Mucking and furriness
Mar. 31st, 2004 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoFor those who are into details, Chama's Furrycode allows me to give a succinct definition of my degrees of furriness. Just click on the code below to view the interpretation if you are so inclined.
Finding the sources of furriness is every bit as elusive, perhaps moreso, than finding the cause of gayness (if it even has a cause.) I can remember playing games with my brother when I was still less than ten years old in which we pretended to be dogs. In fourth grade, a classmate and I constructed elaborate fantasy games in which we played the role of horses. She introduced me to the copious supply of horse, dog, and other animal stories and books in the local public library, and we both read these voraciously.
By junior high, I was already planning to go to veterinary school. Hey, if you can't lick 'em any other way, be their doctor! I collected pets the way some kids collected stamps or rocks. Pigeons, chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs, turtles, fish, snakes, the family dog AND all the neighbors' dogs. I wanted a horse, badly, but we lived in a suburban area and couldn't afford one. I wanted a cat, but my dad insisted he was allergic to them. (Later that proved not to be true, when my sister brought home a tiny kitten and he didn't have the heart to turn it away.)
When I got to college, I did most of the pre-veterinary stuff with good grades, but began to feel too restricted by the program itself. They didn't want me to take electives in philosophy, literature, or languages "because you need good grades to get into professional school". I defiantly kept gerbils and baby chickens in my dorm room, against regulations, and took the elective courses anyway. Got good grades in those too, but I was rebellious enough to switch into the liberal arts when I got tired of being nagged about it. Working the summer in a so-called "animal clinic" convinced me that small animal practice at least would never work out for me anyway. I couldn't put dogs down just because their owners didn't want them any more. I couldn't refuse to treat an injured animal because there was no one to pay the bill. I'd have gone bankrupt in no time.
I eventually graduated with high honors, on the dean's list, with a degree that indicated great erudition and no marketable skills. It didn't take me long to drift into library work, books being another of my deep love affairs, but it took another 20 years for me to actually get a graduate degree so that I could call myself a professional librarian. In the meantime, I still collected as many pets as I could manage, played with other folks' horses as often as I could (which was nowhere near often enough) and saved as much as I could toward getting my own piece of rural property.
In the same time, while working at various library jobs, I discovered the internet. That was when the idea of a 'public' internet was still a novel concept. Before the NSF transferred it all to commercial interests, when advertising was unknown, spam was still a mysterious pink 'meat' in a can, and the web was an idea just being tested at CERN and the U of Illinois. A local alternative paper ran an article about Lambda Moo. It sounded interesting, so I investigated and became a regular player for a while. Human character, I think they all were. It was interesting, and weird at the same time. While looking for other similar places, I found Furrymuck.
Lambda was soon forgotten. I built an elaborate character for Furrymuck, a canine mime. Vaguely sheepdog-ish, he wandered the muck for several years, always IC, never speaking. He saw a lot, learned a little, and never understood either his attraction to the place or the attraction others seemed to feel.
Then, (with time on my hands after losing my academic librarian's position of the previous seven years,) I read about WildSpirits MUSH in a bb posting on Furrymuck. "Come play a horse in a wild southwestern setting," it said. Somehow it had never occurred to me to play a horse on Furrymuck, even though I had horses of my own by then. I investigated WildSpirits and fell deeply into the theme of the place. This is not particularly a recommendation, but just a statement that it inspired me to think and act as an equine, which turned out to suit me well, far better than my shaggy canine. The canine was soon converted to a horse as well.
Then came Tapestries, an adventure worthy of a separate entry that I will write someday. Unlike WildSpirits, Tapestries encourages fantasy creatures: dragons, unicorns, flying wolves, strange chimerae. You name it, and you'll find it there. You'll also find things that defy naming. Also you find out, if you didn't already know (I did not) what real yiffiness is. I found out it didn't suit me at all, and I have bucked the mainstream there ever since. Fortunately for Tivo, Furrymuck isn't quite the sexual pressure cooker that Taps is. He soon needed an escape back to something more 'civilized' (at least, his definition of civilized.)
WildSpirits and Tapestries exposed me to self-professed 'zoos' or zoophiles, some of whom were convinced that I belonged among their number, though I remain unsure of that. I might be more inclined to describe myself as a were-beast, except that those are historically individuals who are forced against their will to assume the shape of some animal. Instead, I wanted to assume that form. Of course, all things being what they were, I'd still want to be able to change back and forth at will. Talk about having your cake and eating it too! But the fact remains that I fit in fairly well with some portion of the 'furry community' as it is often called.
I'm curious about how others discovered their 'furry' nature and how they have expressed it. I'll be looking through some other journals here to see what folks have to say. That's probably long-winded enough for now. If you read this far, thanks for putting up with me.
| My Furry Code FEHp4admw A C D H++ M+ P++ R+ T++ W** Z Sm+ RLCT/ET !a cl++ d--- e+++ f++ h+++ iwf+++ j p+++ sm+ |
Finding the sources of furriness is every bit as elusive, perhaps moreso, than finding the cause of gayness (if it even has a cause.) I can remember playing games with my brother when I was still less than ten years old in which we pretended to be dogs. In fourth grade, a classmate and I constructed elaborate fantasy games in which we played the role of horses. She introduced me to the copious supply of horse, dog, and other animal stories and books in the local public library, and we both read these voraciously.
By junior high, I was already planning to go to veterinary school. Hey, if you can't lick 'em any other way, be their doctor!
When I got to college, I did most of the pre-veterinary stuff with good grades, but began to feel too restricted by the program itself. They didn't want me to take electives in philosophy, literature, or languages "because you need good grades to get into professional school". I defiantly kept gerbils and baby chickens in my dorm room, against regulations, and took the elective courses anyway. Got good grades in those too, but I was rebellious enough to switch into the liberal arts when I got tired of being nagged about it. Working the summer in a so-called "animal clinic" convinced me that small animal practice at least would never work out for me anyway. I couldn't put dogs down just because their owners didn't want them any more. I couldn't refuse to treat an injured animal because there was no one to pay the bill. I'd have gone bankrupt in no time.
I eventually graduated with high honors, on the dean's list, with a degree that indicated great erudition and no marketable skills. It didn't take me long to drift into library work, books being another of my deep love affairs, but it took another 20 years for me to actually get a graduate degree so that I could call myself a professional librarian. In the meantime, I still collected as many pets as I could manage, played with other folks' horses as often as I could (which was nowhere near often enough) and saved as much as I could toward getting my own piece of rural property.
In the same time, while working at various library jobs, I discovered the internet. That was when the idea of a 'public' internet was still a novel concept. Before the NSF transferred it all to commercial interests, when advertising was unknown, spam was still a mysterious pink 'meat' in a can, and the web was an idea just being tested at CERN and the U of Illinois. A local alternative paper ran an article about Lambda Moo. It sounded interesting, so I investigated and became a regular player for a while. Human character, I think they all were. It was interesting, and weird at the same time. While looking for other similar places, I found Furrymuck.
Lambda was soon forgotten. I built an elaborate character for Furrymuck, a canine mime. Vaguely sheepdog-ish, he wandered the muck for several years, always IC, never speaking. He saw a lot, learned a little, and never understood either his attraction to the place or the attraction others seemed to feel.
Then, (with time on my hands after losing my academic librarian's position of the previous seven years,) I read about WildSpirits MUSH in a bb posting on Furrymuck. "Come play a horse in a wild southwestern setting," it said. Somehow it had never occurred to me to play a horse on Furrymuck, even though I had horses of my own by then. I investigated WildSpirits and fell deeply into the theme of the place. This is not particularly a recommendation, but just a statement that it inspired me to think and act as an equine, which turned out to suit me well, far better than my shaggy canine. The canine was soon converted to a horse as well.
Then came Tapestries, an adventure worthy of a separate entry that I will write someday. Unlike WildSpirits, Tapestries encourages fantasy creatures: dragons, unicorns, flying wolves, strange chimerae. You name it, and you'll find it there. You'll also find things that defy naming.
WildSpirits and Tapestries exposed me to self-professed 'zoos' or zoophiles, some of whom were convinced that I belonged among their number, though I remain unsure of that. I might be more inclined to describe myself as a were-beast, except that those are historically individuals who are forced against their will to assume the shape of some animal. Instead, I wanted to assume that form. Of course, all things being what they were, I'd still want to be able to change back and forth at will. Talk about having your cake and eating it too! But the fact remains that I fit in fairly well with some portion of the 'furry community' as it is often called.
I'm curious about how others discovered their 'furry' nature and how they have expressed it. I'll be looking through some other journals here to see what folks have to say. That's probably long-winded enough for now. If you read this far, thanks for putting up with me.
