Winter reading

I read a little bit, but truth is, not that much.  Sitting around at my mother’s house this winter though, I had more time on my hands than usual, and I read a few books I wouldn’t have read otherwise.  Books in the photo are some of them, not all.  I just looked around quickly and gathered some up for this photo.

Ok, honestly, I didn’t even read all of these.

“They Wrote on Clay,” I didn’t read.  Mom pulled that book off her shelf when we were talking about ancient writing and we glanced over it looking at the examples of cuneiform and talking about the differences between different cuneiform writings.

“The Story of the Clipper Ship” is a fast easy read.  It’s a fun little synopsis of the clipper ship era.  I’ve always loved clipper ships.  As a child I built a couple of those 3 ft Revell plastic models and at one time knew the names of all the sails.

“Guns, Germs, and Steel” is an amazing whirlwind tour and interpretation of the history of civilization.  It inspired lots of conversation with my mom, including the ones mentioned here about writing.

“Radical Knowing,” I tried, but just couldn’t get into it.  It’s philosophy, and I just haven’t figured out how to appreciate philosophy yet.

“Radical Evolution” is about the coming technological singularity.  I believe this stuff already, so the book was preaching to the choir with me.  It seemed a good book, but I was bored with the old news and didn’t read very far.

“Godel, Escher, Bach,” I read long ago and I loved it.  I pulled this one off the shelf during our discussion of writing because I remembered it had a page illustrating diverse scripts of different languages.

“Night and Low Light Digital Photography,” my mom picked for me at the library.  I was an interesting contrast to Jill Waterman’s book that I bought last year.  While both books talked about both technical and artistic aspects, this book focused more on the technical aspects.  I liked Jill’s book better.

“City In Time” was so engaging, I grabbed my mom and made her go through the book with me.  It is a book of pairs of photos, one historic, and one recent.

Peterson’s “Field Guide to Western Birds” is a classic.  No I didn’t read it cover to cover, but did dig through it a bit trying to identify birds we saw out the back window of the house.

“Jane Eyre,” required reading.  Wonderful book.  Just read it.

“The Other Boleyn Girl” was fascinating and a great read.  It’s history with a bit of conjecture, thus forcing it to be categorized “historical fiction” with the standard disclaimer that all persons are fictional.  It was also fun to find the movie version on cable tv while I was there.

“The Secret Life of Bees” was absolutely delightful.  Another one I highly recommend.

“The Law of Love” I read some time ago.  I pulled it out again to refresh my memory of the historical period.  This, after reading something in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” or perhaps after some conversation with my mom about the European conquest of the Americas.

“The Alchemist’s Daughter,” more empowering fiction.  Very good.

The two Boyd books, “My Husband Betty” and “She’s Not the Man I Married,” were fantastic.  Absolutely required reading for any married crossdresser, but highly, highy recommended for anyone interested in gender.

Of books not pictured here, most memorable was Michner’s “Chesapeake.”  Just wonderful.

Low Point

Just a little note that I am feeling more defeated than I ever have in my life. I do expect to die a long slow very horrible very painful death. Not some time in the future, but now. That’s “now” as in “in progress.”

Pain and misery started a year ago when I was suffering from then-undiagnosed cancer, was sent to jail, and lost my home. I have not since had the means to support myself, not had the means to hire lawyers who could get the law off of my back, and only about half of that time have had access to medical treatment for my cancer. I live with a raving lunatic (yes, literally raving–shouting nonsense 60 seconds per minute, x60×24x7×365, and yes, literally insane–incapable of meaningful social interaction with sane people, and incapable of caring for herself.)

I’m talking about Jessica here. She’s ADHD and OCD and doesn’t feed herself, bathe without prompting, wear clean clothes, sleep on clean sheets, or use clean towels. OCD means she rants about insignificant things in the world, displays indescribably bizarre behavior, and insists everyone around her appease her desires. She occasionally gets violent if anyone around her protests following her incessant and random whims.

This house is scary beyond belief. The whole structure slopes and leans at an alarming angle. It is the filthiest place I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s packed with clutter. I have no bed here. In the past I’ve slept in Jessica and Stacy’s filthy bed with them. I’m currently sleeping on a folding cot. Why do I live here? Because I have no money. My other choices have been homeless shelters, or jail, depending on whether or not I’ve had arrest warrants. Currently, the choice is jail. Neither a homeless shelter nor jail is an allowable residence to my employer. Basically I’ve lied to them for the last year, saying this is my residence. Basically I’ve lied to everyone saying this is my residence. I don’t claim this place as home and I never have. I hate this place. Jail was nicer. It was more sanitary, the food was better, the inmates smelled better, and they could carry on more intelligent conversation. Don’t get me wrong, jail is not a nice place. It’s just that this place is worse.

Jail I think is my only choice currently. I have no money to hire a lawyer to keep me out of jail. I know when I left Massachusetts, they wanted to give me a 120 day sentence. With out a lawyer to fight it, I expect them to give me that plus more.

My health is bad and I expect it to get worse in jail. The cancer doesn’t grow very fast, but I know it’s growing and I sense it. I don’t know how much I imagine and how much is real, but I know some of it is real. I developed a sore shoulder around the first of the year. No idea the cause of it. I can’t think of any way I could have possibly injured it. Having my hands handcuffed behind my back is going to cause lots of pain in this shoulder. Oh well. I expect worse pain is on the way as my health deteriorates.

I’m fucked. I am so fucked.

Communication skills

Amanda and I had another girls day out last Thursday.  At the end of the day she sent me home with a couple of books of hers, Helen Boyd’s “My Husband Betty” and “She’s Not The Man I Married.”  I’m part way into MHB now, and of course it’s as good as I had heard.  One point Helen makes early in the book is that cross dressers are no different from other men in that they often lack communication skills.  I think I’m the worst person I know in this area.

Unrelated, on the Tiffany Club mailing list this morning was a post by Michael calling for recognition of friends who had dropped out of visibility because of health reasons, and he offered Francis as an example of someone who shouldn’t be forgotten.

So the two incidents together put me in my place.  I’m dying of cancer too.  I might like attention too.  Just one little problem:  I’ve rejected all of my friends by ignoring them and being uncommunicative.  I can hardly expect public attention when I reject private and personal attention.  I can hardly expect to have friends after treating them so badly.

I happened to be invisible on Yahoo Messenger at the moment.  I don’t usually hang out invisible there, but I’d started it up earlier thinking I might chat with Amanda.  I saw Rita come on line and messaged her.  We chatted for a bit and I gave her a very brief update on my situation.  She knew a lawyer that might help me.  That made me think of Deedee.  If I’m using friends to help me find a lawyer, Deedee should be first.  I emailed Deedee.  I’m also not sure I should be staying in Massachusetts.  If Massachusetts is aggressive enough, they would track me down and arrest me.  Providence is a possibility.  I could stay out of state mostly, and take the train in as needed–without showing ID.  I emailed Jean then.  A short email, just to say hello.  I didn’t mention fears of arrest and so on.

There.  I contacted three friends.  Granted, with ulterior motives in each case, and not out of selfless friendship.  But still, it’s a start.

House cleaning

Here is a post I started in March of 2008 and never finished.  I know I’d planned on writing more.  Hopefully I also would have reworked parts of it, as reading it now, some of the arguments aren’t quite coherent yet.  It’s not my usual journal entry, it’s a bit of a rant, not exactly an essay.  Anyway, here’s what I had sitting around as a draft for nearly a year now.

There is no right

Horror

A while back I got a message from my dear friend Trina, with the simple, out of context, plea, “Sonia? Tell me you’re happy. I need to know.” Inquiring as to what she talking about, I learned she was upset over news that a friend of hers who had had surgery and transitioned from male to female, had now returned to living as a male.

Oh, the horror at having made such a terrible mistake! Having to live now with a ruined body. That’s why the SOC is so important, right? To prevent such tragedies by screening out the people for which would fail in transition and have to forever be…broken.

We talked and I ended up getting so mad that I ended the conversation. I disagree with just about every premise in the above paragraph. I asked Trina, “so, is she really sad?” “Well…she must be!” she answered. “But have you talked to her? Did she actually say that she regrets having had her surgery?” To Trina, it was tautological that since her friend is now living as a guy, that she must regret it. I kept trying to argue things like, “But what if she lived for a year as a woman and that was the happiest year of her life and she wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world?” What if she’s ok with her body today, ok with having a little secret in her pants. What if she’s ok with that and with correcting me on my pronouns, saying “I prefer to be addressed with male pronouns these days. Yes, even by my dear TS friends who know my history. I loved my year as a woman. Now I love being a man.” Isn’t it possible that he sees no horror in this? No mistake, no tragedy? That he doesn’t consider himself ruined or broken? Here are some cases I can see where he would be ruined:

1. His sole ambition is to be a male porn star. If he can’t do that, his life has no meaning and he wishes to die.
2. His sole ambition is to impregnate a woman. If he can’t do that, his life has no meaning and he wishes to die.

Oh, he doesn’t fall into either of those categories? Well let me point out the true horror here: It is gender variance itself, as seen through the eyes of the gender-binary majority. This non-variant majority is progressive enough these days to support a don’t ask don’t tell policy with transsexuals, as long as they transition invisibly from one side of the gender binary to the other, as long as they are intensely discouraged from doing this, and as long as the few who persevere the gauntlet of the SOC receive the punishment of being banned forever from their birth assigned gender and banned forever from reproducing. The horror in the case of Trina’s friend is the failure of the SOC to prevent this victim of self-mutilation from walking among us.

Consider the term “Sex Reassignment Surgery.” On the surface, this term is nonsense. “Assignment” is a logical operation. It means associating something with something else in some sense that is conceptual or clerical. “Surgery” is physical operation. The two are in different realms. There is nothing abstract or theoretical about surgery; and conversely, there is no cutting or burning involved in assignment. Something is going unsaid here. What? Look at exactly what kind of assignment we are talking about here. We are talking about the ‘M’ or ‘F’ on legal documents. A doctor assigns us M or F when we are born. Under what circumstances can we be reassigned? It turns out that society allows exactly one circumstance! The conditions for this circumstance are that a doctor perform surgery on us, and then sign papers declaring that the surgery successfully achieved the effect of changing the sex in a way that is permanent and irreversible. Ah, so there is the meaning of the whole term! SRS is the surgery that the law requires for M/F reassignment.

Um, does anyone see problems?

But, you’re protesting, it is permanent and irreversible! You know what? All surgery is permanent. Bump your head, get a few stitches, and you will heal, but you’ll never be the same. There will be a little scar tissue there. Maybe you’ll be lucky and it will be undetectable to the unaided eye, but there will be some scar tissue there. You will never be the same. In fact, surgery isn’t even required. From what scientists tell us, the whole universe seems to be irreversible. Whatever happens today becomes permanently in the past, part of history, never to be changed. Let’s get specific. You can’t go back after a orchiectomy and say, “You know, I changed my mind. My sole ambition now is to impregnate a woman….” All arguments over specifics disintegrate into nonsense at this point.

Reading some blog comments about sex change requirements in other countries recently, I cringed when I saw them referred to as sterilization. Well, let’s not mince words! The law dictates that the price you must pay for your gender variance is to undergo sterilization. That is, we don’t want your type reproducing.

In the end, it’s not all about sterilization, it’s not all about the penis, it’s not all about genital mutilation, it’s not all about lying to gatekeepers and surviving a year of public humiliation to prove your sincerity. It’s about the horror.

These unfinished arguments weren’t all.  Here I had notes for two more points I wanted to make, but the notes don’t ring any bells anymore and I can’t remember what I was thinking.  So, sorry, that’s all for now. 

Friending

I have such mixed feelings about my latest bit of news:  Katelynn accepted my friend request.  Why the torment?  Lots of reasons.  I think most friend requests are silly acts of “collecting” people, just as badges saying look here at this sexy person I’m friends with!  The person collected gets a little quanta of ego.  My ego score is currently 242 on MySpace, for example.  Not bad at all considering that I very rarely initiate friend requests—most of those 242 are people who have friended me.  On MySpace there’s also the variant of that where fans collect their favorite celebrities.  The fan gets the badge, the celebrity gets a little quanta of fame.  I’m also tormented because I’m such a bad friend.  I feel like I have no business asking for another friend when I don’t take good care of the ones I have.  Nevertheless…I did it.  Katelynn seems such a cool person I couldn’t resist finding her online and sending a friend request.  And she accepted   I’m so happy.  So silly.

Outed myself

I inadvertently outed myself at the grocery story yesterday—as being not from around here—when I ordered a cappuccino from the deli counter at the grocery story.  Mom and I went to the grocery store a little after noon, and I, sleeping crazy hours lately, needed caffeine.  I had noticed before a coffee shop in the strip mall with the grocery store and I went there first.  The place was shuttered with a “for lease” sign in the window.  In the grocery store minutes later, catching up with mom and telling her about the closed coffee shop, our eyes wandered over the deli counter, which we happened to be in front of.  They had two big signs with all the kinds and sizes of coffee they had.  Who needs a coffee shop?  There was cappuccino on the menu, in two sizes.  “Can I help you?” the man asked.  “I’d like a cappuccino grande” I said.  Panic flooded his face.  He asked me to repeat what I said.  He looked at the sign.  He looked at me.  He read the sign again.  He grabbed another person working behind the counter and explained the problem to her.  “She wants a cappuccino.  Can you…”  The girl smiled, nodded to him and smiled at me.  She asked me again what I wanted, and then explained that they only had one size, showing me the paper cup.  I said that would be fine.  “And what kind of milk would you like?”  “Oh, whole milk please.”  She was staring motionless at a laminated sheet of bar codes in front of her.  Awkward pause.  “Is that what you asked?” I asked, suddenly unsure if I heard her right.  “Oh yes, yes…” she murmured.  And, “Ok, I’ll be right back, I have to get the, uh, supplies” and she dashed out from behind the counter and disappeared into the isles of the store.  The man left at the counter now took charge of the sheet of bar codes, studying it, then looking up at the sign with prices, looking over at the cash register, and repeating this whole sequence before telling me, “uh, you’ll have to wait for her to get back to enter the, uh, code for this”  and he excused himself and went off to attend to someone else.  After several minutes the girl returned with two half gallons of milk.  She asked me again, “now what was it you wanted?”  I repeated my order, and she looked thoughtful, determined, and went behind the counter to prepare it.  Not too many minutes later I heard the familiar sound of a cappuccino machine, and felt much more at ease.  I went to pay for it.  The girl entered codes in the cash register, said it would be $2.63, and seemed startled then that I had three dollars ready in my hand.  She made change, I got my cappuccino, and the adventure was over.  I walked away smiling, wondering how long it had been since someone had ordered a coffee drink other than “coffee” from that counter.  The cappuccino was fine, by the way.  Nothing great, but it made the grocery shopping much more enjoyable.

A week

Well, a little over a week by now.  This is how sparse my notes are:

Tuesday – lawyer, VR, chat over at midnight

Wednesday – Amanda party, home drunk, in bed relatively early

Thursday – email, longview, jerry’s, late chat

Friday – slept too late, chatted too late.

Sat – miss america, real world, no amanda.

Sun – real world episode 2.  still no amanda

Mon – amanda post

Tues – no photos for dave

Lets see how much I can remember now.  Tuesday I did meet with the lawyer.  I’d failed to set my alarm clock propery and my mom woke me at 10:15, the time when my sister was expected to be there to pick me up and give me a ride.  I think about seven minutes later I was ready and we hurried off, arriving at the lawyer’s office just barely at the appointed time.  News from the lawyer was mixed.  The judgment against me had been reduced to less than half of what it was before.  This was now an amount that I could possibly pay, whereas the previous judgement was more than my entire paycheck as a scientist.  (That deficit of course is what put me in jail and what would keep sending me back to jail indefinitely.)  Bad news was that while this sounds like progress, court officials had still ingored case law and state mandates, cheating me in two different ways.  One way cheats me out of $13,000.  The other way–completely on top of the $13,000 cheat–is that they are still calculating my judgment as if I held two full time jobs, making my full wage as a scientist for each.  Obviously, there is only one of me, only one job.  It’s totally illegal.  The lawyer recommends that I just accept that and don’t fight it.  There were other problems too…but I’m done writing about this for now.

On a much much lighter note.  VR stands for Vicki Rene.  Friends online were talking about Vicki Rene’s web site recently and I decided to ask her to list me.  She wrote back to me within 12 hours saying I would be listed on the next page update.  Withing 24 hours, she’d updated the page and I was there.  It’s a silly vanity thing, but hey, everyone’s doing it.

I’ve been chatting a lot lately on MySpace 4 T-Girls.  One of my main chat partners has been Amanda, and we both turned in early (midnight) that night because we had plans to meet the following day for lunch.  Really plans were to have a party at her house, but those kind of fell through.  Amanda, like me, is currently not working and the most convenient time for a party is a weekday during the day.  Well guess what, that’s not convenient for anyone else.  It ended up being just the two of us.  No matter, we had a blast.  Part of the party plans were to have a couple of people join us by web cam.  This worked very well.  We spent the afternoon on the computer together, on web cam together, eating pizza an drinking wine.  Enough fun, in fact, that our little party stretched on into the evening.  She got me home at 10:00, making our party nearly 12 hours.  Full of wine, I went to bed relatively early for the second night.

The email Thursday was lawyer related.  Longview is a nearby lake.  The weather was unseasonably warm that day and I suggested to my mom that we go for a walk at Longview Lake, which has a very nice path for walking.  Afterwards, we easily talked each other into going out for pizza instead of eating at home.  We went again to our pizza bar in Lees Summit, Jerry’s Bait Shop.  With more food and less alcohol this night than the night before, I fell right back into staying up late chatting.

Friday, chatting too late turned out to be too late for Amanda.  Her wife was at her Amanda limit.  We missed Amanda in chat the next night.  And the next.  Anyway, I liked the Miss America Pageant.  Hadn’t watched it in years, and it was very different.  For one, it’s now hosted by TLC, and had TLC all over it.  The format is different.  And of course most different was that for the first time, I was watching it as a woman myself.  Don’t know if I was supposed to, but I got a little teary right at the end.

After the pageant, I flipped over to MTV to watch The Real World.  The special attraction is Katelynn, TRW’s first ever transgender housemate.  Again, thanks to the internet, I had heard a few people talking about it and decided I had to watch.  Episode 3 was on.  I liked it enough that I went to the internet later and watched Episode 1 as well.  The next night I watched Episode 2 on the internet and was caught up.  I have to say that I was impressed with MTV’s casting of Katelynn and in general, their presentation of her.  Of course you can’t represent a large and diverse community with a single person, but as a first representative, I think Katelynn is a great choice.

Monday, Amanda posted to MS4TG explaining her absence, a result of an unhappy wife, simmering feelings brought to a head following a very long party with me and then two nights later, a very late (past 4am) chat session.  Oops.

Tuesday came and went without me posting a submission to the Flickr group “Class with Dave.”  This flickr group has weekly exercises to help you learn photography skills.  The exercises this week were “Light painting” and “Self portrait.”  Self portrait I do every day for the 365 group.  I had nothing to submit to CWD though because my SPs have been pathetic zero effort things lately.  I would have been ashamed to show any of them.  Light painting I would love, except I’m stuck here in suburbia in the winter and more problematically, with out a car.  I need to go to an interesting subject to do this assignment properly.  I had no way of doing that.

Today (yesterday by now) I slept until about 8:30 pm.  Watched a little TV with mom.  Sat here at the computer all night.

Passion

Sometimes I make a few little notes for a journal entry, but don’t have the motivation to write complete sentences.  Notes for this entry sat for a month and I don’t remember much of what I was thinking at the time, except for some thoughts on passion. Not sexual passion, but passion for some activity.  I think I’ve had this at just a few brief times in my life.  It’s always wonderful.  I wish I could find it again.

I think the first example was sailing.  I’d been intrigued with sailboats early in childhood.  I’d built model clipper ships and read books on sailing.  One book I owned had plans in it for building a sailboat and I think I had that book and every illustration in it memorized.  Our family moved to a new house on a lake when I was 13, and, perhaps out of fear that I would actually try to build this boat, my parents soon bought me a sailboat.  For about three years then, sailing was my passion.  I sailed pretty much all day every day on our small lake.  I got into racing at a larger lake near by.  I got good at it.  I won’t begin to tell more specific stories here because if I began, I couldn’t stop.  But you can see, it was an obsession for me.

One of my theories of life is that if you do anything all day long every day, you get really good at it.

I think sailing began to fade when I got my drivers license.  I had a girlfriend in there somewhere that occupied much of my time.  But how however it happened, sailing was overtaken by my next passion, computers, computer programming, and artificial intelligence in particular.  Now, this passion was interrupted by a few years of angst where I bailed out of the college track and spent a few years in the Navy, but following that, I plunged right back into it by studying computer science in college.  College kids have different ways of being wild and crazy.  Some drink, some have lots of sex.  My way was to stay up late all night every night writing computer programs.  I remember one friend watching me write code once burst out laughing and explained that I typed like a concert pianist, my whole body moving rhythmically, and finishing blocks of code with grand flourish of hand movement.

That passion was killed when I got married, and I lived without passion for years.  In the midst of depression then, I somehow stumbled into a new passion of astronomy.  Again, I did this all day (er, all night) every night and soon got very good at it.  Good enough that it sort of led me into a new career as a professional astronomer, never having had a course in astronomy in my life.

Today, I’m without passion.  I’m in a deep pit of depression and despair.  It sure would be wonderful to find passion again.