Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

[Dick Johnson]

That's a rough 42.

Some people are genetically fortunate and will age more slowly than average. Some people are genetically unfortunate and will age more quickly than average. Joe's probably the latter, and I'd guess that his relatives have a tendency to look a bit older than they actually are. They're probably very sensitive to lifestyle factors such as, in this case, exogenous hormones.

He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke and doesn't have an inordinate amount of exposure to solar radiation but his skin still looks like he bought it from someone fifteen years older. (Goes great with his 'bag lady' sartorial sensibility.)

It's not like there aren't other MtFs his age that look a shitload better, he just got an unlucky roll of the genetic dice.

 

[monstrous bubo]

but his skin still looks like he bought it from someone fifteen years older.

In addition to the skin, it’s the dark shadows under his eyes and deeeeeeep naso-labial folds.

He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke and doesn't have an inordinate amount of exposure to solar radiation

He doesn’t exercise either. Flabby, unfit, and sluggish don’t scream youthful.

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

I'd guess that his relatives have a tendency to look a bit older than they actually are

A bit?! Gorl. His face looks 65. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s bad.

Losing 80 pounds would probably help.

 

[Dr. Butt]

42nd

jesus christ really

 

[Dick Johnson]

In addition to the skin, it’s the dark shadows under his eyes and deeeeeeep naso-labial folds.



He doesn’t exercise either. Flabby, unfit, and sluggish don’t scream youthful.

Yeah, he looks like hell but exercise isn't going to do a ton for the way skin ages, and Joe's age is mostly due to the way his skin, and the tissues that connect it to the muscles (and fat - lots of fat) beneath it has lost elasticity. He's fat, but it's the way his skin just hangs off him that makes him look so old.

A bit?! Gorl. His face looks 65. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s bad.

Losing 80 pounds would probably help.

Maybe it's the sea buckthorn that does the trick for him.

Losing weight would make him look thinner, not younger. Fat fills a person out, and becomes beneficial to appearance past a certain point of dermal deterioration. If Joe lost a bunch of weight he'd look even older, his skin hanging off of him like a depilated Shar-pei.

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

Yeah, he looks like hell but exercise isn't going to do a ton for the way skin ages, and Joe's age is mostly due to the way his skin, and the tissues that connect it to the muscles (and fat - lots of fat) beneath it has lost elasticity. He's fat, but it's the way his skin just hangs off him that makes him look so old.


Maybe it's the sea buckthorn that does the trick for him.

Losing weight would make him look thinner, not younger. Fat fills a person out, and becomes beneficial to appearance past a certain point of dermal deterioration. If Joe lost a bunch of weight he'd look even older, his skin hanging off of him like a depilated Shar-pei.

Losing weight would remove the weird bloat, so at least it would be more congruous. And though yes, fat fills out some lines, it can also drag a face down. And his is dragged down.

Adrien Brody is (was) his celebrity semi-doppelgänger. Brody is 9 years older and exceptionally thin - and looks his age (unflattering pic of Brody below), and he looks 1000x healthier and younger than Joe.



Sure, Brody is a celeb and so that’s a little unfair of a comparison. But he has lines, circles, a prominent nose - unconventional appeal. He certainly doesn’t look younger than he is. Joe just looks awful for his age, even for a “real person.”

 

[Dick Johnson]

Joe just looks awful for his age, even for a “real person.”

At no point have I suggested otherwise. I've just made some guesses at why Joe looks so bad, beyond the knee-jerk reaction of 'troonery is bad for you in every conceivable way'.

(Brody also hasn't stretched his skin out via weight gain.)

 

[Bookwork]

Joe was a boozer and drug user for years. Smoked, too, didn't he? There's no re-set for that abuse. It ages you. Plus he always looked like shit. It's not like he's going to grow a chin at 42.

He's living in Fear because he's on a green card as a daring, radical professor who writes shatteringly important book(let)s at a time when a Brown University professor on a green card has been snatched up and deported for being an alleged Hezbollah fangurl, so it could happen to Joe any second.

But while the snatched professor is getting all kinds of attention, Joe is not, not even from the people closest to him to whom he emotes and emotes and emotes and emotes because IT'S ALL ABOUT JOE.

 

[Autistic Nonetheless]

I’ve got it in mind to write a cookbook, and I’m planning to do so.

That must be that eco-horror novel he was talking about. Shudder...



Still this was all perfectly alright by his standards. Particularly the second paragraph is surprisingly sensible and even touching. He is worried for his kid. Got it.
That he immediately goes back to writing in fluent wank when talking about himself should, in an perfect world, be a hint that he is not his own best subject.


Edit:
Joe mentioned someone called Lee Edelman and looking up the publisher description for his latest book kinda made me lol in a snake eating its own tail circular waffle sort of way.

Spoiler: Sooooo much wank

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.

 

[Free the Pedos]

It goes without saying that Joe had to come to America to trade on his British accent to make anyone of himself, right? He never would’ve had this success with women or academia back home.
What I’m saying is: he has to go back.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Joe was a boozer and drug user for years. Smoked, too, didn't he? There's no re-set for that abuse. It ages you. Plus he always looked like shit. It's not like he's going to grow a chin at 42.

He's living in Fear because he's on a green card as a daring, radical professor who writes shatteringly important book(let)s at a time when a Brown University professor on a green card has been snatched up and deported for being an alleged Hezbollah fangurl, so it could happen to Joe any second.

But while the snatched professor is getting all kinds of attention, Joe is not, not even from the people closest to him to whom he emotes and emotes and emotes and emotes because IT'S ALL ABOUT JOE.

Because Joe is lazy he probably still is a PR but he could have become a citizen years ago.

@Dick Johnson is right, genetics play the biggest role but his lifestyle exacerbated it. While his past smoking, drugs and drinking are bad, his sedentary lifestyle and estrogen are probably the biggest non-genetic culprits behind him looking like larva.

Estrogen really damaged him in this dept. without the cross sex hormones he might have just been a skinny fat, pasty Englishman with a drawn, sallow face. But the E thinned his skin, upped his appetite and lowered his metabolism and energy levels. He didn’t have much muscle to begin with but what little was there was withered and then replaced with extra fat. It made him fatter and flabbier and it really shows on his face.

I think Joe and Mal both had magical pill delusions. A lot of adult troon’s seem believe cross-sex hormones will transform them into teenagers or adolescents. But both of them needed to put in a lot of effort to mitigate the damage of cross sex.

(I’m always shocked when I see pooners who don’t hit the gym when they start taking T. I know they want to be cute adolescent boys, but unless they hit the gym they just turn into short frog voiced neckbeards. The one benefit of taking T is increasing your ability to build muscle mass, all the other side effects on women’s bodies are awful.)

 

[Constellationzero]

Adrien Brody is (was) his celebrity semi-doppelgänger.

Disagree.

Sideshow is a Michael Des Barres melting wax statue.

 

[Pig Cups]

I’ve become much better at cooking, again, over the last year. I’ve got it in mind to write a cookbook, and I’m planning to do so. I have an angle, and it will only be a few recipes, along with some criticism and memoir.

Joe’s attempts to be a true culinary, while producing tawdry, pretentious end results that rely entirely on presentation (and even those efforts fail in their intent) and demonstrate a distinct lack of technical ability- all while still looking completely inedible- remind me of this scene from Why Him? (2016).

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

How many actual moms get to spend their infant's first year dawdling about learning pretentious cooking styles but never having to do the cleanup, contemplating writing a cookbook-memoir (I nearly said a cookbook-cum-memoir but realized the potential for grievous misunderstandings), all while being paid for a full-time job?

#JustTransMomThings

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

Disagree.

Sideshow is a Michael Des Barres melting wax statue.

In his dreams.

Spoiler

I’m no big fan of MDB, but this is him fairly recently (he’s 77 now, so this is him at around 75 - >30 years older than Joe). And he never had a doughy look even when he had a plumper face.


Plumpy:


Des Barres in his 40s:

I’m not seeing it at all, even melted.

Agree with @MirnaMinkoff that the estrogen has not done Joe any favors.

 

[Anasa Tristis]

and sometimes I feel those around me—who love me and share my fear, at least abstractly—come to wonder, to themselves, whether my fear itself is the problem. It makes sense that they would do so. Fear splits us, and it is difficult to share. I do versions of the same thing—questioning the fears and anxieties of those around me, attempting to corral them, nudge them towards something I recognize.

Sounds like there's not a BPT consensus on the impending fascist doom that's coming for Joe and Co any day now.

and our medium-range plan is to buy somewhere to live out here for a little while.

On what, their good looks? Or has LaLa agreed to push all her chips into the pot for a big BPT win?

Rocco isn’t a future—he’s shockingly present, and his material here-ness is perhaps his most striking quality

Big thinker Joe has figured out that babies are not abstract concepts.

 

[Pig Cups]

(I nearly said a cookbook-cum-memoir but realized the potential for grievous misunderstandings)

Oh, no misunderstandings whatsoever. I regret to inform you…


Yes, it’s real. He has quite the oeuvre.


Should video instruction be preferred, see here (dude sounds like an estrogen-riddled troon).

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

Oh, no misunderstandings whatsoever. I regret to inform you…
View attachment 7107222

Yes, it’s real. He has quite the oeuvre.
View attachment 7107236View attachment 7107237

Should video instruction be preferred, see here (dude sounds like an estrogen-riddled troon).

The paperback versions of these would be perfect white elephant gift exchange gifts.

 

[Justin Igger]

HHH seems to enjoy it, since he's done it consistently for a long time. All he has to do is post his opinions and he's guaranteed replies.

And I will give him those replies, to call him a faggot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTMtoe4keIs

 

[Bookwork]

The Lonely Lumberjack reprises a sad theme and not quite the same way twice. At the top, X; below, a subsequent Bluesky.

Text: "making friends as an adult can be so hard. [firmy] and it should be harder"


Text: "making friends as an adult can be so hard [my countenance changes, terrifyingly] and it ought to be harder. now run"

Does one not like one's friends, Mallory? Is one having a little BPD episode?

ETA - Mal's latest installment on Bon Appetit - Link | Archive to get around paywall


Highlights of all highlights: "Lily is normal" and "I want to be the baby’s favorite." Also, "we share only about one out of every four meals."

Spoiler: Article text

In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s saucy stir-fried mushrooms from author Daniel Lavery.

A few years ago the three of us—Lily, Grace, and self—decided to have a baby together. Lily introduced the idea to the floor, Grace and I unanimously seconded the motion, and baby Rocco appeared more or less shortly thereafter. At present his diet is mostly milk, although from time to time he will condescend to be presented with a fragment of grated apple or swipe of yogurt. His demeanor in such moments is one of lordly courtesy: I shall permit you to make me a gift of this impedimenta, since you seem so bent upon it. But it is to please you, and not myself, that I do it. As a result, mealtime is probably the aspect of our shared life that has been the least altered by his arrival.

Our biggest challenge is that we are all old first-time parents, each with very decided ideas about what we like to eat, and when. Collectively we have over 120 years of ingrained habits that none of us want to alter. Grace can’t eat eggs or dairy and loves a roasted haunch of animal. Lily prefers vegetarian food. I am allergic to shrimp, although this allergy is merely physical (spiritually I can handle it perfectly well). Worse yet, I’m the type who has to eat breakfast within an hour of rising or I start chewing the countertops, and I could happily eat dinner at 5 p.m. or earlier. Meanwhile, Grace and Lily hold a monstrous sort of European attitude toward meals. Breakfast they could either take or leave, and they often leave it. I don’t even want to tell you what time they start talking about making dinner. This is why we share only about one out of every four meals. I suspect eventually we will need to achieve a greater degree of synchronization someday.

Despite our mealtime independence, we’re all concerned with doing our fair share in this postpartum period—Grace and me especially, since Lily did all the child-bearing. Grace goes in for the ambitious home pantry stuff. The counters, windowsills, and half of the back patio are littered with her various fermentation and salt-curing projects (homemade soy sauce, garum, and something that looks like rice but smells of apricot). I’m more inclined toward the role of short-order cook, ready to improvise with whatever happens to be on hand. I have caught myself listing the contents of the refrigerator to the others, as if they weren’t at the store with me when we bought groceries, and I wonder who I think I’m helping: There’s that good tofu behind the corn. Some radishes if you want a salad. I could go get some milk if we were out of milk, but we’re not out of milk.

Lily is normal, both by comparison and in her own right. She bounced back shockingly well from childbirth, and is always taking the baby out on hikes, lashed to her back like a shipping container. Under ordinary circumstances she cooks quite a lot, but in our newfound parenthood, she gets crowded out between my and Grace’s bids for helpful one-upmanship. “I’m making STEW,” I’ll text the group at 9 a.m. And since Grace can’t compete with that directly, she’ll counter with, “Don’t forget—this Sunday I want to have so-and-so over for dinner and roast something in hay,” and so on. I counter with leeks à la grecque, goulash the color of bricks, pork chops with anchovy butter, zucchini rice, braised cabbage. It’s very simple why: I want to be the baby’s favorite. I want both Lily and Grace to privately think of me as the best one. I want our dogs to always sleep on my feet in bed and nobody else’s. And I want everyone to find this obsession with being adored to be a likable quality in itself, instead of off-putting and suffocating.

Occasionally I remember to turn all this off. In those moments I make something easy, rather than something that only looks easy. Like scrambled eggs, pantry pasta, or stir-fried mushrooms. The latter really is easy. I already have the ingredients 99% of the time. Mushrooms please everyone. They’re meaty but suitable for vegetarians, they cook up fast, they taste pleasant and odd, like the earth. I feel good about handing a seared gobbet of mushroom to the baby and watching him wave it around in his fat little fist before scraping it against his eight teeth (four on top, four on bottom). I don’t want to invite anyone over for this dish. It’s not that impressive. But I do want everyone in the house to eat it and be quietly pleased. So quietly pleased that they don’t even have to tell me.

Recipe - Archive - I am not finding the recipe itself in the Archive, but Punchfork came through.

Spoiler: Recipe intro text

Saucy Mushroom Stir-Fry

Nothing should ever get in the way of you making this weeknight-friendly mushroom stir-fry. It’s a real “stone soup” arrangement—meaning if you’re missing an ingredient, there’s probably something in your house you can swap in and it will still be good. (Yes, even the mushrooms.) I like using a mix of shiitake, trumpet, and oyster mushrooms, but if you don’t have access to those varieties, standard grocery store crimini (baby bella) or white button mushrooms will be just fine. If you don’t have a large skillet, be sure to cook the mushrooms in batches to avoid sogginess.

Spoiler: Recipe via Punchfork

Ingredients
Makes 4 servings
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1 lb mixed fresh mushrooms (such as shiitake, trumpet, oyster, maitake, and/or...
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp Japanese barbecue sauce (such as Bachan’s)
1 tbsp cornstarch
2 tbsp vegetable oil, divided
1/4 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 tbsp mirin (sweet Japanese rice wine)
2 tbsp seasoned rice vinegar
1 tbsp chili crisp
Toasted sesame seeds, furikake, or chopped scallions (optional) and steamed rice...
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper