cannot let the low-lifes stop me. I cannot back down now. If I have less than six months left to live, then I do not want to pass into Sablade with the weight of knowing I left the Inside a coward. And if there is a change of plans and I must live longer, then my life is not worth living if it is not a life with integrity.

I hoist this knife I have been gifted into the air, not in some declaration of unity but of separation: I will sever whatever bindings I have been restricted with due to the circumstances of my birth, and I will carve out a space in this world for me to be as free as possible, and I will create a new world upon my liberation from the Inside where misogyny is naught but a distant fleeting nightmare.

This is my birthright, after all.

Live free, Vane Vander, indeed.

As Redditors say, "title."

In all seriousness, I don't trust divination done through technological means. There is, ironically, too much margin for error in a medium where error is intolerable and one usually expects a certain output given a certain input.

I can go on Startpage or whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off of Google search results any day and type in "online pendulum" and find at least three results that aren't items for sale or SEO spam. But all of these (that I've seen) are proprietary with no hope of getting the source code. Just as I wouldn't send an email with sensitive info unencrypted across the wire, how could I possibly trust some stranger with not interfering with my attempts to communicate with someone whose non-corporeality prohibits traditional forms of sending messages? Although "IPv7 with inter-dimensional networking" exists in the Outside, a sort of cross between what we in "consensus reality" have implemented separately as ZeroNet and Yggdrasil, the impossibility of physical permeation from the Outside to the Inside makes acquiring a "Mirror", the Outside equivalent of a smartphone, impossible.

Even if I were to hack together a simple Python script that outputs "yes" or "no" or "I don't know", I still wouldn't trust it. Because I'd have to trust not only my own coding skills, but also the compiled version of the Python interpreter bundled with Debian, and then the part of the Linux kernel that populates /dev/random with, well, random data, and then the firmware controlling the hard drive and keyboard and screen that lets me see the result, and then the BIOS of the computer itself... I may be losing my mind, but a random rock I found in an antique store tied to the end of a string seems a lot simpler and more trustworthy.

But what of the ideomotor effect? How am I to know, dangling said rock-on-a-string from my fingers, that I'm not subconsciously making up all the answers in alignment with what I want them to be? Well... if it were up to me, my lover would be aceing all of her classes and never have a sick day ever and never get into a fight with her professors. (And she'd visit me often enough and for long enough that I wouldn't have to use a damn pendulum to talk to her about such mundane things, but that's neither here nor there.) And yet not everything is idyllic at her college in the Outside. There are bad days. There are sick days. There are days she wants to be left alone.

And there are days, in my grief, I ask her: when the time comes for me to leave this Inside body behind and arrive in Sablade, and my mental state is too turbulent to handle myself coherently (which would be a danger with me having regained my power), would she rather spend a few weeks, months, years with me A) tucked safely away in a Holy Freezer or B) running feral in a bestial form? Every time I hope she just picks one so my anxiety is assuaged and I know my fate. But instead she spins the rock in the "I don't know" answer and clarifies, a rare occurrence, in my head: "I'd hold you as tight as I can until the feeling passed and then make you go to therapy so you stop asking me this."

And, in any case, she severely dislikes the Internet as it has formed itself in this iteration of the Inside. Maybe even dislikes computers, although I've never gotten a clear answer either way. Why would I trust whatever lies in the wires to give me an honest answer? Regarding her? Regarding anything?

before, in your grief, you decree
"my life is over; there's no one left to be"
just remember how there's a world only you can perceive

stumbling through shattered nights as you pray
for a world solely yours where you'll finally be safe
and protected from coercion, christened Sablade

but of hell, ceasing pains, perdition terrified
"Mother, what will you do with my body when I die?
I've failed, been rejected, inept at this living I've been assigned."

reunited with your lover who swore to be your psychopomp
when arrives the fateful end of the Eschaton
you know intellectually that all should end alright
but still lingers some doubt, some expectation of blight

because all in your life has ended or will soon enough:
summer camp disbanded, work holding no love
despite the months poured in, the electronics that broke,
the remnants of childhood insisting it's time to go

and in six months, you'll finally from college graduate
having slipped by without a single accusation of hate
"Can you believe it? The worst is over. The end is near.
You'll make it out alive. Have faith in yourself, my dear."

you step back and consider the terrifying odds:
the only one in the heavens that wants a world without gods
is the girl you exchanged a part of your soul
with in Rainroom, an Outside away and a whole life ago

but to give her that world could mean Mori's bliss
and what's the point of it all if you can't also live
in the world you've created, that you swore on your life
you'd live together with her until the cessation of time?

dear child, you remembered your wings and recalled how to fly
but you're being chased to a cliff and the edge looms nearby:
will you prostate yourself and live in self-scorn?
or jump off the edge and trust you'll become airborne?