the challenge of writing things before my twin calls

welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Taylor.

I have an hour and a half, according to the text I just received. I often give myself this challenge—see how much I can write—how far I can get—before I am rewarded with a conversation over the phone with my sibling, Madison. Usually, our calls last more than an hour, and they demarcate the time at which the day ceases to be productive for me. Before them I work, focus, do things that require doing. After them I play, I scroll, I watch.

I’m starting this newsletter because I’d like a place to put my thoughts at times when they don’t seem to suit the tenor of the kinds of thoughts that dominate my personal, hand-written journals. That is, when I am not feeling too moody, or straight up morose, I am hoping I can turn here, to this. Generally, when I am tasked with engaging with real people, I cannot convince myself to depress them, and so I end up writing more intelligently and less dramatically. If you find yourself reading this, then you can have this assurance: I don’t intend to be the impetus for, nor do I desire to exacerbate, anyone’s depression. I’m sure some of the things I say here might occasionally make one person or another feel sadness, or something akin to it (say, existential dread, hopelessness, etc. yay~), but my hope is not to sustain those feelings. I’d rather obliterate them before reaching a conclusion. Despite the various lapses I’ve had in my ability to sustain hope, especially recently, I do still remain strongly affixed to hope. The corners of the world I find myself in are dedicated to hope. They are full of love, laughter, and goodness, as well. I’d rather participate in that, not in hope's fearful opposites—not in despair, nor disillusionment—for as long as I can.

Seeing as I live a life that is queer, I anticipate, or rather, I know, that all of what I write will incorporate the particular perspective that I have cultivated as result of being who I am, of existing outside a number of societal norms. Being queer brings me a great deal of joy, and it is the primary lens through which I view the world. I’d like to write about being queer, about the love that I’ve been a part of, and also, potentially, periodic unpleasantness I find myself bumping up against as a result of being queer. I also cannot restrain myself from talking about science. I have two degrees in biology—I am, at any given moment, probably thinking to one degree or another about some plant or animal. Mostly, it’s the turkey vultures that seem to congregate in unusually high numbers at an orchard near my home. I find them peaceful, unbothered, elegant. Nearly all the brainstorming I did for the name of this blog involved some creature or another. Vultures, mostly, though also other birds, moths. And so in a nutshell you can expect to encounter here the ramblings of a queer person obsessed with winged carrion-eaters—those eaters of hot, stinking, pavement death that I actually find quite overwhelmingly compelling.

Though I am, to be sure, obsessed with many other things. That is what has made settling on a topic for this blog frankly painful, and why I think I’ve basically foregone doing so. I am a generalist in many ways. There are people in my life who have a term they’ve coined specifically for use at times when I bring up some lore about my life—some road I’ve decided to go down, some experience I’ve had, some fixation—that seems completely unexpected and unaffiliated with any of my other skills or interests. One thing about me: I’m always vacillating. Virginia Woolf once wrote that the the mind is the most capricious of insects, always flittering and fluttering. I related to this when I was eighteen and quoting her next to my yearbook picture. And despite all the ways I have ceased being similar to eighteen year old me—despite my belief that eighteen year old me is in essence dead—I do still believe my mind is more or less like an insect that is careening around, doing incredibly chaotic things, never still, never completely relaxed.

Yet despite my whimsical mind, I constantly aim to be a steady person. Someone other people can put their hand on to stop them from falling if they wobble, for one reason or another, as they balance on the downed tree of life. I like teaching people things. I like telling stories. I am hoping that this newsletter leads me to something new and something interesting, and that I learn from it. Recently, I was listening to an episode of the podcast Dear Hank and John, which is a podcast in which brothers and educational media creators Hank Green and John Green give questionable advice to people who email them their questions. A listener wrote in to ask if it was too late for her, at twenty-six years old, to start wearing sunscreen. She wanted to know if her skin was damaged beyond rescue—if there wasn’t even a point in trying to save it, now. If she was doomed to get cancer, to suffer because for the majority of the life she’d lived, she didn’t have accessible to her certain information. And John Green said in response to this… he said that this woman, at twenty-six, was only “just getting started in this broken world.”

I was on a jog on a trail in the woods when John said this. It was hot, humid, bugs were annihilating my skin. I had probably had a rough day at my job, considering most of them at that particular job were rough. I may have teared up as I was panting my way up a hill. May have gasped mortifyingly for breath as I choked myself with the inundating feeling of relief I experienced in that moment. I have clung onto these words, since; this recounting is evidence of my clinging. I am twenty-six, too, and Dear Lord do I hope I’m only just getting started in this broken world. I hope I have loads and loads of time to do things—to talk and to be myself and to figure things out and to make things better—to have fun.

 And I hope this will help me do that.