ghosts are good company

last night i had a long and complicated dream, which isn’t so surprising… the surprising part is that i then remembered this dream when i woke up. this isn’t so much the “look at what a wacky dream i had” narrative as it is a “what does this mean about waking life?”

because in this dream i was having an argument with someone who was in to me, liked me a lot, wanted to be my friend, but flatly refused to accept that i was part of the trans community.

… and this is something that i’ve been worrying about a lot lately, as i explore what it means to be largely femme-identified in a female body. in my burlesque class i’ve been trying to choose between two pieces – one that’s pretty much just high femme, and one that’s obviously a genderqueer commentary. my analysis of these two pieces is that the genderqueer one would be easier and probably more interesting, and that the femme one would be more challenging, but also potentially boring.

i’m in burlesque 101 to challenge myself (i’m in this world to challenge myself?), but also to increase my strength as a performer. i was thinking seriously about starting hormones a few months ago, when i realized that the only thing holding me back was fear of societal repercussion (the alternate word that i was going to put there was “asshattery”)… i think that somehow i’ve come to believe that if i’m not challenged, if i’m comfortable, things aren’t worth my time.

this is everywhere in my life – work, relationships, gender – and it has such an amazing contradiction with my agoraphobia, i can’t even begin to fathom. i wonder if it comes from judging myself harshly for letting the agoraphobia win and not facing the challenges? and i wonder how the hell i might try to beat it.

this isn’t at all where i thought this entry was going to go. it was initially just going to be a reassertion of my place in the trans/gender/queer community, my role as a “militant genderqueer” … but then i wonder, if i feel the need to constantly remind everybody that i belong… am i feeling like i belong? obviously not. i have no way of knowing what everybody else is feeling, but i keep distancing myself from transmasculine spaces in particular because of my femme presentation – but other than being the most femme gay guy you might ever meet, i’m also pretty darn gay and man.

i don’t know, sweethearts. i have no idea.

i didn’t get the job. i mean, i might get the job in the future. but they’re not going to hire me as immediately as they had suggested. so i’m frustrated, and not sure where to go from here with some of my plans.

nat came home today and excitedly announced that he was surprising me with dinner guests (or an invitation to be dinner guests? i wasn’t paying too much attention, because). the response he got was perhaps not as he expected, as it involved me groaning (and whining!) in a fetal position. after consultation with said potential dinner companion as to where a low income health clinic could be found (yay after-hours and the lack of health insurance) and a visit to the doctor (i hate doctor visits), it was determined that i had a bladder infection. go go team awesome. i’m feeling a little better now, still not-so-great but stunned by nat’s rockstardom around a medical ‘emergency’ and the related anxiety/incompetence that builds in me around medical situations.

it was my mom’s birthday yesterday! it sounds like she had a great day, which is what she deserves. part of the frustration with changing plans is that i was hoping to see her this weekend, and now i’m not sure if i should head down there or not.

those are the things on my mind, this 3:35am. i’m heading back to sleep, and hope that your rest is better than mine.

although it’s been raining wonderfully for the past seven hours, and that’s perfect.

you should really just be glad that i haven’t posted thus far this month, because this may has been perhaps the saddest month ever.

i got this link from my friend jaci. the simple origins of this link on seattle’s social dysfunction are telling – jaci and i met online when i was in tenth grade. she was blogging out of kent(?) and i was blogging out of dash point and it took me moving away from seattle and moving back for us to meet. jaci is one of my best friends, and yet we have immense difficulty getting together (when i’m in town) – it seems like with all of my friends, there is a challenge of figuring how to go from wanting to do something to actually doing it. jaci and i talked about getting together for literal years before we did.

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine : Our Social Disease

“There’s no sexual energy here at all,” he says. Seattle is “a city of the mind . . . a city of geeks. People here . . . they totally blow you off. And these are good friends, right? They just don’t call you. It’s unbelievable.”

i see this with all of my friends from seattle, and i wonder how it affects me as somebody who has moved to other cities but remains rooted in the emerald city (emeralds are beautiful but cold).

Seattle is like that popular girl in high school. The one who gets your vote for homecoming queen because she always smiles and says hello. But she doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to. She doesn’t want to be your friend. She’s just being nice.

there’s been this trouble with me and people. in large communities (high school, and college), there’s this thing where everybody seems to know me. this would be great, but i don’t know them. i don’t know why i know them. but i say hi and i will chat with them… and i won’t know who they are and i probably won’t remember them the next time we have the same awkward but pleasant conversation. did i mention that i was prom king? i was just being nice.

i chat with people on the buses here. in elevators, cubbie and i have had good conversations with people. i made my best contacts in a series of one-day classes, while not really connecting to people in my long-term classes. i have email addresses for those people, but i haven’t yet contacted those folks – even though i’ve blogged about how great the last class was – and i’ll probably lose the addresses before i use them.

what is that? blaming it on seattle seems useful. cubbie talked about how much trouble he had socializing when we moved here, but i didn’t hear anything about that when he moved to seattle. more than once i’ve remarked on how amazing it is that cubbie wasn’t a native seattleite. i am fascinated.

one of my favorite stories to tell is about how i cope with my agoraphobia by befriending people in public. this summer, cubbie and i went to see kimya dawson and the mountain goats at neumos (why must they have a scary clown on their webpage?! oh look, mountain goats are playing there on march first. that means they’re playin *here* march seventh through ninth! delightful.). we got there early and, feeling very awkward, i wandered over to find some comfort in the presence of kimya – who is a friend, in the she – is – very – popular – and – has – a – lot – of – people – who – want – to – be – her – friends – so – that – she – is – nice – to – me – but – probably – doesn’t – remember – my – name sense. see above, i suppose (this is also such a weird time, mediawise, for being friends with your heroes). so we chatted and i chatted with people around her and i felt better, and then cubbie came back (from where?) and so we found a place in front of the stage and set up camp, maybe sitting on the floor (which is a conversation-starter in itself. on our first date we sat on the floor in front of the stage before the show and met all of our neighbors), and eventually got to know the people standing next to us, who were super cool and really helped the show be more fun. they were more into the mountain goats and we were more into kimya, so averaging that out meant that we were all super excited about everything. they offered us alcohol which we didn’t take and we all got along and had a lot of fun. which was more fun than just getting mad at them for shoving us. and the moral of the story? is that we never knew their names. and we never saw them again.

i have better relationships with strangers than i do with my friends, i suppose is the point here. i’m fascinated by what my seattle family might have to say about this. anyone? (beuller?)

i’ve been having trouble sleeping, so i’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately. tonight i took a bath and finished (re-)reading my copy of genderqueer. the article about transy house, which is on page 297, i think, if you want to read it in google books. they have a cooperative house that operates in a family structure. the author of the piece owns the house, and discusses how wearing it can be, but the piece is so very full of hope. combining thought about that with the way that babies have been stars in the media that i’ve been consuming lately (the baby on lost is being baptized as i write this) and the dufty-goldfaber baby – oh, also and tango makes three… i’ve been in community baby-raising mood. i suppose it could also be that one of the guys we are hoping will be helping us with hypothetical child(ren) was (maybe is?) in town – and that cubbie is becoming friends with one of his friends who might want to carry a baby… so yeah. babystuff like woah.

i also think that cubbie and i should get registered as domestic partners soon. legal paperwork is good, sometimes – i also want to start thinking about what would be necessary should this type of baby-housing arrangement ever happen. eep.

anyhow, i’ve been doing crazily at school. i think i’m going to make twelve credits this quarter (after having originally registered for seventeen), and i should really pull eighteen credits next semester. i think i can do that, at least if most of them are online.

here are the classes that i’m looking at:

online
intro. to les/bi/gay/trans studies (3 credits)
mass media and society (3 credits)
racial and ethnic groups in the us (3 credits)
strategies for problem studies (2 credits)

in-person
aids in america (3 credits, wednesdays 6:30-9:30)
anthropology of homosexualities (3 credits, mondays 6:30-9:30)
supporting lgbt families in early childhood education (3 credits, tuesdays 6:00-9:00)
diversity: racism (.5 credits, 9:00-1:00, march 3&10)
diversity: classism (.5 credits, 9:00-1:00, february 3&10)

i could pick up a one-credit class if i wanted to get rid of the diversities (they’re early! it’s saturday! i have to get up at seven to get there on time!) in addition to one of the three-credits… i’m thinking that the e.c.e. class might not be for me. i think the best plan is to rank them and see what classes i can get, since my registration date is really late.

anyhow. i need to do better in school next semester, and then i need to graduate, and then i need to do well this summer, and then i need to do… something. and then maybe i’ll feel like i know what’s going on.