ghosts are good company

every so often, my favorite comic publishes a(nother) strip that makes me squeal “that’s my (new) favorite!” … i’ll admit that i was really behind on things, since it was published more than a year ago, but this is my favorite.  the trouble with claiming a favorite, though, is that not long after, i always find one like this one which argues and tries to take its place.

i save comics that i like a lot, so that i can devour in batches when i am sad about things like how my great-grandmother just had a stroke.

my small orange friend is back in town, which is fantastic.  he is getting along well in our new household.  i bought a car.  that’s how he got up here, me driving for thirteen hours from san francisco to olympia.  it was a good idea in my head.

it seems like my new apartment comes with built-in trans friends, and also crafty friends?  so that is pretty neat of it.  i’ve been stepping up my knitting game due to peer pressure, yarn donations and halloween (all combine, actually, to equal - remember what i said last year?).  knitting is good.

this is like i’ve taken all of my boring entries and combined them into one meta-boring-entry.  i mean, i got bored in the middle of it.  i’m going to go back to cleaning the house, and you know that means something.

a few years ago i started a trans group at my college… now my baby group has grown up without me, and i’m back with exciting plans. the first year we did an open mic focusing on people talking about their bodies, generally specific parts of them. this quarter, i want to do it again, with a lot of prep time and beauty. we’re meeting tomorrow to iron more stuff out, and i’ve scheduled space for on editing workshop at the end of april. what’s next on the list is, of course: a name.

i was drawn the body project, until i remembered… that’s a book. that i just purchased for class. which you can see in the video in my last post. the body monologues is just too… yeah. i’m thinking maybe bodies talk? but that seems a little too talking heads. i want… something inviting and fairly obvious to folks seeing the fliers, something that mayyybe gets into gender, but also is open to other folks - largely this is about how people experience the world through their bodies, and how those bodies affect those experiences.

maybe i need to pull out a thesaurus. hmm.

moral of the story: advice, please?

and so it goes. it’s olympia, it’s raining. i can hear the rain on my balcony. i’ve moved into a house just above the fourth avenue bridge, with: two cats, three kids, four dogs and, come may, five adults. my room is pretty big - maybe twelve by eighteen, or a little bigger (larger than two pucks plus three pucks), plus closets. it’s got nicely green walls, two redorange doors, and a yellow ceiling, which matches the trim on the windows and th balcony doors. it might be hailing, actually; the rain is bouncing a bit more than usual.

at first i thought there was no wireless here, but there is and that is helpful - for one of my classes our weekly assignments are primarily blog-based, which makes sense. for another i have to have a livejournal, which makes less sense.

all of my classes seem pretty awesome, which is delightful. five courses means scads of reading, but it should be good. i’m trying to not get too distracted by student activities and such this quarter, but i have a plan simmering for a giant final project for myself/STAR (my trans group grew up without me!). if i want to make it happen i have to start NOW (after i get my homework for this week in order), so i need to decide if i want to commit as much time as it needs. i’m currently trying to have my entire College Experience As a Single Person in one quarter, so that’s exhausting in itself.

there is a corgi demanding my attention. i must go.

hi blog!

things are fine, the world has been proceeding normally without you. i’m heading up to evergreen on fool’s day - although it sounds all like a hoax, since i don’t actually have a place to live, i’m hoping to find some sort of stability once i’m there. i’m registered for eighteen credits at the moment, waiting to get through a wait list to bump it back down to sixteen - i’m taking enough credits to graduate just in case amsterdam doesn’t work out, as it has a tendency… not to, and considering the state of the dollar.

the trans leadership summit was a fantastic experience, and i’m lucky to have been able to go. i made the acquaintance of some great people, and got back in touch with folks i’d lost touch with. i was able to find genderqueers again (it’s lonely down here in san diego) and learned a lot, much of which was a reminder of the binaries and biases within the trans community. i had to walk out of a workshop which began with discussion of how badly the hrc had done with enda - and ended with the conclusion that perhaps the trans community would do better if we had the “normal” trans folks step up in the media, and let the “militant genderqueers” be out of the spotlight. so that “the mainstream” doesn’t think that the whole trans community is made up of “freaks” [like me*]?

i was enraged, and wrote an impassioned piece about it while i was on the plane, and then my computer deleted it. that’s what i get for writing in a program that doesn’t auto save.

i’m going to be updating wordpress sometime in the next few days, so if things get bumpy over in greendinoville, that’s why.

tonight i’m making buttons for the rubber rose (they made my button-helpers volunteers of the month for february, and that makes me happy) and tomorrow i’m going to the getty with my family! yay for things!

the birds are twittering outside. happy spring. i’m looking for the perfect daffodil header for my blog - which i recall doing last year as well…

* don’t you wish your partner was a. i was lucky that this rage was mostly productive, it’s the kind where i got pissed off and motivated, rather than pissed off and depressed.

tho bout was crazy. mad. wonderful. i got to work the door, organizing lines and making people sign waivers… it’s an overwhelming job. i spent the afternoon running up and down lines and bellowing news - we were sold out, we might be able to let a few more people it, we were really truly officially sold out. it was very strange to have interacted with nearly everyone by the time i sat down.

this week is calmer. no more flower job, less social plans. i’m waiting for my outdoor wheels to show up so that i can skate without paying the rink. i asked my grandmother if she wanted to come to skate lessons tonight, but… she didn’t.

my scarf is something like four feet long now, so that’s amazing to look at - knitting is really a place where you can keep an eye on your progress, where there is instant validation, if you will.

i’ve been planning my next few months, year or so, and i’m hopeful. i’m great at plans, and every so often i can make them pan out. this feels like one of those times - trans leadership summit is coming up, then evergreen, then summer. amsterdam. something. i’ve been eying a bunac visa for after amsterdam, i want to take a look at british housing/employment stuff and see if i could actually make it happen.

this is the part where i wiggle with potential.

oh, hi blog!

lately i’ve had Too Much Staring At A Computer Syndrome, which i don’t think will go away anytime soon, what with the 35 hours of computer-staring i’m scheduled for next week. ah, well, at least they’re giving me money for it.

they’re also allowing me to knit in between jobs, which is great. i made a baby hat for a baby who is due to arrive a few months from now - the hat looks like this except more baby-sized - and am currently working on a scarf for my unclestephen.

stephen approached me at christmas about making him a checkered scarf and i said “sure, that’ll be easy!” before realizing that frankly, no. that would be confusing. i tried everything i could think of - stranded colorwork in the round, stranded colorwork to be folded over, just making three striped scarfs and then crocheting them together - before heading back to what i had been avoiding all along: double knitting.

i was avoiding it because it seemed harrrrd, and confusing, and (shh) sometimes i forget how to purl. the knittinghelp video on doubleknitting didn’t help much either because “um, i thing i messed up” in the middle doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?

eventually i found the stitchdiva tutorials and, while i was still confused, decided to give it a go. and now i’m this far! …and excessively proud of myself.

other things going: Plans for school might work out, apparently i could have walked at graduation last year, and i’m excited and nervous about heading up to the bay area next month for the trans leadership summit.

and those are things.

i have a challenge between making this blog [my] “family friendly” and making it… about much of my life. but i guess since folks wouldn’t know me very well at all without knowing this, i spend the vast majority of my social time engaged it trans community activism and/or at the “local queerlady-owned sexuality boutique” - “a sex store even your mother would love.”

partially i bring this up because they (the rubber rose, the store mentioned above), just hosted the annual traveling roadshow that is the sex worker’s art show. i’ve been four out of the last five years now, and this year i had the most fun (even though nomy lamm wasn’t on the tour), largely because carly and lea (see above queerladies) made it such an awesome environment.

i attribute the environment mostly to lea and carly, even though the show was at a different venue, because it had the same spirit of delight, enthusiasm, and wonder that makes all of the rubber rose’s events awesome. still, it was missing as much of a feeling of power (youtube, sound) as some of their past events. the show was at a different venue becauuuuse the rubber rose has permit Issues. due to their being an “adult business” apparently there is a whole laundry list of things that are not allowed in their performance space. which drives me crazy.

ah, well. if you haven’t missed it yet, go see the art show. and if you’re in the area, go give the rubber rose some money. because i can’t. because i still don’t have a job. awesome!! oh: and official no-go on amsterdam today. double-awesome.

i decided to backpedal - um, skate backward - with my skating practice. i’ve been going to boot camp with the san diego derby dolls off and on, but having trouble there because i’m Just Not Good Enough. so i decided (on the recommendation of a skater who used to live in s.d. but has recently moved down from san francisco…) to try out the Adult Skating Lessons at skateworld. they’re shorter, cheaper, and more geared to people my level - and also a totally different kind of workout! we were doing a “scissor” thing around the rink, where you use your legs to move your feet out and in without lifting them up? and ow, my thighs. i don’t get this much of a thigh workout just striding.

so that hurts. but also, i managed to fall down and kick myself pretty hard in the inner-thigh. no wonder derby’s hardcore, if i can injure myself this much just on my own. i haven’t worn my skatetown shirt to the rink yet (it was a “paulie bleeker is totally boss” day, so orange - but different orange), but i hope to soon.

and i did actually skate backward today! woo!

there’s been discussion lately about “yo” as an organically developing gender neutral pronoun, but none of the discussion that i’ve seen really addresses race or class issues, which i find… fascinating… especially considering the demographics of the communities contriving other gender neutral pronouns so far.

(note my not addressing it either? i’m just bringing it up for people to think about what connotations “yo” has in their minds.)

i’m still an epicene “they,” myself, and damn anyone who tries to tell me that it’s grammatically incorrect. they seem like probably the people who would make sad faces at me if i took “it” instead, and if they want to find something 1) grammatically correct 2) not dehumanizing 3) that flows well in language, i welcome them to go ahead - and tell me when they’ve found it.

my alarm is set for six hours and forty-two minutes from now. i have a job (for a week), which is a pretty awesome thing because it means, mostly, five hundred plus more dollars than i had before.

unfortunately, i am already spending some of that money in my head… i’m wanting to buy roller derby pads, probably from sin city skates. expensive, but important.

jorb is good for structure. i’ve been better at getting getting things done just knowing that it’s coming - making things ready for the next day, sure, but also cleaning the house. it’s crazy, how important it can be to have something to work toward.

that said, though, my sleep schedule still isn’t working. i trained for two hours today and then came home and accidentally napped for five hours. i just downloaded an alarm clock for my computer, so hopefully that will help, but still - obnoxious.

saturday: my mum has a hair appointment at nine downtown. at eleven downtown there is a tranny picnic (until two, i think). at one, a tiny we know is being baptized. at five-thirty, there’s a tranny meeting. of course saturday is the day we decided to go to the padres game…

sunday: knitting. it was fun this week, i went with my aunt. i was afraid they’d make fun of my garter stitch scarf, but they really liked it. nobody could advise me on fulling, but someone taught me how to do an i-cord. and then i taught some other people. there were six new people there, including my aunt and i - and maybe twenty people there total. crazy! we left three hours after it started and they were still knitting like mad.