My name is Lamp and I wish that I was a dragon who could burn this shit world to a crisp. I wouldn't really do it, but I could, and that would be a comfort to me living in a society that really wants me gone. xe/xem/xyrs pronouns plox. ♥ ♦ /♣/♠

About me.

“gay” -Alasdair

“Safe for children! Amazing customer service!” -Ike

“well, ace actually but still gay” - Alasdair again

“what the fuck is a testimonial i once fell out of a 50ft oak and almost got impaled by a lawn decoration i was like 7” -Zante

Send me testimonials, for fuck’s sake.

I am the lamp! Look to your nearest lamp: that’s me! Look to another: also me! No matter which lamp in particular is being discussed, I am the lamp. As such you can call me Lamp. My actual name is Ceilidh, which I also anglicise as Caley sometimes for nametags and such, since no one can read Gaelic. I don’t have a preference for how you spell it really, though brownie points are gained just for attempting to spell anything in a Goidelic language. I also shorten it to Ceil/Cale if you like that, and I’ll answer to most nicknames I’m called.

My dad is from Rutherglen, Scotland, my mum is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I was born in Mount Lebanon (Pittsburgh), but we moved to a suburb of Los Angeles when I was six, and I lived there until moving out to study linguistics at CSU Northridge in fall 2019. I hated LA when I was little because I didn’t have friends and it’s too hot, but now I know people and I realise that I’m queer as hell in one of the safest places (in the world, maybe?) to be openly queer as hell. It’s still too warm though, and I don’t like In-N-Out. Their fries are sad, limp, soggy potatoes just waiting for the end.

Living in the USA my entire life didn’t stop me from learning to speak a bizarre hybrid of British and American English that I mostly use with family, while socialization with others is done in language more typical of a Californian dialect, I guess. I’ve still been told outside the home that I have an accent, but I think it’s more a mix of my inflection/sentence structure/personal lexicon than anything else. I know solid ASL, and I speak French in a way that probably used to be somewhere between mediocre and decent, but my lack of practice has dragged that one down. Apparently my accent is great though, probably in part due to my high school French teacher being super anal about our pronunciation. Thanks, Mme. Langdon.

My main fandoms at the moment are Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Star Trek, and Marvel, but I like a lot of other things, like Harry Potter (fuck JKR tho), and The Adventure Zone, and Welcome to Night Vale, and the occasional meme. Good stuff, memes. My favourite band is Fall Out Boy, and I won’t quite say it saved my life, but it certainly made life a little more worth living when I was a teenager. Also I don’t blog about him a lot, but Nikola Tesla is my hero. I have a plushie of him? and I’ve literally cried real tears because I get so upset about how much better he deserved from this world. Capitalism ruins everything.

I love labels! They help me connect to people with similar experiences and find community and all that. I won’t force labels on anyone who doesn’t like them, but if you ever need help figuring out what exactly you could call yourself, I know a lot because I spent so much time figuring out what I was and I’d be more than happy to talk to you and help you out! I’m really proud of all the words I’ve found that describe my experiences and identity. My mother doesn’t understand what a “sensual asexual polygreyromantic agender dyadic transsexual” is though, and affectionately refers to me as “fancy gay,” much to just about everyone’s amusement.

My pronouns are important to me. My primary ones are “xe/xem/xyr.” If you need time to get comfortable with using that, my secondary set is “it/it/its,” and if that makes you uncomfortable or muddies up a particular phrasing too much, I will answer to “he/him/his.” Please note that “it” and “he” are only meant to be temporary while you have the chance to learn and practice “xe” before using that actively. That’s just for your comfort though; if you’re okay with jumping straight in, I’ll just correct any mistakes you make as you go. (As a side note, I kind of have a linguistics beef with noun-based neopronouns, and if you want to try to explain or debate or something to make me accept them more, I’m open to that. My thoughts aren’t worth much without relativity to others’.)

I like multiples of three and semicolons and the color purple, and I’m convinced I’m an unnurtured child prodigy past my peak, which I’m bitter about. I have a second degree black belt in taekwondo, and have a job teaching lower ranks, so sometimes I’ll talk about my kiddos! I wanna get into other martial arts, but I don’t quite have the time. My MBTI is INTP and my enneagram is 5w4. I have ADHD, MDD, autism, and (more recently discovered!) C-PTSD, as well as dermatillomania and mild trichotillomania.

My familiar spirit and emotional support cat, Jynx Salazaar Edmund, (my Jynxy Bear) passed away September 2, 2018. I miss him very dearly and always will, and will occasionally tag posts (especially with black cats) as “in memoriam.” In January 2019, I adopted four rats named Valentino, Taako, Ouija, and McRib, because my friend Matthew was rehoming them. About a year later, three of them passed away in as many months, and because they’re such social creatures, I had to rehome the last (Ouija) with a lovely friend-of-a-friend named Izzie (fliptricxed on Instagram). In December 2019, one of my roommates adopted a sweet little tortie cat named Buzz Aldrin. No one will ever replace Jynx, but I do love all the little brats and bastards that move through my life.

The skinny of my blog’s policies (if you can call them that?) are pretty open: you don’t have to ask to reblog anything, selfies and personal posts included. Everything is free game unless tagged as “warning high voltage” which is my vent tag that I never want reblogged. If you want any content warnings on my reblogs or posts, shoot me a message/ask, anon or not, and I will happily tag recent and future posts. If I reblogged something made by a gross person/blog, lemme know! I’ll probably delete it! Communication is cool!

I’m not very good at the friendship thing I don’t think, but I do like it, so please don’t be nervous about talking to me; I’m just a lamp. You can practice with the lamp at home if that helps. I will judge you just as hard as that lamp, unless you somehow ended up with a really judgmental lamp? Where did you get your gossipy decor?