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"Well, there's your problem, ma'am"
Jun. 29th, 2012 07:34 pmI've been thinking all day about this business of feeling fairly good with so much bad news at hand, and I think I've got a handle on it.
The big thing is that there are objective problems. Which means that I wasn't just being lazy. I can point to blood chemistry issues and other stuff and know that they've been getting worse for a while, and that there's treatment for some, and that it isn't just a matter of better attitude or whatever. And that's a big load off, given how prone I am to self-condemnation.
Basically, it's a move from "do I just suck?" to "this objective thing sucks". That's part of a balanced recovery.
The big thing is that there are objective problems. Which means that I wasn't just being lazy. I can point to blood chemistry issues and other stuff and know that they've been getting worse for a while, and that there's treatment for some, and that it isn't just a matter of better attitude or whatever. And that's a big load off, given how prone I am to self-condemnation.
Basically, it's a move from "do I just suck?" to "this objective thing sucks". That's part of a balanced recovery.
The state of me, midsummer 2012
Jun. 29th, 2012 10:53 amShort form: not so great.
This has been a bad run of seasons for my underlying health. My weight is up badly and my system's stressed six ways from Sunday. I may need a gastric bypass; we're seeing what a round of dedicated effort short of that can do. Surgery of any kind is bad for me anyway, thanks to the auto-immune troubles, and I'd like to skip it if I can. But I don't dread it, if it proves necessary.
My work writing stalled dead months back, and is just kind of flickering occasionally right now. One of the reasons I've resumed posting here is I want to goad myself back into fanficcing, actually, and write around some of those barriers.
Transitioning remains stalled dead too. I am so, so far from any condition that my doctor - himself a gay man at a GLBT-oriented practice with experience working with trans patients, so this is isn't just routine prejudice or anything - regards as safe to begin hormone treatments. My own reading suggests he's right about that, too. I'm back in major stroke risk territory. I have to get out of that before anything else.
I'm not despairing. I'm not quite sure why not sometimes. :) But I feel like I can still, eventually, get to where I'd like to be. In the meantime, I have missed you folks, and look forward to swapping text again.
This has been a bad run of seasons for my underlying health. My weight is up badly and my system's stressed six ways from Sunday. I may need a gastric bypass; we're seeing what a round of dedicated effort short of that can do. Surgery of any kind is bad for me anyway, thanks to the auto-immune troubles, and I'd like to skip it if I can. But I don't dread it, if it proves necessary.
My work writing stalled dead months back, and is just kind of flickering occasionally right now. One of the reasons I've resumed posting here is I want to goad myself back into fanficcing, actually, and write around some of those barriers.
Transitioning remains stalled dead too. I am so, so far from any condition that my doctor - himself a gay man at a GLBT-oriented practice with experience working with trans patients, so this is isn't just routine prejudice or anything - regards as safe to begin hormone treatments. My own reading suggests he's right about that, too. I'm back in major stroke risk territory. I have to get out of that before anything else.
I'm not despairing. I'm not quite sure why not sometimes. :) But I feel like I can still, eventually, get to where I'd like to be. In the meantime, I have missed you folks, and look forward to swapping text again.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends
Jun. 27th, 2012 11:45 pmHello, anyone still reading this. It was a hell of a year. It still is, in some ways. But I'm freshly feeling the extra intense need to write to the world as myself, without any of the usual camouflage. So here I am back again.
Star Wars fanfic: Note to self
Nov. 14th, 2011 09:24 pmThe thing about a civilization thousands of years old is that it's not going to be consistent through that, or anything like it. It's not just a matter of war versus peace. There will be eras of matriarchy, eras of gender redefinition, eras of central authority withdrawal and central authority expansion, the whole deal. Cultural continuity on that scale is #1) non-existent and #2) manufactured later, to serve a variety of agendas.
Stuff to play with, if and when.
Stuff to play with, if and when.
Desired states
Nov. 13th, 2011 09:59 amI've been poking at this from a variety of angles for most of this year, and I think I've got it articulated now:
I crave some time where I live basically unmedicated.
It's not that I wish to do without any of the benefits I get from any of the many things I take, or have taken, or expect to need to take in the future. Nor do I think many of them act on my thoughts and feelings in any way more directly than relieving me from pain, helping me get more energy, and otherwise get the freedom to actually make decisions.
It's just that I am tired of having my life so deeply structured around schedules for taking things, arranging the refills, and all the rest on various scales from hours to months. I'd like a year or however long wherever I don't have to think about interactions of complex chemicals with each other and my various health problems, and can instead just think about diet and choices driven by, well, choice and taste rather than chemical necessities of that sort.
I suspect strongly that this is not an altogether practical sort of wish. My non-gender-related medical issues aren't the kind of thing that usually ever get so under control that they need no management via medication. But I feel like I really want to aim for the best approximation I can get, to be taking as little as possible for a while, to enjoy some middle-age-y time being more me and less me + lots of pills.
I crave some time where I live basically unmedicated.
It's not that I wish to do without any of the benefits I get from any of the many things I take, or have taken, or expect to need to take in the future. Nor do I think many of them act on my thoughts and feelings in any way more directly than relieving me from pain, helping me get more energy, and otherwise get the freedom to actually make decisions.
It's just that I am tired of having my life so deeply structured around schedules for taking things, arranging the refills, and all the rest on various scales from hours to months. I'd like a year or however long wherever I don't have to think about interactions of complex chemicals with each other and my various health problems, and can instead just think about diet and choices driven by, well, choice and taste rather than chemical necessities of that sort.
I suspect strongly that this is not an altogether practical sort of wish. My non-gender-related medical issues aren't the kind of thing that usually ever get so under control that they need no management via medication. But I feel like I really want to aim for the best approximation I can get, to be taking as little as possible for a while, to enjoy some middle-age-y time being more me and less me + lots of pills.
Meanwhile, two months later...
Nov. 12th, 2011 05:27 amIt's been another one of those runs of complications and stuff, but it looks like winter is going to be better for me than autumn was, by a wide margin. :)
One of my best friends commented recently on her problem of disengaging from general traffic, then reengaging, then over-engaging, then getting swamped, then needing to disengage again. Obviously that's a problem for me, too. I've decided to make the next season one of cautious rebuilding, with the aim of actually again sustaining reasonable interaction with the world and neat people in it.
One of my best friends commented recently on her problem of disengaging from general traffic, then reengaging, then over-engaging, then getting swamped, then needing to disengage again. Obviously that's a problem for me, too. I've decided to make the next season one of cautious rebuilding, with the aim of actually again sustaining reasonable interaction with the world and neat people in it.
Another spy game
Aug. 29th, 2011 06:24 pmOccasioned by browsing through various spy RPGs...
The characters work for/with "Team T" (for "Turing"), a multinational LGBT group/secret society/conspiracy in the midst of the Cold War. Their mission is two-fold: destabilize the forces of heteronormative patriarchy, without making life worse for bystanders.
The first part is relatively easy - driving James Jesus Angleton even more crazy is good fun for the whole family. Romancing closet cases and helping them find the courage to come out and carrying on with the open and proud of the day, this is just fun, too. Making sure others don't suffer for one's own fun and chaos-bringing, that's the hard part, requiring plans, fall-backs, construction of plausible alternative targets, and so on.
The characters work for/with "Team T" (for "Turing"), a multinational LGBT group/secret society/conspiracy in the midst of the Cold War. Their mission is two-fold: destabilize the forces of heteronormative patriarchy, without making life worse for bystanders.
The first part is relatively easy - driving James Jesus Angleton even more crazy is good fun for the whole family. Romancing closet cases and helping them find the courage to come out and carrying on with the open and proud of the day, this is just fun, too. Making sure others don't suffer for one's own fun and chaos-bringing, that's the hard part, requiring plans, fall-backs, construction of plausible alternative targets, and so on.
Still not dead
Apr. 3rd, 2011 06:27 pmJust slogging along. Getting very little done, but my mood seems manageable when I avoid mental overload. Looking forward to writing more, though....
About not posting
Feb. 19th, 2011 06:17 am I'm having a demanding time, but in a good way. My oral hygeine really went to hell in my depressed years leading up to gender identity insights, and I have a lot of bad teeth now. Well, I'm getting them fixed. The local university's dental school is apparently widely regarded as best in the region, and they're really treating me right. Old fillings out, new ones going in that should last me a minimum of ten years and a maximum of, well, a lifetime with reasonable care, the whole deal. I'm very happy.
But being so immersed in medical environments takes a huge toll on my body thanks to the autoimmune weaknesses. I come out of each session set for some days of migraine and woe, and have to keep fending off opportunistic colds, and so on. I've simply had very little energy for posting. But things genuinely are going well - this is work that will keep on giving in relief, and I'll make it up to you folks with more traffic later. :)
But being so immersed in medical environments takes a huge toll on my body thanks to the autoimmune weaknesses. I come out of each session set for some days of migraine and woe, and have to keep fending off opportunistic colds, and so on. I've simply had very little energy for posting. But things genuinely are going well - this is work that will keep on giving in relief, and I'll make it up to you folks with more traffic later. :)
Down in my mouth, so to speak
Feb. 4th, 2011 08:48 amI need dental work. A lot of it. I neglected my mouth along with the rest of me during years of depression and pre-aware struggle with gender identity. Now I need to catch up. Well, today I do - the first of what'll be many sessions for filling and all at the University of Washington dental school. I very much like the dental student assigned to me and have a lto of confidence in him; he did an excellent job with my initial cleaning. I'm just so tensed up about any medical matters these days. It's very, very hard to keep from quietly (or maybe even noisily) flipping out along the way.
I'll be better once this session is done and the whole thing's actually happening.
I'll be better once this session is done and the whole thing's actually happening.
Star Trek fanfic in progress
Jan. 31st, 2011 05:59 pmAs it says on the tin. Original series era, polyamorous lesbians in love, bletcherous trans childhood memories, no sex or violence in the first 1100-ish words.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Some writing happiness
Jan. 29th, 2011 11:38 pmI'd been fretting that I might not live up to my goal of having something post-worthy in the fanfic department this month, but the thoughts in my head are coming together well and I should have one of my celebrated multi-thousand-word rambling vignettes. Having fun with it, too.
I've been writing this down somewhere for a while, and some conversation with a friend about our respective psychological developments reminded me of that. So here goes.
I was born in the middle of the 1960s, in a racially heterogeneous part of the country closely associated with some of the iconic racial violence and turmoil of that decade. I was aware right from the outset that there were a lot of people quite close to me who weren't getting the opportunities I was, and that some pretty drastic changes were necessary to get them the stuff I could already count on. A bit more gradually I realized just how many ways life was worse for those identified as women than for those of us identified as male; then I learned first-hand about the problems thrust on the disabled, and after that about the ones pushed on the non-straight.
My parents grew up in the Great Depression, and they shared the knowledge not just that collective action could work but that it had. They were also prepared to keep learning, to understand more about the world and themselves and make changes to their behavior based on new insight.s They also taught us that there were times you had to do something whether or not you felt like it, and that when it was the right thing to do based on facts and morality, you would just have to trust that your feelings would catch up later through practice.
So I was part of the expanding white middle class, with a father of academic and professional background and a mother from the working class. Dad had stable employment with some strong union benefits and the expectation that my siblings and I would be able to enjoy good education and good prospects of our own. And we had the expectation that it was possible and desirable to extend this kind of prospect to others - that nobody really had to live with a lot of misery and uncertainty, and that while progress was often much too slow, it was happening and as long as good people kept pushing it would keep happening. The day would come when nobody would be stuck in the sort of grief that Mom had endured in the midst of the depression, or that some people were enduring not far from our home in that very moment.
Th 21st century has been my opportunity to learn that we were all wrong, and for a pretty straightforward reason. We thought of ourselves as solidly in the Haves camp, and assumed that we'd stay there, that the question was what to do about then who were then stuck as Have Nots. But it turns out that the real Haves, the top 1% and even more the top 0.1%, always begrudged people like us our place too, and were then busily working out how to push us out. They've been succeeding on various fronts for a long time, and now they're in the midst of consolidating it. I've learned that I don't have any more security than a lot of folks I feel sorry for, and wouldn't even if I were a healthy cis man instead of a sick trans woman.
I haven't given up believing that progress can happen, because after all, the Great Compression - that era where the rich's share of things wet down and a lot of people's situations improved - did happen. But we have to re-fight a lot of battles now, and Mom has said that she things the elites are now more consciously mean and cruel than they were back in the Depression. Then they were mostly simply callous and arrogant. Now they know more fully what they're doing, thanks to the actual existence of alternatives rather than it just being speculation. I know she fears for my siblings and me, and how we'll do after she's gone, and I have to say I share her fear.
This is where my politics now have to begin.
I was born in the middle of the 1960s, in a racially heterogeneous part of the country closely associated with some of the iconic racial violence and turmoil of that decade. I was aware right from the outset that there were a lot of people quite close to me who weren't getting the opportunities I was, and that some pretty drastic changes were necessary to get them the stuff I could already count on. A bit more gradually I realized just how many ways life was worse for those identified as women than for those of us identified as male; then I learned first-hand about the problems thrust on the disabled, and after that about the ones pushed on the non-straight.
My parents grew up in the Great Depression, and they shared the knowledge not just that collective action could work but that it had. They were also prepared to keep learning, to understand more about the world and themselves and make changes to their behavior based on new insight.s They also taught us that there were times you had to do something whether or not you felt like it, and that when it was the right thing to do based on facts and morality, you would just have to trust that your feelings would catch up later through practice.
So I was part of the expanding white middle class, with a father of academic and professional background and a mother from the working class. Dad had stable employment with some strong union benefits and the expectation that my siblings and I would be able to enjoy good education and good prospects of our own. And we had the expectation that it was possible and desirable to extend this kind of prospect to others - that nobody really had to live with a lot of misery and uncertainty, and that while progress was often much too slow, it was happening and as long as good people kept pushing it would keep happening. The day would come when nobody would be stuck in the sort of grief that Mom had endured in the midst of the depression, or that some people were enduring not far from our home in that very moment.
Th 21st century has been my opportunity to learn that we were all wrong, and for a pretty straightforward reason. We thought of ourselves as solidly in the Haves camp, and assumed that we'd stay there, that the question was what to do about then who were then stuck as Have Nots. But it turns out that the real Haves, the top 1% and even more the top 0.1%, always begrudged people like us our place too, and were then busily working out how to push us out. They've been succeeding on various fronts for a long time, and now they're in the midst of consolidating it. I've learned that I don't have any more security than a lot of folks I feel sorry for, and wouldn't even if I were a healthy cis man instead of a sick trans woman.
I haven't given up believing that progress can happen, because after all, the Great Compression - that era where the rich's share of things wet down and a lot of people's situations improved - did happen. But we have to re-fight a lot of battles now, and Mom has said that she things the elites are now more consciously mean and cruel than they were back in the Depression. Then they were mostly simply callous and arrogant. Now they know more fully what they're doing, thanks to the actual existence of alternatives rather than it just being speculation. I know she fears for my siblings and me, and how we'll do after she's gone, and I have to say I share her fear.
This is where my politics now have to begin.
Akira, written and drawn by Katsuhiro Otomo, translated by Yoko Umezawa & Linda M. York & Jo Duffy
I was shelving things the other day and it dawned on me that while I read the first couple of volumes of this manga quite a few times and remembered them well, I tended to run out of steam and actually had no reliable recollections at all of the last volume. So I re-read the lot.
This is epic psi-blasting sf. It's set in Tokyo in 2030, in a history which includes a short but sharp World War III in 1996, started by a mysterious explosion that wiped out the old city of Tokyo. Reconstruction's happened and life moved on...but hey, there are secrets to come out and more history waiting to happen.
The story has its flaws. There are, more or less, no female characters. There are female bodies who speak exposition and serve as mobile mystery dispensers. There are male characters with distinct personalities and motives, but nobody female rises to that level.
But the story also has a couple real strengths. One is visual detail. Otomo's always been a meticulous draftsman (and good at choosing assistants to keep in his vibe), and never more so than here, with some absolutely berserk architectural detail. The scenes of mass destruction are therefore truly epic, multi-page mind-blowing extravaganzas. I love 'em. The physical signs of not-directly-observable psychic force are likewise marvelous, with ripples and distortions and smashes and eerily shaded domes. This is stuff that's shaped my imagination for such things, more than I'd realized until this re-reading.
The other is a freedom from social traditionalism that's really refreshing. The American version of this basic story would almost certainly end with the reestablishment of Tokyo as part of the existing Japanese nation and reconstruction bringing it back to normality, the psychic evolution at the heart of the thing ticking into the future in secret. As Otomo tells it, though, changes begun in the midst of catastrophe by people of less than admirable motive come to seem admirable by others, and carried on in opposition to the forces of the world as it was. I like that very much indeed. I'm sorry I'd forgotten it, and happy to have it restored my memory.
I don't see myself reading this again anytime soon, but I'm really glad to have it fresh just right now.
I was shelving things the other day and it dawned on me that while I read the first couple of volumes of this manga quite a few times and remembered them well, I tended to run out of steam and actually had no reliable recollections at all of the last volume. So I re-read the lot.
This is epic psi-blasting sf. It's set in Tokyo in 2030, in a history which includes a short but sharp World War III in 1996, started by a mysterious explosion that wiped out the old city of Tokyo. Reconstruction's happened and life moved on...but hey, there are secrets to come out and more history waiting to happen.
The story has its flaws. There are, more or less, no female characters. There are female bodies who speak exposition and serve as mobile mystery dispensers. There are male characters with distinct personalities and motives, but nobody female rises to that level.
But the story also has a couple real strengths. One is visual detail. Otomo's always been a meticulous draftsman (and good at choosing assistants to keep in his vibe), and never more so than here, with some absolutely berserk architectural detail. The scenes of mass destruction are therefore truly epic, multi-page mind-blowing extravaganzas. I love 'em. The physical signs of not-directly-observable psychic force are likewise marvelous, with ripples and distortions and smashes and eerily shaded domes. This is stuff that's shaped my imagination for such things, more than I'd realized until this re-reading.
The other is a freedom from social traditionalism that's really refreshing. The American version of this basic story would almost certainly end with the reestablishment of Tokyo as part of the existing Japanese nation and reconstruction bringing it back to normality, the psychic evolution at the heart of the thing ticking into the future in secret. As Otomo tells it, though, changes begun in the midst of catastrophe by people of less than admirable motive come to seem admirable by others, and carried on in opposition to the forces of the world as it was. I like that very much indeed. I'm sorry I'd forgotten it, and happy to have it restored my memory.
I don't see myself reading this again anytime soon, but I'm really glad to have it fresh just right now.
Health happiness
Jan. 22nd, 2011 05:30 amFlushing out accumulated toxins and metabolic junk isn't fun. But feeling better after each round really is. I am emerging more and more from the slump of recent months, and loving it. :)
