Plaza Lighting Ceremony

Mom and I went to the Plaza Lighting Ceremony tonight. The Country Club Plaza, here in Kansas City, has most of it’s buildings decorated in Christmas lights from Thanksgiving through New Years.  They do a lighting ceremony each year with live entertainment on a stage, a cute child to throw the big switch that turns on the lights, fireworks, and then sing-along Christmas songs while the crowd disperses.

I took my camera, of course, and have a set of photos posted at Flickr now.  All but one of these are hand-held (the posed shot of us sitting on the fountain) and most are shot in “high sensitivity mode.”  If I understand the manual, this mode bins 2×2 on the CCD and bumps the gain up as well.  I’ve seen reports on the internet where people have tried this and reported that the images are terrible and the mode is useless.  I think they don’t under stand what binning and gain buys them.  It buys the capability tho shoot handheld at night and get photos like these!  The other mode I tried for the first time was “fireworks mode,” for the fireworks.  Looks like it shot 1/4 second exposures with the aperture wide open.

Afterward we found an IHOP that was open and filled up on comfort food.

The photo at right made me sad because of how much my beard shadow is showing above the lip.  Now I know that camera flash is particularly cruel lighting, and granted, I’m wearing nothing but a little bit of powder, but still, this is the current state of my face.  I’ve still just been tweezing to remove hairs, and as this photo shows, it’s no longer enough.  I’ll have to come up with a new routine that involves foundation at least.

I didn’t post yesterday but not much happened.  I did finish a little maintenance project on the journal here–I added some entries for the second half of July.  I found some brief notes for this period and used them to reconstruct journal entries.

Fringes

The sites listed yesterday are most of my network, but there’s more.  I posted regularly at crossdressers.com and made some friends there.  I started to do the same at Susan’s place.  A number of other sites I created profiles at, but never did much with.  There was some site for drag queens, for which I can’t even find the URL now.  There’s twitter, orkut, youtube, pandora, livejournal, typepad…  others.

A sad pattern is that I don’t stay at any one place for long.  Fear of relationships, shame over my situation, I don’t know.  I wish I was different.  I wish I could maintain friendships that I form, and not ignore people the way I do.  I’ve made just a dizzying number of friends over the last two years, almost all of them absolutely wonderful people, and then…I fade away.

My online social network

The last two years I’ve emailed a holiday greeting form letter to all of my online friends.  I think I had almost 100 email addresses my first year, and 233 last year.   Is it even possible this year?   Here’s what I have to work with:

Gmail, sonia1427

330 people in contact list and 16,184 messages in the archive.

Gmail provides a wonderful database system for organizing email contacts and archives.

This was one of my early “Sonia” email addresses and remains the one I use most. I picked the number 1427 just to be interesting and easy to remember. It happens to be a prime number and the sequence 1, 4, 27 is 1¹, 2², 3³.

The 330 people are simply Google’s “recommendations.” I haven’t done any work to manually groom the contact list. There are certainly countless other email addresses in the archive there for the searching.

Gmail, soniakeys

31 people in contact list, 1808 messages in the archive.

I created the soniakeys account to go with my new name, to have an email address that wasn’t quite so publically connected to all my interesting nightlife and trangender escapades, and to have a separate place for me to read and archive more “serious” or “real life” message traffic.

Google reader

14 blog subscriptions to journals of other transwomen.

These are all really amazing and really cool people.

Yahoo instant messenger

63 in contact list.

This is a kind of low quality list.  Yes some of my best friends are here, but also a number of … non-friends.

Yahoo 360

52 in contact list.

Yahoo’s most popular social network to date. Not dead yet.

Mostly really cool people.  Unfortunately, I joined Yahoo 360 after I was already at my limit of attention for social networking, and I’m put almost zero effort into maintaining any of these friendships.

Yahoo upcoming, T Party

12 members.

My still-born attempt at organizing a Boston area transgender social group.

Yahoo groups

17 memberships to groups that are social or related to gender, or orientation. Membship counts in the 18 lists, in decreasing order: 3532, 1368, 924, 762, 596, 504, 411, 347, 307, 297, 147, 92, 82, 59, 53, 57, 24, 15.

Flickr (a Yahoo service)

66 contacts.

People with a hobby other than shopping and flirting.

MySpace

219 friends.

This place is crazy.  Total strangers send friend requests on no more than a glance at your profile photo.  I grant most all of them.  Then when they ask A/S/L when that exact information is right beside my photo, I ignore them.  It happens a lot.

Transspace

35 friends.

WordPress.com

17 blogs linked.

Facebook

24 friends.

Hi 5

11 friends.

URNA

49 friends.

MySpace For T-Girls

21 friends.

Sunday

an egg with leftover rice

internet chat

weight 148

laundry

fritos and hummus

cleaned kitchen

made chili.  it was ok, not great.  I accidently dumped a little too much sugar in it.

slept through most of really long really bad movie – supernova.  this was the really long really bad 2000 movie about bad things going on with the sun — Not the 2005 movie about weird stuff happening on a ship in deep space.  I actually liked that one.

internet chat

wrote this journal entry

Restart?

Maybe I can resume writing.  Setting the whole summer aside for the moment, here was yesterday then:

I rolled out of bed at like 1 pm or so.  Made a cup of coffee, sat around until I got hungry and then made a little breakfast sandwich on an English muffin.  I sat and wasted some time on the computer, went to take a shower and find clean clothes about 4 pm.  Shower lasted until the hot water ran out.  The razor was getting clogged anyway.  Started dinner around 6 pm.  Mom and I made tilapia and rice.   The tilapia was frozen.  I thawed it in water, rubbed it with olive oil, sprinkled on some lemon pepper seasoning, and broiled it.  We had coleslaw and wine, and sat down to watch the 1998 “Great Expectations.”  Loved Anne Bancroft.  Mom was sleepy by the end of the movie (9 pm) and went straight to bed.  I sat down to play at the computer and finish the bottle of wine.

One thing I did was a little strange for me lately.  I went to my Yahoo profile and sent friend requests to lots of people.  Yahoo is currently thrashing about trying to decide what to do with profiles.  They took down mash.yahoo.com and replaced profiles.yahoo.com with something new.  In the process, they wiped everyone’s profile so everyone has to redo their yahoo profile completely.  Yesterday I went there and updated my photo and sent all these friend requests.  The next thing I did was even stranger–I logged on to Yahoo instant messenger.  I haven’t logged on there in ages.  Too much noise, too many people I didn’t want to chat with, and really, as I’ve been kind of hiding from the world all summer, I hadn’t wanted to chat with anyone.  So as predictable, the rest of the night was spent chatting on Yahoo.  I had three chat partners:  Rachel, Trina, and Alice.  Rachel was of course happy to see me, but since she knew basically what had been going on with me recently, chat with her was light and easy.  Poor Trina hadn’t heard from me all summer and we had lots of catching up to do.  Alice was a new friend I had never met.  She had run across my profile and sent me a YIM friend request at some point.  Seeing it just tonight, I granted it, she happened to be online, and we chatted.

*sigh*  I do feel bad about ignoring all my friends.  Maybe I can not only start writing in my journal again, but perhaps answer some emails from friends.