ghosts are good company

“Someone like that, who does those kind of things, and goes out in public, knows full well that this might happen to him.”

a nineteen-year-old from puerto rico was horribly murdered last week. the above statement was from the local police investigator assigned to the case.

nobody deserves that treatment, that bias. but the sentiment happens world-wide.

it’s the trans day of remembrance.

this is the eleventh year of transfolks worldwide making a conscious effort to get together on the same day and remember their dead.

too many people are killed, (unsurprisingly) skewed largely toward transwomen of color.

there are vigils today, yeah, you can vigil at home, but to me this is a day to be with your people and love them,

and then think about who aren’t your people.

who’s not with you? how can you expand your world to include everybody? how can we work together to stop folks from slipping through the cracks?

i’m caught between an idealistic “don’t ever let your posse be alone” with a feminist “i should be able to be alone if i fucking want to.” how can we unite those concepts by making the streets safe for everyone?

gender jam is this weekend, but that kind of space needs to be available to folks always. how can we create immediate support while still maintaining hope and building toward long-term change?

three things for you to work on tonight: light a candle. change the world. keep breathing.

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.

i have been very anxious and avoidant lately, which makes the world pretty awesome. it’s that time of the quarter – the new!shiny! aspect of it all has worn off, and very few of the classes are as great as i was hoping. still, i have a new momentary excitement, which is that i have a topic for my Big Paper for one of my classes. i’m going to look at gender variance and tricksters, since… those are, you know, things that this trannypuck is interested in. i’m a little worried about the trickster as a racialized entity, but since it shows up in so many cultures… that would be an interesting thing to research on its own. it’s kind of exciting to have a paper idea that actually feels like it could easily fill its required length.

so that’s exciting, and graduating in a few weeks is exciting, but oh my goodness the stress has been killing me. i’ve had two migraines since getting here (it’s a good thing i’ve still got my medication-toting habit, since it’s been at least three years since i’ve had one), and my body has been wracked with acid. fortunately, i’ve only had one actual panic attack, and even that was… under special circumstances.

work is over after friday, a ‘good while it lasted but oh golly glad it’s gone’ type thing. i still haven’t heard from either of my summer programs to know if i should, you know, buy a plane ticket… if things don’t pan out there, i’m thinking of staying in washington and maybe doing americorps or something, but i really wish that i had any sort of idea at all when i would hear from the programs!!

yep. here’s me frustrated. i’ve been knitting a lot (a lot) to try to keep calm – it’s not a horrible thing, really. it’s kind of fun to follow patterns, that is my new knitting thing.

i want to remember to share with you: some pictures, stuff from the kimya show, and… what the tinies i live with did for my birthday. these are all Important Things that i should get to once the world shifts back into… whatever the second-highest gear is.

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.

i am first on the waitlist still, but nowwww the program leaves in less than a month! so chances that i’m going look very. slim.

which leads me to: do i want to graduate in six years but with this awesome gender and sexuality program last on my transcript? or do i just want to freaking graduate already, by taking whatever at evergreen this spring?

the latter is quite appealing (except that the only program that really excites me is this one? but.)… i could still go to amsterdam, it would cost the same (evergreen would want tuition to put it on my transcript anyway), and i could have a college degree. wouldn’t that be nice.

p.s. jaci, there was no way for me to refrain from stealing your boat (garage) for this post. i love you.

not too long ago, i posted about how fantastic my experience with the buffy musical on the big screen has been.

i went again for its second night in san diego, and it was even more awesome than the first – there had definitely been a lot of word of mouth at work, and the crowd was super pumped. it made me happy, and glad that i had sat in the front row and as such could see everything.

and it was good.

and it is gone.

the curator, if you will, of the buffy musical sing-a-long has been notified that “Fox has pulled the license for ALL their TV shows from theatrical exhibition.”

and that pisses me off, because these things have been bringing together some awesome community. usually i hate online petitions, but i signed this one.

in non buffy news, i can’t go skate tonight because of my broken butt.

grr. arg.

i just got out of a hot bath and into dirty clothes. tonight my mother and i are staying at the serrano hotel, which has lovely deep bathtubs – with enough hot water! at my apartment, you have to turn the water to its hottest possible to get anything near a nice bath, and then pretty soon it’s cold.

when we started planning my move, she booked this room with two beds just in case i wanted to stay. it’s good she did, because everything i own is now stuffed into a cheerful ten-foot u-haul truck. a year ago i drove my car down to san diego to sell, and now i’m driving my whole life down there. from here i can see the building in which everything i own is parked, but i can’t see my truck. it worries me – but not as much as parking the truck in front of my tenderloin apartment does.

i should sleep, as i need to be up in five-and-a-half hours to clean (after three hours sleep last night, awesome), but i wanted to check in and tell you that, hurrah hurrah and hallelujah, there will be no ore packing updates from me here. for now.

oh! and my mother was a sweetheart, after me bitching all day, and took us out to dinner at the tonga room. she mentioned as we walked in that she expected birds to start talking – and it was indeed as awesome as hoped.

i hurt everywhere, folks. soon my move will be over, and the world will be happier.

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.

things are feeling a little better, planswise – i had double advice to let time figure things out, so while that’s hard to explain to people sometimes… that’s what i’m doing. mostly. :D

tonight i made seitan. well, today i made a few things. we had a stale loaf of bread, so i had some of that for lunch with garlic and butter, and then i wanted to make…. something… so i made breadcrumbs and then wanted something to fry in them, so i made seitan. it wasn’t from the ppk recipe, which i had used before, but it was very similar…. here! i used garlic instead of powdered garlic, and… we didn’t have some of the flavorings, so i used extra veggie stock for simmering. and molasses. it turned out fine, a bit soy saucey (becuase i used the high end of the suggested amount – i wanted flavrs!) and was completely underwhelming when baked in breadcrumbs. alas. now we have a bowl of seitan and a bowl of garlic butter in the fridge. i’m not sure what to do with them, but it’ll be… something. i stood on the phone with my father and cataloged things i could cook in breadcrumbs – green beans? a beet? squash? … none of them seemed appetizing. i wouldn’t have done well cooking on rations.

tomorrow i have a midterm, and then after that hopefully maybe i will go to a self defense training for trans and genderqueer folks. we discussed hate crimes in one of my classes recently, and that was a major suggestion (of course) for survival. but, i’ve never felt comfortable in any of the self-defense classes that i’ve taken. this one seems like it would be optimal, but it actually starts *during* the midterm. rawr, says dinosaur puck.

sleeping is optimal for children and other living things. and extinct things. including dinosaurs. goodnight or goodmorning or whatever works for you. xo