Hi, I'm Rifkala. I'm a disabled queer trans Ashkenazi woman from the Midwest, currently living in western New York.
I'm extremely obsessed with languages, including artificial ones. I'm fluent in Esperanto, advanced at Toki Pona and Yiddish, OK at Spanish, and I know a good deal of Hebrew. I like to design graphics for Teepublic and similar sites, putting various political slogans (both popular and self-invented) in various languages. Other languages I'm interested in include (this is not an exhaustive list): Arabic, Turkish, Kabyle, Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Catalan, French, Italian, German, Guarani, Globasa, Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, Brithenig, Klingon, and Láadan.
I'm a published poet many times over, though it has been years since my last publication.
Lately I've been rediscovering leisure reading, and am currently reading Dune Messiah. Before that I read Dune, and before that, The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi (highly recommend).
Judaism-wise, I grew up Conservative and was active in BBYO as a teenager. I became estranged from Judaism as an adult because I wanted to "just be a human," and plus, I was unable to stomach the occupation and its regular atrocities. I started re-evaluating my desire to "just be a human" after the Tree of Life shooting and became more unapologetically Jewish, though I still only rarely go to shul. But I've been taking Yiddish lessons since 2019, and my Teepublic store that I started around that time is unapologetically left-wing Jewish. Still, it was only 2016 that I was last yelling at Jews for caring about antisemitism when the Palestinian cause was so much more important.