souslik vibes

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

There is a genus of Palearctic-inhabiting ground squirrels called Spermophilus. Latin for seed-lover, which I assume is most likely a truth about them—that they are lovers of seeds—so who am I to judge this taxonomic choice. But in Russian, the word for these ground squirrels is souslik (суслик), which to me sounds infinitely more fun. Souslik. I love it. 

Dasha asked me the other night if she had souslik vibes. This is how I was introduced to these animals. She showed me pictures and asked me to make an evaluation. After observing these rodents, with their elongated, soft-looking rodent bodies and big black rodent eyes, I said that in my opinion she had vibes that were about 10% souslik in nature. The vast majority of the rest of her vibes, I said, are cat vibes, which is an opinion I have maintained for some time now. She accepted this and said that she thinks I too have slight souslik vibes. I couldn’t have been more honored. To be told I exude a little bit of Palearctic sciurid energy was easily a highlight of the night.

This past weekend I applied to Lambda Literary’s 2025 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, something I have done every December for the past three years. It requires submitting a 500 word ‘artist’s biography’ and a fiction writing sample of 15 pages. I anticipate that I will continue doing this in December for the foreseeable future, and each year I will have a new and drastically different and hopefully improved 15 pages of my writing to submit. The application inevitably becomes something of a chance for me to reflect on the year and to consider who I’ve grown to be in the last twelve months. 

And this year, I’ve come to realize how explosively fast I have grown and changed in comparison to other years. Despite still feeling the seemingly perennial way of existing in stasis in some parts of my life, in others I feel wildly different. Back in August and September I wrote a little about this, about the things I’ve done as a twenty-six-year-old and my approach to navigating this year, but even in the few months since then, things have changed. My mind has been constantly feeling very new to me, like it’s turning over and over and over. I think something about this, about the weirdly, excessively mercurial state of my brain this year, has allowed me to write stories I didn’t know I was capable of writing. I’ve experimented with style and voice in ways that felt less uncontrolled than they ever have in the past. I feel more measured and confident as a writer. I also feel more certain in the knowledge that writing is what I want to do, more than anything else in my life. It’s the work that holds the most meaning to me, and it probably always will, no matter how much I’m able to achieve with it.

Other Russian words. Cachalot (кашалот), the clearly superior word for sperm whale. Sobesednik (собеседник), a word meaning companion—specifically a conversation companion or conversation partner—someone you can talk with easily and for long durations of time. Luk (лук), which means onion and is pronounced like ‘look’; commence jokes about one’s outfit not being garlic.

In the past two and a half weeks, I’ve watched over 300 videos from the same YouTube channel, a channel that was created in 2006 and is still active nowadays, its purpose to share the strange life of its creator with the internet. I also read a story about two dads raising their seven magical kids: a shapeshifter, a forest sprite, a garden gnome, an amorphous tentacled green blob, a wyvern, a yeti, and the Antichrist. And I read a short story about a girl named Merowdis who wants nothing except for a wintertime woods to grant her a child—in the form of a bear cub. 

Susanna Clarke, the author of this short story, has said that some stories sink down into your bones. 

If I have any goals for 2025, it’s to create a story that sinks down into someone’s bones. I tend to resonate with the idea that many people become who they needed the most as a young person. What I have always needed—what has brought me the most excitement and comfort and inspiration ever since I can remember—are storytellers sharing stories that sink down into me so deep they will probably only have a chance at dislodging themselves when one day my body reduces to dust. Stories that bring me hope and laughter and the chance to think about new things for the very first time, that let me revel in being a human listening to other humans tell their perspective on something—these are sort of everything to me.  

Siksik is another superb ground squirrel name, by the way. It’s the Inuktitut for Arctic ground squirrel, which actually is a squirrel that isn’t even a part of the Spermophilus genus but instead the Urocitellus genus, a word which means ‘tail’ and ‘ground squirrel,’ not ‘seed’ and ‘lover.’ Siksik, however, is an onomatopoeia for the sounds ground squirrels make when communicating with one another. Which makes it, as was said, superb.