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.

Last Holiday

Three months have evaporated here in the Midwest.  Three months that have passed in a blink, with very few remarkable or memorable experiences.  Last week my case finally came up in court.  My lawyer went with me not present.  I heard by phone that things went ok, but not ideally.  I go meet the lawyer tomorrow to get all the details.

The best scenario, I think, is that whatever happened is sufficient for me to return to work and begin recovering some normal sort of life.  Other scenarios are all bad.  I’m three months without my cancer treatments at this point.  I won’t keep forever.

An account of today is as follows.  Mom woke me up about 4:00 pm to see if I wanted to go to the grocery store with her.  I did.  Up, washed face, dressed, a little make up, and out the door in about thirty minutes.  Grocery store was uneventful except that we bought lots of stuff.  We’d put off grocery shopping for several days while the weather was cold and were out of lots of things.  The total was nearly $200.  Home, we had a deli counter rotisserie chicken for dinner, with macaroni, beans, carrots and celery.

The movie we picked to watch on cable was Queen Latifah’s “Last Holiday.”  Now, we picked it pretty much at random, with out even looking to see what the plot was.  I just said, “Oh, Queen Latifah’s good” and my mom pressed play.  Turns out the premise of the movie is similar to the movie we watched last night, “Bucket List.”  Somehow the movie tonight made me happy whereas the one last night made me grumpy.  Not sure why.  I don’t think it was just the difference in the endings.  Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it last night.

After dinner I came up and sat down at the computer.  I’ve been wasting lots of time here lately.  I chat, I look at Flickr photos, I play solitaire.  I just waste time.  So much I could be doing.  I just haven’t been doing anything.

BS

I know, I’m still not doing well at writing.  Just for a random example of what I wish I were writing every day, here was today:

Woke up just before noon, as I had stayed up very late last night for some strange reason.  Had a can of Campbell’s soup for breakfast.  Checked emails.  Nothing.  I was hoping someone would offer to give me a ride to the local TS support group meeting, but no, that didn’t happen.  Wasted a little time on the computer, then the phone rang.  It was the lawyer.  My case comes up in court tomorrow.  She’s going, I’m not–because I would almost certainly go to jail if I showed my face.

She explained that the court would like me to give them money.  Breathe, breathe….  Ok, I just wrote and then deleted a huge rant.  Breathe…

Mom ran me over to the lawyer’s office and I delivered the bribe money.  Took my 360 photo outside the office building there.  After that, she suggested we go out to eat.  I didn’t argue.  Dinner was nice.  Of course I never made it to the support group meeting.  Home, checked emails again, and no, no one had ever offered to give me a ride to the support group meeting.

Found Blade Runner on cable.  This was nice because one of the weekly projects just for fun on Flickr was to take an image inspired by Blade Runner.

After the movie, killed time in a chat room.  I don’t know why I do it.  It’s so very depressing for me.  The girls chat about all this stuff that I don’t have, can’t have, because it costs money.

Wrote this entry.

That was my day.

Oh, one thing I want to say specially is that I added someone new to my blogroll, at left.  I ran across Black Sissy’s blog and…liked it.  Go read.