No show cast this balance better than the flagship Dick Wolf production Law & Order. We even had the episodic plots carved out for us with the now-iconic metal staccato sound. Were there plot repeats over the 19-year run for the series? Of course there were, but who would have noticed were it not for the omnipresent reruns on A&E and TNT? I’m okay with that, because I was busy watching Lenny Briscoe gum it out as a veteran cop in recovery, Anita Van Buren manage her office while battling cancer, Claire Kincaid duke it out with Jack McCoy over legal ethics, and making note of all of the wonderful cameo appearances for the role of villain.

Shake a stick at detective shows these days and there’s something gimmicky about most of them—this detective never forgets a single second of her experience, this man is a former charlatan who can trick criminals into giving themselves up, this guy is a numbers whiz (Numb3rs) and can apply game theory to the current case at hand—and while their extreme talents may be interesting for a while, eventually they drag down the narrative into silliness or unbelievability at some point. Because sooner or later the ability of the central character needs to be explained, or threatened, or put to the test, and so on, and this upstages everything else about the show. What happens when Carrie Wells (Unforgettable) is knocked unconscious and can’t remember? What unravels when Patrick Jane (The Mentalist) is so troubled by his wife’s killer that he no longer can spot people’s tells?

Maybe we’re so afraid that American Exceptionalism is dead that we’re etching it into prime time television. NCIS and Bones feature characters who are the very best in their businesses—people with multiple PhDs, world renown researchers, sharpshooters and the like. Lie to Me and Person of Interest boast not just super-smart investigators, but also teraflops of computing power; Criminal Minds has its cadre of geniuses and its own Lear jet so that the team can run a project anywhere on the continent. Even White Collar spends a lot of screen time showcasing the extreme talents of Neal Caffrey, cat burglar extraordinaire.

One of the reasons that The Closer stood out for me as an engrossing series is that other than Brenda Lee’s CIA training, everyone is rather ordinary. A man too old to keep dating pretty young women; a young detective wanting to find his place in the community; a veteran administrator who has personalized his career—they were folks I could relate to. But where The Closer tried to dazzle viewers with impossible-to-figure-out criminal cases, Law & Order kept it real. Yes, there were the “keep watching until the last second!” episodes, but more often than not it was about people who murdered for love lost, for money, by accident, for revenge. Simple motives, few conspiracies. I could leave at the end of an hour and not worry whether I was enlightened by the experience. I was merely entertained, and darn it, entertainment was all I wanted.

I don’t need another extraordinary detective (Grimm, Castle) or an extreme situation or set up for the detectiving (Leverage, Breakout Kings, Burn Notice, Covert Affairs). I just want to see ordinary people dedicated to their careers and/or justice, working hard on garden variety cases, because there is more than enough that is watchable and interesting in those realities. And I write this as a person who tries to write science fiction, so I’m totally okay with non-realities in storytelling. But there needs to be a grounded detective show on the air for those of us who don’t want something magical at every moment.

When does the next season of The Killing start again?

Fast forward into the age of the information superhighway, and conversations roiled online about the use of “tranny” among LGBT people. We’ve arrived in a different place with this epithet, and it doesn’t include any kind of reclamation. Whereas people in the LGBT umbrella felt that they themselves could use “queer” as an in-community term, that has not been the conversation with the t-word. Even Kate Bornstein, the author of Gender Outlaw, was told in no uncertain terms that her trans sisters were hurt whenever they heard her use it, and they wanted her to erase it from her vocabulary. She went public with her feelings of conflict.

If trans women are walking away from using “tranny” en masse, then the rest of us should, too. Even trans men like myself. Even if that word has been used against us personally. Certainly non-trans gay men should consider it verboten. Ru Paul and his insistence on throwing it in the community’s face is not only misreading his own likeability, he’s making it harder to find common ground between gender nonconforming people and transsexuals, two groups who surely need each other politically. As I’ve said for years now, people who would discriminate against someone because they don’t fit gender norms don’t ask first how an individual identifies, leaving the transvestites or masculine women alone and only oppressing transsexuals.

We are in this together, or rather, we need to be in this together. By “this” I mean the fight for our civil rights. And by “civil rights,” I mean, the following:

• The right to receive affordable and necessary preventative and critical health care
• The right to receive health care insurance appropriate for our needs as gender nonconforming people (e.g., I need my PAP smear covered, I don’t need a prostate exam)
• The right to have our identity documents reflect our gender identity
• The right to have our commitments to loved ones honored legally just as they are for non-trans, heterosexual people
• The right to custody or visitation of our children when our legal commitment to a partner ends
• The right to obtain and keep our jobs, and not be discriminated against in our place of employment because of our gender identity or expression
• The right to obtain and keep our housing, etc.
• The right not to be harassed at school or at work because of our gender identity or expression

This is not an exhaustive list of course, but you get the point. The line between discriminating against butches and trans men is fuzzy, full of vagueness precisely because bigotry is not a rational process.

That said, the crevasses between L, G, B, and T are enormous, and our lived experiences vary because we live with intersections of race, class, and mobility, as well as other aspects of social power. If trans women ask and then tell a celebrity like Ru Paul to stop using the t-word, he should. Instead, he pushes back, insisting on using it even more. After all, if Ru Paul can stop using one word, when does it end? Transsexuals everywhere will stop him from speaking at all by the end of this slippery slope, right?

Silencing only comes with institutionalized power, which presumably trans women as a group don’t have. Consider the latest instance in which transfolk are supposed to just laugh along and let a gay man make a mockery of trans women (WARNING: triggering content in the YouTube video):

Let’s talk about slippery slopes. If the t-word can’t be banned within the LGBT community, can we ask non-LGBT to stop using it? If we’re supposed to laugh at Ru Paul screaming “tranny!” in front of “hot mess,” every week on his show, must we laugh at the image of a battered trans woman sex worker? Is no marginalized group allowed to purge a terrible word with a violent history from the public popular culture sphere, or must they all wait for the mainstream general public to decide they’re not interested in using that term anymore?

I call bull hockey on this. The days when we could use this word with impunity should be over.

It was only a matter of time then, for a hospitality industry to respond to the need to serve the west-side tourist while they spent copious amounts of money in our little town. One of the fastest growing businesses in Walla Walla was the independent restaurant. In fact, there are no mid-range chain restaurants within the city limits; right next store in College Place is an Applebee’s, and that’s notable for its singularity of presence.

When the bottom fell out of the economy, many of the fine dining establishments closed up. Even the Microsoft executives were feeling the pinch. But time passed, and people started carving out new opportunities for themselves in the city’s downtown. A public house, a beer tavern, gourmet pizza, $9 sandwiches that boast of their hand-craftedness. In the space of one month two breakfast eateries opened up, and excited as we were, Susanne and I tried them both out to see if they would likely stick around or make it onto our dining circuit.

The Maple Counter opened first, in an old car repair shop on Alder Street. Yes, there is great food to be had there, but the environment inside is a bit overdone, more a fabrication of what tourists think Walla Walla should be, rather than what it is. Prices were geared for tourists with thick wallets, with a plate of pancakes running more than $13. It’s a nice place to get good homemade fixings, but it’s not a restaurant where the average townsperson can eat on a frequent basis.

Bacon & Eggs opened soon thereafter. Featuring Stumptown Coffee, a Portland extract, is a little bit of a thumbed nose to the Walla Walla Roastery that sits next to the airport, but I’ll give them a pass because I do like a good cup of Stumptown. Susanne, my good friend Michael, and the Wee One joined me in a breakfast during their first week of operation. Every single thing we ate there was not just good but amazing, except for some mushy challah bread French toast. We planned on telling friends to eat there, and I thought I’d leave it at that (as well as becoming something of a regular there).

I was surprised then to learn from a friend that Bacon & Eggs was getting trashed on Yelp, the restaurant and business rating Web site. Because I’m never more than six inches away from the Internet, I looked it up. An average of two stars? Why?

I read through the reviews:

Stay away from the bloody Mary. Pretty sure they put taco seasoning in it. Nasty. Food is good, lots of hipsters. LOTS.

This one gave a three-star review because the breakfast was under-seasoned—”I had the biscuits and gravy. There biscuits are great but they didn’t give me enough gravy and the gravy was way under seasoned ( a little bit of salt and pepper would go a long way.)” All the way to 5-stars? Huh?

And this condemnation, which makes me wonder if he wasn’t dumpster-diving in the back alley:

Just tried that new ‘Bacon & Eggs’ place downtown. If you refer to yourself in such a lofty title, DO NOT serve me bacon that powders to the touch from being burnt. Make sure the eggs aren’t some bland lifeless chunk of yellow. If you choose to serve me fruit with my meal, keep the mixture of rotting and freezer burnt desicated seed rejects behind your kitchen doors. Please make sure that my ice water has ice in it. Is it really so hard to see that my hash browns are still in a state of liquification that would be better suited to a decaying corpse? Ketchup is not considered a gift, do not serve my breakfast with a dollop of disappointment and hopelessness. In short, I’d like to summarize our visit in these simple words: ‘High-priced garbage, served lovingly on a plate’.

Curious. Sure, some places have a hard time in their first few weeks of service, but none of the actual people I know who went there said anything remotely like these reviews described.

I’m not a big Yelp user, but I noticed a little link that said, “filtered.” Apparently this means that the Yelp site owners are concerned as to the validity of the review—in other words, they’re on the lookout against the business owners writing their own glowing reviews. I suppose that is a risk in the let-anyone-write-a-review industry. But I noticed something odd: they were almost all 5-star reviews stuck behind the filter.

Eleven reviews that Yelp buried, leaving mostly negative and so-so reviews on the main page. That seemed suspicious to me.

Susanne wrote a nice review, and I did too, each of us sitting at our laptops in the Patisserie. I read mine aloud to two other people and asked if I missed anything, and then clicked submit. Power to the people, right? Now I could at least add my voice to the group.

Yesterday, I got an email from Yelp, to a no-reply address:

I’m writing to let you know about our decision to close your user account. Your account was flagged by the Yelp community, and our Support team has determined that you have violated Yelp’s Terms of Service (http://www.yelp.com/static?p=tos) by creating multiple accounts.

I think that because Susanne and I wrote about the same restaurant and posted 5-star reviews within minutes of each other, that we were both flagged. But there’s no investigation beyond what some Yelp manager—in this case, a woman named Miranda—determines as a likely invalid review. The Yelp hand of God reached down and obliterated my entire account without hesitation. I was a Yelp voice no more.

Now we were pissed. The mean reviewers were winning! All of the work the owners had put into their new place and childish, awful things were being said about their product and I couldn’t do anything about it?

Wait a minute, I thought moments before I gave myself a head slap. I have this blog. Thousands of people read this blog. And my Facebook, and Twitter feeds.

So let me say: I am sticking to Zagat’s and the advice that comes out of the mouths of my friends and acquaintances. More than that, there is reason to believe that Yelp is involved in actual extortion of businesses by how they manage the reviews on their site, even as one class action lawsuit was dismissed last year. Yelp is aiming to open an IPO this year, by the way. An IPO based on a business model of what, exactly?

Many of us have asked, what is going on here? Surely there are informed, reasonable Republicans with solid experience who could be in this campaign–not that anyone comes to mind in the ten seconds I’m willing to think about it. But out of 313 million Americans, isn’t there someone with foreign policy experience, a non-reductive reading of the Constitution, and a willingness to work in a bipartisan way in Washington, DC?

Some Democratic and left-leaning cynics have said that there are reasons to run for the highest office the country has to offer, other than winning the mantle. Like getting a chance in the spotlight, and the money that flows to people seeking the presidency.

I’m not certain about these individuals’ motives, but one thing is common among the GOP field this year: many of them have books or book deals. Here’s a non-exhaustive list.

Michelle Bachmann–Title: Core of Conviction, Sentinel HC Publisher. Sales of Bachmann’s book have been abysmal for all of the publicity she received. It’s almost like readers don’t care what she has to say about herself.

Newt Gingrich–A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters, Regnery Publishing. Gingrich also has a new co-authored history book for sale, and his wife is peddling her own tome at the moment. There have been days on the campaign trail when Newt has done more book appearances than campaign stops. I’m sure he has his priorities in line.

Herman Cain–This Is Herman Cain, My Journey to the White House, Threshold Editions. It takes some chutzpah to title a book like this,  in such a flirting with hubris way. I wonder if there will be a sequel entitled, Who Needs the White House Anyway?

Mitt Romney–No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, St. Martin’s Press. Big banner publishing house, big sales. And still the conservative edge of the good old party worries about electing this guy. Tangled webs, people.

Ron Paul–Liberty Defined: 50 Issues that Affect Our Freedom, Grand Central Publishing. Paul, like Gingrich, has several books in print, this one being the latest. And while Paul started out his run as a Republican candidate, people don’t doubt that he could wind up an independent candidate in the general election.

Rick Perry–Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Little, Brown Company. Granted, this title was released in 2010, well before Perry announced he was running for President. But let’s not pretend his campaign hasn’t helped sales of this or of his other title, On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting for, co-authored with Ross Perot.

I’m not saying that book sales are the only reasons why these folks jumped into the fray, but sales from their books aren’t considered campaign contributions, either. Most of these folks wouldn’t hold much interest for a publisher but for the fact that they’re candidates.

The general campaign season is right around the corner and many of these titles will lose their luster, destined for the same bargain bins that once held John Kerry’s A Call to Service and John McCain’s Why Courage Matters. And then maybe we can get back to reading about vampires and broomsticks. And wondering what the election of 2016 will hold for all of us.

I figure that we’ve gone through the worst of them, so when it’s my turn, I pick dare and consider myself the cleverest person of the evening. It only takes about five seconds to reconsider handing over my mantle.

“Put this chip clip on your boob.” She held it out to me. It was all bright yellow and innocent-looking.

I was 15. What did I know of the nerve endings there? I’d only had boobs for something like nine months.

Instantly, I was on fire, in a very bad, excruciating, this-was-a-terrible-idea way. I ripped it off and crumbled over on my side. I pretended we were all sharing in the good laugh.

As body parts go, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about my nipples, so I suppose in that way I’ve been ungrateful. My head, face, brain, knees, hands, skin, teeth, stomach, and feet have received way more in accolades and attention. Nipples rank somewhere in the midst of armpits, ass, and that space between my shoulder blades that I can’t reach. Not exactly honored territory.

I suppose I forgot about the fact that there are two big bundles of nerve fibers on my chest when I decided to get one of my nipples pierced. I was trying to get good with having breastage, I suppose. It’s not unheard of for transfolk to try to find ways to like their body more, and heck, a barbell piercing seemed as good a way of getting in touch with my body as wearing a fried egg on my head, so why not give it a shot?

I had, after all, pierced my tongue with no fanfare (or pain) whatsoever. I forgot that tongue piercings happen in front of the main tongue nerve. Nipple piercings go right through the nerve cluster.

My entire torso, which is of considerable size, turned dark purple when the piercer stabbed me, and I let out a scream that I’m sure was heard all up and down Connecticut Avenue in DC. I looked down at my wounded nip. The piercer smiled at me.

“People come in here for 10, 20 years looking for a sensation like the one you just had,” he said.

“How nice for them,” I said. I walked back to my car pinching my shirt away from my chest because even air molecules hurt me as I walked past them.

The poor piercing never really healed, and 18 months later, I removed it, tired of trying to keep it clean and infection-free. In no short order the hole closed, thankful I was finished with my titanium foray into stupidity.

Setting: Strip mall, Halloween 2007, Timonium, Maryland, suburbia. I am scheduled for top surgery to remove all of my breast tissue and excess skin, and recreate a male-looking chest. This means that my poor nipples will be physically removed from my body, cut smaller, and reattached. I can’t think of any other time when any part of my body hung out and chilled while not attached to the rest of me. I’ve had things taken away — eye muscle tissue, the aforementioned breasts, bone chips, but nobody’s ever put them back except for this. There are many ways to accomplish the FTM top surgery, but this is the one the surgeon wants to do for me, and she knows what she’s talking about. I count down from 10 on cue from the anesthesiologist, and make it to 7. I’m certain the last image in my mind is the abstraction of my nipples floating in saline.

According to the surgeon, it will be years before I have nipple sensation again, as nerves grow about half an inch a year. Sometimes feeling never comes back at all.

Other times, like I’ve experienced, there is referred pain, where I feel the pain in the wrong spot from where it’s occurring. The real bastardly thing about this is there’s not much one can do about it. I can touch the area that hurts but it continues to hurt. I’ve thumped my chest like Tarzan, tried distraction by stimulating another nerve (read: pinching myself), taken pain medication like ibuprofen, but when it wants to make a visit, it’s there. Fortunately, this has become less frequent over time.

I wondered about the chip clip a couple of years ago, so I fumbled around in the kitchen drawer where such things exist, and tried it again. No problem! Not that there’s any usefulness to this as a skill as far as I could tell. It was just a change from my adolescent body, one among thousands, I supposed.

A few days ago I was holding baby Emile after I’d taken a shower. He had a full diaper and I needed to fix his situation for him, as he’s currently incapable of it. Clad in only my boxers and socks, I lifted him out of his crib and he threw a big relieved smile at me.

In one second he reached out and grabbed my right nipple and twisted.

My nerve has grown back and is now functioning.

I mean, we’re post-race in this country, right? So there’s nothing race-related about calling the First Lady “Mrs. YoMama.” There’s no race in any of the billboards that have popped up across the nation of President Obama in a turban, or in the incessant, it’s-been-proven-wrong notion that he was not born in the USA. There’s no racism in saying that black city kids should become janitors so that they can learn a work ethic. Of course Rick Santorum wasn’t racist when he went on the stump and said he didn’t want to give black people taxpayers’ money. They were “blah people,” he said in a correction.

As I wrote last year for Bitch Magazine’s blog, more than two dozen states have introduced voting right restrictions in their state legislatures, under the rationale that there need to be regulations to minimize voter fraud. “Fraud” is trotted out all the time as the motivation for regulations, in a right-leaning party that is otherwise loathe to regulate things like air pollution, manufacturing, natural gas fracking, health care insurance, or oil exploration. When Florida Tea Party backers got a drug testing law passed so that all welfare recipients had to undergo testing to receive benefits, the idea of mass fraud was revealed to be an illusion. Ninety-six percent of people on welfare in Florida passed the testing. But hey, let’s not say that racism had any part of this push for finding tricksters.

The same goes with these voting rights restrictions. Insisting on seeing a birth certificate, passport, or driver’s license disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities who may not have these documents at their disposal, and conservatives know this. It remains to be seen how these statewide efforts will affect not just the 2012 turnout, but the legality of the individual votes cast.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, there are still people out there who refuse to believe the GOP has it in for black and brown people. But if someone wants to convince me I’m wrong, then they need to explain the following:

• Why all of the anti-terrorism rhetoric only focuses on terrorists from the Middle East and Africa. So neo-Nazis and white militiamen get to organize and cause terror with impunity?
• Why the anti-immigrant push is all about Hispanic workers. This country has leveraged and invited undocumented or guest worker labor since its founding, but all of a sudden we need a fence along the border with Mexico?
• Why do we need to imprison even more people when we already have 2.5 million of our population in jail, including a sizable percentage of African American men aged 25-50? Why aren’t we doing the “Christian” thing and getting people only guilty of drug possession into recovery? Where is the Republican evangelical movement on rehabilitating drug users?
• Why are GOP members of Congress so invested in cutting breakfast and lunch programs for poor and minority kids, and for gutting Head Start, when these programs have so much evidence to show they significantly help kids’ test scores and education outcomes? And when they’re so cheap compared to other programs?
• Why aren’t GOP candidates and elected officials out there cutting some of the more egregiously unneeded tax breaks for our largest corporations to balance the Federal budget, instead of cutting social programs that have been shown to help our most vulnerable citizens?

Answer these questions in a reasonable way, and I will stop believing that the Republican Party is systemically racist. Pinkie swear.

Meanwhile, the idea of buying a couch at 30 percent off to celebrate the life and death of a civil rights leader is at the very least, in bad taste. Seriously.

At least we had the annual Girl Scout cookie drive, the largest fundraising activity for the Girl Scout organization. There’s a proper emphasis on cookies. Who doesn’t like buying a couple of boxes of these to help support one of the biggest woman-run organizations in the US?

Taylor, a teenage Scout from California, that’s who. In her YouTube video, she calls for a boycott on Girl Scout cookies because a troop in Colorado let in a trans girl as a Scout. Taylor thinks this 7-year-old is a danger to the other Scouts, and unravels the entire “for girls” mantra in the organization.

Taylor seems pretty coached to me, and also supremely bigoted. Susanne made the off-hand remark that she must be gunning for her Hatemongering Badge.

As these Internet sensations go, people around the country responded almost immediately to the idea of hurting the Girl Scouts for their trans-inclusion. Let’s start a buycott and purchase extra Girl Scout cookies. One trans support group in San Francisco is now hosting an “Eat In” of cookies once they show up in their area.

After months of listening to people gripe about the divisions in the LGBT community, or becoming despondent about the constant stream of news about queer and trans youth suicide, we finally have a moment. People all along the LGBT spectrum were posting in their social networks about buying more cookies. Instead of talking about the hell that must be living through a transgender childhood, we are celebrating a family that is supporting their daughter and a national organization that is giving her access to all of the leadership training, community time, and wellness promoting activities that the Girl Scouts offer girls.

Of course this is precisely the moment of backlash, even as people on the right tell us all the time they don’t want to see kids killing themselves. They just don’t want to give them any support, want the “right” to bully them with impunity, and want to ban any gay or trans-affirming organization that may be founded in a school. These are disingenuous arguments, just like the idea that letting a transgender girl into a troop is somehow dangerous to the Scouts in that troop, or to the organization itself.

More damaging to the Girl Scouts would be a significant drop in cookie sales. This idea—that one single, trans kid who has been accepted into the family of scouts is so terrifying that the entire fundraising system should grind to a halt—is bigotry at its most paranoid. It also flies in the face of everything we know about what kinds of support kids need as they figure out who they are as people.

Fortunately, many of us on the progressive left and in the broader LGBT community are fed up with the poverty of these lies and calls for our attention. And in the case of the Girl Scouts, Taylor has riled up a lot of women with memories of their own participation as Brownies or Scouts, many of whom don’t appreciate being told what to do.

One of the highlights of my youth was leading an insurrection in my Brownies group. I had all the girls marching in a circle and chanting protests. It was awesome.

I was kicked out of the Brownies for being “subversive”. I just did not want to wear brown socks and was rather vocal about it.

I was a Brownie. It sucked. All we did was tie knots and make lemonade.

Personally, I think knot-tying comes in handy from time to time. But what this call to boycott faces, ultimately, is resistance from people’s political positions as supportive of queer and trans youth, and from their affectionate ties and memories of personal experience as Scouts. My own sister was a Girl Scout and in her adulthood, a cookie mom (the people who coordinate the cookie sales for their troops). Somewhere in the midst of calling for a boycott for the reasons Taylor provides, against the organization Taylor is a part of, people are pushing back.

In so doing, Taylor has given us all a moment when we can come together and voice our support/opposition, when we can find a simple, concrete thing to do (Eat MOR Cookies), and open up spaces to talk about why these issues are so important and dear to us.

Hey. Thank you, Taylor.

Perhaps it’s time to admit that I’m hard-wired for a positive lens on life. Or I’ve got some darn stubborn tendencies.

Most of my most important lessons I’ve learned the hard way; popularity is never as important as doing the right thing. Half of Brooklyn’s queers won’t speak to me because I refused to let someone start a brawl in a Philadelphia bar during a transgender conference, for example. They called it “silencing,” the most disingenuous argument I’d come across in LGBT circles at the time.

I never made it to the A-list crowd in high school because I was also friends with geeks and outcasts. (I’m pretty sure I was a geek myself, but I don’t think I saw it that way at the time.)

Before anyone grouses that I consider myself some kind of golden child, let me reassure the world: I’m a serial mistake-maker. I snickered about an effeminate high school teacher, used the word “gay” as a derogatory term, and threw a massive fit when my first girlfriend announced they wanted to transition to male. My saving grace, if I can call it that, is that I’ve got an enormous conscience that has smacked me upside the head when I pull rank, wreak unfairness on the people around me, become short-tempered, or let my biases flow.

So I’ve tried to be a better person, on something of a constant improvement cycle. This comes with some existential pain, of course, but the advantages are many, and optimism as nearby companion is one of them.

A dear friend puts it this way: give yourself the room to be cynical, and you’ll find some optimism underneath. She offers the AFGO as one method. AFGO is Another Fucking Growth Opportunity. I can roll my eyes at my circumstances, but still see the big picture.

When I moved out to Walla Walla, I was dumbstruck that none of my previous work experience counted. None of Susanne’s colleagues cared what I’d done for a living. Project management is just double-speak to most people even in the most garrulous of circles. The bottom had dropped out of the global economy. I was at once too experienced, wrong experienced, and inexperienced for any job opening I could identify, and I applied to 130 of them.

Four years later, all of my project management training is in full gear again as I’m heading up a small nonprofit in town. The pessimist could call it coincidence, but because I’m not one of those, I see it as building on an earlier foundational level. So that is point number one:

1. Be willing to look back on earlier experiences and trace their relationship to the now. It doesn’t even matter what the earlier moment was–a mistake, a piece of bravery, a friendship, a poem that resonated, whatever. Your life is a story with pieces that fit together as you go, so each new moment ties in somewhere, either to a moment that hasn’t occurred yet, or something already done. There is joy in identifying these connections and growing from them.

2. In the big picture, mistakes happen. I try not to get bogged down about my failings anymore. After all, I’ve spent years being mired in my own failure, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m done with that. Instead I widen my aperture and allow myself to be imperfect but working toward improving. I apologize, come up with a new response that is more fair, honest, or appropriate, and try to move forward that way.

3. Be present. I can stop a lot of those mistakes from happening if I’m living in each moment. I aim at being a good listener instead of waiting for the other person in the conversation to breathe so I can get my point in. This requires more patience, and I’m grateful I have more patience in my 40s than before. When I feel myself getting antsy, I re-gather myself to get back in the present moment.

4. Stop tallying the points. Sure, not every person in the world is my friend. Based on what he’s said, I don’t think I’ll get much support for my life from the likes of Rick Santorum, and given that I live in a conservative-leaning town, I can bet that many of my fellow residents would not be especially amused to know that there’s a chubby transsexual in their midst. But I’m not going to keep track of these perceived slings and arrows, because all they do is destabilize my own productivity. I’m not suggesting here that I don’t have a critique of the right’s prejudices, but I also don’t need to take these messages to heart. And while I’m not personalizing anyone’s attack on me or my community, I can better respond. I’m a fan of public forums, after all.

5. Let the future work for you. My pessimistic moments happen when I dwell on what hasn’t gone right in the past. That’s the problem–it’s past, over, finito. There’s nothing I can do to change it. But I’m still breathing; I have today and tomorrow. Looking toward the future bolsters the optimistic approach that improvement can and will happen. I can make better choices, stronger connections, get to see the rewards from earlier painful lessons. And then I find myself charged up, more able to turn sow ears into Prada. That query letter I sent out with the typo in the agent’s name? Let’s do better name checking next time. The two-and-a-half years I spent in that terrible relationship where I felt like crap all the time? Memoir!

Any lived experience asks for interpretation. It’s one of the human being’s strengths, the ability to find patterns, meaning, and value. Interpretation, however reflects where we’re at in our lives and our attitudes. I want my takeaways to shore up my optimistic outlook on life, not to box me in. And it’s my dearest hope that the folks around me find themselves limitless, especially when they need it.

Also affecting my ability to get all of my stuff done is the baby himself. Emile is omnipresent in the house, mostly due to the fact that this winter, he does not prefer alone time. So he comes around with us as we operate in each room of the house. Yes, this slows down progress–for instance, I am making it through this blog post one sentence an hour.

To further entertain him but also to increase the odds that I can get stuff done, I talk to him, explaining whatever is going on around us. It’s banal for the most part, and when I do it while cooking I feel a bit like a chubby, trans Rachel Ray. But sometimes I surprise myself with the things that come out of my mouth. Things like:

• That’s a blanket your great-aunt made for you. See over there, that’s another blanket your other great-aunt made for you. They’re sisters. They’re a little competitive with each other. But what do you care, you got two blankets out of the deal.
• The way to tell the difference between a nice cat and a mean cat is the nice cat will let you pet it and the mean cat will pee all over your bushes.
• We have liquid measuring cups and measuring cups for solids. Because atoms are like that. They’re tricky.
• Chemistry is a good thing, unless you’re Monsanto, or that guy from Breaking Bad.
• That is Stevie Wonder, and you like that song, don’t you? But stop mocking him by moving your head back and forth.
• Now, you’ll hear me call this a dust bunny, but it’s not anything we keep as a pet around here. Although maybe we do, come to think of it.
• I can’t pick you up right now because I just touched raw meat. It’s crawling with germs. But it’s fine for supper.
• Ooh, that’s a stinky trash can! Stinky stinky stinky! Uh oh, that’s just your diaper, isn’t it?

Poor little kid, having to listen to my silliness all day. I really hope we can socialize him properly at some point.

Worse, it didn’t say anything about what the book was about.

So I came up with Bumbling into Body Hair: Tales of a Klutz’s Sex Change. That title spelled out everything I thought needed explanation. It’s a funny book. It’s about trans people. It shares the tone and a snippet of the protagonist’s voice. 

It gave agents that easy yes/no based on the title alone. My publisher loved it.

Technically, my editor loves the title too, but she isn’t a fan of the subtitle.

“You can’t even say it without getting stuck,” she said.

“What, tales of a klutz’s sex change?” In her defense, I’ve rolled the whole thing off my tongue so many times I don’t even think about the cadence of it anymore. But I told her I’d go to the drawing board and try to come up with something else to follow the colon.

So dear readers, by way of an informal poll, please give me your votes on the following, or suggest your own subtitle if none of the ones I present here are adequate. Okay, here goes.

1. Bumbling into Body Hair: The Story of My Hilarious Sex Change
2. Bumbling into Body Hair: Girl Becomes Boy Meets Girl, a memoir
3. Bumbling into Body Hair, or Why My Sex Change Was a Hilarious Experience
4. A Very Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Sex Change
5. Bumbling into Body Hair: The Laughs and Trials of One Transsexual

Seriously, I think I hate them all. Help me through the hate, people.