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eli nova rose

@unambivalence.bsky.social
371 followers 230 following 1.2K posts

bad gardener, trying to be a good parent, sometimes music and writing, works in software, ex-academic, love, irony, exhaustion, feelings, optimism, etc she/her/dr 🏳️‍⚧️

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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
neat trans history stuff here www.them.us/story/early-...
them.us
You Can Now Look Back at the Early Trans Internet. Yes, There Were Memes
Three years of TGForum posts were found on a CD-ROM — and uploaded for all to browse.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
does anybody have an analysis of “drama” in its vernacular interpersonal sense, like what do we mean when we say someone is “overly dramatic” or “loves drama,” is a “drama queen” etc? does the drama queen have a history? it feels related to discourses on hysteria but i absolutely haven’t checked.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
sometimes i think there are only two core parenting skills: bargaining, and not bargaining the main trick being to know when to do each…
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
me for the past 10 years: "uchicago was a very depressing grad school in a lot of ways and i would not want to stay in touch with the institution" me this year: "dear alumna, thanks for randomly inviting me to the local book club and vegan potluck of uchicago folk, i think i would like to come…"
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
i really loved Robin Morgan's 1970 feminist anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful—it was formative to me and absolutely brilliant—but as a trans feminist it's super depressing to me that @theguardian.com just published an obit that doesn't even mention her awful transphobic views 🤦🏼‍♀️ these things matter.
theguardian.com
Robin Morgan obituary
Political theorist and one of the first feminists of her generation to point out the misogyny within male leftist counterculture
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
i thought this was really interesting — i mean the odds that AI will allow us all to have fully automated luxury aristocratic clan life seem negligible, and i am v skeptical of the teleological quality of theories of modernization and liberal individualism, but i loved reading this anyway
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
quite a while ago, i tried going to these weekly life drawing sessions (having zero skills or training of any kind), and i found a few of the sketches that somehow i liked:
pencil sketch of a person kneeling
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
i feel very weird about the elementary school pushing kids to quantify all their “reading minutes” and track them in some app that has “digital badges” and “leaderboards.” like i love books and i hate this.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
i thought someone might need to see this today.
idk i guess it is a colorful painting of a theater with cats on the stage and in the audience
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
it’s funny that, since the word “ok” is a relatively recent invention, there was an earlier period in the history of this culture in which it was just impossible to “be ok” or “feel ok” or “be doing ok,” since these idioms just didn’t exist as we currently know them.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
my partner got me this copy of Nat Pyper’s Queer Your Love Letters, a wild and beautifully designed book about queerness and fonts/typography as a kind of political kinship
cover of Queer Your Love Letters, it’s purple with strange glyphs
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
my kid (age 7, loves art) says that he doesn’t see what is such a big deal about the mona lisa. it’s just a painting of a face, he observed. i could paint one just as good myself in a few weeks of working on it, he added. i’d like to see that, i said.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
i enjoyed this. i also have an analog watch.
terrygodier.com
The Last Quiet Thing
Your possessions came alive. Now they won't stop talking.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
i realized at the end of the afternoon that my pants (ok leggings) were on inside out and had been that way since morning. did i also mention it was a solo parenting day and vaguely hectic.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
i've been doing this weekly silent peace walk with some (cis) women in our neighborhood, each tuesday morning, and i was thinking — after copious interpellations of our group as "ladies" — of mentioning that i wasn't born as a woman; and then i laughed at myself and thought, well, neither were they.
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Reposted by eli nova rose
to wound the autumnal kitty @blurry-line.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
I know I don't need to explain it, but fyi, the reason I'm not posting more about the state of the world right now is that the posts would all just say AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
in my dream, we were cat sitting for two cats, and the two cats came with two visiting toddlers, who were wandering everywhere unsteadily, while the hallways were full of laundry drying like a red cloth wind, an anthropologist wanted to play a saxophone in the kitchen, and my day job was calling me.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
i'm curious, if you were having people over for dinner, and you needed to do most of the cooking the day before, what you would make?
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
i was feeling a little blue during some random childcare things yesterday but then i saw an old woman pushing a stroller and wearing this sweatshirt that said YOU ARE ENOUGH
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
my workplace gave me a perfectly good backpack but i felt weird about their logo being on it and these are the first two buttons i could find to cover it up
blue backpack with two purple buttons reading: Sublime, Votes for Women
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
7yo made me this valentine
purple marker on a card saying

i love you

with "love" repeated 28 times
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
hardware store guy 20 years older than me randomly wished me happy v day with what he described as the rose left over — as he had previously given roses to “all the ladies who work at the store,” adding, “i do it every year”
red rose in a parking lot
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
how to destroy your legacy as a radical theorist in one plane ride or less
Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein on a private jet
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
the fox in The Little Prince (1943) proposes this caustic theory of friendship under capitalism: “People buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where you can buy friendship, and so people have no friends any more.“
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
generally feel like my political feelings are super disorganized and sad lately and i feel like i should be protesting but instead i’m like staggering on with life
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
back in 2011, i saw this graffiti in france that said: “this world is already lost” now i wish it didn’t still resonate so much
graffiti on cement wall reading “ce monde est déjà perdu”
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
I was just gifted Mastering the Art of French Cooking and it's interesting to read about her weird distaste for women's spaces ("I hate groups of women") and her pretty wretched homophobia. "What she really disliked was effeminacy in men," as Shapiro puts it: www.bostonmagazine.com/uncategorize...
bostonmagazine.com
Just a Pinch of Prejudice
Just a Pinch of Prejudice
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
today our kids started a family group chat with me and my partner. it contains a nearly continuous stream of cat memes, elmo gifs, weird sarcasm, emojis of people puking or yawning, some random insults, storming off, i love yous, weird photos, and question marks. they are 7 and 10.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
lego owl was too hard for 7yo so i ended up building it, but it did come out v. cute.
Lego owl on a Lego tree
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
“what end of life guidance would you leave for your partner if you were in a coma and also carrying a nonviable pregnancy?” …surreal questions they asked me at the lawyer’s office today
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
I enjoyed this formulation: "The cutesy language flows in one direction only. Your compliance is demanded in the language of contracts; their failures are communicated in the language of the nursery." www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-in...
joanwestenberg.com
Uh Oh! The Infantilization of Failure
When apps fail, when software breaks, you'll likely encounter a message constructed from a specific vocabulary: "Oops!" "Uh oh!" "Whoops!" Sometimes you'll get the full nursery treatment: an "Oopsie-...
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
“That said, there is A LOT of illness spreading right now - flu, strep and everything in between!” the first grade teacher wrote cheerfully
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
baby pigs have very beautiful eyelashes.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
welcome to femininity in your 40s, says the mammogram order that my physician gave me today, or seems to say… it’s funny how something can be so banal and yet also a little bit surreal and disheveling and slightly anxiogenic and like a bundle of vaguely confusing things.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
ok I'm trying to have a will (blah) and I just want to say I loathe this bit of legal boilerplate: "Whenever required by the context of this Will, the singular number shall include the plural, the plural the singular, and the use of any gender shall include all genders."
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
an adorable toddler on an airplane is yelling loudly at the snow falling heavily through the window: “I LIKE SNOW. MAMA! DADA! LOOK!” after a brief pause: “KEEP LOOKING!”
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
“I never cry when I’m sad; at those times I just pinch down into a miniature version of myself like an ailing turtle trundling off into the forest to die alone.” (confessions of the fox)
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
“and the soft eyes softened” (it’s just a tiny James Baldwin phrase that i liked)
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
in the department of obscure indie films, we just watched Chestnut (2023), a film about a bi woman in her early 20s drifting through a summer, getting awkwardly attached to the wrong people, being very open to life but also almost diffident about it, having a lot of both composure and confusion.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
sometimes i look at our yard in November and it feels like those fairy tales where you are condemned to spend the night doing some impossible sorting or cleaning task, or else suffer some awful consequence
a sea of fallen leaves and the shadow of the subject
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
"I have dreamed stubbornly." www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/599...
thesunmagazine.org
The Childless Aunt
Though a faint hope that I might yet conceive continued to smolder in the back of my mind, at some point it dawned on me that none of these joys and trials I wished for myself were exclusive to biolog...
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
i wrote a little bit about therapy and emotional capitalism for this forum my partner organized: www.madinamerica.com/2025/10/ther...
madinamerica.com
There’s No Escape From the World
There’s always an economic transaction underneath. When the business stops working out, the therapy is apt to end.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
it’s funny how certain femme bodies are sometimes called “willowy” and now i’m wondering if masc bodies are ever likened to tree forms (oaken? piney? walnut?)
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
does anyone else find that typing on a phone is ok for basic everyday statements like “fml I’m so tired” or simple questions “when will you be home?” but that somehow it’s v. hard to write anything long and thoughtful in this input format? when i pick up a pen and a paper notebook it’s different.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
my neighbors put this in their front lawn
two skeletons in chairs with big hair
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
a thing about caretaking without reciprocity… “I don’t read them [=stepkids] my own poems or share my own stories. I am realizing that I can go with them into their world without needing them to come into mine.” (Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life)
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
last year i brought my electric organ outside and played spooky music to the passing trick-or-treaters, and this year it occurred to me that i could repeat the experiment with a more specific theme: lullabies for the dead.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
I’m reading this stretch of bookshelf as meaning that The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work are Cruel Optimism, Black Trans Feminism, Transgender Marxism, Females, Desire/Love, the Female Complaint and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
books on a shelf with The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work in the middle
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
6yo spent most of the last 12 hours loudly groaning, lamenting, honestly whining, decrying, deploring, and generally being completely against absolutely everything about the world around him. everything bugs him. even things that are arguably going fine. i am starting to lose my mind.
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eli nova rose @unambivalence.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
i woke up today feeling certain that it was a weekend and then realized it was friday, but our kids have a random day off school so idk how i'm going to do 3 hours of meetings…
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