Timeline for adpleroma list by gnusocialjp, page 10
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 03:07:15 JST 
lainy
@feld i really prefer short stories, they don't overstay their welcome -
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 03:07:18 JST
lainy
@feld i don't know 'the giver' but yeah that's what i was going for
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Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: (tk@bbs.kawa-kun.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 03:04:42 JST 
Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem:
@snacks It took five hours and three days? :blobfoxscared: -
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 03:04:23 JST
lainy
"is this a metaphor" yeah you bet
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 03:02:56 JST
lainy
@Racist_Columbo clearly you don't know @augustus
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 02:55:36 JST
lainy
They called today. Thursday. My next appointment is on Monday.
I have been thinking about what to write here, because it seems likely that this will be the last time I am able to. Not certainly — I don't know what they'll take on Monday, and it's possible they'll leave me something. But if the pattern holds, and it has always held, then I think the right arm will go at the shoulder, and after that the mechanics of pen and paper will be beyond me.
I want to say something important. I have been sitting here for an hour trying to think of what that might be.
Maren is in the next room. I can hear her humming. I don't recognise the melody, but it has the structure of something she once played, simplified, adapted for humming, for a body that has learned to make do with less.
I will put down the pen soon. My hand is tired — it tires more easily now, with so much asked of so few fingers. I will go and sit with her. She will ask me if I want tea. I will say yes.
On Monday I will go to my appointment.
I have never missed an appointment.
───
I wonder what will happen next.
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 02:54:44 JST
lainy
...At university I studied engineering, which turned out to be largely mathematics and therefore largely indifferent to the number of fingers one possesses. My roommate, Felix, was ahead of me — left hand entirely gone already, taken at the wrist in what he called a "consolidated session," which was apparently an option in some regions. He seemed to regard this as progressive. Modern. His parents were from Hamburg.
We never discussed whether it was right. We discussed Hegel and football and whether the woman from the economics faculty was flirting with him or merely being Swabian, but never the appointments. Once, late at night, very drunk on terrible wine, I began to say something — I don't even know what — and Felix looked at me with an expression I have thought about many times since. Not hostile. Not afraid. Blank. The way you might look at someone who had begun, calmly and without provocation, to recite the dictionary. As though the words I was about to say did not connect to any known category of conversation.
I said never mind. He poured more wine. I adjusted.
───
The left thumb went at twenty-three. The right small finger at twenty-six. I was engaged by then, to a woman named Maren who played the cello, or had played the cello, before the appointments had made certain fingerings impossible. She taught music theory now. "It's more honest," she said once. "Performance is vanity. Theory is structure." I did not ask whether she had arrived at this philosophy before or after. The question seemed unkind.
Our wedding photos show us smiling, her right hand on my right arm. We look happy. We were happy. Happiness is not the absence of loss. It is the successful integration of loss into the ordinary. Everyone at the wedding had their own missing pieces, visible in the way sleeves fell or shoes fit, and this was not tragic. It was Tuesday.
───
I am writing this with my right hand, which still has its thumb and two fingers. The left arm was taken at the elbow last spring, in a session that required general anaesthetic — a concession, I was told, to the complexity of the procedure rather than to my comfort, though I was grateful for it all the same. Recovery took longer. I had phantom sensations for weeks, the ghost of a fist clenching in air. But they faded, as everything fades.
Maren brings me coffee in the mornings and helps me with the buttons I can no longer manage alone. This is not tragic. This is marriage. All marriages involve buttons of one kind or another.... -
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 02:54:45 JST
lainy
...I should say that I looked for explanations. I was a curious child — my father said too curious, but gently, in the way that meant he was proud — and the absence of an explanation troubled me more, in those early weeks, than the absence of the finger. I asked my mother why and she said "It's just what's done, Liebling" with a tone so genuinely puzzled by the question that I felt foolish for having asked it. As though I had asked why we eat dinner in the evening or why rain falls downward.
I tried the school library. I tried the internet. You must understand — it was not that the information was forbidden or hidden. It was that there was nothing to find. There were no pamphlets for or against. No debate. No history of the practice. It existed in the way that weather exists: as a condition so fundamental that it precedes the question of its own justification.
After a while, I stopped looking. I want to be honest about that. I stopped, and it was not because I was afraid of what I would find, but because the question itself had started to feel odd in my mouth, like a word you repeat until it loses meaning. Why. Why why why. You cannot sustain that kind of wondering against the sheer, massive, immovable indifference of everyone around you. The question requires a foothold, and there was none.
───
I was twelve for the next appointment. The left ring finger.
By then I understood the procedure, and I did not cry, though it still hurt. Dr. Renault had a new fish tank — cichlids now, bright and quarrelsome. My mother didn't come this time. My father drove me and waited in the car, because I was old enough, he said, and I understood that he meant this as a gift: the recognition that I could bear it alone. That bearing it alone was part of what the appointments were for, maybe. Or maybe he just had calls to make. These interpretations do not exclude each other.
At school, nobody mentioned it. Why would they? Thomas Drexler had missed a week in October for his, and we hadn't mentioned that either. It would have been like commenting on someone's haircut — not rude, exactly, but oddly intimate. The appointments were private. Not secret. Private. There is a difference.
I joined the swim team that year. The coach showed me how to adjust my stroke. You'd be surprised how quickly the body renegotiates its relationship with the water.
───
The middle finger was at fifteen. The index finger at seventeen, three weeks before my Abitur. I sat the maths exam with a hand that was just a thumb, and I received a 1.3, which was the best mark in my cohort. I tell you this not to boast but to demonstrate something about the human talent for accommodation. We are, above all else, creatures who adjust.
My girlfriend at the time, Lena, had her appointment the same spring. Her right foot, the smaller toes. She was a dancer, and I remember thinking, briefly, that this was cruel. But she switched to modern dance, which was more forgiving, and by summer she said she preferred it. "Classical was so rigid anyway," she said, and I nodded, and I think we both believed it. Belief, I have learned, is as much a decision as a revelation.... -
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 02:53:22 JST
lainy
The Appointments
I was born in April, in a house with blue shutters, to parents who loved me very much. I want to establish this at the outset because it matters. They loved me. I never doubted it then and I do not doubt it now.
My mother taught piano. My father sold insurance, which he said was the business of quantifying worry, and which made him — perhaps paradoxically — the least worried man I ever knew. We had a dog called Pistachio, named by me at the age of four, when I still had the authority of the very young, which is to say, absolute authority over things that do not matter.
I was seven when my parents took me to Dr. Renault for the first time. It was a Tuesday. I know it was a Tuesday because we stopped at the bakery on Helmstraße on the way, and the Helmstraße bakery only made Bienenstich on Tuesdays, and my mother bought me a slice, which I ate in the back seat. I remember being very careful not to get custard on my school trousers.
Dr. Renault's office was on the third floor of a converted townhouse. There was a fish tank in the waiting room — tetras, mostly, with a single angelfish that held itself very still among them, like a priest at a carnival. I watched it while my mother filled in forms. My father read a magazine.
They called my name and we went in together, all three of us, and Dr. Renault, who was tall and had a grey moustache and kind eyes, explained that he would be removing the smallest finger of my left hand.
I looked at my mother. She was smiling. Not the fixed, encouraging smile that adults use to paper over something dreadful, but her real smile, her Tuesday-bakery smile. My father put his hand on my shoulder.
I said I didn't want him to.
Dr. Renault said that was perfectly normal. My mother said it would be over quickly. My father squeezed my shoulder.
There was no anaesthetic. I should be clear about that. Dr. Renault used a device I didn't get a good look at because my father was holding me and I had my face pressed into his coat, which smelled of tobacco and the leather interior of our car. It hurt very much. I screamed, I think. Then it was over, and there was gauze, and my mother held my hand — my right hand — and told me I had been very brave, and on the way home we stopped again at the bakery, though it had run out of Bienenstich by then.
I did not go to school for three days. When I returned, I kept my left hand in my pocket. At lunch, Stefan Möller saw the bandage and asked what had happened. I told him. He nodded and showed me his own left hand, which I had somehow never noticed was also missing its smallest finger. So was Katrin Berger's. So was the teacher's.
"Does it hurt?" Stefan asked.
"Not anymore," I said.
"Mine neither," he said, and then we played football, and I found that you do not need the smallest finger of your left hand for anything important.
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narcolepsy and alcoholism :flag: (hj@shigusegubu.club)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 02:35:06 JST 
narcolepsy and alcoholism :flag:
@lain nice dwarf fortress tileset -
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lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 02:35:07 JST
lainy
worst river i've ever seen
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