Trans/plant/portation

It should come as no surprise to anyone that getting my hands on a copy of my own book has been something of a debacle. I’ve been reading through the manuscript for the last couple of weeks wondering which sections I should offer up at my inaugural reading in Portland this weekend. For me and my easily tired eyes, scrolling on a screen works less well than flipping through actual pages. I’d rather hold sections open with pens and fingers and jump around to plan out my entertainment strategy than make electronic notes on my tablet. And I’m a big fan of technology. Just not for this purpose.

I dropped onto Amazon on the first day of sale and noted that I’d have to pay almost as much for shipping as for the book itself if I wanted to get it in time for our trip to Portland. And then I saw it, a little glimmer of a link–a free month-long trial for Amazon Prime. It was my knight in brilliant armor, promising me an easy, free delivery by Tuesday. Read More…

On the Cynthia Nixon episode of Law & Order: SVU, her character remarks, “You’re never more than six feet away from a spider.” I really didn’t care to know that, true statement of fact or not. As bugs go, spiders are not my worst enemy. That mantle goes to the disease-spreading cockroach. Fortunately I haven’t spied any of those since moving away from the nation’s capitol. Out in DC broad flat roaches skitter across the sidewalk in the summer months, sensing oncoming foot traffic. It’s like a creepy, disgusting version of the parting of the Red Sea, except there’s nothing approximating divine intervention going on.

But if Walla Walla is free from mosquitos and cockroaches, both of which love humidity, then it has more than its fair share of spiders, some of them extremely poisonous. We’ve got rattlesnakes out here too, because we’re in dry tumbleweed territory. The snakes, however, don’t hang out in corners of our home—other than a friend’s dog who got bit during a hike on a low ridge, I haven’t heard of any rattlesnake encounters since I moved out here. Read More…

These days I use chronic sleep deprivation as a tool. It’s my excuse when I can’t think of a particular word. It’s my justification for taking an early afternoon nap. It’s my benchmark for whether the latest set of nighttime hours aided or subtracted from my sleep deficit. It’s my metaphor for 2012, in which I measure achievement in between unintended bouts of sleep. At some point I may actually drool into my keyboard and short-circuit my laptop. Anything is possible.

But another effect of not granting rest to my brain is the effect it’s had on my frontal lobe. Perhaps my cerebellum is demanding that it operate at peak efficiency so I can like, breathe and blink and such, but my filter for shutting up has gone all wonky. I’m not lecturing passersby as I run errands, exactly, but my big booming laugh is taking more people by surprise.

Last week I left extra early before work because a significant number of my dendrites told me to get a mocha from the patisserie. Not the roastery, not the drive through espresso place on 9th Avenue, but the patisserie. Without enough alertness to remember that the shop wouldn’t be open at that hour, I maneuvered the car to downtown, then cursed at the Closed sign, which of course didn’t care, it being an inanimate sign and all. Idle at the light on Main Street, then press the accelerator. I figured since I was near the post office now I might as well pick up the mail for the office. About thirty feet past the stop sign I recognized that hey, those red octagons mean something important. What was it again? Read More…

Once upon a time, Walla Walla had political importance. It was the site of incorporation for Washington State, a real pioneering town with horse-driven wagons and farmers, a small jail—still in service—and a few men who counted as the moneymakers and power brokers, like Dr. Baker, Stephen Boyer, and Judge William Langford, who oversaw the transition from territory to county. While industrial pressure led to the flooding of the actual Walla Walla Fort, now trapped at the bottom of the Columbia River in Wallula, much of the original western outpost feel remains today.

Maybe that’s not too terribly challenging, as many of these old buildings are only 100 years old, give or a take a few years. But memory often fades faster than brick, and still the townspeople hold on dearly to Walla Walla’s roots as a farming town and hub of land title deals. Read More…

This whole life creation thing makes for an unpredictable voyage, and not just because Susanne and I have been coming at it from an alternative place—I get that not every baby started out with their parents combing through medical histories and sperm count data. And I hereby note, for what it’s worth, that I may hear some unusual rantings when our child is 14 or so about how they entered into this world, in the midst of their teenage angst. I’m okay with that. We’re still going to sit through the six-week course at St. Mary’s Hospital, with the pillows brought in from home clutched to our chests as we watch painfully accurate portrayals of live births on a wide screen in the training room. Vernix is a necessary substance, I’m sure, but it does not do wonders for anyone’s look. Read More…

I admit it: I was a touch fearful about talking to the doctor on Monday. I’ve got a short list of items about which most physicians get lectury, after all. But for the reasons I expressed in my last post, I needed to have a local doctor, so I was willing to lay it out there. Susanne declared it was a “test” of his cultural competency. I liked that as an approach enough.

For some reason, the appointments at this family practice (it’s the same practice as the one for Susanne’s baby doctor) are significantly late to start. I know we all complain about start times at our doctors’ offices, but I can’t for the life of me understand why they set up 11:30AM appointments when all of the nursing staff, en masse, goes to lunch for 90 minutes, especially as they’re 45 minutes behind schedule by the time noon rolls around. Read More…

My physical is tomorrow. I suppose most people call it an “annual physical,” but I haven’t had one in a couple of years because it’s been a while since I saw that physician. So it’s more my biennial physical, bordering on every 30 months at that.

For regular checkups regarding my hormone therapy, I drive out to Portland, Oregon, because I haven’t found a doctor in Walla Walla who knows anything about the whole gender transition thang, and this particular doctor sees more than 1,000 trans patients. Plus heck, it’s a pretty enough drive along the Columbia River, and I suppose it keeps my stamina up for long car rides. Read More…

Walla Walla suffered its first homicide of the year with a gang-related drive-by shooting on Tuesday night. Also, it was the first gunshot death in the city as far back as anyone can remember, which makes it ipso facto the first for us residents. When 20-year-old Julio Cessar Martinez was rolled into the emergency department at St. Mary’s Hospital, I can only imagine how the trauma team responded. They’re much more likely to come across a farm machinery accident, drug overdose, car crash victim, or domestic violence survivor than this. Presumably, this is a foreign moment to Walla Wallans, who are bent on creating a wine economy to draw in the nouveau rich from the West Side. As the economy sluggishly picks up speed, still in the shadow of the 2008 credit collapse, downtown is springing up all kinds of new shops and eateries to cater not to local folks so much as the weekenders who need a break from their hectic lives at Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

This violence is unheard of. Or is it? Read More…

Our unborn dragon is now at 23 weeks and counting, and as Babycenter.com tells me, can hear sounds pretty well, so I broke out my iPod and played a little Billie Holiday the other day, thanks be to Susanne’s unending patience. One book I found suggests that I should play loud sounds in proximity to her uterus so that they won’t bother the dragon as much once it’s out in the world with us. I’m not sure I can pass off needing to vacuum our bedroom, as we have hardwood floors in there. Maybe I’ll blame it on the dust bunnies that have huddled under our bed. Protection in numbers won’t save those buggers from the Electrolux, after all. Read More…

We received an audience with Sarah Palin again today (read, the family practitioner who looks like Sarah Palin), and after waiting only 45 minutes, she joined us for Susanne’s latest exam. After a string of additional symptoms, like sudden, cataclysmic leg cramps, stubborn heartburn, and the mucous that accompanies late spring pollen bursts, Sarah Palin grabbed her fetal heartbeat monitor and pushed around searching for sound.

WHAM, responded the baby dragon, who I imagine had been sleeping peacefully just a scant few seconds earlier. Read More…