which makes sense – i got in early and my flight to san diego is late, so what else should i be doing than catching up on the last two months with you Strangers From The Internets?

since i have that penchant for reverse chronology (and the bad memory, i’m sure that has a lot to do with it), i’ll start with last night’s double-stuf’d amazingness. the evening started with a free choir practice/performance at what i’ve been calling the stretch pants summer jam. it’s always fun to get out of our rut (as we’re doing next week at the shelton library, as well), especially in stretch pants. mine were purple lame and quite glam.

the glam continued with tragic magic at northern, where i promptly fell in love with all of the performers. i had a theater mentor tell me once that he thought i’d make a great performance artist – after seeing these kids, it’s firmly in the compliment column (again).

golly, if there was stuff that happened in the past two months that wasn’t choir and/or awesome queers, i don’t remember it. also it doesn’t seem likely to have been my life.

i have a new job, starting on tuesday – thus the trip to san diego now. i went to san francisco for the national conference on volunteering and service (huge! overwhelming!) over pride weekend and was elated by trans march. while i was there i was able to catch Chagall and the Russian Jewish Theater, which was spectacular. so much of his work was done so quickly, i learned, that it could only be almost a stream-of-consciousness.

the first piece i saw of his, like most people i’m sure, is america’s windows. i actually have a tote bag of it, which was one of my favorite bags to carry around when i was high school. he’s done a lot of work, i’m not sure if that was his only stained glass (research finds that no, there are lots of amazing glass pieces of his around!), but the most stunning part of the russian jewish theater exhibit was a set that he had created for a show… i could have stood there for hours staring at the details, and apparently i should have. one of the museum guards yelled at me for trying to take a picture of my favorite bit, and of course i can’t find it online. i wish my memory was better; i’m tired of things i love being so ephemeral. anyhow, the beauty that i can’t find is part of “chagall’s box,” and you can read more about it here.

my favorite quote of the day, from nat about butter:

i covet this poster like crazy, but it’s $30.

my great-grandmother passed away on sunday, after a week’s worth of post-stroke sleeping.  she lived such a long and wonderful life; she was my favorite lady.  i was her namesake for eighteen years, and will always remember her.  i’m mostly still numb, i think.

i’m petrified. i’ve been panicking about and procrastinating on this final step – the “give them fifty dollars and then not be able to edit your application” step – for weeks now. but it’s done. and maybe sometime they’ll call me and go “hey, wanna give us lots of money?” … and maybe they won’t.

i joined a new library system today, so that i could check out knit a square, make a toy. it is for absolutely brainless knitting, and is an awesome book. cubbie (and as such really, i, because i inherited his knitting books when he stopped knitting) had a copy, but then our delightful cat butter (who i miss soooo much) peed on it. it’s out of print, and only sixteen libraries in the u.s. seem to have it. handy that one of them is seventeen miles from my house.

speaking of knitting, i am now a ravelry member! i’m puckish there. they’re chugging through invitations fast, if you want to be a member but haven’t signed up yet.

tweedle dum. i’m sitting on a phone book, because my butt still hurts. i’ve been singing “my butt hurrrts,” to the tune of cute overload’s “i et too moishe.” i’m pretty sure that i fractured it on the right side, because… that’s where it hurts the most! i took this week off of (telling my temp place that i’m looking for) work, because it hurts to sit for a long time, but i need to go back to work next week because, hi, amsterdam? i have 1300 saved, and that’s not going to get me far. i should get one of those little thermometers for how much i’ve saved. i wonder where on the internet i could do that in a lazy fashion. i don’t think i care enough to code my own.

i think when/if i hope when the time comes for amsterdam, i’ll create a new blog here for that. because everyone needs many many blogs. and why did i buy myself a fancy domain and stuff if i’m not going to fill it up with stuff? cubbie has, unsurprisingly, stopped using his blog here – and that makes me feel lonely.

want a blog, people i know? i’ve asked you this before, i’m sure.

the funny thing about this cold is that it started at about the same day my mother went in for surgery, and so i’m hoping that when she gets to leave the hospital, i’ll not have a cold any more.  at least, i hope that’s the way it works – if the cold lasts until she is fully recovered from surgery?  i’ll be very frustrated at the end of those few months.

we head that way on christmas.  i was afraid to fly on christmas, at first, but it sounds like it’ll be fairly quiet on the plane, so that will be good.  hopefully mum will feel well enough to celebrate!  if not, we can all stand around the bed in a made-for-tv-movie type fashion and send her air hugs, so that we don’t injure her with lovin’s.

i’ve always been an arts and crafts person, afraid of formal writing – i never have enough original ideas for fiction, and i can’t keep my mind on one track long enough.  somehow, though, i’ve been impressing people without even trying.  i have mentioned this other places before, but three of my teachers this quarter have complimented my writing – two in a “you should try to be published” way and one in a “i’m going to hand out this exam and on the side note that you’re very skilled at writing” way.

this hasn’t happened since my senior year of high school, which leaves me wondering if it’s just a context thing?  both places i’ve been with students who have been told that they’re not so good at school (here at a community college, then at an arts school where we learned about “punctuation, your friends and mine!”), so maybe it’s just the pompousness of my writing style that’s impressing people – that i have been doing this long enough that i can make fun of the form and the structure?  i don’t know.  what i do know is that i wrote a paper last week, the final paper for my transphobia class, and it was awesome.  it wasn’t quite in my normal, scoffing tone (the easiest papers for me to write are the ones where i hate the subject matter), and cubbie noted – and i agree – that it’s somehow more mature than the rest of my work.

the piece gave me a glimpse into a place where i can write from knowledge – because surely an opinion-piece on trans stuff is somewhere i have knowledge.  it makes me look at my procrastination and wonder what my work would look like, if i weren’t always afraid that it was going to avalanche  down on me.

not that i have, you know, any immediate plans to stop procrastinating.  and i’m going to turn that submission that i’m working on for that anthology…  sometime.  i have until the end of the month, anyway..

i’ve been trying to figure out how to make things work out so that i can take the class. i found this bit on the ccsf website:

This program with CCSF and the University of California, Berkeley, provides qualified students the opportunity to enroll in one free UCB course.

… but then i came across this bit, finishing it up:

Students who have attended four-year colleges or universities are not eligible.

humbug.

all of this came up as i was in the middle of looking into some things that i’ve been wanting for christmas, and i was like “yes! this is the best christmas present ever!” … but it turned out to be a lie.

any ideas on how i can fenangle this, anyone?

in other news, i was a fantastic eleanor roosevelt! i’m thinking about wearing the costume again and making cubbie take pictures of me wearing it, because it’s pretty darn cute. i got a lot of compliments on the outfit, and it sounds like my fairly unrehearsed presentation was amusing and educational. woo! one course down.

i’ve had some trouble with the “diversity:” courses in the past, so i was feeling fairly trepid, but it went well – really well. sausa offered a class that catered to people with all ranges of experience around trans issues – managing to both engage people who were new to trans experiences and also to offer relevant information for people with pasts in trans organizing and education. yay.

i’ve gained more resources to use in my education, and (hopefully) folks newer to these issues will have found an impetus to their working with them further.

perhaps my favorite part of the class was when sausa brought up different theories of gender. one of them was dylan vade’s concept of a gender galaxy… and the other, my favorite, comes from my favorite genderqueer rockstar, lynn(ee) breedlove. this is the “nesting doll” theory of gender, which i was immediately attracted to – if just because the czech parts of my family inundated me with matryoshka dolls as a child. so, this theory revolves around there being many layers of gender. in a sketch, breedlove suggests that hir tiniest inner gender is “peter pan – a young boy, always played by a woman” and that on the outside they’re unka lynnee, who is made up of all of those inner parts. of course, there are seven or eight other gender identites in between those – and for everybody, there is a different set of dolls. this concept makes me want to do art, to do paintings or molds or mini-statues (um, figurines?) of my own gender makeup. apparently breedlove was in class last semester to do their comedy routine about this. it’s probably the best thing that i wasn’t there for that one, as breedlove makes me fairly weak at the knees.

umm, where was i going here? oh! one of the folks in the class was touched by a lot of the exercises, to the point where they realized that they really did need to come out to their family. the wistful “i wish my parents could have been here!” made me realize that – hey! maybe their parents could be there… the course is going to be repeated on january sixth, from 10:00am to 6:00 pm. you should take it! it’d be something like $15 for california residents, $80 (i thiiink) for non-residents. thoughts?

City College of San Francisco:
IDST 80G Diversity: Transphobia 0.5 37954 W01 Lec SAT 10:00-06:00PM 01/06 BNGL Accessible: The classroom is fully ADA code compliant. Sausa, L

come visit us! come learn things. yes folks, that was an ad for my school.