Reasons to Despise Society, Pt. 1

It feels like last time I did a post we were still in the paleolithic age, smacking rocks with other rocks and chasing buffalo off high ledges. A whole lot of stuff has happened since last I took up the metaphorical pen to gift you with the machinations of my often idle mind, but rather than attempt to compact it all into a readable wad of text, I think I’m going to leave it all up to your imagination. You can imagine I was bundled away in the night by a mysterious band of rebels out to protest some awful new law and then became their leader, went on to conduct a completely underground (and successful) rebellion; or you can imagine I was stuck on the top of some distant mountain, barely surviving on bits of trail mix and granola while I waited for the authorities to come find me (while at the same time writing my masterpiece novel); or you can imagine that life has been kind of as it always has. Better, these days, but still not all that much different. I realize I’m hurtling, reluctantly, towards adulthood, and that at the end of this year my friends will be off to the bizarre guessed-at lands of life; and it is a bit daunting, to think that soon we’re all going to get tossed to the winds like so many discarded leaflets – but that’s life, it evolves and the people around you evolve, too. To remain static is impossible, and stupid if you try. You’ve got to kind of ride the waves, man.

I am imbued with some obscurity today, sorry. I think the happier I get, the sillier I get – and when I’m down or depressed I turn into a bad realistic fiction novel. I really do, I’ve read over my previous writings. I think I prefer my writing when it’s somewhere in the middle – not too obscure as to be difficult to enjoy, but not too raw that it starts to suggest the world sucks horribly and everything will be bad forever.

So with that out of the way, let’s look at reasons to despise society. I was inspired by one thing in particular, but I’ve realized since then that there are reasons all over the place, simply growing on the trees ready to pick off, and that I should maybe discuss them. Because as anyone who knows me knows, there are some aspects of society that I just can’t get past, that I feel it is my duty NOT to get past, so that you may understand them, too, and wield your new-found knowledge for the betterment of humanity. Or something; I’ll go with that for now.

What’s the thing, then? The thing is this:

Does it look fairly innocuous? A little creepy, but pretty much innocuous? Hold on to your hats. This is the cover for a book that I happened to see at the store, and when I saw it I felt a narrow look of uncertainty grow on my face, wondering if it was the new sequel to Ransom Riggs’ popular series about weird kids who live in Wales (it isn’t that good in my esteemed and glorious opinion.) But aha, the author is someone new – Madeleine Roux, to be exact – and, because my deductive skills rival that of the well-known fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, I was able to deduce that this Roux person is not in fact Ransom Riggs, and is in fact someone entirely different who just so happened to write a book that is eerily familiar to a certain other book which I didn’t find all that good. Am I overreacting? I’m not overreacting. Just look at the cover to Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children:

WHAT HO! Still not convinced? Take it upon my word then that both books use the quirk of including photographs en lieu of illustrations, for I guess a more realistic and avant garde feel. Yes, both novels feature photographs as a way to enhance their texts. There is no coincidence here. Why is there no coincidence here? Because, in the Goodreads summary of this “Asylum” book, it is written: “Asylum is a thrilling and creepy photo-novel perfect for fans of the New York Times bestseller Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.”

THOUGHT YOU WERE CLEVER, DID YOU, SOCIETY? Well, you can’t get that past ME, deductive cynical intellectual that I am! Point goes to the Cellar Boy. Smirk.

This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened, naturally. I remember when Twilight was huge (remember those strange, dangerous times? I got through them by hiding in a closet with a pot on my head), a whole bunch of knock offs suddenly mysteriously appeared, with names like “Blue Moon” and I wish I had another example but I don’t. I didn’t really care about them because my opinion of Twilight and vampires in general was so low. But I have, in comparison only, a much higher esteem for Ransom Riggs’ kind-of-neat books, and it actually sincerely bothers me that other authors can publish books that are just obvious rip offs, and then make money off of them. The same thing happened with a book called “Gods of Manhattan”, which was clearly written straight off the fame of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians. And in film, too, we can observe this annoying practice recurring – (look up Asylum Films. That is beautiful irony right there, that it should have the same name as the Ransom Riggs ripoff novel.) Why do people feel they can do this? More than that, why do they feel they can do it and then get away with it scot-free? Sometimes leeching off of other people’s ideas and success isn’t the most terrible thing (for instance look at the humorous goodness of Pigfarts), and I suppose it’s stupidly subjective of me to forgive in some cases and not in others – but I think, just in principle, that it’s a pretty slimy thing to do. There are fan fiction websites out there for a reason. Put your rip offs on there so random internet-goers can have fun reading them. But for money? Really, for money? O, the green-eyed monster, she who pulls the strings of our desperate hearts.

Now, wait, there are more reasons. Of course there are. I would never just leave you with one. The second one is perhaps even less of a big deal, but what it is is far more prominently displayed in the public light. In fact, it’s so prominently displayed that everyone and their poodle is doing it. It is so prominent that I currently cannot turn my head in any direction without seeing it. At school, it is everywhere, like some bizarre tribal brand signifying that soon the civilized world is going to be overthrown. Even the pompous Canadian politicians in their fifties on the news channel I watch religiously are doing it. It is starting to make me sincerely unhappy, simply because no one seems able to resist it. It is, of course, this.

No, not the guy. Well, the guy too. But more specifically his hair. Good mother of all that is holy, everyone has this haircut now. Put down summer and fall of 2014 in the record books as the “Time of the Shaved-Sides Haircut”.  It’s like we’ve crashed hair-first into some Utopian  George Orwell concoction where Big Pop Star is Watching You.

I think I’m about to have a nervous breakdown. Such conformism has not been seen since the Time of the Skinny Jeans, and thank Brian that one’s mostly over. It’s not the haircut itself that I dislike, you understand; back before everyone had it I thought it was kind of neat, but since then it’s gotten unnervingly prevalent. I’ve seen fads before, and fads are weird, granted – the one with the hamster teddies on wheels was basically impossible to grasp – but this one is different. It could be because I’m older, more aware, and far more cynical and angry – or it could be that it’s just seemed to hit all at once this time, and with force. I don’t understand it at all. If I see a popular figure that I really like get an interesting new haircut, then maybe I’d consider doing the same thing – if it looks good on him or her, then why not? I can understand that, sure. But you’d think – I mean you would, wouldn’t you? – that after a certain point, you would no longer want to get that haircut, after five out of the fifteen people in your class have that hair, after the goddamn Conservative fifty-year-old guy on Power and Politics has that hair. I mean, I don’t really care, but I do care. I care but I don’t care. If you have this hair, then I think no less of you; it could very well be you weren’t aware of the extent of this fad, or that maybe you just didn’t care. BUT – if you are actively aware of the popularity of this hairstyle, and then you go out and get one yourself – I must ask you why. Why? Do not be a pop star sheep. There are too many of them already, they’re clogging up the classrooms and I don’t have anywhere to sit. I’m a pretentious idiot, aren’t I. I’m just a sheep covered in rainbow paint with a little hat on its head trying to not be the same. Well, I stand by my ethics; I will not wash my wool.

New slogan for 2014.

Perhaps I should separate myself from Photoshop, forthwith. How silly, why would I do that? I think that’s it for this particular wad of text and bizarre pictures. I have perhaps or perhaps not officially returned from my hiatus. We will see. Do stick around; until next we meet, I am your champion of the obscure blog, he who sits among the sheep, – The Cellar Boy

 

– FIN –

Adventures in French Nowheresville (ooh la la)

We drove out to French Nowheresville today for the yearly family corn roast thing. It was a nice day, warm but not unpleasantly so, and the clouds were fantastic, big and puffy and dramatic. We turned a corner on the lonely country highway and were faced with a gigantic one that looked exactly like a penis. Now usually I seem to miss sexual innuendos, but that one was just too obvious, I couldn’t help feeling affected. I kept my eyes on the road and hoped my mom wasn’t looking up. When we passed the little Papanack Zoo, I yelped, “Hey look! Llamas!”

Fucking modern culture got to me, I guess.

Anyway, we turned some more remote corners and got to my uncle’s place, a cottage out in the tamed, farm-covered lands slightly east of the city, and voila! The corn roast faces me down, armed with its various ranks of half-known uncles and aunts. All of them are French, and not just a little French, very French. And the language of Quebec is different, full of slang and weird pronunciations – that on top of the fact that French in general is tough to speak with competence when it’s your second language. So I end up sitting there, understanding most of what’s being said but also terrified to try to speak it myself. My usual strategy is just to say “Bon, merci” when the relatives ask how I’ve been and hope that satisfies them. Rarely does anyone try to engage me in conversation, outside of the small circle of people I like, and who like me back, I imagine – but when they do I get along with short answers and lots of smiling and nodding. I thought that was only a thing in bad TV shows but you know, it isn’t; you can smile and nod your way through lots of real-life things.

The corn roast was long and fraught with mosquitoes, but otherwise it was nice. Everyone was friendly. I’m not sure to what extent the family knows of my LUBR (Large Uncomfortable Boy Revelation) and I’m also not sure how the future will go, as I duke it out with backwoods Quebec. Honestly it unnerves me, to imagine how they’ll face the fact that I’m going to grow up and become a man, not a woman. I’m not exactly front and center in the family, I imagine my place is off to the side somewhere, a floating speck of no particular importance, nice and quiet and inoffensive – so I guess they could all just ignore it and let it be. Everyone has always seemed basically nice, and have never been rude to me; the opposite, they’ve always been friendly and I hope I’m a positive figure in their minds. But they’re also conservative and traditional, excepting a few of the younger aunts, uncles, and cousins, and excepting my grandma. And it’s hard for anyone to accept the thing I have, even people like my English grandparents, who have always been kind and intelligent and progressive. I’m worried about when the hormones I’m taking really kick in and nobody can imagine away the fact that I have a thing and it’s actually going to affect them, in whatever small way. For instance I literally can’t even begin to imagine a certain great-aunt I have ever doing the pronoun switch, not even when I have sideburns and a deep voice. And that is going to be extremely difficult, when it happens, because I’m so sure she won’t switch. I just don’t want to be alienated. I like these people, even if I only see them once in a blue moon; I really do like some of them, and I’m happy that I can go to the corn roasts and be accepted and everything. I never want that to end, I appreciate it and I appreciate them.

But that, as well as many other things, I’m learning, is out of my control. I can send everybody LGBT leaflets – every obscure aunt and uncle from here to the northern end of Ontario – but in the end how they react is up to them. I guess all I can do in the meantime is worry about myself and my immediate friends and family, and hope it works out without me.

You know I think I’ve talked about this before, but I want to go over it again – the thing about sexuality, how it’s not related to gender, but how everyone thinks it is. First everyone thought I was a lesbian because of how I dressed. Then, coming out as transgender, people slowly began to assume that I really did like girls after all, being a boy. Now I have to explain to them that I don’t, in fact, explicitly like girls, but in fact just sort of like who I like, with no real preference. I bring it up because of a thing that has happened recently: it’s that one of my friends (take note, he was the one who told me he had a crush on me in grade five) sent me a cat emoticon with a heart over its head in a Facebook message after we had a conversation about me being transgender. (He asked me slyly about it after I sent him a story I’d written.) Now, before you shake your head (I see you beginning to think about shaking it, or perhaps you already have), let me tell you that no, I don’t put much store in cat emoticons. I think they’re pretty cute, but that’s not relevant, is it. It’s just that of ALL the cat emoticons, why the one with the heart over its head? Sure, you could say it’s an expression of support, of caring (by the way I had a small heart attack of relief after he said he was utterly fine with my big revelation), but could you not also come to the conclusion that it is an expression of liking? Well? You know, I hope it is. I’ve had an on-off liking of him for years. And I’m tired of Zuko being my pretend boyfriend, a real one would be great. A real girlfriend would be great, too. I kind of maybe have briefly entertained fantasies about the ridiculously cool girl at the video game store downtown who looks like she jumped right out of Scott Pilgrim v.s the World. If she doesn’t seem like she’s maybe twenty or so, and if I was less Asperger’s, I would ask her out in a jiffy. Then we would play Zelda Twilight Princess and watch artsy movies together all day. That would be great.

And also, wouldn’t you know, school approaches. Oh yes, indeed, she does, upon her chariot of death, eyes aflame, wielding the scythe of misery in one cruel hand! Cower before this demon – all ye children hide yourselves, ‘fore she sweeps upon you and steals you away, to suck the lifeblood from your lovely veins and deposit your creaking bones ‘pon the bed of heartless society. That was a bit over the top. I think school is more like a wolf, and we are sheep, running blindly from its snapping heels and losing ourselves in the wilderness of vapid education. Although last year’s English class wasn’t so bad – I happened upon a pretty great teacher, not one of those badly-constructed androids that seem so common. Anyway yes indeed, I’m headed back to school in nine days, although my brain won’t process that reality quite yet, and I’ll be trying for my last English credit and my first arts credit. Should be anxiety-ridden and horrible as always, but at least I’ll see my friends.

Anything else? I’m pretty tired now, it’s almost midnight and the corn roast sucked most of the life out of me. I wrote all this on my last 10% or so. I apologize for not doing any posts for the last couple of months – sometimes life is very hard to fit into a 1000-some blog post that a handful of people may or may not read, and besides that I get lazy and overwhelmed. I’ll try to write more often again, but no promises – in fact when I make promises like that, more often than not they just make doing it harder. I do write stories, as ever, although most of them I end up abandoning for one reason or another – and I’ve also been doing some stuff on my music blog, darksideoftheroom, if you happen to be interested in that, and if you’ve been reading this far. Oh and also, I made an album on my Bandcamp, you can buy it if you want, or you can ask me if I can send you the link to it for free so you don’t have to pay, which I’ll do. Is that it? That’s it. Do come again, and thanks as always for taking the time to read this large mess of words.

(Psst: I don’t always wear sunglasses, but when I do, they’re rainbowy sunglasses.)

– Brynn

In the Forest

The forest next to our condominium goes much farther in than I thought it did. It still isn’t much, and it’s surrounded on all sides by the lonely looping streets of the suburbs, but I’m pleased to have discovered that from one end to the other, it takes about twenty five minutes to walk. Today I went out to explore it again. The last time I did, I saw this:

I was walking home from the library and decided to get there through the forest, just for fun. Then I saw the family of deer. There were five or six of them, lingering between the trees, lovely and silent – when I saw them I stopped, and crouched down on the leaves to stare. I inched closer. One deer wandered by, saw me, and raised her head to look at me – her baby, the one in the picture up there, came up to her, and gave me a look, too, seeming unbothered. The mom licked the baby’s head absently, and then after a while she drifted away, leaving the little deer standing there, about twenty feet away from me. She looked at me. I looked back, trying to be as silent and still as possible. My legs ached. The deer started to inch towards me, very slowly, ducking her head a little bit as if she was trying to get a better look at this strange forest-invader all in black. The closest she got was maybe fifteen feet – and then, figuring out I was actually pretty boring, she quietly headed off after her mom.

It was amazing. I knew that there were deer in the forest, but I didn’t think I’d ever get so close to them, or that it would make me feel like I did. There was something about the little deer, edging closer and closer to me, that really struck something emotional – I don’t know. It was pretty cool.

So today I went for a walk again, and saw no deer, but I did see an ancient Coca-Cola machine, sitting in a pool of water, completely rusted through. I kicked it with my shoe and it felt crumbly and light. The thing had a 60s feel about it; and there were other old bits of metal, what looked like a car bumper, and an unidentifiable box, and a weird thing that had curlicues like the headboard of a bed. I have no idea why people chuck large metal objects into forests. I guess it must have struck them as a good idea at the time. I also clambered through some thorny bushes, which hurt, and wandered around near the stream, which snakes through the forest, until it disappears towards the Green Belt, and probably joins up with the river. A duck flew in a circle above me – it was trying to get away, I think, when I came crashing through the trees, but it did a really unnecessary and amusing loop before it flapped away over the rooftops. I walked along at the side of the fence, which separates the forest and the new development that’s just behind our condominium – and there was a nice beat-down path, so I decided to jog along it for a little bit, with the cool hiking stick I’d found in one hand. As I ran, I heard someone shout, like a bark; looking around, I saw people on their back porch, maybe turned in my direction. I couldn’t quite tell, it was far away, and they were blurry. Anyway, I turned away and kept going, and a man shouted something else. I’m not sure, but it sounded like “HEY, FRODO!”

So that’s great. Because I didn’t have enough self esteem issues already, without random assholes on their back porches yelling at me just for running through a forest.

I hate the world. I get shitted on for doing absolutely nothing. I’m not hurting anyone, running around in a forest – in fact that’s a pretty innocuous way to spend my day, I’m just exploring, I’m not hunting or chopping down trees or planning out future housing developments – in fact you could say it’s good for me, being outside in the fresh air, getting exercise. I spent a year of my life basically unable to leave the house, I don’t need any more reasons to go back to that.

My mom is frustrated with me. I don’t exactly know why this time. I don’t really want to say I’m sorry because I have no idea what I did. I probably did something – almost definitely, I did something. I just wish she’d actually tell me, so I don’t feel like the worst person who ever lived, not knowing the true extent of it. But whatever. It’s spring, you know, and that’s supposed to be a good thing. No, it is a good thing. And if I’m Frodo, then so be it. I’m Frodo.

Some Thoughts on Equality, Hatred, Cruelty, etc.

Why are people assholes, especially online? Huh? The incredible Cellar Boy gives his rainy, depressing Wednesday thoughts about it. Also he apparently switches to third person for no reason.  Right here.

My dad has a new apartment, and he’s going to move in this Saturday, and I can stay there whenever I want. It’s in the basement of an extremely old building, weathered red brick with some new additions on the front and a picture of the handsome Prince Rupert on the lobby wall. It’s two stories tall, in the middle of the city’s rich downtown neighborhood, about a five minute walk from the canal. The basement smells like death. It’s kind of one of the shittiest places I’ve ever seen. There are two rooms, plus a bathroom; one is the kitchen and dining room, it’s all white with a window looking out at street level, with a latch that’s about a centimeter too far for me to reach, even standing on the foot stool that you need to stand on, no matter how tall you are. I’m five foot six. I should really be able to reach the freaking window latch on a foot stool. The bedroom-living room is nicer, with a wooden floor and a little closet, and another window that I can’t reach, looking out on the street. We have a fridge and an oven already there, and yesterday my grandma and my dad and I went to Ikea (the monstrously huge, three-story Ikea that looms like a blue and yellow space station out in the west end) and we bought a shelf thing to put boxes in to hold our clothes and two chairs for the kitchen table, which is a fold-in slab of wood attached to the wall. My grandma and grandpa will bring their old futon and we’ll get another mattress. I’m thinking about bringing either my record player or my stereo; my dad wants me to bring my Van Gogh print to put up on the wall. He’s been really into Van Gogh lately, ever since I showed him some paintings online – we’re going to be doing a painting class together starting this Thursday, and I’m looking forward to it. I want to spend more time with my dad and besides the thing itself actually does sound kind of fun.

So the apartment is pretty bad, really small, and with its high ceilings it kind of feels like a prison – but I don’t care all that much, and I’m actually looking forward to staying there, because it means I can get away from my mom’s house and be closer to my friends, who all live in my dad’s neighborhood. It’s not as if I don’t like being at my mom’s – of all the people in my family, it’s her I get along best with, even if we argue half of the time and sometimes it feels like she’s got me in a vice grip of parental over-attention. – That’s the reason I want to have some days away, how I feel like she’s always hovering over me. She probably isn’t. It just feels like she is. All of her hovering is well-meaning, but holy shit does it get under my skin sometimes. And I love spending time with her (we’ve watched four seasons of Lost in the past two months or so, and it’s been great), but I NEED TIME BY MYSELF. Holy shit, do I ever need time by myself.

Today I went to that Yu-gi-oh tournament with my friends. It was kind of nice, surprisingly. I haven’t spent much time with them since I left school again in March, and it’s great to know we still get along and everything (like we wouldn’t, for some reason?) I still haven’t told them about the transgender thing. I have to do that. It feels so bizarre to hear them refer to me with girl pronouns, since everyone else in my life is switching, and I myself have long since switched. It also makes me uncomfortable and frustrated, but I can’t possibly fault them. Because… I haven’t fucking told them yet. I need to. I just have no idea how – as always. At the Yu-gi-oh tournament most people seemed to accept my boyness but one guy called me “her”, but he sort of looked familiar so he might have seen me some other time at another tournament when I looked like an X. I felt pretty good at the tournament, in terms of self-esteem; a little shaky, it’s true, when I had to talk, but mostly all right. I lost four times and won once. Another time it was pretty close, though. Although I dare not suggest I’m actually very good at Yu-gi-oh – which is sad because I’ve been playing it since I was six or seven. I think part of it is that everyone else is so good – these tournament guys are pretty serious, and more often than not they really study the strategies, to the point that you literally can’t get a move in before they win the match. So it might not be that I suck, really. I’ll tell myself it isn’t, anyway.

I told my friends about my dad’s new apartment and then Devin asked to come over and play music sometime. (We used to have a band. Nope, I will not disclose the link to our Youtube thing, I personally quarantined it forever.) I was happy to see he still has enthusiasm about the band, and that he wants to hang out with me. I’m a bit embarrassed about the apartment, but it’s not like it’s my dad’s fault, really – he just doesn’t have the money, and besides this was the closest one to the house where my sister lives with my step-mother. I think I’ll try to stay at the apartment at least half the week, and especially when school starts up again because it’s so incredibly close by – just a twenty minute walk, or a five minute bike ride. (As opposed to going to school from my mom’s house, which is across the city.) When I mentioned to my mom that I want to stay there sometimes, she said “Maybe every Friday you can give it a try”, and I think that spells danger. Probably she just wants me to be comfortable, but another part could be that she doesn’t want me at my dad’s house because she doesn’t think he’ll take care of me as well. My dad loves me and I love him, and he would never not take care of me, but it’s true that he would let me stay up, sleep in, and drink pop later than five o’clock (all things my mom doesn’t let me do. I don’t always listen; if I always listened I’d have to kick myself.) My mom and my dad have different styles, drastically different; my mom is the one who gets things done, she’s set up all my hospital appointments that have to do with my transitioning stuff, and she deals just about 100% with the school and everything – and my dad doesn’t do that stuff. He would try, and he would if I asked him to, but he could never be as ruthless and amazingly persistent as my mom is. So I can see why my mom doesn’t want me to stay with him for half the week like I used to. Maybe she also understands the completely fucked-up situation that my dad is in right now, and wants me to be away from that. I want to be away from that, too – but I’ve been talking with my dad about it a bit, and so I’m kind of in the loop already. He told me that my step mom cheated on him. He probably shouldn’t have told me that, it was probably selfish of him to put all that on my shoulders, but I don’t really care, and I want to help him. My mom would say that it’s selfish of him, I am positive about that. And I wasn’t surprised that my step mom cheated on him. She kept going away at night and didn’t want him to come, and also she’s a troubled sort of person, to put it extremely mildly. She psychologically and verbally abused me for about seven years; she’s been abusive to my dad, too. I’ve seen it – I’ve heard it at least a few times. He finally left, I guess her cheating on him was the last straw, and now I hope he stays away. I have no control, obviously, it’s not my life or my problem – but I would encourage him to stay away, if he asked me. For everybody’s sake, his and mine, and my sister’s too, so their problems don’t get in the way of her life, like they did to mine.

The whole situation is fucked, and it’s not fair that we all have to deal with it. But we have to, and at least it’s moving in the right direction, finally. Now I can spend time with my dad on a regular basis, and see my sister more, too. I’ll be back in my old neighborhood, near my friends, and I can get to school way more easily in the morning, and play music with Devin. He already set a date, which is funny – he said Next Wednesday? And I said no, the one after that, because my dad isn’t moving in until this Saturday. It’s awesome how eager Devin is. So if all goes right we’ll be playing music in my dad’s high-ceilinged, nice-acoustics apartment by the Wednesday after next.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday I’m getting my (hopefully last) Lupron injection. But I don’t think I see the endocrinology doctor til the 12th, as I may have said before. And I don’t know how fast I can get my MBDs, for that matter. I want at least two months on the MBDs before September, when I’m thrown back into the world of other people and social situations – enough time for changes to actually happen. I will never again enter a Yu-gi-oh tournament being embarrassed about my voice.

So, time marches past, and life continues. In other news, it’s spring. For real this time.

 

Scam Phone Call Conversations, Basketball, etc.

On Saturday I’m going to a Yu-gi-oh tournament, and I’m sorry to have to admit that’s the second most exciting thing I’m looking forward to at this moment. It’s a rainy, grey afternoon, and the air tastes a little bit humid; it’s ten degrees out, going up to fourteen it looks like, and while that might sound pathetic to those who live in warm climates, up here in the domain of the ice dragons it’s actually pretty nice. I was thinking about going up to the basketball court to play sadly by myself for a while, but I don’t want it to rain on me. And I continue to lack a good sweater. The one I have on right now has been worn steadily since the ninth grade, that’s almost four years now, and before that it was my dad’s – and it’s probably going to disintegrate next time a strong wind blows. When I visited my friends yesterday Josh said that each time he sees me there’s less of my sweater, and he’s right. I don’t know where all the fabric that used to be over my arm went, but it’s certainly not there anymore.

It’s the twenty-second of April already, and I think it’s the twenty eighth where I go to the hospital to get my last Lupron shot, and then a blood test right afterwards so that they can check how well it’s been working or whatever. Then I hope I’ll get to talk to the endocrinology gender clinic blah blah doctor, the one I saw once before, and ask her to finally get me my MBDs, before I go crazy. Now that I know what testosterone can do, and now that my conscience allows me to envision how awesome I’ll feel when it starts to work, I’m almost sick with impatience. I’m very used to waiting at this point – most of my life in fact seems to have been spent waiting – but the thing about that is it never gets any easier. It’s always completely maddening and frustrating to the extreme. When I saw my friends yesterday and we were playing Yu-gi-oh and video games and the RPG board game that I made, I was just thinking about how unfair and ridiculous it is that in order to be what they already are I have to stick a needle in myself once every two weeks for the rest of my life. They don’t know how lucky they are, to actually be all right with their bodies, and to feel good in them. They don’t know. And they don’t need needles and medication and anxiety pills because they can’t deal with how it feels. Everyone who feels comfortable as the gender they are takes that comfort for granted; I wish I was like them. It makes me so upset I can barely express myself. So April twenty eighth had better get here soon, and I’d better get those MBDs pretty fucking fast.

So the Yu-gi-oh tournament, as sad as it sounds (yeah, it’s just as sad as it sounds), is the second best thing in my immediate future. The best thing is of course getting those hormones. I don’t really like Yu-gi-oh all that much anymore, I’m sure I’ve said this before, and I only go along with it because I can see my friends more that way. The tournaments are held in this little toy store out in the suburbs, I’ve been there a few times before; what happens is about twenty boys between the ages of let’s say eight and twenty stuff themselves in to the nerdy confines of that place and play for prizes. I pretty much do badly every time, but I’m not hopeless – I’m just not as desperately into the game as some other people are. If I cared more I’d probably do better, at least I hope. But I don’t care. Because Yu-gi-oh is actually stupid, although my friends would argue otherwise.

I like collecting things, and I think that’s what got me into Yu-gi-oh in the first place. It was grade one, a long time ago in the fuzzy far reaches of my early childhood, and I saw some boys showing off their cards at recess. I think I asked one of them if I could have a card, or maybe I was just lingering next to him staring and he wanted to make me stop – so he shuffled through his cards, found one that wasn’t all that good, and said, “You can have this one. It’s a girl.”

I still remember which one it was. Rogue Doll, 1600 attack points – somewhat useless card, given to my six year old self because I was a girl and so was the card. By grade four, at my new school, me and Josh were playing Yu-gi-oh at recess, sitting on the gravelly pavement beneath the looming brick walls of the building, sometimes attracting small groups of like-minded recess-goers. I wish I could go back to those recesses sometimes; they were great.

*

The other day another one of those scam artists from India called our house, and called me ma’am. That’s the second time that’s happened. That time, it must’ve pissed me off quite a bit – the conversation went a bit like this:

“Hello,” said a man’s voice, from a noisy-sounding place.

“Hello…”

“How are you today?”

“Fine.”

A pause here, because he was waiting for me to ask him the same thing, and I never did. Because I didn’t actually care. He said, “Ma’am, we’re offering a cleaning service now for a short time good price mumble mumble something something, how many bedrooms do you have in your house?”

“Thank you,” I began, “but I’m not interested. Also I’m not a ma’am, I’m a boy. Have a nice day.”

Then I felt bad, but sort of proud of myself. I’m really tired of those scam guys calling me ma’am, assuming I’m some kind of housewife. They have no way of knowing, of course, but Jesus, it makes me crazy. I can’t wait for the Magic Boy Drugs so when the scammers call me, I can go “Hi again, India – I dare you to call me ma’am again.”

At least the last scam call wasn’t as bad as the first call, when the guy was talking about some computer virus thing, and he called me “honey.” Hanging up on him mid-sentence felt nice.

Right now it’s raining, but the sky is bright – I like when that happens. Maybe it’ll clear up soon, I really wouldn’t mind going up to play basketball. Part of me is hoping somebody will want to play with me if I go, and I’ll make a friend – it happened once before, some guy on roller skates drifted up and we had a brief conversation, but then he had to go and I never saw him again. I remember feeling desperately self-conscious, because that was before I wore my boa constrictor, and I was all sweaty, and my voice was too high, and there I was just wanting to talk to a guy who was interested in playing with me but it was made more complicated by not exactly knowing what he thought I was, or if he could even tell in the dimness. Now at least one of those problems is fixed – I’ve got my boa constrictor, and that is so much fucking better, even though I get anxious sometimes wearing it while I’m exercising and worrying I’ll pass out. I hear that’s a danger with boa constrictors (otherwise known as binders.) But what am I supposed to do? Not wear it when I exercise? No way. I really need it then, too. It’s just another thing to be anxious about. Just throw it onto the pile, I guess.

I wanted to play sports this year, but that’s also complicated at this point. I don’t want to ever play hockey on the downtown team again, because I know all those guys and they all know I’m supposed to be a girl. I don’t want explanations and I don’t want more awkwardness and anxiety. Also there is no possible way I’m ever playing girls’ softball again, like I did last summer. I kind of didn’t like that very much, anyway. People were nice, but I didn’t fit in there, and felt that usual outsider thing whenever I’m with a group of girls. But I don’t think I would want to play boys’ softball or baseball, not right now anyway, not before the MBDs. I wish I could’ve done that this year, but I guess I’ll have to wait for next year.

Do you get bored, always reading about my transgender stuff? Sorry if you do. It’s just, needless to say, the biggest thing in my life these days (always has been, sort of). It probably always will be. I need to get this stuff out of my mind so it doesn’t drive me insane by staying in there.  But what’s tomorrow? Tomorrow is Wednesday or something. At the moment I still have six days before my next injection, and I don’t know exactly how long before the first testosterone one. I’ll write about that when it happens, of course. And the stupid Yu-gi-oh tournament.

See you later; thanks for getting through all them words.

 

Graveyards, Long Dark Cloaks, and Pretty Flowers

I biked about half an hour in the misty rain today, up a hill, down a hill, and then up a hill again until I got to coast down the last slope to the old strip mall that’s just down the street from my grandparents’ house. I was feeling a great need to procure myself a long dark cloak – and I went in to the Salvation Army (ah, thrift stores, for a would-be actor, thine junk is shimmering treasure to me) and I actually found one, even though I wasn’t really expecting to. It’s great. It goes down to around my knees, and the sleeves are gigantic, and there’s a collar that can be flipped up so it juts out, vampiresque. It was just twenty dollars, and it’s really a great coat – not just good as a costume, but also for rain and stuff. It’s warm, too. When I got home, my mom was busy at her computer; I sidled up to her, waiting for her to notice my wardrobe, and eventually had to say, “Hey. Check out my Vaudeville coat.”

She glanced. Then she said there was dirt on the back, I should clean that up, and also that she wouldn’t be comfortable with me wearing it out in public because I might be mistaken for a terrorist or someone who carries around shotguns. Long dark cloaks are scary, she said. I don’t disagree, but –

Here’s where fiction is so much better than real life.

A couple of years ago, when my depression and anxiety was really bad and I wasn’t going outside, I wrote a book called Vaudeville. It’s about a mean teenage gravekeeper who smokes cigars and Gordon Lightfoot, who’s kind of his sidekick, or just his companion. The main character Vaudeville is pretty nasty indeed, and I think he’s some sort of materialization of all the issues I was having back then. In the end he gets better, and makes friends with another gravekeeper named Etta who drips water on dead people’s heads to get back at them if they were bad people while they were alive (in Vaudeville dead people can come back to life, if they so choose.) So, today when my mom and I went to get lunch, we talked about a possible Vaudeville movie. She suggested I do it in short installments and put it up on Youtube. I thought that would be cool, even though there’s a definite shortage of actors (the cast would be one teenage boy, one teenage girl, one old man who can sing and play guitar, a large number of zombies, a middle-aged man, and a woman who runs a corner store). I don’t know anybody who would want to be in a movie of mine. Nobody gets as excited by this stuff as I do. If I did somehow get the thing set up, I’d play Vaudeville – even though I’m sure there’s some guy out there who could play him way better than I ever could (even though I wrote him.) It makes sense because I’m the only person I know who comes close to what Vaudeville is supposed to be like.

So, I got that long dark cloak at the thrift store, to wear if ever I get the movie set up. (Because in the book he’s always wearing it.) And my mom says it would make me look like a terrorist. Me, though? I’d understand that more if I had a wild beard, a baseball hat pulled low over my eyes, and a big backpack slung over my shoulders – but I’m pretty innocuous-looking, I always thought. It kind of makes me feel bad because I was looking forward to wearing the coat around, and I was excited by the prospect of play-acting a character I loved writing so much. I guess I still can, but only during the movie that will probably never actually get made. I don’t know. Like, I go through life kind of not being able to stand who I am – mostly the “girl” part of it – and it’s better to not be me, sometimes. Maybe that sounds really stupid and bad. I can’t tell. I’m just looking for a way to be more comfortable, and damn, I like that cloak I found. I really like it.

It makes me wonder how much longer I’ll have to listen to my mom. I know that often she’s right about things, and I don’t really mind listening to her, because she’s my mom and that’s the way it is; but eventually I think I should get more say. Although this is different a bit because she said that she won’t be comfortable walking around with me if I’m wearing that coat, and there’s no way I would make her uncomfortable. My grandma said she liked my coat – and so did the lady at the Salvation Army. I don’t know – I don’t look at people in dark coats and think, ‘Ah yes, there goes a terrorist.’ Maybe other people do.

Maybe I’m overthinking this, and I should just hang the coat up and never wear it. But I spent twenty dollars on it. And it’s cool. This is all pretty trivial, I guess.

We also visited the graveyard today, which is what got us talking about the Vaudeville movie. For no particular reason; just because. We both agreed it was a weird thing to do, but we had fun looking at the old graves and finding the weird names. Among the weird names was this doozy of a weird name:

And of course, Joy Oy.

 

 

My mom and I were talking about how it’s a bit weird that graveyards are a thing, that when you die you get put in a box in the ground with a stone above you that says who you were. I think it’s definitely weird, but I get why it comforts people – you don’t want the world to forget about someone, and everyone’s afraid of that happening. Having your name set in stone to sit there for hundreds of years like a stubborn cry against the irrelevancy that death brings is a comfort. I understand.

Meanwhile, believe it or not, it’s actually spring. We had a lot of rain yesterday, and some today – most of the snow has disappeared, receding back into the trees, leaving wide swaths of damp, bleached grass. My grandma’s garden has a little group of snowdrops, sitting with their white heads bowed. There are iris shoots behind them, and the magnolia bush is full of buds. The little birds have returned – the twitchy brown ones are everywhere, and the other day when I was sitting out on the front step the forest was full of birdsong, probably ten or more different kinds singing discordantly. The sun stays longer and the wind has gotten warm.

On the twenty-fifth (or twenty-seventh?) of this month I’m supposed to go to a Yu-gi-oh tournament with my friends. It’ll be the first time I see them in a couple months; I talked with Josh for a little while a few days ago, and he admitted he’d been trying to call me but had been busy or shy – I told him I’d been in the same situation, (just minus the busyness.) It probably won’t be fun – a couple hours sitting stuffed into a small toy shop in the suburbs with twenty-odd other people, all unnervingly similar to me and my friends – but at least I’ll see my friends again. I really miss them. It really helps, psychologically, seeing your friends. It’s like the difference between a sunny day and a cloudy one. In the meantime, I’ll persist with this annoying transitioning business. So far, Lupron has knocked off a good deal of my girl-curves, and my voice seems to have actually lowered a tiny bit, enough so that I’m able to notice when I listen to old recordings of myself versus the new ones. I don’t know how much of that is just in my head, though. I’ve been kind of checking out those STP things (that would basically allow me to use the guys’ bathroom) but they look really finicky and I’m not sure if I’d have enough courage to try and get one to work. Never mind how I’d get one in the first place. I figure my mom, being as helpfully smart as she is, will figure out that I want one eventually – for right now I’ll just continue my lifelong tradition of avoiding all bathrooms, always.

But fuck, imagine how it would feel to walk into a bathroom and feel like you belong? Well, maybe you can’t. But if you can, then imagine it, let the wonderfulness of it sink in. You just walk in, do your stuff, and walk out again, and don’t feel any crushing anxiety or anger or fear. It’s just simple, how it’s supposed to work. Never mind that I’d be going to the bathroom with a plastic thing.

Whatever. I think I’ll probably just muddle through like always, and things will be all right. For now I’ll enjoy my graveyards, long cloaks, and pretty flowers.

Weird Mood Swing Inspires Pointless Blog Post

Sounds like a newspaper headline.

So, one o’clock in the morning is around when my brain begins to plead for mercy because it wants to sleep. One o’clock in the morning is around when I ignore my brain and continue to be awake.

Traditionally I’ve always had mood swings, but I’m wondering if I’m having worse mood swings right now thanks to the Lupron floating around in my body. Earlier today I was really anxious about changing my gender on Facebook – and right now I give so little fucks that it’s like we’ve gone into antimatter fucks here. Any fucks that collide with my antifucks are going to instantaneously cease to exist. I’m sure, though, that this feeling will wear off by tomorrow, and I’ll be sitting around anxious and extremely stressed out again. So I guess I might’ve not done it in the first place – but I think not doing it would’ve bothered me more, in the long run. And by the way, many a high five to Facebook for even having the option of changing that – they didn’t used to. Now you can even customize your gender; I tried to do “I am a fish” but they gave you a list to choose from, so.

This blog post is crap. I’m sorry. It’s the Lupron talking, I bet – it’s sitting up in my brain with a megaphone making me type stuff. (Now say I am your leader!)

Is it really doing anything, though, or am I just insane? The other day I half-convinced myself my voice was changing. Then I remembered testosterone does that. Then I tried to figure out if I was getting less curvy but I sincerely doubt that too, since it’s been about a week. The one thing I think it has done is stop the MGT (“Monthly Girl Thing”), but I’m not sure if it’s too early to know for sure. I was having cramps but nothing came of them – so perhaps my body was really trying, but Lupron just kept kicking it in the face until it gave up. Anyway, if that’s the case, and it really is never going to happen again, then thank fucking God, and Jesus, and all the non-existent holy people up in fake heaven. It’s one thing I can stop having to be dysphoric about. And besides being a boy kicking around in a girl’s body, who actually enjoys the Monthly Girl Thing? Isn’t it uncomfortable and embarrassing? I understand that children are made from it, but otherwise, what are the pros? I see many cons, very little pros. But then again I am kicking around in a girl’s body, so don’t take my word for it, I suppose.

I got my new health card, and my picture actually looks normal on it. Usually, on official documents, people look like unfortunate raving lunatics, for whatever reason – I think probably a mixture of bad lighting and not being able to smile – but this time, something went right, and it looks good. I look tremendously non-girl-like. But then there’s that little “F” stuck on, and it’s fucking stupid. You really think that person is an F, government of Ontario? Really?

Look at how normal it looks!

Maybe this doesn’t mean much to you, but to me it’s a tiny victory in a world of always being identified constantly and never-endingly and incessantly as female. If it weren’t for the “F”, you’d never know, I hope. Because I strive constantly to be “normal”, if nothing more, and I’m fucking normal up there. Fucking normal, man. I said it. I said it, I did. I’m normal.

Except when you start to look inside my brain. Then it’s existential nonsense and paranoia and Arcade Fire lyrics all the way to next Sunday.

I’m swearing a lot. I’m sorry about that – I think it’s too much Youtube combined with not enough sleep combined with the weirdest mood swing I’ve had in a really long time. It would have to be weird, for me to take a picture of my health card, of all things, and then brag about how normal it is. I hear teenagers post a lot of selfies with their shirts off, or something.

I hate that selfie stuff. It’s fine if you’ve got something you specifically want to show off, I guess – like a new hair cut or a new t-shirt or something, but when it’s just you standing next to the mirror with your phone – well, why? What great need inspires people to do that? I’ve taken selfies in my time, certainly, but I never put them anywhere other people can see, unless there’s some valid purpose. For instance my Jake Bugg selfie, seen below. I recommend you check that out, I’m proud of it. But other kids, they post these endless pictures of themselves in various so-called attractive positions, with dozens of embarrassing hashtags that range from straight “#selfie” all the way to “#beautiful” and “#gorgeous”. Why do they do that? And especially when the person in question is very much not beautiful or gorgeous, and they use the hashtag anyway. Yuck. It screams out for attention, and it’s the wrong way to get it, if people want you for your looks. For instance, I type off posts about gender issues and health cards expecting not very many readers at all to find their way here, and I’m happy enough. The world’s constant struggle for acceptance and popularity drives me completely insane.

That’s why, when I grow up, you’ll find me sitting on a hilltop drinking iced tea in only a pair of socks, finding shapes in the clouds and listening to Arcade Fire through my headphones. You can’t come unless you’re bringing more iced tea. And this has absolutely no relevance to anything.

Will I publish this post? Mm, I’m kind of worried about what I’ll think of it in the morning.

Now I’ll begin the process of getting to bed. My brain starts to threaten me with child abuse lawsuits around this time of night – child abuse lawsuits against itself, of course.

It Actually Ends Up Being Sensical.

I’m getting that desperate restless feeling again, and I absolutely hate it. I can’t do anything when I feel like this. I want to hit something or run my fist through a wall – I want to try and describe it, but it’s a weird thing. It’s as if my mind is going in loops, only touching on ideas and thoughts briefly before spinning around again, and it creates this unsettled feeling in me that’s like being on a constant roller-coaster ride. I think I can fix this by either going to sleep or jumping around some to get the energy out, although my mom might hear me if I started doing that and I’m fairly sure, her being exhausted and recovering from being at the hospital, she might actually disown me. I can’t do that to her right now. Maybe I could dance to my ridiculous screamo music (with headphones, of course, of course) and just do some quiet jumping up and down and moving around, until I’m too tired to be so anxious and restless.

I might do that. For now I’ll try to wring out this post, but we’ll see how sensical it ends up being. I find it interesting that I’ve never actually gone nonsensical – I guess I always have enough presence of mind to keep one foot in reality and not run off on wild philosophical tangents about existence and death, which are the two things that I seem to instinctively gravitate to when I’m anxious and overtired. It’s what I have panic attacks about; death, or what happens after death. If I hit that level of awareness where I convince myself I’m absolutely right about the oblivion after life, then I’m screwed, my heart leaps into my throat and I have to move before I lose my mind. Once when I was having a panic attack, randomly in the middle of the night, I was in my mom’s room before I realized I’d moved. I used to run around the block when I lived at my dad’s house, even if it was the depths of the night. I once ran right down the middle of the street, in the most dead and silent hour you could ever imagine, as fast as I could and trying to not stick to the sidewalk because it didn’t matter. It was so quiet. Like you could’ve sneezed and the stars would’ve started spinning. Right now I can talk about all this without feeling too anxious, but it’s different when it’s right in the thick of the night and I’m alone with my thoughts, not with a bright computer screen and music in my ears to distract me.

I’m listening to early mewithoutYou, and I love it. They’re amazing. People I think would instinctively hate them because they’re heavy rock/experimental (or at least their early albums are), but if you have the time, try to get past the screaming and take note of the instrumentals and the poetry, and the atmosphere. I don’t know how many people can, not as if I’m special – but if you’re depressed and need some feeling shocked back into you, then they’re a good band for the job. It’s hard not to feel anything when Aaron Weiss screams in Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, after a long gentle buildup. A very dark and difficult beauty, this stuff.

Why I feel so down, though, is difficult to assess. It might just be because my mom was in the hospital for a while, although now she’s fine and I don’t think it was ever completely life-threatening. It’s so nice to have her back; I wish she wasn’t exhausted, though. At least we were laughing earlier; same as when I visited her in the hospital. She was in pain but she was still laughing with me. A sign that she’s at least okay.

Right, and I’ve been missing school. I just can’t do it, math and science, two subjects I don’t like, with no friends and nobody that even looks very friend-worthy. And I’m so behind right now that it would be pointless to go back now, so far along. I do miss my friends, though, but I guess I’ll see them next year.

*

A little star just so the post has some order in it. Plus I need some asymmetry – like there’s been a lot of mostly equally-sized paragraphs going on the past little while, and I hate that. So I needed to do a double space to break that up.

Moving past the craziness now, am I ever tired. Life is a big tiring hamster wheel that goes around and around and never does anything for you, despite making you tired and frustrated. Although there’s one bright spot around here: that of going over to Zoe’s house the other day. Her dad Martin and my mom haven’t been getting along for the past couple of years, I’m not completely sure why, and I feel torn because I really like him, a lot. He’s never been anything but nice to me, and is the first person to start using boy pronouns of their own volition. (The school doesn’t count, we forced them.) And I just went to my e-mail to send a reply to my failed co-op teacher (I couldn’t handle her class, it was too much in the morning) because she complimented me on my writing, and now I’m sure I’m going to be agonizing about if my reply was all right for the next several weeks. I just said thanks a lot and that I appreciate her being so nice, but naturally my mind is going to twist it around until I convince myself I wrote the equivalent of “You’re a stupid teacher and I hate you so much, I hope you die in a hole somewhere”. I always second-guess every single thing I say to other people, and I hate the feeling of never being able to accept that what I said was fine. Whatever. I can’t get away from the anxiety, ever.

My dad came over briefly today, but he couldn’t stay long because whatever. I didn’t care. My mom said “Only an hour?” and I feel like that’s a little bit out of line, because at least we’re seeing each other, we could not be seeing each other at all – but I think she’s still mad because he didn’t bring me to my appointment last Monday. Which he was supposed to, and which he said he would be able to bring me to. And he didn’t, and he didn’t have a good reason for not doing it – and I was mad too, but I’ve let it go by this point, it’s over and far away, and he said he’ll bring me to the next one, anyway. I got a bit angry at him and I think he understood my feelings – but I can’t be that angry at him, because he’s so anxious all the time, like me. I feel like some slack should be given to him, not all the time, but right now at least.

And my appointment went well. I set it up myself – the clinic called and asked when was a good day, and I said as soon as possible, so they set it up for the next day. I returned to the endocrinology place and the nice nurse sprayed some stuff on my leg and stuck a needle in there for about three seconds – I looked away, ready for some incredible anxiety-heightened agony, and then it was over. I looked back at her, unbelieving, and had to admit that it hadn’t been nearly as bad as I’d thought it would be. It was a Lupron injection, so now the Lupron’s floating around in me slowly doing its stuff, whatever exactly its stuff is. I searched it online to refresh my memory, and maybe get some more details, but it turns out no one fucking mentions that it’s used on transgender kids, so nobody explained what it does in that respect. Under ‘side-effects’ on one website there was loss of your period and possible increase in body hair – under ‘side-effects.’ Side effects? Nice, that doesn’t make me feel awful about myself or anything.

But I know the basics. It stops the estrogen in my body and, it seems, will turn me into an eleven year old boy again. Because that was a fun time in my life. There may be something with fat distribution involved – and as far as I understand it, that means I won’t have the curviness of a girl anymore. I cannot wait to wear my beloved skinny jeans comfortably, which I wear a lot anyway, which I wish didn’t show those useless curvy things. Don’t need that shit. I wonder how long before Lupron actually starts working? It’s supposed to make me asexual, too, which is going to be weird. And I already have trouble figuring out the whole sexuality thing without suddenly being asexual, in the midst of trying to get a handle on this stuff – it’ll set me back a little while, I think. At least it’s only three months of it before, against all hopes, they’ll finally throw some Magic Boy Drugs at me. I’m not so scared of needles anymore – still get uncomfortable, but I figure that’s a good feeling to have, since sticking sharp objects in your own skin would logically not be a wise thing to do.

I just want it to start working. I’m not convinced about this body hair stuff; because it’s not like testosterone is being added. Estrogen is just being taken away. That leaves me… with funny Lupron stuff floating around in me? I have no idea about that. What did I have in me before puberty? Nothing? Well, I certainly didn’t have extra body hair. I probably would have noticed.

*

When I was at Zoe’s house, we played Monopoly for a long time with her little sister Nikka. She wiped the floor with us. And I was actually trying. Nikka’s only eight or so, but she’s a frightening little package of smarts and intuition and trickery – she kept trying to cheat, until the whole thing had dissolved into a depressing melting pot of dishonesty, which was pretty amusing at the same time. Even without cheating, though, she completely creamed us. Then we put on Louis Armstrong 45s and Nikka made us do lame Buzzfeed quizzes. I kept ending up being the troll character. One question demanded you pick your favorite Disney prince – I was debating about whether to go ahead and pick Aladdin, the least offensive of them all, when I noticed the “No” option. I picked that, relieved. Zoe reacted as if it was predetermined that I like girls, and therefore would have no interest in Disney princes – and I wonder if that’s just because she recently found out I’m transgender, or if she’s just known me so long that she knows that sort of question would horrify me. I think maybe a bit of both. Again we touch upon sexuality, and how clueless I am about it when it comes to my preference – because honestly, none of those princes are anything close to desirable or cute or lovable to me – while the same could very truly be said about the Disney princesses. Maybe this is just because it’s Disney.

That day we also went to the record store, because Martin needed a new band for his record player, and we briefly went to the anime store because I wanted to, where I scored the last volume of Fullmetal Alchemist from the quirky-looking cashier girl. Zoe and Martin and everyone were so nice to me that I had paranoid feelings that it was only some kind of ruse. They were trying really hard with the pronouns thing, and poor Nikka was doing her best, switching erratically and unintentionally between “he” and “she” as I sat there trying not to feel awkward and avoiding Zoe’s eye. Zoe even used “he” a few times, and I almost had to leave the room because I was getting too emotional. Even her step mom, traditionally a somewhat frightening Russian woman, was very nice to me, in a way that’s unusual for her since she’s usually so opinionated and tough. Although she’s always seemed to be a bit extra nice with me, for some reason – maybe that’s on Martin’s orders. Either way nothing was forced and everyone was genuine, and we ate spanicapeda (how do you spell that?) and fries and it was all good.

Nonetheless I still feel unsettled, and maybe not as happy as I should logically be. Ah, but, when it comes to feeling things, logic is an unknown concept.  I think you always just feel how you feel, regardless of why.

I don’t know what happens next. I’m thinking vaguely of a long summer, a stressful return to school in the fall, and whatever daily issues come in between. I think at the moment I’ve satisfied my restless feeling to just do something, and I should probably get to sleep now, before I wander off into the deep hours of the night again, writing and watching stupid videos and avoiding getting to tomorrow.

– Brynn, or Cellarboy, or “Arymm”

 

Cellarboy the Overlander (also Jake Bugg)

I’m tearing through a series of books by Suzanne Collins about a kid who visits an underground world and has to save them a bunch of times from utter doom, because why would you want an army or a police force when you’ve got unassuming twelve year olds? It’s written for young kids (not Doctor Seuss young, although that would be terribly amusing), more for the 9-12 age-range, hence the books’ placement in the 9-12 section at Chapters. I feel a little weird picking them up, but then again, it’s sometimes equally embarrassing wandering the teen section. Have you ever looked at that shit? It’s the fastest way to completely crumple up your faith in the world’s goodness.

In these books, our inexplicably successful hero falls down every once in a while to the underground world, where he rides giant bats and fights mean creatures that want to kill him, eat him, or dismember him. (Reference to scary alive jungle vines.) One of the things I really like, though, is how he never comes out unscathed – sure he always wins, but people die, get sick, and generally are worse off than they were when they started out. His dad was missing for years, held captive by rats, and his mom, in the last book, suffered from a plague and nearly died, forcing a time limit on him to go find the cure. He also has a baby sister who is, I must admit, ridiculously adorable, and there’s also a romantic intrigue in there, (a somewhat unlikable warrior girl) although Suzanne Collins doesn’t make it cheesy or stupid, and thank God for that, because everybody knows how insufferable those 9-12 romances can be. Hey, you guessed it, Rick Riordan.

The story isn’t fantastic, but it makes me happy, and it’s hard to be happy these days. My mom has been in the hospital for the past couple of days, but she’s doing better and they’re pretty sure it’s just an awful infection – and that they can fix it. I went to see her a few hours ago and she was sitting up, and she could walk again, and she laughed at my stupidest jokes, which is a sign that either she really is doing much better or that the narcotics she’s on are really working. Either way is good.

I missed school all last week, and this week I haven’t gone, either. My anxiety has been attempting to build a spiky building of some kind inside my stomach, and any way I move, it hurts. I don’t know if it’s completely because of my mom, or a mix of several things, including her of course, but I’ve been having troubles. My obsessive compulsive stuff keeps me up an extra twenty minutes or so every night, and it’s at the stage where I dread getting up even if I have to go the bathroom, because I know I’ll get stuck doing some ritual or other. And grandma, please stop coming into my room – especially if it’s because of the unripe red bananas we got at the grocery store. I miss being at home, because there’s less people – just me and my mom, and my cat – and therefore less chance for interruptions. Not as if I mind interruptions all the time – but when I’m sunk deep in my writing, and it’s about the bananas – I just need that couple of hours where I can be on my own. To decompress, as my mom calls it.

The Suzanne Collins books are starting to get uncannily relatable, because of the fact that the main character’s parents are both having issues, and he has a little sister, and there’s, you know, jungle vines that would happily dismember him, that being a metaphor for my problems. His mom’s sick, my mom’s sick – his dad’s sick, my dad’s sick. He has to face horrible things that he hates and wish would go away. I really feel like we’re in the same place, even though he’s twelve and not real, and I’m sixteen and real. I think. Let’s not get existential again, though. I’m too tired for that, fuck.

And you know, I got ten hours of sleep last night! Funny, because I feel exhausted. The world gets a nice long middle finger for that. At least ten seconds, maybe fifteen. Why don’t you make some sense sometime, eh? I’ll buy you a chocolate bar or something.

Maybe it’s psychological. It probably is. I had to go to the hospital myself, in the endocrinology-something section, where they were finally able to set up my Lupron injections. My grandma brought me because she knows that I’m transgender now – and she was extraordinary about handling the news. A quote from Nana: “She is just ‘he’ with an ‘s’ in front of it.” Well, shit. You don’t find grandmas like that anywhere, do you? She grew up in the 50s and 60s when being gay wasn’t accepted, and she takes this news like, I don’t know, even; like an extraordinary person. My uncle knows too, after seeing a pamphlet about transgender stuff that I left by the computer, but we haven’t talked about it and besides, he’s my uncle. Find the most understanding and accepting person you know, and increase their awesomeness by 10, and you’re still several notches below my uncle. He has some sort of Asperger’s-like condition or other, so he’s different than other adults – but more wonderful than other adults, too. Nah, I don’t worry about how he’s taking it.

So, I sat in the endocrinology-something place for a few hours and was brought in to see the first doctor, a pregnant woman whose name I missed. She asked me some stock transgender questions, and was really nice and awesome; she reminded me of one of my best friends. One of her questions I found really funny – she asked me what my idea of masculinity was, and asked me to tell her what person I saw myself as; I thought that was a bit tough, because there’s nobody I really see myself as, but I said Win Butler, and so she Googled him. Then she said I looked like him. Then I died. The ultimate honor! I look like Win Butler! Holy shit! After that I told her to Google Jake Bugg because, if I look like anyone, it’s him, and frighteningly so. If my music career falls through I’m going to be a Jake Bugg impersonator, because I feel there’s money in that, or will be in the future. Anyway, the whole thing amused me greatly, and I told my mom today about it. She suggested the reason that the doctor asked me that was because they want me to have reasonable expectations for what testosterone and surgeries can do – so no Arnold Schwarzenegger body, in other words. The doctor even asked what my expectations were, and if I was thinking about rippling biceps – I said a very passionate and honest “No way, ew” and then directed her to Win Butler and Jake Bugg, who are, let’s be honest, somewhat girly men. It’s no secret I can be somewhat on the girly side – or what do you call it when it’s a boy? Flamboyant perhaps. A moment while I shake the rainbows out of my hair.

When I can joke about this stuff it becomes less stressful. However, I don’t know how I can joke about the needle they’re going to stick in my leg next week when I get the first Lupron injection – because that isn’t funny. Surrounding the idea is a cold haze of unpleasantness, similar to how I felt about my blood test a little while ago. And apparently I have low levels of calcium and vitamin D, but at least that’s a normal thing – so now I’ll just be sitting around force-feeding myself four glasses of milk a day to account for it. Or taking the supplements, which is what they actually prescribed.

Fuck my room is cold. I have this suspicion that the two outside-facing walls are just a sheet of drywall, some tissue paper, and another sheet of drywall or something. I have four blankets, count ’em, four blankets, and they actually kept me toasty last night – I felt like a caterpillar on a summer’s day. It was nice. I’ll do that again tonight.

Probably going to stay up too late again, too. Last night I was so tired I had to go to bed early, and by eleven I was out like a light, not to wake until ten thirty the next morning. But my usual thing is to stay up far too late into the strange twilit hours of the morning – I’ve shredded my way through an entire series of anime and 12 episodes of another one, plus a lot of writing and internet-messing-around. The anime series I finished was really good, I wish I could say great, but meh – a little too much inconsistency to win a wonderful mark from me. Plus it constantly felt as if it was going to turn into some kind of porno, even though, ah thank God, it never did – you have all these good-looking men standing around leaning in close to each other, and after a while you just sit and accept that if it’s going to be a porno, it’s going to be a porno. You should note that the Japanese are surprisingly and somewhat uncomfortably free with exploring the sexual aspects of things – and sometimes it gets pretty grating. In this anime (Kuroshitsuji, or Black Butler) nothing actually happened, but so much almost happened that I came away from it relieved and vaguely disappointed. What I really liked about it, though, was how they played around with gender – there’s actually a transgender character in there, even though he’s kind of stupid and ridiculous; but I appreciated it, at some level.  Not to mention whoever does the story seemed to thoroughly enjoy sticking the main character, who’s a boy, in dresses sometimes, maybe in a comedic way, or maybe not; and the other main character, the sexy butler guy, is not exactly masculine. Plus in his demon form he has high heels on, so you know. Hey, shit gets real when the sexy butler wears heels. And it’s true.

I’m looking around for another anime to watch now. I was into Sword Art Online for a while, but it’s starting to taper off and get less interesting; and I tried Attack on Titan, but I hate the main character, so I can’t watch it. I find it impossible to enjoy something when the main character is difficult to sympathize with. Unlike in Gregor the Overlander (Suzanne Collins) who I can completely sympathize with. I have the fourth and fifth books, and I look forward to being happy by reading them – I’ll take my time to appreciate them more, too. I usually just speed my way through everything and then only remember half of it, including life, I think. I should really slow stuff down a bit so it doesn’t keep passing so quickly, as I barely get my feet down in one month before the next one’s come up on me. For instance, it’s nearly March, and I’m pretty sure it was just January.

Spring’s coming, though. I can feel it a bit in the air, seeping into the dark winter chill and breathing some freshness back. It’s still cold out, but not bone-chillingly, and there’s more sunlight – I’m looking forward to the spring, for the first time in years, thanks to the magical boa constrictor I wear around my chest. And that first Lupron injection is coming, it’s almost here, and then I’ll go through menopause. Sounds really fun, doesn’t it? Sixteen years old and psychologically a boy, and I get to have menopause! But seriously, that’s what it is – my evil little girl-hormones are going to get the shit knocked out of them, for about three months, until I can procure my Magic Boy Drugs, otherwise known as testosterone, and hopefully then face the new school year in a better place, a much, much better place. But first I get to be a middle-aged woman.

I really hate that idea, and I bet the spam bot reading this thinks it sounds weird, which YES, IT DOES, I fully admit that it’s weird. Talk about your weird puberty. Go from regular female puberty to menopause and eventually to non-regular male puberty, and then fuck knows where, I guess I’ll just be a Jake Bugg impersonator.

I think that’s all I have in me today. Thank you for getting this far, as always.

– Brynn

 

(I couldn’t resist, my apologies, spam bots. Also the fact that our haircuts are exactly the same is amusing but not intentional.)