April 3, 2026
Where: the neighborhood
When: 3:40pm
Bird Species: northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, dark-eyed junco, house sparrow, blue jay, Carolina chickadee, common grackle, American robin
Things I Thought About:
- I left my phone at home. This was a deliberate decision and, shockingly, it is not making me anxious at all. I’m just happy to be outside on a very warm and sunny day.
- That is the slenderest mockingbird I have ever seen, like in a movie where there’s a guy in a gang who is inexplicably 11 years old.
- In a certain type of novel, they are always describing men taking off T-shirts by reaching behind them and grabbing a fistful of it to pull it off, which seems crazy to me every time I read it. Does this mean that all men just know to do this, rather than pulling up from the waist like a normal woman removing a t-shirt? How did they learn this? Doesn’t their shoulder crack? Do men really do this? Sound off in the comments.
- It is very depressing that I can’t draw up a single memory of a man taking a T-shirt off in front of me. I may have been drunk for most of the sex I have had in my life, and since I mended my ways that dataset may be small enough to be statistically invalid, but I’ve certainly been to a lake. I have seen this.
- As a slightly sweaty middle-aged lady, something that is fun is to reach behind you and grab a fistful of your T-shirt from the back and haul it up so the breeze cools you down. That feels like little kid stuff, in a good way. Happy little kid stuff, I can remember.
- That junco looks like a parrot or some other exotic BOTD in all that green. They are winter birds. When I see them on a green summery day I always remark it.
- I have just now remembered I’m going to see a show tonight. Huge bummer that I can’t tag KenCen photos anymore; I hate it when the current name is what comes up.
BOTD: the blue jay. We know ‘em, we love ‘em, they look great in a dogwood. This one has a wife and they were scrapping like Flo and Andy Capp in the ancient comics.
if there’s anything wrong with this formatting, please know that I’m trying to post this from my phone, waiting for the show to start. If you see a typo or something unbolded, no, you didn’t.
