I yanked out my ball of clairvoyance +2 last January, and crafted a snarky list of things I thought would occur by year’s end. With the birth of the New Year just around the corner, I suppose it’s time to take another shot at what’s in store for us over the next calendar year. Because politics, television, writing, and cooking are my interests on this blog, I’ll stick to those as topics. So here goes. Read More…
My father passed away in 1995, a few weeks after my birthday, and a few weeks before his 67th. He was a gambling addict, a child of the Great Depression, a churchgoer and a divorcé. I have been made well aware of this one man’s faults from many people he wronged, even though I didn’t commit his crimes and even though I am likely to internalize his shame. After 15 years of reflection on the father I knew and lost, I think I see him for who he was—a person with faults who wanted to do right and often fell short, a man who felt a terrible push-pull of obligation and scratching for freedom, and who most sadly, died full of regret. I fight to push past his mistakes and my own because I don’t want my life to end with any similarity. Read More…
I recently finished watching the fourth season of Mad Men, and am glad to call myself All Caught Up with the rest of the AMC-watching world, which in the grand scheme of things, is not that large. I’ll add here that I’m not nearly as happy to hear that Jon Hamm refuses to wear underwear unless he’s wearing skivvies in a scene. He may be handsome, but all I can think of is the unlucky dry cleaner on the set. Regarding his character, Don Draper, audiences have known since early in the first season that his identity is a stolen one, and the narrative around this subplot only gets more complicated from there. There are spoilers from here on out, so please consider this my warning. Read More…
This week, Susanne and I are dog sitting. Somehow this entails dogs. And poop, and a lot of it. Actually, now that I think of it, much of these “sitting” endeavors involve poop, pooping, or conversations regarding same. It’s not so much sitting as poop management. Maybe we should have a public conversation about updating the use of “sitting” as a term because for me at least, reclining on one’s derriere to relax doesn’t happen often in these arrangements. Unless, I suppose, a toilet is involved.
Long time readers of this blog will recall my experience with a baby’s explosive offering. Nothing of the sort has transpired with these dogs, one of whom is an anxious herder, and one a saved puppy from a farm in Yakima whose entire body shakes when he wags his tail, which is constantly. Read More…
For those of you following along, here’s another excerpt of the first draft. Enjoy!
While Dr. Stanger worked on building a crude EEG machine, I drove out to Conestoga for more information on the town and its residents. Whatever town square I’d seen was gone now, subsumed into a street grid. Only on the outlying areas were there still farm lands, but the vast majority of the area had been developed. I pulled over, seeing a yellowed sign in the window of a storefront: Historical Society. I fumbled for dimes in my pocket and bought an hour’s worth of parking time, and headed inside. An older lady with curly white hair greeted me.
“Suggested donation is one dollar,” she told me, “but you can see if that’s worth paying after you walk through.” I smiled and put a bill in her metal box. It didn’t appear they had visitors often. Read More…
I saw Kate Bornstein speak in Seattle last week at a book signing, and even though probably two-thirds of us had heard her story before, she told it to us. And once again I was subject to a familiar-sounding tale: that of confronting one’s demons, at the precipice of life itself.
I’m making it sound dramatic because in the final analysis, it is. I’ve spoken to dozens of people in the years before, during, and after my own transition, and in those stories, there are loads of differences. We come from divergent backgrounds, understand our identity in a multitude of ways, prioritize this aspect or that over others, and have created strategies for transition or for not transitioning (or for de-transitioning) that reflect ourselves. We resist the notion that there is a “Transgender Narrative,” namely, that we are all our chosen sex in the wrong body. Postulated decades ago in order to explain to non-trans people why we feel so strongly about our decisions to buck the gender binary, the “girl in a boy’s body” trope has pigeonholed the transsexual experience, and among the people I’ve spoken with, we hate its place in our community’s mythos.
But there is common thread I’ve noticed. In every single story I’ve heard, including Kate’s, we have contemplated suicide. Read More…
Just call the iPad the gift that keeps on giving…for a price. My latest little obsession is Angry Birds, a deceptively simple game that features a slingshot and birds on one side, and evil green pigs on the other. I played this game for the entire first leg of my flights to Arkansas, where I am now, baking cookies for the holidays with my mother. (Keep your jokes to yourselves.) It all becomes about aspect and pitch and when to time that explosion, as my brain decided, delirious with giddiness at the comical nature of the app. But the game was fortunate because I’m sure I avoided a painful conversation with the man in the middle seat, who had a terrible case of halitosis. Life Note #29: Always travel with mints, not always for oneself. Read More…
My latest bit of Parallax, from the first draft. To read the earlier excerpts, click on Parallax in the tag cluster on the left side of the screen.
Sanjay looked much older in scrubs.
“Green’s a good color on you,” I said, sitting in my car.
“Oh shut up.” He clipped his brother’s hospital badge on his shirt and said, “Wish me luck.”
The plan was for Sanjay to say Dr. Stanger needed to go to respiratory therapy, and he was the orderly to remove him. With all the smoking the doctor did, we hoped it wouldn’t look suspicious. According to Jay’s brother Prabal, lots of patients on the mental wellness ward smoked a lot and it was common for them to get checkups from the respiratory therapy staff when they inevitably had problems breathing. Read More…
When I was a project manager, I loved the three hours after winning a new contract. Nothing had been sullied; the project lived only in my brain, free from reality, bad decision making, a change in funding, or the soul-crushing realization that a lot of computer work is boring, especially when it’s on behalf of a government project. Before all of that would inevitably occur, I could take a wee snatch of time to smile, knowing others had seen fit to approve the project I and others had outlined. It was a lovely spot of validation, and no fools had yet rushed in. Read More…
Many of us who had the fortune to attend college, or who lived in a tight-knit community can relate to the concept of venturing out around campus and its nearby neighborhoods and running into lots of people they knew. In Syracuse, an acknowledgment or short conversation seemed to happen every 6.3 yards. With my move to Washington, DC, after nine years in snowy Central New York, I was suddenly anonymous. And in that urban landscape, hardly anybody cared if they saw a masculine woman in a tweed jacket, so I was initially pleased that I’d gotten some degree of quiet in my subway/walking commute to work. But quickly, I realized that I missed the little, often pithy small talk from New York. What I missed was that degree of community. Read More…
Trans/plant/portation 