butch girlcat

The End of the World As We Know It

2009-11-26T16:23:00.000-08:00

I heard that song on the radio yesterday and felt it was so appropriate as to be ludicrous.

Things are hard here and more than that, my life has changed over the last three months, in ways good, bad, and just breathtaking.

I don't think I can keep this space alive any longer. It has been a lifeline and a joy, and it has brought me into contact with people I will always cherish. But it is also a monument to a certain phase of my life which is coming to an end. What is next, I am only beginning to discern.

Thank you for reading. I will leave the blog up in the hopes that anyone might find it useful, entertaining, or inspiring. I may take down MacCool Uncensored, not certain, but I doubt I will hand out the password much any more. (For those of you who have asked recently & been ignored, my apologies: it's not personal, not in any way.)

And maybe I will return to this space in the future, or start another one. Until then, farewell readers; I give thanks for each and every one of you.

Meme That Proves I'm Still Kicking

2009-11-18T12:43:00.000-08:00

I was tagged by the super-cool ANPFisher, who is blogging every day this month. Whereas I have not blogged at all for a month. It makes a nice symmetry anyway, right?

But here it is, to prove I'm still alive... and to shake things up, I'm going to post seven good things about the last month. It's been a hell of a month so believe me this counts as "random and weird" things about me.

Rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. FG got a table delivered that had belonged to her grandparents and resided in her family's basement for a looooong time. I've been knocking myself out cleaning it. Picture me, a bucket of hot water & Murphy's Oil Soap, flannel rags, and a small screwdriver to ease dirt out of the carvings, and you have it. I love it. It's a beautiful table.

2. Working on the table, plus doing some other minor fixing jobs, has made me think seriously about developing a furniture-refinishing hobby, especially if I can turn it in green/natural/historical-materials directions. I might take a relevant class or two from a nearby school. And I'm also thinking about refinishing a dresser that was originally my mom's and has been mine since I was a child. It's been mine for longer than it was hers but it still feels like hers; I'm thinking a rehab might fix that.

3. Cuban sandwiches. Um, goodbye vegetarianism...

4. Belle & Sebastian. Worth a listen. My preferred table-cleaning music.

5. Running. I ran a little over a mile *nonstop* for I think the first time in my life. Very happy about that & how it feels.

6. My lovely students. Who knew teaching was so energizing? Even if I am running around like a crazy person half the time.

7. All those friends & loved ones who keep on keeping me from falling.

No tagging, except you, Jess!

Stolen Meme

2009-10-20T15:56:00.001-07:00

because I feel like blogging but I got nothing to say. Stolen from the ever-fabulous GREG.

1. What is the color of your toothbrush? Blue
2. Name one person who made you smile today. A student. I love my students.
3. What were you doing at 8 am this morning? Desperately stuffing crap into a bag from my weekly two-night stay in Job City, hoping I wasn't going to miss the train.
4. What were you doing 45 minutes ago? Teaching
5. What is your favorite candy bar? Bounty Bar
6. Have you ever been to a strip club? No. To be honest the idea kind of horrifies me. I'm not sure why. I don't think it's prudery or judgment, lots of other similar things seem fine. In the context of a show it seems ok, even. I don't know, some unexamined issues there?
7. What is the last thing you said aloud? "Where do I return these?" (in regard to two movies borrowed from library)
8. What is your favorite ice cream? How to choose? At the moment peanut butter oreo.
9. What was the last thing you had to drink? Old bottled water on my desk. Blech.
10. Do you like your wallet? Yes! FG bought it for me quite a while back. Simple and black, just what I like.
11. What was the last thing you ate? Twix bar.
12. Have you bought any new clothing items this week? Three undershirts and three pairs of socks, and a pair of black trousers that I have to return. The last time I tried clothes on in that store the dressing room attendant offered me the choice of the men's or women's tags (you had to split into one or the other set of dressing rooms after the attendant-station). Awkward. I took men's and then my companion referred to me as 'she' and she told me to switch rooms. Later she did tell me the trousers I was trying on looked nice, but anyway, I'm not in a hurry to try stuff on there again. So I bought it and I'm returning it.
13. The last sporting event you watched? Very sad, I can't even remember. And that used to be a major activity for me. I even missed the Pats' snow game this week.
14. What is your favorite flavor of popcorn? None. I don't like the stuff.
15. Who is the last person you sent a text message to?: FG
16. Ever go camping? No. (Weeps quietly.)
17. Do you take vitamins daily? No, but a few times a week.
18. Do you go to church every Sunday? No.
19. Do you have a tan? Erm, no. Did have a farmer's tan for a while this summer though.
20. Do you prefer Chinese food over pizza? I like Chinese food but I do not think it makes a good topping for pizza, no.
21. Do you drink your soda with a straw? Sometimes.
22. What did your last text message say? Nosy, aren't you? I'm not saying but it was sweet.
23. What are you doing tomorrow? Attending a seminar, volunteering, having tea with a colleague, grading...
24. Favorite color? Blue but it's not a big thing.
25. Look to your left; what do you see? A chair with my bag on it.
26. What color is your watch? Am sans watch.
27. What do you think of when you hear “Australia”? Australia.
28. Would you strip for money? No. Maybe for free though.
29. Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive thru? Always in. I'm afraid of not being understood through the drive through, or messing it up somehow. I've done that before.
30. What is your favorite number? 22
31. Who’s the last person you talked to on the phone? Friend
32. Any plans today? It's almost over. Gonna head 'home', eat some pasta, do some reading, watch part of a movie.
33. In how many states have you lived? Counting the states of grace and panic? No? Ok then, four. Plus one foreign country.
34. Biggest annoyance right now? Hm, not really all that annoyed with anything. (!?!?)
35. Last song listened to? Fiery Furnaces, "Borneo"
36. Can you say the alphabet backwards? I prefer not to.
37. Do you have a maid service clean your house? Um, no. DIY.
38. Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time? At home, my doc boots. At work, I'm really happy with my new Bostonians.
39. Are you jealous of anyone? Not especially, at the moment. Jealousy flares up ever so often these days but it's not a lingering thing.
40. Is anyone jealous of you? No idea.
41. Do you love anyone? Yes, deeply.
42. Do any of your friends have children? Yes
43. What do you usually do during the day? Each day, as I said, is its own epoch. I really can't answer this question.
44. Do you hate anyone that you know right now? Next question, please.
45. Do you use the word hello daily? I do.
46. What color is your car? Silver.
47. What size wedding ring do you wear? I forget. Maybe 5? Something rather small, I have bony fingers. My fingers have grown since then, though.
48. Are you thinking about someone right now? Not specifically.
49. Have you ever been to Six Flags? Nope.
50. How did you get your worst scar? A dog bit me.

Jess, for old time's sakes, you're tagged, even though there's no tagging with this one. K?

Music of the Moment

2009-10-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

Well it's been a hot minute, hasn't it? That would be because I am a) busy with my new job and b) busy being a hot mess. Every day is its own epoch at the moment, entirely separate from the one before and the one following. As my therapist said, this is what trauma looks like, when you're first starting to deal with it. (If you're a serious reader-of-mine and want more on this, check out the sidebar on the uncensored blog; though fair warning, I haven't updated there in a while either.)

One thing that's consistently getting me through right now is music. In fact when I don't have any appetite for any music at all, that's a sign that things are really seriously bad. And so, with LL Cool Joe in mind, I thought I'd share with you my top songs at the moment. Too lazy to link but check 'em out at Pandora or lastfm or blip or whatever. They're worth it. They're helping to keep my head above water.

Antony & the Johnsons
*"Cripple & the Starfish". I think this is a song about BDSM. That's how I interpret it anyway. It's hauntingly lovely, like most of their stuff, and carries a message of survival for me too.]
*"Atrocities" Featured in the excellent movie "Otto or Up with Dead People" and just absurdly beautiful.

Arcade Fire
*"(Antichrist Television Blues)" A manic ballad from the point of view of a manipulative, abusive, haunted parent.

Beirut
*"Nantes"

Bryan Adams
*"(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" Don't ask. Just know that this is twisted around in every way possible in my head. It came on the radio twice on a recent late night drive and it was serious catharsis. Not parting with $1.29 to buy it on iTunes though.

The Cliks
*"Dirty King" Don't just play this on your computer. Find some speakers that can let you appreciate the bass line. It's good.

Delta 5
*"Mind Your Own Business" Female punk rockers from England back in the day. The lyrics are not a covert message to you, dear readers, never fear.

Echo & the Bunnymen
*"Bring on the Dancing Horses" Hoping to catch them live this fall...

The Fiery Furnaces
*I love pretty much their whole album "Bitter Tea". This is the essence of my life right now, the very marrow of how I feel. Particular highlights: "In My Little Thatched Hut", "Black-Hearted Boy", "Bitter Tea", and "The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry".
*"The End is Near" off their most recent album. Don't dismiss it without giving the nasty, bitter lyrics a good listen. Love it like crazy.

The Go-Betweens
*"Love Goes On!" and "Quiet Heart" especially, from 16 Lovers Lane.

Joy Division
*As ever. Especially "Atmosphere" and, of course, "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

k.d. lang
*"Hallelujah". Always.

The Kills
*Still getting a lot of mileage out of "Midnight Boom". "Goodnight Bad Morning" is one of my main go-to songs when I need to be rocked out of the worst places.

M.I.A.
*"Paper Planes". They wuz robbed. One of the few songs that always makes me smile.

The Ramones
*"I Wanna Be Sedated". 'Nuff said.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
*Still enjoying "It's Blitz!" especially "Zero" and "Softshock".

10,000 Maniacs
*"What's the Matter Here". My dad gave me "In My Tribe" (on cassette) when I was about 8. I listened to this, the first track, over and over again. Still in love with Natalie Merchant and her amazing voice.

First Tattoo

2009-09-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

I wanted to get my first tattoo for my thirtieth birthday but I couldn't decide on a design in time. Shortly after my birthday, though, I realized what I want: a bee on my left arm, specifically using the bee design that is the logo for the city of Manchester, England.

The bee works on multiple levels for me:
1. I have a fondness for bees as creatures. I love watched honey bees flying in and out of their hives and I love watching a bee working its way through a flower. And given the range of comparisons I make between femmes, especially FG, and flowers, well, it just works.
2. It's the symbol of Manchester and so a powerful evocation of the place where I transformed my life, a place I have come to love very dearly. (The symbol there is related to Manchester's history as a mill town: the bee as industrious worker.)
3. I have a whole repertoire of puns building off b-for-butch that I use often as short-hand. In Stone Butch Blues, the old slang "b-girl" as code for butch was invoked at one point. Bee for butch then, it's a private linguistic joke.
4. I love honey, the taste of it, the imagery of honeycombs, the whole thing.
5. My mother is somewhat allergic to bees and has a serious fear of them, so the image is also a protective totem.
6. I just like how it looks.

My goal is to have as large a tatto as fits, aesthetically, into the space of my upper left arm. That's the plan. Now I will start asking around and looking for a good artist. (Tips, especially in the Boston-Providence area, gratefully received.)

Here are some versions of the Manchester bee. I'm leaning toward not having too many colors and followng the gold-on-black design, which appears on bollards and lampposts in the city itself (though I imagine I'd used black or another dark color for the gold, and my skin as background). But I include the mosaic image because it's lovely. FG thinks I should add a stinger to my design. Maybe so.

Safe Spaces

2009-09-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

I started my new job at the beginning of the month. It's going well. It's in a different city from where we live and I'm spending two nights a week there which is working out nicely. It has the unexpected benefit of allowing me to build my own space in my room here and have it as a sort of contemplative, all-me retreat. And I have my own office, too. I never realized how much I would like that, but I love it.

And... there is a new post at MacCool Uncensored, this one less content-free than the last.

If Only to Reassure LLCoolJoe...

2009-09-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

... I thought I'd update you all on how things are going in the non-passworded portions of my life.

I think I'm taking up running. I've gone for a run four times now, over the last two weeks or so. I quit my kung fu place, partly because of scheduling but mostly because I wasn't comfortable with their safety precautions.

So I needed some other form of exercise and tried running. Which makes me laugh--I tried fighting, now I'm working on running, I figure I have a better chance that way! But it's been nice, actually. Just a little bit at a time, but I've been able to run farther / longer (before switching to a walking break) each time.

Running was kind of a nightmare for me as a young person. We would do "conditioning" every fall in gym class, which meant running six laps around the track, a total of 1.5 miles. I was terrible at it and felt like such a disgusting fool. The gym teachers were not very sympathetic and would make fun of people for walking for a while or for how hard we were breathing. Also I turned a deep red that one of my (sort of) friends at the time labeled purple. I still turn red when I work hard, it's just how I roll. I'm fine with that now.

Anyway after that I never imagined taking up running but here I am, giving it a go and enjoying the feeling so far. It's nice to reclaim something that was so mixed up with bodily shame before.

And finally: new post up on MacCool Uncensored. Per yesterday's post, e-mail me if you want the password.

New Site for Times of Trouble

2009-09-21T05:53:00.000-07:00

In the middle of a little nervous breakdown here, y'all. FG and I are fine, but I'm wading through some kind of big stuff. And I want to write about it, but I can't do that here. So at long last I am setting up the password protected blog.

It's at maccooluncensored.wordpress.com. E-mail me for the password (butchgirlcat at gmail dot com). If I don't already know & love you, tell me a little something about yourself, like where you found me, if you have a web site yourself, that sort of thing.

This is some very personal stuff that I'm aching to talk about but I feel paranoid about it being findable by my family, first of all, and second of all, I just want to have a better sense of who's reading. Oh, and if you could *not* share the password, that would be brilliant. And if you're Tina and you don't read passworded blogs, um, write to FG maybe? Even just to tell her you love her, that would be super. Thanks, Tina. ;)

Oh yeah and. The passworded blog is not my sole method of coping. Just to reassure y'all. Ok, see you over there or back here once I can write things that only rate 10, and not 11, on a scale of 1-10 for deeply personal...

The Stone-as-Liberation Post

2009-09-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

It’s a little like a video game, but instead of moving up a level by killing enemies, I cross another taboo-laden threshold on a journey of enlightenment into the inner sanctum, the ninth circle of my own personal inferno. Slaying demons right and left along the way.

Or it’s like relaxing into the truth that has always been there, for better or for worse. I am one of those people: I am homosexual, I am a lesbian, I am butch, I am some kind of trans, and I am stone. And falling backward through that list I discover that the power of each label is dispelled in the claiming. All that trying to be not that, oh please God just not that one was more confining and rigid than admitting: yes, of course, that’s what I am and always have been, and in fact it’s more varied and complicated than I ever could have guessed when I was ducking my head and shading my eyes and hoping the monster would go away. Or maybe it’s just more personal and more alright.

Because the monster, in reality, was never the thing I feared (the lesbian, the butch). The monster that has been haunting me really has been this girl I was supposed to be, or this woman. And not only a girl but a certain kind of girl, the kind who has no boundaries and exists only to please. This is not the womanhood I see queer femmes reclaiming. This is the nightmare girlhood of misogyny and abuse.

Claiming stone(ness) for me has been finally letting that compulsion to girl go. It has been about claiming absolute autonomy over my own body and its responses for the first time ever. It means I get to set the boundaries where I need them, and what I owe my partner is not access or orgasm but honesty and communication and responsibility for myself.

Over the winter sex wasn’t always ending well. I felt a rawness and vulnerability welling up in me and I would override that and push through to achieve what I thought was necessary. And I found myself unable to keep faking it, I found myself defeated and shattered and miserable afterward, and my beautiful femme beside me begging to know what she’d done wrong while I sank into a white noise of fear and sadness.

And we talked and talked some more. And there came a moment when I decided I could be as stone as I needed to be or wanted to be, and I did not have to go involuntarily to that raw place. A breakthrough moment for me came when I declined, one day, to get off during a particular session of sex. And she was anxious, worrying that she’d done something wrong or that I was disappointed or frustrated. Which was not the case, not at all. And I said to her, “It’s not a boundary if I can’t say I’m ok and I’m done and have that be ok between us.” And she nodded, and somehow it was ok between us then.

I am not prescribing norms for butch behavior. I am not even prescribing norms for myself. I have no interest in listing out permanent boundaries. Just the one, really: I can ensure a basic level of safety for myself. I don’t know, really, how much this has to do with gender, and how much it has to do with all my personal messy baggage. We both exult in her radical openness, and I wonder about the cost to her of being so open when I need to be so closed, when sometimes I can’t bear to be touched at all, anywhere. But it is nonetheless a liberation to me that sexual intimacy isn’t an emotional roulette; or more simply, that it doesn’t have to hurt.

Second Meme in a Row (Don't Cry, a Real Post will Come)

2009-09-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

Tagged by Rhett, the Asphalt Cowboy. Rhett, just so you know, I read you regularly. Just still can't comment, dude.

The rules are, erase the answers already listed and fill in your own then pass it on to four bloggers of your choice.

1. Who is the hottest Movie Star?
Like Rhett, I like blondes. But my movie start knowledge is way, way out of date. I fell hard for Scarlett Johannsen after "Lost in Translation" and I've stayed loyal. I used to really have a thing for Gwyneth Paltrow but not as much now. Oh, Marilyn Monroe was pretty hot, too.

2. Apart from your house and car, what is the most expensive item you have ever bought?
I don't own my house! And technically it's FG's car (little bit of queer-insurance there, in case something happens to me she doesn't have to fight anyone or prove anything to have a ride, anyway). I guess it's a tie, therefore, between our bed (nice solid wood frame, proper mattress, too bad it creaks...) and FG's engagement ring. A diamond with two sapphires. I told the salesman I was buying it for a friend. We chatted for a while, then he smiled gently and said, "How long have you two been together?" I was twenty; it was a few days before Christmas, 1999, and the stores were filled with guys who wanted to propose at the turn of the millennium. And I paid in cash, like counting off actual bills, because I didn't have a credit card yet. Ah, the memories.

3. What is your most treasured memory?
Speaking of memories! I don't know. I have a few. I'm feeling squirrelly today, though, and I don't think I want to write about any of them. Ha.

4. What was the best gift you ever received as a child?
My parents roto-tilled a patch of our lawn and put a fence up and let me make my own garden when I was 11 or 12. I kept it going for several years, until I moved out of that house when my parents got divorced. Working in it gave me a knowledge of plants that's been a source of satisfaction ever since, and the physical labor was one of the best and only such outlets I had at that juncture. It was really an oasis in a very difficult patch of life. And I grew some impressive veggies, too.

5. What is the biggest mistake you have ever made?
Giving up on myself after college. Deciding that I had to "grow up" and "be a woman" instead of facing up to what was really going on with myself and my gender issues.

6. 4 words to describe yourself?
Difficult, steadfast, mercurial, generous.

7. What was your highlight or low light of 2008?

Highlight: Hello, read the archives! 2008 was the year my whole world broke open. I rediscovered sex, came out as butch and then as sorta-kinda-trans, and remade just about everything. 2008 has been a highlight of my life.

Lowlight: all the crap I had to wade through while remaking everything. Lots of dealing with the past, especially, and plenty of mistakes along the way.

8. Favorite Film?
At the moment, I'm crushing on "By Hook or By Crook" which I saw for the first time recently. Never before have I seen a movie that looked like the movie playing in the inside of my head, if you know what I mean. It was amazing.

9. Tell me one thing I don’t know about you.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
But haven't I told you everything already, dear readers? Hm. I like cream in my coffee, but at home I always use milk. There, that's a new one, I'm sure.

10. If you were a comic book/strip or cartoon character, who would you be?
No idea. Batman, maybe? I like Batman. Or, in a less heroic vein, possibly Garfield. A cross between Garfield and Odie, maybe.

The four bloggers I am tagging with this meme are:

Jess
Tina
FreedomGirl
Screaming Lemur

Honest Scrap

2009-08-27T18:28:00.000-07:00

Tagged by the inimitable Kyle...

There are three rules for this award:

First, link back to the person who gave you the award: Kyle, who tells it like it is.

Next, give the award to ten other bloggers:

1. Jess, because I was telling the truth when I said I'd always tag him
2. Freedom Girl, who tells the truth about what it's like to have to put up with me
3. Tina, probably the honestest scrappiest blogger of all
4. Jen, bringing the honesty about being a dyke in evolution [Jen, I can't comment on your blog. Hope you see this... also, check out #10. Bit of Maine synergy there.]
5. Sarcozona, who is uncovering new truths about plants all the time
6. Femme Is My Gender and
7. Holden, because I honestly think they should write more!
8. Two Ladies in Waiting, who should tell us the truth about where they've been all month
9. Miss Emily, for not flinching from the hardest truths
10. Dawn on MDI, who always, always shoots from the hip and tells it the way it is, a fact recognized most recently by no less than CNN

10 honest things about me

1. The whole blog is true. Ever since I started, I've tried to be ruthlessly honest here. At first, it was the only place I had for that.

2. I find it calming to rest my nose and mouth on my upper arm/shoulder. If you see me this way, I'm not stretching my neck or checking for B.O., I'm just taking a moment.

3. My favorite household chore (not of the handybutch or diesel dyke varieties) is doing the laundry.

4. I broke my toe once when I was banging a chair on the floor to send a message to an irritatingly noisy downstairs neighbor. It hurt like the devil.

5. I am allergic to apricots, but peaches are my favorite fruit.

6. I prefer my shoes a half size too big. I don't like my feet to be crowded in there.

7. I've been enjoying some time off over the last week. On Monday, FG and I went to the ocean and had just about the most fun day I think I've ever had.

8. I like the hair on the back of my fingers and I kind of hope it gets more present as I age.

9. I hardly ever drank water until I met FG. I guess I drank juice or Kool-Aid mostly.

10. I had a dream the other night that FG and I were in a French government building or palace of some sort, and we wandered by accident into the living quarters of two zombies. When I realized they were going to kill us, I tricked them into letting us near the door. Then I pushed FG out and we started running. The zombies followed us, but I turned and punched them away using my mad martial skillz. I think this dream is indicative of real subconscious progress. A few years ago, I was haunted by recurrent nightmares about monsters or bad people who were after me, closing in on my house or whatever. I was overwhelmed with helplessness and terror in those dreams and would wake up so utterly terrified I was unable to move. Maybe my dreaming mind feels I have finally gained some of the skills I need to tackle my monsters.

Dr. MacCool

2009-08-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

...stumbling sleepily online, tea in hand...

so I defended my dissertation on Friday. It went well. I keep telling people, "I passed!" and then wanting to add, well, I mean, nobody passes, darling, of course they knew I was queer as a three dollar bill. But I realize this will make no sense to almost anyone.

As you can see I'm still a little befuddled by it all.

My advisor, ze of the awesome name-supportiveness, was equally supportive and appropriately celebratory on Friday. Ze even bought us all champagne at lunch afterward.

I was wearing my first proper pair of dress shoes. Bostonian, in burgundy; I also wore pinstripe pants and a white shirt. I felt distinctly grown up.

...time to stumble back into my day. Serious posts to come, when my brain is back in working order...

Thirty Thirty Thirty

2009-08-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

That's how old I am today. I'm very happy. I stayed up until midnight last night and felt such a sense of elation and joy and relief. I made it to thirty! Here I am! I've never been so happy about turning a specific age.

Staying up until midnight was not so difficult, thanks to a certain lovely person and a certain lovely birthday-present-to-myself that finally arrived in the mail yesterday. It came from the Land of Babes and goes by Rick. Good times, and an excellent start to a new decade...

After midnight, I opened some presents from FG: three new shirts. One was too big (apparently made for the heavily paunched, prosperous set) but the other two are gorgeous, both white, one with French cuffs. This morning I opened the rest: a very nice cigar and a Zippo lighter in the style shown above. Perfect, just absolutely perfect. And she baked me a peach cake, too.

Next we're going to do some gardening and then maybe out to dinner, maybe to a movie, I haven't decided yet.

Thanks to all of you who voted in my poll. I was surprised to see that the options were close in popularity--I figured there would be at least one stinker in the bunch. I think I'll start with the stone post and work my way down the list.

Once I'm done birthdaying, of course.

PDSD & a Poll

2009-08-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

According to a PhD'ed relative of FG's there is a phenomenon known as post-writum depression. I did some googling and found this description of post-dissertation stress disorder. Looks about right to me... especially the "increased need for sleep" "inability to concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes," "increased need for meaningful relationships," and, of course, "pure laziness."

I find myself emotional, as well, especially over losses old and new. Today I was patting my little cat and got choked up remembering the first cat I really loved, who was given away by my dad and his new girlfriend after my parents got divorced.

And I find myself craving company and reassurance. I was at a community event last night and wanted to walk around and spend the evening hugging nearly every person there. Of course I did not do any such thing.

There is much on my mind to write about but I don't know where to start. The ten-minute attention span isn't helping either, of course. How about a poll? In my mental bloggy queue:

1) settling into stone and why it's been a (thorny) liberation
2) thoughts on (not) transitioning. my complicated desire to claim transgender anyway.
3) confronting (more of) my personal legacy of shame (special body edition!)

Cheery line-up, eh? But I promised more angst. Go vote in the sidebar. Feel free to elaborate your preference or express another in the comments.

Little Love Note

2009-08-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

We're lying in bed talking. It's after sex and after all the night-time pre-bed things, so my hair is wet from the shower and the fan is blowing and we're brushed and clean and under the sheets. You're talking, and then you notice something in my face--concern? alertness? Something. What, you ask, what is it? Did I say something wrong? (And it always stings a little, this trepidation of yours, tiptoeing through my minefields; but I know that it is hard-earned.) No, I tell you. I'm just listening. I heard a noise. A noise? Just a little noise. (I'm the light sleeper, the one who investigates things that go bump in the night.) Maybe it was a blind flapping, or maybe it was the cat yakking. Time will tell. And maybe it's relief or post-sex happiness or the vulgar novelty of that word, yakking, and how it rhymes with flapping, that makes laughter erupt, bright and sharp, between us. But in any case: I love you.

Thoughts on Health Insurance

2009-08-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

I've been fortunate, thus far in life, in my health insurance coverage, and in my ability to make sure FG gets the coverage she needs, too. And we've both been lucky (knocking on wood here) not to have to use that coverage all that much. But even for me, in my absurdly health-insurance-privileged position, there have been some twists & turns along the way.

Like learning that separate is not equal in New York, where married folks in my office could get their spouses covered, but FG and I had to register as domestic partners and then she had to buy the cheapest possible private coverage, which my workplace then partially reimbursed me for. But it wasn't just the hassle of that: the federal government taxed that reimbursement as income, whereas legally married people could have their payments withheld from their paychecks. The bottom line: I paid more than married colleagues in the same situation.

And then we moved (back) to Massachusetts and got married. But I had to raise a fuss at my school in Rhode Island in order to purchase spousal coverage for her. Your marriage certificate is not good enough, they said: we need bank statements, credit card statements, joint leases. They tried to claim it was "Rhode Island law" which was bunk: at that time, RI law permitted them to choose whether or not to recognize my marriage, and the AG actually expressed the preference that employers should recognize it. A few angry e-mails and some educatin' later, they accepted the marriage certificate.

So yeah, repealing DOMA, or legalizing gay marriage nationally, would have addressed most of our personal health insurance issues thus far. But really, that's ridiculous. FG's access to health insurance should never have depended in the first place on her being married to someone lucky enough to have some access to employer-based spousal coverage. This is exactly the point that many people make when criticizing the focus of the LGBT movement on same-sex marriage: it solves a ton of problems for coupled, prvileged queers, but a lot fewer for everyone else. A really progressive movement should be about more than allowing the most privileged of an oppressed class to join the oppressers. (Damn I'm on an anti-oppression kick these days.)

Most recently, as dedicated readers know, I've finished school and taken a job. That job offers health insurance but, because it is a one-year job, there is no subsidy for that health insurance. Which means it is very expensive. For around the same sum, I could have gotten covered through FG's school instead.

But hey presto! We live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which passed a law a while back requiring everyone to have health insurance and requiring health insurance companies to make various kinds of private, individual coverage available. I don't really know all the details, but I do know that it meant I could go to a clearinghouse web site, enter the details of my situation, and get hooked up with a plan that costs me just a bit over half what my other options would have cost. I signed up in a jiffy and my new card arrived in the mail today.

I'm not a health-policy wonk. But the moral of the story seems clear enough: when the state gets involved to ensure universal coverage & reasonable(ish) options for people (there were much cheaper options for those with less income), it makes things better. I remember my English friends gasping in horror when I described the system in the United States, and quite seriously apologizing for ever complaining about their system in my presence.

And thus ends MacCool's Public Service Announcement on the great health insurance debate. Back to your regularly scheduled sex & gender angst soon, I promise.

My Summer Vacation

2009-08-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

And what, you may be wondering, have I been doing with myself when I'm not worrying about discourse on the experience of oppression?

I'm in an oddly peaceful little pocket of time here. At the end of this month I defend my dissertation, and at the start of the next month I begin my new job. Both of those things produce a certain amount of work, but not an avalanche of it. Certainly nothing on par with the work of actual finishing the dissertation.

My brother compared this moment in my life to waiting lazily on a train platform, watching the surroundings, in no hurry for the train to arrive but also certain that's it's puffing along on its way. It's a good metaphor.

Instead of doing something officially Vacation-Like--since FG, after all, is working hard and will be for a couple more weeks yet--I've instead be living life at a gentler pace. I work most days, but not terribly hard. I take breaks to walk in the park. I eat my way through the half-bushel of peaches FG bought me at a farm stand after I remarked that peaches are my favorite fruit and there are never enough of them. I invite myself over to see friends. (I need to do more of that.) I pester people on gchat. (Hi, Jess!) I find a sunny bench and smoke a small cigar. I take FG to thrift shops and watch her look mad sexy in any number of little dresses and things.

None of it is official Leisure Activity, either. I don't have a pile of summer novels to read or a summer project of painting a table. It's just... taking it slow, taking it all in. And when it works, it's been so, so nice. Walking back from the park the other day I had the sensation that the sunshine was actually soaking into the marrow of my bones.

It occurred to me that this is actually taking care of myself. That's not something I'm terribly good at. Much of my internal life has been structured by shame, guilt, and anxiety over failure. My Summer Vacation is, I hope, another step toward changing and healing that.

Special Bonus Picture: my own thrift-store find. The tragedy is that the pants were missing. But for $25, plus a little more for the tie, I wasn't complaining.

Thoughts on Denial of Oppression

2009-08-07T09:02:00.001-07:00

What is up with the trouble people have hearing and believing other people's experiences of oppression? This is a pattern I've noticed recently and I'm trying to figure out what the deal is.

The part that really puzzles me is hearing this sort of dismissal or denial from people who would not deny that oppression exists, in general; they only deny it in whatever specific case they're hearing about right then.

After Prof. Gates was arrested by the Cambridge, Mass. police (Google it if you don't know, I'm too lazy to link anything right now) I heard a lot of white folks saying something along the lines of oh, this probably wasn't really racism; it was just two men being jerks; why jump to a conclusion of racism; and other things like that.

Similarly, FG was telling a relative recently about the hostility we'd encountered from our last landlady, which seemed almost certain to be rooted in homophobia. "Oh, surely you jest," the relative protested, and another backed her up: "It's just so hard to believe." I've had this experience, too; one relative was extremely dubious that anyone ever stared at me on public transit. Even when I assured her that it was a nearly daily experience, she wanted to insist that I was probably misinterpreting the situation.

I'm trying to watch out for this instinct in myself now, too. I found myself thinking, of a local woman-owned business that was trying to raise money to meet an unexpected tax bill: oh, they must have done something wrong. I stopped myself there, a) since there's no reason to make that assmption, b) unexpected tax bills do in fact happen, and c) even if they messed up, so what? They're a good business and a good presence in the community.

I think my reaction was rooted in a desire to believe that the world is fundamentally just and that the system works. I want to believe that if I do the right thing, I will be rewarded. I want to believe that I am not at the mercy of structures and systems that care nothing for me as a person, at best, and are informed by oppression & prejudice against me, at worst. And on the other hand, as a white person who's had some major advantages, such as parents who were willing to invest in a college education for me, I suppose I would prefer to believe that I've just been a personal success, rather than benefiting from unfair systems, too.

I wonder, though, how we can get past that reflexive defensiveness. I suspect it's crucial to progress. How can someone really take homophobia/racism/classism/sexism seriously if they only concede it as an abstract concept and deny it, and blame the victim, in every immediate circumstance in their lives?

Settling In

2009-07-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I've only posted once in July. I've been terrible about reading, too, though I'm trying.

Part of the reason I've been internet-absent is that I don't have internet at home anymore, at least in a reliable way. We don't have a television. Our old cable internet company want to charge us *more* for just internet than for television plus internet. I understand giving a discount if you buy more than one product, but charging less for the whole package than any component part? And it's not peanuts: they wanted over $60/month for internet. And the kicker: they wanted a $100 installation fee, too. Which they only charged for internet-only customers. If you got internet plus television, you could self-install. Because installing two things is easier than one? Because internet-only customers are clearly idiots? Ugh. Sorry for the rant. Anyway, I can walk to one of our local coffee shops most days, and get a coffee and free wireless, and not only do I still come out ahead financially, I get good coffee, too, and exercise! But not quite so much unlimited internet-surfing time in my life.

Then, too, life has been busy this month. I submitted the all-but-final draft of my dissertation to my committee. Defense is scheduled for late August. Now I'm working on preparing for my fall job and writing an article. Should be doing that now, in fact, but I wanted to holla to all of you first.

I truly love the new place where we're living. The apartment, the street, the neighborhood, all of it. We took the subway over toward our old neighborhood a few weeks ago and when we changed lines to our old subway line, I immediately started attracting hostile stares. A surprisingly stark reminder of how much less friendly the old area was.

A brief undeveloped thought on that: the old neighborhood was also much whiter and on average a good deal wealthier. This business that, as a movement, the queers are fine with the middle- and upper-middle-class East Coast whites but we struggle with people of color? I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think even within the so-called 'liberal establishment' there are lots of white people with a lot more homophobia and transphobia than they'd necessarily admit.

I don't know, I don't want to theorize and over-generalize. But the shift has been striking. And while my white middle-class liberal family looks slightly alarmed at the racial mix of my new neighborhood, I put up with a whole lot less crap on the streets than I did in the old place. It could be unique to the balance of this particular neighborhood, which is so fantastically queer, too. In any case I'm enjoying the release from stress I had almost started to ignore, it was such a daily part of life in the old neighbhorhood.

And have I mentioned that our immediate neighbors are friendly, not just not-glaring but actually saying hello, trading favors, etc.? And the new place gets nice light, and the cats like it, and we walk regularly to one of the lovely big parks nearby.

All this makes me wonder if we'd be able to stay here for a long time. FG and I moved in together in 1998. All total, we've lived in nine different apartments in four states and one foreign country since then. I've learned a lot and grown up a lot in that time, and I'm grateful for all those experiences. But I'm also feeling bone-tired at the prospect of uprooting ourselves again. FG remarked that, as adults, picking up and leaving is what we know how to do. We've never really, truly put down roots in a community; we've always been planning our next escape. But I think we've been learning, this past year, how to start to be a part of a community, not just bystanders and transients. I may want to try staying put on for size in the next decade or so...

Oil Change the Second, Plus Miscellaneous Shenanigans

2009-07-06T14:57:00.000-07:00

This post is a little overdue... we moved this past week in a flurry of boxes and tape and kind friends and rain and happiness. Yeah, that about sums that up for now.

But before we moved, I spent an evening getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and working on the car! And since I know you're as excited as I am to witness my reincarnation as a Diesel Dyke (TM), I offer here an account of the proceedings.

First, I drove with FG to the auto parts store and picked up some supplies, including a light bulb for a burned-out headlight. Then we made our way through heavy traffic out to her sister's place, where I got to work, washing our car and FG's sister's car while I waited for the engine to cool down.

My first order of business was replacing the air filter. It's screwed on with seven very rusted screws. I couldn't get them out with a screwdriver last time, but when I saw Dawn she pointed out that I could use my socket wrench on them. Um, right. Why didn't I think of that?

So that worked just fine. I'm not sure the air filter was really that dirty, though it was a little dirty, for sure. But I replaced it anyway, since I'd gotten all those screws off, and I was tired of carrying the new filter around. I also pulled some nut hulls out of the filter's casing. Like, five or six. I'm not too sure how they got there, but I guess it was a good thing to take them out?

Next up was the headlight. I was nervous about this, because I was flying solo, with only the owner's manual for guidance. First it said to remove a reservoir from a holder to give easier access to the bulb. After some tugging and tussling I got it free.

Next I was supposed to pull a clip off the bulb to detach it from the car's wiring. I fought with the thing for about fifteen minutes. I didn't want to break anything, of course, but damn, it was just not moving. Finally I asked FG and her sister to come out and give it a go. They tried, but nothing doing.

I was getting seriously frustrated. This was supposed to be so easy that it was actually in the manual--a manual that warns that only skilled mechanics should basically touch anything else at all. I asked myself, what would Dawn suggest? And I heard her voice in my head: "Brute force and ignorance." So I got out a small screwdriver and alternately coaxed and pushed the thing until, click! Off it came like it had never caused any trouble at all.

But alas! My sorrows with the headlight were not over, because I had bought the wrong size bulb. A strange thing about the auto parts store I go to. The clerks are generally very polite. They all seem to read me as female and to take a moment to realize I'm going to conduct this interaction in a masculine mode, not a feminine one; and once they realize that, they opt for that mode, too, and all is well. But in most cases the little exclamation-point-shaped cloud stays about their heads for the whole exchange.

This was the case with the pleasant middle-aged man who'd sold me the bulb. He was unfailingly friendly but definitely wrong-footed by the mysteries of my gender, which were in this instance amplified by FG's presence, all high femme with skirt and cleavage to match. So he mixed up a number and sent me home with a bulb that would not do at all.

Carefully I replaced the broken bulb. It was getting late and I did not have time to get to a store and exchange it, so the bulb would have to wait. Instead, I turned to the oil change, which went much faster this time since I pretty much knew what I was doing and could, you know, find the filter.

By the end I was one dirty butch. It turns out that if you wash your car on a dirt driveway, and then crawl under that car to change your oil, you will emerge not only oil- and grease-stained but soaked with mud as well. And in my case, thoroughly bitten by mosquitoes to boot. Luckily I had brought at least a change of t-shirt, and FG kindly dug out a towel for me to sit on while the three of us enjoyed supper.

A day or so later, I exchanged the bulb for the correct size (which I looked up myself, thank you very much), and replaced it parked outside a softball field in a tony suburb. The locals opted to stay out of it.

And so the car seems to have survived another bout at the hands of Mechanic MacCool.

You Say Butch Like It's a Bad Thing

2009-06-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

As one of the judges on Sinclair Sexsmith's Top Hot Butches / Sugarbutch Hot List project, I wanted to weigh in on the discussion that's been going on about who's included on the list: namely, whether more feminine women, trans men, trans women etc., 'really belong' on this list.

One thing I like a lot about Sinclair's project is its use of a category of gendered experience that doesn't simply reproduce the old binaries of man and woman. It's a category that reflects the experiences of a lot of people I know and the community I live in. I see it bringing together two threads. First, there is 'butchness' as a particular expression of masculinity, quite apart from biology or sex assignment or sex identification. Second, there is the insight that people who have been assigned female at some point in their lives, whether by choice or not, yet who place masculinity at the core of their identities, well, we have something in common. Finding that common ground, and discussing it together or separately, is not about appropriation or stealing; it's about kinship.

This category is not theoretically perfect nor are its borders rigid and exact. I'm aware, for instance, that the first thread includes people assigned male at birth who still identify as men ('cisgender men') while the second would tend not to. But the categories of men and women themselves are not more perfect. And I believe that trying out new categories, new ways of organizing our experiences and our relationships to others, is an important part of the working of dismantling the dominance of the idea of men and women as seemingly eternal, natural categories. That's exactly why I keep that Judith Butler quote in the sidebar.

One of the very sad things about the debate over this list has been the tendency to insist on those very categories of man and woman. This list is about women, the argument went, and trans men are men. And yet there are many people, myself included, and many on the list as well I believe, for whom neither 'woman' nor 'trans man' is an adequate description.

In my real-life community, that fact is not a problem. The category that Sinclair is exploring and invoking in this list actually functions to bring people together, and ultimately, that's why I believe in it. I believe in a world in which I'm welcome at trans events and my trans friends, FTM and MTF, are welcome at the Dyke March. Which is not to say FTMs ought to go to the Dyke March, necessarily, or that they have to feel comfortable being on Sinclair's list; but it's a matter of individual variation and preference, as has been amply demonstrated by the fact that some of the trans men on the list have opted to be reinstated, while others have not.

This leads me to another thing I like about Sinclair's project. It refuses from the outset the idea that being including on a 'butch' list could be insulting. I appreciate this on a visceral level because of how very long it took me to claim that word for myself, because of how long I spent thinking of it as a bad word for bad women. I think it's an admirable audacity to insist that butch is a good thing. It's one thing to say, if this isn't the category for you, if this isn't a place you want to be, say so, and I'll respect that. It's quite another to concede butch from the outset as something insulting.

This issue has been taking up a lot of space in my brain since the list was published last week. While packing boxes and sorting papers for our upcoming move, I fulminated about any number of aspects of the whole thing. I wrote some angry posts in my head, completely blowing the 'cool' out of MacCool. But time passed and I spent time in my own community, with my own friends, and I realized, I don't want to add more fuel to anyone's fire. Instead, I want this post to be a tribute to the connection and liberation that can flourish when we stop treating the space between "man" and "woman" as a despised, battle-scarred borderland, and start treating it as the center of our own better universe.

Fluff Observation

2009-06-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

One of my e-mail accounts has recently featured many ads that are variations of the claim that, by mixing two products, you will be able to cure ordinary complaints such as yellow teeth or stretch marks. Often the ad claims that a "mom" discovered she could effect this remedy on her own.

Does this remind anyone else sharply of the Lily Tomlin movie, "The Incredible Shrinking Woman," which features the fabulous Tomlin as a mom who starts shrinking due to the freak chemical interaction of Galaxy Glue and some other thing?

I loved that movie with a rare passion as a small child. We had a tape of it and I would ask to watch it over and over again, the only movie or show I did that with, as far as I can recall. I guess I had some gaydar even at four.

And you could psychoanalyze even further, no doubt: get rid of excess femininity using two common household products! This mom figured out how! But the sun is finally out and I'm not quite in that sort of mood.

Instead, let's give it up for Lily Tomlin. And let's not start mixing random household substances just because Yahoo says it's a good idea...

Making Trouble

2009-06-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

Like many of us I've been following the news from Iran, hoping for the best and admiring the courage of all those who've had enough and are taking a stand, despite the danger. I wonder what it feels like to reach that point and I wonder if I will reach it in my own lifetime.

I remember being transfixed by the demonstrations in Tianamen Square, twenty years ago this spring, when I was nine years old. My family generally watched the evening news every night (60 Minutes on Sundays), sometimes with dinner and sometimes afterwards. I wondered if the students would be able to force their government and their country to change, and I was genuinely shocked as well as horrified when the government instead forcibly put them down. I have memories of images of the empty square, evidence of violence in the midst blowing trash and broken dreams, but I don't know how much I'm imagining or filling in from later descriptions.

I was also shocked by my grandparents' reaction. My grandmother in particular argued fiercely that the Chinese government had done the right thing: by killing some students, it had averted a much larger conflict that would have killed many more people. Although emphatically liberal on most issues, my grandmother believes in the value of strong leaders and governments; in certain respects, from my adult perspective, her views remind me of some of the proto-Fascist intellectuals of the 1920s, before Fascism was forever discredited by Nazism and all the rest of it.

Implict in her stance was a sharp rebuke to the protesters, idealists and troublemakers who were only going to bring suffering down upon their society. My child's soul rebelled against that interpretation. I wanted to man the barricades and fight for the right, the just, and the true, come what may.

I thought that all I had to do was grow bigger and stronger, and I would do just that. I didn't realize what an effect that injunction to keep quiet and keep your head down had had on me. In spite of disagreeing about things like Tianamen, I adored my grandparents and strove to earn their respect and admiration. I was ashamed to make too much noise and to ask for too much; in my own real life, I didn't even know where the barricades were.

My increasing self-confidence and my newly unorthodox gender expression have, not surprisingly, introduced an element of distance or even strain into my relationship with my grandparents. What took me by surprise was that my graduation and new job, rather than easing that distance, seems to have increased it, even though my decision to pursue this career was very much part of an effort to live up to their values.

And yet perhaps I should not have been surprised. In embarking on this profession I am claiming authority and power. I am asserting that my own words matter, that they can contribute to knowledge and that they should be read. And I am doing so at the very moment where I emphatically make too much noise, take up too much space, demand far too much from my society at every turn. I insist on my right to exist even if it offends, and if I die for it, I insist on my right to choose to die for it.

When I saw them last month their reaction to my news was strikingly lowkey. A few polite questions, a few awkward jokes about my new job & its associated title. A long discussion about how perhaps I should have been a judge instead (a slightly more entertaining variation on the very old theme that I should have gone into finance like the pretty young women on the business TV shows). And avoidance of my new name except to make jokes about it, more or less. Even references to me as "Miss [Oldname]".

I processed all that, vented to FG about it, and thought I'd moved on. But a friend who hadn't seen me for a few weeks called me on it as soon as ze saw me, looking tired and apologetic and profoundly subdued. I realized I hadn't felt genuinely happy about the graduation & job since seeing my family. I was subdued: I had been put in my place.

I'm faced now with some dilemmas. How do I un-subdue myself? And how do I do that as I take the first steps in a career that was, originally, all about earning love and approval and now must fit into a life that seeks, if not to man the barricades all the time, at least to raise the hell that my child-self longed for?

It's Still Rock and Roll to Me

2009-06-19T19:12:00.000-07:00

I'm turning 30 in a little under two months. I'm looking forward to it. My main concern at the moment is whether my party will kick enough ass and involve enough champagne. (Or other, cheaper, bubbling options. I'm not hating on cava, spumonti, or prosecco here.)

When I was a child, I felt old. Or rather, I never felt the way I imagined a child was supposed to feel, and I often didn't act that way, either. I was quieter and more cautious, wary of revealing too much and never trusting too soon. I always felt large and clumsy and deep-voiced. (I consciously changed my voice in my adolescence to sound more light and feminine, which has now become an ingrained habit that I'm slowly and painfully trying to unlearn. It's a process, rediscovering your own voice twenty years on.) People described me as serious and mature, always.

In many ways I feel younger now than then. I am much less burdened with the weight of shame and fear. I think so many fewer things are impossible or off-limits, and so slowly I'm learning, for the first time, the spontaneity and enthusiasm that one is supposed to lament losing at my age.

In other ways, of course, I feel ordinarily chronological. My insights feel more saturated with context and history than the quick, sharp observations of people ten years younger than me. And I don't have quite the manic Gumby-flexible energy I did as a teenager, though I'm physically stronger now than I was then, by a long shot.

I wonder in what ways being queer shapes our experiences of chronology and life stages, beyond the obvious questions of access to marriage & reproduction milestones. My thoughts on these lines are shaped by Jack Halberstam's 'In a Queer Time and Place'. Halberstam argues there for a kind of prolonged adolescence as being characteristic of queer subcultures, which reject the reproductive calendar of their straight counterparts.

Sitting in the library the other day, I was staring out the window, as you do in libraries after a while. And I was watching a middle-aged man have a conversation with a police officer. It looked like they were probably friends. The man was wearing a polo shirt and khakis; he was solid, beer-bellied, and ruddy, and I imagined him as the respository, in a way, of all that was respectable, normal, and, in the words of my youth, as it should be. I wondered about the burden that must be, carrying all that legitimacy around, maybe watching out worriedly for transgressions, maybe just carefully ensuring that the rounds of barbeques and high school graduations and conservations with your pal the cop went on in perpetuity, preserved for the next pillars of society.

And that got me wondering if that burden and those immense privileges that accrue to carrying it are, in the end, what really growing up and being mature are about in our world. Maybe that is why queers seem like eternal adolescents: by the very nature of our lives, we are never going to ascend to that level of legitimacy.

A colleague recently remarked to me that rock and roll is dead, which he then amended to the observation that rock and roll dies for everyone at a different moment, because it is the music of youth and rebellion. But maybe, I thought, youth and rebellion are ultimately the same thing. And the reward that we get, the queer and the marginal and the deviant, is that for us, rock and roll lives, like Frodo, for ever.

Question for Vegetarians, Current & Lapsed

2009-06-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

Less prominent among the great events of 2008 was the transition into full-on vegetarianism for me and FG. I haven't eaten any meat or fish since a smoked salmon sandwich one mid-spring day about a year ago.

In some ways this was a natural evolution. We were already eating very little meat and had been for quite some time. On another level, for me, it was not an obvious choice. Whereas FG used to reject meat and opt for tofu even as a little, and always complained that things like hamburgers made her stomach hurt, that was never me. I like protein, a lot, while I think she could subsist on bread, potatoes, pomegranates, and cherries.

Back in the day, I'd start to get a serious protein craving, and I'd take myself out for a burger, or I'd ask FG to make pork chops or roast a chicken, or I'd invite her out for a sushi date. Nowadays, things seem not quite so easy. Too much soy makes me feel unwell, so a constant stream of soy-based replacements is not the answer. And I don't seem to get quite the same sense of satisfaction from things like chick peas as I do from animal proteins--which means a lot of omelette requests, in my case.

So I eat a lot of eggs and a mix of soy and non-soy meat substitutes and dairy stuff and some legume-stuff too (I love peanut butter). But I still feel this relatively constant, low-level craving for MORE PROTEIN. And on occasion, when I eat an almost-all-protein meal (like fried eggs & fake sausages) I get a rush of well-being and strength, so I think I'm not just crazy or deluding myself.

If you've made it this far... fellow vegetarians, past & present, do you know what I'm talking about? Do you have any advice? I have to admit, I'm getting close to falling off the wagon & getting myself some fish or something like that...

Fruit in Bed

2009-06-11T12:45:00.001-07:00

We're moving, I'm graduating, it's time to shovel out and organize and throw away bags of accumulated crap. I have a hard time throwing stuff away. Part of it is an obsessive need to have documentary evidence for everything, as overcompensation for the lack of recognition given to our household. Need proof we paid for electricity in March 2003? I've got it. (See also: frantic cleaning of the house before straight people visit. I've got hang-ups. Of course I do.)

But in amongst the boring things (taxes) and the sad things (angry letters from my dad) there are the sweet things. And so I present to you "Fruit in Bed," a very short story I wrote on March 16, 2001, a few months before I graduated college and a year and a day before FG and I got married. I don't remember exactly, but I think it's safe to say this is not very heavily fictionalized...

---------------------

We lay in bed together in the dark. We weren't touching but I knew she wasn't asleep. Still, she'd said she was tired, so I shut my eyes and played the game that had often lulled me to sleep as a child--imagining myself on a small raft floating down a gentle river or in a calm bay.

The water thing just wasn't working that night. I opened my eyes again.

"Wouldn't it be cool to sleep on grapes?" I said.

"On what? Grates?"

I rolled onto my back. "No, grapes. Red grapes or whatever they used to make wine. Wouldn't it be cool to sleep on a huge pile of them?"

"No, that would be sticky," she said.

"And I guess they'd roll away. You'd need a vat, really, and you could sleep on top."

"But they'd break. I think that would be gross. Why not oranges or grapefruits?"

"Too hard. Picture how grapes would compress and bounce, like a perfect mattress. Oranges wouldn't do that. You need something soft," I said.

"Tomatoes, then," she suggested.

"Not that soft. Picture how the grapes would massage your back. Tomatoes wouldn't do that--they'd just mash down into a paste if you rolled. Mangoes maybe..."

"No," she said. "Too sticky again, plus that funny shape. You'd want symmetry. Kumquats." She sighed deeply and sleepily. I was feeling sleepy myself, imagining kumquats rocking me gently and supporting my slumber.

"Kumquats. Perfect," I said, and drifted off thinking: marriage will be great.

Back from Mercury

2009-06-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

I'm bouncing back, it seems, from a trough. This trough was so bad I was almost paying attention to remarks I saw around online about Mercury being in retrograde until June 7. That's it, I thought. It's that damn Mercury.

Which, I don't know, maybe there's truth in that. Any astrologically inclined readers? I'm yours to persuade. But Mercury or not, the fact of the matter is that my mojo was grievously injured by a rough weekend with my family-of-origin. I'm seriously considering starting a password-only blog just to vent about stuff that's too private for the general internet but amenable to that special dynamic of blogs that gets me to sit down and actually write about stuff. Which is good for me, at least, and maybe sometimes entertaining for visitors here, too.

Anyway, on the drive up to the weekend, I felt alive and strong. My radio-sing-along version of Bohemian Rhapsody was virtuosic. I thought there was nothing I could not handle. But once I was back home, I sank into a proper funk.

This past weekend, though, was an excellent dispeller-of-funks. On Saturday morning, I went to softball practice, then to coffee. I flyered for a queer event (hi thisfrozenlake!) and when I got home, FG and I decided to stay in and--what was it Jess used to call it? Oh yeah, we reconnected and had some nice bonding time. ('Cuz you know, hugs are the best cure for stress, of course.) And eventually we got really hungry and we went out for ice cream and got burrito-makings for a late dinner. The next day, I had a softball game. We were slaughtered, as usual. But! FG was there, cheering us on, and I caught a fly ball for the very first time. There was more lazing about, some chores, and the weekend was capped off by FG making a brilliant blueberry coffee cake.

As I ate it, I felt so glad just to be alive, with this woman beside me. I realized that I'm hardly reading fiction this days, just because my own life is interesting enough. And maybe I've had enough of the days when my motto was "People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading." [Logan Pearsall Smith] Life is the thing, especially when the mojo is finally back.

Yay Genderlabel!

2009-06-02T18:32:00.001-07:00

Good stuff. You can do yours here.

Hello

My gender is

activist, aggressive, amorous, BDSM, boi, boy with a vagina, boy with boobs, bulldagger, butch, crossdresser, cute, diesel dyke, differently-gendered, dog lover, dominant, dyke, FTWTF, female-assigned, feminist, femme-fucking, femme-loving, full of love, gender deviant, gender liberationist, genderqueer, gendertrash, hyper-sexual, kinky, LGBTQI, lover, loving, macho, misrepresented, misunderstood, non-op, obsessed, pro-sex feminist, queer, radical, same sex different gender oriented, sex positive, stone butch, stud, teh gay, top, transmasculine, tribade, trustworthy, woman-loving

What's yours?

Pink Grapefruit Cake

2009-05-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Sarcozona, FG got a recipe for a new cake: Pink Grapefruit.

She baked it and chatted with her sister on the phone while I worked on my bibliography and surfed the web.

When she took it out of the oven to cool, we started kissing, lying on the sunny floor near the window.

Eventually we made it into the bedroom for a proper tumble in the hay.

Then we ate the cake, which was delicious, a mixture of sweet, sour, and a little bit of bitter, just like grapefruit.

FG: It's pink grapefruit cake!
MacCool: It's not pink.
FG: But the grapefruit was.
MacCool: So was the girl.

Happy lazy Saturday afternoon.

Changes Ahead

2009-05-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

It's been a big week. I got a one-year job offer which means that not only do I have a job but also that I will be graduating this summer. That'll be Dr. MacCool to y'all. I don't want to get too specific here (except to clarify I'm not fixing anyone's broken arm, ok? it's not that kind of dr.) but this is going to be a really major milestone in my life, no question about it.

Since I got the news I've been through so many different emotions. Relief that I'll be earning money--I also got part-time summer work, hurray--being able to support myself and, ideally, my family has always been intensely important to me. I've been working pretty steadily at one thing or another, or more than one, since I was 16. I got some rejections this spring and had a little moment of panic. Part of what induced the 'crazy' of my mid-20s was the feeling that I had to have a certain level of gender conformity in order to be hired and to earn money. (I got this as a pretty clear, if covert, message at my first real job after college, so it wasn't just delusion.) Anyway, I refuse to go back to that place of fear and fake conformity, but it's a big relief to find that that doesn't require a total reinvention of my professional path, at least not this year.

Then, I'm excited about the work I'll be doing, and apprehensive about doing a good job. I'm afraid of leaving my fellow-grad-students behind (though honestly, the changes in my personal life in the last year or so have already done a pretty good job of that already). And I'm on guard lest the lure of succeeding at this job screws with my head the way that the first job did. I have a post brewing about my new year's resolution to be an asshole as necessary. I better write that to remind myself not to let it fall by the wayside in a quest to please my new colleagues & bosses.

Getting this job is slightly melancholy, too, because it represents the culmination, in a sense, of all of the hard work that was done mostly by a person who I now only dimly recognize as myself. I feel a strange urge to reach into the past and thank her a little, but also warn her I'm going to do something different with all this, not what she had planned at all.

This is probably an impossibly cryptic post to read. The point is this: I've been moaning about jobs & school here & on Twitter. I've gotten some awesome news. And, being me, it's complicated and I have to process it and stand at an angle from it, too, in addition to drinking champagne & smoking cigars.

Settling into Myself

2009-05-13T15:34:00.000-07:00

I wrote a few weeks back about springtime being the time of new beginnings for me. I've been thinking since then about what that means for me, this spring, one year after my universe exploded. It's not the second big bang (or third, or whatever) this time around. But as the new leaves have unfolded and the bees have started cruising around the neighborhood, and the flowers have been blooming and the MacCool household has been sneezing, I've felt a certain subtle shift, or set of shifts.

One shift is about gender. (Oh, I sense the shock. Try to contain yourselves.) When I started accepting & claiming masculinity last year I wondered what exactly that meant, when I'd want to get off the ride, as it were. If I just kept opening the next door, would I transition, in other words? And somehow, over the last few months, that's just been fading for me, and being replaced by the sense that, nope, that's not where I'm heading, at least not until or unless something pretty major changes for me. I've been thinking about this partly because of my good buddy Jess, who's being incredibly brave in sharing his own process in this connection. But also it's related to experiences and people in my non-bloggy life.

One thing I've heard from Jess & others is the sense of profound bodily wrongness. Jess mentioned looking in the mirror and not recognizing himself. And heaven knows I know that feeling. I spent years feeling that way. I was so out of touch I couldn't even picture myself in my head. But I don't feel that way now. There's plenty of things I'd like to change and I'm not trying to deny that there's some real body dysphoria going on at times, but mostly when I see myself, I look like myself. I feel like myself.

My point isn't really about not transitioning, but about settling into this person that I've become. I was trying this morning to explain to FG the feeling I've been having, of walking up the street, say, or buying a quart of milk, and just feeling... like myself. Like just another guy going about the daily business of living. I don't know. Maybe that's how most people always feel? Anyway it's new to me.

Another aspect of this is related to style. When I was trying to be a (good) girl, and yet not go completely bonkers, I developed a style centered on two themes: androgyny and invisibility. Plain jeans, not too tight. Endless black shoes of one boring variety or another. Button-up shirts from the Gap, from the women's side, but again, not too tight. Hair back in a plain ponytail (at the neck, like a boy). Brown wire-rim glasses. Little tweed or velvet blazers. Yep, I think that's it.

And now of course I can buy the clothes and shoes and glasses that I want, and it's slowly dawning on me that I don't have to opt for plain conservatism any more. (LL Cool Joe, I know, I'm a slow learner.) I went shopping with a friend recently and started to wonder, what do I really like, in the most superficial and entertaining of senses, now that I've gotten past the simple point of insisting that I shop on the men's side and not the women's? I think I'm going to have some fun figuring this one out.

Things I'm Happy About

2009-05-08T10:19:00.001-07:00

Not an exhaustive list, just an immediate one.

1. New battery & power cord = being able to work on the computer outside.
2. Just ordered new glasses. So much sexier than the apologetic I'm-just-a-shy-girl-please-don't-mind-me glasses I've been wearing for the last 2.5 years. My tentative motto for the new glasses: oh-yes-I-am-all-that, I'll-quote-you-Foucault-then-fuck-you-silly.
3. The frames are new but the prescription isn't. My eyesight hasn't gotten worse! Hurray!
4. Got an interview. For a very part-time casual thing but another company in this same field has been blowing me off, and these folks were very professional, so I have new hope for my ability to generate some cash this summer. Thank heavens. Unlike Rachel Maddow, I haven't found any good yard boy openings to tide me over while I finish my dissertation...
5. Friends. I haz them. And I love them. (One of the funny things about this blog is that I started it at a moment of intense, severe isolation. And through the changes I've made & documented here, I've mostly escaped from that. But I'm entirely opposed to writing about my IRL peeps here in any but the most general of terms, which means that in a sense the end of that story is missing. Well. There are worse things.)

Five seems good for now. Happy Friday, all.

Meme of Eights

2009-05-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

I'm stealing this from Vic over at Dykes & Guitars. I've been lurking there for-freakin'-ever. Check out the post on the linkfest--classic D&G humor, had me LOLing all over the place.

8 Things I Am Looking Forward To:

1. Going to kung fu in half an hour.

2. Hearing back from job applications large & small. (And some "yes" answers would sure be nice...)

3. Dancing with FG again.

4. Moving closer to friends. (This is just a neighborhood shift, nothing major.)

5. Fresh tomato & mozzarella salads

6. Changing the oil again

7. Beer. Always. <---- me too

8. An ever improving wardrobe

8 Things I Did Yesterday:

1. Had dinner with new & less-new friends.

2. Talked to my advisor and got good advice. How about that. Talking to hir is generally an uplifting experience and yesterday was no exception.

3. Failed to get any despite numerous advances. Damn final papers, let go of your grip on the sexy woman who shares my bed.

4. Cleaned the apartment for the first time in so long I can't even remember. We do OK with straightening, dishes, that sort of thing. But it was well past the time for the vacuum and I to get reacquainted.

5. Ate proper crisps sent by an English angel. (I finished them today and actually licked the inside of the bag.) (That's potato chips, yanks.)

6. Read bits of Jennifer Finney Boylan's "She's Not There" out loud to FG. Brilliant, funny book written by a transwoman; it has moved me almost to tears several times.

7. Worked on the Giant Dissertation of Doom.

8. I don't know, I'm sure I did something else. Um, looked at the lettuce plants on the porch? I probably did that.

8 Things I Wish I Could Do:

1. Fly airplanes.

2. Sleep with anyone I want with no adverse consequences. (Final papers!! I hate them!!!)

3. Expand the overall size of my skeleton esp. shoulders & hands.

4. Find size 36 suitjackets regularly stocked.

5. Get a job.

6. Go swimming in the ocean regularly.

7. Go back to England.

8. Be a more compelling blogger who doesn't rely on ripped-off memes.

8 Shows I Watch:

I subscribe to the Rachel Maddow podcast. Even that though I usually never get around to watching. We don't got no TV round here.

[Vic called it a stupid, stupid question & changed it. Good man.]

8 albums I'm granting listening time to lately:

1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
I don't care what anyone says, I love it like crazy and thank God it exists.

2. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Just started listening to them. They're not half bad.

3. Arcade Fire - Funeral
See above. I like Neon Bible better though.

4. Joy Division - Best of Joy Division
This band rocks my world. "Atmosphere" is my favorite these days. "People like you find it easy..."

5. Kills - Midnight Boom
My album of the year. I don't know what year. But it wins.

6. k.d. lang - Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Always what I turn to when I need to regain calm, perspective, and maybe a little joy. It's damn near perfect.

7. Delta 5 - Sessions & Singles
Trying to get into the other stuff besides "Mind Your Own Business".

8. Mrs Jynx - The Standoffish Cat
I'm starting to expand my electronica range of interests. This is pretty cool stuff. It's not good sex music, though. We tried. We felt like we were in truly bad porn. Consider yourself warned.

8 People I Tag:

I'm gonna be late for kung fu, folks. No tagging eight over here. Steal it from me, let me know you're still reading. But I will tag Jess. He can change pronouns, he can transition from Blogger to Wordpress, but he can't escape my tagging.

I Love You but I Can't Say So

2009-04-29T09:15:00.001-07:00

My computer is over five years old. The letters have been worn off most of the keys for ages now. Two days ago I got her a new battery & power cord (farewell duct tape!). I love her and I plan to keep her as long as possible.

But the old operating system limits any number of possible software updates. This can be good--I can barely do anything on Facebook anymore, for instance--but also not so good. There are now several blogs on Blogger whose comment functions don't work for me anymore. I think you all have the same template more or less.

So this is a confidential post to say I love you, but I can't tell you so on your own blogs. I can't even email you, 'cause you don't have addresses listed on your blogs, either. I love a good tease as much as the next guy, but I'm starting to worry you think I'm just not that into you. Not the case.

The main suspects (but I'm missing some, I know it):
Asphalt Cowboy: Dude, we have a lot in common. Your sex stories are awesome, and B.C.S. sounds like a ton of fun. Go fucking Sox.
Dyke Evolution: I'm glad you're blogging. It really does help with the tough times. And may you get some proper butch loving a.s.a.p.
Good Ship Priory: You started out with a brilliant first post on trans issues in mainstream science. Now you have a teaser up about femme invisibility. I wanted to encourage you to write more, but I couldn't.

How to Fail to Wash Your Car in 10 Easy Steps

2009-04-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

1. Get in your car and wash the inside of the windows.
2. Open one window so you don't asphyxiate yourself. Don't feel bad about the fumes or getting your leg stuck when climbing from back to front seats. It's all down hill from here.
3. Start the car and head towards car wash.
4. Avoid collision with dude blowing through four-way stop.
5. Get glared at by pretty pedestrian for honking at dude.
6. Drive past car wash, confused by the maze of contruction on the street outside.
7. Bang a U-ie.
8. Return to car wash and enter only non-closed, non-busy self-service bay.
9. Get informed by fellow car-washer that the bay is broken.
10. Back slowly out through contruction maze and return home. At least the inside of the windows are clean, and surely you didn't have anything better to do with that half hour.

Number 100

2009-04-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

That'll teach me to suggest I'm going to start daily blogging. Not so much apparently.

While I was gone I won an award from Joliesse, who started her blog not long ago but has already covered all sorts of interesting topics, on being femme, on mental illness, on topping vs. bottoming, on whether or not spring has started, and that's just what comes to mind. Thanks, Joliesse. There's a bunch of stuff I'm sposta do now, like reposting a very pink & flowery picture & awarding it to some other folks. (You want it, Jess? I know how you like pink flowers...) Anyway I'm feeling lazy and maybe I'll do it one of these days or maybe not. Still, I was very touched by Joliesse's post and her kind words.

This is my hundredth post. (I think. Could be 99 or 101. I deleted one for privacy reasons a while back and I forget how it affected the numbering.) 100 or so posts in a little over a year. I'm amazed at how much I've written and how much has changed. Maybe the biggest suprise, but also the nicest, is the way that I feel just like myself these days. When I think back to myself, oh, 18 months ago, it's like looking through a fog, or at a drugged zombie version of myself. It's hard to make myself believe I really was that person, living in that body and making those choices. Weird how the mind works.

I went to a drag show at my college the other night and found it a strangely emotional experience. I was out in college but I didn't have any queer friends or community. I went to the gay group once or twice but never saw anyone who was anything like me (it was only 4 or 5 people total each time so that's not exactly a shock). I used to think of my college experience as one of the happiest times of my life, but walking around before the show, I thought maybe it was a bit more complicated than that. There was joy to be sure, the sheer elation of having gotten out of my childhood home and the fierce joy of the crazy quantity of intellectual learning I did then, but it was a strange, solitary kind of exaltation. Whole days and weeks would go by when I hardly spoke to anyone outside of formal interactions, especially in the first couple of years. I experienced a new kind of happiness but I spent a lot of time desperately lonely, too, on the verge of breakdown or hallucination. The drag show, though, was all kinds of awesome and I was glad to be there.

Work-related stuff shows no signs of letting up in the near future, and then there are real-life distractions too. I'm about to run out of this cafe where I'm typing this after dropping off a job application and pick up FG and try to squeeze in dinner and some more work and maybe something a little more intimate before a birthday party. And that's just tonight. But even if another long time goes by before I post again know that I am reading your blogs as often as I can and am grateful every day for you all. And I'm working up to another 100 posts, just you wait.

Book Meme

2009-04-14T15:58:00.001-07:00

My sexy FG did this meme and I'm doing it, too. I'm feeling very happy this week & pleased with life, in spite of having insane amounts of work to do and deadlines looming, and I just feel like blogging. Maybe I'll blog every day this week just for the heck of it. (Hello, ecstasy half of spring! Hello! So glad you've dropped by!)

1) What author do you own the most books by?

Salman Rushdie. One of my good childhood friends loaned me his children's chapter book, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," when I was a 14 or so and I was hooked. ("Look out! Slow down! Don't be funny! Life is precious, cars cost money!") That summer I took "Midnight's Children" out of the library, feeling very daring. The public librarians in my town were very old-fashioned and barely approved of kids being in the adult section at all, much less borrowing thick foreign novels by authors with fatwas against them. I mean, it just wasn't done. Anyway I worked my way through the book that summer on the porch, mesmerized by the language and the descriptions of Indian life and history. I even bought myself a jar of mango chutney. Over the next several years I worked my way through most of the rest of his books: "Shame," "Satanic Verses," "The Moor's Last Sigh," "Imaginary Homelands." I bought "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" new when it came out in hardcover and devoured it. I living in California when "Fury" came out and was distraught at having to wait several extra days for it to be shipped from the East Coast. But, ultimately I didn't think much of it, and I haven't read any of his more recent stuff, either.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?

I think I don't have any repeats. I give them away when I end up with them.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

No. Silly rule. Like Winston Churchill supposedly said, this is English up with which I cannot put.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

Vina Apsara from "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" (Salman Rushdie)

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Mark Haddon. I think it's brilliant. Every time I read it I find something new. And I also find the language oddly soothing.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

Hm, I'm not really sure. I read a lot of cotton candy books when I was ten, Encyclopedia Brown and kids' mysteries and Baby Sitters Club (yes, really). Life didn't get interesting for another year or so, when Joseph Heller's "Picture This" sent me on a binge of reading grown-up books with Big Ideas. Oh, and I discovered and inhaled the complete Sherlock Holmes.

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

I don't know, something I wanted to cite that I probably just skimmed.

8 ) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble"

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?

I wish I could say Leslie Feinberg's "Stone Butch Blues" but I'm not sure it would work. I'm not sure they would get it. Wait, I mean 'everyone in the world' here. I'm only tagging Jess, of course. Jess has already read it and definitely got it.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

Me! The first person to win for their blog! (Hey, I could use the prize money, ok?)

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

No idea. I'm horrible about watching movies. I drive FG crazy with movie deprivation. I'm a terrible partner.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

See above.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

I think I dreamed I was in Jean Auel's "Clan of the Cave Bear" once. But it was a long time ago. I don't really remember.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?

Can I go for magazine here? For several years in my late teens/early twenties I had an unhealthy adoration for "Men's Health". You're stunned, I'm sure.

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics" There's so much brilliance there and it's not easy to read but it was so worth it. Lucky for me I was reading it on a train that broke down and I sat there in the sunny train seat for two hours and soaked it in, and after that, it made a lot more sense. I saw her speak recently, too, and again my brain felt like it had had a workout. I'm a fan.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?

Dunno. I have trouble keeping them straight.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

I like the Russian novels I've read: "Anna Karenina" and "Crime and Punishment" leap to mind. I almost let a boat float away when I was reading the latter secretly on a summer job in college. But I love French literature too, though I have an idiosyncratic view and modern & Francophone taste: Michel Butor rather than Victor Hugo, Maryse Condé rather than George Sand.

18) Roth or Updike?

Roth. I haven't read anything by Updike but I thought "Portnoy's Complaint" was so much damn fun. The scene where he wanks with the liver...

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

Like my darling FG, I have only read Sedaris. He made me laugh.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

All of the above, though none with special enthusiasm.

21) Austen or Eliot?

All of the above: Jane Austen I came to late, but love; George Eliot's "Middlemarch" is a favorite; and hey, I quoted T.S. Eliot a few posts back, I can't be dissing him now.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

American fiction. I didn't even finish "Huckleberry Finn". That's how bad it is.

23) What is your favorite novel?

I don't really have one. I have about 25 favorites. And don't worry, I'm not going to list them here. Each favorite is so special that I couldn't rank it.

24) Play?

Not sure, I'm not that into plays. We just saw "Endgame" (Samuel Beckett) though and damn that was some good stuff.

25) Poem?

I haven't read as much poetry as I'd like. I really like W.B. Yeats and what I've read of T.S. Eliot.

26) Essay?

I like Joan Scott's "Gender as a Category of Historical Analysis"... it's smart and well-constructed as an essay in my opinion. Not sure it's my favorite but it's what I thought of.

27) Short story?

The Bank Robbery by Steven Schutzman. Gotta agree with FG on this one. (And don't go pressing any alarm buttons or I'll blow your head off.)

28) Work of nonfiction?

Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble"

29) Who is your favorite writer?

See answer for novels above.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Oh, what a mean question.

31) What is your desert island book?

"Ulysses" by James Joyce. I know I could get more each time. As it is, I don't have time for even a second round.

32) And… what are you reading right now?

My own fucking dissertation. (Oops, did I say that?)

Red Letter Day

2009-04-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

Friday was a red letter day for me: I changed the oil in my own car for the very first time.

First off, I have to say I was incredibly fortunate to have the generous guidance of a genuine Butch Big Sister aka Dawn on MDI. (Not my real sister, of course. I don't even have a sister. I'm being Metaphorical here.) Anyway, Dawn provided extensive consultation on the question of tools and preparation, and told me to call her once I had the car jacked up and ready to go.

It's going to be difficult to convey here how off the charts excited I was. When I bought the tools & equipment, it was like freakin' Christmas. Only better. I sat on the floor and sorted out the sockets and the various wrenches and everything. The night before the big day, I literally couldn't sleep, I kept waking up and thinking: I'm going to change my own oil tomorrow. With my own tools.

On the morning itself, FG and I drove out to her sister's house (we don't have a driveway, and FG's sister kindly offered the use of hers). While the engine cooled off I washed her sister's car. Then I got out the jack and the owner's manual and I worked out how to jack one side of the car up. When I got my pair of brand-new jack stands out, though, I hit an obstacle: the directions said to place the stand in an appropriate spot. What the heck did that mean? I couldn't put it in the jacking location, because the jack was there. I looked around under the car but nothing seemed quite right. I wasted a lot of time on this mystery, and eventually Dawn wondered what had happened to me and she called me. She agreed that "an appropriate location" is like "bake until done": if you haven't done it, you just have no clue. With her help I positioned the stand under the axle, did the other side, and then I was ready to go.

Now, FG's eyes kept glazing over when I described the blow-by-blow of the oil change, and she was a captive audience. You, dear readers, are less captive, so I'll spare you the details: searching for the oil filter, using my socket wrench for the first time ever, learning the relationship between a gasket and a washer. One moment stands out in my mind: when I'd finally found the filter, and I loosened it with my hand. BBS had warned me, "This is the part where you get dirty," and she was right: when it came loose, there was dirty oil all over my hand and running down my arm. I was lying under the car at this point, my back on the damp sandy gravel of the driveway, the cool spring breeze contrasting with the warmth of the oil, and I have to tell you, I was just about transcendentally happy at that moment.

I have to give major props to Dawn. After a lifetime of being made to feel like I'm about to break something or get in the way or generally cause a disaster, her guidance made me feel reassured and competent. She threw in useful little remarks like, don't worry if you drop the drain plug into the oil pan, it's not the end of the world and it happens to lots of people. (Luckily, I didn't.) And even when it took me forever to find the oil filter, she didn't get impatient. (Or, she didn't let on if she was impatient, anyway.) I'm so used to acting tough and figuring stuff out on my own--acquiring knowledge and competence painfully and in secret and only showing the world when I'm 110% sure of myself--and this wasn't like that at all, and it made an awfully nice change. Not to mention, I'm dying to go for some long drives so I can do it again.

Springtime Drives Me Crazy

2009-04-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

Spring is my favorite season. I don't understand starting the new year in January because for me everything is reborn and remade in the spring. This was especially clear last year but it's true every year in one way or another. Spring is ecstatic and wild and liberating.

The flip side is that it also makes me crazy. Or, I can hear FG's objections already, it makes my craziness more volatile, harder to control, more liable to spin out and crash. Sometimes the new bright sunlight streaming through bare tree branches seems horrible to me, raw and unbearable. I am reminded that spring is a time of starvation in the natural world, and once in ours too, when the winter food supplies run out and the new ones aren't available yet. Spring is nature red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson wrote. Or, better to quote T.S. Eliot, who describes exactly how I feel in the opening lines of The Waste Land:

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

I want to write a summary of the last year here, answer E.'s question about how we reinvented ourselves after that April Fool's Day, but I can't bear to immerse myself in the quiet of the past right now. The future seems equally impossible to contemplate. I want to lose myself in the immediacy of the present. My mind is filled with wild thoughts, but I'm holding on to the details of life, making coffee and arranging to watch a friend's cat and working on my dissertation, and reminding myself that rebirth hurts every year but the leaves will break through the buds and the light will soften and mature and I will come down off this ledge, cleaner and hopefully wiser yet again.

Happy Friday Meme

2009-04-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

This one from the enchanting Queer Rose.

Five names you go by:
[Real Name], that damn girl name I'm not such a big fan of
[Nickname], which I love more and more every day
Leo MacCool
Sweetie (but only to FG)
I think that's it, only four names for me.

Three things you are wearing right now:
My beloved black hoodie from my martial arts studio
Jeans
Black Doc Marten boots

Three things you want very badly at the moment
My lovely FG (yes, I mean it that way)
To get one of the jobs that would let me graduate this year
Dinner

Two people who will probably fill this out
Jess!! (well, ok, Jess already did it.)
FG, cuz QR tagged her, too, and I bet she's gonna do it.

Two things you did last night
Went out for beer & southern food with FG and one of her pals
Got stuck in traffic

Two things you ate today
English muffin
Peanut butter & butter sandwich

Two people you last talked to on the phone
FG
Hair-cutting-place person

Two things you are doing tomorrow
Working
Something else I'm sure I'm forgetting

Two longest car rides
Driving from Mass. to Calif. and then back again! FG and I lived there for five months right after college. We made so many stupid mistakes. Oh youthful folly.

Two of your favourite beverages
Beer
Cranberry juice

Tough Day, 2008, 2009

2009-04-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

A year ago today I played an April Fool's Joke on FG. We were about a month into our gender awakening/sex explosion/life & relationship reinvention that happened last year. I went into the bathroom and put my hair up (it was still long), put on her lipstick and her bra, and came up behind her in the bedroom. There was a long quiet moment in which she stared at me, and then I said "April Fool's!"

It was just about the least funny joke I've ever played on anyone. Maybe now I could do drag humorously but then, in the raw first weeks of truth and discovery, when we were acknowledging how deeply dishonest and fucked up our relationship had gotten... it was a bad idea.

FG was spectacularly angry. So angry, I actually slept on the pullout couch for the next week. I remember that week with a vivid sensory recall: the smell of the dodgy, thin couch mattress, the prepared meals I bought at Tesco, the cheap brandy I drank. Listening to Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart Again on endless repeat. The smell of the English springtime coming in through the windows. Working my way through Sinclair's archives. And, of course, starting my own blog. I started working on it the night of April 1 and blogged my first post the next day after I'd settled on a name.

So tomorrow is my first blogiversary and I hope to write a little more about the blog & where it & I have been over the past year. April 1, 2008 was a tough day. April 1, 2009, is kind of tough, too, though my life is so much better now than then. But there are no pat happy endings, there's always more to do and live through and think about, and the damage and loss we sustain stays with us. I talked on the phone with my dad last night and due to a variety of circumstances I realized, or articulated to myself, for the first time how hurt I have been by him, how small and worthless I have felt. We were never terribly close but after my parents' divorce when I was 15 we were on strained speaking terms for a few years, and then we didn't have any contact from when I was 19 til I was 22, about three and a half years. And I've been angry and all sorts of things about that, but I never really admitted how vulnerable it made me feel and how much it hurt to be rejected by my masculine role model at that juncture. Anyway I'm feeling sad about that relationship today, and wishing I could call in sick to my life and go watch the planes land over Boston Harbor or something. But nothing doing, I've got things to do, and probably that is for the best.

Wanting Too Much

2009-03-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Holden's review of a new soft packer. I felt a familiar back and forth tug in my gut reading it, a private longing mixed with an even more private warning: you want that too much. Don't get it, because once you have it, you won't be able to let it go. And that will make you vulnerable.

I'm surprised in a way that I still feel this tug, this wanting too much. And I'm surprised at how often and at when, or over what. It's such an old, old feeling.

I had a sense, growing up, of the person I really was, and the person that I had to be: two very different people. One was just me, inside, mostly masculine and maybe even male, maybe not, depended on the day. (It still does.) And then there was the little girl (and later the teenage girl, and later still, kind of sort of very briefly, the woman), the one whose name I had to answer to, whose role I had to play.

And sometimes there would be things that the real me would want, things that were appropriate to the real me in some way. And those things were the things I wanted too much. I was afraid that if I got those things, I would not be able to hide myself any longer. I would be too obvious because letting those things go would hurt too much.

I read a line somewhere, and I really wish I could remember where. It was in a work of fiction but I don't even remember the circumstance, only that it dealt with some kind of personal loss that had been repeated in a character's life. And the author wrote that each loss cut some vital thing in that character, and that there would come a time when that thing, maybe the analogy was to a thread reaching out to others, would not grow back. It was so much more beautiful than this but as you see I don't remember enough even to google it. Anyway it is one of the few instances I can recall of completely breaking down and just sobbing over a single image, a single sentence.

I was afraid that if I wanted those things, and got them, and lost them, something in me would die like that and never come back.

I vividly recall the first time I really, truly overcame that feeling. There had been sneaky, backdoor exceptions, times when my vigilance was down and I got the hot men's shoes, or times when FG somehow saw the conflicted longing in my eyes and bought me the cufflinks or whatever. But the first time I really overcame the tugging warning about wanting too much was a little over a year ago now, back in England.

We were in a department store and FG was shopping for bras. I was bored senseless, of course, wandering around and around the lingerie section and I forget, whatever else was on that floor--women's shoes? Accessories? Something like that. She was taking a long time, and she came back out at one point and said she'd need to exchange some sizes and was going back into the fitting room. And somehow, maybe the boredom was so bad it broke down my defenses, but something in me admitted that what I wanted to do was to take the escalator upstairs to the men's department.

I fought inwardly on the ride up, and rationalized. I needed something better to wear, now that we had befriended another... at the time, I would have thought, lesbian or female couple, now I would describe them as another butch/femme couple. I could buy a shirt to wear the next time we went out with them. That's all I was doing.

I knew I was lying. By the time I reached the top of the escalator I was nearly hyperventilating. My heart was pounding audibly as I walked over to the dress shirts and began looking at them. Maybe people will think I'm shopping for my boyfriend, I thought. I looked through the colors, wondered what size I was. After a while I chose the smallest size in a handsome stripe and brought it downstairs, where FG was just coming out of the lingerie section.

I told her I thought I would buy it. She looked at me, quietly, waiting. I was waiting, too, for her to tell me to put it back. I offered to put it back. I temporized about the price. I said I didn't really need to have it. She took it out of my hands, checked with the clerk that it could be returned, and bought it for me.

When we got home, and I put it on, I knew why I had been afraid of wanting it so much. Once I had it on, I knew I could never wear any of my other shirts ever again. I felt like myself, in real time, in actual space, in living color. It didn't hurt to be me, wearing that shirt.

Since that day I have gotten a lot of things that I have wanted too much. But that desperate longing can still rise in me and constrict my throat and surprise me. What's changed now is that I try to pay attention, not to run away, but to trust that I've grown strong enough not to lose that fundamental thing, my own self, no matter what else gets taken from me along the way.

Props to the Single Parents

2009-03-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

I'm almost done with the house-sitting gig here. Fish still mouthing along at me, so nothing new to report there. I've been doing this mostly solo, with FG spending occasional nights, but mostly it's been my thing. (Which I can't complain about since I want to spend all the money I'm earning, too! Starting with some car-fixin' wrenches...)

One thing that's occurred to me more than once is how insanely hard it must be to be a single parent living on their own with kids. I'm a big animal lover, and these are nice ones, too. They have their own quirks but they're good critters. But when the dogs start whining to go on their morning walk and it feels like about ten minutes since I went to bed... or when they just. won't. stop. barking at the mysterious raccoon or zombie or whatever lives in the tree outside at night, I feel seriously on the verge of losing it. And I think, well, it's just for x more days, it's ok. And I keep it cool. But honestly, single parents of the world? You have my admiration. You always did, but now you really, really do. (I know dogs are not the same as kids. But frustration and sleeplessness and housebound isolation... there are some similarities in those experiences, I think.)

I made my own jambalaya last night! Round of applause for Chef MacCool? To be honest, it was just a jambalaya mix plus veggie sausages but still I feel pleased with myself. It even tasted good. And on the topic of food, does anyone else love the hot cross buns that they sell in the grocery stores this time of year? I've had posh ones and foreign ones but the New England grocery store ones rock my world.

Time to take the dogs for a walk. I'll try to write again before *next* Wednesday.

Scraping Off the Rust

2009-03-18T18:43:00.000-07:00

I'm still alive and I think I remember how to blog something besides memes. Maybe. I'm a little rusty. Like my brakes were...

Spring seems to be arriving with torturous slowness this year. Last year I was stunned by the sudden arrival of flowers and light at the end of the dark, damp English winter. Still waiting here in New England.

I'm housesitting for some relatives. Their fish watches me eat, mouthing along in sympathy. What do fish think about, floating in their little glass cages? One of the cats stalks up silently and stares at me until I sense his presence by the force of his gaze. This was particularly disturbing when I was in the bathtub, and then there were cat eyes sort of peering over the edge at me.

I went to a new mechanic this week and got the rust scraped off my rear brakes. Thank you, winter. Navigating the world of cars & mechanics & all that is a bit of a big deal to me. I started driving young (like barely legal) and was responsible for my own car in high school (a hand-me-down). Then I spent a bunch of years living in the city sans vehicle. We've had this car since 2004.

Car expertise is one of those things I've always felt stressed about. I was sort of thrown in at the deep end as a teenager... my dad and I weren't talking all that much, my stepdad doesn't know much of anything about cars (he's a great guy, but seriously, he didn't even realize that it is in fact possible to overinflate tires...), my mom considered it my problem to sort it out. Which I kind of did but not very well. When we got the car we have now I did the basics, read the owner's manual for instance, and even asked both my dad and my uncle (who's a mechanic, though one who lives very far away) to show me the basics of easy DIY maintenance. They both said sure and then avoided the topic like the plague thereafter.

Obviously competence with cars is a major marker of masculine expertise in our culture. I felt for a long time like I was being specifically, systematically excluded from figuring cars out, and like with a lot of things, I gave up for a long stretch there in my mid-twenties. But now that the car itself is getting to be of a certain age, and I'm no longer willing to cede the masculine expertise I want to have, I'm starting to take a new approach. Like losing the crappy dealership service department that never really fixed anything properly anyway. If the weather ever warms up, I'm going to wax the car, taking advantage of having a driveway this week, and I'm going to do it with pride. Who knows, one of these days I might even change my own air filter. Time to scrape off another layer of shame & limitation.

More Mindless Fun

2009-03-11T09:47:00.001-07:00

This is a meme to cheer me up. It made laugh when I saw it on B's blog and it made me laugh when I tried it. And it's rainy and I'm generally proving the point that I'm more trouble than I'm worth, so, mindless fun blog meme to the rescue it is.

1. Take your cell phone.
2. Open your txt messege inbox.
3. Answer the questions with a first sentence of the txt messege that has arrived.
4. Question 1 - First sentence from the first messege.
5. Question 2 - First sentence from the second messege, etc...

1. What would you say if your significant other was unfaithful?
Maybe when you get home we can make it a reality?
2. What do you always say to your best friend?
No work on subway [That's right, friends. Don't sleep there either.]
3. What is first thing you say when your friend is hit by a bus?
Nice train guy exchanged my pass! [That's rather callous, isn't it?]
4 What is the worst thing you could say to your enemy?
Hey [Leo] give me a call when you have a free minute. [Because talking on the phone with me is sheer torture, of course.]
5 What does your mother say before you go to sleep?
Sounds good! [tough to recall, but I'm pretty sure she never said this before I went to sleep.]
6 What would you scream if you won over a million in lottery?
Cool, will come get me?
7 What would you say to God if you met him/her?
3 17. [That should confuse the deity plenty. Unless God=St. Patrick.]
8 What would you like to hear the most?
Love you stud [Well, yes. Yes indeed.]
9 What will be your last words?
3 days!!! [Because apparently I think I'm going to be resurrected in a modern-day version of the Easter story? I really do have a complex.]

And I tag... Jess! (I'm really never going to forget, buddy. You're stuck with me tagging you til doomsday.)

New Post Rising: Joey's Meme

2009-03-08T16:09:00.001-07:00

Well, time flies when your honey's home. (And you attract more flies with honey than vinegar, but that's neither here nor there.) While I've been neglecting this blog, LL Cool Joe not only invented his own meme, but tagged me, too.

From Joey's Pad:

1. You've got to post a link from the person who tagged you.
2. List 8 things that you know about on your chosen subject. You get to choose the subject.
3. You don't have to tag anyone but you can if you want. If you do, let them know on their blog that they've been tagged.
4. List the rules.

He adds: "So the idea is to write 8 things about a subject, eg. your job, marriage, sexuality, a hobby, diet, sport etc. that sheds light on the subject from your own personal perspective. So for example if you teach, you list some of the "inside" knowledge that you've gained, making your work more interesting or successful."

It took me a little while to think of what I might be able to write about here. I settled on writing about a hobby that I've neglected recently (much like the blog) but that I'd like to pick up again to some extent: making bread.

I took up breadmaking when I was in college. I read that John Lennon started baking bread in his post-Beatles life, and it sounded kind of cool and hip and non-stereotypically masculine to me. Then I read Salman Rushdie's "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" and one of the main characters, Ormus Kama, also bakes bread, heaps and heaps of fluffy white bread. Ormus is an insanely sexy rock star that I identified with strongly in the book. He's in love with Vina Apsara, a mysterious, strong-willed singer who is both his soul mate and yet ever elusive.

But enough about the book. The point is, I decided baking bread was an appealing hobby and I took it up. And here are eight things I know about it.

1. You don't need an exact recipe to make bread. In fact, it's almost impossible to write one. This is because flour is very affected by humidity, so the amount of liquid you need to flour varies a lot. Some people try to get around this by weighing ingredients, but to me, that misses the point. I love that you can take the basic ingredients and combine them in a million different ways until the dough looks and tastes right, and get a different but tasty result each time.

2. You can make bread with just flour, salt, water, and yeast. Well, technically, you could leave the salt out, but it wouldn't taste very good.

3. Yeast is a microorganism. People often say they're intimidated by baking with yeast. But, I like the analogy I found somewhere that yeast is easy if you remember to treat it like you should treat yourself. Keep it about body temperature. If you put too much fat in the bread, the yeast gets sluggish and slow, and it takes a longer time for the dough to rise. If you add too much sugar, the yeast gets hyper and eats and multiplies like crazy, but also tends to die off fast. It's better to give it a more balanced diet. The analogy ends though when you bake the bread and kill the yeast off.

4. Bread is done when you can knock on the bottom of the loaf and it sounds hollow.

5. It's hard to get homemade bread to taste like bakery Italian or French breads. At the bakery, they have special steam-injected ovens which help to get the crust that crunchy, shiny texture. There are a lot of home substitutions but I've never gotten one to work. After dumping ice water into a tempered glass casserole dish in the bottom of the hot oven, and having shards of glass spray everywhere, I decided that I could buy bakery bread at the bakery. Homemade bread has its own virtues and special taste.

6. You can freeze bread dough. But, the yeast dies off over time. So you should add extra yeast at the start.

7. My favorite bread cookbook is King Arthur Flour Company's baking cookbook. I learned a lot of what I know in that book. Plus the recipes are good and an excellent base for experimentation.

8. It's really, really cool to see the bread dough expand in size over time during the rising process. It goes fastest in a warm environment, like a sunny windowshelf or near the heater. On the other hand you can also slow it down, for instance making dough in the morning and sticking it to rise in the fridge all day.

I'm going to tag some folks now. Eight, I guess, one for each fact. But feel free to play along if it looks like fun.
Jess
FreedomGirl
Sarcozona
MLC (pottery maybe? I'm so fascinated by your art.)
Greg
Jessie
Holden
Saint Chick

This is a very old picture from my first foray into bread-making (and my first short hair cut, oddly enough).

To Do List: Tomorrow

2009-02-21T19:20:00.001-08:00

1. Wash the car. (I can hear the salt eating it, even though it's parked up the street.)
2. Go grocery shopping. Buy flowers, too.
3. Make dinner.
4. Straighten house: especially, remove weights from the middle of the living room floor.
5. Drive to the airport and PICK UP FREEDOMGIRL!

I'll leave #6 to your imagination.

What About the Body, Leo?

2009-02-19T16:19:00.000-08:00

It's a real treat, when reading Judith Butler's books, to encounter her rare, telling autobiographical asides. One of my favorites is in the Preface to Bodies That Matter. She describes being repeatedly asked, "What about the materiality of the body, Judy?" and reflects: "I took it the addition of 'Judy' was an effort to dislodge me from the more formal 'Judith' and to recall me to a bodily life that could not be theorized away. There was a certain exasperation in the delivery of that final diminutive, a certain patronizing quality which (re)constituted me as an unruly child, one who needed to be brought to task, restored to that bodily being which is, after all, considered to be most real, most pressing, most undeniable. Perhaps this was an effort to recall me to an apparently evacuated femininity .... Or perhaps someone forgot to teach me 'the facts of life'? Was I lost to my own imaginary musings as that vital conversation took place? And if I persisted in the notion that bodies were in some way constructed, perhaps I really thought that words alone had the power to craft bodies from their own linguistic substance? Couldn't someone simply take me aside?" (pp. ix-x)

How can you not love her? Apparently evacuated femininity-- I haz it too. My Butler bromance smolders on.

I thought that writing that post on sexual freedom and autonomy would be a sort of summing up. I'd take the thoughts I'd been having about sex and bodily boundaries and childhood experiences and write them out in an essay for you to read and that would be that. Instead the act of writing and maybe more than that the act of putting that up on the blog has jarred something loose deep within me. Or several things perhaps.

And then Jess and Holden and Tongue-tied wrote very thoughtfully about breasts, and even though I was considering ditching this draft post entirely, I decided to go back to it and try to say something about where I am right now in my own complicated views on bodies in general and mine in particular.

You know that picture you look at and you can see a young woman with a hat or an old lady? (No? Check it out here.) My body is a little like that to me. Sometimes I look at it and think, oh, that's me. (I'm usually dressed when I think that, if it matters. I'm usually dressed when I look, full stop.) But once in a while I look at myself and think, yikes, it's the young woman! Where did she come from?

What I mean, in part, is that the mental map I have for my own body is really different from what I think it's 'supposed' to be, according to normal sex-gender identification. When I was sixteen or so I mostly stopped wearing bras. I was super skinny then so it didn't matter that much and it was just so much more comfortable. But in fact it was more than that. One hot day, I was just wearing a button down, loose, nothing underneath. And I was standing in my mom's kitchen, talking to her and FreedomGirl, and my nose was dripping, and I lifted up my shirttail to dry it off. I thought the looks of horror were for my appalling hygiene. But no: it turned out, of course, that I had flashed them. Because to me, those weren't Breasts under there, not in the capital-B belonging to a capital-G Girl way that would have warned me to keep them covered.

When I wrote that post I thought I was putting something away. But it turned out it was more like opening the big locked chest inside me marked "Your Body," and peeking tentatively inside, trying not to be overwhelmed by the gusts of musty sorrow and pain that rushed out.

I grew up with a very embodied view of gender. By which I mean, I got the impression that your gender was marked on your body in ways that were utterly, permanently insurmountable, starting with the obvious bits but extending far beyond that. One of my very early memories is being in the front yard with my mother and seeing a person walking on the far sidewalk. The person was wearing pants and a hat, and I didn't know if they were male and female. "Oh, you can always tell by the way they walk," my mother said. "That's definitely a woman." I wanted to rebel against it but it sounded like higher law: you will never walk like a man, no matter how hard you try. Your body will betray you. The examples could be multiplied but the moral was always the same.

And sometimes this creeps up in strange ways, at strange moments. We're having brilliant sex and a voice in my head says, you pathetic sod. You're a woman and all you're doing is smashing your woman parts up against the back of a plastic cylinder strapped to your womanly hips. Stupid, messed-up sex for a stupid, messed-up woman.

To understand the import of this, you need to understand that I have never thought of myself as a woman, not in my whole life. Even as a tiny kid I never truly believed I'd grow up to be a woman. It seemed like an unlikely hypothesis that adults would occasionally drag out with a shocking lack of propriety or realism. So you know, I have some sympathy with the idea of the body as mainly linguistically constructed. (Sorry, Sublime Femme.)

I don't hate my body. I feel pretty comfortable in it on many levels. Sitting here, typing this, a little stoned on whiskey, a little wordy from loneliness, in my boots and jeans and shirt and blazer, I feel fine. I like the look of my hands on the keyboard, the skin a little rough, the knuckles and ligaments prominent, the little faded Sharpie-drawn heart that was the stamp I got for being old enough to drink on Valentine's Day. I like the feeling of the muscles in my arm, the narrowness of my back and ass where they press against the chair, my legs jutting out and then together again at the ankles. It's all ok, it feels like the home for my soul that I've always known and I'm safe and comfortable within it. It just doesn't add up to woman for me, and when someone or something makes me think it does, everything changes.

What about the body? All my life I've thought to myself, don't even go there, don't open that door, don't touch that topic. It will hurt too much and there's nothing you can do about it anyway. And I thought I was writing a post that put the finishing touches on that approach and instead I blew the whole thing to pieces.

Greetings from Sex-Starved Isolation

2009-02-19T15:05:00.000-08:00

I've been enjoying the comments on my week of bachelorhood. I think the reality is just as gendered as the jokes, though in a different way. It's a feminist household here: we divide all the chores as evenly as possible. Basically that boils down to, I clean and she cooks. So the dishes are not piled up. In fact things are generally orderly. When I'm home alone it gets very quiet and not much gets moved around. It's almost like I'm not here, except for the music which I'm almost always playing. I got very good at being invisible when I was young, disappearing out of the realm of family to exist in my own world.

What I really can't do is feed myself. It's kind of pathological at this point. The concept of meals disappears pretty fast and I really have to remind myself to eat some kind of regular, balanced food on a daily basis. I kind of hate cooking for myself. So I eat a lot of random stuff, packaged things or just out of a bag whatever. And I either eat way too much at one go or I forget to eat entirely and wonder why I feel so weird at midnight.

FG feeds me very well and I appreciate it very much. I've noticed, though, that women in general feed me. (Though my mother is an exception. Feel free to get all armchair-psychologist with that fact.) I get offered food and drink in all sorts of situations with a special kind of soliticousness. Even women who make a point of how they don't cook feed me. And I have to admit I kind of love it. It makes me feel anchored to the earth by a sisterhood of femmes who will stand between me and self-destruction. It makes me feel cared for and looked after. I know that probably sounds sexist, women as providers of nourishment and all that. Maybe it is. But hey, I clean the bathroom and take out the trash. I'm not all bad.

****

Her thigh-highs arrived in the mail today. Sex starvation has set in.

****

The visit with my grandparents was good. The highlight was definitely helping my grandmother hang her birdhouses. (Hammers! Brackets! Ladders!) She and I had some nice conversations, too, about some of the changes in my life over the last year and about homophobia in general, to name a couple of the more memorable topics. I was surprised by how empathetic and insightful she was about it all. She's been like a mother to me in many ways, due to circumstances of my upbringing and my parents' personalities--not in a direct, daily sense but in an emotional sense.

I'm like my grandmother in a lot of ways. I always think of her when I hear that U2 song, "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own." "Tough / You think you've got the stuff / You're telling me and anyone / You're hard enough" and also "I don't need / I don't need to hear you say / That if we weren't so alike / You'd like me a whole lot more." She certainly is tough, in more ways than I can list here, or would want to, considering how private she is.

She has a strong philosophy of life and she adheres to it, disregarding her own suffering if necessary, and she demands that kind of strength of character in those around her, or rather, she dismisses the weakness of those who lack it. I've called her by her first name since she asked me to stop using what she saw as a silly, sentimental title when I was five or six. I learned a lot about perservence and overcoming pain from her, and maybe some things that weren't so helpful, too, like rejecting help and refusing to forgive myself for mistakes. In recent times I've thought a lot about the negative aspects of her legacy to me, but this visit reminded me again of the good parts. It's a harsh, bleak love but it's strong and steady, too.

Bachelor Life: An Update

2009-02-16T08:08:00.001-08:00

I was mostly kidding when I said I'd be sad, lonely, and hungry this week. Though clearly I should not kid about these things. I've even gotten an IRL offer of a care package. Do I look that helpless? (No need to answer that.)

Seriously, though, things are fine in the MacCool household. Cats are a bit suspicious but I feed them anyway usually so they're mostly keeping it cool. I munched on Thai leftovers all day yesterday and slept in the middle of the bed. Yeah, I know how to live it up. Today, the car is getting a weird noise checked out (oh let it be cheap & easy to fix) and I'm working. I've got some social engagements planned, including a trip tomorrow with my mom to see my grandparents. A bit nervous about that of course.

And FG is safely arrived at her destination which she tells me is beautiful and strange to Northeastern eyes... I think she's having a good time. And I believe her that she doesn't have cell phone service there, I really do.

Happy Valentine's Day, belated

2009-02-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

FG and I had a pleasant Valentine's Day which for us is doing well. This is not our holiday, a fact which has become a joke between us now. One year I did pretty well, got up before she awoke and returned with fresh blackberries and blood oranges and some chocolate. Otherwise it's not been a good scene, generally speaking. Maybe we were scarred by being so deeply closeted on the High Holy Day of Gooey (Heterosexual) Romance in high school. Make that probably. I meant to write up our very worst Valentine's Day story, which involves the best of intentions and ended with a resolution never to cook squid again; maybe later this week.

This year, I made dinner on Friday night (no squid! nothing unusual at all!) and we sat and drank some wine and talked. Yesterday was mostly taken up with her preparations for her trip. She's doing an alternative-spring-break program, which means I'm a bachelor this week. (Or in other words sad, lonely, and probably hungry.) And we went out briefly to a dance party, but we weren't really feeling it, and anyway we had to get up to get her to the airport insanely early this morning.

But I did order her some very sexy thigh-highs. Looking forward to test-driving those when she's back. And she got me lovely card made by a local artist, very much Georgia O'Keeffe style erotically artistic. And inside she wrote (among other things), "Valentine's Day is super silly, but it gives me an excuse to wear fishnets all day and give you a card that looks like my bits. :) " Can you see why I'm crazy in love with this woman?

I've Been Borrowed

2009-02-12T09:07:00.000-08:00

by Tina for Freedom to Marry Week. You can find me doing my guest stint thing here.

Silly Music Fluff: Still Thrives This Love

2009-02-08T17:31:00.000-08:00

Tina has a request up for advice on music--what are your top ten songs right now, basically. I think it's a great question, it's always awesome to get new music recommended to you and I think people's favorite stuff is actually pretty revealing.

In that vein, and to pop up out of my grad school funk and say hello, I present the following meme, which I'm sure everyone & their blogroll has done already, but I'm tagging Jess, of course, because I can and I always will.

What does your music library say about you?
--------------------------
1. Put Your iTunes on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name.
--------------------------

What do your friends think of you?
Give Me Novacaine (Green Day) [sorry, friends. I didn't realize it was that bad...]

How would you describe yourself?
You Can't Always Get Want You Want (Rolling Stones) [um! I'm actually relatively satisfied? I mean like broadly speaking? ::moving on::]

What do you like in a guy/girl?
Fidelity (Regina Spektor) [on my honor, I'm not rigging this. But pay attention, FG!]

How do you feel today?
Drain You (Nirvana) [actually, yes. It was a fine day, but also strangely draining.]

What is your life’s purpose?
Until the End of the World (U2) [as in, immortality? Or I'm going to bring about the apocalypse?]

What is your motto?
Smalltown (Chumbawamba) [erm, no. I grew up in a small town and I like the big ones a whole lot better, thanks.]

What do you think about very often?
You (Radiohead) [aw, well of course I think about you, dear reader.]

What do you think of your best friend?
Lies (Once) [I'm not sure I have a best friend at this juncture. Several very good ones which is probably more my style anyway. Do I think lies about them? Well, not on purpose, anyway. Maybe they lie to me sometimes. No one's perfect.]

What do you think of the person you like?
The Jessica Numbers (New Pornographers) [Any Jessicas reading this? Hi! I like you!]

What is your life story?
School of Etiquette (Boyskout) [oh, too true. How sad.]

What do you want to be when you grow up?
The Day After That (Kiss of the Spider Woman) [proof I'm not rigging this. I'm not censoring the musical theater.]

What do you think of when you see the person you like?
Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me (U2) [on second thought, you can skip that last step]

What will you dance to at your wedding?
Simple (kd lang) [I wish we had.]

What will they play at your funeral?
When Your Mind's Made Up (Once) [no comment]

What is your hobby/interest?
Hamburg Song (Keane) [what? I'm a vegetarian! And I've never even been to Germany! And I don't even like Keane!]

What is your biggest fear?
Kurious Oranj (The Fall) [well, it does sound scary, doesn't it?]

What is your biggest secret?
Lullaby (The Cure) [now you know! I sometimes oversleep!]

What do you think of your friends?
You Can Make Him Like You (Hold Stead) [my friendships are the result of sheer force of will.]

What will you post this as?
Still Thrives This Love (kd lang)

Best Damn Dog

2009-01-29T14:58:00.000-08:00

Tuesday would have been 18th birthday of my First True Canine Love. (There has not yet been a second, for the record, though I'm still dreaming of a shepherdish mutt in my future...) She came into my life the spring of my sixth grade year, not an otherwise happy time. My family was moving (houses, not towns) and my best friend (and first proper crush, ahem) had just moved out of state and... well, I was a total mess, socially, as all this girl/puberty stuff started catching up with me. Anyway, along came this awesome puppy, who became mostly my responsibility. She had stitches on her chin from an unfortunate encounter with another dog early in life (she was scrappy like that) and I would put a cream on it each evening and sing her to sleep. In the morning I woke up early and threw a ball for her as long as I could before school. She was instantly the love of my life.

She was a smart, funny dog. A wicked escape artist who could dig under anything, who would wriggle her way through any hole, and who would wander out through any open door. She swam like a champion and we dog-paddled side-by-side every summer of my adolescence. Cocky like me, she would actually chase after flying birds, and one winter almost got herself killed that way, launching herself into a fast-moving little ocean channel in pursuit of a seagull. She went under, as I tore after her, but before I got there she'd regained some footing and pulled herself out. She was tough as nails, in her way.

We walked hundreds of miles together during my high school years, along the edge of the roads of the little town where I grew up. She was never really well-trained--I think she was too smart and willful for that--but we understood each other. I remember the sense of calm companionship we had, three or four miles into a properly long walk, both of us having worked out the restlessness and settled into an even stride. Those walks are a series of happy memories from an otherwise very difficult time.

She slept in my bed or next to it just about every night. FG was not always happy about this, nor about her tendency to lick my face and attempt licking FG's face as well. It never bothered me, though.

I missed her like crazy when I went to college--I didn't live at home again, since I moved in with FG immediately after my freshman year, and so I didn't live with my dog again, either. I called in sick when she was dying, got on the first train I could out of New York and went to be with her. I spent her last night sleeping next to her on the floor, listening to her struggle to get enough air into her lungs, and I held her as she died the next day, euthanized by one of the vets I'd worked for in high school.

I still miss her. She was sassy and awesome and one of the best friends I've ever had. She had this look of confidence that I used to joke was her way of saying, "I'm the best damn dog YOU'LL ever have." And you know, I think she was right.

Best Damn Dog (1991-2004) (with half-sister in the background)

Here Be (No) Dragons

2009-01-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different. A while back, there was some silliness on Twitter. It started when the lovely and multitalented Femme Is My Gender mentioned that she would be cooking Red Dragon Pie and offered the recipe to my own darling FreedomGirl.

Ever the chivalrous provider, I of course leapt from my desk and began to don my Red Dragon Slaying Gear. Yet just a few tweets later I discovered the name of the pie is a mere metaphor. In fact the pie is vegetarian, to the everlasting scorn of staunch carnivores Tina and Kyle.

But once Red Dragon Slaying Gear has been mentioned, what are butches to do? Discuss swords, of course. Holden weighed in, we heard about Kyle's all-conquering Sword of Love, and Jessie's damned impressive sword collection was enumerated. Natt Nightly's own sword collection is of course legendary as well.

And there it all would have stayed, if I had not been lured by SaintChick into promising to post a picture of me in my own Dragon Slaying Gear. I stalled, but she called me to task in her last comment, and quite rightly, too.

I am here today to make good my vow to the fair lady. Without further ado, here I am, in Dragon Slaying Gear (also known as my Inigo Montoya costume). All I can say is: that mustache deserves a better sword. And I think this picture stands as final proof, I really would do anything a beautiful femme asked, however difficult, painful, or, um, humiliating.

Sexual Freedom & Autonomy: A Stone Perspective

2009-01-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

What does a stone butch have to say about sexual freedom and autonomy?

What don’t I have to say about those things?

I accepted the label of stone around the same time I embraced the identity of butch. In both cases it seemed like a matter of accuracy. I’ve written pages and pages now about being butch but very little about being stone.

Which only makes sense. We do silence well. She does give me pleasure, oh my god she does, but you won’t hear about it from me, not even if you’re standing next to the bed. I know my face gives me away to her. That’s my version of surrender.

I have a female body. In this world that means I’m by definition made to be penetrated and fucked. My refusal constitutes the very basis of my sexual autonomy. The pleasure and joy that many female-bodied people take in being penetrated, in receiving sex, in being fucked, is a beautiful thing. I’m in awe of it and grateful for it. But I do not want that.

My sexuality is not only about refusal. The silence into which I coax her murmurs and cries and maybe eventually screams: that is my sexuality, too. And the hundred ways she has of stoking my desire just by how she moves herself under me. The exquisite moment when my hips fall down into hers and our movements match. And those tiny fissures—the look on my face or the change in my breathing or the thrusts I’m no longer consciously controlling—out of which my love pours onto her. Those things are also my sexuality and my sexual freedom.

What is this thing called stone? When I read Stone Butch Blues (by Leslie Feinberg) I felt the constant assaults on the main character viscerally. The whole book, it seemed to me, could be summarized as a balancing act between the strength and liberation she gains as she builds up the stone necessary to protect herself and her bittersweet longing for Theresa to come back and finally melt her stone. I think ‘stone’ means different things at different moments in that book, and perhaps in my life, too.

The trust and vulnerability I can bring to my intimacy with FG is precious to me. But I have and I do and I will lash out at her, even her, if the core of inviolability that the stone protects seems to be in danger.

This spring, when everything was in play, I experimented a little bit with those boundaries. One attempt at penetration, one only. You can read about it here. I wrote then about the emotional fallout: “The pain, a lot of it, came from: how I hated being the girl I was required to be, inoffensive, acquiescent. The desolating dawning realization in childhood that the stakes of my success were staggeringly high (love, for starters). She touched the place in me I held safe behind barbed wire and alarm sirens while the girl (me) was doing what she had to do.” There’s an implicit offer of catharsis in that post but in fact there was no follow-up, not really, unless you count a more recent and random meltdown after a less-planned loss of autonomy in bed.

I don’t think we’re butch or femme or gay or stone or kinky or anything else in some simple causal chain that can be followed back to childhood. I don’t devalue the complexities of our adult sexualities with: oh, ze must have been abused as a child. That’s garbage, deeply damaging and insulting garbage.

But I tried to write this post many times without going into the dark places that are summoned up when my sexual boundaries are crossed. And frankly it doesn’t make sense. There’s no neat narrative here, only fragments tossed up from within my own mind and memory. A picture of me as a small child, under four, on my mother’s lap, doubled up over the arm she has around my waist. I remember how my scowling frown felt from inside, the desperate need to stop being touched around my hips. I still feel that way, I can’t stand being held fast there. The e-mail correspondence I had with my older brother (not the one I've written about before on this blog, but the other one, older than me by fourteen years) in which he first revealed that my father had told him I “had been under a lot of psychological pressure” as child but had “found ways to deflect it and create [my] own safe space.” And the transient sense of trust that e-mail evoked, which led me to be more honest with my brother than I ever had been. Which led him to reveal that he always wondered if his falling out with my mother (his stepmother) stemmed from an incident when he was playing with me when I was three or four, and he (accidentally, by his account) touched my crotch, and I told him not to touch me there. Which led me to end the correspondence. What am I supposed to do with that memory? I feel ill even contemplating it. And then all the shame and lack of power over my own body as regards my mother. How I had to fight to be allowed to stop bathing with her at an age well past the usual ending point for such a thing. Her rage when any part of my body was visible in any way that might be remotely construed as sexual in front of my father or later my stepfather.

These are only the most coherent, the best documented, the most verifiable, of a range of shadowy memories and impressions, all centered on fear and shame and the urgency to protect that safe internal space at any cost. I don’t know what any of it means. This is not a disclosure of some special, distinct narrative of sexual abuse; I don’t have any such thing. All I have are the specific dynamics of shame, control, and desire that existed in my particular family, and a hazy sense of the lines that connect those dynamics to the person I have become.

But I know that that sense of urgency persists and is no longer able to be disentangled from my sexual and gender identities. As I told FG recently during a very difficult conversation: “I would rather never have another orgasm with a woman again than be somehow made not whole or violated or controlled by that experience.”

I’ve been writing this post, in my head and on paper, for days now and I’m still not pleased with it. Because being stone isn’t all about suffering or trauma and I think this post might still suggest that it is.

What I really want to say is two separate things. First of all, we bear the weight of our individual histories of shame and lack of autonomy. Sexual freedom and autonomy are radically limited by where we come from. And second, the sexual autonomy of the stone butch is a minority thing, a rare experience of embodiment and boundary-setting; but it’s real and sometimes painful and sometimes ecstatic and I want to share that with you all who have been with me on this journey.

Love Letter to the Other Butches

2009-01-20T19:29:00.000-08:00

There's never only one beginning to a story. But if there were, I would have to say that the story of this blog (or, of my journey into gender acceptance) began with a butch. The Catalyst, I called her at the time, the one who shattered the glass bubble of my isolation. I met her on a Friday night and bought my first men's dress shirt on Saturday morning. She was the first person to call me a butch, too, decisively stating that it was obvious in how I moved, how I held myself, my very energy. I think she might have saved my life.

Since then I've had the good fortune of meeting and getting to know other butches as well and every time it's like a little miracle to me. The sense of quiet in my head, the knowledge that I'm not alone and that someone in the room has my back in a way no one else can. And the way we can play, goof around, show off--somehow snowball fights are instantly inevitable--just be the boys we are--in the most relaxing way possible. (Nothing to prove, no one wondering why that girl is tagging along and trying to keep up.)

And then there's the understanding and the shared experience. Here's a little anecdote about that. My brother didn't want me to be 'out' at his wedding. He invited FG (this being just a few months after our own ceremony, which he attended) but he didn't want to have to explain to his new wife's (foreign, non-English-speaking) family that we were a couple, that we were married. "They wouldn't have understood," he told me later. "If I had told them you were married, they'd have thought you were a male transvestite." Well, I thought, but a particularly unambitious one. (I wore female clothes to his wedding but strictly shirt and pants still.) Anyway I've told this story to two different butch friends. And both reacted almost the same way. One winced, as though I'd thrown cold water in her face, and nodded slowly, swallowing as though she could taste my pain bitter in her own mouth. And the other winced, too, and brought her hand instinctively to her chest: "That stings."

We know the geography of one another's pain. We have the same dark maps etched in our own souls.

My buddy Jess wrote a brave post today asking for help in getting top surgery; click over and check it out. Asking for help is so much harder, in my experience, than simply drowning in pride. I admire Jess enormously and this post reinforces that. And reconciling our transmasculine, genderqueer souls with our bodies (and all the social expectations our bodies incur) is no simple matter, I know that too well from personal experience. The saving grace is that we are here for one another.

A Name I Call Myself

2009-01-10T11:15:00.000-08:00

Back in September I wrote about my frustration with my name. I compared my first name to a gray wool skirt: unambiguously female though not over-the-top feminine, plain and perhaps lovely in its own way but just not me. As a kid I remember saying I hated my name--I wanted to change it to Jacqueline and be nicknamed Jackie at one point, I recall. And throughout my adult life I've had this delayed-reaction response to hearing my name; it just doesn't sound like me, to my own ears. I'm like, who? Who is that girl? Oh, right, me. Sort of.

Anyway, when I wrote that post, I was very very tentatively trying out a nickname that a new friend had suggested for me. (For some reason it's very important to me that the nickname was suggested by someone else. And this is a particularly insightful, gentle individual too, which makes it that much more meaningful.) Over the course of the fall I tried it out more and more--giving it as my name at coffee shops, and then when meeting new acquaintances. I knew I'd reaching a turning point when someone started to introduce using my old name and I interrupted them, thinking, "Don't you fucking dare."

FG made the switch around then. (Like I said, she almost never called me by my old name, anyway.) Over the past month I've started introducing old friends to the new nickname. It's like a mini-coming-out all over again. I tell them I've acquired a nickname, that I really like it and that the old name never quite fit, and that I'd be very pleased if they'd use it, too.

At first I thought the nickname would be for friends, and the old name for family & professional contacts. But it was quickly apparent that those lines are blurry in reality. Plus, my old name started to seem increasingly alien and even annoying when I'd hear it from random people.

When I registered for the conference a couple of weeks ago, the form gave an option for distinguishing between "First Name" and "First Name on Badge". Um. Looks like a sign or something. I bit the bullet and contacted my academic advisor, who officially should win some kind of award for awesomeness. Ze wrote back immediately, using my nickname, offering total support and understanding--and then called to talk it over as well. I mean, damn. And the whole conference, whenever we talked or ze introduced me to people, ze used the nickname, as did another main mentor who was also there. It touched me so much I actually wanted to cry. (I'm using "ze" to protect hir anonymity a bit, ze is in no way queer or genderqueer.)

The nickname feels right, now. It feels like an appropriate name, something people can call me and I can respond. For the first time I wore a name tag and didn't wince when I saw it, wasn't desperate to get it off my body at the end of the day. In fact it's on my desk at home now, where I can see it. When I introduce myself, I feel like I'm actually introducing myself, not some imaginary feminine version of myself. I feel like I'm shedding the albatross of that version, slowly, slowly, and the name is a major part of that.

I haven't told any of my family yet except for my dad, who sort of stared at me and then proposed an entirely different nickname that he could call me. Whatever, that's fine, too. He's a little odd with names and calls FG by a unique nickname, too, so I think that's OK. I think my mom and grandparents are a special case; my mom chose the old name, for starters. I don't necessarily expect them to use the new nickname, but just to understand that it is my nickname, so that FG can use it in front of them, for instance. I'm planning to talk it over with my mom when she and I have dinner later this month. I think I can do it in a way she'll understand. My brothers might be more of a stumbling block, particularly the one I have more issues with (have I written about that here?). My nickname relates to our shared last name so there could be some patriarchal issues there--like who am I, youngest and female, to lay so thorough a claim to that name.

Most friends have been very cool with it, as has most of FG's family. A few friends have actually seemed touched that I'm sharing this new part of myself with them, and pleased with the invitation to use the nickname, which is sort of cool. I'm not worried about people slipping up--I mean, of course they will. One very old friend (like I've known him a long time) seemed disoriented, joked a bit, and now is avoiding using any name, as far as I can tell... but hey, we've been friends for over twenty years, we'll sort it out.

But there have been a few hiccups. Of course there have been. ::segue into rant section of post:: FG's mom was, apparently, pretty dismissive--"I don't have to call her that, do I?" "It's just--it would be like someone nicknaming you Biff!" Like, how does that analogy work? Because nicknaming FG 'Biff' would be ridiculous? De-femininizing? What exactly?

More troubling is another friend. I told him about it relatively early on, when I was still unsure about the friend/professional divide, and he wrote an email using it, but adding "I'm not sure I like this". OK, whatever. But then we were at the conference together, where it was on my nametag, and I introduced myself using the nickname in front of him. When I signed an email to him recently using my nickname, he responded: "for the time being, i think i'll stick to [old name]. don't know about this [nickname] thing, yet..."

I gotta say, it made me mad. I admit I left him an out in my initial email. I don't want to overreact, but I also want to let him know that it actually matters to me. It's not simply a question of how he feels about it, or what he thinks of the two names' merits. It's about his respect for my decision and my right to make it. I remember he was surprised when a fellow colleague changed her name upon marriage, but I doubt he insists on the 'right' to use her maiden name. More than that, it really calls into question our friendship. I've tried to share with him some of the changes I've gone through in the last year, and mostly, it's been quite unsuccessful, and I've been surprised at his conservatism, actually.

More generally, I'm angry at his response and FG's mom's response because they remind me how much of my time and energy I've wasted trying not to make people uncomfortable, trying to embody the fake feminine version of me that is named [oldname] just to please them or placate them, hiding my real self behind a fortress to prevent their rejection or ridicule getting near me. This post is too long as it is but this is a major, major issue for me and one that, nowadays, makes me just incandescently furious. I don't need, I guess, to explode that all over my recalcitrant friend, but any hints on how to react, besides "Well, fuck you, too," would be greatly appreciated.

A Whole Week

2009-01-07T19:13:00.001-08:00

... into the new year, and no new post from me. And it's not that I haven't been up to things. Here's a random bullets update of all the excitement 2009 has offered up so far.

I got sick. I can't really complain, it's been like over a year since I was sick. But I felt plenty bad for myself, what with all the sneezing and coughing and general grossness. I hate being sick.
Being sick meant that I completely flaked out on the New Year's Eve party we were going to attend. It was really cold and snowy here that night and I just wasn't up to the walk to the subway and all of it. I didn't get my midnight kiss because I was asleep. But before we fell asleep, there was a whole lot more than kissing. There's something to be said for staying in (bed) on New Year's Eve.
I attended a professional conference and it went well. I'm feeling better about my profession than I have for a long while, recession be damned. There are queer and genderqueer people in my profession, I just have to put a little more effort into meeting them and connecting with them.
Not one but two of my professional mentors told me to be gentle with myself. Ok, universe, I get the message.
I hung out with Greg and her gf and some other cool folks, and we got to see Sinclair read. It was a brilliant show and a relaxing and fun evening out, marred only by my Cough that Wouldn't Quit. (Sorry, audience at Sinclair's show. The cough drops weren't working any more.) Let me tell you--Greg and her gf are fantastic, even better looking than in the pictures, and it's totally true, they rock like crazy on the karaoke.
I thought a lot about my gender identity (big surprise, I'm sure) after a friend suggested strongly I make use of some of the support networks etc. available for trans or gender-deviant folks in our city. She's right of course but hearing her say it was oddly touching and also disorienting. Maybe the cold medicine was making me more emotional than usual.
I had lots of fun wasting time with the still-on-vacation Freedomgirl. She even baked cookies today. Yesterday we did errands in the morning and in the afternoon we bonded, in the infamous words of Jess. It was a long, tough fall semester and it's awesome to be feeling so relaxed and reconnected with her. Oh yeah, and a major shoutout to her for getting us organized for my conference and our trip to New York. I'm not the greatest on planning this sort of thing, and she really stepped up to the good-partner plate. Thanks, my love.

Quick New Year's Question

2008-12-29T18:32:00.000-08:00

What is this thing about the person you kiss on New Year's, or the first kiss of the new year, or whatever? I've never heard of this before the last several months. My family always held hands and sang Auld Lang Syne. By always, I mean the years where we were with my extended family, which includes a great-aunt who insists on that. Otherwise we were usually asleep. Last year FG and I were on an airplane at midnight on New Year's Eve. We didn't kiss. We weren't kissing much anyway, in those days. Anyway: is this a newly invented tradition? Or have I been living under a rock, and you all have been kissing away every year since forever?

Old Resolutions

2008-12-28T19:45:00.000-08:00

It's obviously been too long since I blogged. My browser didn't even suggest my URL when I typed butch... though good old Kyle popped right up, of course.

2008 is almost over. It's been a big year for me. January never seems like the right time to start a new year, spring would be more like it, and in fact spring was when my new year started in 2008. But with all this New Year's Resolutions talk in the air, I remembered a post I wrote back in April about what I intended for myself and my life once we got back to Boston. So this post is a sort of accounting about a kind of homecoming, because I want to see how I've done. (The stuff in italics is from the old post.)

Friends around whom I can be myself, no playacting, no tailoring my gender to fit what I think they will find acceptable. I want to be able to as boyish, as butch, as gentle and provocative and gallant as I feel. (Extant candidates: just a few. Interestingly, nearly all are fellow grad students.)
Check. Big giant fucking check on this, yes indeed. And it's even more awesome than I'd imagined, and so fundamental that I can hardly remember what life must have been like without any of that. But none of them are fellow grad students.

A safe place to live. Safe landlords, safe building, safe street. I don’t want to waste my time worrying about roaches or fire escapes or drugdealers.
Yes, I think it's fine, perfectly reasonably safe.

Access to activities nearby, ideally by foot or subway. Readings, shows, cafes, bars.
Well, not quite. Some stuff I walk to. I drive a whole lot more than I used to do, but a lot of that is carpooling, so that's fine, and I'm enjoying the driving, too. And you know, being a designated driver is actually helpful in keeping me from drinking more than I should. The subway is a lot more stressful now that I get stared at a whole lot more. Overall, this one didn't turn out the way I'd imagined, but it doesn't make any real difference.

Enough money budgeted to look good and do things. (This has been a major issue for me—having enough money in fact, but feeling compelled to be frugal and save it while hating my clothes and my life.)
Um, yeah, I'm not having any issues with compulsive frugality any more. ::moving on::

A hairdresser I trust. (Major trauma around this one. I’ve actually been told I have too much hair.)
Yeah, I love her, in fact. She's a little pricey (for me, 'cause I'm cheap, not 'cause she's fancy) and I've been flirting with trying a barbershop. But she's also family and it's so, so relaxing to go there. (Next time: Wednesday, thank god! Getting stupidly shaggy at the moment.)

To be a part of organizations, to do something productive, to have interests that pull me outside of myself and my home. (Extant candidates: two different book clubs, one with a queer focus, the other with a professional focus. Need something besides book clubs. Politics? I really want to start acting on my convictions and working for a change. How do to that? Also, something outdoors related? Walking/hiking?)
Check on this, too, though I'm doing a lot more partying and dancing than I would have thought, and a lot less of being the outdoorsy activist type. I guess that wasn't me after all, or at least, that's not me right now.

To have regular, loving, hot sex.
Oh yeah, baby. Like six hours ago. Thanks again for my Christmas present, sexy woman.

To do yoga, eat decently, sleep decently.
Hm, yoga has been a bit intermittent, but I'm doing a bunch of other related exercise things. Eating and sleeping are fine... well, there was a certain lack of sleep this week, but it was a well thought out violation.

To be able to say no to family interactions/gatherings when I need to, and to be myself there when I say yes.
Ok, the first stumbling block. I'm getting there on saying no. Honestly I had no idea what a major issue that was for me, the sense that I just couldn't refuse my mother anything she asked for. But that's getting sorted out. Being myself with my family? It's been a struggle, with some progress. The progress is internal, though--I don't do the destructive femming-out stuff that I used to do constantly, and so I'm not so devastated inside. But that hasn't always gone over well with family members, which has caused its own kinds of stress. I said to FG this morning that I think my family might slowly be realizing what a stranger a I really am , and on some level always have been, to them.

To be busy, to get tired, to have to hurry to accomplish something because my life is so full, rather than doing every damn little thing with the perfectionism that comes from sheer boredom and loneliness.
Oh, this makes me laugh. Busy? Tired? Yes. I think I'm running at N + 2 at least, where N = the number of things I can plausibly handle in my life. And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way, not any more.

To have a lesbian context in which to exist, to stretch myself and test myself and be myself.
Interesting to read this... I feel I've found a queer context, not necessarily a lesbian one. And increasingly I think of myself more as queer than as lesbian, per se. Something for a longer, more thoughtful post, perhaps.

To be able to buy sex toys without fear.
My only fear now is for my credit card. Shopping online is fine, and I've stopped in one of our local (good) sex toy shops and browsed though I haven't yet bought anything there. But I'm sure I will, one of these days.

To have –no, to make time for genuinely creative endeavors apart from The Career. Personal/creative writing. Maybe picking up the guitar again. Maybe a creative writing group?
Yes, though all my personal writing has been here and there's been no guitar-playing at all. But the writing I do here is very important to me. And there's the dancing, which has become a significant part of my life. I would like to do something with making things with my hands but that's a long way off for now. There was also our little porch garden over the summer, too, which has turned into an even littler window garden now.

A space dedicated to my professional work—at home or not—so that I can focus on it there and leave it there.
I have the space, more or less. Just a corner of a room but it does stay there. I'm stressed about work at the moment but this too shall pass...

To be able to seek help as/when I need it—counseling, body work, whatever. Not to have to be the Lone-fucking-Ranger all the time who doesn’t need any help. (A big issue for me.)
Well, I hate to end on a down note, but that's still an issue, actually. It's still hard for me to admit weakness or to ask for the help I might really need. That's something I struggle with and I have not found an easy fix for it. We went to a marriage counselor a number of times over the summer and early fall and it was ok... helpful in some ways, kind of useless in others. (The counselor's take on gender identity issues was to ask me if I wanted to transition, and when I said I didn't think so, to figure the matter was completely resolved, to the point of referring to me as a "lady" at one point... just to take one representative gripe.) Anyway we got to the point where the useless outweighed the useful and stopped going but there are still issues out there for me that need addressing.

One of which is that, if I'm going to claim the "decent sleep" thing, I'd better finish this post and go to bed. It may not be too interesting to read, but I'm pleased to discover that I've achieved or made progress on most of my intentions. And in spite of all the difficulties, in spite of everything that's not so great or easy, I wouldn't trade the life I have now for what I had a year ago, not for anything. I love being alive now, even when I'm tired and stressed and up too late.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, warmest wishes to all of you and yours.

Christmas Meme

2008-12-18T13:44:00.001-08:00

I've been casting around for something to lighten the season-affective depression mood here. And what better than a Christmas meme? Stolen from Jess.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
I like wrapping paper better. And I'm cheap that way, too. But I love how easy gift bags are...

2. Real tree or artificial?
Always real, although I don't have anything against fake ones. I think it would be cool to get a live tree and plant it one day, but that's not feasible for now, given our lack of outdoor space. Our first tree together was so scrawny the lady gave us a discount. It was more like a branch, stuck into a little pine disc with a hole in the middle. Then there was the year we carried a medium-small tree two miles through the city back to our apartment. I'll never forget the look of wonder on one little boy's face as we passed. Did he think we were Santa's elves? Or the Grinch's henchmen?

3. When do you put up the tree?
My family had a rule about not putting the tree up until Christmas Eve. We'd buy it a week before and leave it outside. Then, my mom would spend all day Christmas Eve cleaning. In the mid-afternoon my dad would put the tree up, and then either he and I or my brother and I would string the lights around it. (By this time my parents had usually had their annual Christmas Eve fight.) And then, torture of tortures, we had to sit and have dinner before actually decorating the tree. But it was pretty magical to look at the freshly decorated tree for the first time, before going to bed to await Christmas morning.

FG and I are not so strict, though it's usually not more than a few days ahead of Christmas. One year we didn't have time to even buy the tree until Christmas Eve. That was some scrambling--we thought we might not find one, actually. This year, I don't know... no tree yet, but I expect one of us will suggest we do it sooner or later.

4. When do you take the tree down?
The family tradition was New Year's Day, and I've basically stuck with that. FG gets pretty stressed about the tree not staying up too long (that's *her* family trauma) so getting the tree down in an expedient, non-stressed way is something I can do for her.

5. Do you like eggnog?
I used to drink it like it was going out of style. Seriously, I'd go through cartons of the stuff. Now it's a bit too sweet for me. But yeah, I agree with Jess: add plenty of booze and it picks up considerably.

6. Favorite gift received as a child?
No idea. I got a lot of presents as a kid and found Christmas a little overwhelming, honestly. I never knew how to seem appropriately grateful, and all of it was stuff I was kind of neutral about anyway (stuffed animals, Barbie dolls).

7. Do you have a nativity scene?
No. We both had creche scenes we were attached to as kids but have never found one that seems right for our household. Maybe someday, maybe not.

8. Hardest person to buy for?
I'm not great at buying presents. Either inspiration hits or it doesn't. I finally learned to stop buying people books I either loved to death or wanted for myself or both. When FG and I were going through bad times, I had a very hard time buying presents for her. She got some stinkers as a result. (How romantic is a $10 Chinese tea pot? I mean, really.)

9. Easiest person to buy for?
FG, generally speaking. The only limitation is money--there's so many things I'd like to get her. But I know she'd like us to stay solvent, too. ;)

Oh yeah, the cats are easy to buy for, too. And yes, they've got their own stockings. How sappy is that? But they're cute.

10. Worst Christmas gift ever received?
My aunt used to send, for Christmas and birthday, little dresses or frilly nightgowns. The really awful part was that she shopped for them based on my cousin's size. Although she's two weeks older, I've always, always been bigger. Luckily my mom didn't make me wear them, but they always made me feel terrible anyway. Knowing she meant well (she lived across the country and didn't really know me at all) helped, though.

11. Mail or E-mail Christmas card?
To receive? Mail. We used to send lots of cards by mail, too, but not so much any more. Yes, you see the theme emerging, we've really become pagan heathens over here.

12. Favorite Christmas movie?
It's A Wonderful Life. I know, I know. I can't help it. I cry every. single. time. Donna Reed completely melts my heart and I identify with George Bailey 100%. Zuzu's petals, the fight with the teacher's husband, oh don't get me started.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
Haha, today! Except I bought FG's major present weeks ago, and gave it to her then, too.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
Of course, lots of times. What am I supposed to do with all those terrible candles from random people? That's what they did too, right? There's just a few of those candles making endless circuits through Secret Santas and Yankee Swaps, I'm convinced.

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas?
We have a little tradition of making something new each year for our Christmas celebration. So I'm going to say, whatever FG comes up with for the new thing each year. Now, there's one exception to that, when she made something so awful that words cannot do it justice. FG, this is your story, my dear. And may I suggest you beg her to post the pictures, too? Oh my god, the pictures.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree?
I love them all: big and darkly colored, little and brightly colored, clear, pink. For my own tree, my only preference is not to have them blink.

17. Favorite Christmas song?
Jehovah (this isn't super common but I like it--it's about the birth story, and all the logistical problems of finding a place to stay, and the refrain is Jehovah, Hallelujah, the Lord will provide. I'm not really religious at all but I find that a very comforting song & notion.)
I also like Bruce Springsteen's version of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, and I've always loved Silent Night.

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home?
Stay home. My favorite Christmases are the ones FG and I have spent together, enjoying the peace of the day, making a special supper, playing with whatever new toys we've gotten each other...

19. Can you name Santa’s reindeer?
No, Santa did that already. It would be rude to give them new names at this point.

20. Do you have an angel on top of the tree or a star?
A funny blue blown glass ornament that I call a star but it isn't, exactly. But it belonged to my grandparents and they gave it to us for our own household and it means a lot to me as a result.

21. Open presents Christmas Eve or Christmas morning?
Usually Christmas morning. Sometimes one the night before. Two years ago, we opened them all the night before. Good thing, because FG was coming down with the chicken pox and was too sick to do anything by Christmas day.

22. Most annoying thing about this time of year?
How stressed people get and how much negative family energy gets generated. There are such high expectations to achieve in such a short time that there's always disappointment. I'd rather have it be a time of quiet, winter-solstice reflection, without all the booze and presents and enforced togetherness that isn't always desired or appropriate.

"You Can't Take The Weight of a Single Ounce of Shame"

2008-12-14T12:40:00.000-08:00

If it's gotten boring over here, blame my dissertation. I'm trying to finish it this year and folks, it's getting me down. I don't want to write too much about my professional stuff here but let's just say poor Freedom Girl is probably sick to death of hearing me rant about whether I'll ever finish and why I can't write short drafts and how miserable I am. And also how working in a room that hovers around 60 degrees Fahrenheit most of the time is not impossible, but is not massively pleasant, either. End of rant. Follow me on Twitter if you want this self-pity in real time.

Jess wrote recently about making a plan to live and eat more healthily. It's an admirable goal. For me, the thing I need to make a goal for is not so much how I eat (it's ok, I'm not worried about it, and FG makes sure I don't run off the rails too much and survive on cheese, granola bars, and coffee alone). It's more about mental health.

::crickets::

That's not easy to write about... but here it goes... as I've mentioned before, I have a problematic relationship with my family. My dad and I didn't even talk for over three years, and though things are ok there now, well, there's some leftover baggage, how could there not be? And more pressingly, my relationship with my mom is just so damn fraught. I sometimes wonder if I should migrate to Wordpress and do a whole series of ranting passworded posts about her which no one would actually have to read, of course, but which might do me some good. Is that a big hassle for everyone, the Wordpress migration? Or is there any way yet to password protect a Blogger post?

I blogress. So there are issues. And mostly I muddle through, putting FG through lengthy sessions of venting and decompressing after family visits or phone calls, but mostly getting on with life. Other times, though, I have to be honest: I fucking fall apart. The scary thing for me is that I don't know know what will set me off, or when.

As Tina would say, TMI ahead.

The other night, FG and I were messing around. And in the course of this messing around, which was getting serious but had not yet progressed to getting nekkid, she grabbed my boxer shorts, a handful on either side, and pulled me down towards her, and I freaked out. I felt myself grow cold and a wave of feeling tiny, small, helpless, and saturated with shame overcame me. Gently, I disengaged from her, and tried to explain what was wrong. Of course she felt terrible, though it was not her fault at all, really. I really couldn't move past feeling upset. She tried to comfort me and I couldn't let her even touch me. Eventually I explained enough and she went to sleep, as did I eventually; the only way I could get comfortable was curled up tight, one arm in my stomach and the other over my neck. For context... ass-grabbing is a perfectly normal & acceptable part of our repertoire. But something about pulling my shorts instead triggered something in my head. I don't know exactly what it was, though. I'm pretty stone, and that's fine with me, but this was something more, this was not a sane boundary but a minefield of distress that I've barely even acknowledged.

In the course of talking about this incident the next night, and all the feelings about my childhood and myself that it brought up, FG said two things that struck me and that have led me to write this post. One was that I really, really need to talk this stuff over with a therapist. So, I thought, if Jess can post her physical health goals, maybe I should post my mental health goals, too. I'm reluctant and it's logistically a bit challenging (see re: dissertation, above) but in the new year, I aim to start to address these problems in a systematic way, with hopefully effective professional help.

The second thing she said was that she can't be my entire support system; and in the context of that, she said how I go through life and everything seems ok, and, "I'm the only one who knows something is wrong." That's a powerful point. I think somewhere in my head I believe that if only she sees me fall apart, it means I've got it under control. Which of course is nonsense. So to lighten her burden, if only symbolically, and in a gesture of combating shame, I'm saying to all of you--I go through life, and mostly it's fine, but something is wrong, and I know I need to deal with it, and I'm working on it.

Post title: Melissa Etheridge, "Heroes & Friends"

Monogamy, Part II

2008-12-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

Hey, thanks for all those thoughtful comments on my last post. I'm not sure posting it was as courageous as you give me credit for--it's nothing that FG and I haven't already talked about, at length, in one form or another, for one thing. But I'm not sure my balls have ever gotten that much praise all at once, so thank you on their behalf, too.

One point I want to clarify is that I absolutely don't think monogamy is correlated with boredom. We've had boring times and toe-curling, hair-standing-on-end, scream-so-the-neighbors-across-the-street-can-hear exciting times and everything in between, through a decade and a half of monogamy. And my current thinking is not fuelled by a sense of boredom. I don't write about sex too much here but... boredom, not an issue in these parts at the moment. (FG's cough & ear infection? The two wisdom teeth I had extracted on Wednesday? Those are the obstacles to fun & games here.)

LL Cool Joe and others pointed out that there are other ways of defining faithfulness and intimacy as well, and maybe that's really the larger point I'm trying to get to: connection and intimacy (not necessarily sexual) with people outside of our singular relationship, which will hopefully strengthen us, singly & together, rather than tearing us apart.

This is a huge deal to me, perhaps more than to a lot of people. (Including, I suspect, the ever-patient FG herself.) To say that my childhood was characterized by solitude would be a serious understatement. I went to school, I had friends, but I spent unusually large swaths of time strictly alone and at home. And I also spent a lot of time being my mom's main companion. So this business of connecting to other people, and especially of finding for myself, in a variety of friendships, the emotional sustenance and support I need... well, it is a big freaking deal, and I'm all over the map about it.

I'm feeling a little radical, too, perhaps in a long-overdue reaction to my convent-like upbringing, and not wanting to place any limitations on us from the start--friendship is ok but crushes are not, flirting is ok but touching is not, this part of you is yours to share but that other part is mine alone. I'm feeling tired of relationships as possession, and perhaps it's not really about monogamy at all, but about shaking off some very, very old chains.

Monogamy

2008-12-02T12:58:00.000-08:00

It's been on my mind lately. FG and I have been together nearly fifteen years. As readers of the last post will have gathered, we got together in high school. We've had plenty of problems over the years but we've both been strictly faithful the whole time. (Or, to be realistic, I have been, and if she hasn't I don't know about it. But honestly? I think we've both been faithful.)

Some of that time was characterized by hot sex and mad jealousy; I was insanely jealous over a series of straight guys, always convinced that eventually she was going to 'come to her senses' and 'get a real man'. (I mentioned the self-hatred and internalized homophobia sometime, right? Sigh.) And then after our marriage we sank into a long stretch of what doesn't qualify as lesbian bed death but was surely lesbian bed terminal illness. I was the one saying things like, "No, we have sex! I remember, we had it ... wait... was it last Saturday or the one before? But it was nice, right? Wasn't it?" I was so out of touch with myself that it was literally a nightmare to have to be naked and intimate; not because she wasn't sexy and hot (believe me, she always has been) but because I was so ashamed of myself and in such denial about how my sexuality and gender worked.

Part of what has been revolutionary about this year for me has been a full-on sexual reawakening. And part of the reawakening has been a new awareness of sexual attraction towards other women, and from them, too. This is true for FG, too, she tells me (though her experience of our lbti was much different from mine).

This brings up lots of difficult issues. Sometimes I think, I'm going to die and I'll only have slept with one person, and it drives me batty. And I think, I've locked up her and my own sexuality for so long--I thought on such a deep level that marriage was about deluding some pitying woman to chain her life to yours at your one moment of attractiveness--isn't it time to break out a little bit? What if we negotiated some freedom? Would that even work? Could I withstand the jealousy of her being intimate with anyone else? (Yeah, there's a double standard at work here in my head; I'm not defending it but there's no sense in lying about it either.) Would that be fair to the potential other people involved? How does any of this work in real life, outside of permanent committed polyamory situations (which is not what I'm talking about or looking for)?

As you can deduce from the previous paragraph being written all in question form, I don't have any answers about any of this. One thing I know is that the only prospect that seems just chokingly, unbearably sad is that of not having her in my life and by my side.

And the other thing I know is that I don't want to repeat the layers of jealousy, controlling, and hypocrisy that was modeled for me in my parents' marriage(s). I don't think it all comes down to sex, either; I remember my dad would be in trouble even for seeming to notice a pretty woman on the television. I don't know if FG and I ever will try sex with other people, at least as long as we're together; but I do know that I'm relieved to be done being the jailer of her sexuality, her ability to flirt and dance and feel alive outside the tight orbit of our relationship. More and more that ability seems to me to be a fundamental human right, something no one has the right to steal from another.

Damn Fine

2008-11-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

In response to my last post, the lovely greg asked, "Do you remember the first moment that you realized you were in love with FG?"

Well! As it so happens, I do. But like any perfect moment, it requires some background.

FG and I grew up in a small, insular town where you basically knew everyone who was your age, +/- one grade. So we knew each other but we didn't start really hanging out until the summer I turned fourteen, which was also the summer before we started attending the same school. I was entering high school, she was starting at that school as a sophomore. Even that summer I was becoming infatuated... there were those endless, unspeakably fascinating conversations of early love, both of us on my kitchen floor, or over the phone while I walked barefoot on the kitchen counters or leaned out the bathroom window.

On the first day of school I remember thinking about her all day--it was a special orientation day for freshmen and new students, so she was there, and I kept imagining where in the building she was or what she might be doing. It didn't take long for us to start finding reasons to run into each other between every class, sit together at lunch, the whole nine yards. Occasionally I wondered what I was doing but honestly the drive just to be in her presence was so strong I didn't think about much else.

(Of course I wasn't thinking about whether this was a crush. I was a girl, and girls didn't have crushes on girls. Full stop, end of conversation. In fact, don't even start that conversation. That's how it went in my head.)

Towards the middle of September, or maybe earlier, I don't remember the exact date, there was some sort of assembly that was, again, just for freshmen and new students. On the way back I walked with FG and another new sophomore, who made a sardonic remark about having to spend so much time with the "damn freshmen."

FG half-glanced at me and replied, "Well, I've been spending time with a freshman. And a damn fine one, too!"

And that was it. Bang, hey presto, it's all over: I was in love. I still remember the hallway being soaked with honey-colored sunshine, feeling invincible and like my knees were about to give way, a new painful joy that started in my heart and throbbed out past my fingertips and toes.

I don't know if I said anything in more or just wandered off to my library orientation, grinning stupidly. But I remember smiling all the way through the presentation on call numbers and card catalogues, and thinking: "I'm in love. I don't care what this means. I don't care. I'm in love, and I'm never going to forget this happiness."

And I haven't.

Reflections, Miscellaneous

2008-11-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

It's gotten a bit quiet in here.

I went to the protest in Boston over Prop. 8 etc. on Saturday. It was my first public protest and while I didn't find it transformative in the moment, I find that my feelings on politics, particularly queers politics and the politics of queers and the politics you can't avoid just because you are queer, have undergone quite a shift over the past several weeks. I was raised not to give offense, ever, to anyone, and so it's something new to stand around with 5,000 of my closest friends outside Government Center shouting about my civil rights, that's for sure. But even more new for me is the talking out and talking back, not letting a conversation peter out when I feel uncomfortable but pressing on and making the best case I can for challenging the passage of Prop. 8 in the courts or whatever it is.

All this politics, and it's all so important, and tomorrow's Trans Day of Remembrance, too. I'm not able to take part in anything formal but I'll be thinking about all those who have suffered and died for being transgender. (Well, does anyone transgender not suffer, in this society? But that's another topic entirely.) I really hope all this galvanizing over Prop. 8 ends up being inclusive and expansive. We need an end to violence and we need civil rights; we need equal protection, full stop.

And in the midst of all this, real life flows on, too, of course. I distract FG from her homework and drag her off to the bedroom (oh yes I do). And I make up for all that (not so) wasted time by making a couple of big pans of lasagna, which fed us for most of the first half of this week. I gave a presentation and it went well and I feel better about my work than I have in a long time. And I keep on learning to dance and building new friendships and rehabilitating old ones and crushing and sending cyberhugs to Jess & Tina and wishing they were real ones.

And between all those shifts in political consciousness and the press of daily life, there's still the ongoing drama of my life, the sorting out of my past and my relationship with FG and my gender, oh, always gender with me. But who really wants to hear, right now, about my complicated reaction to the middle-aged couple who, when I passed them on the sidewalk, hissed to each other "that's different" and "uh, yeah"? I'm not sure I'm even interested enough to write about it.

But I miss you all and so here is this miscellania of my consciousness, offered up from a dear friend's guest room where I am spending the night. Is there anything you want to know that I might write about? What should we write about now? Is it really the dawn of a new era, or am I just sleepy and typing nonsense with chilly fingers?

Daily Life chez MacCool: A Photo Meme

2008-11-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

The posting of this meme proves several things:

1. I am nearly incapable of saying no to a good-looking woman. You want more memes, Renee? You got it, baby.

2. I cannot stop stealing things from MLC, even if we would make a queer couple. (Yeah, we would. But the dogs would like us.)

3. My cats are unusually fine.

4. Blogging is my main form of procastination this week, yet...

5. I am not finding the energy to write about all the weighty, and even relevant, topics banging around in my head. Maybe one of these days.

But in the meantime, I present you with my very first PHOTO MEME!

The rules:
Get up and take the following pictures:

- your bed as soon as everyone is out of it and before you make it
- the contents of your medicine cabinet
- the contents of your refrigerator
- favorite place in your home

don’t arrange things
just take the picture
post pix without editing

It doesn't say to tag anyone, but just for good measure, I'm tagging Jess.

OK, first the bed.

Damn I love those cats. And the Red Sox.

And now the medicine cabinet.

God, that's a bit bleak, isn't it? Bathroom items belonging to the femme half of this household stored elsewhere, it should go without saying...

Refrigerator (oh, I bet the excitement is killing you).

It doesn't look great, but the brownies hidden by the foil on the bottom shelf were made by FG and totally rock.

And finally, my favorite place, which at the moment is my cozy desk area.
And there you have it.

Random Meme for a New Start

2008-11-10T07:33:00.001-08:00

Stolen from a blogger I'm steadily falling in love with, Mid-Life Clarity. My last post was so depressing, I want something different to start this new week off.

What color are your socks right now? Black. Long black woolly socks because it's cold in here and I am planning on wearing boots later.

What are you listening to right now? Nothing. But the last thing I listened to was "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba. Remember them? Major flashback to 1997.

What was the last thing that you ate? Cold leftover pizza. Breakfast of champions.

Can you drive a stick shift? Daily.

Last person you spoke to on the phone? FreedomGirl

How old are you today? 29. I swear it's true.

What is your favorite sport to watch on TV? Pro football. I know, I know, there's no defense for it, but I find it completely absorbing. I swear I feel it when the QB gets sacked. I would love to be the NFL's first female lefty QB. Don't hold your breath.

What is your favorite drink? At the moment? Sam Adams.

Have you ever dyed your hair? Nope. But I've found a gray hair or two so this may be in my future. I'd go for something totally different though, bleached or black or something.

Favorite food? Cheese. Of almost any kind.

What is the last movie you watched? Itty Bitty Titty Committee.

Favorite day of the year? Like MLC, I can't answer this one. The best days sneak up on you with their joy & wonder.

How do you vent anger? Oh, the usual ways... I throw stuff and say unkind things in a loud voice. Vent constructively? Singing too loud in the car, I guess.

What was your favorite toy as a child? I don't remember. I liked digging though, trenches and holes and whatnot. I liked mucking around generally, so I guess I'll say mud.

What is your favorite season? Spring.

Cherries or blueberries? I hope I never have to choose.

Living arrangements? Been living with FG basically since I moved out of my mom's house, over a decade ago now.

When was the last time you cried? Saturday night. A long hard conversation on all the pain we've caused each other and a lot of bottled up anger, growing up gendered wrong, loss & grief & the usual suspects.

What is on the floor of your closet? Some shoes, some bins of stuff, some cat hair.

What did you do last night? Made a mix CD, went for a long drive & walk in the dark with FG.

What are you most afraid of? Wasting my life through fear.

Plain, cheese, or spicy cheese hamburger? Cheeseburger (well, cheese soyaburger these days).

Favorite dog breed? I love them all, especially the big proper doggie ones. Mixes are great. My great canine love (so far) was a golden retriever. I dream of a german shepherd in my future. Border collies are awesome but not likely for me as I don't have a herd of sheep handy.

Favorite day of the week? Friday. So much potential.

How many states have you lived in? Four.

Diamonds or ruby? Erm, rubies I guess? I really don't care about gemstones.

What is your favorite flower? How can you dislike a flower? Daisies make me especially happy, as do sunflowers.

The Limits of Tolerance

2008-11-09T08:18:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to think of what to say next since the election. I haven't figured it out yet but I'm posting today anyway because I just can't leave that picture at the top of the page forever.

I'm deeply happy about the presidential election. I remember the sense of joy and possibility of the first months of the Clinton administration (I'm not really that old, I was just a political nerd as an adolescent) and I think that, coming after the Bush administration, 2009 is going to be some kind of something for us as a political nation. I'm looking forward to it.

And, of course, I'm incredibly disappointed that the gay civil rights movement was handed a series of eviscerating defeats. To lose on marriage in California, Arizona, and Florida, and even more hurtfully on fostering & adoption in Arkansas, during a year of progressive change and hope is demoralizing. There's been a wealth of thoughtful writing about this in our beautiful little corner of the blogosphere. Honey captured my feelings particularly eloquently: "I am left with a feeling more of being impressed than proud, fascinated than inspired, an outsider to the excitement shared by so many of the people around me."

I'm not surprised by this feeling in myself; it's as familiar as rain. The world of people who might vote for Obama and against us does not strike me as foreign; it's the limits of liberal tolerance, the sense that gay rights are granted by a straight noblesse oblige, and that we can damn well play by their rules and at their pace if we want to be granted anything at all. I was raised to think that gay people, while inherently icky, should be tolerated as human beings--as long as they didn't flaunt themselves. (Straight PDA was also regarded dubiously but only in extreme cases.) Even now only one family member has contacted me after the election out of all that I made the case against Prop. 8 to; and even he said that, after all, gay civil rights might have to wait until we'd figured out 'survival' (the economy, the environment). Linaria said it well in a comment at Sugarbutch: "There are the people who actively oppose gay marriage, and there are the people who believe it’s a “special interest issue,” and those two categories encompass everyone who is not gay in this country..." I would expand her remark beyond the marriage issue, and suggest that it applies to the whole spectrum of legal and social discrimination and violence practiced against LGBT folks. Most people I know think the right thing, on a superficial level at least, but there's only so dirty they want to get their hands. There is a hard limit to their tolerance and we're walking right into it at the moment. No wonder it hurts.

Radclyffe Wilde

2008-11-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

For Tina, since neither of us are ready for the weekend to be over: a not so great shot of my Halloween costume... design credits to Freedom Girl, who looked smoking hot in her own costume(s), but I will leave that to her to tell you more about. (Can I mention that there were fishnets involved? Oops, I just did...)

Basking in post-kd haze of happiness

2008-10-29T17:41:00.000-07:00

I just saw kd lang twice, on Monday & Tuesday. It was so insanely awesome. She was funny and political and passionate and damn, she really is the best singer I have ever heard. Jess came with me to the first show and we were both in awe... getting to see kd up there, completely rocking the butch thing as Jess said, was amazing. The next night we took our beautiful dates with us and it was just as fantastic. I actually got a little teary-eyed during Hallelujah, holding T.'s hand and remembering when we first discovered this song, and thinking about everything that's happened since.

In between shows there was some great hanging out, not to mention a very tasty lasagna dinner. A weekend away with two concerts (and a dead car battery all the fault of yours truly, but let's skip over that part with a brief nod towards T.'s tough-guy femme heroism) should be the sort of thing that leaves you needing a weekend from your weekend. But I gotta say, when kd lang is the entertainment and Jess and Tina are the hosts, that's not the case. I feel relaxed and renewed and so, so glad to be here, at this moment in my life, with these friends and role models and T. still by my side.

Just a Little Post About Marriage

2008-10-23T11:48:00.001-07:00

I'm married. All kinds of married, actually. And I don't write about it a lot, I don't even usually refer to T. as my wife, though I do call her Mrs. MacCool, just between us. Longtime readers (or those with a taste for the archives) might remember that we took off our wedding rings this spring in a gesture of ending a very dysfunctional, unhappy time in our relationship and starting anew. (I don't miss the ring, though I occasionally wake up terrified that I've lost it somewhere, grabbing my finger in confusion until I remember it's safe in my jewelry box, with T.'s rings.)

We first put those wedding rings on during our commitment ceremony, which took place in March 2002. Those moments when we were saying our vows, seemingly alone in the universe, are some of my most precious memories.

There followed a string of legal semi-commitments: a muncipal domestic partnership (or maybe two?), a whole lot of signing forms swearing that we were mutually interdependent and committed so that she could get health insurance through my work, you probably all know the drill.

And then we found ourselves living in Massachusetts once again, and we got legally married on June 12, 2005. We jokingly say that we eloped this time: it was just us and our minister (after a trip to City Hall, of course), on a drenchingly hot, sticky day. Then we went to the beach and watched barnacles open and close under water, and had dinner overlooking the harbor. It was awesome.

I think marriage has some major issues as a social and cultural institution. And I regret a lot about the ways in which I've treated my own marriage, or to put it differently, my relationship with T. in the first six years following our first ceremony. Most of all I regret taking her for granted as much as I did.

But I've never once regretted our legal union. The legal status, recognition, and protection mean an enormous amount. They take all sorts of anxieties off the table (though not all--our Massachusetts marriage is still far from equal in the federal context), and give me a sense of equality that is really something. It's not ultimately about whether I think marriage is a perfect social form or not; it's about, to paraphrase the California Supreme Court, equal protection under the law.

For a while it looked like our marriage was in imminent danger of being undone by a proposal to amend the state constitution. Our amendment process is lengthy and complicated. I thought I'd be voting on an amendment this fall, but as it turned out, our Legislature didn't let it get that far. Still, I remember the sense of threat and insecurity, which even now is never entirely absent; it's only a fraction, though, of what married queer Californians are going through right now.

On the slight chance that you're reading this, and you're a US citizen, and you haven't already done whatever it is you can do to defeat Proposition 8 in California, head on over to one of these web sites.

No on Prop 8
Lesbiandad (see the right-hand column for a full panoply of No on 8 links & info)

And finally, my own humiliating contribution to Looky, Daddy's series on Because Everyone Has the Right to Be Awesome:

Because everyone has the right to get married on the cusp of a massive gender identity crisis, and to wear the resulting bizarre pseudo-glam-rocker outfit, LEGALLY:
(cropped to remove not only my head but also the worst footwear choice of my life. My bride looked much better, I should add.)

Because I Think Some Self-Mockery Is In Order

2008-10-21T06:07:00.000-07:00

First off, thank you so much for your kind comments on my rant on Saturday. They really did make me feel a ton better. (The pizza & beer was good, too, but I want to take each of you who offered a beer up on your offer one of these days.)

And secondly, courtesy of the awesome Musodyke, the results of my personality defect quiz. Let's just say, when T. heard the results, she said, "This thing is more accurate than I would have thought..." But I swear, I don't look like that dude at all.

Your result for The Personality Defect Test...

Haughty Intellectual

You are 57% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 43% Brutal, and 57% Arrogant.

You are the Haughty Intellectual. You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an intellectual, and you would like everyone to know it. Not only that, but you also tend to look down on others, thinking yourself better than them. You could possibly have an unhealthy obsession with yourself as well, thus causing everyone to hate you for being such an elitist twat. On top of all that, you are also introverted and gentle. This means that you are just a quiet thinker who wants fame and recognition, in all likelihood. Like so many countless pseudo-intellectuals swarming around vacuous internet forums to discuss worthless political issues, your kind is a scourge upon humanity, blathering and blathering on and on about all kinds of boring crap. If your personality could be sculpted, the resulting piece would be Rodin's "The Thinker"--although I am absolutely positive that you are not nearly as muscular or naked as that statue. Rather lacking in emotion, introspective, gentle, and arrogant, you are most certainly a Haughty Intellectual! And, most likely, you will never achieve the recognition or fame you so desire! But no worries!

Take The Personality Defect Test at HelloQuizzy

Big Jerk

2008-10-18T15:44:00.000-07:00

That's what the card I bought T. this afternoon says. Inside it says, sorry.

The day started off ok. I cleaned up our container garden for winter and changed the screens to storms in the front door. Then I started hanging curtains and wasting time and everything that's been making me mad recently just kind of bubbled to the surface. The high point was probably me slamming a curtain rod to the floor and making an unnecessarily jerky comment about one of T.'s family members. Nice, huh? So much for chivalry.

Finally I got myself together enough to get out of the house (civilly) and went for a six-mile walk. I kept walking until I'd calmed down and my head had cleared, and then I stopped by a pond, lay down, and let the sun soak into my face.

Lots of things have me on edge right now. I have a lot of work-related pressure, which ordinarily isn't a big problem for me. But at the moment I'm sick to death of my work. It feels like the ultimate good-girl profession, like something I chose in order to please my family and isolate myself from the world. I look at the series of hurdles ahead of me for promotion and career success and I just think, fuck it. I'm so over this treadmill. I was valedictorian of my high school class and honestly? I regret it, in a way. I regret using my being smart as a way out, as a way to be acceptable and to connect with people, as a way to 'deserve' my family's approval. I regret getting caught up in the cycle of rewards and achievement. In high school I also had a manual-labor job and I kind of wish I'd stuck with that, or something like it. Landscaping maybe, I'm good at that. Anyway it makes it hard to muster the energy to do anything work-related, while the deadlines pile up and I wonder, what am I doing?

Then there's family stuff. Not getting into that here for privacy reasons. Just adding it to my list of complaints.

And then there's the sense of loss and wasted time. I look at my new friends and acquaintances and I feel so incredibly happy. But how did I spend nearly thirty years with 'friends' who mostly actually didn't really like me? What was wrong with me? Why is this path, this life, this identity, so hard? (Cue violins, I realize this is a giant pity party, but it's my blog and I'll whine if I want to.) We went to a performance the other night that included the seemingly superficial line, imagine your life without homophobia. But as a friend pointed out, in fact, our lives would be unrecognizable had they been lived in a world without homophobia. Using my analogies from the other day, what would my youth have been like if my family had said, in addition to oh she's lefthanded, oh she has a boy soul? What if we didn't have to worry about random violence and harassment for how we look? What if T.'s colleagues' curiosity really felt only benign, and not like I was on the boundary of their definition of fully human? I think spending time with other butches and genderqueers etc. has really made me feel this stuff so much more strongly, partly because of the contrast with the sheer joy and calm and connection of hanging out with them, and partly because I see what they've been through and go through, and it's something different to see your own anxieties and heartbreaks walking around in front of you, lived by someone else, too.

And I haven't had enough time to work out, either. And I'm hungry. OK, with that, I'm off to pick up some pizza and open a beer. If you've made it through this post, I have the feeling I'm going to owe you a "Big Jerk - Sorry" card, too.

Seven (More) Things About Me

2008-10-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

I am deeply touched by Sublime Femme’s faith that the blogging world can stand reading seven more factoids about me. Rest assured that I have re-read my first such meme to ensure that there will be, in fact, SEVENTEEN unique bits of MacCool trivia available for anyone following along at home. (Anyone? Hello out there?)

OK, here it goes.

First, da rulz:

1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. I started carrying white handkerchiefs (for the purpose of having them to offer to damsels in distress) not only before I identified as butch, but before I was even out of the closet. And I had no idea ANYONE ELSE had ever done such a thing outside of the movies. Imagine my surprise.
2. I broke my nose playing basketball in college. I am really awful at basketball but I was trying to impress a certain pretty girl. Oddly enough I think she was more impressed by the broken nose than my basketball playing. How about that?
3. I got two parking tickets in the last week. That’s not random, I realize (I mean, I was parked illegally in both cases) but I want an excuse to vent my self-pity.
4. The food I miss most from my non-vegetarian past is pepperoni pizza.
5. I like peanut butter & butter sandwiches much more than peanut butter & jelly. I’m not big on sweet stuff but salty stuff drives me crazy.
6. I checked Gwyneth Paltrow out on the street once and didn’t realize it was her until a block later. (The hot celebrity fan-stay-back glare isn’t that different from the standard straight girl queer-stay-back glare, I discovered.)
7. I can’t stand Coldplay and if I’m honest, I have to admit it’s partly that I’m jealous that he gets to have sex with Gwyneth Paltrow and I don’t. But I’d categorize their music under the general heading of “straight boy crap” anyway so it’s not total hypocrisy. (Apologies to anyone whose musical sensibilities I’ve just offended. I don’t mean it personally.)

And I’m tagging:

Packing Vocals
Femme Is My Gender
Queer Rose
Butch Boo
Freedomgirl
Femme Hinterland
SaintChick

Just a thought

2008-10-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

We drove down to Washington this past weekend... well, I drove, and T. tried to get homework done. Something about a long ride makes for talking, I think. On the way down, after dark, as we passed through Delaware and then Baltimore, the discussion turned to gender. (You're shocked, I know.)

And maybe it was the dark, maybe it was the keeping my eyes on the road, maybe it was being alone in the car with her, just the two of us passing through a strange city. But I found able to say how I feel so much more simply and clearly than before.

I feel like I was born just fine. I was born with a masculine soul and a female body, but this seemed natural and comfortable to me. And then at some point, round about age 4, the terrible fact was revealed that this combination was not fine at all. It was labeled shame in the world I was born into.

I made an analogy to being left-handed (which I also am): it's the most natural, comfortable thing in the world, but after a while it is impossible to miss the fact that everything around you is backwards, designed for the right-handed people. Except that being left-handed is no longer shameful in our society.

Like the title says, this post is just for this thought, which somehow made clear to me why I don't feel like a balance of feminine and masculine but I also don't feel a desire to transition. It's because this masculine soul in this female body seems ok to me.

(This post started out as a comment over on Honey's recent post on gender, which is definitely worth a read if you haven't read it yet.)

Addendum to Thought: which is in no way to underplay how differently I live in this body, the way I walk, the way I dress, what I want and don't want in bed. And which is never, god forbid, to imply that there are neat categories, male/female bodies, masculine/feminine souls, that go without saying, that exist only as binaries, that are useful for more than strategic rhetorical aims. Indeed I realize even the soul/body distinction is suspect, and that my sense of self is perhaps worrying in its echoes of soul-culture-male/body-nature-female. And yet, and yet. How else to describe this sense of being, this embodiment?

Crush

2008-10-10T06:23:00.000-07:00

Life has been jam packed recently, travel and more travel, work and more work, job applications and dancing and friends. I'm not complaining, in fact it's exactly what I want and what I need, but it means that I have been remiss in posting here.

And so a week has gone by and I have not even written about this amazing thing. You know how (straight) girls use the phrase 'girl crush' to mean a sort of infatuated hero worship thing in regards to another girl? It's always irritated me a little but I'm reclaiming it here, because I am seriously crushing on this person in exactly that way.

We went out the other night. From the moment she walked in the room I was in awe and it lasted all night. She embodied the exact female masculinity that feels most natural to me, but she did it with decision, certainty, panache, authority. She backed me up, humorously, when T. back seat drove (I was driving) and handled a random drunk guy on the street with grace and calm. She made fun of me when I got nervous and femmed out, and when she praised my parallel parking I let myself enjoy it, just a little, just for a moment.

This is not the eloquent post I've imagined writing all week. But this sort of thing never is eloquent, is it? But look, the thing is, I've never really met someone and thought, that. That's what I want to be when I grow up. And I've read about the baby butch thing and the butch mentor thing and I don't know if this is where this is going, really, in any more formal or elaborate sense. But I know I'm grateful to her for having the balls to exist the way she does and for letting me see it. And I wanted to let you all know about it, even in this awkward, haphazard, blushing and stumbling over my feet kind of way.

Lonely in the Desert: A Post of Unbridled Narcissism

2008-09-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

Here I am on the last night of a work-related conference, wasting time before our closing dinner. It's been an intense, busy weekend. I'm not great at this stuff, mingling and chatting and all that. In the past I've felt ineffably backward, wrong, and out of place. This time was different, especially since I was aware of the need to forge of professional identity that will fit with my sense of self. On the one hand I felt like I was always carrying difference with me, queerness dragging behind me like a cape. On the other hand I was more comfortable with myself, and that made it easier to connect with people, too. I actually spent a lot of time hanging out with some (straight) women here and really enjoying it, not in a flirtatious sense at all but just as colleagues and human beings. That's not something I get to do very often. (Not that I usually flirt with straight women, not at all, it's usually just much more awkward and wary.)

And yet. I feel tired, I miss queer people, I really miss my apartment and my girl. Finding vegetarian food here has been a real hassle and I'm hungry. There's a black bug (or a gaggle of them?) crawling across my hotel room floor, back and forth. It creeps me out but I don't have the heart to kill it, or the energy to carry it all the way downstairs and out through the lobby. Stupid windows don't open.

I have a long day of traveling tomorrow and then the next day I'm supposed to have coffee with my mom. I haven't written much about family stuff here, partly I guess because I don't want too much of it out there on the internet. But basically things are not really ok, in the slow motion passive way characteristic of my family. My new priorities, my new outlook on life, my new independence: not really ok. And honestly, it hurts, even though I feel deep down that I'm making the right choices. This year I've felt like I'm in a battle for my own existence, refusing to live the mummified almost soul dead life I had before. I realize I've been less careful of my family's feelings, less deferential. And slowly, slowly, my guts no longer turn on a dime with their (her) disapproval (again quoting the fabulous tongue-tied).

But that's a depressing note to end on, isn't it? I will leave you with the image elevators doors closing on two women working at the hotel, a brief moment of slightly embarrassed, mostly smiling eye contact between me and the one who's just finished saying *something* about "...like Rachel Maddow." I'm taking the most ego-boosting interpretation of that one, folks. Yes I am.

Nonsense in Three Parts

2008-09-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

I'm off to a work-related conference thing tomorrow. I'm excited about seeing a new city and hopefully making some professional connections. I'm not so excited about having to fly (all that being cooped up and shuffled about like livestock). And I'm a bit nervous about the fact that I'll have a randomly assigned roommate. With whom I will have in common: the letter "F" on our drivers' licenses. Wish me luck...?

And a few questions for you smart technically savvy folks out there...
-How do you get that cool thing where you can see who's updated on your blogroll?
-How about that Twitter update thing?
-And... what's the scoop on Twitter etiquette? Do you follow the people who follow you? Vice versa? (Hussy Red, help me out here...)

Finally, I actually dreamt about k.d. lang this week. That's how stupid excited I am for these concerts. In my dream I was in some sort of back-up chorus for her, and we were rehearsing. Oddly she was wearing not only a black skirt (which she does sometimes) but also those funny high-heeled shoes with the little tiny heel. (T. says they're called kitten heels?) Afterwards we chatted, and she told me she had to do make-up advertisements to make the money to pay her therapist. And then I rested my head on her shoulder and felt utterly at peace, and I thought, well, she smells like a butch, in spite of those shoes. No, I do not remember what butch smelled like in my dream. Good lord. Where does this stuff come from?

All Tied Up

2008-09-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

This is for Greg... here is the tie FreedomGirl gave me for my birthday. I'm not necessarily rocking it in these pictures, though. I'm just about the least photogenic person on the planet (please forgive the headless horseman effect, it's the only way I could bear to put these up).

For the masculine fashion connoisseurs, check out the very British spread collar. I'm a walking Marks & Spencer advertisement--I'm sure the modeling offer will come any day now.

And for the bird's-eye view...

It's Cold Outside, It Gets So Hot In Here

2008-09-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a free association post.

The title is from U2's 11 o'clock tick tock, which they used to play at the end of their concerts. I used to be a very serious U2 fan, and then one day, their music just stopped doing it for me. I still like it, I don't change the station when it comes on the radio or anything, but I've just moved on. Life is funny that way.

It is cold outside. I like it, but I'm not used to it yet. I do like getting to wear jackets and stuff though. I'm a big fan of outerwear. For a while I wore the pea coat my grandfather wore in the Navy which was super cool, but I'm actually a bit big for it (I'm taller than my grandfather and my arms are longer than his).

Hot in here... not literally. This dancing thing is crazy hot, though. We've just started learning and let me tell you, this dance is on fire. I'm learning how to lead which requires summoning up total confidence and direction--you have to communicate to your partner what to do with decisive motions and the sheer force of your own conviction. I have a lot of that energy but I am used to keeping it smashed down and hidden away pretty much everywhere but the bedroom. Learning to dance in this way has so far been absolutely therapeutic and liberating, not to mention darn sexy. Of course we're both terrible so far. It's not easy. But no way am I giving up--I want to do it right.

So far I've danced mostly with my teacher--T. and I aren't really good enough to dance together yet. You're supposed to dance with a variety of people, not just your usual partner all the time. At the last class, the teacher was demonstrating the different ways of holding your partner, which range up to chests-touching-close. This is another way learning to dance is stretching me and releasing things in me. My family does almost no physical touching; even hugs hello and goodbye are quick and distant, more distant than the closest dancing embrace. And being touched has always been, for me, a complicated and fraught thing: what I could accept, what I could reject, what it meant. I realized, during the lesson, that I was so afraid that my teacher would hate having to touch me, would be repelled by having my body that close to hers. And that the human closeness that happens when dancing is actually profoundly reassuring and grounding to me, even though I have to overcome my fears about it. It warms something in me that has been cold for so long.

Survey on Transgender Discrimination

2008-09-15T17:34:00.000-07:00

I got this from my (very sexy) local lesbian meetup group and took the survey this evening. It's one of the better-written surveys I've ever taken. And I'm not just saying that because they gave me "masculine woman/butch" as a listed identity option, either.

If you're transgender or gender-nonconforming, have a look, and take the survey if you can. (I believe it's for US residents, but correct me if I'm wrong on that.)

Comprehensive national survey on transgender discrimination launched by National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Respond to the survey online at
https://online.survey.psu.edu/endtransdiscrim/

"This is an absolutely critical national effort. We urge all transgender and gender non-conforming people to take the survey to help guide us in making better laws and policies that will improve the quality of life for all transgender people. We need everyone's voice in this, everyone's participation."
— Mara Keisling, Executive Director, National Center for Transgender Equality

MEDIA CONTACT:
Roberta Sklar, Communications Director
(Office) 646.358.1465
(Cell) 917.704.6358
rsklar@theTaskForce.org

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 — In the wake of one of the most violent years on record of assaults on transgender people, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force have teamed up on a comprehensive national survey to collect data on discrimination against transgender people in housing, employment, public accommodations, healthcare, education, family life and criminal justice.

To date, in 2008, several young gender non-conforming people of color have been murdered, including California junior high school student Lawrence King, who was shot in public during the school day. King's murder, and the murders of Simmie Williams in South Carolina and Angie Zapata in Greeley, Colo., come in a year in which we are still working to include transgender provisions in a federal bill to protect lesbian, gay and bisexual workers from discrimination in employment.

Hate crimes against transgender people suggest multiple points of vulnerability, which can compound each other: discrimination in employment may lead to unstable housing situations that in turn can leave transgender people at the mercy of public programs and public officials who may not respond respectfully or appropriately to them. These stressors add burdens in a healthcare system that is often unprepared for transgender people's needs. The list goes on. "We know that transgender people face discrimination on multiple fronts," said Mara Keisling, executive director of NCTE. "This data will help us sort out the combination of forces that leave transgender people vulnerable to unemployment, homelessness and violence."

Jaime Grant, director of the Task Force Policy Institute, noted, "There is so little concrete data on the needs and risks associated with the widespread discrimination we see in the lives of the transgender people we know. This data will help point the way to an appropriate policy agenda to ensure that transgender people have a fair chance to contribute their talents in the workplace, in our educational systems and in our communities."

NCTE and the Task Force have partnered with Pennsylvania State University's Center for the Study of Higher Education to collect and analyze the data. Applying rigorous academic standards to the investigation will strengthen any case made to legislators, policy makers, healthcare providers and others whose decisions impact the lives of transgender people. A national team of experts in survey research and transgender issues developed the questionnaire, which can be completed online at https://online.survey.psu.edu/endtransdiscrim/

Keisling notes: "This is an absolutely critical national effort. We urge all transgender and gender non-conforming people to take the survey to help guide us in making better laws and policies that will improve the quality of life for all transgender people. We need everyone's voice in this, everyone's participation."

The mission of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is to build the grassroots power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. We do this by training activists, equipping state and local organizations with the skills needed to organize broad-based campaigns to defeat anti-LGBT referenda and advance pro-LGBT legislation, and building the organizational capacity of our movement. Our Policy Institute, the movement's premier think tank, provides research and policy analysis to support the struggle for complete equality and to counter right-wing lies. As part of a broader social justice movement, we work to create a nation that respects the diversity of human expression and identity and creates opportunity for all. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., we also have offices in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis and Cambridge. © 2008 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. 1325 Massachusetts Ave NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Phone 202.393.5177. Fax 202.393.2241. TTY 202.393.2284. theTaskForce@theTaskForce.org.

The National Center for Transgender Equality is a national social justice organization devoted to ending discrimination and violence against transgender people through education and advocacy on national issues of importance to transgender people. The National Center for Transgender Equality is a 501(c)3 organization. For more information, please visit www.nctequality.org.

Clothes That Matter: A Very k.d. Sequel

2008-09-13T05:19:00.000-07:00

At the risk of the turning my blog into a Judith Butler & k.d. lang fan site (not that that would be a bad thing, of course), I present you with the following videos. They're from around the same time, the mid-1980s, back when k.d. was the lead singer of the ReClines and I was in elementary school.

To my eyes, there's a huge contrast between the two videos (apart from the fact that Lemming Polka just rocks and it's an almost flawless performance, too). The level of confidence, of comfort, hell, just watch the videos for posture alone--k.d. alternately looks like she's ducking a blow or about to be violently ill in portions of "Hanky Panky". And the real kicker? Keep an eye out for the cowboy in red in the middle of "Hanky Panky". Yeah, clothes matter.

And k.d. lang is the best. And I'm going to see her. TWICE (thank you Jess & Tina!). I'm so darn excited.

OK, so, first, "Hanky Panky":

Now take a deep breath (if you're like me, you need one). Sit back and enjoy the awesomeness of "Lemming Polka":

And lest anyone think I'm picking on k.d. here, I offer proof that I understand: I wore a lot of skirts in the mid-1980s, too.

Clothes That Matter

2008-09-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

Only two posts so far this month, September is buzzing away, and I have so much I could write about.

Odd times last weekend. At one social event, a woman described her distaste for “militant” looking lesbians ... then described the exact outfit I was wearing. (Striped shirt tucked into jeans, if you must know. It’s my lucky shirt, actually, the very first item of men’s clothing I bought this spring and one of my very favorite things to wear.) I knew it was about her own struggles with her sexual orientation and visibility (she’s bi and with a woman), not really about me ultimately. Still, white tall femme, as Jesse James would say? And of course I had that little moment of panic: am I an ugly, militant lesbian snickered at by all the cool kids? Sigh.

The next day was a wedding so straight, it was like queers were never invented. Except for yours truly and my faithful femme sidekick, of course. I’m exaggerating, but only a little. A measure of my own changing identity... when we were invited early this year, I joked with T. that I’d go in drag. I didn’t, of course, I went as me. Which meant wearing all men’s clothing. Which is how I would have described drag, then. Which did in fact earn me: one extremely uncomfortable older male relative, a large number of curious glances (plus one I’m pretty sure was hostile), a whole lot of feeling like a fish out of water, and the designation ‘dapper’ from the sweetheart bride who was the whole reason we even went to this thing.

During the ceremony, I got to thinking about gender theory and the latest Judith Butler book I’m reading, Bodies That Matter. The book is, in part, Butler’s response to criticisms made about Gender Trouble. Reading it, I felt for the first time like I really get what she means by the word “performative.” As Butler puts it, neither performativity nor social construction are meant to imply that gender is something you can choose to put on or take off, like the clothes in your closet. (Hussy Red makes this point beautifully in her recent post about being a femme, which also underscores how painful it is to have people suggest that your gender is like a jacket.)

So an identity isn’t performative because you “perform” it like a role, like a character you put on at Halloween. It’s performative because you create it, or a little bit of it, a version of it, with your actions. There’s no original man or woman or femme or butch or mountain-goat-gender out there, that we can each “do” better or worse. Rather, all those identities come into being, and evolve, and exist, through our doing them.

Sitting there at the wedding, the only female-bodied person in male attire, I thought to myself, I’m not imitating a thing called “man”. All of us here, any of us doing any kind of masculinity, are constantly present at its creation. We’re all a little bit in drag, and mostly not, because mostly we’re just doing us, as best we can, whatever the circumstances that might have made us the varied ways we are.

Well, it made me feel better, anyway. That, and the fact that the slightly-queer-looking caterer-woman gave me a very nice smile. That was good, too.

names & no name

2008-09-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

Have you helped Jess decide on hir new name yet? Well, go on, and then come back here.

I admire Jess’s decision: it takes a lot of courage and certainty to choose a new name. Me, I’m in name limbo here. My real name is ok. It’s not one of the super-feminine female names, though it’s also unambiguously a girl’s name. Sort of like the gray wool skirt of names. My middle name is in the same general category. Nothing wrong with either of them, but I’ve never really identified with them, either. When someone says my real name, oftentimes, a ghostly image seems to appear next to me: the girl I think they’re imagining, the girl I thought I was supposed to be, the girl I’m definitely not. It’s a strange, disembodied feeling, and I admit I prefer it when people don’t use my name at all.

I read an old interview with k.d. lang (shocking, I know) where she talks about the song on Ingénue with the line “Where is your head, Kathryn?” For the less k.d.-obsessed, her full name is Kathryn Dawn Lang. The interviewer suggested that the line was especially personal since that was probably how she thought of herself in her own mind. k.d. laughed and replied that it was more the sound of her mother reprimanding her. She didn’t say what she calls herself inside her own head.

I don’t call myself anything, generally, or at least nothing like a name. In my own internal consciousness I’m nameless, which seems just fine to me, though I admit it could suggest some existential question.

But despite my lack of identification with my proper name, I’ve never sustained a nickname, either. In daily life T. calls me ‘sweetie’ or ‘baby’. Adorable, but not how I want to introduce myself. I’ve grown really fond of this “Leo MacCool” self, but I don’t think I want hir to leave the confines of cyberspace. Recently I’ve been trying out another nickname, derived from my last name, but it doesn’t seem to quite fit, either.

I tried this meme but the results ranged from silly to bad. Some highlights:
Your rock star name (first pet, current car): Casey Honda (um, no. Not even remotely rock star.)
Your gangsta name (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite type of shoe): Chocolate Doc Martens (tasty lesbian treat!)
Your Native American name (favorite color, favorite animal): Blue Sheep (sheep dip gone wrong?)
Superhero name (2nd favorite color, favorite drink): Red Beer (ewww)
Dancer name (the name of your favorite perfume/cologne/scent, favorite candy): Soap Bounty (oh yeah, I think we have a winner... not. Bounty Bars are the British version of Mounds, coconut covered in chocolate. So good.)
TV weather anchor name (your 5th grade teacher’s last name, a major city that starts with the same letter): Kovaliv Kalamazoo (my personal favorite. What’s not to love?)
Spy name (your favorite season/holiday, flower): Spring Sunflowers (I. Don’t. Think. So. Seriously, if I were a spy, I’d really, really hope for something a little darker and edgier than this.)
Cartoon name:(favorite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now): Peach Boxers (awww)

So... do you identify with your name? How did you get a nickname that felt right? And how did you know it felt right? Any tips or thoughts or suggestions?

Until next time, I’m ... Soap Bounty.

my girl is tough

2008-09-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

I'm so glad Hurricane Gustav seems not to have a repeat of the disasters of a few years ago.

Like everywhere else, I guess, this hurricane spawned talk, at my house, of hurricanes past. Our stories aren't too impressive; forgive us, we're from the North.

Then T. said, dead serious, "I was in a Category 2 hurricance once. It wasn't as impressive as I thought it would be. We lost thirteen trees. But they were weaklings."

She slays me.

gender troubles back in the day

2008-08-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a little sorting through old papers and photographs these days. Apparently I've been thinking through this gender business my whole life--well, I knew that, but apparently I've been committing it to paper from time to time as well.

Exhibit A: In which I foreshadow my interest in social construction, challenge sexism, and betray a certain confusion. Judging from the handwriting, dates from when I was 7 or 8.

What's the difference. It is true that we learn from the way we are handled. But often the problem is that we get thinking that one sex is better than the other. If you are a girl, there's no reason why you shouldn't play a sport. If you're a boy, you don't have to play sports. So if anyone tells you to be ladylike or to be a boy, just say I already am!"

Which, as T. points out, gives the syntactical suggestion that I already am a ladylike boy.

Exhibit B: In which I resurrect the most appalling sexism and use an alter ego to tear myself down. Dating from when I was 15 or 16. The background to this: Ahmad was a character I'd created. He was supposed to be Iranian (I don't know why, apologies for strange stereotyping) and the embodiment of old-fashioned, chivalrous masculinity, complete with backstory full of heroic suffering and extraodinarily good looks. In this scene, he's being interviewed by a friend's son on whether he is a sexist. I'll omit the ponderous introduction and cut straight to the ponderous chase.

Interviewer: You mean you ignore who people really are, and judge them on the basis of their gender?
Ahmad: You misunderstand. I judge people entirely on who they are.
Int: Then how can you judge them on their gender?
A: That's part of who they are, is it not? Would you not say that your maleness is an inherent part of who you are?
Int: Well, yes, certainly-
A: Then my treating you as a man is just a part of my treating you as who you are--you are a man, as well as a student and the son of a dear friend.
Int: But my--maleness--as you call it--it's not the same as your maleness or my father's maleness. They're all different. So too with women.
A: Certainly. And some woman may be timid and frightened and completely submissive while another is strong and proud of her family and respectful while a third is scheming and lustful and lazy. Naturally I would treat each of these differently, yet their personalities are all female, so I treat them all as women.
Int: Well, what if a woman's personality were just like a man's?
A: I'd pity a creature so cruelly deceived by God.
Int: But what if she was naturally like that?
A: Is a man born a cripple not naturally crippled? Is he therefore less worthy of our pity?
Int: All right, all right! But what should I put down? Are you a sexist?
A: No.
Int: But you just acted like you were...
A: You make it sound like something bizarre, when in fact I only act as it is natural for everyone to act.
Int: It's impossible! Thank you, sir, that is all!

Indeed. I had to laugh at the sheer mindless predictability of the stereotypes of the three women. But I do feel pity for who I was when I wrote this, summoning up my ideal male alter ego only to make him pronounce female masculinity a crippling deception imposed by a cruel God. Sigh. Ending self-indulgent walk down memory lane here.

gender panic-mine

2008-08-25T06:08:00.001-07:00

We went to a movie last night, a documentary about three people transitioning to male called “Boy I Am”. (What a great title, huh?) It covers a lot of interesting ground—the intersection of race and class with transitioning genders, taking testosterone, undergoing top surgery, navigating relationships with partners and family—in a thoughtful way.

During the movie itself, I kept shifting around, absolutely could not get comfortable in my seat. Afterwards, there was an audience discussion, and I found myself unable to say anything at all. T. said some interesting things about femmes, her older friend whose partner transitioned, and some other stuff. It was a safe space to talk, you know? But I was silent as the grave.

Partly I was afraid of offending the transguys there. The drawback to the movie, in my opinion, was that it used Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam as basically the sole representative of butches. (Halberstam is the author of, among other things, Female Masculinity, which I read this spring and found utterly liberating.) So it was too easy to conflate butch vs. transman with older vs. younger and real-life person vs. theoretical academic. (Just as a series of comparisons, not as oppositions.)

And since just about all the butches in the audience elected not to stay for the discussion... well, there I was, not wanting to recreate any border wars (butches are the real, the brave, the subversive embodiment of female masculinity! butches are just ftms in waiting, too wimpy to really do it!).

But also, I felt surprisingly emotional and conflicted about the whole topic. Shaking hands with a transguy afterwards, I found myself panicking when I realized my grip was firmer than his: is that butch-ly overcompensation? Does he think I’m a pathetic pussy, relying on an iron grip to mask my lack of ‘real’ male signifiers? (Please pardon the misuse of pussy; it’s what occurred to me at the time, sadly enough.) I’m so used to defending my right to masculinity against straight cis-men—why did I fall apart at the imagined judgments of transmen, who I would think I have far more of a natural alliance with?

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that my embrace of masculinity and butchness itself is a relatively recent and hard-fought thing. But the movie, plus a weekend in which I looked at a lot of old photographs, made me reflect what a long fight it’s been, too.

I thought about transitioning in college, in a vague, confused way. At one point in the movie, Halberstam says if someone had offered her testosterone at 19, she would have taken it; the implication was that she’s glad now she didn’t. I sympathize with that. I was so lost at 19, in terms of gender.

The movie focused a lot on top surgery, and oddly enough, that’s always been one of the least attractive things about transitioning to me, in a physical sense. A deeper voice, narrower hips, more muscle? OK, sounds cool; at times, I’ve desperately wanted those things.

But I’m really fond of my breasts. They’re not very big, but they’re not invisibly small either. They were just about the only part of a female puberty I was genuinely enthusiastic about. For some reason, they seemed unequivocally mine, a friendly presence there on my chest. How I got this in a culture that packages up breasts and turns them into objects-of-male-gaze par excellence, I can’t tell you. But I feel comforted by their presence, hidden under layers of just t-shirt and shirt back in the day, tucked into a gentle sports bra now that I’m not a skinny-ass teenager anymore. I like the way they’re small enough not to interrupt the fall of my dress shirts from my shoulders too much, yet still present and visible, confirming the female half of the female masculinity thing.

So my confused 19-year-old self thought: but to transition I’d have to lose my breasts! I can’t do that! I’ll just have to be a woman, full stop, end of story, stopping mucking about with boyishness!

Which brought its own set of troubles, because really, I feel somewhere in between. I want my breasts and my masculinity. I want to grow up to be just like Jack Halberstam. I just didn’t think a well-made documentary and a room of well-meaning, kind-hearted transmen and their allies would bring all that anxious confusion rushing back to me.

I might lose my nerve and take this picture down, but for now, here’s a reward for anyone who’s read this far through my little identity crisis: me and T., dancing at a wedding in the mists of the past. It’s incredible but true: we had NO IDEA what butch-femme even was when this picture was taken. You’ll just have to take my word for that.

first & only twenty-ninth

2008-08-19T07:59:00.001-07:00

Well, happy birthday to me. I am 29 today, and I will not be making this an annual event. Late-twenties-almost-thirty is just fine with me. Finally old enough not to care, finally old enough not to put up with anyone's garbage. Being young has always seemed to me to be about restrictions so I'm content to be All Grown Up.

It's been quite a year. Last August I was scared, scared, scared. About to leave for England, full of obsessive little plans and overflowing with apology. Now here I am, and I don't even feel like the same person, or rather, I feel like the person who was always deep inside me finally got to stand up and breathe some fresh air.

We went up and saw my mom over the weekend--she dragged out the baby book, of course. Funny to see all the pink IT'S A GIRL!! stuff. My birth announcement had a little pink paper diaper thing, and my mom said, somewhat randomly, 'They had blue ones for boys.' 'And green if you weren't sure?' I suggested. 'No, I bought these after you were born... oh.' Maybe getting it just a little, since she laughed and then told, again, the old stories about how all the old superstitions predicted I'd be a boy. Well, almost, right?

No big plans for today... gotta work, then some Thai food, then out for some drinks. No need to go overboard, on this first birthday where I'm actually pretty much glad I was born, even if it took me almost three decades to figure out that IT'S A BOI!!!

Butch Castration Anxiety?

2008-08-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

What does it mean that I've dreamed my hair is long again four or five times in the last week or so? Sometimes I realize I've forgotten to get it cut, but mostly it's just this awful manifestation, hair where there was none. In one dream it was just long on the sides--I felt my neck and was relieved to discover the hair was still short and stubbly there. And recently I've thought, during the dream, 'This is just a dream,' but I still can't wake up, and then (in the dream) I think, 'Oh no, this time it's for real!' I won't get into the variations about being unable to schedule an appointment for a haircut as I suspect this post is getting too long. (Like my subconscious hair!)

(Just in case you're wondering: yes, I'm getting some.)

Long-suffering felines

2008-08-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

We love our cats, we really do. They're great cats. But I have to admit we got a little out of the cat-care groove in England. We keep running out of cat food and having to rush out to our local natural pet food store at the last minute. And that store is run by two awesome women with a small child, so it doesn't have the most extensive hours ever.

A few days ago T. picked up some cans of our usual brand from a different store. A little more expensive, they looked a little different. Whatever. But the cats just didn't like it. They nibbled, they looked at us suspiciously. I mixed in some sardines and they liked it a little better. (Yeah, I buy sardines for my cats. You wanna make something of it?)

Today I went to our usual store and stocked up. When I got home I noticed that the old cans really were different. I looked closer: "all natural food for dogs".

Sorry, guys. We'll remember how to do this. In the meantime... anchovies anyone?

just a word

2008-08-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

stolen from jess & tina:

1. Where is your cell phone? bookcase
2. Your significant other? true
3. Your hair? trimmed
4. Your mother? problematic
5. Your father? lonely
6. Your favorite time of day? evening
7. Your dream last night? hairy
8. Your favorite drink? beer
9. Your dream goal? strength
10. The room you’re in? airy
11. Your ex? straight
12. Your fear? rejection
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? connected
14. What you are not? sleepy
15. Your Favorite meal? eggs
16. One of your wish list items? ipod
17. The last thing you did? procrastinate
18. Where you grew up? massa-fuckin-chusetts
19. What are you wearing? jeans
20. Your TV is? leaving
21. Your pets? opinionated
22. Your computer? lap
23. Your life? changing
24. Your mood? distracted
25. Missing someone? maybe
26. Your car? silver
27. Something you’re not wearing? jacket
28. Favorite store? m&s
29. Your summer? erratic
30. Your favorite color? blue
31. When is the last time you laughed? today
32. When is the last time you cried? yesterday
33. Your health? ok
34. Your children? nonexistent
35. Your future? new
36. Your beliefs? evolving
37. Young or old? both
38. Your image? aloof
39. Your appearance? queer
40. Would you live your life over again knowing what you know? yep

Femininity: the making & the discarding

2008-07-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

There’s a beautiful metaphor in Butch is a Noun, in the chapter where S. Bear Bergman is warning young butches not to let their embrace of masculinity turn into misogyny. Ze writes: “Leave femininity aside but don’t ruin it. Think of it like a castoff piece of clothes, fold it gently and leave it out where some young thing who wants it can pick it up.” (S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun [San Francisco: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2006], p. 111)

If my femininity were a piece of clothing, what would it look like? I imagine a thin cotton dress, slight, a faded tiny floral print.

Lady Brett Ashley has been writing about her discovery of her own femininity, after a lifetime of tomboydom, and her feeling that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, she wasn’t raised to it. Reading her latest posts, I thought for a moment, take mine.

It’s a cotton dress without any ornament, though. I knew from the moment a preschool pal wanted to spend forever painting our nails bubblegum pink that I was never going to have the energy to figure out all those little fussy details. And honestly, though tomboy was strictly off-limits, no one at home was invested in making me a hyperfeminine, supercute little girl, either. So from the start mine was a femininity on the cheap, toenail polish always chipped, only my Johnny-Depp-eyes-of-doom eyeliner carefully reapplied.

The cut might be a little off, too. It might just hang a little funny. Efforts were made, when I started negotiating puberty, to help me along the path of womanhood. How to sway my hips, how to cross my legs, all the little details of poise and grace. You see I’m falling back on generalities here, because I don’t really remember those details. I was too busy with my intensive covert spy operation, gleaning all the tidbits of masculinity I could from a distant father and much older brothers, carefully filing them away in the massive cross-indexed database in my head. And I never could sway my hips, anyway.

It’s a slight dress, as I said; it doesn’t offer much protection and it doesn’t have much substance. There were some lessons of femininity I learned very well and without leavening. Don’t upset men. Don’t be smelly or greedy or pushy. Don’t make too much noise. I’d been told I had the right to say no to unwanted sexual advances, but I also knew they weren’t supposed to all be unwanted; that was something wrong with me.

Femininity for me was constriction and stumbling awkwardness. I imagined feminine sexuality as masochism and violation. Femmes are a revelation to me: femininity as joy, feminine sexuality as a desire to receive and to hold. I’ve undervalued femininity so much as an adult, despite my feminism, because it hurt so much for me to wear it.

So on second thought, Lady Brett, don’t pick up my femininity. When you look closer you’ll see it’s stained and torn. Leave it folded there by the side of the road where the sun and the rain can clean it. Let it subside back into the earth, poor misbegotten thing.

Update on the girl

2008-07-22T07:22:00.001-07:00

I started this blog partly because I thought I might be breaking up with T. (also known as freedomgirl, but don’t tell her I said so). Yet here we are, making our new lives together so far, wedding rings tucked safely away.

We’re watching the L Word, working our way through the whole thing, up to season three now. I come a little unglued when Tina cries, so (spoiler alert) that scene at the end of season two where she has the baby? It was rough. T. looks a little like her, and obviously we have some of that Bette & Tina long-term relationship drama over here.

After fourteen years together, we’ve been through some stuff. The Christmas before last, she got chicken pox—not a good thing when you’re grown up. The night she passed out and hit her head on the bathtub ranks as one of the most frightening moments of my life. Mostly, though, it was two weeks of constant vigilance, sitting by the bed, kneeling by the couch, bringing her what she needed, comforting her the best I could, watching for any sign of the complications the doctor had explained to me. Everything was ok in the end but it was genuinely terrifying and I have a profound respect now for anyone who cares for a chronically, seriously ill partner.

So this scene with Tina reminded me of all that, the helplessness I felt when she was suffering and all I could do was whisper, “ok, it’s going to be ok,” and hope that I was telling the truth.

We got up to get something cold to drink and I pressed her against the wall in the dark kitchen, holding her hot, damp body to mine.

“You have to promise to take care of yourself, ok? Because I love you so much...”
“Ok,” she said. “But you have to promise to fuck me. Lots.”

And that’s how it is, yin to yang, heat to cold, seriousness to laughter, sex and caring all wrapped up in one complicated dance.

Sounds like a good deal to me, baby.

The Who? The New Kid on the Block

2008-07-16T20:02:00.001-07:00

I hate being the new kid in town. And especially after a year away, believe me, being a new me in an old town is an awful lot like being the new kid full stop.

I’m working hard to do it right. Spoken word, drag shows, queer rock band, we’ve done it, and truly it’s been amazing, mind-expanding, all that intensely relevant and funny and beautiful art. And the hanging out at the girl bars and the Notoriously Dyke-Filled Cafe? Check on that, too. We even gave an extremely nice girl (friendly! queer! our age!) a ride home the other night, so it’s not like it’s been all wallflower all the time, either. And tonight I dutifully betook myself to a local queer book club, introduced myself to the organizer, and talked about the book.

And I know that if I keep it up, after a while, I’ll walk into some of these situations in this town and someone will say something radical, like, “Hi, Leo!” But in the meantime, damn, it gets tiring, always being the new face. Especially when the face in question is still a little new to me, too.

Driving back from the book club, I got a laugh out of the first two songs I heard on the radio. I love it when the radio seems to be trying to tell me something. First it was The Who, from Tommy: “See me, hear me, touch me, feel me...”and then I hit seek (yeah, I’m an obsessive presser of ‘seek’, drives T. crazy), and came in during the middle of Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”:

Well you walk into a restaurant,
Strung out from the road
And you feel the eyes upon you
As you’re shaking’ off the cold
You pretend it doesn’t bother you
But you just want to explode
Most times you can’t hear ’em talk,
Other times you can
All the same old clichés,
“Is that a woman or a man?”
And you always seem outnumbered
You don’t dare make a stand
Here I am, on the road again
There I am, up on the stage
Here I go playin’ star again
There I go turn the page

What you see when you look at me

2008-07-13T07:39:00.001-07:00

She’s in the shower right now (that pretty girl I sleep with) and when she’s done we’re headed into town to do some enjoying of the day and maybe some clothes shopping. I have worn my one pair of acceptable jeans so many times, I would not be surprised to see them get up and walk away of their own accord. And I sort of like shopping these days, now that what I see in the mirror looks like someone I might want to be, rather than an embarrassingly awkward stranger.

I got called sir for the first time. At a security checkpoint where I had to swipe a card and then open my laptop. It was a hurried transaction—I’d been through a few times already that day—and the security guard there at the moment was distracted, telling her coworker about some trouble earlier in the day. I swiped the card and waited, then opened the computer, and then she glanced over: “Oh, I’m sorry, sir, you’re good, go ahead.” The deferential apology, the air of unthinking certainty, the word itself, all shook me a little, tipping the axis of my rotation just a little.

On the other hand, back in these spaces of family and old, old friends, it’s a case of the elephant in the corner. My hair is a good barometer: mostly, the people who Say Nothing At All are going to be weird the whole time. There’s an exception to every rule, of course, and the supposed friend who told me I looked like I got my head caught in something is it. He said something, but it was weird. Otherwise, it’s been a glacier of crushing silence, an invisibility of averted gazes. Not an outright rejection of female masculinity, but treating it like something to be politely ignored, like an oozing abscess on my forehead. Best to swallow the discomfort and talk of the weather while looking at the femme girlfriend, the table, the sky, anywhere but right at me.

It makes me flicker and fade. Years ago that’s precisely what I did. But now I have been seen, and often enough to make me know it’s real and it’s possible. The Dyke March, our incredibly generous host in Brooklyn, the events we’ve attended so far in Boston, the cute dykes who eyed me at the Farmer’s Market yesterday, all of it reminding me: this is what it feels like to have a conversation with people who make eye contact. This is what it feels like to be myself, outside of a vacuum.

Summer Heat

2008-07-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

At the back of the dance floor, in a crowded lesbian club. I can't hear the conversation but I find out later it's about how to let someone know you want to go home with them. And then this gorgeous girl I barely know is walking around, standing behind me. Her hands on my shoulders, then pressing, sliding down my chest. (Stopping just short of my breasts, temporarily, sexily, rendered beside the point.) A light brush on my ass, a gentle pressure of breasts on my back. How could she know the geography of my desire so intimately? Does she also know how badly I wanted to touch her?

still alive

2008-07-04T06:07:00.002-07:00

i've been back in america nearly two weeks now. the big goal has been achieved: i'm typing this in our new apartment, surrounded by boxes and haphazard furniture and some very forgiving cats. there's so much i want to write about here:
-the overlap between femininity & acceptability in my head, and why i 'girl out' when i'm nervous
-being invisible and the subtle homophobia of perpetrating invisibility.
-how i got wet at the nyc dyke march and relied on the kindness of strangers who are no longer strangers now
and lots more. but as i'm cadging wireless here i'll stop now. i've missed reading your blogs so much. thanks for still stopping by here... hope to have proper internet by next week.

Radio Silence

2008-06-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow the lovely T. and I are returning to the United States. We had an awesome send-off last night (or leaving do, as they say here) with three of our favorite local lesbians, which involved among other things our initiation into the wonders of Rock Band (the video game). Dangerously fun.

We're plunging right into the apartment search, but while we’re living with my mom, I expect internet access to be very occasional at best. The plan is to be in our own place by July 1st, fingers crossed.

And hey, if you’re going to be at New York’s Dyke March next weekend? Keep an eye out for us! We’ll be there. I’ll try to wear my Manchester t-shirt for maximum visibility.