Life Log

I got practically nothing done at work today. Miserable. (The one exception was helping my new teammate A, the one I kinda-managed when she was doing a work placement with us earlier this year, book some train tickets to London. She's going to her first APPG meeting on Wednesday! Her would-be boss R helped me with this when I was new (it's an arcane, inaccessible process and she's not even on the system yet) so I'm glad I could pay back that kindness now that R has been off for a few weeks due to some horrifically sad personal-life shit).

I have to go to the post office and I need a haircut and I need to get passport photos taken and I just didn't want to work this afternoon, I wanted to get chores done instead.

I was so glad to get to go to circuits again -- the bank holiday weekend was so welcome but the disruption was sorely felt. I tried for three days in a row last week to get to the gym and didn't manage it once, for different reasons each time. Lovely to get back to routine.

But it was rough to watch the daylight all seep out of the sky as we were there, and then walk to and from the bus home in the rain. Which I was woefully unprepared for, so whatever part of my body and clothes that wasn't soaked by sweat was soaked by the weather. I don't want to grumble too much about autumn (all seasons have their charm and I know it's many people's favorite!) but I am not ready for this.

This weekend is "alt pride," at a local community garden.

There's someone at a picnic table on a typewriter.

I went to a speed-friending thing and talked to someone who collects sticks and was very excited about it. I was a little distracted because they had one big dangly earring that took me ages to place; I eventually realized was a magic-wand type vibrator. And now I'm so envious of it.

I got to pet a small white dog who I think is called Peach. The fluffy tip of her tail has been dyed pink.

I got a different brand of instant ramen than usual in yesterday's grocery order.

This one comes with not just the little packet of flavor powder (labeled "flakes" this time) but also a Sauce! The little packet is just labeled "sauce" and it looked like soy sauce. So I just dumped it in.

But it is in fact pretty spicy for this white boy. My tongue went numb and my mouth hurt and my sinuses streamed.

It was good! I just had to eat it slowly.

Can't wait until we have self-driving taxis in the

Current: There will always be bootlickers, unfortunately. And a lot of poop you all have to clean at the depots, apparently. Anything else you’d like to add?

Robotaxi Handler: If there’s some anti-Waymo movement, the best thing to do is to get everybody to poop in one at the same time. That would be the best.

Current: Thank you.

These companies are desperate to cripwash themselves, "blind people love our service!" Meanwhile the blind people I know have all imagined how much we do not want to discover barf or drugs left in the cars by the previous passengers (or chocolate that might hurt their guide dogs!), but I wasn't even aware that we had to think about how we'd avoid the poop in the cars!

I can't help but think of the hidden labor. Never mind "drive it like you rented it," now we can also have "leave it like a hotel room someone else has to clean." What kind of wages is that cleaner going to get? What kind of job security? What colors is their skin likely to be, do we think?

This afternoon, D and I watched Mean Girls. Last week when we watched Clueless, and he realized that he had seen that one before after all, I wondered if it was Mean Girls he'd been thinking of as the one he hadn't seen.

I'd only seen it once, I think just after I left high school; definitely a long time ago. (I mostly remembered the "Don't have sex. If you do, you will get chlamydia. And die" line because that's how I've described my own sex ed -- entirely fear/disgust based.)

And apart from all the racism and homophobia and fatphobia I have to expect from a 90s movie (just as I'd been about to go to bed last night, D put Stripes on so I unwisely stayed up to watch the "aaarmy training, sir!" scene because my dad loves it but my god is the rest of that movie sexist racist trash now in a way I didn't appreciate when I was a teeanger any more than I appreciated how odd the "We're America, we're 10-1 in wars!" line is! (Which is the one??? Which are the ten for that matter?!)

...Anyway. Except for all the stuff I expected, all I could think was See why I thought NO ONE could like being a girl??? It's exaggerated for dramatic effect and sometimes the Plastics have to say out loud things that are usually learned by years of osmosis like "You can't buy a skirt without consulting your peers first" but it's not that exaggerated.

When I was newly out as agender, I wrote about why it took me so long to discern my dislike of being understood to be a woman vs. being understood to be a woman under these conditions.

Sharing this on fedi today, my excellent friend Stel replied:

soooo much to respond to regarding that blog post and how I was nodding along the entire time, but all I have the energy to say right now is that I giggled because when I read "I hate all the ways my assigned gender had been poisoned and booby-trapped and used against me," my brain decided that "being booby-trapped" is a great description of someone who hasn't yet been able to have top surgery. Trapped by boobies!

I giggled too. That's me, I'm booby trapped!

(But only for like two more months, heh.)

In my soon-to-become-a-zine piece on being too fat to get top surgery in the UK, I said

It came up at the local queer meetup; someone is just back from their top surgery. They joked about having had [small number of] kilos removed, and I slapped the table in front of me in...strength of feeling. A non-binary friend whose barely-used binders I’ve inherited and wear all the time now once made what I thought was a joke about how the BMI calculation for top surgery should not include the weight of the tissue to be removed...but now I don’t even know if it was meant to be a joke. It seems unfair now that this isn’t how it’s done.

I slapped the table in anger and frustration if I could subtract the weight I want them to take away I'd probably hit their BMI limit.

More than one person was like "who do I need to set on fire for this" and "we'll sort you out." But I hate that I still flip out, that my brain immediately goes staticky about this.

The person who just had top surgery showed me the clinc’s instagram photos of bodies of so many shapes and sizes, showed me the part where they said that they don’t use BMI like this; there are health criteria that need to be met, but they’re not a number. It’s in another country. It’s private, which means expensive. But I don’t feel like I have a choice about either of those things at this point. I am numb to any slings and arrows.

They sent me the link, and I thanked them sincerely.

I hadn't seen that person since, as it happens, so I was delighted when they turned up to march with us in the parade yesterday.

Before I could say anything, they said "Did you ever get in touch with that clinic?"

I was able to excitedly share my news, and they could not have been happier. They assured me they can help with questions if I have them, and told me stuff like "the public transport app is good" and "there's a really good aquarium, and you can use their wheelchairs if you need to post-top-surgery."

Their excitement rubbed off on me a bit, and the details helped me imagine this as a thing that's going to happen. They were wearing a semi-transparent top with a brocade-ish design on it; not showy at all for Pride but also not something someone could wear if they weren't happy with the landscape of their chest, so it was a delight to see in that sense too. They said they're becoming such an ambassador for this place, they've just recommended it to someone else too.

I'm glad I could tell them how much their recommendation has meant for me.

D and I stayed home from Pride today -- good thing too! there was a thunderstorm this afternoon; the park where we were enjoying the drag king show on Friday night had to be evacuated due to both lightning in the area and torrential rain -- and D kindly sorted out flights and a place to stay. Having that much sorted is a real weight off my mind.

I've finally told fedi my top surgery news, useful as I have a weirdly huge number of mufos in Germany. I have learned this way that Düsseldorf has good Japanese food, and while no one seems to be in Düsseldorf, there are a few nearby who are willing to travel to say hi to me so that sounds like fun.

After

• the wettest Manchester Pride parade D has marched in (and that's a lot of them!)
• also being the one where we held up big cardboard shapes (on dowels) that were a couple years old now so already a little janky despite a few interventions of strategic duct tape
• a too-brief rest after we got home and I'd stripped off all my wet clothes
• eating some long-overdue lunch at like 3pm
• going back into town even though I'd made us too late for the drag king show we'd talked about seeing
• having to walk halfway into town because the bus was on some weird detour thanks to Pride
• leading us to stopping for a drink at a favorite place of ours before we got to the crowded noisy village
• where D immediately got recognized (it's useful being so distinctive!)
• so we sat down with our drinks (I had my first Delirium Red since we went to Brussels! I wanna go back to Brussels) with her and her girlfriend and had a fun conversation
• them we actually did go into Pride, to the main stage and everything (somewhere I haven't been since 2008 or so, when my them-boyfriend wanted to see The Human League and I thought I was just being dragged along but then went "oh this is a good song..." about every new song they played and I could sing along with knew most of the words too!)
• this time, after hearing the end of some band I've never heard of that D said were big in the 90s or 00s, we were there to hear Esther Ghey, the mother of a trans teenager murdered by other teenagers three years ago, talk about how parents don't get to decide who their children are going to become and that this shouldn't affect the love and support they get. I held it together for some of this bit was crying a lot by the end
• then we went to get some food, thinking we should eat before the last thing on our agenda for this evening, a friend's birthday party
• one the joys of sitting outside is that you might see your friends walk by and flag them down. It was extra good to see them because they spend the parade and associated bits of Pride with a group that was formative to my integration and mental health in a new country but but has since deleted me and D from its circles of concern (and I guess the five or so years since that happened still isn't enough to stop me hurting over it! ah well...) so it was extra nice to have them join us for food

After all that, we got the bus to our friend's place for his birthday only to find that he had to cancel the party. "I'm not feeling well, I think I've been too busy," he told us, which sounds extremely plausible. He said this was the first time he'd ever canceled a party. Welcome to being 47, my friend!