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<h1>Zk | 2012-07-27-suicide-part1</h1>
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<hr />
<p>type: post
title: On Suicide
slug: on-suicide-1
date: 2012-07-27</p>
<hr />
<p>{{&lt; warning &gt;}}
<p>On March 21st, 2012, I tried to kill myself.</p></p>
<p>It's amazing how such a simple statement of fact reflects (at time of writing), months of strange tension, slow recovery, and a whole lot of trying to understand what really happened. It's not a comfortable thing for anyone to discuss, but it's one of those things I need to discuss, need to get off my chest. A little to much of what makes life meaningful for me now is wrapped up in that one night.</p>
<p><em>This subject is a huge trigger for me, and a good way to make me instantly feel bad; understand, if you're the same, that the whole thing is about suicide. I apologize in advance. It's one of those things I needed to write.</em>
{{< /warning >}}
> From the point of view of the universe, Max's death wasn't a big deal,
> it was just my big deal.
>
> -- Steve Eisman, as quoted in Michael Lewis' _The Big Short_
## Introduction
I've noticed that, with almost every large, defining moment in life,
a need to share, or at least explain, starts up once things start to
wind down. The need to move on from life lived with parents for so long
at the beginning of college led to a big jump in the number of words
written, for me, and ditto getting settled at my new job: that was about
the time that I started to work on \[adjective\]\[species\].
It's not really so much that I have the need to write about what
happened, even, as that, after something of such import, I feel the need
to expose myself through writing, to force ideas out into the open
whether or not they actually have anything to do with what's going on.
That was the case with getting a new job. I didn't need to write about
the new job, I just needed to write. Creativity, it seems, is one of
those things where, the more you put it to use, the more you *must* use
it.
I've toyed with how to write something like this for the last few
months. In this case, after all, I feel the need to actually write
about what really happened, as I tried the whole "write about something
else" thing and it didn't work; it didn't relieve that pressure within
myself that needed to be released. I even tried venting little bits of
it here and there on twitter, but now, I think I really need to get this
down in a long format.
I tried to kill myself on March 21st, 2012. It was, as the epigram
says, not a big deal; it was just my big deal.
## Beforehand
I have always been one of those on-edge people that can't quite seem to
manage to calm down. It's been with me for as long as I can remember;
being told that I take things too seriously, that I'm jittery and need
to just chill out, that I'm too emotional about things.
I have specific memories dating back to when I was seven or so, being
told that I was taking things too seriously and was "such a crybaby"
about it. I've been told by my mother, that even earlier than that I
explained my fears, that back to the moment of my birth, she and I both
were too nervous to sleep when the nurses put me in a crib in her
hospital room, that we both lay awake, staring at each other, unable to
get the necessary rest without some alone time.
This is one of the benefits of psychotherapy: not so much as finding
fault in things, as finding a common trend that winds its way through
life, connecting moment to moment across sometimes (relatively) vast
distances of time, so that we can say, "See, it is doing this now."
While it wasn't until the beginning of 2012, at the urging and on the
recommendation of my boss that I started seeing a psychiatrist also
credentialed in psychotherapy that I started to really put these in
words, I knew all about panic by the time I had started my job. In a
myriad of ways, I was feeling the symptoms of anxiety from day to day,
and I was having my own little panic attacks.
It was the type of thing that worried me enough to see a doctor at one
point, worried that I was starting to show signs of agoraphobia, since I
was having a hard time walking around in public (quite a problem when
one has to walk to class). While I know that the psychologist that I
saw at the time touched on issues relating to panic and anxiety in a
more holistic manner, I suppose I was mostly interested in having a
diagnosis I could wave in others' faces, at the time, and I didn't seem
to have internalized any of it. Indeed, judging from actions after the
fact, I seem to have even forgotten about the diagnosis.
I should note that I wasn't some jangled, half-crazed hermit who
couldn't leave his house without serious psychological pain. I felt,
and still feel, like a fairly normal person. There's not spectacular
about me that points to some dramatic panic disorder. I interact
happily with my friends, I can deal with store clerks and walk through
crowds, even if it takes a bit of concentration. In fact, the only
thing that marked out any sort of problem to me, at least in the
beginning, were intermittent panic attacks that influenced my mood
heavily.
A panic attack is a strange sort of thing to go through. It's not
exactly what I expected, and it took several of them happening to me
before I even figured out what they were. The words "panic attack" make
it sound as though, for no reason, terror strikes you out of the blue
and your heart races, eyes dart from left to right, and all those
physical reactions that are the stuff of cartoons and movies.
Perhaps that is what happens for many, but for me, it's a little
subtler. I have ruminative panic attacks, where my mind will get stuck
on an idea and turn it over and over, examine it from all angles,
attempt to work out all possible solutions and counters no matter how
absurd, and then turn it over some more. There is, of course, anxiety
or even terror involved in the sensation, and there are some of the
physical symptoms that fit within the clich&eacute;: racing pulse and tunnel
vision among them.
Anyway, the whole point of bringing this up is that, by the end of the
year 2011, I was experiencing panic attacks with increasing severity and
frequency, and others started to notice. James, of course, noticed them
right away, and several friends, including my boss at my job, who had me
nearly in tears at one point as he handed me a check for a thousand
dollars and a recommendation for a psychiatrist.
I started seeing Dr. Johnston, one of Colorado's best psychiatrists
according to word around the block, near the beginning of 2012. One of
the things we did immediately was attempt to set up a series of
discussions as to what exactly was causing these panic attacks, and why
they were affecting me so strongly. I walked into our first meeting
with a bit of a script, as I felt was appropriate, since I needed to get
an idea of what I was feeling across quickly and efficiently.
"I'm having an inappropriate reaction to stress, I think," I told him.
"I start to panic and it leads to a lot of depression, suicidal
ruminations, and trouble concentrating." This topic wound on between
us over the next six months, and I'm sure
I'll get more into the results later, but for now, I think it'd help
more to explain how things felt to me.
I've always had some sort of issues with control. I've always needed to
be on top of a situation, and all of my deepest fears, all of those
things that I would ruminate on during panic attacks, would surround the
fact that I was not in control of a situation. Being falsely accused,
for example, is a prime selection: being prosecuted or locked up for
something that I did not do was frightening enough, but toss in the fact
that I have no control to prove otherwise, whether through marshalling
of evidence or sheer persuasion based on personality, and I'm totally
lost in a spiral of anxiety.
More to the point, however, the doctor also put me on two prescriptions
\- one daily and one meant to be taken as needed for more severe panic
attacks. The first was Clonazepam, a type of anxiolytic that is
intended to remain in the system for about thirty-six hours. The point
of that was to take, in my case, half a pill twice daily and maintain a
constant level of it in my system, allowing me to react in a calmer
fashion to the world around me. The latter was Lorazepam, which, while
it had the effect of stopping just about any panic attack that hit me,
also had the effect of sending me to bed right away; it was to be used
as needed for "breakthrough" panic.
Things started to look up. I would occasionally still sneak into James'
room to lay down with him, as I had been doing during high-anxiety
moments, in order to calm myself down, but I felt like things were
moving to a better place.
I remember, about two or three weeks into starting on the medication,
that I remarked on Twitter that I was a "firm believer in modern
medicine." These stupid little pills (and I mean little; the Lorazepam
was smaller than a match-head) had caused me to just...calm down. While
I certainly still had this urge to be in control of a situation, not
being in control did not lead to me freaking out, complete with tunnel
vision, pounding heart, and thoughts of driving my car off a bridge. I
was *pleased as peach* that they worked. I was ecstatic.
--------------------
## During
The way that work works, really is not all that complicated, though it
sure seems like it from an outside perspective. We do work for a
client, and the general order of events is:
1. They give us a requirements document - basically a specification of
what our work should be
2. We develop locally and make occasional deployments to a dev
environment visible only interally.
3. When finished, we move our work to a QA environment for the client to
test and ensure it meets spec. We fix any defects they find.
4. When an agreed-upon date arrives, we move our work from QA into the
production environment, where the client does validation and it
eventually goes live,
On March 5th, 2012, this went wrong. Rather, everything went smoothly,
but we found out a few days later that some old data in the system would
be causing some problems. Our goal, rather than having a new
requirements document to work from, was to fix this defect and prepare
for a production release as soon as possible.
This was a setback, of course, but I was ramping up my medication, and
it seemed as though everything would be going fine. We had found a
work-around to allow the old data to work properly, and it was the type
of thing that would be a fairly simple push to fix. Everything was
tested out and seemed to be working just fine. We were all happy, and a
date of March 20th was decided on for the secondary release.
Actually, the release went swimmingly. It was a smooth transition into
the new product and there was relatively little production validation,
so we all went to bed fairly happy on the night of the 20th.
That always surprises me. Everything went well.
On Wednesday the 21st, everything was still going well. I had an
appointment with Dr. Johnston, and we talked mostly about the release,
and how it had gone fairly well with a strange sense of calm and
distance from the whole matter. The appointment was held over the
phone, as we were moving from one office to the other at the time, and I
had to move all of my work kit from one building to another, but we hung
up feeling as though this weight that had been sitting on my shoulders
had been lifted off, and everything was looking better. There was a
void in my life, but that was to be expected, as the last two weeks had
contained so much surrounding this one stressor.
That strange void did not let up throughout the day, however. Sure,
everything had gone well, but I had been living off anxiety for the last
however-many-weeks, and for things to suddenly drop in such a fashion
was a strange event to me. I couldn't quite internalize that we were
_done_. We had nothing left to do.
On the drive home, the weird sensation morphed into a more familiar
anxiety and stress that I had known for the past weeks. Sure, the
release had gone well, but so had the previous one, and it had taken a
few days for the problems to be discovered. Would further problems be
discovered?
I was pretty quiet when I got home, but I usually am, so I didn't feel
as though anything was out of place. I made dinner for James and
myself, and settled in to watch a little bit of Babylon 5. It's a
cheesy old show, but I figured something lightweight like that would
help to put my mind at ease.
James went to bed about fifteen minutes into the one-hour pilot in
order to get up in time for work. By this point, things were starting
to get strange, from my point of view, and here is where we need to take
a step back.
I sat, slouched in front of my computer, watching probably the
world's prime example of tacky, wooden acting. At hand was my
keyboard, his phone, an empty glass, a stick of deodorant, and a
multi-tool used for working on computers. Always a fiddler, I spent
most of my time picking up my phone, unlocking the screen, and
putting it back down again, but hands wander, and they wandered
eventually to the multi-tool.
It took a lot of playing around with the tool, expanding all of the
different parts and putting them back together again, before, without
thinking about it, I settled on the knife attachment. The fact that
the show was running in the background had left my conscious thought,
as had the fact that he was playing with a rather dull knife. All
that was going through my mind was...nothing.
Nothing.
No input seemed to reach me, and though my breathing had picked
up and my eyes had gone wide, I was not reacting to the over-wrought
acting on the monitors in front of him, nor was I paying attention as
he dragged the ridiculously dull blade of the knife down along my
forearms. I was...empty.
It took a few pretty firm scratches in order to awaken any other levels
of consciousness. To be honest, I'm kind of guessing at the previous
few paragraphs, because I really don't know what happened. I zoned out,
it felt like, and the next thing I know, some internal part of me was
screaming at myself to wake the fuck up, because I had somehow found the
box containing the X-acto wood-carving tools and was playing with the
knife in there - infinitely sharper than the multi-tool - and some part
of me had woken up to the fact.
Even so, I felt as though I was still observing someone I know doing
something terribly embarrassing, making a fool of themselves as they sat
in front of the tackiest sci-fi show available and played with a razor
blade. Perhaps it was the sheer amount of ridiculous clich&eacute; that woke
me up to what was going on, because, even as I write this, I can't help
but shake my head at how _stupid_ it all sounds. It's like something
out of some terrible middle-schooler's journal (and I know, I kept an
extensive journal in middle school).
What really woke me up was watching this person-who-was-me somehow go
into 'fuck it' mode and tear the shit out of his right arm from one end
to the other with a very sharp, very new razor blade.
Waking up is the best analogy out there, I believe. It was like that
rush of coming to your senses after a nightmare, the pulling forward and
the re-anchoring, the flood of adrenaline in preparation for flight. It
wasn't necessarily the cut that woke me, though, but the second or so
before when I entered that 'fuck it' mode, and I was too slow, too
confused and frightened to stop this person-who-was-me from pulling the
ultimate embarrassing act: trying to commit suicide while watching a
dumb '90s science fiction show.
Before I continue, I want to add my own personal amendment to what I
just wrote. I mention that it sounds like some terrible journal of a
thirteen year old, and that's true. However, I really _have_ to make the
point that this was legitimately surprising to me. I had had my fair
share of suicidal ruminations, of thinking all sorts of what if
thoughts: what if I drove my car off a bridge? What if I shot myself?
What if I drowned? These were all so far from the realm of actual
possibility, however, that there was no connection to reality. They
were thoughts that _scared_ me, they were why I went to see someone,
because they were abnormal.
To have one of them actualized was absolutely the most terrifying
experience to date.
I cut fairly deep along about seven inches of my forearm, and the
reaction was immediate. I dropped the knife with a clatter to my desk
and clamped my hand immediately around my arm with surprising speed -
although the cut started to bleed immediately, there was surprisingly
little blood loss of any kind.
Within seconds I was overtaken with guilt-ridden sobs. I stopped the
show with my elbow on the space-bar and sat, huddled in my computer
chair, curled around my arm and crying for the fact that I was,
apparently, decidedly crazy.
It took probably ten minutes for me to realize that me crying like some
caricature of myself, huddled over one of the deepest cuts I've
received in my life was not going to do anything. Struggling to keep
quiet, I slowly made my way to the bed, then the floor, then the door,
before eventually collapsing in the hallway just outside my door. I
would be totally unable to do anything about this, I realized.
I started whispering James' name, then eventually swallowed the
miniscule bit of pride I had left and called out loud enough to wake him
up. "Can you come help me?" I asked. It took asking two more times
before he got up. I found out later that he thought I had made a mess
and just wanted help cleaning up, thinking that I should just clean up
my own messes. A good point, that.
Though the rest of the night is still sort of a blur (I hadn't totally
gotten out of the state that I was in, just woken up slightly), I do
remember James helping me to clean and bandage my arm as we sat on the
floor of the bathroom, the dog occasionally wandering in and out. The
whole time, I was still sobbing, blubbering out, "I don't
want to leave you, I don't want to leave Zephyr, I don't know why I did
that, I'm sorry" over and over again.
--------------------
## Immediately After
The last thing I did before going to bed that night was to send an email
to work saying that I would be in later in the day due to an "emergency
appointment" in the morning. I certainly couldn't tell them what had
actually happened, but I had so thoroughly exhausted myself and still
felt so bad that I decided sleeping in would help me out quite a bit.
I wound up at the office around eleven in the morning, and sat down,
feeling tired, worn thin, and still traumatized from the fact that I had
apparently acted out something I had thought was just one of those
persistent negative thoughts that won't go away, one with no grounding
in reality. Within minutes, I received a message from my boss informing
me that my attitude in the last few weeks was not acceptable. I had
been irritable and angry, to the point where my supervisors felt as
though they had to word things so that I wouldn't get upset.
I was stuck in a weird situation, here. On the one hand, my boss was
totally right and I really did need to take a look at how I was
interacting with others at work, but on the other hand, I wasn't in a
place to do anything about it at the time, and I certainly didn't feel
as though I could talk to my boss about what had happened in order to
save the conversation for another time.
I did my best to accept it and trudge through the rest of the day. The
plan that was in place before was to follow a friend up to Blackhawk for
a free night at a casino hotel that he had available. It seemed like
getting out of town might actually help, and it also meant that my
workday was significantly shorter than it would've been otherwise.
The drive after work was calming, and I actually got to the point where
I felt as though the night out would be a good change of pace to keep me
from going too crazy.
And you know? The evening really did help. It was a lot of fun
spending $20 on roulette and walking away with $60, it was fun eating a
ridiculous amount of crab legs, and it was...well, it was mortifying,
watching some of saddest people I've ever seen in my life sit, lost, in
front of their slot machines.
We had planned on going hot-tubbing, but, as became clear when I took
off my shirt back at the room and exposed the rather bulky bandage along
the underside of my arm, that was pretty much out of the question, so we
mostly just sat around talking, and, in my case, trying to feel better
about the whole thing.
I was fine until it was time for bed. As is usually the case, the
stillness is when I get the worst, in terms of anxiety. That's when
it's easiest for my mind to wander, fixate on a subject, and loop over
it in all the worst ways for the longest time. The problems started
when sleep didn't come.
And didn't come.
And still didn't come.
After a time, I suppose I just lost it. I got up and started pacing the
room, walking from the bathroom to the window and back again, clenching
and unclenching my hands before I let loose a "Jesus fucking Christ!"
I locked myself in the bathroom and broke down again.
Both James and Karl checked in on me throughout the next few hours, but
it was mostly spent huddled up on the cold tile of the floor feeling
awful about both myself and what I'd done - that it had any effect on
those around me was just starting to hit home. I will not lie that,
several times throughout the night, I wished that I had succeeded in
order to not be going through what I was going through at the time. I
simply couldn't stand what I'd done.
After calming down, I went through and admitted it all on Twitter in
several tweets posted in quick succession. Thanks to the Internet being
the Internet, I've got them all saved:
* Panicking over work and stupid shit I did last night. Agh. _(3:22 PM -
22 Mar 12)_
* Things are totally out of control now. (5:00 AM - 23 Mar 12)
* On meds for anxiety now, but that seems to have just let loose
something terrible. Tried to kill myself Wednesday night, spent all
tonight-- _(5:09 AM - 23 Mar 12)_
* --obsessing about it, woke up Karl and James, then felt guilty and
upset about it. _(5:10 AM - 23 Mar 12)_
* It's not even really about anything, I'm just messed up, I guess.
_(5:11 AM - 23 Mar 12)_
* Days are spent in a surreality, both happy and unreasonably angry.
_(5:12 AM - 23 Mar 12)_
* I'm sorry you'll all wake up to a bunch of Matt freaking out, but I'm
stuck :S _(5:13 AM - 23 Mar 12)_
In poured a series of confused and sympathetic responses; not just
replies, but also direct messages, text messages, and in the morning, a
few phone calls. Of particular note was one message, the first,
informing me that there was a possible correlation between the
medication I was on for anxiety and some of my actions. I didn't think
too much of it at the time, but research eventually let me to believe
that was indeed what happened. More on that later, however.
I managed an hour or two of sleep before I got up early to head down
back down from Blackhawk in order to make it to work early. Before I
managed to leave the room, however, I got a call from my boss, who had
seen the tweets, ensuring that I was alright, and that I would make it
in to work alright, as he wanted to talk to me.
By the time I had made it down to the office, I had also received
several more text messages, and a call from a friend I had known since
elementary school, Ryan. Ryan was working in a hospital at the time,
and expressed shock when I told him my prescriptions, mentioning that it
was pretty rare for people to be prescribed two benzodiazapines at once,
another indication that it might have had something to do with the
medication that I was on.
The real surprise of the day, however, came when about half an hour
after I got into work, when my boss showed up.
"Come with me," he said, and beckoned me out of the office.
"Sorry about all of the freaking out," I mumbled, once we were out of
earshot. "I think it has to do with the medication, I'm going to call
Dr.-"
By the time we had made it to the empty office next to ours, I had
fallen silent out of embarrassment.
"I need you to tell me what your plan is," my boss asked.
"Plan?"
"Plan to kill yourself."
"I...don't have a plan, I don't know why," I managed.
"Well, you need to tell me if anything like that happens again."
The conversation continued. My boss wanted me to spend some time at
Mountain Crest, a mental health center, and had even been prepared to
take me there himself with or without my consent had I been obviously
not just as shaken up by the whole situation as everyone else.
In the end, we agreed that I would take that day, Friday off, as well as
Monday, with no questions asked by other employees. I was to use the
time to get a hold of myself, and when I came back, there would be no
repercussions. The idea of Mountain Crest was mentioned again, as well,
and I was assured that my boss and his husband would help take me there
if I needed it.
--------------------
## The following few days
I headed straight home after the talk.
I was exhausted. I had two nights of very poor or very little sleep
behind me, and the first thing I was going to do when I got home was
going to be take a nap.
James was gone when I got home, and after an hour or two's restless
sleep, I started in on cleaning the house. A good friend of mine had
always said that cleaning was an excellent way to help out in tough
emotional situations, because you could always see something getting
done, you could point to something and say, "See, it's cleaner now."
I washed the walls. I washed the banister, which had turned gray from
James' grease-covered hands levering him up the stairs after a long
day's work. I cleaned the front door, and the entryway. I cleaned part
of the kitchen, and part of the bathroom. I was exhausted, but wearing
myself out doing something with results was apparently just what I
needed.
James came home later that day, and we got a bit of talking done about
it, but we were both still too raw from two terrible nights to say too
much to each other. I agreed to stop the Clonazepam - had already
stopped - and to talk to the psychiatrist about what had happened.
During the call with the doctor, he mentioned surprise at the reaction I
had had, but did not deny it. We scheduled an appointment for later
that week, and would spend the next several months working out exactly
what had happened.
That weekend, two other friends visited us, though the trip was already
planned, and kept us company. Additionally, my boss's husband stopped
by the house to make sure that I was alright. It was a time to chill
out and relax. James took Monday off as well, and we spent time roaming
around and shopping, and talking.
All of this has been incredibly difficult to write. That whole week was
one of the most difficult to work through of my entire life, to be
honest. It's one of those things that needs to be told, though. I
need to get it off my chest.
I've learned a whole lot from the scenario, both through concrete
consequences and more abstract lessons, which I'll work on in future
parts.
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/dc-comics%E2%80%99-new-knight%E2%80%99s-gender-shines-forth171112
title: DC Comics' new Knight's gender shines forth
date: 2012-11-20
slug: dc-comics-knight-gender</p>
<hr />
<p>Some discussion on a DC character's apparent admission to...something like some sort of non-normative gender/sex. It's hard to tell, as the story takes place in the time of Camelot, really. I'll at least give it to the creators for keeping that part sort of authentic (I know, I know, comics...but still, sometimes the little anachronisms are the ones that stick in the craw).</p>
<p>However, I'm not quite sure what to think of this, over all. </p>
<p>The article mentions intersex a few times, though I'm not sure I gather the same thing from the quotes provided. The writer states that it's up to the readers to interpret how they wish, which I appreciate, but then goes on to say that the character came out as transgender. This, following the Green Lantern Coming Out thing back in June feels a little as though DC, upon hearing that their comics were not diverse enough, is going down some internal checklist of groups to appease.</p>
<p>On the very big, very necessary other hand, I am all for positive role models for consumers. And not just children, either. Enough people read comics of all ages now that I think it's fair to say that many would benefit from this positive portrayal of a...non-binary-gendered hero (I'm still hesitant to accept transgender, much less intersex). Even without the supposed additional story here as brought up by Gay Star News, the backstory behind a characte trying to break into a masculine role is certainly a good one (and has been used before, quite successfully, in several instances).</p>
<p>I suppose comics are just a strange world to me, still. A world driven by a few very large and several small groups of creators. The world of (super)hero comics is even stranger to me, as a non-reader. Discussing it with a friend over lunch today, we found ourselves talking about the essential Nietzsche-ism of the genre, where it's "okay to be strong, and it's okay to solve problems by punching people, so long as they're the right people." I guess I should stick with being glad about this. Visibility - good visibility - can certainly be helpful!</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://wonkette.com/490359/niagara-falls-newspaper-owner-simply-does-not-care-for-snarling-feminism-like-snow-white
title: NIAGARA FALLS NEWSPAPER OWNER SIMPLY DOES NOT CARE FOR SNARLING FEMINISM LIKE SNOW WHITE'
slug: niagara-falls-snow-white
date: 2012-11-20</p>
<hr />
<p>Wh...well...ah, hmm.</p>
<p>It may be worth reading the letter that actually inspired Wonkette's post, here.</p>
<p>You know, I just recently had a discussion over Twitter about how, when I was in elementary school, a friend of mine roleplayed The Phantom of the Opera over and over again, except Raoul was bad, the Phantom was good, and we may have been kitties, as well. There were plaster Phantom masks and interpretive dance on the playground balance beam in front of our parents. There was, as far as I can tell, any discussions of how manly I was. Maybe I was a little sheltered, though probably much more than a little, but I simply cannot...make this guy's ideas work.</p>
<p>snow white and the huntsman is such a film. when my boys were young i would never have allowed them to go to such a film for i believe it would injure their developing manhood. if i would not let my own sons see it, why would i want to publish anything about it?</p>
<p>It really makes me wonder where my developing manhood* went. I mean, I wound up a cyclist and a programmer, and my friend wound up going to MIT and excelling as a gymnast outside her classes.</p>
<ul>
<li>...the manshape wrote, wearing a pink shirt, a purple skirt, and painted nails. Maybe I'm a bad example... :x</li>
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link: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/woman-versus-female.aspx
title: "'Woman'' vs. ''Female''"
slug: woman-vs-female
date: 2012-11-20</p>
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<p>The difference between 'woman' and 'female'. In a nutshell, the former's a noun, and the latter's an adjective. It's...very strange to me, that, in some places (coughfurrycough), it seems to be the norm to call women 'females'. To be fair, men are often referred to as males, but I don't really know that that makes it better. It feels like being referred to as cattle.</p>
<p>And foxes are not cattle &gt;:/</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://knowhomo.tumblr.com/post/35780906575
title: LGBT Posters
slug: lgbt-posters
date: 2012-12-21</p>
<hr />
<p>I work with a lot of data - like really, a lot - both as a job and for funsies, and the whole infographic thing really kinda irked me when it started working its way into common parlance. I don't really like the portmanteau, in the first place, but I always got the impression that infographics were data visualizations dumbed-down for media consumers. The thing that really changed my mind on their usefulness, however, was seeing them as a poster in school (I think it was a donut chart showing duration of art shows on campus, with some quips in the middle). Once I started to think of them that way, and stopped really thinking of them as bad charts online, they suddenly made a whole lot more sense. Posters, as a rule, are not meant to be whole stories, like data vis can be, but simple scenes, a glimpse of something meant to sway, inform, or even just delight.</p>
<p>I really like these a lot, in that respect. They don't need to tell the whole story of using 'transi*', demographics, trans youth, gendered language, and all that in one huge story, they can simply tell little scenes of it at a time, and sometimes that's all that's needed to slowly change a culture, even if it's in one small area, like a school or college campus. Some of the design isn't to my taste, but I could easily see these all over my alma mater.</p>
<p>Cheers to the creators :o)</p>
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title: Books and History
date: 2012-11-22
slug: books-and-history</p>
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<blockquote>
<p>The notion that gender - the social aspects of sexuality - might be separable from biological sex did not become widespread until the second half of the twentieth century.</p>
<ul>
<li>Hanne Blank, in Straight: The Surprisingly Short history of Heterosexuality</li>
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<p>I wound up wide awake at 2AM this morning, after hearing what sounded like a car crash outside. Turned out to be a trash can being tipped over, but I was up, and sleep was gone for the time being. My go-to for quiet things to do that won't wake my husband or the dog (I was successful at the former, but Zephyr's up now, too) is reading or noodling around on the Internet, or both. </p>
<p>I've been trying to get back into reading newer books, recently, trying to branch out and get content from more places than slap-dash articles online, because no matter how well thought out they are, there's only so much that you can explore in the format of a blog post. I'd been re-reading the same books for quite a while now, for various reasons, and my new push was toward non-fiction after Michael Lewis' excellent <em>The Big Short</em> caught my attention.</p>
<p>Three historical explorations have caught my eye in the last year, each of which discusses, or at least touches on, biological sex, gender, and orientation. Hanne Blank's <em>Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality</em> was the first one I picked up after seeing it mentioned on Twitter. Straight does a good job of exploring the history of heterosexuality from the mid 1800s up to the present, and why it is that we think of things the way we do. Blank argues that heterosexuality (and, of course, homosexuality) as a concept was something that didn't quite come into being until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that before that time, sex was instead either morally (or naturally, during the Enlightenment) right or wrong, that our current categorization of sexuality can be traced to scientific and political shifts around the turn of the century. That is, of course, an exceedingly brief overview, and Blank makes a convincing argument that straight is straight because of a few social shifts, both dramatic and subtle, over the last one hundred and eighty years.</p>
<p>The second book I wound up finding was recommended to me by a friend, and I picked up the audiobook version on a whim. Sam Kean's <em>The Violinist's Thumb</em> is an excellent exploration into genetics from Mendel to the present day, and our own genetic history from unicellular soup to complex organisms. Scattered throughout, by necessity, is some discussion over biological sex and just how it is that such a thing works, exploring the subject from sex chromosomes to sex-linked genes to prenatal hormones. The whole story of our past is, of course, wound through there, not just our biological sex, and it's all terribly fascinating.</p>
<p>The final book I found through extrapolation, and have only just started reading it, so I can't offer too much about it. <em>How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States</em> appears to be a similar exploration as <em>Straight</em>, except in the realm of trans issues, particularly transsexuality and transitioning. I'm only a few pages into it, but it's already piqued my interest.</p>
<p>The reason I found the last book was that both of the previous books expose just how small the time scale is for something to wind up as doxa, a fact or idea accepted as truth without needing proof. In <em>Straight</em>, Blank shows how our culture of heterosexual and homosexual, of straight and LGBT, can be traced back only a handful of decades, even the word 'heterosexual' was only first used in the 1860s. In <em>The Violinist's Thumb</em>, Kean exposes just how young the concepts of genetics are, how ideas going back only a scant few decades have already entrenched themselves within our society. "Well," I thought, "If there's these two books about sexual orientation and biological sex, there almost has to be something similar about gender identity. Sure enough...</p>
<p>I suppose I'll have to see how this latest find turns out, but it sounds pretty good. Even so, I'm continually surprised at the fact that these things that my generation has really taken for granted as absolute ideas, those of sexual orientation and of gender, are such recent 'innovations'. Maybe I'm just a little mushy when it comes to this sort of stuff (and I don't feel that's a bad way to be), but it really does make me feel like things are getting better, always improving, always moving forward.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Straight-Surprisingly-Short-History-Heterosexuality/dp/0807044431">Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Violinists-Thumb-Genius-Written-Genetic/dp/0316182311">The Violinist's Thumb</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Sex-Changed-History-Transsexuality/dp/0674013794">How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States</a></li>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/stacylambe/the-transgender-visibility-timeline
title: The Transgender Visibility Timeline
slug: the-transgender-visibility-timeline
date: 2012-11-22</p>
<hr />
<p>Well! Speaking of both history and "infographics", Trans Media Watch posted this before I got up this morning. Just sort of an example of the short history thing from the last post. According to the first few pages of that book, the word 'transsexual' was first used in only 1959.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/war-on-women-waged-in-postcards-memes-from-the-suffragist-era/
title: Memes From the Suffragist Era
date: 2012-11-23
slug: memes-from-the-suffragist-era</p>
<hr />
<p>I read this excellent article a while back when Kate Beaton posted it, and was tempted to write about it somewhere, but lacked the outlet. I posted a quip on my main tumblr, but then felt bad for doing so, because that was mostly just a place to post cute little furry things and to follow others. I mean, I dig the whole separation of concerns online; I think it really helps to have a place for each of the things that interests you. However, now that means that I've got more than one tumblr blog, [a][s], a wordpress elsewhere, a jekyll site, and so on and so on.</p>
<p>Now that I have a place to blab about the whole thing, though, I think this is definitely something worth pulling apart and digging into a little deeper. If nothing else, there's quite a few little quotes in the piece that are worth sharing.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Do hormones drive women's votes?" That headline is not from a newspaper published in 1892 or 1922, but from CNN online in 2012. Posted just last week, the story survived all of seven hours, weathering ridicule from the blogosphere, before the news hub "determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a little nuts, to me. I mean, I've been thinking so much recently about how quickly things have been advancing in the last two hundred years - the widely embraced conceptualization of sexual orientation and attraction, the idea that gender may be separate from sex. And indeed, the suffrage movement in America fits neatly within that time frame: the Seneca Falls Convention formalized the demand for women's suffrage in 1848, and the 15th amendment enfranchising black men after the civil war, while it caused a split in the suffragist movement (some of whom did not wish to support it unless it also enfranchised women) added impetus to the movement. It wasn't until 1920, however, that the 19th amendment was passed, giving women the right to vote in America.</p>
<p>I don't think that this is too out of place with what I've learned about history recently, especially the history of gender and sex over the last two centuries. While it seems reprehensible from here in 2012 that it took nearly 80 years for a concerted effort to expand liberties to succeed against propaganda campaigns and social sentiment surrounding sex in the west, it does fit in with the times, and the battle was against centuries of entrenched social norms in the west.</p>
<p>However, here we are well into the third wave of feminism and still seeing headlines like this on CNN (CNN! Seriously!). This is a good deal of why this article startled me from the get-go. I mean, I count myself lucky to be surrounded by people who I'd say are pretty with-it and together folks, and I honestly have kind of a hard time picturing a major news outlet publishing an article with a headline that sounds like it's straight out of the early 1900s, much less with the lead: "There's something that may raise the chances for both presidential candidates that's totally out of their control: women's ovulation cycles."</p>
<p>Given that the article is about, and contains several examples of, suffragist postcards from the war of propaganda waged during those eighty years, it's easy to see echos of a lot of the sentiments going back and forth from that era echoed in CNN's article. Really, though, despite the article tracing the history and portrayal of the women's suffrage movement, it does a pretty good job of exposing how wide the "gender gap" is even today.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"The phrase 'public woman' actually referred to prostitutes. The assumption was, if you were out in public as a woman, unescorted, you were a prostitute. The battle for suffrage wasn't just about the legal right to vote, but it was also about women's ability to be public figures, not confined to the home. It was more broadly about women's role in society."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The root of the problem lay in the past and the social standards that it had set up:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Victorians firmly believed in the concept of "separate spheres," meaning men were more naturally suited for the public life of politics, law, higher education, and business, while women were meant for the private life, dealing with domestic matters like maintaining a home, raising children, and upholding religious piety.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even though it's now generally considered okay for a woman to walk unescorted without being deemed a prostitute, as was the case then, it's often still not considered safe for a woman to be alone in public, particularly at night, thus such things as the <a href="http://www.takebackthenight.org/">Take Back The Night</a> campaign or even my alma mater's Safe-Walk program, where campus security would walk with you from, say, a late night study group at the library to your dorm or car, a service targeted almost exclusively toward female students. (A friend got around this by borrowing a folding knife from one of her friends and holding it in her hand in her pocket if she had to walk across campus at night - a different sort of solution for a very singular person.) It's just one of those instances where a particularly persistent idea has stuck with us as a society and only changed enough to fit the times, the idea has been recast from prostitution to an 'easy catch'.</p>
<p>In the end, despite the grand-seeming changes that come with things like the 19th amendment, not to mention victories in the political arena for the LGBT crowd even in this last election, change is one of those things that happens over time, and sometimes very slowly. We're still working with some of the very same ideas from the Victorian era or earlier cast in the light of the twenty first century. Doxa is one of those things that's quick to enter into society, as is evidenced by the relatively recent history of heterosexuality, according to Hanne blank, but is particularly hard to chance once it's there. </p>
<p>I'm certainly guilty of this as well; after all, it's not as if being on the other side of one of these ideas makes you immune to it. Wearing more feminine clothing, or even certain colors of clothing, not to mention painting nails and all that stuff, still has a titillating other-side-of-the-fence feel to it, a bit of transgression in every day activities helped out by gender roles that go way, way back.</p>
<p>I'm sure I've gone on too long about all this; I still feel dreadfully behind whenever I write about something like this, no matter how much it interests me. I should probably read more before I write so much. One last quote, then, and a particularly poignant one, before I skip off to more reading:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We operate with this zero-sum mentality, which is, if women gain rights, men lose them," Palczewski says. "You see the same sort of idea that if people of color or ethnic minorities make gains, whites therefore lose something. So if men only understand their identity in relationship to being bigger than women, then it's a trade-off. You see it in dozens of anti-suffrage postcards, showing men being hurt if women advance. Human beings seem to operate with this mentality where if you expand the rights of some, it diminishes the rights of others, instead of collectively expanding the rights of all of us as a people."</p>
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<hr />
<p>type: post
title: On Gender Bending
slug: on-gender-bending
date: 2012-11-24</p>
<hr />
<p>Part of the problem with bending gender in some ways is that necessitates acknowledging some contentious gender roles. It's some sort of mixture of fun, comfortable, and acknowledging a personal problem to say, shave my legs or paint my nails, to worry about my looks (well, it's a big deal in my industry) to whatever extent and shave daily or dress nice. On the other hand, a lot of these little steps toward stirring up those roles are, in their own way, an acceptance of the same. </p>
<p>I think, all things considered, it'd be just excellent to be the type of person who could be a pretty neutral sort of thing and give the whole set of roles a miss, you know? Sometimes, however, it feels like the only way forward is to accept some of these weird, restrictive, and sometimes counterproductive gendered activities like shaving legs, things which many have to do rather than want to do.</p>
<p>I guess it's just one of those things that I should...I don't know, keep in mind. I know that there's sort of this set of things that I can do to play around without doing anything too serious like screwing with hormones (more on that some other day), things that make me feel sorta...happy, in a way, I suppose. Things that make me grin at the whole silliness of it all. I just need to remember that I'm only subverting something already in place.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: That sure is a distinction
date: 2012-11-25
slug: distinction</p>
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title: That sure is a juxtaposition
slug: juxtaposition
date: 2012-11-25</p>
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<p>type: post
title: On Anxiety
date: 2012-11-25
slug: gender-anxiety</p>
<hr />
<p>I have a hard time with anxiety. Like...a real hard time. I know that the Internet in general and tumblr specifically seem to be focused around talking about a lot of the things that aren't right in one's life, but its pretty pertinent here, I think, where my whole goal is to talk about all those weird and awesome (and weirdly awesome) things about gender, sexuality, and so on.</p>
<p>Anxiety is, first of all, not quite the same as stress, though people may often say that a stressful situation is making them anxious. Anxiety is, in my mind, closer to doubt. If I'm getting anxious over the fact that someone's passing me in the right lane on the freeway, it seems to boil down to the doubts "am I driving fast enough?" and "did I do something wrong?" and so on. In fact, the "did I do something wrong?" doubt is basically the clearest summation of anxiety that I can think of. Or, rather, it's the clearest negative summation that I can think of, with the clearest positive being "I need to be in control of this situation," because that's how the positive situations (read: the situations that don't fall into the negative of anxiety) work. I feel responsible for a lot. A lot more than I should, because I'll feel responsible if a storm knocks out a friend's Internet and they're upset about it, or I'll feel responsible for my husband's reaction when the dog dies, even though the dog is three years old and perfectly healthy. That's anxiety, for me.</p>
<p>All of my own problems with gender, then, really tend to circle around responsibility and doubt. My doubts about my own gender feel like failures, like I had been irresponsible at being a man who felt like a man. I've been thinking seriously about gender since elementary school at least, and its all bound up in guilt or doubt, which is why I've been either reticent to admit or unwilling to accept that I was anything other than how I was shaped until this last (very dramatic) year.</p>
<p>Even now, even after starting to move forward through this roadblock I set for myself (however subconsciously), I still doubt every step forward. I am very, very anxious about gender and sexuality in myself, not only because of my past, but because that's just how I work, currently. I don't mean this as a poor-me sort of thing; I don't like anxiety, it's just sort of a fact of life for me and a ton of other people, and I'm working through it. Rather, I think that if I'm going to be talking about it in a public space, it would be helpful to know why.</p>
<p>The why of talking about it is tied up with the why of learning more about it. I have been reading and rereading articles, pages, and books about gender and sexuality for a while now. I've been trying to trace my own experiences through the tangle of information, finding analogs and parallels, as well as things I disagree with or find abhorrent.</p>
<p>After learning what I felt like was enough to do so, I started to write as a means of going further. I started very privately, on a locked twitter account that I eventually deleted (it was quite awful, oy), then slowly growing more and more public, talking about the whole concept with others - first in general terms, and eventually as it applied to me - until now, with this thing. It all falls into the realm of responsibility: if I did not know enough about the subject or myself, I had more to doubt when it was something that would come up in intersections with others; I was responsible for not screwing up when it came to talking about, writing about, or simply being this thing.</p>
<p>I suppose all this boils down to the fact that I'm striving to keep ahead of some sort of perceived point of failure. I want, at some deep-down level, to be perceived as competent, successful, or even just healthy in my understanding of myself and where I fit in the world.</p>
<p>I've been called on some pretty basic stuff, before, and it always gives the same twinge of failure, in greater or lesser amounts. Often, it means that I really, really should have dug deeper and understood what I was talking about, but it always, always triggers that heart-racing, tunnel-vision, oh-my-god-I'm-going-to-die anxiety that alternately drives me forward and keeps me back.</p>
<p>It's uncomfortable to be called out like that, and it occasionally throws me for a very panicky loop, but it almost always makes me a better person overall. So please, by all means, call me out, set me straight, and if everything bears out, I'll do my best to pull that into myself and move on.</p>
<p>Cheers :o)</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://asexual-not-a-sexual.tumblr.com/post/28253369005/ive-recieved-a-lot-of-requests-for-a
title: asexual-not-a-sexual's Gender And Sexuality Masterpost
slug: asexual-not-a-sexual-masterpost
date: 2012-11-26</p>
<hr />
<p>The ideas of taxonomy have come up quite a bit recently, mostly in a lot of the stuff I've been reading, but also in a few conversations here and there. Looking back on classifications, there are the obvious examples of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae, Kraft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, and the first edition of the DSM with Menninger leading, all examples of a perceived need for classification. In Psychopathia Sexualis, some of the motivations were quite political, however scientific the taxonomy purported to be; while the first DSM was, according to Jon Ronson in The Psychopath Test, a sort of race to list everything any of the team of mental health professionals had ever heard was a problem.</p>
<p>However, despite this era of taxonomies and classifications, I very much agree with the first of these posters: language, labels specifically, are not necessarily an evil in need of abolishing. They are a means for creating subcultures and communities, attractors, lights around which people can huddle to help define themselves, and language in general is how we share so much of our lives and ways with each other. Language does have power, and can be used to hurt people, as is hinted at in many of the subsequent posters, but it's difficult for me to accept denying labels and language all the same. Maybe I just really like words (as ought to be obvious), but too much of all that is good and wonderful in life, too much of the really interesting things to me, are bound up in language, worth exploring in language, prime for sharing in language.</p>
<p>I, like the original creator of the posters, just think it's a really good idea for language and labels to be used kindly, and for our own classifications in an era of classifications to be used with common sense.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://gawker.com/5963362/
title: 'Up is Down and Girls are Boys: Swedish Toy Ad Flips the Script on Christmas'
date: 2012-11-26
slug: swedish-toy-ad</p>
<hr />
<p>I have a lot of links, I'm sorry.</p>
<p>Sweden's been going down an interesting track with the whole gender-neutrality thing, recently, and I suppose I can't complain, though some of the things they've been doing have been a little silly. The preschool that has abolished gender is a little strange, given that the children likely go home to a family that uses gendered pronouns. It kinda begs a study of whether or not the kids treat 'hen' as slang at school, then, sorta like the whole 'yo' thing that came up a while back.</p>
<p>Here's an interesting comment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lets ignore the fact that boys will never want to play with babies and dollhouses. Lets ignore the fact that boys are different from girls.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There's a lot bound up in that comment, really. A lot that's been discussed ad nauseum before, though, so I'll not go into it other than to suggest that perhaps that might actually be the point that Sweden's kinda trying to make, here.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/fashion-blog/2012/nov/25/androgynous-models-ignore-gender-rules
title: Androgynous Models Who Ignore The Gender Rules
slug: androgynous-models
date: 2012-11-26</p>
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<p>Agh, I forgot the description when posting this.</p>
<p>I may or may not be getting in on the whole thing 'cause of the 72 year old Chinese male model, which is just kind of awesome. However, it's a neat article all around - not entirely filled with positive news, and there's a comment about Crystal Renn, the ex-plus-sized model, that's a little weird - but still a good read.</p>
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<p>post: link
link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238663/Belgian-husband-leaves-wife-19-years-discovering-man-says-knows-good-ironing.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
title: DailyMail article on a man marrying a transsexual woman without knowing
slug: marrying-transexual-woman
date: 2012-11-26</p>
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<p>I follow a neat twitter account, <a href="http://twitter.com/transmediawatch">@TransMediaWatch</a>, which posts articles from the UK daily about gender news of all sorts, and this came up as a negative counterpoint to a more positively worded article. It's certainly a very poorly written article. There's a lot of weird phrasing that's just sort of, kind of, maybe trying to hide a bias, but not really succeeding, including good examples of using an adjective to objectify, as in "the transsexual hails from...". It seems that the Telegraph tends to do a better job both of posting relatively okays, and posting corrections when TMW calls them out.</p>
<p>Edit: copied title corrected.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://asuperfluousman.tumblr.com/post/36118029283/nosefetish-elaborates-on-why-trying-to-respond-to
title: NoseFetish elaborates on why trying to respond to creepy PMs with "Thanks I'm not interested" is an exercise in futility.
slug: responding-to-creeping
date: 2012-11-26</p>
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<p>This is a very long read (that I'm sharing as a link because reblogging makes it hard to get to all of the post), but certainly worth reading. A redditor posting in /r/creepyPMs explores why it's often counterproductive for a woman to reply to unsolicited PMs (or any such similar attention) with a denial: it's the attention that carries the weight, not so much the content of the reply.</p>
<p>Reading through this, I was searching back through my own past to see if there was anything analogous in same-sex interactions, and I feel as though there was, but I can't remember clearly (it's tough to disentangle such interactions from role-play, sometimes, given the nature of furry, especially when the interaction may be between differently-sexed characters but same-sexed players).</p>
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<p>type: post
title: On the Recent Spate of Breathless End-of-Men Articles
date: 2012-11-27
slug: recent-end-of-men-article</p>
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<p>I've seen a whole slew of 'end of men' articles come around recently, from various sources (<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/">The Atlantic</a>. <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/24/war-on-men/">Fox</a>, and <a href="http://scenariosusa.tumblr.com/post/36541292226/the-war-on-men">some others</a>), and I'm a little confused. This all sort of goes back to that zero-sum quote from the Suffrage Postcards article I <a href="http://androgynousfox.tumblr.com/post/36365965458/memes-from-the-suffragist-era">mentioned</a> a while back, where the reaction to a lot of advances by one group, particularly in a binary, fearing that their rights will be lessened by the act. It's also come up twice in personal accounts in various levels of pertinence, and I'm still just confused by the whole thing. </p>
<p>The articles have the flavor of things-aren't-the-same-anymore, post-second-wave, MRA-Lite (despite the all-women authors) fear that comes with a sort of logical attempt at a rebuttal on such an emotional topic for so many. The personal accounts are much more subtle, and certainly honest, but I'm just confused. I feel so sheltered, hearing about all of this, given the industry I work in and the company I work for. Those are, in turn, the software industry and a company where everyone works from home and meets remotely on G+ Hangouts if they need to, and IRC otherwise. I live in, lets face it, a same sex household (well, except the kitty, but not the dog), in a relatively liberal college town. </p>
<p>I feel like I'm not seeing either side of this whole thing clearly - not the misogyny, nor the wage gap or (new to me) leisure gap, but the...I suppose mix of superiority from women and fear of litigation or subsumption* or whatever in men or employers that a lot of these articles seem to suggest. I can't, as the Fox article states, think of anyone who has ever thought or said that "Women aren't women anymore." Is this a thing people say and think? Am I too sheltered for this?</p>
<p>* I swear I looked this up - the act of being subsumed.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/31/us/while-barbie-talks-tough-g-i-joe-goes-shopping.html
title: While Barbie Talks Tough, GI Joe Goes Shopping
slug: barbie-talks-tough-gi-joe-goes-shopping
date: 2012-11-27</p>
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<p>This made me giggle a little. The idea of it, to be sure, but also the execution, though it sounds like some folks aren't quite so happy. The quote calling it "terrorist acts against children" was a bit of an eye-roller. Additionally, I do agree that it's not going to...necessarily do a whole lot. I mean. three hundred toys out of the entirety of all toys, all things that children see, all over the United States is going to be a curiosity, rather than any successful subversion of gender roles that will get people thinking. Still, neat idea :3</p>
<p>Thanks to @SatoriTindalos for the tip.</p>
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<p>post: link
link: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/associated-press-bans-word-%E2%80%98homophobia%E2%80%99271112
title: Associated Press bans the word 'homophobia'
slug: ap-bans-homophobia
date: 2012-11-27</p>
<hr />
<p>...and 'transphobia' and 'Islamophobia'...</p>
<p>On the one hand, I can sort of understand their argument, and those made when I brought this up online, that phobias are certainly real, medical things, and the tunnel-vision-racing-pulse-headache-shallow-breath panic attack that comes with any window or balcony over about two stories certainly agrees with that. </p>
<p>However, it's easier for me to see the other side presented. A hatred is born in fear, just like a lot of fear is involved in the whole zero-sum game so many think is being played when it comes to gay rights being improved. Either way, though, if the press is going to stop the use of 'homophobia' and other such words, they'd certainly better come up with something to replace it, something with as much meaning and power that homophobia has picked up over the years. I don't think they can, really, and it makes me wonder if there's not some effort in this directed at knocking down the power that the word has gained.</p>
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link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121203131702.htm
title: 'Gender and Race: How Overlapping Stereotypes Affect Our Personal and Professional Decisions'
slug: gender-and-race
date: 2012-12-04</p>
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<p>An interesting article I found through TMW. From the link:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"This research shows that the intersection of race and gender has important real-world consequences," Galinsky concluded. "Considering the overlap between racial and gender stereotypes — our gendered race perspective — opens up new frontiers for understanding how stereotypes impact the important decisions that drive our most significant outcomes at work and at home."</p>
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<p>Stereotypes are, of course, quite slippery. I hadn't really thought of the overlap of two commonly stereotyped areas of life, but these are some pretty concrete examples, and are borne out by even just thinking back to the most recent Olympics and some of the roles in sports that were played out there. It makes me wonder how much other areas of life full of stereotypes overlap - I know that interests such as fandoms and career paths both overlap with gender quite a bit.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://ansaraonline.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/APA_Response_Letter_2012_Updated_version_10th_September_Ansara_Friedman_Blumer_Fryer_Nic_Giolla_Easpaig_Richmond_Samons.253222842.pdf
title: Response to the Proposed Psychiatric Diagnosis of 'Gender Dysphoria'
slug: response-to-gender-dysphoria
date: 2012-12-04</p>
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<p>I hadn't realized (though am not surprised) that with the ever-changing DSM, Gender Identity Disorder had come on the table as something that needed to be revised. I also hadn't quite understood the process for change, which appears to require a task force to submit a proposal and report regarding the treatment for the diagnosis at hand, at least in some cases (the story of the first DSM is quite interesting, at least as told through Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test - excellent, fun book). Additionally, since these reports are published long before the changes are made - DSM IV TR is the current version, with the DSM 5 under consideration - there is a chance for such things to be reviewed both formally and informally. The link provided is a rebuttal to "the proposed psychiatric diagnosis of 'gender dysphoria' and the Report of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on the Treatment of 'Gender Identity Disorder'"</p>
<p>It is, of course, contentious. In fact, here's the exact tweet where I found the link, asking (albeit with an expected response) for discussion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>TMW's Y Gavriel Ansara challenges the compilers of the new DSM: <a href="http://t.co/qbLFamiz">ansaraonline.com/yahoo_site_adm...</a> Does their change of language make a real difference?</p>
<p>— Trans Media Watch (@TransMediaWatch) <a href="https://twitter.com/TransMediaWatch/status/275961457169006592">December 4, 2012</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It's a long read, and a tough one, at that. There's also a site that allows you to add yourself as a signatory (linked below in the citation). First of all, here are the concerns presented:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>The Task Force's exclusion of and disregard for psychological literature and multiple professional organisations that recommend against psychiatric gender diagnoses</li>
<li>The past role of some Task Force members in promoting discriminatory and unethical practices</li>
<li>The pathologising of 'distress' typically caused by social exclusion or by body 'dysphoria' that is prolonged by delayed or denied access to medical gender affirmation services</li>
<li>Failure to provide biomedical rather than psychiatric pathways for access to gender-affirming hormones and surgery</li>
<li>Ethnocentric and discriminatory views of people's gender self-designations</li>
<li>The legislative human rights and professional ethics violations attendant to these views</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>Of these, the one that I am most concerned with is the combination of the first two bullet points, that a) the task force appears to have excluded concerned parties and b) the task force included individuals who seem to have some strong views regarding the topic. These views appear in the response to boil down to "fix the gender, not the sex" which is refuted (with citations) later in the PDF. The report, of course, includes little of that, as it has been refuted, but it's still worrying that the construction of the task force seems to be skewed in one direction. If the goal of the DSM is to provide an accepted and accepted-as-neutral document to work from, then I am certainly not convinced that this is the way to do so. The story of how homosexuality was removed from the DSM is certainly <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/204/81-words">just as fraught</a>, however, so I should caveat that I have a personal interest in the subject.</p>
<p>As to the question asked by TMW - whether or not the change in language make a difference - I'm not sure. I've been turning it over in my head all day long and I just can't say. I do know that the language involved around a topic can make a big difference in how someone involved interprets it; it's come up several times in my own life. I went through my own 'distress' about homosexuality, and agree with the British Psychological Association that it was a normal part of the spectrum of human experience, but I've also gone through significant distress surrounding anxiety. Not just that anxiety is distressing (though it certainly is!), but when I thought about it as panic attacks, I was less inclined to seek any sort of help for the problem, since it was something perceived as a weakness by society at large. It took significant nudging from my old boss before I wound up seeing someone about it, and even then, it took quite a few sessions before I was able to comprehend the problem as a panic disorder rather than some, as I put it, "inappropriate reaction to stress".</p>
<p>So I'm not sure whether the change goes one way or another. The ethnocentrism is a concern, in that this makes for a DSM entry that applies to certain cultures and not others, but on the other hand, if another culture has a point of view that takes self-determined gender as a fact of life for some individuals, they're probably going to be less likely to take it in DSM terms (but on the other-other hand, infiltration of western culture...argh, it gets so complicated!). I guess that ties in somewhat with the 'distress' bit, as well. If I were pressed for an answer, I would probably have to say that I generally agree with those who would rather talk about the topic in a more positive light (such as in terms of gender variance, rather than dysphoria; support rather than pathologization), and I most certainly would fix that distressing problem with the task force's membership problem!</p>
<p>Anyhow, the response boils down to a series of demands, and an overall request:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nearly 40 years ago, The American Psychiatric Association depathologised homosexuality and removed it from the DSM, recognising that this diagnosis perpetuated discrimination based on sexual orientation. We agree with WPATH (2010), BPS (2011), and 'the global call' (TransgenderAsia) that we need to similarly depathologise all people's own gender designations and expressions. Instead of treating people's minoritised genders as problematic, we urge the American Psychiatric Association to address the social causes of individual distress or impairment that include widespread discrimination, harassment, violence, and denials or delays in medical and legal gender affirmation services (American Psychological Association, 2008).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This seems rather broad and sweeping to me, though I am notoriously conflict averse. No matter how much I agree with the sentiment, I can't imagine anything realistically other than gradual change in this area - there simply isn't enough momentum, popular support, or professional voices in the arena for a full 'depathologisation' to happen, as happened with homosexuality. However, I've also added my signature. I've learned a lot about how societies change and move over time, recently, and I do agree with the ways in which medicine, science, and psychology specifically change along with them, even if they're a step behind. I feel for yesterday's youth and hope for tomorrow's, when it comes to this topic and others - I feel for the stigma of old definitions and hope for ones that help people be healthier and happier.</p>
<p>Cheers.</p>
<hr />
<p>Note - I've shortened the title considerably. Here is the full citation:</p>
<p>Ansara, Y. G., Friedman, E. J., Blumer, M. L. C., Fryer, D., Nic Giolla Easpaig, B., Richmond, K., &amp; Samons, S. (2012). Response to the proposed psychiatric diagnosis of 'gender dysphoria' and the Report of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on the Treatment of 'Gender Identity Disorder'. Ansara Online. http://ansaraonline.com/publications/apa_response_letter_2012</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.autostraddle.com/the-trevor-project-gives-katy-perry-an-award-because-gay-visibility-or-something-148848/
title: Katy Perry Perplexingly Honored By The Trevor Project for LGBTQ Visibility
date: 2012-12-04
link: katy-perry-honored</p>
<hr />
<p>I was really, really hesitant to post this, to be honest. I still feel torn. I strongly recommend reading this article, but I also recommend reading it with an understanding of bias (like you do on the Internet), and as always, please be careful reading the comments (like you do on the Internet): there are a higher percentage of good ones than elsewhere, but still...comments on the Internet. </p>
<p>I've never been a huge fan of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or Dan Savage, but I've never felt very strongly against them, either. Being sort of neutral, I mostly just keep my mouth shut: I really had nothing to add. They are all, I think, good enough to warrant their fans, even if I don't like them personally, so I'm not going to but in with my neutralness.</p>
<p>I do have to say, though, that despite their popularity, I am rather surprised at the status they've gained for their role in the LGBT arena. Lady Gaga writes songs - at least one in particular - that appeal to the outsider in us, and I do think that's good; Katy Perry I never really got, nor event spent much time listening to, because I didn't feel there was anything to really draw me in; and Dan Savage is too abrasive for my tastes, despite being occasionally quotable. I suppose that I'm with the article in that, while I appreciate some of the mainstreaming that these folks have done, I can't honestly identify them as heroes of LGBT. A lot of the heroes in my life are those with realistic journeys, or at least realistic journeys that are part of their story as to why they're heroes: Lana Wachowski is one of my heroes because, after her <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/lana-wachowskis-hrc-visibility-award-382177">talk at the HRC Visibility Award reception</a>, she became a product of her story in a way - a success, a survivor, a step forward for her was a step forward for so many people.</p>
<p>Because of this, it's really hard for me to accept a very public figure such as a performer or writer as a hero or idol of the LGBT crowd, or even just the gay crowd. This goes further when, because they're so public-facing, their faults come out in the present, rather than something in the past which was overcome. I'm all about loving someone for their faults, or even because of them, but not idolizing them or placing them in the role of a hero. A hero, to me, as with an idol, is someone you can hold as an ideal for yourself in spite of or because of their humanity. I count Lana Wachowski as a hero due to the fact that she is who she is now because of her past, for example. Her story helped place her in that role for me.</p>
<p>However, I worry about posting this link, even though I think it's worth sharing, because I know how much a hero or an idol means. I know that, in a lot of places, these folks mean a lot to people, and often for good reason: many times, it's the legitimacy of seeing someone even talk about or mention tough issues in a public role that means a lot. I can dig why these people became heroes, even if I disagree with a lot of what they did. They're not my heroes, but I can see how they would be for others. To you all: keep being awesome, thanks for the visibility, and I'm only sorry that we don't see eye to eye on all things :o)</p>
<p>Cheers.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/google-funds-research-tool-for-gender-role-analysis-in-tv-films/
title: Google funds research tool for gender role analysis in TV, films
slug: google-funds-research-gender
date: 2012-12-06</p>
<hr />
<p>Via @teamvalkyrieftw -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Google granted $1.2 million to a nonprofit organization to help with gender stereotyping research in the media on Thursday, according to Google's websitefor its own Global Impact Awards. The money will go toward developing a tool that will automate the process of identifying women and their actions in hundreds of hours of video.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is pretty neat, actually, especially if the data is made available.</p>
<p>I've mentioned before that data is something I deal with a lot of, both in and out of work. I screw around with data for the furry fandom offline and I screw around with data for cloud stuff online, it's just the type of thing that I like to work with. Big, juicy sets of data. My own role seems to have settled on visualization, 'cause I have relatively little background in manipulation, analysis, etc. In this realm, I've already poked and prodded at the <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/bechdel/">Bechdel Test data</a>.</p>
<p>Probably understandable, then, that my favorite bit is this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With Google's grant, the institute will reach out to developers to automate the collection of data, designating how women fit into fictional and non-fictional worlds. The institute has not made clear how it hopes to identify women and further establish their marginalization through that automation process (presumably that's mostly for the developers to figure out), but we imagine a combination of audio and visual analysis that check for a number of typical female identifiers would do the trick.</p>
<p>What we'd most like to see is a tool that could analyze the speech content and patterns of women in TV and films to compare their eloquence with the men presented alongside them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(I left off that annoying quip at the end that goes along with short articles.)</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/84635-why-does-pandora-need-my-gender-
title: Uh...Which Do I Click?
date: 2012-12-08
slug: uh-which-do-i-click</p>
<hr />
<p>I had to sign up for Pandora in order to get a gift this year, and was presented with a required question asking my gender with the two standard options. It's apparently required in order to provide targeted ads, which, well, okay, but boy howdy did it make me feel super awkward for some reason. </p>
<p>Just kind of makes me feel like a weirdo :oP</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/stacylambe/60-reasons-to-be-proud-in-2012
title: 60 Reasons to be Proud in 2012
date: 2012-12-08
slug: reasons-to-be-proud-in-2012</p>
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<p>The single trans* item out of sixty aside (which, as I've posted already, is very much debatable), I find it interesting that just about all of these items are about visibility and new norms. It is important, especially for LGBT youth, to have positive role models in the public, and I appreciate that it's not really newsworthy for someone to come out anymore, but just an article full of "hey this celeb is gay and so is that one and so is that one and that one even has gay friends" is kinda strange. Ah well, I don't mean to rain on the parade - there's a lot of good things, to be sure - it's just a BuzzFeed article, and it is fairly positive :o)</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Reduced to Their Maddest Edges
slug: reduced-to-their-maddest-edges
date: 2012-12-15</p>
<hr />
<p>The title is a phrase from Jon Ronson's book, The Psychopath Test, and refers to the way our society treats individuals in certain circumstances. Specifically, it refers to the way society, and media in particular, treats individuals who have attracted attention to themselves, whether intentionally or not. It describes those who wind up on Springer-style daytime shows, folks who have been reduced to their maddest edges by media in order to create a story; it describes those who have wound up in the news for whatever reason, who have been reduced to their maddest edges, had all of the life polished from them in order to make for a story.</p>
<p>It's really a sort of cynical way to look at society. Society, which occasionally has needs to fit people into categories and call them mad. I should note that I'm bringing this up because I found another <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/shortcuts/2012/dec/09/transgender-people-get-status-update">article</a> on the proposed DSM change a few days ago. I should reiterate that I'm not super upset about the change (though, as stated, neither am I super happy), nor am I surprised at the direction in which it's headed; the removal of homosexuality from the DSM took an intermediate step which changed the entry from all of homosexuality to "ego dystonic homosexuality", that is, homosexuality was fine, but homosexuality that was causing the homosexual person distress was a disorder, precisely because of the distress. The argument against the change from GID to GD in the new DSM focuses in part on this distress, which many argue is a normal part of life for a lot of people. This is part of what Jon Ronson means by being reduced to their maddest edges (though I should note that that is not all that he means by it).</p>
<p>I guess I keep thinking and writing about this because I keep coming back to this idea of definitions. I'm not really one of those no-labels folks because I think that the expansion and acceptance of language is a really great thing. If 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' were created in the 1860s, if 'transssexual' was created in the 1950s, then I really think that we've gone super far with these concepts; taken them and ran with them. On the other hand, though, I feel locked in by current language, rather defined by my maddest edges. If I feel "not trans enough" for the trans community, no matter how accepting, than I've most certainly failed in my working of the language; if I've been unable to accept "gender-queer" because the word 'queer' kinda bugs me with its clashing /kw/ sounds, with it's /i:3`/ glide, a combination of sounds that make me feel dirty, a word that makes me feel super weird, then I've definitely been unable to accept this minority term. Language is great, but only in some ways.</p>
<p>Great thing or no, I keep getting stuck on the boundaries provided by a definition, and it's really, honestly, kind of tough when things don't fit within those boundaries. I got past that with 'gay' when I, to be truthful, stopped talking about the subject almost altogether. At the time, I wasn't experiencing any distress - it wasn't my maddest edge - and so by dropping the subject and going out with people that I was attracted to, physically and emotionally and intellectually, I was able to get over the whole label thing when it came to sexual orientation. If I was asked now, I'd shrug and say, "I don't know, but I'm married to a guy." Ask me about gender, and that's when the distress comes up. It's not the type of thing I can just plop 'transgender' on and call it a day, and for totally different reasons, I can't exactly get myself to use 'gender-queer'. This is the distress phase, the time when one is, in all earnestness, trying to figure oneself out.</p>
<p>There was an <a href="http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2012/12/06/transgender-dinosaurs-and-rise-genderqueers">article</a> I was pointed to recently, an op-ed that was kind of wanderingly-written (just like this, I suppose), which talks about the changing scene in the trans* community, particularly with the older, ah...gender-binary portion. I worry about that phrase, but I suppose that's part of the problem I have with adopting a trans* adjective for myself: I often interpret it that they apply to transitioning across a gender binary from A to B. I know - I KNOW - that's not, or at least no longer the case. I've got several people in my life that embody the fact that that's not the case. Part of me, though, lives still in that realm of gender binary, despite thwarting it as best I can in my own interactions. I interact with the world as a sort of gender-neutral thing, and I've done my best in the past to blur lines here and there, but it's still not quite a thing I can manage to fully integrate with myself.</p>
<p>For now, I guess, I'm reducing myself to my maddest edges. I try to blur the lines here and there, and sometimes, like this morning when a cashier at the supermarket refused to talk to me or scan my loyalty card in part, I believe, 'cause I was kind of a dude wearing nail polish, it just doesn't work out. After that shopping trip today, I stripped my nails, feeling all guilty and crazy, rather mad. I reduced myself from a whole sort of person, which I suppose is a healthy way to be, to a definition that made me feel uncomfortable. A transvestite, or cross-dresser, or something like that. Something quite out of place for how I imagine I fit into the world, and thus something kind of upsetting.</p>
<p>I want to dismiss this as a contemporary problem; our language and our society has this way of dealing with new topics that involves defining their maddest edges, like, say, calling homosexuality a disorder, then slowly softening its stance to ego dystonic homosexuality, to just, in my neighbor's words, a lifestyle. From the book I purchased recently, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Psychiatry may, under special circumstances, act upon society, using its cultural influences to challenge social values and practices.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If I were to grow up twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, when perhaps even GD has been removed from the DSM, would this be a problem for me, or is the distress something that everyone goes through?</p>
<p>Of course, as a member of society, this is the type of thing that goes both ways. Again, from that book:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Protected from understanding the potentially negative consequences of their own power by a benign ideology, they rarely anticipated an outraged response on the part of those to whom they proffered their concern. Only when psychiatry's vision of itself as a humanizing force is appreciated can the pain, sorry, and anger of those who are reproached, not only by antipsychiatrists but by those they have claimed as patients, be fully comprehended.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I guess what I'm trying to get at with all of this wandering is that, for me, there's this transition, this forward momentum that's driving toward that lack of need for labels, or at least that lack of distress, for me. Even between when this...distress over gender started, this was sitting in the back of my mind. It wasn't something that would require really talking with anyone about, because orientation had never required any real talking about, it was something that I'd work through with time and figure out (hell, gender never even really entered into my thoughts during the suicide attempt - I was honestly so much more strung out about work that I was thinking about releases, rather than feeling gross about gender). It's one of those distresses for me that's not ego dystonic; I questioned who I was, I felt bad about a lot of things, and then I grew into where I am now: not perfect, but also on my way to no longer defining myself by my maddest edges.</p>
<p>I wonder about this DSM change, the idea that there are transgender dinosaurs, and I think that maybe we're on our way to something really cool. Maybe we're on our way, from GID through GD to something that's just...a lifestyle, as my neighbor puts it. A bit of society that doesn't quite work the same way as the rest of society, but is still sort of accepted or welcomed. I was invited to a trans* group recently by my ex, a wonderful trans guy, and, on investigation, thought, "You know, the social nights, rather than the support nights, might be more fun, or even more helpful, because that gives me a framework from which to base the rest of my forward momentum in a 'this is normal' sort of way, rather than a 'I need to accept this' sort of way that the support groups might offer." It is, obviously, telling that I'd think that way: I'm certainly still anxious about the whole subject. However, I think that it's a good step forward for me, from being unwilling to accept any of the labels out there, to being willing to just sort of coexist with some folks that share a lot of the same thoughts as me. That's not to say that I wouldn't benefit from the support sessions, as well, as I obviously would, but signs point to me being a fairly normal person, too, so I'm hopeful that it's also a sign of some good steps forward.</p>
<p>Sorry for the rambling, but cheers :o)</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Never Shopping Here Again!
date: 2012-12-19
slug: never-shopping-here-again</p>
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<blockquote>
<p>I don't have a GENDER! Gender is a grammatical property (masculine, feminine, or neuter). I have a SEX. Sex is a physiological property (male or female). STOP corrupting the language, Bizrate! Use appropriate words in your survey.</p>
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<p>Negative review on Google shopping.</p>
<p>Stop corrupting the language, I guess! Though +1 for neuter! :o)</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.mookychick.co.uk/feminism-politics/lgbtq/transgender-transition.php
title: Growing Up Trans...The Inbetweeners Of Society
slug: growing-up-trans
date: 2012-12-20</p>
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<p>This is a neat little interview, really. There's a couple of points that echo some things I've said before here, but written much more clearly.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Gender roles are a very tricky thing for anyone who is transgender, whether they are pre or post transition. I was watching some videos online made by a female to male transsexual, and he summed it up beautifully. He said that even though transgender/transsexual individuals rely so heavily on gender roles, (e.g. wanting to be seen as male, so they find themselves playing on general male/female stereotypes found in their society. Such as abstaining from all things society considers female, and taking on those that society sees as male) a great many of us would want nothing more than to see these stereotypes completely abolished. To simply be able to be seen as ourselves, just human, would save us a great deal of pain and stress.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There's a lot more that I could write about this, but I'll pull something together another time; I reeeally should be working right now, instead of words words words, but I'll kind of point to <a href="http://androgynousfox.tumblr.com/post/36668146841/grayjing-yes-ethiopienne-perolyke-this">this</a> again in the meantime :o)</p>
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<p>type: post
title: self.update
slug: self-update-1
date: 2013-02-09</p>
<hr />
<p>I believe that I posted something to the effect of this on National Coming Out Day last year: "I'm pretty comfortable with pansexuality, I'm still figuring out the polyamory, and I'm terrified of the transexuality." I can't tell for sure because you can only access the last 3,200 tweets, and boy howdy is it depressing that I tweet that much. I had a bit of a rough evening tonight due to the tic in my neck, and so I decided to take a bath, which always leads to reminiscing. Just what has changed in that statement in the last four or so months?</p>
<p>Things remain comfortable on the sexuality front. However, that has to be taken with just the biggest grain of salt imaginable. Starting in June last year, I very carefully removed my sex-drive and set it aside. Before I get called on it, yes, I know that there's more to an orientation that just sexuality, but conversely, having had that willfully set aside, I ask you to reassess just how much. There's a lot that goes into an orientation, by all means, but the amount of that which is desire certainly occupies more than half. There is, after all, a desirous aspect to love and affection, and with desire often (not always, by any stretch) comes sexuality. My stated goal with that little experiment was to see what the overlap was with sexuality and gender, but the end result also involved the overlap between sexuality and desire, and there is rather more than I would have thought, in some sort of ideal world. We are, has many have stated, just animals. Our desires have a driving force, and I've found that this plays a big role in expectations. In kissing and cuddling, in cooking dinner, in being close. Everything, everything changes when one changes sex.</p>
<p>The experiment, such as it is, ended in November, and the end of the experiment is playing out basically as a reverse of the beginning. Feelings are starting to change back (though it's been long enough that it all feels rather new), and testosterone levels are starting to rise. It's been an interesting time, by any stretch of the imagination, especially with the ways in which things are returning: mental and intellectual libido is returning much faster than physical libido. That is, for those keeping track, I feel turned on much faster than I actually get turned on. This has its ups and its downs, in a way, for someone who tends to be the type to play an...ephemeral dominant role in relationships (TMI: I'm fine teasing).</p>
<p>When it comes to polyamory, I'm really also sort of in the same boat as before. The intellectual and emotional sides of me both agree vehemently that there's something to be said for liking people. A lot to be said, actually. Liking people is great and fantastic. A++ experience would like again and again and again. The practical side of me, however, is still as cautious as can be. I've been in situations before where one party is not content being just one of the parties, or some variation on the theme of boy howdy I'd like to be around you more, and I know quite well that there's two ways out: through and around. Around doesn't jive with the 'liking people is fantastic' bit, and through is often quite fraught, but take it as it comes, I suppose. I'll take it.</p>
<p>The gender thing is decidedly more confused than either of the previous two. As I said, my cute little experiment was set up originally to determine (read: play around with) the overlap between gender and sexuality. As before, it's perhaps a touch disappointing in just how much they do overlap, but mostly from some sort of idealist standpoint. They do overlap. Quite a bit. However, I'm not at all convinced that this is a bad thing. Gender, after all, is complex and contradictory, and contains the multitudes of sexuality, expression, and identity. My experience toward neutrality in the sexuality side of things just helped define the borders of that little segment, and, as is visible from this silly bit of trite writing, I've played around with more than my share of either of the other two. I can't quite express how they overlap - it's one of those day-to-day, lets-just-call-it-complicated sort of things, you know? I can say quite easily that power roles in terms of sex and in terms of gender are pretty intertwined, and removing sexuality greatly confuses power roles in general (I should note I mean sex as in the activity, not biological sex, there; I've had a few fascinating conversations on power roles as they tie into biological sex and gender, but that's something for some other time).</p>
<p>When it comes to gender, I suppose I could boil it down to the fact that there is the simple explanation that "it varies" - I feel like I was veering much more feminine during those months, but I feel back sort of in my neutral, middle-of-the-ground territory now - and the overly complicated explanation that there are just too many aspects of gender to really describe the changes, so much as experience - the fact that my expression has changed greatly over the last year is testament to that. There's too much going on in that whole area to boil it down, but there's also too much to understand without doing so. It remains, of course, quite terrifying.</p>
<p>And what about this blog? Goodness knows. I mean, I still find things to write about here, but honestly, the problem has become too many things to write about, and too little concentration to spare. I mentioned the tic before (and but for the grace of hot baths and melatonin, I wouldn't be writing now), and that combined with a flood of, to be honest, not terribly useful information, means that I'm less willing to keep up with writing about this than maybe I should. I love writing, and I try to do so as much as I can, but that 'can' bit gets in the way more often than I'd like. Either way, I'm glad to be around. I'm glad to like everybody no matter what, to like lots and lots, and to feel totally weird about gender even still. I'm glad I still have people peeking at this, and I'll be glad if they've made it to the end :o)</p>
<p>Cheers &#x2661;</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.themarysue.com/gender-dichotomy-study/
title: Gender Dichotomy is a Fairy Tale We've Been Telling Ourselves to Sleep at Night
slug: gender-dichotomy-study
date: 2013-02-13</p>
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<p>This is pretty intriguing stuff!</p>
<p>The writing style at The Marry Sue, like at Wonkette and a few other places, can occasionally get a little snarky for me (I've really been trying to be more earnest overall, and I think this and the direction in which [a][s] has headed are examples of that). Sometimes that snark works out, and sometimes it doesn't. </p>
<p>Here, I'm a little mixed, because on the one hand, it comes off as a bit strong, but on the other, it is actually pretty refreshing to see science and meta-science being done on this subject: that is, it's nice to see a study turn itself on its discipline and notice that, hey, the way we divide up our subjects, respondents, and what-have-you may not be as valid as we had thought, and where did that supposed validity come from, anyway? I suppose I'd do well to read the actual study.</p>
<p>I was pointed to this by someone on Twitter - I think @DogAsRxD? Don't remember!</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://lacigreen.tv/sexplus/sexuality/4502-problems-with-the-kinsey-scale
title: Problems With The Kinsey Scale
date: 2013-02-13
slug: problems-with-the-kinsey-scale</p>
<hr />
<p>Speaking of the need to classify...</p>
<p>There's a lot to be said about the evolving classification surrounding sexual orientation. From what I've read (which, I'll admit, is quite limited), we went from church-approved/sinful to normalsexual/pathological to heterosexual/homosexual, to straight/gay, then added lesbian and maybe bi, then definitely added bi (but maybe only for the acronym) and poooossibly trans, to GLBT, then LGBT, to LGBTQIA+ or however the acronym goes these days (the last coming from a link I'll post later). The reason there's a lot to be said about classification, in particular, seems to be the reasons for it. One of the more defensive reasons offered, usually in an argument and usually from the opposing side is the idea of policing borders. This came up quite a bit during the recent Moore/Burchill media kerfuffle in the UK over the idea that there were some policing the boundaries of womanhood.</p>
<p>However, there are other, more positive reasons, and something that I'll (again) get to in another link, is that along with shared identity comes a sense of community. With things such as sexual orientation, a shared identity and a sense of community can go a long way toward not only increasing one's one personal comfort, sense of self, and <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130102140528.htm">overall health</a>; but also help to advance the sorts of causes that would help benefit many others as well. All that to say that there is benefit to be had from identity. I really think that the link I'll post next does a much better job of describing that than I every could.</p>
<p>However, at the same time, I can freely admit that there is harm in mislabeling. To identify as something and not be able to be taken seriously for one's identity (as still happens with bisexuality), or to be labeled by someone else with no chance at recourse is definitely a painful experience. It's quite nice to be able to specify what you are as best as you are able, even if that means providing one number or letter out of a scale (or, as proposed with the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, twenty-one numbers that, alas, still leave some out) or nothing at all.</p>
<p>I just find it interesting that there is something to be gained from both the restrictive forms of identity such as homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual; as well as from the freer forms out there, or even coming up with something unique. The communities out there such as AVEN, AIB, and the like help to prove the former, and all of our personal comfort help to prove the latter.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2012/11/bisexuality-and-binaries-revisited.html?spref=tw
title: Bisexuality and Binaries Revisited
date: 2013-02-13
slug: bisexuality-and-binaries-revisited</p>
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<p>This is the interesting read I've been working up to all night.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have heard countless [bisexual, multisexual, no-label, omnisexual, pansexual, polysexual, and queer-as-in-sexuality] people ask, "Why do we have to label our sexualities?" I do agree that we should not be forced to reduce our complex sexual attractions and orientations down to a simple moniker. But as an activist, I would argue that the most persuasive argument for why BMNOPPQ folks should unite around some kind of umbrella label (whether "bisexual" or otherwise) is to challenge monosexism and bi-invisibility. In this scenario, said label would not blithely detail who we are sexual with, nor claim that we are somehow inherently different from hetero- or homo- or asexual folks (because I do not think we are), but rather point out that we (and we alone) are targeted by a particular sexist double standard, namely, monosexism. Doing this would enable us to raise awareness about, and to challenge, monosexism in our culture.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a long read, but well worth it. It takes a bit of time to plow through all the different aspects of intersectionality inherent with the author's argument: that bisexuality is valid, and not necessarily a reinforcement of a gender binary, that there are valid reasons for choosing the term with no intent to step on any others' toes.</p>
<p>Let me start out by saying that I know that, of late, I've read quite a few posts here about how the term 'offense' should probably just be banned, because it's a good way to hide abdicate one's responsibility - saying "we meant no offense" or "I don't mean to offend anyone" is a good way to say something offensive without claiming any responsibility for saying something offensive. Saying "we didn't mean to offend anyone" when a job posting says that a CTO "is almost certainly a man because x, y, and z" (I'm paraphrasing, but it's a <a href="http://programmersbeingdicks.tumblr.com/post/42926495446/minuscule">thing</a>) is a good way of saying "gosh you guys are touchy" without saying "gosh you guys are touchy", especially if the apology doesn't actually include an honest apology (<a href="http://programmersbeingdicks.tumblr.com/post/43009929961/the-amazings-respond">here</a>, but I digress). Needless to say, I do see the parallels here - saying "I'm bi, but no offense meant when it comes to gender binaries" has plenty of problems going for it.</p>
<p>However, in her post on the matter, the author raises quite a few excellent points on the fact that so many of these groups rely on the existence of a binary for their own existence. That the transgender community relies on, and often rises against the idea of a gender binary is analogous in many ways to the idea that the bisexual community, in all its forms and labels, relies on and rises against the idea of a monosexual binary. It's just one example of the fact that intersectionality isn't simply the case of a four-circle Venn diagram: it often works out to be much more complicated than that implies. </p>
<p>Again, to the author's credit, mentioning that there are uneven vagaries through out the debate, throughout time, and (only vaguely hinted at) throughout locale makes the issue all the more complex. I hadn't really heard of issue, myself, but after digging into the <a href="http://www.thescavenger.net/glb/bisexuality-does-not-reinforce-the-gender-binary-39675-467.html">original article</a> (this article being a counter to the criticisms the author received on an original post), there certainly is an argument going on out there over the language involved in identity, and even identity itself. I hadn't heard of the terms 'essentialist' or 'binarist' used in this context before, even, though to be fair I would hardly consider myself well-read on either matter, being rather new to both circles - gender has only solidified for me recently, and I was part of the no-labels camp for many, many years, and even now, the 'bi' label fits weird for me for various and inarticulate reasons.</p>
<p>I guess it comes down to the fact that, just like all these vague and complicated arguments, it's easy enough to see both sides of the matter, and it's hard enough to choose a side. All that's to be done is to listen and read and learn, and find out where one fits with the matter and maybe even contribute here and there. I know that most of this is pretty waffly, but I've been reading for most of the evening, and I think I come down more on the side of the author for a few points:</p>
<ul>
<li>There isn't just one binary; the gender binary isn't the only one out there.</li>
<li>Labels are important for more than just simple self-identity - we are not solipsistic, insular creatures, and we have a lot to gain personally through shared identity.</li>
<li>Labels are STILL important for self-identity, and someone's label for themselves is not necessarily an indictment against one's views on a binary (in short, leading with "bisexuality is binarity and essentialist" denies one the chance to defend their journey toward accepting that label).</li>
<li>Yes, this may all seem pretty small in the long-run, and perhaps even counter-productive, but intersectionality in all its myriad forms adds up and does count for quite a bit for the ways in which people treat each other. We are not just one label at a time, and even if we have a hierarchy of labels within us, we are not each of those labels separately. I am not just a furry*, or just pansexual, or just poly, or just whatever, but all of those things cluster together and mingle to make a me, and I'm just a me in society of others who are their own clusters of labels, and sometimes, its those identities that seem to interact, rather than whatever it is we call people.</li>
</ul>
<p>(Pointed out to me by @ForneusLex)</p>
<p>* I mentioned policing boundaries in an earlier post; this is a very pertinent topic for that. Who is and isn't a furry, what makes a furry versus anything else, is a topic that's thorny as all get-out, but holy moly that doesn't stop just about everyone (including me <em>sigh</em>) from trying!</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/video-games-showed-me-who-i-could-be-transgender-gamers-share-their-stories
title: "\u201CVideo games showed me who I could be:\u201D transgender gamers sharetheir stories, joys, and fears"
date: 2013-04-05
slug: transgender-gamers</p>
<hr />
<p>I realized recently that I've been saying "I'm not really into video games" quite a bit. Its not false, necessarily: I don't own any consoles, I have a desktop computer that I never use, it has Steam on it with a few games that I never really played, I joined the Steam-on-linux beta through work, installed TF2, but still have yet to play it... I just don't really get into it all that much. I can certainly understand games as fun, and especially as a means of social interaction. I had consoles growing up (Sega Genesis and an N64) and a step-brother to play with. However, that never really translated to playing solo, and with the lack of play time after my mom and step-dad's divorce, I lost the feel for it and when I moved into the dorms for college, I never wound up playing in any of the nightly games of Mario Kart or Smash Brothers.</p>
<p>So yeah, it's certainly true that I'm not all that into video games in the same sense that this article is talking about. However, I've been a part of several MUCKs and IRC channels that work in many of the same ways that MMORPGs work: one goes through the process of character creation and, in a much less formal way, builds up a guild of friends, amasses social currency, and so on. These were my games, and, much like in the article, that's where a lot of my exploration of gender took place. These characters that I created were an extension of myself, and it was through these extensions that I was most easily able to think about gender as it pertained to myself, and to interact with others in such a way as to gain that 'real life experience' without being, as the author put it, a man in a dress.</p>
<p>So yeah, the "not really into video games" quote, while it still holds true in many ways, doesn't totally apply, as I managed to find my own outlets, characters, and game-like experiences to help me figure things out. This is, I think, one of the biggest upsides to video games: the ability to tell a story that others can experience and immerse themselves within.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://wehappytrans.com/news-media/the-trans-100-2013-inaugural-edition-u-s/
title: The Trans 100 2013
slug: trans-100
date: 2013-04-10</p>
<hr />
<p>This is really cool!</p>
<p>I can understand some concerns that people might have regarding the list, and I do think it's a good thing for the creators to include a list of concerns and responses at the beginning of the document itself. They do a good job of addressing them as well as summing up a lot of the reasons why I like seeing such a document put out there. The list provides good examples not only of all the work being done with gender and trans* issues, but also just the sheer diversity of those involved and their stories. It's as if We Happy Trans and This Is H.O.W. went ahead and published a list of role models, in a way, and one varied enough to give just about everyone someone of interest to look up to.</p>
<p>If you check it out, make sure to download the list itself (link at the top of the page) and read through at least some of the biography snippets.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/is-gender-dysphoria-simply-recognised-as-fraud-in-the-eyes-of-the-law-8569827.html
title: Is gender dysphoria simply recognised as fraud in the eyes of the law?
date: 2013-04-19
slug: gender-dysphoria-fraud</p>
<hr />
<p>Growing up identifying as gay in Colorado, and then specifically moving north to Fort Collins, led to a good amount of exposure to the "gay panic" defense, with the murder of Matthew Shepard. It was everywhere in the news, it seemed like, and it was talked about quite often in the support/social groups of which I was a part (OASOS in Boulder, and SOGLBT at CSU). The thing that hit me most about this article was the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thankfully, there is no record of the courts yet succumbing to any desire to allow a “trans panic” defence in cases of assault or murder: but if not disclosing trans history to sexual partners is an offence, the point when someone tries that, pleading self-defence in the process, can surely not be far removed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reason that this struck me is that the "trans panic" defense has been used before, and again locally, with the murder of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angie_Zapata">Angie Zapata</a>. As the article mentions, the court (granted, a US court rather than a UK court) did not allow the defense to be used and Andrade was convicted of hate crimes as well as murder.</p>
<p>However, while this does help when the trans* individual is the victim, especially in such a clearly defined case and with a history of the "gay panic" defense being considered invalid, it does not necessarily mean that the courts really know what to do with trans* folk. While the article admits that this is certainly a difficult question, and that several of those involved did not necessarily have the language to defend themselves in court nor the resources to keep themselves out of tricky situations in the first place, it does point out that a lot of the law is behind the times when it comes to these things. The law is often reactionary and very rarely forward looking, of course, but much of the interaction between the law and trans* people has shown it to be basically just stuck in the mid 20th century in so many ways. Our ideas of gender, sex, and the law are shaky enough as it is (all it takes is a look at some of the recent news about trials and even investigations regarding a woman being raped), but add in gender variance, gender identity, SRS and hormones...well, I suppose we just have a ways to go.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://www.wbez.org/blogs/nico-lang/2013-03/we-need-give-transphobia-106351
title: We need to give up transphobia
slug: queer-transphobia
date: 2013-04019</p>
<hr />
<p>(Note that the article in the link references a second article, also worth reading, which is available <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-clayton/queer-community-transphobic_b_2727064.html">here</a>)</p>
<p>A couple of recently published articles caught my eye this week, both of which focused on the issue of transphobia within the larger lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. I really wasn't all that sure of how to write about them, really. I really feel like it's something that needs to be talked about quite a bit more than it is, and it fits really well into the whole idea that the 'T' part of "LGBT" is often very, very minimized, and only in part due to visiblity. It's as though it's more often "LGB...(t)", sort of whispered at the end with a bit of a confused look and a shrug.</p>
<p>So how do I write about this, really? I mean, both articles are written by people who very clearly put in words an epiphany of transphobia, and in two very different ways. Both articles provide good examples of what the authors consider to be the transphobia involved in the rest of the queer community.</p>
<p>I guess it's just that there's a good portion of my own story that fits in along with this and I'm not sure how much of it is just me looking for assocations and how much is actually relevant.</p>
<p>I remember some time around first grade coming up with a pithy explanation: "gay guys are just guys who want to be girls and gay girls [having not learned 'lesbian' yet] are just girls that want to be guys." The concept of sex is pretty clear to a first-grader. People are very obviously different at that time (often due to parents' influence, granted), and that's what one latches onto at that age. A guy wanting to go out with a guy must just want to be the opposite, right?</p>
<p>So even after I understood the whole idea of what a sexuality was - lets go with some time in middle school, say twelve or thirteen - I still didn't really <strong>get</strong> gender. It wasn't something that really crossed my mind, really. I understood sex, of course, and I understood attraction, but even though I can remember the discomfort of gender going all the way back to third or fourth grade, I didn't really understand the concept of gender as being an aspect of oneself separate from sex.</p>
<p>Even after getting into high school, even after exploring sexuality a little further. Even after deciding that "girls aren't so bad". Even after winding up in a relationship with a delightful trans guy. Even after growing into something resembling a real person, I still didn't quite get the whole thing with gender. I knew enough about it to talk about it at a shallow level and I could, with a little effort, use the right pronouns for whom that mattered.</p>
<p>A lot of transphobia, a lot of bigotry and phobia in general, comes from the inability to really understand what something is, or why it is. It took a lot of time, a lot of introspection, to really figure out what gender is, what trans* anything is, it took it becoming pertinent to me, it took experience, and I think that I've been incredibly lucky to have had people in my life and information available to me in order to help make that not just possible, but relatively painless. I've run into a lot of transphobia in the larger queer community, just as I participated, myself, and so much of it was bound up in misunderstanding.</p>
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<p>type: link
link: http://a-full-life.drab-makyo.com/
title: A Full Life
date: 2013-05-26
slug: a-full-life</p>
<hr />
<p>I've been spending a lot of time reading articles like <a href="http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/5/24/4341042/the-queer-games-scene">this</a>, and, even though I really don't play any games at all, I really like the idea of communicating an experience more directly than with just words. It's interesting: a lot of the early uses for technology centered around this, with MUDs and Virtual Reality and all that, but everything sort of skipped off into a television-like experience of interactive fiction. Only recently is the genre making a comeback, and this time focusing on much smaller goals. Games such as these focus on only portions of life, or only abstract ideas that one is bound to run into.</p>
<p>I'm still stuck in the land of words, so most of what I did here was just kind of poke around the edges of this sort of thing. It was fun, but the fact that I don't play any games, don't have any experience in game design, means that I really felt like I couldn't do much more. Oh well! I felt the need to do something like this rather than actually sit down and write about it. While I'm at it, though, I should note that I've been stuck in kind of a weird cycle of feeling pretty normal and relatively happy for about seven months, then just total soul-crushing depression for a month following that. It's been a constant for most of my life, but only really in hindsight, and it's only recently that I've started to actually work on working with this in a way that doesn't involve making those around me feel terrible and doesn't involve me trying to off myself. There's not a whole lot else I can add in addition to "A Full Life", so I won't, suffice it to say that, thinking about that sort of thing constantly, minding the gap, as it were, is making this go-round much less crushing and much more...tiring. An improvement, even if only a small one.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Words Android Refuses to Type
slug: words-my-phone-wont-type
date: 2013-06-09</p>
<hr />
<p>I keep running across words that are disallowed by autocorrect on Android
4.2.2 using swiping on Android Keyboard (AOSP). They're not censored, as
you can type them by hand, but they will never autocorrect. I'm not really
sure of the reason, perhaps it has to do with trying to prevent users from
autocorrecting themselves into trouble? Some of them are pretty out there,
though, and honestly, there has to be better UX around that (say, having a
list of words that never autocorrects to that word <em>by default</em>, but is still
on the list of selectable words).</p>
<h2 id="curse-words">Curse words</h2>
<p>Pretty standard list of dirty words (their variants are usually blocked, too).</p>
<ul>
<li>fuck</li>
<li>shit</li>
<li>cunt</li>
<li>ass</li>
<li>butt</li>
<li>piss</li>
<li>cock</li>
<li>tits</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="non-curse-words">Non curse words</h2>
<p>This is where it gets a little weird. I suppose I can understand not wanting to
accidentally text 'penis' to a family member, but some of these are a
little...out there.</p>
<ul>
<li>suck</li>
<li>sex</li>
<li>sexuality</li>
<li>penis</li>
<li>vagina</li>
<li>clitoris</li>
<li>menstrual</li>
<li>menstruation</li>
<li>erection</li>
<li>semen</li>
<li>coitus</li>
<li>anal</li>
<li>rape (‽)</li>
<li>orgasm</li>
<li>circumcised</li>
<li>nipple</li>
<li>vibrator</li>
<li>rectum</li>
<li>genitalia</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="words-android-will-type">Words Android will type</h2>
<p>These are some words Android will type that are a little weird given the
above list.</p>
<ul>
<li>asexuality</li>
<li>prepuce</li>
<li>cervix</li>
<li>vulva</li>
<li>foreskin</li>
<li>womb</li>
<li>prostate</li>
<li>oral</li>
<li>condom</li>
<li>pussy</li>
</ul>
<p>It all kind of makes me wonder what goes into making these blacklists of words.
What was going through the mind of someone who decided that 'rape' was never a
word that someone should want to type when swiping? What about 'menstrual'?
And 'coitus'? I can't even remember the last time I used that for anything
other than discussing "the standard post-coitus cigarette", and then only as a
joke. Sigh.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Link Roundup
slug: link-roundup-1
date: 2013-06-09</p>
<hr />
<p>Hey! I haven't had the energy to write for a little while, so I've fallen way
behind, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been reading, so I now have a huge
backlog of links. Given that still don't have the energy to write a full post
for each, I figure I'll just do a little round up here with a little blurb about
each so that a) I'm still writing but b) I'm not spending all day writing :o)</p>
<p>In no particular order...</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://auntiepixelante.com/d/sphoria/" title="D/sphoria">d/sphoria</a> (NSFW)- I loooove this, particularly as it relates to myself
in more than one way. There's the dysphoria aspect, of course, but the idea of
moving sex away from orgasm has been particularly important to both James and
myself over the last few months. It's been an interesting exploration, for
sure.</li>
<li><a href="http://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privileged/" title="The distress of the privileged">The Distress of the Privileged</a> - This is a pretty interesting article on
just how privilege works and how there is distress on both sides of an issue
that involves such things. Notable especially with regards to some recent
conversations on language and interaction that have taken place on Twitter.</li>
<li><a href="http://cnlester.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/beyond-the-binary-question-two/" title="Question two: what's the difference between genderqueer and genderfluid?">Beyond the Binary: What's the difference between genderqueer and
genderfluid?</a> - I found this interesting mostly for the different ways in
which people think about these two terms, and others like them. People have
different reasons for using the labels they do, of course, and that leads to
these different interpretations.</li>
<li><a href="http://now.msn.com/arriva-rain-driver-skirt-protester-poses-in-sweden" title="Arriva train driver skirt protester">Arriva train driver skirt protester</a>: I...kinda want that skirt :S</li>
<li><a href="http://www.autostraddle.com/im-a-trans-woman-and-im-not-interested-in-being-one-of-the-good-ones-172570/" title="I'm a trans woman and I'm not interested in being one of the good ones">I'm a trans woman and I'm not interested in being one of the good ones</a> -
I really like this sentiment. I really have a hard time with the concept of
gatekeeping, sometimes, and I still hesitate to use all but the vaguest terms
for myself out of...well, fear, I suppose. Fear that I'm simply not X enough.
Again, I think this is pretty pertinent to a lot of recent discussions I've
had online.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.transadvocate.com/seven-transphobic-tropes-debunked.htm" title="Seven Transphobic Tropes Debunked.">Seven Transphobic Tropes Debunked</a> and <a href="http://www.tmponline.org/2013/05/02/feminist-misogyny/" title="Fighting misogyny within feminism">Fighting misogyny within
feminism</a> - These two articles seem to go hand in hand. There are a lot
of ways in which anti-trans* sentiment is espoused, and these do a good job
of dissecting and doing their best to debunk those sentiments.</li>
</ul>
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<p>type: post
title: self.update
slug: self-update-2
date: 2013-06-15</p>
<hr />
<p>I told myself when I started writing more that I'd spend less time writing about
myself and more time writing about the things that I was learning. There is
use, however, in being able to think things through in the process of trying to
form them into words. The effort it takes to translate things into language
from thinking or feeling is sometimes enough to tease them into greater clarity.
Besides, I've written one of these before, and I suppose I should document at
least some of the stuff that's going on.</p>
<p>It's kind of amazing watching the way identity and dysphoria shift. I've been
off what hormones I was on for the last seven or so months and that's led to
quite a few changes. Of course, there's the strange roller-coaster that's been
my libido as things shift around chemically, but other aspects, as well, such as
hair growth, skin texture, energy levels, and temperature tolerance. Hair, of
course, seems to be at the center of its own well of dysphoria, as I think it
might be for many. I remember friends talking excitedly about being able to
shave for the first time, and here I am struggling with a mix of too much body
hair and too little hair on my head; genetics is really working against me here,
and it's exasperating how bad it can make me feel (and how stupid I feel for
feeling bad about hair).</p>
<p>Really, though, I'm not sure what that means for myself, or what it should mean.
I know for a fact from hard-won experience that one is hardly pinned to a gender
identity or affinity, and that it's the type of thing that fluctuates over time,
but it's hard to internalize that sometimes. Being able to just say "Oh, I'm
$IDENTITY" at all times would be a helpful sort of thing, in social situations.
People I've known for a long time could then easily assume that it's safe to
call me the pronouns that fit with $IDENTITY down the road, just as it was
before. It's hardly that simple, of course, and even setting time aside, I've
found myself using different pronouns in different aspects of my life.
Masculine, of course, for unsafe spaces and work/professional life,
singular-they for some other places online, and more aggressively gender-neutral
pronouns elsewhere, though to be honest, I've yet to run across a pronoun that
doesn't make me feel awful, so I guess it really doesn't matter which.</p>
<p>All this by way of saying that I've been drifting more and more aggressively
neutral, or something like it, and I don't know what that means. I've got these
things that make me feel bad, and no real way forward for dealing with them,
since it often feels as though there's no way forward that doesn't involve
expressing <em>something</em>. I'll always be this dumb 6'2" man-shape with a receding
hairline (or "high forehead" if we're being generous). What way out of feeling
bad is there? So far it seems to involve pretending to be a fox-person on the
Internet a lot of the time, which is helpful that it's so easy, but certainly
involves less getting-out-of-the-house-ness than I'd like.</p>
<p>So how does that really fit in with the whole trans* thing, anyway? I still
suppose I identify as such in a broad and general sense, an umbrella term
encompassing gender-queer and so on, and I know I'm not <a href="http://gendermagick.tumblr.com/">necessarily</a>
<a href="http://cnlester.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/beyond-the-binary-question-four/">alone</a>. There's a lot to be gained from the label, such as the sense of
identity, the community, the support, the recognition, and so on. After all,
transgressive matches that expression, and transgressive as it is, I really
don't feel strong enough to push forward without that community and identity.</p>
<p>However, along with all that comes the question of whether or not I really am
part of such a community, and whether I'm really entitled to all of that. I
know that there are groups within the community that would strongly disagree, of
course. There seems to be a very ardent group gatekeeping the label, along with
many others out there, which disagrees with myself, others like me, and even
allies from being able to identify as such, speak on the matter, or even feeling
like they have the right to think about it. My partner, delightful as he is,
was notably called on the fact that he had no place talking about issues
surrounding the trans* community, which is hardly a good thing to have to
watch, or be a part of. </p>
<p>I count myself extremely lucky for the people in my life, to be sure,
whether they're in the role of ally or along the same path as myself. I would
be nowhere without them, really, and for them to not be welcome in the
conversation surrounding a community of which I'd like to consider myself a
part, even as staunch allies, makes me feel decidedly unwelcome in the community
as a whole. Sometimes, it feels like it'd be easier to leave all that behind,
cheer silently from the sidelines, and just man it on up. It's really hard to
take an idea that crops up primarily when I'm feeling bad seriously, though.</p>
<p>I understand where a lot of this is coming from, especially as I watch the
directions in which the culture (identity to a lesser extent, but definitely
culture) surrounding the rest of the LGB community has taken - or, rather, has
been drawn, with intense focus on marriage and other ways of being more
effectively subsumed into heteronormative culture. The argument is that the
fight of the minority should not be cast in the majority's terms. What that
loses, I feel, is the complexity of social interaction within and between
identities. I am not solely someone who identifies as trans*, of course, and
even though I have identified as such in the past, and am currently primarily
(though not exclusively) in sexual relationships with other enpenised folk, I
hardly solely identify as 'gay'. I guess I just feel that gatekeeping denies
interaction between identities as an unnecessary expense of focusing on
interaction solely within an identity. After all, things like sexuality, or
even gender, do not happen in a solipsistic world: I am not only confused about
gender in the context of the trans* community, but also in the company of those
close to me, and even those around me wondering "how <em>did</em> he get his legs so
silky smooth?"</p>
<p><a href="http://blackgirldangerous.org/new-blog/2013/6/17/8-ways-not-to-be-an-ally">Allies</a> make up my community, too, is what I mean to say. Allies who
understand that there are imbalances in my world, and there are some that can
and ought to be fixed. Allies who understand that language means a lot, that
intersectionality is a thing and "cisgender" is a word we need if we don't want
everyone reduced to "trans*" and "normal", and allies that will talk me down
when I'm at my frumpiest. The goal, after all, is not to force trans* into
being what's considered normal now, but to add it to the list of things embraced
in the future.</p>
<p>I try not to talk in manifestos most of the time, I promise. I just want to
feel comfortable, and I want those who are closest to me, or can at least
commiserate with me, to be able to say "that's okay."</p>
<p>I guess it comes down to the fact that I'm still just as confused about all this
stuff as I ever ways, and that confusion is often expressed as a sort of
malaise, a feeling of being upset: upset that this is even really a thing. When
I feel like that, I think about it from the standpoint of cost-benefit analysis:
what would be the cost of just going with the most privileged option? Is it
worth feeling bad to just pretend like this isn't a thing? Of course, it
doesn't really work that way, but that doesn't stop me from considering it when
things look bad.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Kickstarter and Censorship
slug: kickstarter-and-censorship
date: 2013-06-19</p>
<hr />
<p>So, let's talk about censorship and transgression.</p>
<p>I wrote about transgressive behavior <a href="http://adjectivespecies.com/2013/06/19/an-argument-for-non-conformity/">earlier today</a>, notably why it's
important for minority identities and subcultures, and how it winds up
benefiting the majority of society in the end. I think it's an okay read, even
if it does gloss over quite a bit - I mean, I had to get to the point somehow!</p>
<p>Today, however, it came up that somebody was aiming to fund a book through
Kickstarter to <a href="http://caseymalone.com/post/53339539674/this-is-not-fucking-harmless">teach the art of seduction</a> via quite a few creepy and
objectifying lessons, boiling down to: Men, you are Men, and they are Women, and
so if you want to Do The Sex with Women, here are the steps to woo that alien
species. It was bollocks, and I think that this was easily recognized by just
about everyone I talked to. Not once did it come up amongst any of those I
follow on Twitter that it's ever okay to "just put her hand on your dick" in
order to force the issue of sex.</p>
<p>Let's set the content aside, though. We can all agree that it was, at the very
least, a poorly executed attempt to cast someone's <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:40tT3neK7egJ:www.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/1dvnem/above_the_game_part_7_physical_escalation_sex">Reddit posts</a> into book
form, and at most, a (and I quote) "De-facto rape manual". Let's set that
aside, and lets talk about the importance of transgression to oppressed or
minority identities, and lets talk about censorship.</p>
<p>An oppressed or minority identity - say, LGBT, or women, or PoC - has a few
options to try and seek change in their status, aiming nominally for equality.
They can petition politely, I suppose, and write open letters or talk amongst
themselves about how they wish things were better, but that accomplishes little:
the former doesn't necessarily challenge anything, and the latter isn't heard
outside their discussions. They could commit a terrorist act, but I think we
can all agree that that tends to accomplish the opposite of the intended effect.
Or they can structure their behavior around transgressive (that is, acts outside
the boundaries of what's considered normal in a given society) acts and
behaviors in order to get their point heard.</p>
<p>It's not a new thing, by any stretch. A protest is the basic transgressive act,
and it can take the form of modifying fashion, sitting silently, yelling loudly,
or even a boycott. These are the ways we have at our disposal to transgress -
literally step across - the border of what's considered conforming into
non-conformity and prove our points. Polite, non-transgressive discourse
requires multiple participants, after all, and the comfortable majority has no
incentive to begin a discourse with a quiet minority, least of all in a
capitalist system.</p>
<p>So here's what happened: some entrepreneur decided to start a Kickstarter in
order to produce content on a controversial subject and received both a personal
and professional (through Kickstarter) backlash. This description is vague
enough to target both <em>Above The Game</em> and <em>Tropes vs. Women</em> intentionally.
What happened specifically in that backlash portion is where things differ:
<em>Above The Game</em> induced a protest and a rash of complaints to Kickstarter about
the perceived appropriateness of such an organization to fund such a book.
<em>Tropes vs. Women</em> caused Anita Sarkeesian much the same, plus a rash of death
threats and a virtual "Beat up Anita" game on top.</p>
<p>Both Kickstarters were transgressive - the point of Kickstarter is to fund
disruptive projects, after all - and both responses were transgressive as well:
most public campaigns such as these are. The difference here lies in what way
the participants view their transgressions. The transgressions of the author of
<em>Above The Game</em> and those who responded to Sarkeesian's project, coming from
the majority, occur well within the confines of that majority. That is, it
costs those involved almost nothing to perform a transgressive act because, even
though it's weird and a little out there, and probably goes against what some
would consider polite behavior, it still fits within that majority viewpoint.
The opposite is true of the other parties, though, because it costs them rather
a lot to transgress from the minority viewpoint: they're going against all that
is right and good in the eyes of those on the other side, and the other side has
a lot more power in their hands. At the same time, their transgressions mean a
whole lot more to them, by virtue of the fact that this is their attempt at what
they view as equality. This is their way to try and change the world.</p>
<p>This is nothing new, of course. This describes the same tension, when viewed
from a more classical critical theory point of view, that occurs when any
minority struggles against any majority, in the small scale. However, it needs
to be put out there, because of the censorship question, and how it ties in with
feminism, a force often vehemently accused of censorship.</p>
<p>Censorship is a mechanism to prevent the flow of information by silencing the
source. There are, of course, some ways to interpret this petition to not let
<em>Above The Game</em> be funded as censorship, but here are the reasons which I
disagree.</p>
<ol>
<li>Censorship is the prevention of the flow of information. The point of the
campaign here is to prevent Kickstarter from funding the publishing. The
flow of information began back on Reddit, and although the author removed the
posts, it will continue to flow there as long as there is a sink for that
information, an audience. My opinions on the content aside, I don't think I
would stifle the guy from posting the content to the 'net, or even funding
his own publishing.</li>
<li>Kickstarter has meaning to its users beyond a simple funding scheme. The
propensity toward disruptive and social activism projects lends credence to
this. The business has come to be a means for the voice of the small to
reach the ears of the large (some notable exceptions, of course), and so when
that medium is challenged, people react (see some of those notable
exceptions, for examples).</li>
<li>The leveraging of capital against interests as a form of protest is not new.
In fact, the boycott, embargo, and blockade have been around for thousands of
years. Neither have they gone out of style: just look at the recent
Chik-Fil-A boycott regarding connections to Christian organizations opposed
to LGBT rights to see a recent example. It's a transgressive (read:
noticeable) means of making one's displeasure known in a system that
automatically tunes out the displeasure of a minority group.</li>
</ol>
<p>Given these three points, a boycott of something in a medium that carries
additional meaning seems to be a fairly obvious solution, and the only thing
that complicates this fact is that the book has not been published yet: the
fight is over whether or not this medium should <em>fund</em> the book. While I could
see that as a form of censorship if the author were not surrounded by potential
other funding sources (Offbeatr was recommended as a source that not only
exists, but also might be quite fitting), I can't given the possible
funding and distribution channels available.</p>
<p>Beyond even that, in order to evoke change in the world from a disadvantaged
point - that of a minority or oppressed group - one must be able to use what
tools they have, and in this case, that tool is financial leverage. By putting
financial pressure on an organization through boycott, either by not purchasing
products already made, or by refusing to purchase products that have yet to be
made, we are transgressing only on capitalist tendencies and still working
within the law. It's a protest basically blessed by Western society as a tool
of the free market, should such a thing actually exist.</p>
<p>The tl;dr version of this boils down to a few quick points: no one's freedom of
speech was restricted, because the real problem that we're facing is a that
something that works against so much of what so many of us stand for is coming
to us from a respected channel.</p>
<p>That's the protest. </p>
<p>Do I think the book's awful? Yes. </p>
<p>Do I think it objectifies women and perpetuates rape culture? Definitely. </p>
<p>Do I not want it around me? Certainly. </p>
<p>Do I want to censor the creator? Absolutely not. </p>
<p>However, do I have the very same right, the ability, and more than enough will
to spend my own breath making my displeasure heard in order to try and enact the
change I want to see in the world? Of course.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Link Roundup 2
date: 2013-06-21
slug: link-roundup-2</p>
<hr />
<p>More and more links, less and less bandwidth. Most of that is because I'm
writing in earnest about other things again, and that feels really good! The
downside is that I just can't bring myself to write a thousand words about some
thousand-word article I found anymore. I do still find all of this stuff
interesting, though, so I'll pass it on.</p>
<h3 id="games">Games</h3>
<p>This is a category that I fear will never be empty! Hooray! Go games!</p>
<p>You really did it.</p>
<p>For serious, though, there's been a steady stream of news coming in on the
gaming front with regards to gender and sexuality, and I am happy to say that
the tide is turning toward the positive, however slowly. I only started really
reading about this sort of stuff maybe a year ago and I still don't really play
any games, but still, I like to watch!</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://kotaku.com/the-creepy-side-of-e3-513484271">The Creepy Side of E3</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/5/24/4341042/the-queer-games-scene">Just Making Things and Being Alive About It</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.reactionzine.com/why-invisibility-isnt-a-superpower/">Why Invisibility Isn't a Superpower</a></li>
<li><a href="http://theorts.tumblr.com/post/53262160482/invisibility-illegibility-thoughts-on-why">Invisibility / Illegibility: Thoughts On Why Invisibility Isn't a
Superpower</a></li>
<li><a href="http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10995">A Rundown on What's Going On with Penny Arcade Now</a></li>
<li><a href="http://thefullbrightcompany.com/2013/06/21/why-we-are-not-showing-gone-home-at-pax/">Why We Are Not Showing Gone Home At Pax</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="sfwa">SFWA</h3>
<p>The SFWA recently went through a kerfuffle regarding their newsletter featuring
a boys-club-esque article written by a couple of old white dudes. It's worth
collecting a few links if only for the first, which brings up good points that
stand even outside of the subculture of SF/F writers.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/06/10/25-things-to-know-about-sexism-misogyny-in-writing-publishing/">25 Things to Know About Sexism and Misogyny in Writing and Publishing</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.annaguirre.com/archives/2013/06/02/this-week-in-sf/">This Week in SF</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.delilahpaints.blogspot.com/2013/06/on-sexism-in-publishing-or-why-im.html">On Sexism in Publishing, or Why I'm Not Writing This Two Days Ago</a></li>
<li><a href="http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/513901.html">Sexism, the Current SFWA Kerfuffle, and "Lady Authors"</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="other">Other</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/about-work/aa49dffc975d">Misogyny and the Marketing Chick</a> - Institutionalizing misogyny. Because
reasons.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/we-were-wrong">Kickstarter: We Were Wrong</a> - An apology for a recent Kickstarter that
went through which some saw as promoting objectification of women.</li>
<li><a href="http://blackgirldangerous.org/new-blog/2013/6/17/8-ways-not-to-be-an-ally">8 Ways to Not Be an Ally</a> - A link regarding some recent gate-keeping.
There are, of course, good allies and bad allies.</li>
<li><a href="http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/2013/06/poly-as-relationship-status-of-totally.html">Polyamory in the News: Poly as "the relationship status of a totally fabulous
future</a> - Partner pointed this out to me as a very "me" sort of article.
I think he's right. The big take-away is communication and how that gets
skipped in a lot of instances.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/coverflip-maureen-johnson_n_3231935.html">Coverflip: Maureen Johnson Calls For An End To Gendered Book Covers With An
Amazing Challenge </a> - A delightful way of pointing out gendered visual
language on book covers.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.jimchines.com/cover-posing/">Cover Posing</a> - Another instance of pointing out gendered visual
language.</li>
<li><a href="http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/">The Hawkeye Initiative</a> - Just a reminder that this exists.</li>
</ul>
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<hr />
<p>type: post
title: Recent Anxiety
slug: recent-anxiety
date: 2013-09-20</p>
<hr />
<p>I think that it'd be helpful for me to have some outlet for expressing more
personal things in my life, and the last few weeks have really hammered that
home, so I'm starting up a new section here, which won't show up on its own,
just as a place for me to dump some of this stuff.</p>
<p>I've been dealing with generalized anxiety disorder for...well, forever, but
it's really become obvious in my adult life. Since I started college, the
anxiety has really come to the forefront, and since I left college, it has all
but taken over. I am always - <em>always</em> - anxious, and it affects every aspect
of my day, and in a variety of ways.</p>
<p>Not all of the ways are bad, of course; I consider myself reasonably happy,
hardly living in some sort of stressful hell. Anxiety informs a lot of
positive things in my life. I work hard, and do well at work, primarily because
my motivations have their basis in anxiety. It has gotten me where I am today,
in a way. The depth of my communication with my partners is also driven in part
by anxiety, and I enjoy how close I am to both of them by virtue of sussing out
details that make our relationships work. I think my dogs are happy, healthy,
and safe, since I fuss over them so much, making sure they get what they need
and stay out of harm's way (no, Zephyr, a snake is not a toy, and no, Falcon,
you may not play in traffic).</p>
<p>The feelings of inadequacy and the fear of failure (on my part or others') that
go along with anxiety drive me to succeed in a lot of aspects of life, to be
sure, but that generally is restricted to those things with concrete outcomes,
and when things are less immediate, less under my control, the anxiety redoubles
itself and builds insidiously until I'm completely overcome in panic.</p>
<p>I think the word 'insidious' is particularly fitting in this case, as it
describes the way in which anxiety builds slowly enough as to be almost
unnoticeable until it's hard to remember where it even started. In fact, once I
started seeing a doctor for, I thought, depression and suicidal rumination, it
took a few sessions of work to get me to understand how much of me feeling awful
was due to anxiety rather than simply a mood disorder, that it was the anxiety
affecting my mood, in all likelihood, and not vice versa.</p>
<p>My work with my doctor led to prescription of a few anxiolytic drugs: clonazepam
and lorazepam, both benzodiazepines. Clonazepam was a slow and mild
anti-anxiety medication meant to be taken every day until a level built up in my
system, helping to knock down the overall level of anxiety, whereas lorazepam
was a very strong, but relatively short-lived, anxiolytic to be used in
instances of 'breakthrough panic', or panic attacks. Along with medication, I
kept seeing my doctor on a regular basis for some cognitive-behavioral therapy
and more traditional talk therapy.</p>
<p>After my suicide attempt, I stopped the clonazepam: the drug did knock down
overall anxiety, but it also masked the beginnings of panic attacks, and when I
was panicking, I often found that I wound up in a state of derealization, as
though the things around me and in my life were not real. The attempt itself
was during one of those moments, where I had drifted into this liminal state
detached from reality, and the logical means of escaping this terrible feeling
of anxiety was to escape everything all at once.</p>
<p>Without clonazepam, I increased my efforts with my psychiatrist and worked out
several mechanisms to help me out with anxiety. These primarily focused on
heading off rises in anxiety which could turn into outright panic attacks. The
general idea for the course of therapy was to increase my ability to deal with
the anxiety as it came up. This was done by identifying what a panic-state felt
like (tunnel vision, increased heart rate, 'freezing up', and so on) and think
about how I felt and what I was thinking immediately before that before letting
the attack take its course. When I started feeling and thinking those things
next time, I'd know that I was right before a panic attack and could try to
distract myself or go for a walk or something. At the same time, I could think
about how I was feeling and what I was thinking immediately before that. By
repeating the process, I'd know the signs of the very beginnings of a rise in
anxiety, heading off even elevated levels, not just outright panic attacks.</p>
<p>This worked fairly well for me for quite a while (and still does, but more on
that in a bit). Over time, I got better at controlling my anxiety and the ways
it affected me. Sometimes I'd lose and fall back into panic, but not nearly as
often as before.</p>
<p>A few times, however, the anxiety shifted in its course. For example, when I
left my old job at a health insurance company to start working at Canonical, the
stressors in my life shifted, and so the somatic symptoms of my anxiety shifted
in step. Rather than high levels of acid reflux (I'll never be free of it, but
it got worse with panic), I developed a motor tic in my neck, causing me to jerk
my head to the side every few seconds when relaxed, or a few times a second when
panicking. Shifts like this caused consternation at first until my doctor and I
worked it out as sweeping changes in my life reflected in my anxiety, and they
even act as additional sigils that I can rely on, signalling an increase in
anxiety or a pending panic attack.</p>
<p>With that history in mind, fast-forward about eight months to mid-July of this
year. Life had settled down in several ways for me - I was getting used to the
job, I'd gotten another dog and she was relaxing into her new home, James and I
were comfortable living together - and changed in several others - Russ and I
had grown into our relationship, I was exploring being more open in my
exploration of sex and gender, and I was getting more involved in the furry
community through my projects. At this point, however, I was well on my way
into an insidious change in the tenor of my anxiety.</p>
<p>As July started to taper into August, I was finding myself with a few months
with no free weekends. Not that I was doing something onerous like work, I had
a convention at which I was speaking, a visit from Russ, a roommate moving in,
some travel, and so on. Over time, I found myself more and more anxious with
none of the signs that I had trained myself to notice. Additionally, as August
wore on, I noticed two new symptoms come to the fore: derealization and auditory
aberrations.</p>
<p>These latter two were very concerning to me. The derealization took the form of
paranoid delusions, at first, and it was only recently that I sorted that out.
The topics were standard fare: James or Russ had already left me and were hiding
the fact from me, or the people around me had sinister intentions, or weren't
really 'real' at all, being instead automata acting mechanically. The auditory
aberrations (which I called hallucinations until corrected by my doctor), took
the form of an additional 'inner voice' such as you hear when reading, except
not my own. Sometimes male, sometimes female, it would speak 'aloud' what I was
thinking in the third person or, more often, instruct me to kill myself,
sometimes down to specifics, listing the steps required to hang or shoot myself
in the calm voice of an announcer at a train station stating the next arriving
train. At first I felt crazy, but then that settled into merely being annoyed
or frightened. If I got upset at hearing these voices, their tones would get
harsher or mocking.</p>
<p>Much of this culminated during a work-sprint in London and the week after. It
was then that I started to worry most and think about heading to the psych
clinic in town to get this checked out. While these were all signs of
schizophrenia or the like, the onset was late in life and too sudden for that.
London was particularly hard on me being so far away from my partners and dogs
and home, as well as due to the heights involved in both the office building I
was working at and the bridges over the Thames. This is when the paranoia and
derealization set in strongly, particularly in relation to my relationships: not
being able to interact much with those closest to me and watching their
interactions with others after the fact bred a jealousy not at all tied to
reality, where I wasn't just worried that I would be replaced, but believed that
I already had, and that this was being hidden from my for sinister reasons.</p>
<p>London was not all bad, as I did have a friend in town who has been a grounding
force in my life since I've known him. Additionally, the city was amazing, and
unlike our previous international sprint to Copenhagen, I felt more comfortable
getting out and away from the context of work. It was about Thursday of the
sprint when the tic, gone the last three months or so, returned, and I started
to get an inkling that these "paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations"
were less symptoms of me going crazy, and more symptoms of the same old crazy:
signs of anxiety.</p>
<p>The week I got back was up and down to an extreme. One day, I'd be happy to
work and, on my days off, walk around, but the next I would be nearly
incapacitated by anxiety, held in quasi-catatonia by the fear that I would act
out what I was being instructed to do. During these times, I could not interact
with other people. I was in some liminal state, betwixt and between sanity and
insanity, apart from the world, muddled and confused. When I would talk to even
my partners, I felt like I was talking to masks or machines, and I did not get
out of the house much.</p>
<p>This was, of course, made worse by the flooding of the Eastern Slope in
Colorado. I already have an intense fear of disaster (a house fire and close
brushes with tornadoes will do that), but having our neighborhood threatened as
we were stranded by the rising river had my anxiety riding at a constant high.
The inner voices picked up on this and started instructing me to jump in the
river, of course.</p>
<p>The solution became evident when I tried taking the lorazepam I had left over
from my previous prescription. Taking half a pill - 0.25mg - would stop
everything and calm me down within half an hour and last for three or four
hours, or until I fell asleep.</p>
<p>I won't recap the next few days, nor the entirety of the appointment with my
doctor last night, but I will say the outcome.</p>
<p>The aberrations, what I called auditory hallucinations, are a relatively common
symptom of very high levels of anxiety. It's a process called 'expansion',
whereby what might have been a thought about abstract concepts such as death
expands back out of the realm of thinking abstractly and into the realm of
language. Suicidal rumination (that is, thinking about suicide over and over
without any intention to actually carry through with it - not ideation) has been
a feature of panic for me since high school at least, and in this case, it
expanded back into the realm of inner speech.</p>
<p>The derealization, what I had described as paranoid delusions, are an even more
common symptom of panic. It is the sensation of things around you losing their
reality and permanence, of reality itself feeling like something totally
separate, and is indicative of the adrenal 'fight or flight' response, where
things that might once have been people now become things to escape or destroy.
I have experienced it before, but never so pervasive - it used to be that things
took on sort of a cartoonish or movie-like quality, seeming scripted or
mechanical, but this extended even to emotions and social interaction. The
strongest instance previously had been with the suicide attempt, but that was
accompanied by depersonalization, where I felt as though I were not a real
person, but simply a set of actions tied to a sack of meat. This occurred later
on in March, and again in May, in a similar 'delusional' fashion, with various
forms of self-harm that felt as though the act would cause a rush of relief, a
bringing to sharper clarity, or even a release of pressure (literally).</p>
<p>Lacking that this time, the surreal aspect of interacting within the context of
my relationships felt especially sinister.</p>
<p>The end result is, as I had discussed with both partners as well as my doctor,
an attempt to wrangle this under control with the goal to keep it under control,
living with flexible enough coping mechanisms that I can deal with changes to
symptoms or tenor in the future. I live with a lot of anxiety, and I don't
think I will ever not, but I can adapt and, like I have in the past, use it to
my advantage: furthering my career and skills, deepening my relationships, and
exploring the world around me.</p>
<p>To that end, I'm taking up to 0.5mg lorazepam per day in 0.125mg doses, as well
as 5mg fluoxetine per day (a quarter dose of Prozac, basically). If all goes
well, I can stop the lorazepam in a few weeks and keep it, as before, for
breakthrough anxiety. Finally, I also received a recommendation for a local
therapist to see more regularly than I'm able to see my current psychiatrist,
who lives several cities away.</p>
<p>I'm incredibly thankful and feel, for lack of a better word, blessed for the
people in my life not only putting up with me, but helping me through this. My
partners and my roommate must be tired of me ticcing like a madman at the best
of times, and a total mess at the worst. Surrounding myself with them, my dogs,
and any hapless friends that happen to be nearby has kept me going, and will
keep me going in the future.</p>
<p>At the lowest points in all this, the one thought that stuck with me is that I
have to believe that there's a way forward, rather than simply unceasing terror
or death at my own hands. No immediate solution, of course, but a path I could
take. I'm pretty confident that I'm heading in the right direction.</p>
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<h1>Zk | 2013-09-22-anxiety-followup</h1>
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<hr />
<p>type: post
title: Anxiety - Follow-up
slug: anxiety-follow-up
date: 2013-09-22</p>
<hr />
<p>The last few days have, honestly, been a bit of a rush, in terms of just how
real I feel, compared to the last few weeks, minus this afternoon. I never do
well with shopping on the weekends. I love shopping, really, and I also love
weekends, but these clots of people studiously ignoring each other exert a
pressure on me that is not within my power to ignore.</p>
<p>This continued on throughout the day, but given not only the medication I've
been on of late, but also the amount of attention I have been paying to myself
in this realm, I've been able to, if not totally control, though there was some
of that, at least play a spectator to the mechanisms and action of my anxiety as
it unfolds.</p>
<p>Everything moves in waves, and I like to think that this is because my body is
responding to a concentration by releasing a response. The response comes on in
a wave, lasting perhaps five to ten minutes, before the effect starts to fade,
but the anxiety remains, and so another wave is released. This has been a
consistent experience over the last few months, but I've noticed that, during an
actual panic attack, the sensation disappears, to be replaced by unrelenting
levels of whatever-it-is involved in the process.</p>
<p>I think that the waves have been interesting and notable of late because that's
when I, at the beginning, felt as though I were coming to some grand realization
that there was some sinister plan driving the people and things around me. Of
late, however, this has been a slow ramp up when I am able to brace myself for a
sense of "Now I am starting to believe the things I worry about," and that is
far less terrifying than "Oh my God these things are really true!"</p>
<p>The same has been the case for the auditory aberrations for the last few weeks.
So absurd is it to hear someone say, as though they were simply notifying you of
which platform the train would be arriving at, that it is now time for you to
hang yourself. As I mentioned, the aberrations also included various mocking
narrations as to what I was doing or thinking at the time, the most memorable
being, "Makyo the irrelevant fox," which...I don't know. Way to go on
incorporating aspects of my life within furry, I guess? And so I turned one of
these mocking mantras into a response, and those who follow me on Twitter or
know me in person know my fondness for the phrase 'get fucked' of late.</p>
<p>Even so, this is the type of thing that I feel rolling up against me, past me,
and then through me and on to wherever it is that anxiety goes. Today, after
that ridiculous shopping trip, I felt anxiety dogging at my heels until dinner
time, and it was then that I had a moment to pause, let go, and study the
feeling of the slight delusion involved in the rush, as well as the welling up
of other people's voices.</p>
<p>It was intriguing, but, perhaps due to the meds, something I could watch from a
distance, so long as I put in the effort. I can feel just why the last few
weeks were as scary as they were, but I was able to take a step back, and also
able to search back through the events of the day and feel just why it started,
and what it felt like when it did: a shrinking and bracing, a preparing, a sense
of "I had better watch out." Before that, at some point, I expect that I will
find similar roots to a raise in levels of anxiety that I'd felt before. Not
similar enough to catch in the filters that I had set up, but close.</p>
<p>I am not happy about being prescribed benzos again, but I think the last few
days have shown their utility, and I will use them with as much caution as I
can, until I can figure out how the fluoxetine figures in. Either way, I'll
take it, and I'll be sure to keep on myself for finding a way to buttress myself
against this (ridiculous, stupid, nonsensical) onslaught.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Self Esteem
date: 2013-09-23
slug: self-esteem</p>
<hr />
<p>After forgetting my midday pill until almost three, I found last night's anxiety
slowly welling back up inside of me. I was awoken at 1:20 or so in the middle
of a panic attack, snapping awake as one would from a nightmare, though the
dream itself had been rather pleasant. I didn't make it back to sleep until
nearly four, once the panic had subsided. Despite the lack of sleep, I did
fairly well this morning, though that all caught up with me in the early
afternoon.</p>
<p>I took the pill and decided to walk the dogs a little early so that I could
change contexts and locations while I waited for the Lorazepam to kick in. For
the first three quarters of a mile or so, I did my best to practice various
forms of walking meditation - counting steps, breathing evenly, letting thoughts
have their place and just pass through like clouds; stuff I'd learned in high
school - mostly as a defense mechanism so that I would not dwell on things, as I
know I do when I'm anxious.</p>
<p>After that, I spent the rest of the walk dissecting how I had felt and what was
making me anxious, and why. I tried to keep my thoughts organized by thinking
slowly and repeating the thoughts to myself in words afterward to be sure that I
understood them (which worked only so well, as I didn't record them anywhere).</p>
<p>I have a few things that trigger anxiety in my life, right now, and I think that
a lot of them have their roots in self-esteem. When I get anxious about
relationships, such as over the last few weeks, I tend to feel jealousy. The
type of jealousy that I feel is rooted in a feeling of being redundant in a
situation where feeling unique is important. </p>
<p>This hit very strongly over the last few weeks, and the reason it came up has to
do with how I make polyamory work inside my head: each person in our lives plays
specific roles for us and fulfills specific needs. Things work out in my
relationships because each of us fills a different set of needs for each other.
This caused an internal clash for me when a partner started getting closer to
someone rather like myself. The clash arose because I have, throughout life,
reduced myself in my mind to a few simple states, and, while I may be important
to people for reasons other than those states, loved for facets other than what
I have reduced myself to, I can't necessarily make myself believe it.</p>
<p>The take away from this is, I think, to explore the ways in which I fit into my
partners' lives and work on improving a more holistic view of myself. I am not
just a small collection of interests, but something more complete and I need to
trust that that is what is loved, and not just some singular facet, whether or
not there are needs that I'm fulfilling that others do not. I am still a firm
believer that the more one loves, the more one is able to love, and the last few
weeks have been such a hellhole that I stopped loving myself, and stopped being
able to internalize that concept as well.</p>
<p>Similar thoughts have cropped up around work. The project has gone skittering
from focus to focus without settling down long enough for us to even come up
with an adequate roadmap. This has us all a little on edge, but given my past
experiences with things like this getting out of hand, I feel incredibly
anxious about this. The way in which this ties into self esteem is that I feel
as though I must constantly prove to myself and others that I really know what
I'm doing. This has always been a common theme: proof of competence. It's hard
to feel competent when upper management's actions come off as schizophrenic,
however, and so as that control is yanked from under me, I feel inadequate to
complete even the simplest task, though I don't (logically) think that's the
case.</p>
<p>The take away from this is more difficult. I could, like my coworkers, just roll
with the changes and drop whatever I was doing at each hairpin and pick up the
new task without comment. I haven't been doing that, I've been trying to voice
my opinion that we need to keep up our steady progress toward a goal - after
all, agile does not mean schizophrenic. That hasn't been working that well,
though, and I don't want to simply be a mid-level engineer all my life, so I'm
wondering if I need to find some way to be more politic about things without
necessarily feeling bad that I'm not accomplishing everything in half the time
with flying colors or whatever.</p>
<p>Finally, since all my examples seemingly have to come in threes, my projects
have been suffering due to the low opinion I hold for my own work. [a][s]
in particular has languished somewhat as I've struggled to write something that
I feel is worthwhile. I have grand ideas and I feel that I'm not a good enough
writer or not smart enough to actually pull them off. My pride, however, won't
let me just drop them, and so I'm stuck in this tension between wanting to
improve my writing and researching, but feeling like a failure about it in the
first place.</p>
<p>I'm not sure what the best take-away from this is, other than to just buckle
down and hammer one out, accepting that it won't be as good as I envision it in
my mind. In fact, that's what I used to do, all the time. This is the biggest
reason that I feel like the root of a lot of these ancillary symptoms of anxiety
is low self-esteem. Even things that I don't necessarily feel anxious about,
such as [a][s]. I know that I don't need to feel grand about myself and all
the things I do in life all of the time but I'm curious: problems have been
piling up, and if there is one root cause with one (obviously complex) solution,
then I think it's worth looking into. Even if the solution comprises several
individual solutions unique to each resulting problem - exploring the depths of
my relationships, being more politic at work while still getting stuff done, and
writing the articles I need rather than the ones I want - in order to up the
self-esteem, then I think it's worth doing.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Identity and Expression
slug: identity-and-expression
date: 2013-09-25</p>
<hr />
<p>I've been seeing Dr. Johnston for almost two years now, and I think that he's
been an incredibly grounding presence in my life, for various reasons, but
particularly in the way in which he has of boiling his thoughts down to ideas
that can be applied across a broad spectrum of experiences. The most important,
of course, is this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Identity is psychopathological.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm pretty sure that's come up before, but it was one of those short quips in
the middle of a session that just kind of stuck with me, because it fit so well
in so much of my life. Questioning sexual orientation is all well and good, and
if it had been a frictionless bout of experimentation that had led to gay or
straight or anything else, I don't think that I would have spent most of my
high-school career feeling a sense of identity as a gay man. It <em>wasn't</em>
frictionless, as befits an American youth in the early 2000s.</p>
<p>Similarly, I never felt like I got along with the rest of the people in the
music department in college specifically because of identity. In this instance,
however, I think it came down mostly to <em>doubting</em> my identity as a musician,
whatever that meant. I was happiest composing because that got me into the
abstract headspace that I wound up in in music, and one of the best
contributions I feel that I made to the music department wasn't anything that I
wrote, but rather setting up and caring for the computers in the composition
lab, which I even helped procure from my job working as a sysadmin in the
library.</p>
<p>The interactions with gender are, I think a lot more complicated than that,
though, and I think that is due in particular do the ways in which gender
identity and expression interact. I say gender identity here, but I've been
starting to question that phrase recently: after all, trans* people have a
gender identity, and cisgender people have just gender. However bear with me
for the multiple definitions here. I have experienced my fair share of
experiencing identity as some form of trans* person in the past, but I have
been spared of late, and I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad
thing, when it comes to personal growth.</p>
<p>When I was finishing up my school career and on into the job that I held in an
office for almost a year and a half, I was exposed to all sorts of perceived
friction in terms of gender, and much of this was due to social interaction.
Fitting the role I was supposed to play as best I could was the source of plenty
of distress for me. However, starting a work-at-home career at the same time as
I was starting to nail down the boundaries of this particular pathology (as I
felt at the time), was a boon.</p>
<p>Spending all day at home, able to basically be whatever I wanted to be made me
really loosen up, and slip from distress into comfort, from pathology into a
solid sense of self, without identity. This was also helped by forcible dip in
sexual hormones that kept topics physical from causing much in the way of
dysphoria. This all changed slowly and gradually, of course, as I got used to
the situation.</p>
<p>In the last year, I think that I've come quite a ways in terms of who I am with
relatively little in the way of distress or a sense of identity. I have my own
identities behind me, so of course I know their utility in a social sense, but
here I was, personally removed from many such social senses, and the sense of
identity as other faded.</p>
<p>That's been good for me in a lot of ways because of the comfortable reprieve
I've been granted, but I'm not convinced that I've grown all that much. I feel
bad when I have to act, look, or seem a certain way, when James and I go out or
I take part in meetings, but other than that, I have no resistance to push
against and thus few chances to grow. It's not exactly stasis, because I'm
hardly totally comfortable or happy with where or what I am, I just have none of
the direction provided by identity that I used to.</p>
<p>In that vein, I've been intentionally playing a bit more with expression. I
borrowed a friend's sewing machine (hi, sorry, I'll get it back to you soon!)
and made several skirts and such for myself, as well as for James and our
housemate. I've decided to poke around a little at various other forms of
expression - growing my hair out, painting nails, makeup, other clothing, and so
on - to see what fits and what doesn't, because I'm starting to feel that,
without being challenged, and without that social input, I'm liable to disappear
within my own head and simply grow stagnant.</p>
<p>These are all cheap to me. The worst case scenario, I feel worse rather than
better, and I'm out the cost of a bottle of nail polish or a few yards of
fabric. And that's the goal, really: find ways to push myself that I wouldn't
ordinarily think of, given my current position at work. The process of
expanding my sense of self and any definition I might have with regards to
gender and myself has stalled, because it isn't challenged at all, and I don't
think I'm necessarily in a position to progress without that.</p>
<p>This is another part of this. I want to talk about it openly. I want to have
discussions, instructions, and insults. Help me out here, even if it's to tell
me that I'm wrong and in what ways. Tell me on Twitter, in the comments, or
email or whatever. I just need some outside source, some direction (towards or
away), even a little identity, and maybe I'll feel a bit more momentum.</p>
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<p>type: post
slug: millie
date: 2013-10-06
title: Millie</p>
<hr />
<blockquote>
<p>Hi Matt,</p>
<p>I hope you guys are doing OK.</p>
<p>I just wanted to let you know that we had to have Millie euthanized today. She
hadn't been feeling well for a couple of days and it turned out to be cancer
that was causing internal bleeding. It doesn't get any easier to go through
this but it was a gentle, painless way to go.</p>
<p>If there is such a thing as a "sweetness gene" she had it. I did my best to
spoil her and give her a good life. Her goal in life was to be a good dog and
she definitely succeeded. I'll miss petting those silky ears.</p>
<p>Give your dogs hugs from Grandma.</p>
<p>Love,</p>
<p>Mom</p>
</blockquote>
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<p><img alt="Rest in peace, Millie" src="/assets/personal/millie.jpg" /></p>
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<hr />
<p>type: post
slug: medication-and-analogies
date: 2013-10-28
title: Medication and Analogies</p>
<hr />
<p>My doctor laughs at me for the sheer number of analogies I use to try and
describe anxiety, panic, and depression.</p>
<p>During our last session, I think I used three in quick succession. "It's like
reading under a blanket at night when you're a kid and all of the world is
whatever you're inventing in your head and everything ends beyond the
flashlight-lit underside of the covers" - describing derealization and paranoia;
"I feel like I'm on the other side of a chain-link fence from anxiety: about
twenty feet away, but then, as the effects start to wear off, whatever's beyond
the fence starts to attract my attention and draw me near; panic would be the
point where I hop the fence to go see." And, the one that got the laugh,
"Stress is what sets the boulder rolling down the hill, anxiety is when it
starts to break up, and panic is when it starts the avalanche, and I guess I
feel like it's more likely to be just a single rock rolling down the hill these
days than an avalanche."</p>
<p>I may be a little over the top.</p>
<p>I like the analogies, though, because this isn't something that lends itself
well to direct description. The words that would result from me doing so are
either clinical or cliché, and I don't feel as though they accurately get the
point across of what exactly is involved with anxiety and depression. For
instance, restating my three earlier analogies would simply be "derealization to
the point of fugue state", "anxiolytic effects of medication", and "breakthrough
panic". They're accurate, to be sure, but none of them, by necessity, cover the
full experience of what's happening.</p>
<p>Needless to say, things are better. Not fixed, but better. The medication
(switched now from 10mg daily fluoxetine and 0.5mg daily lorazepam to 20mg daily
fluoxetine and 0.75mg daily alprazolam, spaced evenly) had done quite a bit to
lift me out of such a state of constant anxiety as to be nearly non-functional,
to a low level of worry that I imagine is relatively normal, for whatever that
means. The breakthrough panic has also been helped quite a bit, and I'm finding
that both the severity and frequency of panic attacks has shifted: the amount of
breakthrough panic is, overall, less, though, which is good. I'm still at about
one attack every 36 hours or so, which is better than the once or twice a day I
was experiencing before, and what I would call the average attack is more along
the lines of what I was experiencing about a year ago: pounding heart, tunnel
vision, ticcing in hands and neck, feelings of terror, feeling like I'm going
crazy, and suicidal rumination.</p>
<p>A few times a week, though, I'll have something more major. These come in two
loose varieties that I guess I'd call functional and non-functional. Functional
major panic usually involves intense derealization or depersonalization,
paranoia, and auditory aberrations. I disconnect from the world around me and
from myself and wind up, as I said, in some state similar to reading a book by
flashlight under the covers. The world ends at that boundary of the blanket,
and none of the characters I can perceive are actually real. The hearing things
bit has settled down from something like an announcer-type voice instructing me
to hang myself heard just over my shoulder to a TV left on in the next room
which just happens to be showing an instructional video on how to hang oneself.
An improvement, as I said, but not a fix. After all, this was <em>every</em> panic
attack a month or so ago.</p>
<p>Much more rarely are the ones where I stop being able to function in the world
around me. It's like one of the functional major panic attacks kicked up to the
point where things stop working. Language stops making sense and becomes a
series of sounds; vision becomes a bas relief of colors strung together rather
than a comprehensible picture of the world around me, and so on. Becoming
incoherent on top of becoming illucid is hardly pleasant, so the most I can do
is just go lie down or whatever. It's hard to tell what exactly goes on since
it feels as though so little of me is left, so I don't know what it looks like
from the outside. Every part of me is replaced with panic, though at that
point, it ceases to feel like just panic, and more like I'm slipping out of
existence.</p>
<p>I spent last week as a sort of half work-trip, half vacation in the bay area,
working on a planning-sprint with coworkers and visiting my partner and some
friends in the area while I was out there. Over the course of the trip, I had
about three functional and one non-functional panic attacks, which I guess is
kind of a lot, but for the fact that I was travelling, and travel makes me crazy
enough as it is. If you'll pardon the additional analogy, it's as though all
senses became a TV screen tuned to a dead channel, moods like the skies over
Chiba. All I wanted to get by was just a plain, fine-grained static that I
could still see through, still comprehend everything beyond, but every now and
then, pictures, shapes, sounds, and colors would start to form within that
static and assert themselves over the rest of my perception, mood, anxiety
levels, and so on. It's embarrassing - particularly so when it happens in front
of my boss or partner or friends. Mortifying.</p>
<p>This led to some other interesting observations. Or, well, it boils down to one
interesting observation, made in a few different contexts. There are three
stages of working with a problem (well, at least three that are pertinent here)
like this: acknowledgement by self, acknowledgement by others, and integration.
It took me probably a year to a year and a half before I was able to acknowledge
to myself that things were going poorly enough that I probably ought to see a
doctor, and about that long after to really integrate the stuff that I learned
into life.</p>
<p>Similarly, it's all well and good for me to talk to my partners and my friends
about anxiety and panic, and to write here about symptoms after I've
acknowledged them with myself. It's important that I have the ability to share,
of course, but I also feel as though it is respectful of me to be honest with
those that I'm close to. It's another thing entirely, as I found out (again)
this week, to actually integrate that knowledge through actual experience.
Having a panic attack around friends and partners is the experiential side of
the knowledge I've spent cultivating within myself and between myself and
others. It's uncomfortable, painful even, but I think that I'm better for it,
because it helps me to comprehend not only things from an outside point of view,
but also the effects that me <em>freaking out</em> has on those around me. After all,
all of this is my responsibility, whether or not those around me help (and I'm
certainly thankful for those that do!). It's not something I have to deal with
by myself, of course, but it's my responsibility.</p>
<p>Anyway, I know this was all rambling, but I figured it worth it to kind of pull
together some ideas from my record-keeping (which I usually do during or
immediately after on <a href="http://twitter.com/foxproblems">twitter</a>) so that I can be
a little more prepared for tomorrow's appointment. Who knows, maybe I can even
get by with fewer analogies!</p>
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<hr />
<p>type: post
title: A Small Update
date: 2013-11-08
slug: a-small-update</p>
<hr />
<p>Both partners and several friends have expressed some concern of late over the
pattern of anxiety and panic that has emerged after starting treatment for the
same. To that end, I scheduled a phone session with my doctor to discuss that,
and I think it'd be good to get down in words some of the results of the call.</p>
<p>All of our concerns basically boil down to some variation of "I can't tell if
you're getting better or worse". On my end, in particular, it was worry that
the benzo that I'm taking is "covering" or "hiding" anxiety that I would
normally be able to cope with until it reaches the point that it turns into a
panic attack. That's because, over all, I've been feeling much better in terms
of anxiety, and not as much in terms of panic. I was worried that I was missing
a chance to head-off a panic attack through other coping mechanisms. This isn't
helped by the fact that I really worry about tolerance and addiction with
benzodiazepines (though my doctor assures me that I'm on fairly low doses
because I'm apparently ridiculously sensitive).</p>
<p>The pattern of late (the last two to three weeks) has been that I'll feel pretty
okay for most of the day, but sometime in the late afternoon or evening, I'll be
overcome by a rush of dissociation/depersonalization/derealization that feels
like I'm being reduced to a tiny part of my brain while I lose control of the
rest of my mind and it goes into some null-space. I usually have to lie down,
and I usually have to close my eyes and cover my ears because sights and sounds
get too confusing and overwhelming. I also lose track of time (I usually spend
about an hour and a half to two hours out and sort of unresponsive, but
subjective time usually runs about 10-15 minutes), and can't respond coherently
speaking or writing. This happens about three to four times a week, and will
very rarely be a series of rolling panic attacks with half hour breaks between
them.</p>
<p>The difference, as I've noticed and as my doctor explicitly pointed out, is that
anxiety is now no longer such a big factor in my life. Panic of this type has
been going on for months, now, but the amount of anxiety also in my life has
historically been high. Very high.</p>
<p>Panic and anxiety are, of course, very strongly correlated. The original
response was to notice, say, a tiger in the bushes, have a psychological response
(anxiety), followed by a somatic response (panic; adrenaline amplifying the
sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system) so that one can fight or flee.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Does it feel good to explain? To boil this down to scientific terms and say
hey, this is all a vestige of evolution?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Generalized anxiety disorder, on the other hand, is having that psychological
response all the time about things that don't necessarily warrant anxiety, or
having out-of-proportion anxiety about the things that do. I've lived with that
all my life - literally: my mom tells a story that, when they first moved my
crib into her hospital room after I was born, neither of us slept all night,
instead just warily eying each other, anxious and nervous.</p>
<p>Panic attacks are relatively recent for me, starting up sometime in my late
teens and early twenties as any sort of regular occurrence, and those involve
having that same somatic response, often - but not always - correlated with the
psychological response of anxiety. These include all the symptoms of an
adrenaline rush: pounding heart, racing pulse, shallow or quick breathing,
tunnel vision, etc.</p>
<p>Your whole body is one big feedback loop, though, and so effects happening in
your autonomic nervous system - panic - can affect your central nervous system
and, in turn, amplify the panic. In this way, panic compounds anxiety, and vice
versa. This is why panic attacks often also include feelings of dread, feeling
like one is dying or going crazy, depersonalization (feeling as if one is not
real), derealization (feeling as if the world is not real), and dissociation (a
disconnection from sense of self, body, or reality).</p>
<p>When I go to lie down during a panic attack, I'm locked in a room at the very
top of my head, a perfect cube, completely dark. All of my senses come through
muffled and disjoint, the rest of the house of my mind is locked and shut away
in some state I can't access, and I can barely figure out the structure of the
house of my body. Who knows what's going on in the next room, or the room down
the hall? There's just that one little perfectly dark cube left for me to hide
in while the rest of the house rocks and shifts and shakes in a storm of panic,
or settles and creaks under its own weight.</p>
<p>As the panic recedes, more and more doors are unlocked, more shutters thrown
open, blinds lifted, curtains tied back as I regain control of mind and body.
Clumsy at first, stuttering, unable to fully understand language written or
spoken, I start to inhabit more and more of myself to the point where I regain
my connection with the world around - and within - me.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Analogies, man... Do those feel any better?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I feel almost split in two sometimes. There is this part of me that undergoes
massive dissociation and depersonalization to the point where I spend an hour
and a half all but comatose, and then there is part of me that is really here,
is really present. I have to use the one to look at and investigate the other,
to figure out what's going on, but only sidelong. That other part of me is too
magnetic, too easy to fall into, it seems. If I get too close, look to hard,
then I risk slipping back into that side of myself, where muscles in my neck and
back tense up, fists clench and unclench, head tics nervously to the side,
heartburn climbs my esophagus, and I start to lose touch with what things are
and how they work.</p>
<p>I have to investigate, too. I have to find out what started things, whether this
was triggered by anxiety, and if so, what (if anything) might have triggered the
anxiety. I have to walk back down that path just to see if there was something
I could notice sooner, some earlier point at which I could have subverted
things.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of course. Because it always comes back to control, with you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To that end, my doctor thinks that the fluoxetine is helping quite a bit with
the general anxiety, as is the alprazolam, though that will probably be
tapered out before long. The treatment for generalized anxiety is working well,
and continues apace.</p>
<p>The treatment for panic, however, is being stepped up, to combat the obvious
increase in panic over the last few months. I'm to keep a schedule of when
panic attacks happen, including how long and how strong (which I already do with
@foxproblems, of course; kudos, me). I'm to feel free to break up panic attacks
with lorazepam (which, taken sublingually, acts very fast) and now also
propanolol, a beta-blocker, which should help break up some of the somatic
effects of panic such as the pounding heart, shallow breathing, tunnel vision,
and so on (which, again, tend to cause me to panic more by their very
existence).</p>
<p>Do I think I'm getting better? Or worse?</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Mu</em>. Better and worse are falsehoods. Only change, and even that doesn't
matter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think I'm getting better. The anxiety is to the point where I feel real,
present, and...well, normal more now than I have in years and years. The panic
is bad, but it's also more visible by the very fact that the general anxiety is
better. The somatic response is less connected to the psychological one these
last few months that it may have seemed, because anxiety was <em>always</em> running
high. Now that the anxiety is manageable, the beast that is panic is clearly
visible. While I can't necessarily remember everything, I don't even think I'm
having <em>more</em> panic now than I was before. It's just that much more visible.</p>
<p>That said, I'm super thankful for James and Russ for being so supportive, as
well as Kris, Peri, Lu, Nakita, JM (especially JM, who has helped twice
now in keeping [a][s] running while I fix my broken-down self), and a ton of
others. I know I'm a sap, and I know I get maudlin a lot</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Understatement of the year.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>but you all deserve your thanks, and all my love. <em>You</em> are real. I'm real.
This is all real. It's hard to disentangle what is and isn't sometimes, but I'm
keeping on it, and you all are helping.</p>
<hr />
<p>I used to write with an 'ally', way back when, whenever I was writing
therapeutically. It would be contrived elsewhere, and it probably seems
contrived here, but sometimes it helps me, so please bear with me.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not that you give much choice.</p>
</blockquote>
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<hr />
<p>type: post
date: 2013-11-10
slug: on-time
title: On Time</p>
<hr />
<p>I wrote a story in high school called "All of Time at Once" which was about the
first large-scale time-travel proof-of-concept project. It involved sending one
person back in time two years to meet themselves with minimal exposure to the
outside world at large. Additionally, they were not to let on that they were
the same person as themselves to themselves in the process so as to keep any
sort of psychological break from happening. It was merely a means to show that
it could work, that a person could be sent back a reasonable period of time,
interfere with someone unimportant enough that it wouldn't do anything weird,
and then, carry on as some sort of amanuensis, living proof that it had worked.</p>
<p>Of course, it didn't work like that.</p>
<p>The story wasn't about the technological feat that was involved in sending
someone back through time, nor about somehow maintaining the integrity of the
timeline, but what it would do for someone to be confronted by someone who was
exactly them, how much damage it would cause internally.</p>
<p>The story wasn't well written - I was 16 or something - and I keep thinking I'll
revise it some day, but I never get around to it, of course. The idea and the
title have stuck with me throughout, however.</p>
<p>Particularly because what happens to the main character as they spend two years
confronted by exactly themselves in every way except looks (some cosmetic
surgery before the experiment being obligatory) and age is that they spend
basically two years in a dissociative panic attack. One that is only relieved
when they, in turn, travel back to meet themselves at that crucial moment and
they finally get to see "all of time at once".</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Really?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Shut up, I really liked Heinlein growing up.</p>
<p>I am coming down (I think) from a dissociative panic attack, typing with the aid
of whatever spell check vim has to offer. I spent most of the last
<code>$PERIOD_OF_TIME</code> on a dog walk starting somewhere before the peak of things;
I'd call it maybe halfway up (as compared to my two-thirds of the way down right
now). I spent most of that walk thinking about time, when I was thinking
coherently.</p>
<p>It seems to me that the problem with losing time during panic is that the
further into panic one gets, the smaller a quanta of time gets. It's as though
the amount of cohesive time I can possibly hold in my head is limited to
whatever space is left to cognition, and that space diminishes, and then later
expands, during a panic attack. By the time words and language started coming
back to me around the south-west edge of the lake, I was operating at about one
step's worth of time, and up to about five steps by the time I made the decision
to turn right and extend the walk a little further so that I wouldn't be totally
off by the time I got home. At my pace, that's a little less than a second, and
about three seconds respectively, which probably could be extrapolated into blah
blah blah.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Really?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm not done yet. That's not even what I'm about, dude.</p>
<p>Either way, it made me think back to that story because the ultimate relief for
the main character, the ultimate end to all of their panic, was that final
experience before they landed somewhere back in the past, where they were
allowed, for one brief instant, to experience all of time at once.</p>
<p>That translated, on my walk, to the idea that maybe that's the type of thing
that plays a big role in some of the more contemplative religions and mysticisms
out there. The perception of time in such a way as to provide some sort of
enlightenment. The idea makes less and less sense to me as time goes on, as
such things are wont to do, but the dire import struck me on my walk, as I
slowly increased the amount of time that I perceive as a cohesive or coherent
"moment".</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Really?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sometimes frameworks help to provide context for the incomprehensible.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sure, but you realize that
he corollary is that there is some ultimate state of panic, some sort of true
hell, which involves being simply reduced to some Planck unit of time as one's
cohesive or coherent "moment".</p>
</blockquote>
<p>True hell is a bit dramatic, isn't it?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But the panic made the whole experience cohesive to you, even if perception of
time was not. There was some bit of you that lasted through the experience
in order to tie it together into a story after the fact. If there was some
bit of you experiencing truly dissociated moments of incomprehensible input
reduced to an impossibly short measure of time enough to tie them together
into a story...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pleasant. Okay, I'll accept hellish.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Good.</p>
<p>After all, that's all you are, anyway. Panic is just recognition of that
fact.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>type: post
date: 2013-12-04
slug: holiday-donations
title: Holiday Donations</p>
<hr />
<p>Hi! Thanks for reading this. After the success of last year's combined drive
on Twitter, and in memory of my pup Millie, I will be donating $1 to the <a href="http://www.humanesociety.org/">Humane
Society of the United States</a> for every retweet
of <a href="https://twitter.com/drab_makyo/status/408284722972749824">this status update on
twitter</a>. </p>
<p>Additionally, I will be donating $1 to the <a href="http://boulderhumane.org">Humane Society of Boulder
Valley</a> for ever retweet of <a href="https://twitter.com/drab_makyo/status/408378552023666688">this status update on
twitter</a>.</p>
<p>I will donate no less than $500 to each charity, and no more than $2000 total (I
still have to support the house!), but if the numbers differ, I will use the
<em>larger</em> number for both (again, up to $2000); this isn't a popularity contest,
just a fun way to help with giving for the holidays!</p>
<h3 id="why">Why?</h3>
<p>I've got a lot of stuff. <em>We</em> have a lot of stuff. It's just part of the
accumulated past of more than two families. The last thing we really need is
more <em>things</em>. In that vein, and after <a href="http://adjectivespecies.com/2012/12/19/on-giving/">the experience of donating to the ASPCA
last year</a>, I've decided to
repeat the experiment.</p>
<p>Additionally, due to cancer and internal bleeding, <a href="/posts/personal/2013/10/06/millie/">my dog Millie was put down
earlier this year</a>. Millie was adopted from
the Humane Society of Boulder after her previous owner had tried to make a
fighting dog of her. Fed up with her inability to be anything but a sweetheart,
he kicked her and broke her back leg, which then healed improperly. Even so,
she was a trooper, and followed my mom on hikes for years. This is one small
thing I can do in her honor.</p>
<h3 id="the-charities">The Charities</h3>
<p>The Humane Society of the United States is <a href="http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&amp;orgid=3848#.Up9ierWJDAQ">highly
rated</a>
on Charity Navigator in finances as well as accountability and transparency.</p>
<p>Mission:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is the nation's largest and most
effective animal protection organization. Established in 1954, The HSUS seeks a
humane and sustainable world for all animals - a world that will also benefit
people. We work to reduce suffering and to create meaningful social change for
animals by advocating for sensible public policies, investigating cruelty and
working to enforce existing laws, educating the public about animal issues,
joining with corporations on behalf of animal-friendly policies, and conducting
hands-on programs that make ours a more humane world. We are the lead disaster
relief agency for animals, and we provide direct care for thousands of animals
at our sanctuaries and rescue facilities, wildlife rehabilitation centers, and
mobile veterinary clinics.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was brought to my attention that it is not clear that HSUS is <em>not</em>
affiliated with local Humane Societies, though they do operate shelters in five
states and work with various local shelters throughout the US. This isn't a
statement about either HSUS or local shelters, as both do fantastic work! In
order to more properly address this concern, I will also be donating to The
Humane Society of Boulder Valley, the shelter that took in Millie, as well as
one of our current pups, Falcon!</p>
<p>Mission:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is the mission of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley to protect and
enhance the lives of companion animals by promoting healthy relationships
between pets and people. We were founded more than a century ago in 1902, yet
this mission holds true today as we counter animal neglect and cruelty and
partner with other animal welfare organizations, sharing our mutual mission of
saving more animals' lives.</p>
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<p>type: post
date: 2013-12-29
slug: on-ritual
title: On Ritual</p>
<hr />
<p>First of all, let me state that I'm feeling pretty good as I write this. I feel
the need to state such because a lot of my tweets and a lot of my previous
entries could be construed as worrisome, and probably legitimately so, because I
have the tendency to vent freely. If I feel bad, I write, and if I'm not at a
computer, sometimes that ends up on Twitter. It's never my goal to freak anyone
out, so much as to simply cope with what's going on. Writing, putting things in
words and stringing those words together into some form meaningful to others, is
a good way for me to cope with what's happening in my life. That said, although
I try to be frank about symptoms, I know that some are disturbing taken at face
value or to their logical extremes, so I promise: I'm feeling pretty good now!</p>
<p>I'm torn.</p>
<p>I feel as though one of the most important things in my life is ritual, process,
or repetition. It's not so much that these things are comforting in isolation,
as that there is a certain feeling of being tethered to reality in them that
comforts in its own way.</p>
<p>I've been asked what I mean by reality, or what I mean when I say "that makes me
feel real" or "it's important to me that I feel real". A lot of my response
must, by necessity, rely on analogy, by its very surreality - there's no way I
can describe how I feel without using metaphors and similes.</p>
<p>In short, it's part of life that we sort of perceive the world around us as a
spatial, temporal thing. There are three axes of movement, one axis of time
(though sometimes it gets a little twisted up), and that's just sort of how we
interface with much of the world. The feeling of surreality, then, is a
pulling away on some fifth dimension, a cocooning, a means by which one has or
has been made to withdraw from the rest of reality. From the inside, it feels
like being wrapped up in cotton. Senses aren't dulled, as that might imply, so
much as that all connections through reality, all input must pass through a
high-latency barrier that introduces its own artifacts, requires its own
decoding. Again, it's not that I can't <em>hear</em>, it's that the words that are
coming in must be run through an additional filter to associate them first with
meanings, and then to tie them back through the perception of reality (the rest
of which must, of course, go through its own decoding process).</p>
<p>This surreality is, of course, nothing more than anxiety. I talk often in terms
of bandwidth, and that's rather applicable here. If I am spending all of my
emotional and intellectual energy on cycling over counterfactual universes that
I've constructed in my consciousness, then I have little energy left to deal
with the one I'm actually living in. My doctor insists, and I heartily agree,
that I not think of this as anything other than anxiety and panic, which I'll
get to in a moment.</p>
<p>I said that I'm torn above because the result of this is a desire to get back to
reality. The problem is that the anxiety gets in the way quite a bit. I think,
"There must be a way back to clarity and reality, there has to be some sort of
path or action I can take." That, too, is anxiety, but it's as yet too subtle
to recognize as such unless I'm holding still and doing very little else (which
is hardly productive).</p>
<p>As a result, a lot of my day-to-day life is spent focusing on the idea of
ritual. Ritual is the one thing that my mind has latched onto as some sort of
way through or way out, and I think it plays a large role in the events of my
past, though I was less conscious of it at the time - such is life, when it
comes to any sort of personal advancement. I ritually check the stove to make
sure it's off. I check the doors and windows. I get up once a night and check
on JD and the two pups to make sure they're inside (just in case Falcon has
rappelled out the window and is terrorizing the neighborhood - seriously).</p>
<p>It's not just checking that drives me, though. Anyone who has been to my house
knows that it's not cleaning, of course, but, well, it all comes back to the
audible aberrations that I'd mentioned before.</p>
<p>For a few months now, I've been 'hearing' voices, but I'm always careful to
mention that they're not audible hallucinations. They're not. They're what's
called expansion: the inner dialog that goes on in our brains as we go about
life is usually one that takes place in abstract images. In this case, however,
that has broken down into something more simplistic, as though I'm telling
myself a story. The voices have character and gender (though they're usually
boring), and hover <em>just</em> below the level of hearing, something closer to
remembering that I had <em>just heard</em> someone say something.</p>
<p>It's fantastically hard for me to write about this in any sort of open way. I
want to hide it. It's fucking ridiculous. I hate it, and I want it gone, and
it's embarrassing. Embarrassment is, however, a primarily social reaction, and
a harmful one in this case (after all, this is a health problem). That is, more
than I want to hide all of this, I want to tell that embarrassment to get fucked
and talk openly and freely about all this, because it's even <em>more</em> ridiculous
that I feel I can't.</p>
<p>Anyway, as I listened to someone drone on tonight about how I should cut my hair
off, how it would hurt in just the right way, how that would be my penance, and
that would be just what I needed to gain touch with reality again, I think I
finally understood the tie to ritual. This was all I had to do. In fact, this
was all these stupid aberrations were ever 'urging' me to do. It was this sense
of ritual become words. When I feel as though I'm instructed to tease apart my
skin like burlap cloth with a knife-point, to solve a cramp or a gas-pain with
violence, to kill myself before an upcoming trip to London, that's not just an
expansion of some random, totally out there thought, that's the feeling of
ritual, the "there must be something I can do to stop this panic" sense expanded
from an abstract concept back into language.</p>
<p>I've been shifting wildly along the spectrum of following these rituals to the
letter to outright ignoring them. As I said, I feel good: I'm not going to kill
myself before London or stab myself with a syringe to ease gas-pains. However,
I'm still getting up to check on the windows and doors and stove and dogs. In
the middle, I've taken to trying to subvert the desire for ritual with other
rituals: rather than tease apart my skin like lose-woven cloth with the tip of a
knife, I use a pen and just kind of draw on myself. It offers enough catharsis
for me to get to the point to realize that it's actually really, really
ludicrous; that I'm drawing symbols or lines of the utmost importance on my
limbs with a pen pilfered from my bank. That's usually enough to break through
the panicked ritual and leave me just feeling silly (which is, while
uncomfortable, still a million times better than that inner tension that
required the ritual in the first place).</p>
<p>Ritual is a salve. It's an ice cube held against a burn. It's something that
provides instant relief, but only so long as it's present. I can't <em>solve</em> any
of these problems by acting out a ritual. Checking on the dogs does not
ultimately leave me satisfied that they're all comfortably asleep, because then
I need to make sure the windows and doors are shut to ensure that they don't
float away. That done, I need to check the stove to make sure that it's off,
because if it's on and the windows are shut, how will we escape when the house
burns down?</p>
<p>You see, there's no solution. There's no ritual to make me feel good, or real,
or better, or not-anxious. There's only anxiety, and coping, and panic, and
sleep. There's reality, and that's where I dwell, and then there's my
perception of reality, which drifts rather more than perhaps it ought. Cutting
my hair wouldn't hurt - it's hair, for Pete's sake - and it would not be the
penance I need, the right amount of pain to bring me back to reality. It's
hair! I know that. That's the case I argue to the voice demanding such.
That's what makes it panic, and not psychosis: ultimately, there <strong>is no break
from reality</strong>. There's none. I know these aberrations aren't real; I know the
dogs aren't going to go carousing out the windows; I know, for sure, that
cutting my hair is not going to stop any of this. I know it. The voices are a
nuisance, the panic is a problem, but it doesn't control me. There is <em>no</em>
ritual that will solve anything: the ritual is a symptom. It's important, yes;
I live my life by process. But it's a symptom.</p>
<p>That's why I'm torn.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Coming Out to Dad
slug: coming-out-to-dad
date: 2014-10-26</p>
<hr />
<p>Hey dad,</p>
<p>Things are going fine at the house, though things are always more expensive than they first seem. We got the old house rented out, though, and that really helps; the mortgage on that is about $650, and it's renting for $1550, so the extra cash really helps with the new place. Other than finances though,it's going really well. Loveland's kind of a desert for restaurants and things to do, but we've got enough to keep us occupied at the house.</p>
<p>It's a shame to hear about grandma, but I suppose that's sort of what happens as one gets older. You'll have to say hi for me, I'll be travelling to Seattle around then. Things are going okay here, work's going really well and there's lots of travel. I just got back from Brussels not too long ago and am currently in the Bay Area on the first Actual Vacation I've taken in a while, the rest having been coincidental things with conferences and conventions. We'll have to meet up sometime for drinks and catching up.</p>
<p>In all, things are going well, though I think I need to be more honest about a big part of my life over the last several years.</p>
<p>In my life as a gay man, I believe I only ever really come out in an explicit manner once. I was in high school, in my first week of classes, and our counselors came around to our homeroom class to hold some getting-to-know-you exercise. This consisted of a lot of bored kids and one "excited" counselor asking us a series of yes or no questions and having us move to one side of the room for 'yes' and the other for 'no'. Being in a progressive town, I didn't expect to be the only kid to answer the question "Will you get married when you grow up?" with no, but sure enough, I was. I was feeling brave, so, when I was questioned about my response in front of the class, mumbled, "gay marriage is illegal, and I'm gay."</p>
<p>All of the other times I had to come out to family or friends, it was something assumed, or something hinted at. When I came out to my mom, I did so by leaving a book about gay teens and their stories on her stack of books to read. Coming out at work at my first job out of college was a matter of being "the one hired by the gay manager", and coming out at my second job was a matter of my relationship with James being included in a portfolio piece - a data-visualization résumé about my life. When I <em>officially</em> came out to you, I did so by inviting you to my wedding to James. Prior to that, although I assume it was common knowledge, it was unspoken.</p>
<p>Needless to say, I'm not all that good at coming out.</p>
<p>Running away was a turning point for me - for both of us, really. I think that we have always been guarded in our communication with each other. During that time in my life, I felt under intense distress that I couldn't express to you. Not only did I not have the words, it didn't fit in with what I perceived to be our mode of communication. I felt stuck, drained, and worthless, and the only path forward to me at the time was escape.</p>
<p>After that incident, however, I shut down even more. I didn't feel that talking through emotions, feelings, and identity with you was appropriate or allowed. This was something based off of my perceptions, which were that there are appropriate conversations to have, and that not all conversations fit into this category. I think - I hope - that my perceptions growing up were wrong. I know that my running away caused a lot of pain, and that's something that I still feel bad about, just as I know that only coming out to you through a wedding invite was not my classiest move, and I feel bad about that as well.</p>
<p>It has been my goal with my friends and partners to have relationships based on the ability to share the emotions and problems that are part and parcel to being a living human being. Over the last few years, I've worked to open up to my mom as well, letting deliberate honesty take the place of obfuscation and lying through omission about the things that are tough to talk about. I think that, as my dad, I owe that to you as well. I want to make up for all the lost conversations that we've never had. We've made good buddies over the last few decades, and I think it's important that we also make good family.</p>
<p>So what's this about?</p>
<p>I've been having troubles fitting within a masculine role for as long as I can remember. Early on, this was shown through a disregard for the boyish aspects of childhood: a lack of interest in sports, a fascination with reading the same books Marika (I apologize if I've misspelled her name, I believe that's the first time I've ever written it myself), and a need to keep out of the cliques of other boys in my early school years, except for the crowd of misfits I wound up palling around with, with whom I still keep in touch.</p>
<p>Moving to college, of course, provided all sorts of opportunities to explore. Although I spent time hanging out in the LGBT student services office and fiddled around with all sorts of different relationships, I still maintained this repressed attitude toward gender. There is a tendency among gay men to be incredibly misogynistic, and I experienced no shortage of that until I managed to quit that group, about the time I switched into a major that I felt fit me much better. Working in the music department taught me a lot about how gender roles are cemented within western culture, and in particular, I remember a discussion in which a young woman who had accepted a male part in an operetta was taught how to walk like a man.</p>
<p>Somewhere around then, I understood what feminism was all about. I realized how everything from wages down to the ways in which we walk are coded toward gender, and I hated it. I didn't fit this masculine role into which I was born, and there was little to nothing I could do about it.</p>
<p>Gayle Rubin describes gender as the aggregation of "chromosomal sex, hormonal exposure, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia and psychological identifications." Needless to say, there's a lot bound up in the topic, and a whole lot of it made me feel awful. I spent most of 2012 doing my level best to reject gender in its entirety. I denied my masculinity as I strived for neutrality and, while I gained quite a bit of insight, I gained little ground in terms of tackling my own problems with my identity.</p>
<p>It's only recently that I've decided to come at this problem of identity and personal friction in an explicit and deliberate fashion. There are things in my life that make me feel bad - just as there are for everyone - and I've found that it's my job, more than anyone else's, to fix the things in my life that cause me pain. Identity, after all, is that which we feel about ourselves when under duress.</p>
<p>What this boils down to, really, is that I'm more than just uncomfortable in a masculine role, it causes me intense psychological distress, and so I'm working to fix that.</p>
<p>I've found ways to soothe this friction, however, and, as I mentioned, I'm deliberately pursuing these fronts. I can do little things, like dress in a less masculine fashion, walk with less swagger, and, to get down to the point, change my name away from something so decidedly masculine. I'm working on changing my name from Matthew Joseph Scott to Madison Jesse Scott-Clary. It's a way to mitigate this distress, and it's working well from my point of view. I'm finally being proactive about self-actualization rather than waiting for it to come from the outside, and it's doing me wonders.</p>
<p>I waffle quite a bit on whether or not to adopt the label transgender for myself, but in a lot of ways, it really fits. 'Transgender' is an umbrella term that encompasses most all of gender variance in the human population, and literally just means not identifying with the culturally defined gender roles or categories of male or female as it pertains to one's sex assigned at birth.</p>
<p>Going back to Rubin's definition of gender, it is my psychological identification that is not in line with my biological sex. I don't really feel "more like a woman than a man", so much as I feel decidedly ungendered. Gender itself is non-binary - there isn't simply an either-or, or a line between two extremes, but a whole realm of experience that exists, unique to each person as an individual.</p>
<p>As far as definitions go, this makes me more "genderqueer" or "genderfluid", rather than simply "transgender". However, given my tendency to shy away from masculinity, I think it is safe to say that, although I will aways be a man-shape (there's no changing my height, natch), I will be a lot less masculine, and thus to all appearances by society at large more feminine, than I have been in the past. So while transgender works, I generally describe myself as agender or genderqueer, and use gender-neutral pronouns such as "they/them/theirs" to refer to myself.</p>
<p>Big picture, what does this mean?</p>
<p>I've already brought up the name change, and as yet, that's one in a set of very small changes that make up my attempts to alleviate this particular type of distress. It's these little things - changing my name, growing my hair out, carefully choosing the clothing that I purchase - that I've adopted so far as deliberate attempts to make myself feel better</p>
<p>I am, however, still me. There is nothing above the surface level that is changing. This has always been me, and will always be me, and there's certainly no changing that. Little things such as changing my name are ways in which I can better align that sense of self with the ways in which the world perceives me.</p>
<p>These changes allow me to live in a way that makes me content. I've been searching for a long time for the supposed happiness that comes with being a grown-up, and, like most everyone, decided it's bogus. However, there really is something to be said for realizing oneself in a way that provides the utmost self-fulfillment that oneself can provide. What it comes down to is that I feel good here. I feel better than I have in a long, long time, and I think that my actions speak for themselves: this is who I am.</p>
<p>What does this mean for you?</p>
<p>Dad, I really appreciate all that you've done for me. I owe so much more to you than I could ever put into words. So much of the things we did while I was growing up proved formative to who I am today, and there's no expressing the gratitude that I feel for that. You've given me so much that there's no amount I could give back to repay that.</p>
<p>I understand that the changes that I am making for myself, now that I'm nearing 30, vary in size from minuscule to enormous. I understand that I am changing some pretty integral parts of myself, some of which you had a say in yourself, such as my name.</p>
<p>What it comes down to is that I'm writing to seek your acceptance. It needn't be immediate (I'm telling you this in a letter for a reason, take all the time you need in responding), and it needn't necessarily be wholehearted. However, this is the path that I'm heading down, dad, and I'm determined to do so. There's years and years and years of thought and emotion bound up inside of these steps I'm taking, and I want you to be aware of them, and, if it's alright by you, for you to be a part of them.</p>
<p>I know that our communication over the years has been rough in places, but lets have this be the opening to a conversation between us about each of us. I hope to hear back from you soon.</p>
<p>Apologies for so many words, I know I wrote rather a lot. I wish you all the best in work and in life.</p>
<p>Always yours,</p>
<p>Madison Scott-Clary</p>
<p>Some resources:</p>
<ol>
<li>A good explanation of neutrois/agender/genderqueer:</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
<p>Take everything that you associate with masculinity and put it into a
metaphorical yard. Then do the same thing with everything feminine, putting
all of that into an adjacent yard. Then, build a low stone wall (not a fence)
between them, and put atop this wall everything that you can associate with
both genders. Then, imagine that I walked down that wall, picked up a lot of
the attributes from that center place, and then the parts from both of the
yards that most appealed to me.
2. A good set of pages on the subject of transgender issues and gender variance
as a whole: <a href="http://transwhat.org/">transwhat.org</a>
3. A well-written video on non-binary gender, sexuality, and presentation:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibAGYQtk3r4">YouTube video</a>
4. A friend, who is going through similar changes in their life, wrote a really
good analogy on binaries and identities: <a href="https://medium.com/@indilatrani/early-birds-and-night-owls-afc59712b0b8">Indi Latrani on
Medium</a>
5. A really good paper on the types of things I've been working through over the
past decade or so: <a href="http://web.uvic.ca/~ahdevor/Witnessing.pdf">Witnessing and
Mirroring</a></p>
</blockquote>
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<p>type: post
title: On the Path
date: 2014-12-19
slug: on-the-path</p>
<hr />
<p>I realize that it's been a while since I've written in this section of the site.
Things have been busy in general, and particularly overwhelming of late. I've
written <a href="/posts/furry/adjspecies/2014/11/26/witnessing-and-mirroring/">a
little</a> here and
there, but I suppose so much has been happening out of the realm of this site
that I've not felt the need to put so much down in words. I've been talking
with friends, a therapist, a psychiatrist, and as of last week, a physician
about gender.</p>
<p>I've been working so long on the mental health and social health aspects of
gender, that I figured it was time to begin looking into the physical health
aspects as well. I'm still working out the best way to 'transition', such as
the term applies to me, but it's begun with a physical, blood tests, and a
referral to an endocrinologist. At this point, with the flood of information, I
think it is a good idea to dust this thing off and start writing about it as
more news comes in, especially as a way to track the changes.</p>
<p>On the note of changes, before I delve into the tests and their results, I
should mention that I've been working through the process of changing my name
from Matthew Joseph Scott to Madison Jesse Scott-Clary. It's been a slow and
expensive process so far, involving background checks at both the state and
federal levels, and will soon involve court appearances and publications in a
newspaper (gotta make sure I'm not evil, I suppose).</p>
<p>This has also resulted in me coming out as trans* to my mom, my dad, and my
coworkers. This has all gone well enough, with the expected conversations for
the most part. The name change was from something decidedly masculine to
something on the feminine side of neutral, and so simply stating that there was
a change to Madison wound up bringing up the subject of gender with both
coworkers and my mom. I came out to my dad more deliberately through a letter,
and have prepared <a href="http://drab-makyo.com/changes/">a statement</a> on my site that
I can refer to in the future.</p>
<p>Anyway, onto the results. I had ten tubes of blood drawn a week ago today and
received fourteen results.</p>
<h3 id="std-screen">STD Screen</h3>
<ul>
<li>Gonorrhea: negative</li>
<li>Syphilis: negative</li>
<li>Chlamydia: negative</li>
<li>HIV: negative</li>
<li>Hepatitis (A, B, C): negative</li>
</ul>
<p>No surprises there. I'm not terribly sexually active, and am safe when I am,
fluid-bonded with JD.</p>
<h3 id="hormones">Hormones</h3>
<ul>
<li>Testosterone, free: normal - 15 (standard is 9-30)</li>
<li>Testosterone, total: normal - 440 (standard is 300-950 for my age)</li>
<li>Estradiol: high end of normal - 39.2 (standard is &lt;39.8)</li>
</ul>
<p>I will admit to having gone through a bit of an experimentation in DIY hormone
therapy a while back. These numbers aren't all that surprising, considering
that. I will learn more from the endocrinologist when I get the referral, as to
the impact these numbers will have on any transition I decide to undertake.</p>
<h3 id="other-labs">Other labs</h3>
<ul>
<li>Triglycerides: high (hypertriglyceridemia)</li>
<li>Mean corpuscular volume: high (macrocytosis without anemia)</li>
<li>Vitamin D: low (vitamin D deficiency)</li>
<li>Other results within the norm.</li>
</ul>
<p>My triglycerides have been high ever since I took Accutane back in high school.
This, along with the macrocytosis, is likely exacerbated by high alcohol intake
and a poor diet over the last year or two, especially with the move. I'll need
to cut down on drinking, fatty foods, carbohydrates, and get back to exercising
with the dogs (rather than simply exercising them).</p>
<p>I'll have more along these lines coming up soon, and will do my best to update
this as I learn and decide more. I'm still not sure how far, or even if I will
transition, nor really how far I want to. I feel on the feminine side of
neutral, and don't think I would be any happier simply living as a woman (though
it certainly tickled me getting referred to as 'she' a few times over the last
week). I don't know. More thoughts will certainly be on the way!</p>
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<h1>Zk | 2015-05-29-the-path-and-new-beginnings</h1>
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<p>type: post
title: The Path - and New Beginnings
date: 2015-05-29
slug: the-path-and-new-beginnings</p>
<hr />
<p>Hindsight is, as they say, twenty-twenty. That's a core part of the trans
narrative, just as it is for so many narratives for minority identities. It's
usually expressed something like, "I've always known I was trans. I mean...I
didn't think I was trans growing up, I didn't have the language, but looking
back, there was this book I secretly read and I often fantasized about such and
such, and it became much clearer later on."</p>
<p>I'm certainly not exempt from this, in any way. When I came out as gay, I
frequently justified that to myself by thinking, "you know, when I look back on
my life, I can see all these signs of being gay." Lucky me, though, I got to do
the coming out thing twice (or three times, if you count furry, but the impact
on self image surrounding furry identity versus sexual orientation or gender
identity is so small that it didn't have much of an impact on me).</p>
<p>As with coming out as gay, a lot of stuff made sense in retrospect through the
long process of coming out as trans. Coming out has a lot of social
implications, and is often used to describe the act of informing parents,
friends, coworkers, or whomever that such an identity is the truth, but the
process really starts much earlier, when one's sense of identity surrounding
something such as gender identity or sexual orientation starts to gel into
something coherent enough to identify as a minority identity - most majority
identities do not involve the same process of coming out.</p>
<p>For me, the coming out process began sometime around late 2005, early 2006.
In order to get into this a little more deeply, however, I'll need to take a
brief detour into the land of furry.</p>
<p>Within the furry subculture, a significant portion of social interaction takes
place online by necessity. A large part of many people's membership in the
furry subculture is interacting with others through a constructed character, an
avatar that represents both an ideal self, as well as a combination of animal
characteristics that one admires. This needn't be something visual - much of
the interaction within furry takes place in a purely text-based environment such
as IRC or a MUCK - but the visual aspect <em>does</em> play a part in broadcast
situations (that is, situations where one broadcasts a bit of information in a
non-directed way for others to consume - or not - at will).</p>
<p>That said, starting around 2006, I began to shape my interactions within the
furry subculture in a much different way. My initial reasoning was almost
purely sexual. I won't go into detail, of course, but needless to say, I
created an alt (alternate character) who was female specifically for the purpose
of interacting with others in the fandom as a female. I got <a href="http://characters.openfurry.org/image/31">art of
her</a> shortly after, and eventually
wound up in a relationship with a very delightful person, T. Although both
assigned male at birth, T and I's relationship was primarily a heterosexual one,
online. We both had grown comfortable with the idea of acting within that
dynamic and, both question our gender to some extent (whether consciously or
not), often 'traded places', as it were, to share the experience.</p>
<p>Fast forward to around 2011. T and I's relationship had started to falter,
mostly from my end as I began to struggle with serious depression and anxiety,
and the former explorations of gender weren't settling anything in terms of
identity for me. My life was all wrong in ways that I couldn't quite place my
finger on. It wouldn't be until sometime in mid-2012 that I started exploring
gender identity seriously. By then I was in therapy for depression and anxiety
with a psychiatrist and starting out with a therapist as well.</p>
<p>Certainly a shift in career helped my general state out a bit, as did becoming
more financially stable, but coming out to myself so totally overwhelmed those
others, that my therapist wrote in my WPATH letter earlier this month, "I have
never before witnessed such a profound shift in mood as Madison's movement from
despair to hopefulness, from diagnosable depression to essentially normal health
that has been sustained now for many months." </p>
<p>When I started out actively exploring gender (rather than, say, fiddling around
online as other sexes for funsies; not invalid, just more passive), I described
dysphoria to my therapist as the intersection between gender identity and
depression. He refined that to something more specific, that it's more the
intersection between gender identity and shame. It's more directed than
depression: there's always a target. I'm <em>so ashamed</em> of my voice, my hair, my
gait. It may be related to depression, but shame is at its core.</p>
<p>This dysphoria is what is left of the overwhelming depression that had claimed
me before. The depression was unfocused, a malaise that completely enveloped
me. Dysphoria remains, of course, that's part of being trans, but now it's
simple shame over certain aspects that are out of my control, or at least
currently out of reach. I often feel a secondary shame that goes along with
them, a worry that I'm being somehow vain. I do my best to counteract that with
the idea that its these very things that form the basis of how others decide
just <em>who</em> we are, they're part of our expression.</p>
<p>I feel it's important for me to pull this story together into words, to maintain
a sense of where I've come from as I explore where all I can go. I'll end it
with this: The therapy, the doctor's visits, and the consults finally culminated
in me receiving my WPATH letter, my visit at the Boulder Valley Women's Health
Center, and picking up my first prescription earlier this month, on the 14th.
Here's to who I've been, and to who I get to be.</p>
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<p>slug: running-away
date: 2015-06-10
type: post
title: Running Away</p>
<hr />
<p><img src="/assets/personal/mandi--running-away-small--makyo.jpg"
style="max-width:100%;" /></p>
<p><em>Content warning: frank talk of suicide.</em></p>
<p>I think we all have a lot of formative moments in our lives. For me, it was stuff like coming out, the realization of my own mortality, the suicide attempt, and so on. I think that they tend to fall into two basic categories: those which affect us consciously, which we think about from day to day, with enough frequency to say 'often'; and those which affect us more subconsciously, where we can go years or decades without really thinking about them, and yet they still inform so many of your actions.</p>
<p>Running away spent a lot of time in the subconscious camp, quietly informing several aspects of how I viewed myself and how I viewed the world around me. It was only recently, in the last year or so, that it's come to the forefront, thanks largely to recent discussions with friends, family, and therapists. It's only through that process that I've come to realize just how formative an event it really was.</p>
<hr />
<p>In 1997, at eleven years old, I switched from living with my mom full time to living with my dad full time. My parents had divorced at some point early in my childhood, when I was too young to remember, and I grew up knowing nothing else.</p>
<p>The switch was part of a way to make sure that I grew up to be a balanced person. Having spent so much of my childhood in my mom's household, it was time for me to spend more time with my dad than the schedule that we had maintained until then, Wednesday nights and every other weekend. The move was set for the time when I would be switching schools, anyway -- I had just left fifth grade, and that was the time when middle school started in Boulder county.</p>
<p>I remember feeling a mix of excitement and apprehension as the date neared for the switch. On the one hand, it was exciting to be able to spend more time with my dad, who had always been keen on doing things with me that were fun. We'd go skiing, boating, spend a day trying to make the best paper airplanes, learn how to use the computer. On the other, though, I was apprehensive that I would be spending more time with my dad, who had always been somewhat distant, spending much of his time at the bar where my stepmother bartended, caring more about the grades that I brought home than my experience in school. In some senses, we were in line with each other and our expectations of what a parent-child relationship should be, and in others, we found ourselves at odds.</p>
<p>Even so, things wound up working out alright for sixth grade. I moved in with my dad, and moved to a new school. I had to spend one more year in elementary school, as Jefferson county didn't start junior high until seventh grade, but it served me well. I wound up in a 'gifted and talented' program at the school due to how well I did at my previous school, and found the work to be both more engaging and more intense. My grades started to drop, I started to get bouts of depression and anxiety. At one point, I forged my parents' signatures on my <em>Friday Folder</em>, which was supposed to be a weekly communication between my parents and my teacher, leading to a few weeks of being in trouble with both my dad and my mom.</p>
<p>Even so, although I was beginning to struggle for the first time in my life, I did my best to please my dad and maintain the enjoyable, if enigmatic, relationship that we had had up until then. I missed my mom, to be sure, having spent so much of my life until then living primarily with her, but I still felt like I could do well enough and excel in school living with my dad.</p>
<hr />
<p>I don't remember much about my summer between sixth and seventh grades, other than I had almost certainly gone back to the summer camp that I had gone to every summer before. I remember that this was the first time I started really enjoying writing. After leaving school for the summer, a friend and I had exchanged addresses and promised to write each other a letter over the summer. I don't remember if we actually did, but those drafts of letters turned into my first attempt at journalling, which would lead me to writing stuff like this -- putting my introspection down in words.</p>
<p>In the fall of 1998, I began seventh grade at junior high, one of those transitions where students go from being the oldest kids in school to the youngest. I figured that school would be similar, that it would be as though class had picked up where it had left off.</p>
<p>It didn't.</p>
<p>Junior high and middle school is when they start introducing separate teachers for separate subjects, rather than a single teacher for core curriculum and separate teachers only for specialized subjects such as art, music, and physical education. This threw me for a loop, at first, and I wasn't really sure why until I started digging back into my past over the last few years. What had started happening as puberty continued to roar through me is that depressive and anxious tendencies really started to take root. I would start fearing math class, rather than the subject of math with a familiar teacher, start worrying about the fact that band was mixed-grade and I would be pitted against eighth graders.</p>
<p>As a pre-teen, I had no idea what anxiety, panic, and depression were. I thought I was going crazy. My journals at the time were filled with fretting that I was having 'psychotic episodes' and wondering when these increasingly common attacks would become the new normal and coherent thought the brief rays of sunshine.</p>
<p>At the same time, I remember life getting harder for my dad. Things were happening at work -- bad things -- and while I can't remember if it was that I had become more receptive to this or there had been actual changes, the perceived shift in my dad's mood started to wear on me. Over the summer, he had announced that I was grown-up enough to stay home while he went to the bar for the evening. I'd get home at four or so, and dad would get home at nine or ten at night, having sussed out many of his problems of the day at work. I'd be in bed, or maybe we'd watch Deep Space Nine, and then we'd both go to bed.</p>
<hr />
<p>In junior high, report cards came quarterly. My first one came sometime in October. It was not good.</p>
<p>My dad had become increasingly harsh on the topic of grades over the previous few weeks. Parent teacher conferences had not gone well at all, with my math teacher having particularly harsh things to say about me. I don't even remember on what day of the week this happened, though I want to say Thursday. Dad came home for long enough to make us both dinner before he would head out to the bar. Although neither of us mentioned the fact that my poor grades were in my backpack, he must've known what the date had signified, as, before he left, he said something to the effect of, "When I get back home from seeing [your stepmom], you'll show me your report card."</p>
<p>I didn't know what to do. Kill myself? I'd tried half-heartedly in the past. I collected the knife I'd stolen and kept in my desk. It was too dull. I had found a mirror from a makeup compact some days before, and I broke the glass, thinking I could use a piece of that instead, but couldn't manage to get any of the shards of glass actually out of the compact, and as time drew on, I felt less and less like actually dying, as opposed to simply ceasing to be.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At this point, I need to take a step back. I want to avoid mixing the clinical with the reality, but I also don't want to write the same story twice. &gt; What was happening at this point, is that I was having an honest to goodness panic attack. To be specific, I was entering what is called a fugue state. I froze for several minutes, probably about an hour, sitting on my bed and holding a broken mirror in my hands. All thoughts had left me, and all I could think about was not being. Not being here, not being at all.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Having decided not to kill myself, I put on a hoodie, went up stairs and emptied the quarter jar of quarters, left the broken mirror on the counter, and grabbed my bike. I had no idea what I would do, where I would go. I just knew that I needed out of there. That place wasn't a place I could be.</p>
<p>Still in a trance, I made my way to what I assumed would be a safe space to hide out for a while, long enough for my dad to not be out looking for me. I don't know why that was something I was thinking of, but it was. I rode my bike to the nearby Wal-Mart, and hid behind it, where the semi trailers were parked. I hid between two storage containers in the back, the stars invisible to me due to the bright lights of the parking lot, and yet the shadows were such that I remained in total darkness.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I needed to get away. I needed to not be there. I didn't have the language to explain panic, and I didn't understand the importance of escape. What had happened, was that I had boundaries for what I felt were healthy means of interaction, and no means to communicate when they had been crossed. I had been slogging through anxiety with no way to explain to myself or others what anxiety was, and I had crossed the point where I could continue to exist in that state. The only solution was escape. Escaping into an internal world had worked until my dad demanded to see the report card, and escape by death hadn't panned out. The only route left to me was literally escaping the situation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="/assets/personal/walmart-to-bus.png" align="left" style="
margin-right: 1em" />
As the night wore on and the clock struck nine, I realized that I couldn't stay behind the Wal-Mart forever. I'd need some place to go. With only my bike, my hoodie, and five dollars in quarters, I biked the four miles from where I had been camped to the nearest bus station serving the route that would take me back to Boulder. I had no plans beyond getting to Boulder, other than I figured I could be homeless there in relative safety.</p>
<p>That's where I spent the coldest night of my life.</p>
<p>The last bus to Boulder had already left, and so I was left on my own from about eleven that night until nearly six in the morning. I slept off and on on the bench in the bus-stop shelter. I hadn't brought my bike lock with me, so I kept my bike leaning against the bench where I was dozing. I eventually got too paranoid and tied the sleeve of my hoodie around the top bar of the bike while I huddled deep within the relatively thin cotton of the jacket, no protection against the cold of the Colorado night.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At some point during the night, my anxiety abated enough to let me get some more perspective on the situation, and I started to think in terms of what I would do. I would take the bus to Boulder, get off near the then-open Crossroads Mall, and see if I could get something to eat. I never quite made it back to baseline in terms of anxiety, however. I was riding on a high, the fugue state constantly taking over and leaving me paralyzed for hours at a time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The bus was warm. It had eaten $3.50 of my total of $5, but it was totally worth it. I fell asleep in the back seat within minutes of getting on, and was only awoken when the bus reached the end of the line and the kindly driver (who surely knew what was up) shook me awake and helped me onto my bike.</p>
<p>For lack of anything better to do, I rode my bike from the Walnut Street Station to my old elementary school. School wouldn't be starting for another half hour or so, so I camped out in a playground near by, affectionately known as Rock Park. I sat atop the sculpture-cum-playground that made up the park's central feature and watched elementary schoolers trudge toward their classes.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With a bit of rest under my belt and once more in familiar territory (literally three-quarters of a mile from my mom's house, at the time), I was starting to come out of my state of panic. I was left with the dilemma of basically being a fugitive. I couldn't go to my mom's house, and I could never return to my dad's. I was no longer anxious -- my brain couldn't hold that anymore -- I was simply tired and sad.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Without anywhere to go or anything to do, I made my way back up to my original goal of Crossroads and puttered around the mall for a bit. My $1.50 wouldn't buy me anything, so I just strolled around the bookstore for a while, always a favorite spot of mine. As I headed back out to where I'd left my bike in front of the entrance, I was startled by a red Honda Civic pulling up directly in front of me. My mom had found me. She admitted immediately that she had been canvasing the bookstores in town looking for me.</p>
<p>Even in my current state, I was a total dork.</p>
<hr />
<p>The rest of that day and the next were a blur of crying. I was crying, my mom was crying...my dad may have been crying, but it wasn't the type of thing I saw or heard from him. Mostly, he was angry.</p>
<p>I remember heated phone calls back and forth several times throughout the next few days. He had found my journal and accused me, "If you feel like you're going crazy, maybe we should put you in the hospital. Is that what you want from us?"</p>
<p>I couldn't answer. </p>
<p>"I'm throwing out a bunch of your stuff, since you don't care about your place here."</p>
<p>No answer.</p>
<p>"What's with the broken mirror?"</p>
<p>No answer.</p>
<p>"What is it you want from me?"</p>
<p>I struggled for a way to put into words the anxiety, panic, and depression that had slowly taken over my life from the moment puberty had hit, exacerbated by the fact that I was living in a place where I felt distinctly unwelcome. I think I wound up mumbling something about the fact that, with my dad gone all evening at the bar, I had no contact with someone in utter control of my life other than through punishment. Even then, as a child, that only felt partly true.</p>
<hr />
<p>The next few weeks were...odd.</p>
<p>At the time, I knew only that I was switching schools and moving back to Boulder in the process. I learned later -- in 2014 -- that my mom had taken control of the situation to have me move back to Boulder, and that, since then, my dad hasn't talked with my mom except by necessity, such as my graduation and my wedding.</p>
<p>I eventually recovered, myself, although I would be plagued by anxiety and panic through the rest of that year.</p>
<hr />
<p><img src="/assets/personal/mandi--nature-boy--makyo.jpg" align="right" style="margin-left: 1em" />
I know now that I suffer from depression and generalized anxiety. Sure. That's something that I have to live with. Coming to that admission to myself, though, was a process that took several years. It took me missing two weeks of class in college because I was terrified that walking behind anyone on a sidewalk would lead to a sexual harassment lawsuit. It took my boss telling me to go seek therapy, giving me a check for $1,000 in case I couldn't afford it. It took a suicide attempt and leaving my job to work from home and burning a line on my forearm for every year that I've been alive.</p>
<p>I wrote this story because of how formative the act of running away has been in my life, but that's not really what it's about. As I was alluding to in the offset paragraphs above is that this isn't about the act of running away, although that's interesting in and of itself. This is about the ways in which anxiety controls life. This is about the ways in which panic takes over everything that you do. This is about accepting the idea that there's only so much that you can take in life, and that the boundary isn't hard and firm, and that figuring out when to take a step back, say "that's enough", and talk through the larger problem is a process that takes years and years and years, and that nearly two decades later, I still haven't figured that out.</p>
<p>I still wind up in situations where I get stuck in a fugue state. I still find myself standing in the corner of a bookstore, feeling like I have no where to go, responding purely by rote memorization as I seek the nearest exit. Each of these situations has been preceded by a ramp up in anxiety and panic, and even though I'm getting better at setting boundaries for myself (I haven't run away and I haven't tried to kill myself, though I do still burn myself with some regularity), I'm still not there. I still find myself in those spots.</p>
<hr />
<p>Ever since I graduated, my dad and I have had a better relationship. Actually, ever since I could legally drink, our relationship has been pretty cheery. I worry at times that my dad never wanted a kid, he wanted a buddy. A buddy he could share a beer with, someone he could commiserate about work-a-day life with. Maybe that's true, to some extent. Even so, it feels good to be able to earnestly love my dad, even if it took a decade.</p>
<p>I never would've thought, but coming to terms with depression and anxiety has helped me grow closer to both of my parents. For that, I'm thankful. The road has, frankly, really sucked, but for that, I'm thankful.</p>
<hr />
<p><small>Art by Mandi Tremblay.</small></p>
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<p>type: post
slug: on-adjspecies
date: 2015-11-30
title: On [adjective][species]</p>
<hr />
<p>This last weekend, I resigned as editor-in-chief of [adjective][species], a site that I founded in 2011 to explore the furry fandom and the what it means to call oneself a furry. I did so in a brief and considered post - I hardly wanted to clutter up the site that I worked so hard on with a big tearful goodbye or anything - but I realize that this was perhaps too little for people to hang their hats on (or fursuit heads, as the case may be). I still won't clutter up [a][s] any, but this site is all my own, so I get to write whatever I want, for better or for worse, without fear of taking up too much space.</p>
<p>I'm a product of my upbringing, no one can deny that. I was brought up in a school system that enshrined the five-paragraph essay as the pinnacle of student authorship. The structure, for those unaccustomed to the form, is a thesis paragraph, three supporting points, and a conclusion. I think that this wound up hurting me more in the long run than the teachers realized, because it forced me to be far briefer than I needed to be as I progressed through school and page/word counts were enforced, rather than paragraph counts.</p>
<p>All the same, I still think in hendiatris. I still come up with three points which I can use to support an overarching thesis, and that's no different now than it was in grade school. So, without further ado, here are my three supporting reasons for what became the conclusion of me leaving behind my editorship.</p>
<p>We're all busy folk here within the fandom. Everything that we do creates a list of demands on us. The most obvious one is for time, of course, but all of the things we do make demands on our intellect, on our emotions, on how much we can do within a day. I often fall back on analogies to help explain the way that this feels from the inside. A common one for me is to talk about emotion in terms of bandwidth. You can only download so much data over the internet at once, limited by how much bandwidth you have, and similarly, there's only so much you can bear emotionally before things start to clog up and feel bad.</p>
<p>I have a lot going on in my life, just as everyone does. I have three partners, two dogs, two houses, and a job. I struggle with chronic depression and anxiety, and am in the early stages of transitioning. I have as much in the way of hopes and dreams, fears and worries as anyone else out there, and I just couldn't, in good conscience, pretend to be a good editor for [a][s].</p>
<p>And I wasn't. I wasn't a good editor at all. I left submission emails hanging, I deferred most everything to JM, and when I had an opinion on a post, I kept it to myself. I was unable to let my editorial voice show through, and that showed on the site, just as my lack of attention showed.</p>
<p>This brings me to the second reason for stepping down.</p>
<p>Directions shift. They really do. My direction shifted quite a bit in the four years that I was editor. I started the site as a jokey attempt at some self-referential humor within the furry fandom. I think I did a pretty good job of it, too! Over time, that moved on to a dissection of what it meant that we were a fandom with no canon. As the site picked up steam, it added some flavor of reviews, of commentary on current events, and of writing more about the outside world.</p>
<p>Yet I was moving in a different direction. I started hunting for a new job. I started focusing on fiction. I was growing more and more introspective about my role within furry, and my posts became more and more personal until they finally just wound up as editorials: bits of writing about my experiences not necessarily connected to the direction the site was going. This was most evident in the more recent posts on the site, which stirred up controversy. Rightfully so, as I can't say that I agree with many of the recent ones in the slightest.</p>
<p>However, I was so distant as to feel as though I couldn't find my way back in order to make myself a part of it. The direction of [a][s] had shifted to something I didn't recognize, and I had become something completely unrecognizable to [a][s] and its readership.</p>
<p>In the end, though, I feel like working as editor-in-chief for the blog was very much a positive experience. The final reason for stepping down is that I think I got to say what I wanted to say, both through my own articles and through my editorial vision. Sticking around longer would be prolonging a conversation that had ended. With that in mind, it felt more comfortable to let the site transition and grow in the ways that it wanted to transition and grow, while I went my own direction.</p>
<p>It's alright to say goodbye, when the time comes. The last four years were fantastic, a blur of surveys and writing and pictures of RandomWolf suggestively hugging a candle. It's like I said, though: it's the end of an era. It's not the end of everything, it's just the end of my part in it as editor.</p>
<p>As I mentioned, I may write a bit more here and there, and I'll still stay on as technical advisor, both for [a][s] and for the Furry Poll. I'll always be the datavix, and I'll never stop writing. I wish all of the other [a][s]-ians all the best. I'll be here, cheering you on, and working on my own projects. Keep an eye out for more good stuff!</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Identity is not a conversation
date: 2016-08-12
slug: identity-is-not-a-conversation</p>
<hr />
<p>I have to be honest, I'm feeling a little stuck around some matters of language and the consequences that I'm living through.</p>
<p>When I first started to really transition, I used language in a very deliberate fashion. I used female pronouns and I called myself "trans" without any additional modifiers. I chose to make these steps because I felt that, if I didn't, I might miss out on treatment, both medical and social, that I wouldn't otherwise get if I had chosen some other pronouns and labels for myself.</p>
<p>This week, however, a good friend of mine and all around wonderful critter, Indi, completed one of vis goals of receiving gender reaffirming surgery, and is now healthy on on vis way to recovery. One of the reasons that I look up to ver, though, is that ve has done so while compromising relatively little on the topic of identity. Indi identifies as non-binary trans, uses the pronouns that are comfortable for ver in many situations, and expresses vis gender how ve wishes. Ve compromises on pronouns in some spaces, but only so far: ve requests singular-they as vis pronoun when the speaker is someone who may not be comfortable with ve/ver/vis, and where compliance isn't particularly important.</p>
<p>The fact that Indi does something that's still months or years away for me while working from a similar starting point got me thinking about just how much I've compromised, though. And why.</p>
<p>When I first started coming out, I relied heavily on the sorts of things that felt good for me, those things that are consonant with my identity, because it was almost entirely a solipsistic act. I was coming out to myself, maybe my partners, eventually my parents, but it wasn't a super wide-spread thing. I got the chance through furry to explore a little bit, but always through the facade of my character.</p>
<p>The response was less than ideal, though, and the more I started to come out, the less ideal it became. It felt difficult to convince those around me that this was a matter of identity, not of mood or desire. I didn't 'feel' like I was non-binary, I didn't 'desire' the attention that went along with coming out. I was informing those around me of who I was, that was all. I wanted folks to understand where I was coming from and why I might be making changes in my life.</p>
<p>What I got, however, was a disheartening mix of wariness and bemusement.</p>
<p>There's this weird sort of tension between identity and social acceptability that crops up for a lot of social minorities. If I were to be vocal about my non-binary identity, at best it gets labeled as "just a phase" and at worst, I get denied care and tossed aside for being an identitarian Tumblrina looking for attention. If I don't, and I accept "trans woman" as my identity, then I get in trouble if I'm not femme enough, for not striving harder to be parsed as a woman by the average Joe on the street, for feeling bad about simply having to push back against a different gender role. If I stand my ground, I'm a faker, and if I fake it, I'm being real.</p>
<p>(As a side note, "just a phase" is 110% bullshit, a means of authenticity policing on one hand, and an effective way of shaming experimentation on the other, but I digress. There's a conversation to be had about transitory and final identities, but another time.)</p>
<p>In my attempts to most efficiently get what I needed to alleviate physical dysphoria - hormones, therapy, GRS, etc. - I compromised in such a way that elevated the social dysphoria around presentation. Every time I would slip, I'd get tagged with the big "not trans enough" sign. The pressure I would feel was small, to be sure, but enough bits of pressure, no matter how small, from enough sources is still uncomfortable. </p>
<p>But you know what? Identity is not a conversation. It may be a process, but not a conversation. Expression may be a conversation, but not identity. Identity is too far down, too close to the self, to present as an argument. It's not a part of the mind that can be changed, it's an inextricable part of the self.</p>
<p>I tried to compromise on this base part of myself and found myself feeling bad in new and different ways. Seeing folks like Indi who can get what they need without compromising in such a drastic way is making me question whether I actually got anything that I needed in a more efficient or pleasant way.</p>
<p>There's no actions for anyone but me to take - pronouns remain 'she' or 'they', 'trans' still fits, though I'll be adopting 'non-binary trans' when describing myself, just to be explicit - this was just the sort of things that I need to put into words to help myself understand. I'm trying to get comfortable with myself chilling here on the feminine side of neutral, doing the things that I need to feel better about myself. I've been on HRT for more than a year now, and I'm in conversations with two surgeons around GRS, so I'm taking care of me. The rest is making sure that I'm earnest about my identity, because it's not open to conversation. The amount of compromise I'm willing to accept must, by necessity, be lower than it was before, if I'm to be comfortable.</p>
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<p>type: post
title: Notes from Surgery Consult with Dr. Dugi
slug: notes-from-dugi
date: 2016-12-20</p>
<hr />
<p><em>This is mostly a scratchpad of notes right now; I will likely clean it up when I have more spoons, but getting my raw notes out felt like a good idea.</em></p>
<p>Schedule
: </p>
<div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code><span class="k">Next</span> <span class="nv">fall</span>, <span class="nv">probably</span> <span class="nv">september</span> <span class="nv">or</span> <span class="nv">october</span>
<span class="nv">big</span> <span class="nv">effort</span> <span class="nv">to</span> <span class="nv">emphasize</span> <span class="nv">hair</span> <span class="nv">removal</span>, <span class="nv">usually</span> <span class="nv">the</span> <span class="nv">blocker</span>
</code></pre></div>
<p>Staying in the area
: plan on staying nearby for about a month</p>
<p>Surgery timeline
: </p>
<div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code><span class="nv">learn</span> <span class="nv">dilation</span> <span class="nv">during</span> <span class="nv">first</span> <span class="nv">visit</span> <span class="ss">(</span><span class="mi">3</span><span class="nv">xday</span> <span class="mi">30</span><span class="nv">min</span> <span class="nv">each</span><span class="ss">)</span> <span class="o">-</span> <span class="nv">pelvic</span> <span class="nv">floor</span> <span class="nv">pt</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="nv">dilation</span> <span class="nv">within</span> <span class="nv">week</span> <span class="nv">before</span> <span class="nv">surgery</span>
<span class="nv">Surgery</span> <span class="mi">7</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">8</span><span class="nv">hrs</span>
<span class="mi">5</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">6</span> <span class="nv">days</span> <span class="nv">inpatient</span> <span class="nv">after</span> <span class="nv">surgery</span>, <span class="nv">total</span> <span class="nv">bedrest</span>
<span class="mi">2</span><span class="nv">wk</span>, <span class="mi">4</span><span class="nv">wk</span>, <span class="mi">3</span><span class="nv">mo</span> <span class="nv">visits</span>
<span class="nv">visit</span> <span class="nv">a</span> <span class="mi">3</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">4</span> <span class="nv">days</span> <span class="nv">before</span>
</code></pre></div>
<p>Healing
: </p>
<div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code><span class="n">wound</span> <span class="n">healing</span> <span class="n">shows</span> <span class="n">up</span> <span class="o">~</span><span class="n">ten</span> <span class="n">days</span>
<span class="n">two</span> <span class="n">layers</span> <span class="k">of</span> <span class="n">dressing</span> <span class="k">after</span> <span class="n">surgery</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="n">a</span> <span class="n">pack</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">catheter</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">drain</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">plus</span> <span class="n">sew</span> <span class="k">outer</span> <span class="n">labia</span> <span class="n">together</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">plus</span> <span class="n">dressing</span> <span class="k">on</span> <span class="n">top</span> <span class="k">of</span> <span class="n">that</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="k">off</span> <span class="k">day</span> <span class="n">two</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="k">no</span> <span class="n">wound</span> <span class="n">infection</span> <span class="k">with</span> <span class="k">any</span> <span class="n">grs</span> <span class="n">patients</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="n">really</span> <span class="n">rare</span> <span class="k">with</span> <span class="n">surgeries</span> <span class="k">in</span> <span class="n">the</span> <span class="n">area</span> <span class="n">due</span> <span class="k">to</span> <span class="n">good</span> <span class="n">blood</span> <span class="n">flow</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="n">shower</span> <span class="n">twice</span> <span class="n">a</span> <span class="k">day</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">rinse</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">press</span> <span class="n">dry</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">pads</span>
<span class="n">uti</span> <span class="n">risk</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="n">higher</span> <span class="k">after</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">because</span> <span class="n">distance</span> <span class="k">between</span> <span class="n">bladder</span> <span class="k">and</span> <span class="n">world</span> <span class="k">is</span> <span class="n">shorter</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="k">less</span> <span class="n">protective</span> <span class="n">layers</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">etc</span><span class="p">.</span> <span class="n">Always</span> <span class="n">urinate</span> <span class="k">after</span> <span class="n">dilating</span><span class="o">/</span><span class="n">intercourse</span>
</code></pre></div>
<p>History
: </p>
<div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code><span class="nv">Started</span> <span class="nv">six</span> <span class="nv">months</span> <span class="nv">ago</span>, <span class="nv">booked</span> <span class="nv">out</span> <span class="nv">a</span> <span class="nv">year</span>
<span class="nv">normally</span> <span class="nv">booked</span> <span class="nv">out</span> <span class="nv">of</span> <span class="nv">state</span> <span class="nv">through</span> <span class="nv">kaiser</span>, <span class="nv">weird</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="nv">me</span> <span class="nv">to</span> <span class="nv">not</span> <span class="nv">be</span> <span class="nv">kaiser</span>
<span class="nv">Begin</span> <span class="nv">of</span> <span class="nv">practice</span> <span class="nv">started</span> <span class="nv">in</span> <span class="mi">2011</span>, <span class="nv">opened</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="nv">surgery</span> <span class="nv">in</span> <span class="mi">2016</span>
<span class="nv">About</span> <span class="nv">thirty</span> <span class="nv">surgeries</span> <span class="nv">to</span> <span class="nv">date</span>, <span class="nv">waiting</span> <span class="nv">list</span> <span class="mi">10</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">11</span><span class="nv">mo</span>.
</code></pre></div>
<p>After
: </p>
<div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code><span class="nv">most</span> <span class="nv">common</span> <span class="nv">revision</span>: <span class="nv">remove</span> <span class="nv">extra</span> <span class="nv">labial</span> <span class="nv">skin</span> <span class="ss">(</span><span class="nv">added</span> <span class="nv">to</span> <span class="nv">give</span> <span class="nv">room</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="nv">swelling</span> <span class="nv">during</span> <span class="nv">post</span> <span class="nv">op</span><span class="ss">)</span>
<span class="nv">some</span> <span class="nv">choice</span> <span class="nv">on</span> <span class="nv">how</span> <span class="nv">much</span> <span class="nv">of</span> <span class="nv">the</span> <span class="nv">clitoris</span> <span class="nv">is</span> <span class="nv">hooded</span>
<span class="nv">also</span> <span class="nv">inner</span> <span class="nv">labia</span> <span class="nv">some</span> <span class="nv">choice</span> <span class="nv">on</span> <span class="nv">how</span> <span class="nv">big</span>
</code></pre></div>
<h3 id="questions-from-the-form">Questions from the form:</h3>
<p>How many patients end up regretting their GRS? Are there concerns about post-surgery depression?
: Might experience a letdown in terms of "what do I do now?" Day after Christmas sort of feeling. No reported regrets for Dugi, less than 4% instance of regret in general. Greater incidence of regret when the results are unsatisfactory</p>
<p>I'm uncircumcised and have fairly severe phimosis, leading to a very sensitive glans. Can I expect it to remain too-sensitive after, or will it calm down over time?
: Some people have hypersensitivity. Using more tissue for clitoral hood so shouldn't be a problem</p>
<p>How much does insurance usually cover?
: Ask surgery schedulers</p>
<p>How much out of pocket medical costs should I expect related to my stay in Portland?
: pads, surgilube, roll gauze</p>
<p>How does neovaginal wetness work? My understanding is it basically doesn't, so you still need lube
: Moist but not enough for sexual intercourse, but some were wearing pads to deal with excess moisture. Definitely need lube for penetration to prevent pulling on grafts</p>
<p>On average, how long after surgery do your patients return to (physically light) work?
: Definitely limit walking, no real lifting requirements, 1k steps per day within house for four weeks as a guideline. 6 wks back to work/light exercise, but let your body be your guide</p>
<p>How hard is it for nonbinary, dmab, prefer to stay primarily testosterone-based people to get this surgery?
: Dugi would be very open to nonbinary folks, but a lot of that's on WPATH (which suggests a year of hrt) and insurance (both patient's and the practice's). Two letters for all genital surgery</p>
<p>How much say does the patient have in the appearance of the neovagina?
: A little bit:
hood of clitoris depending on skin behind glans - more or less hidden clitoris</p>
<div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code><span class="nv">how</span> <span class="nv">much</span> <span class="nv">skin</span> <span class="nv">used</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="nv">inner</span> <span class="nv">labia</span> <span class="nv">using</span> <span class="nv">similar</span> <span class="nv">skin</span>
<span class="nv">Depth</span>: <span class="nv">depends</span> <span class="nv">what</span> <span class="nv">your</span> <span class="nv">body</span> <span class="nv">will</span> <span class="nv">allow</span> <span class="nv">through</span> <span class="nv">peritoneal</span> <span class="nv">reflection</span> <span class="mi">4</span>.<span class="mi">5</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">6</span>.<span class="mi">75</span><span class="s2">&quot;</span><span class="s"> (any more is unsafe), then lined with skin (two factors)</span>
<span class="nv">mostly</span> <span class="nv">dependent</span> <span class="nv">on</span> <span class="nv">individual</span> <span class="nv">anatomy</span>, <span class="nv">and</span> <span class="nv">different</span> <span class="nv">folks</span> <span class="nv">will</span> <span class="nv">look</span> <span class="nv">different</span>.
</code></pre></div>
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<p>type: post
title: Lessons from Arcana
date: 2017-04-01
slug: lessons-from-arcana</p>
<hr />
<p>At the end of 2016, I decided to take on <a href="/anthologies/arcana.html"><em>Arcana</em></a> as a project. I'd been thinking for a while that writing and editing were something I'd like to do more seriously. Like, I'd done the software thing for a while, and it treated me well; maybe now it was time to see what I could do with my love of words and stories.</p>
<p><em>Arcana</em> is an anthology of stories using the archetypes embodied by the major arcana of the standard Tarot deck. All of the cards in the deck have meaning behind them, but the majors are the ones most commonly known --- Death, The Lovers, The Hanged Man, The Tower, and so on --- and the ones that best lend themselves to a writing prompt, in my opinion. An anthology of short stories felt natural to me: twenty-two cards, twenty-two stories. Each would have their own archetype backing it and their own arc, and there would be the arc inherent in the majors to guide the anthology itself.</p>
<p>It was an ambitious project. Probably too ambitious for a first anthology, if I'm honest. But there I was, writing up a call, and Thurston Howl over at <a href="https://www.thurstonhowlpublications.com/">Thurston Howl Publications</a> liked the idea and was willing to publish the result. All of my editing to date had been with <a href="http://adjectivespecies.com">[adjective][species]</a>, which was 99% non-fiction, and here I was stepping up to edit a fiction anthology from start to finish.</p>
<p>The call ended yesterday, having been open in some form or another since early December, and if working in tech has taught me anything, it's that now is a good time for a retrospective.</p>
<h3 id="what-we-were-up-against">What we were up against</h3>
<p>With a lot of anthologies, you pick a theme and some restrictions, and open for submissions. Your theme may be, to borrow from ROAR, "paradise", your restrictions may be explicit, such as "G-PG13 rating" or "15,000 word max" or implicit, such as "I want to keep the anthology around 100,000 words total". You open for submissions for a while, close, slush, announce, edit, publish, etc.</p>
<p>With <em>Arcana</em>, though, we were essentially opening twenty-two calls for submissions. We need one story per card, and we'd like to have more than one to choose from. It's a strange anthology in that sense. We had to find a good story that fit the archetypes of the card, as we would with a normal single call for submissions, but we also had to make sure that that story would fit within the flow of the anthology as a whole. It's all sorts of complicated.</p>
<p>Luckily Thurston had some ideas as to how to attack this. He'd been working on his anthology <em>The Seven Deadly Sins</em>, which had a similar problem. He needed enough submissions for each of the sins to make pulling together the anthology worthwhile. With that knowledge and some stumbling about, we came up with a plan and opened the call.</p>
<h3 id="what-we-did">What we did</h3>
<p>We tried to tackle these problems in three different ways.</p>
<h4 id="invitations">Invitations</h4>
<p>Our first step was to pick half of the cards and make them invitation only. That is, we wouldn't take any submissions for them, we'd just ask authors whom we knew would be game and whom we trusted to write for these cards.</p>
<ul>
<li>0 --- The Fool</li>
<li>II --- The High Priestess</li>
<li>III --- The Empress</li>
<li>IV --- The Emperor</li>
<li>X --- The Wheel of Fortune</li>
<li>XI --- Justice</li>
<li>XII --- The Hanged Man</li>
<li>XVII --- The Star</li>
<li>XVIII --- The Moon</li>
<li>XIX --- The Sun</li>
<li>XXI --- The World</li>
</ul>
<p>We deliberately chose cards from throughout the majors so that there would be a balance of invite and submission cards. We also made sure to choose some cards that we worried wouldn't get many submissions anyway. The Star, The Moon, and The Sun in particular are more subtle than at first glance, so those were made invite only. Also, The Fool and The World as well as The Wheel of Fortune were chosen as good anchors throughout the anthology.</p>
<p>From there, we hunted down authors. For some, we had a specific card in mind, while for others, we simply showed them the list and let them choose.</p>
<h4 id="pledges">Pledges</h4>
<p>Once we had invitations sorted, we still had to work out how to get general submissions distributed (mostly) evenly across the rest of the cards. We settled on a two-tiered approach of requesting that people register their interest for a card by submitting a pledge for it.</p>
<p>This worked through a Google form, which basically asked for the author's name --- just for being able to tell if someone wanted to back out --- and the card they were interested in writing for. Additionally, we allowed them to 'delete' their pledge by adding a checkbox. If they ticked that, it would remove their pledge from the counts.</p>
<p>We hoped this would give others insight into what cards they might want to write for. It was hoped that lower numbers of pledges would provide an incentive. For example, if The Chariot had zero pledges, we hoped that folks might see that as a reason to pounce on it. After all, fewer submissions for a card meant less competition, which means a greater chance of getting in.</p>
<h4 id="submission-limits-and-visibility">Submission limits and visibility</h4>
<p>The second tier had to do with the submission process. We wanted the idea of encouraging folks to submit to cards that needed more love to extend through the entire process, after all.</p>
<p>For this, we set up soft limits on submissions. We suggested that each card should get at least three submissions, and that after that, we'd prefer that folks submit to other cards. This was accomplished with a gauge that showed how many, out of three, submissions we received. Once we'd receive three submissions, the gauge included text saying that writers were still welcome to submit to that card but asking that they consider other cards as well.</p>
<p>This was intended to offer visibility into what others were writing for. To this end, we also included a breakdown of the pledges that were received for each card.</p>
<h3 id="what-we-got">What we got</h3>
<p>So! Submissions are now basically closed! Here's what we wound up with:</p>
<p>---|---
The Fool | <em>invite --- complete</em>
The Magician | 2 submissions
The High Priestess | <em>invite --- complete</em>
The Empress | 2 submissions
The Emperor | 3 submissions
The Heirophant | 3 submissions
The Lovers | 0 submissions
The Chariot | 4 submissions
Strength | 2 submissions
The Hermit | 2 submissions
The Wheel of Fortune | <em>invite --- unsubmitted</em>
Justice | <em>invite --- complete</em>
The Hanged Man | <em>invite --- draft</em>
Death | 3 submissions
Temperance | 2 submissions
Devil | 2 submissions
The Tower | 2 submissions
The Star | 2 submissions
The Moon | <em>invite --- complete</em>
The Sun | <em>invite --- complete</em>
Judgement | 1 submission
The World | <em>invite --- complete</em></p>
<p>Surprise!</p>
<p>Okay, so. Let's go over what happened:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Payment</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Early on, before signing on with Thurston Howl Publications, I had listed the payment for stories at the going rate in furry of &frac12; cent per word. Thurston informed me that they didn't normally pay authors, however. I was happy paying for submissions out of pocket, and in the end it helped gain attention for the anthology. Paying markets mean money, but they also mean a step toward membership in the <a href="https://furrywritersguild.com">Furry Writers' Guild</a>.</p>
<p>A second, unexpected benefit of the payment was that it made me restrict the wordcount pretty heavily, so that I could afford to pay all of the authors. A lot of writers were wary of the 5,000 word limit, but in the end, it generated a lot of nice vignette type stories, which left the reader engaged and thoughtful.
* <strong>The invite cards</strong></p>
<p>I quickly realized that inviting authors is actually really hard. Asking someone to write, on demand, a short story that fits a certain archetype is pretty difficult. It's hard not to think of yourself as being a bit creepy when approaching authors you don't normally talk with, and it's doubly strange suggesting cards for folks.</p>
<p>In the end, I wound up dropping The Empress and The Emperor from the list of invite cards. We had set ourselves a date of opening for general submissions on New Year's Day, but that didn't quite work out; by then, I had all of the invite cards filled except those two, and I panicked. I'm happy I did, in the long run, given the quality of the submissions I received for them.
* <strong>Opening</strong></p>
<p>After inviting folks to <em>Arcana</em>, I was surprised to wake up to a whole bunch of sudden interest. It turns out that the call itself had started to circulate, with no mention of a start date. Ta-da! Suddenly we were open two weeks early! This is one thing that helped push me toward opening The Empress and The Emperor. Oh well.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I was freaking out, as I hadn't nailed down all of the details with regards to pledging and submitting, and now I felt like I had to stick to my guns. On the other hand, though, I was <em>pleased as peach</em> by the interest the anthology was getting. Folks seemed really into the idea.
* <strong>Pledging and Submission visibility</strong></p>
<p>The concept of pledging worked out <em>okay</em> but not great. The idea was readily understood by most of those who submitted, which led to a pretty even distribution of pledges around cards. Initially, I tried to show the pledges underneath each card on the <a href="/anthologies/arcana/cards.html">cards page</a>, but that soon got out of hand, and instead I just included the Google Sheets snippet that held the pledges in the page itself.</p>
<p>While I think the pledge system and the submission visibility did do some of what we expected, it was often very confusing to the authors. Some of this was due to the way I'd structured the cards. They were presented as a numbered list with the card name, the archetypes, the pledge numbers, and the submission numbers. However, it was all a little jumbled.</p>
<p>If I were to open for an anthology like this again, I think I'd put less structure around pledging and submission visibility. The three-submission soft limit for cards shouldn't have been presented like that. Instead, I should've just shown the number of submissions I'd received. This was actually something Thurston and I had talked about early on, but again, once the submission process was underway, I felt like I had to stick with it --- which, in and of itself, is probably something that should change.
* <strong>Submitting</strong></p>
<p>For submitting, I'd chosen a project I'd worked on for a while called Submitify. Submitify allows editors to open a call for submission with guidelines in place, and allows writers to submit their works for consideration. It accepts many file formats, and coerces them, regardless of text formatting, into something like a Standard Manuscript Format for reviewing, then manages the reviews.</p>
<p>However, I overestimated its done-ness. The site crashed several times, and gave many authors errors when they uploaded their files. This was due to an older version of <code>pandoc</code>, which handled the file munging. I soon had to abandon it in favor of plain old email.</p>
<p>Luckily, GMail (and several other services) allows you to do something neat: you can put a <code>+</code> in your email address at the end of the first bit before the <code>@</code>, and everything after it is ignored. It still gets delivered just the same, but the <code>To</code> field retained that extra text. That meant I could open for submissions at <code>makyo.thurstonhowlpub+arcana@gmail.com</code>, then set up a filter for all emails to that address so that they went into an "Arcana" label. This worked well for the rest of the submission process.
* <strong>Anonymity</strong></p>
<p>I wanted anthology submissions to be anonymous. It's not THP policy, I set that restriction. I didn't feel very comfortable reading submitted works knowing who the authors were, given how much time I spend chilling in the Writers' Guild chat. I wanted as little bias as possible, sure, but I also wanted to go in looking at the writing, rather than also considering the authors.</p>
<p>This worked well enough with Submitify, as there's a checkbox I can mark that makes submissions anonymous. Folks can put in their names, and I can review submissions without knowing who wrote what. All it took was a note saying that cover letters (a text entry on Submitify) and submissions should be anonymized.</p>
<p>When Submitify was set aside, I had to reword the submission call and ask for anonymity manually. My wording confused folks, as the cover letter is usually in the email body itself. What I really wanted was a submission file that didn't have a name attached. I planned on bulk-slushing, so I'd just have a pile of files to go through and read. Thankfully, given that it wasn't too big of a change, I just updated the call on the fly.</p>
<h4 id="what-worked">What worked</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Payment</strong> --- I think payment definitely worked to entice folks to write for the anthology. At the &frac12; cent per word rate, that's only $20 for 5,000 words, but it was a good incentive with the Writers' Guild membership requirements taken into account.</li>
<li><strong>Theme</strong> --- Folks seemed to <em>really</em> like the theme. There were a lot of ways one could take it. The card could be literally involved or not. The card's meaning could be taken upright or reversed. The figure in the card, for cards that had such, could be a character in the story or not. I was pleased to see how folks took that.</li>
<li><strong>Pledging/Submission Visibility</strong> --- The processes could use some work (outlined below), but I think that the pledging/submission visibility did a good job of steering people to wards various cards.</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="what-didnt">What didn't</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Submitify</strong> --- Last time I use alpha software for a production cause. Maybe once it's matured a little. And, yes, I admit that's mostly on me.</li>
<li><strong>The pledging process</strong> --- While I think the concept of pledging really helped in terms of guiding authors, the process was far, far too overwrought. There were too many buttons to click and decisions to be made. In the future, I'd make it optional, and better integrated in the call. Part of that's on the site being static only, but still, Javascript can pick up some of that.</li>
<li><strong>The submission visibility in action</strong> --- Like I mention, I think the submission visibility idea was a good one and did help out. However, I received many questions about whether three submissions was the max, or what the gauges even meant. In the future, I think I'll just list the number of submissions received per category and let authors draw their own conclusions.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="so-here-we-are">So here we are</h3>
<p>Submissions are closed, for now. I'll give everything a quick read-through, and will probably open up for a second, shorter call depending on what I see. I don't feel too comfortable with cards having only one submission or two submissions which are too alike. I'll fight that battle when I get there.</p>
<p>There were some problems --- some big, some little --- but in all, I'm quite pleased with how this project turned out. It was a lot of fun designing a call of submissions and working with the tarot as a source of inspiration for writing. I'll get to read a lot of great stuff and hopefully pull together something really cool from it all.</p>
<p>Thanks, as always, to Thurston Howl Publications, and to Thurston himself, with his unending patience and guiding hand.</p>
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<p>layout: post
title: Editing Arcana
date: 2017-04-05
slug: arcana-editing</p>
<hr />
<p>I got some good feedback on the <a href="/posts/writing/2017/04/01/lessons-from-arcana.html">previous post</a> from writers who appreciated the insight into the editing process. Heck, even I got a lot out of writing the post, because it allowed me to set down in writing a lot of vague thoughts that I had about what worked and what didn't. That's one of the big reasons I write as much as I do, a sort of "how can I tell what I think till I see what I say" thing, if we go by E. M. Forster's words. It's part of why I'm so keen on non-fiction. I love writing fiction because it shows others new stories, but I love writing non-fiction because I learn as much about myself writing the piece as my readers do about the topic reading it.</p>
<p>Anyway, all that to say, I liked having the chance to write that, and I want to keep writing stuff like that as I work with <em>Arcana</em> as my first anthology.</p>
<p>I've edited a lot before. Working with [adjective][species] was fairly straight forward in that I left the call open and edited submissions as I got them. It was simple, but still involved a lot of the editorial motions. My criteria for articles there was that it had a point, expressed it clearly, and was readable. Minor edits were usually okay, and major ones could be requested of the author.</p>
<p>Editing an anthology, however, feels vastly different. It's not just the competition aspect --- though that's a big part of it --- so much as the fact that it's a singular, rather than ongoing, process. It begins when submissions are received and ends when the final, edited choices are handed off to the publisher to work legal, layout, and printing magic.</p>
<p>Still, I have a good idea of all the steps ahead of me and quite a few guiding hands, which will be quite helpful! Also, as above, I'm hoping that writing this helps me figure things out a little.</p>
<p><img alt="The slush pile" src="/assets/writing/arcana-print.jpg" /></p>
<p><em>Update: I was going to talk about these things, but *vague handwaving* life</em></p>
<h3 id="slushing">Slushing</h3>
<h3 id="the-difference-between-beta-and-editing">The difference between beta and editing</h3>
<h3 id="criteria">Criteria</h3>
<h3 id="line-editing">Line editing</h3>
<h3 id="the-second-call">The second call</h3>
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<p>type: post
title: Furry Writers' Guild Presidential Candidacy
slug: fwg-candidacy
date: 2017-04-25</p>
<hr />
<p>Back in 2015, when I joined the <a href="https://furrywritersguild.com">Furry Writers' Guild</a>, I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into. [adjective][species] was chugging along, which felt good, and I was only then starting to get into furry fiction. I'd been writing loads of non-fiction for years, of course, but finding a few stories I had to tell started pushing me into wider realms.</p>
<p>When I joined the Guild, it was as an associate member. My work with [a][s] saw to that, as well as my few articles and a story or two posted elsewhere. It felt like a comfortable spot to me, and I found myself surrounded almost instantly by wonderful folks and neat ideas.</p>
<p>In my time with the Guild, I like to think that I've grown in a lot of ways. For one, I've become more and more entranced with furry fiction, and my few stories spawned <a href="http://post-self.io">several</a>[^postself] <a href="http://exocortic.es">fiction</a>[^exocortices] <a href="/anthologies/arcana.html">projects</a>[^arcana] of my own.</p>
<p>I've also become more adept at providing feedback to others on their own writing. This had always been a thing with [a][s], of course, but the ability to sit down with a piece of writing and provide feedback along several axes has grown from "email with a few comments" to "fully marked up document while editing an anthology". It's a place I'd never have pictured myself five years ago!</p>
<p>Now, I want to do my best to give back to the FWG what I can. I feel that I can offer my services, not only as a writer, but as an organizer. I've worked through several capacities and positions of leadership over the years, and each has given me experience that has extended beyond just my duties in that position.</p>
<p>I'd like to formally announce my candidacy for president of the Furry Writers' Guild. I hope only that I can offer the Guild my service in return for all that it has given me!</p>
<h3 id="goals">Goals</h3>
<ul>
<li>At several points during the last year, we started to address the topic of self-published authors and how that plays into guild membership. We came up with good ideas, but I think that nailing something down and getting it added to the by-laws would be a good goal for this next round.</li>
<li>There have been a few discussions this year about the goals of the guild itself: is it for lifting up of members, or is it for providing outreach to the audience of furry fiction? While each informs a different path that the guild may take, I don't think that they're mutually exclusive.</li>
</ul>
<p>I'd like to see about implementing an outreach arm, program, or what-have-you --- we can decide specifics down the line --- to focus on getting the word out about furry fiction. This will allow the guild to focus on lifting up authors through promotion, access to markets, and so on, while still living up to our stated goal of promoting anthropomorphic fiction <em>as well as</em> its creators.</p>
<p>The outreach arm should target both authors and readers. Even non-member authors can get something out of the guild, in terms of markets and writing advice. A lot of resources are for all comers, not just members.
* I'd like to keep talking with Chipotle and Sean about the future of the forums. There are valid concerns with SMF that would be fixed by moving to something like Discourse or similar, but we <em>do</em> need to address adding a shoutbox of some kind; many people (rightfully) enjoy that, and just forcing everyone to the Slack or the Telegram chat isn't a solution
* I think that getting the FWG blog up and running in a more aggressive fashion would help us out quite a bit in terms of promotion. This is currently done through the member spotlights, but there are other additions that might help as well, such as member fiction, solicited articles, and so on. This would be a topic to discuss with the guild as a whole.</p>
<p>I welcome any and all questions or comments. Please feel free to get in touch through comments here, on the forum, Slack, or Telegram group, or through email to <a href="mailto:makyo@drab-makyo.com.html">makyo@drab-makyo.com</a>. Information on the elections is available <a href="http://www.anthroaquatic.com/forum/index.php?topic=1361.0">here</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p>[^postself]: <em>Post-Self</em> is a collaborative fiction project exploring a world beyond the definition of a singular self.
[^exocortices]: <em>Exocortices</em> is a companion project to <em>Post-Self</em> for stories that lead up to the universe of <em>PS</em>.
[^arcana]: <em>Arcana</em> is a furry fiction anthology surrounding the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.</p>
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<h1>Zk | 2020-01-03-2019-in-retrospect</h1>
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<p>date: 2020-01-03
title: 2019 in retrospect
type: post</p>
<hr />
<h3 id="projects">Projects</h3>
<h4 id="january">January</h4>
<ul>
<li>Migrated [a][s] to Jekyll-based sites</li>
<li>Finished up <a href="https://explore621.net">explore621</a></li>
<li>Created new <a href="https://presentations.adjectivespecies.com">presentations</a></li>
<li>Created <a href="https://trck.ai">trck.ai</a></li>
<li>Started <a href="https://stimmtausch.com">Stimmtausch</a>, <a href="https://snuffler.projects.makyo.io/">Snuffler</a>, and <a href="https://ansigo.projects.makyo.io/">ansigo</a></li>
<li>1.0 of <a href="https://polycul.es">polycul.es</a></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="february">February</h4>
<ul>
<li>0.0.1 of <a href="https://stimmtausch.com/2019/02/12/stimmtausch-0.0.1/">Stimmtausch</a></li>
<li>Forked <a href="https://tv2.projects.makyo.io">tv2</a></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="march">March</h4>
<ul>
<li>Migrated personal sites to Hugo</li>
<li>Wrote some poetry</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="april">April</h4>
<ul>
<li>Not a good month.</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="may">May</h4>
<ul>
<li>Wrote Every Angel is Terrifying</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="june">June</h4>
<ul>
<li>Started pulling together Restless Town</li>
<li>Started reverse-engineering Dogtra remote signals</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="july">July</h4>
<ul>
<li>Wrote What Defines Us</li>
<li>Created <a href="https://makyo.github.io/peak-millennial/">Peak Millennial</a> with Judith</li>
<li>(Re)released <a href="https://makyo.ink/publications/rum-and-coke">Rum and Coke</a></li>
<li>Released <a href="https://drab-makyo.bandcamp.com/album/piano-works-vol-1">Piano Works Vol. 1</a></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="august">August</h4>
<ul>
<li>Started <a href="https://ally.id">ally</a></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="september">September</h4>
<ul>
<li>Created <a href="https://makyo.is">makyo.is</a></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="october">October</h4>
<ul>
<li>Left Internet Archive, started at New Vector</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="november">November</h4>
<ul>
<li>Started ramping up <a href="https://hybrid.ink">Hybrid</a> with anthologies</li>
<li>Released <a href="https://makyo.ink/publications/restless-town">Restless Town</a></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="december">December</h4>
<ul>
<li>Pulled together and released <a href="https://makyo.ink/publications/eigengrau">Eigengrau</a></li>
</ul>
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<p>type: post
title: An apology
date: 2020-01-23
nolist: true</p>
<hr />
<p>I learned a lot of things in very quick succession last night, and would like to apologize.</p>
<p>While at FC2020, a group of trans folks gathered around Sonic Fox to take a picture, and since I was feeling cheeky, I decided to play that dumb <a href="https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/circle-game/">Circle Game</a>, where you make a ring with your index finger and thumb and show it subtly so what, when people notice it, you can say "got 'em" (and sock them in the shoulder, depending whether or not you're still in middle school).</p>
<p>It was brought to my attention that making that hand-shape --- the 'Okay Hand' --- is something that <a href="https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-hand-gesture">4chan recently co-opted to be a symbol for 'white power'</a>. You can imagine my growing horror at learning this. I was absolutely humiliated.</p>
<p>I am sorry.</p>
<p>This is something I did not know, and now that I do, will never, ever do again. I carry no sympathy for racists, and to use one of their symbols, however accidentally, is unacceptable. I have made a donation to the <a href="https://twocc.us">Trans Women of Color Collective</a> as a part of my apology.</p>
<p>I will continue to do my best to help stamp out racism and all forms of bigotry as I work to become a better person.</p>
<p><img alt="Donation screenshot" src="/assets/twocc-donation.jpg" /></p>
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<p>date: 2019-10-01
title: "Inktober 2019 #1 - Poem and snippet courtesy of Lorxus"</p>
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<p><a href="/blog/inktober/2019-10-01.jpg.html"><img alt="inks" src="/blog/inktober/2019-10-01.jpg" /></a></p>
<div class="verse">A year starts not on January first.
The days may hunder but the seasons speak
of time's long march, of fast time, slow time. Thirst
for "start" and "end" neglects the limen sleek.
So, why do some unsubtle sciences
forget about the in-betweens? Those pure
uncolored dreams made mere contrivances;
"between the years" now simply: "year, then year".
These rough mechanics, held unseen, can spoil
the beauty of our silent spaces, take
from us the liminality, embroil
our lives in cold and tired minutiae.
Come sit with me, come stay with me inside
this place between where strange new loves abide</div>
<p style="text-align: center">§</p>
<p>"So, what does it mean?"</p>
<p>She shrugged and sipped her tea. They sat together in silence for a while.</p>
<p>"There's something about the liminal that terrifies me."</p>
<p style="text-align: right">"Me too," she said...</p>
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<p>date: 2019-10-02
title: "Inktober 2019 #2 - Story and poem courtesy of Sariya"</p>
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<p><a href="/blog/inktober/2019-10-02.jpg.html"><img alt="inks" src="/blog/inktober/2019-10-02.jpg" /></a></p>
<h3 id="the-europan">The Europan</h3>
<p>Dim light of distant suns.</p>
<p>Salt-slush of silent seas.</p>
<p>Gravity: a tension of sorts, tidal.</p>
<p>Deep vents, temperature gradients, hot, cold, hot, cold hot.</p>
<p>Fermentation. Combustion. Digestion.</p>
<p>It had so many ways to keep going, to stay powered, to stay alive. All those failsafes and backups, redundancies well into the double digits. Piezos, catalytics, photovoltaics, turbines, even a very efficient stomach, all in perfect working order, all ready to snap into action.</p>
<p>And yet it still prefered the dim light of distant suns to remind it why.</p>
<hr />
<div class="verse">The eighteenth whisker on the left is brown.
I know this after countless nights awake
beside you, watching every quiet breath.
You puff your whiskers out on every yawn.
On longer work-filled days, your whiskers wilt,
exhaustion softening your features, sleep
exerting subtle gravities to lead
you to oneiric seas and dreamlike sands.
I know this after countless nights awake.
I know, I know, it's strange to watch you sleep,
but when I can't, to know that someone can...
at least it somehow lets me rest in turn.
When I lay beside your sleeping form
I know there's rest to still be had for me.</div>
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<h1>Zk | 2013-05-17-advice</h1>
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<p>type: post
title: Advice
date: 2013-05-17
slug: advice</p>
<hr />
<p>I was recently asked over lunch to provide some advice for someone going through my alma mater's computer science program. I took up the whole of lunch rambling on, and dropping in comments like, "Maybe I should just write this down," and "I'll put this online so you can just give it to him directly," and so on. It's a real problem I have. I think, "Oh that's a simple question to answer," and really, if ever there were a signifier that a question is anything but, it's that exact thought. Anyway, here's some advice.</p>
<p>First of all, I should note a few things about the program. My alma mater is a state school, and thus the state has some say in the way things work. However, more than that, the state has some say in the way all public universities work when it comes to certain programs to ensure that transferring between schools goes smoothly. It's a lofty goal, but what it comes down to is a series of educational compromises that, yes, make it easier to transfer school, but rarely add anything to the program. In fact, in the efforts to keep these programs similar across schools, much is removed that might be beneficial to students (and nevermind the lack of competition). A lot of teachers have interesting courses to teach in interesting ways, and a lot of classes do better with one book than they might another, but a lot of that is stiffled. Additioanlly, much of these shared programs are not exactly set up by experts in the field so much as those who have wound up through business or politics in the position to be the type of people who would set a curriculum.</p>
<p>So I didn't get my degree in CS.</p>
<p>This has given me a few benefits and a few setbacks, but I've never really felt as though I regretted to get the degree that I did (music composition) rather than computer science. In fact, a lot of the benefits I've run across have been directly due to my degree. And no, the correlation between math and music is not one of them, I'm sorry. Please stop telling me about that. One of the biggest has been that, after I wound up in the workforce as a programmer and made it to the point where I was helping to conduct interviews, I wound up being the one who helped hire (or not hire) candidates who had come from various different CS programs, and a few who hadn't. The difference is readily apparent.</p>
<p>Although I'm going to number these bits of advice and such, none are necessarily more important than the others, so keep that in mind!</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Unit of Advice Number 1</strong></p>
<p>Maintain a portfolio of public work and information.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A lot of those who wound up coming out of my school's CS program, to my eyes, had very little in the way of a portfolio of work, or even any public information about themselves, beyond just a r&eacute;sum&eacute;. A notable exception, though, was one of my coworkers in school who graduated with publicly visible open-source code as well as time working for private companies, with works he could point to and say were his, as well as projects of which he had been a part. The opposite of that, which I saw with relative frequency, was the sort of blank slate you would expect going <em>into</em> a degree rather than coming out of it. Your time in college is a chance to grow and expand your experience in ways that will help you down the line, rather than simply learning facts.</p>
<p>Write code. Join clubs. Get a job. Get a lot of jobs. Write more code. Do <em>stuff</em>. This comes up more in Number 2 below, but seriously, get out of school. My degree required that I attend a certain number of concerts per semester (15, if I remember correctly), and only a certain number of them were allowed to be department-held events. Getting out of school helps, but yeah, more on that later. The most important thing to take away from this is that you really, really need to have something to show people that you love what you do (because if you don't love it, <em>boy</em> will you hate it as a job!). Set up an account at GitHub/BitBucket/whatever and keep posting to it as much as you can.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Unit of Advice Number 1 - corollary 1</strong></p>
<p>Contribute to open source projects.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While we're on the subject! Contributing to open source projects does a lot more than just show off your skills working with code. It shows three things that will be helpful to you down the line: that you can work with a project not your own, that you can work with a team, and that you can work on atomic tasks.</p>
<p>Working on a project, as I said above, helps to show that you are willing to accomplish something with your skills, which is great! However, as nice as it is to come up with a problem in need of solving, this is usually done by some entity other than yourself. Your business, your department, or even your team in a department is going to have some sort of task to accomplish, and it's not necessarily going to be yours. What you gain by accomplishing your own task is solving a problem, but what you gain by workint on an existing task is project comprehension: it shows that you can read code, understand the project, and then contribute.</p>
<p>More than just working on a task in a larger project, there is a social aspect to working with a project that isn't your own, as many of these projects accept contributions through a vetting process, such as a pull request or merge proposal. These are social, I promise. There's a way to propose code, even if you've never met the project lead, that will make it more likely for your patch to be accepted, just as the opposite is true, and you need to be able to learn how to figure that out for each project, as each project lead will be different. Working solo is fun and can be quite fast, but working <em>well</em> with a good team can go far, far beyond that.</p>
<p>Finally, working on an atomic task is very different than working on an all inclusive task. The reason that this is important is the push for management techniques that help the team to work with each other as much as possible without getting in each other's way. You should also know about these, of course: figure out what the various types of management are and how they work (not just Agile, not everyone follows that, of course). The practical side of it, though, is that a lot of these styles will mean that you'll be working on a small task that is as focused as possible in order to speed you up and keep you from stepping on anyone else's toes.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Unit of Advice Number 1 - corollary 2</strong></p>
<p>Be accessible on the web.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The upshot of both of the previous two points is that you automatically wind up with resources available to friends and employers online. You'll have your GitHub or Launchpad URL that you can point to and say, "See? I did that." This is of the utmost importance when applying for a software development job, and I personally consider it to be one of the most useful things available when deciding whether or not to hire or even interview a candidate. LinkedIn profiles, while good for organizing information and work relationships, tell us relatively little about <em>how</em> you work, which is of immediate importance to us, your future coworkers.</p>
<p>Get yourself a webpage, teach yourself at least something of the net (if you're not going into web dev, fine, but please at least set up a simple landing site for yourself and learn how to manage it), and collect information in one place for people to peruse. Put a blurb about yourself, a <a href="http://me.veekun.com/blog/2013/01/09/cvs-and-file-extensions/">PDF</a> of your r&eacute;sum&eacute;, and links to your portfolio pieces and OSS contributions there. Also, if you're going into web dev or web design, now's your chance to <a href="http://resume.drab-makyo.com">show</a> that you know your stuff. You <em>should</em> already know this, but it's worth saying. Send your r&eacute;sum&eacute; when applying for your job, but also send this URL, or even include a link on your r&eacute;sum&eacute; itself for those application processes that only allow a file.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Unit of Advice Number 2</strong></p>
<p>Branch out away from school.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A lot of programs with a set curriculum will focus only on one limited set of things: one language, one processor architecture, one database style, and so on. Get away from that in your free time. If you graduate with a comprehensive knowledge of Java, MMIX, ANSI SQL, and so on, that's all well and good, but that limits your best-fit job prospects to those that want just those skills. If you're stuck with Java, learn some of the other languages that run on the JVM and scratch out some of your homework in those before finishing it in Java (or write some of those personal projects in them, hmm?). I'd suggest things like Groovy, Clojure, Scala and the like to get away from the Plain Old Java OO paradigm. Try out Mongo, play around with a different OS, definitely try something other than Eclipse!</p>
<p>The goal here isn't necessarily to just make yourself more marketable in these languages, though it's that as well, but to learn how to learn. Once you learn how to efficiently learn a new language, learning a new language isn't a barrier to applying for a job outside of your list of known languages. It's not just languages, either. Get into web dev. Or get out of web dev. Just get away from school and write code and join communities and learn. It's pretty crazy out there.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Unit of Advice Number 3</strong></p>
<p>Creativity and problem solving are more important than mechanics.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Your job is not to sit and do a task without thinking. Your job is to solve a problem. You will run across mechanical tasks like refactoring, but the majority of your work will involve creativity. You'll have to be able to dive into a problem and pick it apart into its component pieces as well as step all the way back and take a look at where it fits within the project at large. There will be a lot of technically correct solutions, and only a few of them will be Actually Right, and your job is to pick one of those and make it work. It's really hard to stress this enough: you are not data entry with a lot of curly braces - your job is to get your job done and to do it well, and that takes creativity as well as the rote skills you learn in school.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Unit of Advice Number 4</strong></p>
<p>Get comfortable with tools.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The language used as an abstract concept at work is not your job, either. You work with computers, and so it's good to know more about them. A very good example is VCS tools. Learn at least git and svn, but don't be afraid to check out all the others, too. You will almost certainly use a VCS of some sort at your first job, and there's a pretty good chance that you'll use a different one at the next job. Learn about DVCS as well as centralized VCS, figure out feature versus release branches, be comfortable in IDEs and on the command line. Get comfortable with the fact that process is a part of work, and that process generally happens over a series of tools.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Unit of Advice Number 5</strong></p>
<p>Do something else, too.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Stop working every now and then. Please. Make sure you keep a hobby that doesn't involve computers at all, or you risk burning out. I took up cycling (until I got hit by a car - twice - at which point I took up running and reading), but there's a ton of things out there that don't involve sitting in front of a computer. Or if they do, they don't involve the same means of interaction, the same ways of thinking as programming. You have to be able to get away from Things That Feel Like Work for at least part of the day, or you start to lose fun. After all, this isn't just advice on how to get hired doing something awesome after school, so much as things that keep awesome things awesome as time goes on.</p>
<p>On a more practical note, look into a work time management program such as Work Rave or a pomodoro technique tool. Ergonomics are plenty important, but they only solve so many problems if you just spend 100% of your time sitting (or standing) in front of a computer. Knowing when to move, when to step away, look away, or exercise are things that can help keep work from seeming so much like a death march, and honestly, stepping away from the computer for five minutes is when a lot of those good ideas come and a lot of problems get solved.</p>
<p>Finally, learn how to say "enough", "no", and "I resign". Be happy doing what you do, and accept that you are not some sort of all-powerful programming deity with all the time in the world on your hands to do everything, even the unpleasant things. Definitely be wiling to accept that as time goes on, you'll be able to do less, especially as you get older. It's not just a time thing, either: your focus will narrow as you'll get better at what you do. Just be healthy about that.</p>
<p>There's a lot that goes into working with computers right out of college, but never forget that your goal is to make awesome things. Just make sure that you get in the habit of doing just that, doing it well, and being healthy about it, and really, everything will be pretty great.</p>
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<h1>Zk | 2015-04-06-dogfooding-1</h1>
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<p>type: post
date: 2015-04-06
slug: dogfooding-1
title: Dogfooding - Pt. 1</p>
<hr />
<p>I work for <a href="http://canonical.com">Canonical, Ltd</a>, a company focused primarily
on open source software, best known for their operating system,
<a href="http://ubuntu.com">Ubuntu</a>, a distribution of Linux focused on both the ease of
desktop use, as well as a seamless experience across desktop, server, mobile,
and TV. That's not all that we make, though, and our umbrella of products and
services stretches across several sectors of the software market.</p>
<p>I am on the Juju UI team. <a href="http://jujucharms.com">Juju</a> is a dev-ops solution
that allows packaging server software into Juju Charms, which act as biased
installations of software that are built by people who know how that software
can best be deployed. For instance, the <a href="https://jujucharms.com/wordpress/">Wordpress
charm</a> encapsulates an installation of
Wordpress, just as the <a href="https://jujucharms.com/mysql/">MySQL charm</a> packages an
installation of MySQL, such that, if you have a Juju environment up and running,
you can simply run:</p>
<p>{% highlight bash %}
juju deploy wordpress
juju deploy mysql
juju add-relation wordpress mysql
juju expose wordpress
{% endhighlight %}</p>
<p>and wind up with a proper installation of Wordpress talking to a proper
installation of MySQL in the cloud of your choice.</p>
<p>I work on more than just the projects I have at Canonical, however. I've bought
wholeheartedly into both the ethos and implementation of open source software,
and so I work on releasing as much of my own free-time projects as open source
as possible. Lately, the project that has been taking up much of my weekends
and evenings has been an exploration of <a href="http://golang.org">Go</a>, a programming
language by Google with a focus on simplicity and concurrency. I chose this
language for this task because Juju itself, along with many of its tools, are
written in Go.</p>
<p>The project I've been working on,
<a href="https://github.com/warren-community/warren">Warren</a>, is a pretty simple bit of
web software that allows publishing of entities of various types - from blog
posts to pictures and so on - and linking of those entities into a web of
content. Or, rather, those are my hopes for it; it's still in its early stages.
I've learned a lot about Go, many Go web utilities such as
<a href="http://martini.codegangsta.io/">Martini</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/codegangsta/gin">Gin</a>, and
<a href="http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/">Gorilla</a>, testing in Go using
<a href="http://goconvey.co/">GoConvey</a>, as well as the services that back Warren up
such as Mongo and ElasticSearch.</p>
<p>Writing a web app such as this, it was a natural solution to charm Warren so
that I could manage it, along with its backing services, in a scalable fashion
on any of the clouds that Juju supports.</p>
<h2 id="what-i-did">What I Did</h2>
<p>The work that I've done to date consists of two parts beyond Warren itself: the
<a href="https://github.com/warren-community/warren-charm">Warren charm</a> and the <a href="https://github.com/warren-community/warren-bundle">Warren
bundle</a>. Whereas charms
describe the way in which a singal service is deployed, bundles are groups of
charms that work together as a group of services providing a particular
functionality. For instance, the Warren bundle includes Warren, Mongo,
ElasticSearch, and haproxy for load balancing.</p>
<h3 id="the-warren-charm">The Warren charm</h3>
<p>I went with the idea of a "thin" charm. This means that the charm itself does
not contain any of the source code or binaries required for building Warren
itself. This is as opposed to "thick" (sometimes referred to as "fat") charms,
which contain a binary, a zip of source code, or some other means of deploying
the service without reaching out to some external location. There are a few
advantages and disadvantages to each:</p>
<h4 id="thin-charms">Thin charms</h4>
<ul>
<li>Advantages:<ul>
<li>Change to the code of the services does not mean change to the code of the
charm.</li>
<li>Charms are much smaller, and thus are uploaded to the environment fairly
quickly.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Disadvantages:<ul>
<li>Services will require access to wherever the source or binary to be
deployed. In Warren, that's the GitHub repository, but it may be a PPA or
other source of packages. In some clouds, access such as this may be
heavily restricted.</li>
<li>Since the code must be fetched, potentially built, and then installed,
some of the speed gains for not having to upload the charm are lost.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="thick-charms">Thick charms</h4>
<ul>
<li>Advantages:<ul>
<li>You can be guaranteed that the code that is in the charm is the only code
that will be deployed in the service without having to use any
work-arounds for pinning fetched source at a revision or tag.</li>
<li>Deployment is usually fairly easy and fast, since you don't have to worry
about fetching source and building, and since no external sources are
required, you can safely deploy behind a strict firewall.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Disadvantages:<ul>
<li>Thick charms are rather large and may take a bit of time to actually
deploy, since the charm will need to be uploaded to the environment either
from your local machine or from the charmstore.</li>
<li>Changes in your codebase will not show up when a new charm is deployed,
since the code exists at one particular revision - this means that
emergency bug fixes in your code mean an emergency charm release
containing that fix, and a charm upgrade.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>For Warren, I went with a thin charm for a few reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>I live in the mountains, where Internet connectivity is limited to microwave
line-of-sight of okay-but-not-great speeds. I didn't want to have to
re-upload the charm to EC2 every time I made a fix to it (charm developing
being a particularly iterative process). Once the charm winds up in the
store, should it wind up there, this will not be as much of a concern.</li>
<li>I want to iterate fairly quickly on Warren, if it winds up going somewhere. I
want to be able to iterate on Warren much more than I want to be able to
iterate on the Warren charm, however, so I'd rather spend an initial
investment allowing a means of upgrading the Warren source in a deployed
instance of Warren through a configuration change (more on this later) than
have a repeated time sink involved in building a new version of the charm.</li>
</ul>
<p>In the end, the wins that thick charms get me are outweighed by the wins
involved in thin charms.</p>
<h3 id="the-warren-bundle">The Warren bundle</h3>
<p><img alt="Warren in the Juju GUI" src="/assets/tech/dogfooding-1.png" /></p>
<p>The Juju GUI is the project that I have spent the most time with during my time
at Canonical. I started out on the GUI, and continue to contribute to it even
as focus has shifted to other aspects of the various user interfaces to Juju.
One of the things that I like about it is that it's really easy to see just how
your entire environment works and fits together. In the instance above, you can
see haproxy exposed, which leads to Warren, which depends on Mongo and
ElasticSearch. There's a flow of traffic indicated in the diagram - a request
to the exposed bit, which is proxied to Warren, which may make a request of
either Mongo, ElasticSearch, or both.</p>
<p>Another benefit of the Juju GUI is that it allows you to export the current
environment in the format of a <a href="https://jujucharms.com/docs/1.20/charms-bundles">Juju
bundle</a>, which is a repeatable
representation of an environment. These bundles can then be reimported with the
GUI or with another of our tools, Juju Quickstart, which allows building and
managing Juju environments from the command line.</p>
<p>In this case, I created and exported my Warren bundle, but am not yet able to
utilize it. This is because the Warren charm does not yet live in the Juju
charmstore - it's only deployed locally - and bundles do not support local
charms yet. For now, though, I'm happy to have the bundle here as a reference
to use when deploying Warren to a cloud.</p>
<h2 id="the-good">The Good</h2>
<p>My list of good things from this post will probably just read about the
advantages of using Juju. Once I had the charm up and running, it was
astoundingly easy to repeat the process: simply <code>juju deploy
local:trusty/warren-charm</code> from my charm repository. I have to say, there's no
beating that. In the past, I've deployed and managed just about every one of my
projects by hand, and the lack of repeatability led to a ton of external cruft.
Deployment checklists, extended QA times, slower iterations, and so on. I think
that Juju helps alleviate all of these to some extent.</p>
<p>Additionally, in writing and testing the charm, I found all of the weak spots in
my code that weren't evident from a development environment. For instance, I
had relied on several hacks and shortcuts supplied by the libraries I was using
which, while they looked elegant, were not good solutions for a repeatable
testing environment or a production environment. For instance, I relied on
defaults for hosting static files and templates. While this made my code look
clean and simple, it was not repeatable because there were no guarantees where
those assets would be stored. Once I charmed Warren, that became evident, and I
found ways to create a robust means of dealing with these problems that was both
elegant, and non-magical.</p>
<h2 id="the-bad">The Bad</h2>
<p>Docs.</p>
<p>I found the documentation around the python Charm Helpers, a package used for
building and supporting charms, to be quite lacking. It feels as though new
features were implemented in code while the documentation had not yet been fully
written; what docs are there read as though the user should already understand
how to use the package.</p>
<p>As a developer, I'm well aware of this pattern, and definitely guilty of it
myself. Even so, I was left spinning my wheels for days as I tried to charm up
Warren. I've helped with the charming of several different packages that we use
within the company, but none of them use the new, undocumented features of charm
helpers.</p>
<p>In the end, I wound up working off the old style of creating a python based
charm - that is, rather than utilizing the <a href="http://pythonhosted.org/charmhelpers/examples/services.html">service
framework</a> included
with charm helpers, I created methods that were decorated as hooks, which were
called simply whenever one of those hooks was fired. This is the style I've
most commonly seen in the charms hosted in the charmstore, and while it does
work, I get the impression that this newer services framework is much more
elegant and easy to use. Easy to use once, that is, you understand <em>how</em>.</p>
<p>It just so happens, though, that the task that I've given myself over the next
few months of free-project time at work is to help improve the documentation of
the products and services that we have, whether that's code-side in the form of
docstrings, wider documentation included with the projects, tutorials, or
videos. Indeed, that's much of the purpose behind these dogfooding posts! So
I'll be working just has hard as the other teams, I hope, to help document Juju
and how it can be used for managing cloud deployments.</p>
<h2 id="whats-next">What's next</h2>
<p>Next, I'd like to talk about more specifics about how the Warren charm works and
the services with which it's deployed. I hope to make this at least a short
series, if not an account of my ongoing adventures with dogfooding Juju for my
own purposes.</p>
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