End of Blogs

By Emily S. | Published: 2 Feb 10

Just a short announce­ment. This blog in its cur­rent form and cur­rent loca­tion will be taken down in a few days. Any followers/subscribers (maybe there are two?) are wel­come to grab any con­tent while it’s still around dur­ing this short grace period, before it comes down. That’s all.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Christmas Letters

By Emily S. | Published: 19 Dec 09

Hey, guys.  I think I’ve ref­er­enced my crush­ing poverty in the past.  If I haven’t, con­sid­ered it ref­er­enced.  I can’t buy gifts for every­body, even trin­kets.  Even if I could, I cer­tainly couldn’t ship them.

But what I can ship is paper.  I have paper, stamps, and envelopes, lots of them, so I’m going to offer to send whomever wants one a per­son­al­ized, hand-made let­ter.  I’ll write for you.  I’ll draw for you.  I’ll stick any­thing that weighs the same as paper that I can for you.  If you can’t think of some­thing I should write, ask me a ques­tion, and I promise to answer it (even if it’s an essay ques­tion from Amer­i­can His­tory 101).  Or I’ll make a poem or draw a snow­man or some­thing.  I don’t know.

It means I will be tak­ing time to think about you, and just you—probably for longer than I would if I bought something—and mak­ing some­thing tan­gi­ble. I’m going to work on it this week and send them out, begin­ning tomorrow.

If you’re inter­ested, com­ment below, with what you want, and your address, if I don’t have it. On all the cross­posts to Dreamwidth and Live­jour­nal, the com­ments are screened, so no one else will see it. (This doesn’t apply to my Word­press blog, but those com­ments won’t be vis­i­ble by default until I approve them.)

All right, guys. I’m pretty stoked!

Posted in Random | Tagged , | Comments closed

Journal Jostle

By Emily S. | Published: 15 Dec 09

This is more just noti­fi­ca­tion for those inter­ested par­ties (and a test to see if this works). Due to con­tin­ued dubi­ous actions from Live­jour­nal HQ in Moscow and wishy-washy wonk­i­ness in gen­eral, and in an attempt to unify all my jour­nal­ing sit­u­a­tions, I’m chang­ing my cross­post­ing situation.

I’m going to con­tinue to use my actual blog as the place where I write. It’s then going to cross­post to my Dreamwidth account. That Dreamwidth account is going to post to my Live­jour­nal account. Hope­fully this all works. I’ll take com­ments in any of those places, though, I pre­fer them on my actual blog.

Also, I’m going to make more of a point of going to Dreamwidth now, putting all my friends and com­mu­ni­ties in my cir­cle and access lists, and so on, so that peo­ple can fol­low me there, and I can fol­low peo­ple there, and so on. In case any of you guys stop using Live­jour­nal entirely.  I totally encour­age whomever to seek me out there, as well.

Posted in Random | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Oh, Kennesaw

By Emily S. | Published: 4 Dec 09

I got one of the big­ger sur­prises that I’ve got­ten in a long time just a lit­tle while ago. Dur­ing my morn­ing read­ing, I got an e-mail from Ken­ne­saw State Uni­ver­sity at my former-name e-mail address I set up a few years ago. It was a request for me, as a for­mer KSU stu­dent, to take a sur­vey about my expe­ri­ences there, in order to improve their recruit­ment and reten­tion rates.

Warn­ing, fol­low­ing involves dis­cus­sion of gen­der and some oblique men­tion of self-mutiliation towards the end.

Read More »

Posted in Queer, Trans, Gender, Transition | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

In Which Bad Words (And Everything Else) Are Said

By Emily S. | Published: 26 Nov 09

So, after some long fuck­ing days, this shit con­tin­ues. Every day is long and packed with either me or the world or both being ass­holes and idiots.

I’m just not even going to write about my expe­ri­ence get­ting my blood work done. I’ve prob­a­bly told you, if you know me. I will say, I didn’t even know it could be so awk­ward to still have the wrong name on my license, but it is. It really is.

At the end of things, I’ve ended up in Jesup. I’m still pretty tired. I can’t seem to sleep well.

It’s Thanks­giv­ing. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’m invited to Thanks­giv­ing din­ner with the fam­ily, which I thought would be okay and relax­ing. But I’m try­ing to ask my mom about it.

How does every­body feel about that? “I don’t know.” Who’s all going? “I guess blah, blah, blah.” Do they know? “I don’t think so.” Nobody’s said any­thing? “I don’t know.” So I’ll have to come out to lots of peo­ple. “I guess so.” What about my sister’s kids? “They’re so young. How would they under­stand?” I guess they’re going to have to, Mom.

Let’s skip a lit­tle of this conversation.

I just don’t know if I’m up for all this. And I’m get­ting absolutely noth­ing from you. I don’t even know how my grand­par­ents feel about it. Only that they know and are tol­er­ant of it. Silence, more or less.

I don’t know how to cope with this shit. I am con­sid­er­ing get­ting com­pletely drunk and going. Besides that, I’ll be in Jesup until Sun­day, and not sure what I’m going to do while I’m here. Fuck. Let’s go see my dad! Shit. Shi­i­i­i­i­i­i­i­i­i­iit. Bet­ter than com­ing out to my uncles.

Lis­ten. I do not want to be the Thanksgiving-coming-out cliché. I thought my fam­ily mem­bers who knew, the ones who invited me for Thanks­giv­ing and also invited the fam­ily who don’t know, would help me out a lit­tle bit in this respect, and yet they haven’t, so I don’t know what to do.

Also, the lap­top I thought I was going to get has been can­celed. I don’t know why. Hope­fully it is just a mis­take that will be cleared up. But know­ing about it doesn’t help.

Posted in Random | Tagged | Comments closed

For My Own Recollection

By Emily S. | Published: 4 Nov 09

I have an appoint­ment with the doc­tor on 2 Decem­ber at 10:00 in the morn­ing.  The office visit is $65.  I need to bring the results of more lab work in when I go.

I called in this morn­ing to have my pre­scrip­tion refilled.  I got a call back from a nurse named Sarah telling me that before they would do that, they needed me to come in for an appoint­ment and have lab work done.  I pan­icked, being as I only had one pill left at home, and asked if I could get one more month and some time to get my shit done and get an appoint­ment in.

She said she would ask the doc­tor and get back to me.  A few min­utes later, she called back, and she said, yes, I could do that, and so I have an appoint­ment set a month out, which should allow me plenty of time to in fact get my shit done.

While we were work­ing that out, the nurse stopped and said, “Do you have a name you pre­fer to go by?”

I prob­a­bly sput­tered a bit.  “Well,” I said, “yeah, I do.  But I’m just using my legal name because that’s what my pre­scrip­tions are in.”

And she said, “Well, okay.  I was just look­ing over this stuff from Fem­i­nist Women’s Health Center.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “well, I told them to put that in my legal name.”

“They did, but…”

So, my legal name is on my blood work.  But this came up again any­way. So, I don’t know what’s going on anymore.

Any­who, yeah, I need to remem­ber this, and set an appoint­ment for more blood work, and set money aside for both appoint­ments, as well as a new round of pills in a month, and money for gas to get to and from Atlanta, too.

Fuck health­care.  My ovaries should be doing this job for me.

Posted in Random, Transition | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Weekend at Jesup and Autumn on Hiawassee

By Emily S. | Published: 4 Nov 09

A few of my dis­parate anx­i­eties as of late have coa­lesced into a sin­gle dream last night.

I had gone home to Jesup.  My brother had some­thing going on, like a wed­ding or a grad­u­a­tion.  I was there with my fam­ily.  Pic­tures ended up being taken.  After a while, I saw those pic­tures, and in them, I looked like a guy, and an old guy, at that, some­one in their six­ties, maybe.  I looked like a cross between guy-me and Bob Dylan.

I threw up (in my dream) upon see­ing that.

I have to go home to Jesup this week­end.  Well, I don’t have to.  I’ve planned to.  I’m still on the fence.  I haven’t been there and haven’t seen any fam­ily in a year.  This is par­tially because I have no car of my own and can’t come and go as I like (Luke is tak­ing me down with him).  This is also par­tially by choice.

The last time I went, Novem­ber 2008, I spent the next few weeks try­ing to scrape together my shit.  My entire iden­tity felt torn down and com­pletely discarded.

I don’t have the energy to come out to more peo­ple, and even if I did, it’s one thing for them to know I’m trans and to be okay with that (which is ask­ing a lot).  It’s another to be in a place in your rela­tion­ship with some­one where I can be com­pletely safe and com­fort­able with them in my real iden­tity and in my body.

I wish I could do this on a sort of queer buddy sys­tem.  What gets me worst is doing this alone and of being com­pletely detached from all exis­tence of queer while I’m gone.

The trees vaulted up for hundreds of feet with autumn leaves

Trees vaulted up for hun­dreds of feet

So, now for some­thing com­pletely not–emo with which to sucker-punch you!  Autumn has come to Athens.  The leaves are chang­ing, although there’s an extra­or­di­nary amount of green remain­ing.  It’s vis­i­ble all around, even while some sum­mer growth remains.  It’s as if fall has made itself known but not entirely taken hold yet.  In either case, I took an album of pic­tures a day or two ago, while I was sit­ting out on the porch writ­ing.  This is of the view from my porch.

Posted in Random | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

NaNoWriMo: Life on Mars

By Emily S. | Published: 1 Nov 09

My writ­ing is under way, and right now, Life on Mars is 1,669 words long and count­ing.  Since I passed that magic 1,667 num­ber for the first day, I’m tak­ing a break at the moment.

Like any­thing else, it’s tak­ing some warm­ing up.  It felt like pulling teeth last night at mid­night as I tried to get things started.  It didn’t come very eas­ily, and I wasn’t pleased with the results.  Part of that was also hav­ing to begin, which I’ve always let over­whelm me.

I’m off to a much bet­ter start than the last two years, where my involve­ment was half-hearted and inde­ci­sive, and I only made it a few thou­sand words in, with ideas I hadn’t fleshed out, hadn’t planned for, and couldn’t use.  I dis­cour­aged myself before I even began.

I think the dif­fer­ence this time is find­ing a good way into the plan­ning process, with a good idea to go with.  Ideas and details started syn­the­siz­ing once I had focused, and that hadn’t hap­pened in a very long time.

Expect more posts as I keep going.

Posted in Random | Tagged , | Comments closed

Divided Attention

By Emily S. | Published: 26 Oct 09

(Updated: See below hor­i­zon­tal rule.)

My atten­tion is so divided these days.

I’ve taken back up knit­ting where I left off—beginner’s level. I want to buy some pretty, thick, plush yarn and make peo­ple scarves for Christ­mas because that’s where my skill level is currently.

I’ve also gone back to the jug­gling club here at UGA, and I’ve man­aged to start a qual­i­fy­ing run of club jug­gling (that is, jug­gling “club” props). I’m going to work on club jug­gling more, if I can bother myself to do it.

I’m also prac­tic­ing fin­ger­spelling, try­ing to get in a half-hour every day. I’m bad at spelling, and so it’s slow going.

I have some pend­ing med­ical issues to get back to, so I still haven’t called the doc­tor. But my stom­ach is doing much bet­ter these days. I am care­ful with what and how I eat and take med­i­cine, and it’s helped a lot.

I’m try­ing to do house­keep­ing with Trans­Ge­or­gia, and my mind is back on that, now. I’ve opened it up to anony­mous edit­ing, and I feel it’s a good move that increases the open­ness and trans­parency, and low­ers the bar­rier to entry for con­tri­bu­tion significantly.

I’m also pretty far in my plan­ning for NaNoW­riMo, and while my out­line is down­right skele­tal in places, I think I have enough between the writ­ten notes and what’s in my head to get started, and I’m excited to do so

There’s also my impend­ing visit home in less than two weeks. First time doing this in about a year. It’s already caus­ing me weird, bad dreams.

Ear­lier than that, even, I need to work on this cos­tume, too. I want to be the Vir­gin Mary, and Jen­nifer wanted to take pic­tures of this. I’m really curi­ous how this is going to go.

Well, that’s about it. I’d write vol­umes more, but now work is divid­ing my atten­tion, too.

Well, so, okay, action­able items for now: Keep work­ing on Trans­Ge­or­gia; flesh out notes for Life on Mars, and maybe a detailed syn­op­sis, or do some prac­tice writ­ing; find some good yarn; put together a sim­ple Vir­gin Mary cos­tume for work’s cos­tume con­test; call the doc­tor about HRT; edit my blog to add some infor­ma­tion about Trans­Ge­or­gia, knit­ting, update jug­gling pro­file, and so on; do a half-hour drill of fin­ger­spelling prac­tice daily; go to jug­gling club meet tomor­row; find time for manda­tory over­time at work; get some yarn at the store to start knit­ting things; and some other stuff I’m forgetting.

Posted in Random | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Once in a While

By Emily S. | Published: 27 Sep 09

I had kind of a nice day yes­ter­day, and today’s been gor­geous. I have the air from out­side just flow­ing in, and I’m tak­ing a break from dishes while the last bit soaks. Luke’s been out of town this week­end, so I get to lis­ten to ridicu­lous or lovely music (Annie Lennox, Donna Lewis, Sav­age Gar­den, Enya—and of course, the peren­nial Namoli Bren­net) and laze around, with the run of the house to myself.

Yes­ter­day I went with a friend from work to a salon and hung out there for a few hours. First, I got to see her house, though, which is one of more amaz­ing houses I’ve ever been in. It was actu­ally large enough that I lost my bear­ings and got a lit­tle lost while she led me through.

Got my eye­brows cleaned up with a lit­tle wax yes­ter­day. That was pretty inter­est­ing. Def­i­nite improve­ment. Maybe I should do more cosmetically-minded things every once in a while.

Posted in Random | Comments closed

Student Loans

By Emily S. | Published: 25 Sep 09

I got this call about an hour ago from some guy say­ing he’s with Sal­lie Mae (I still am won­der­ing in the back of my head if he was a phisher, but I’m guess­ing not). He ver­i­fied it was me with my Social Secu­rity num­ber, and then went on to tell me I had a defaulted loan bal­ance of $3,160.99. Yes, I know about it. He was telling me that if I work with them, then every­thing can be fixed easily.

Well, you know, I’d been mean­ing to do this, any­way, so I went ahead and talked to him and listened.

After talk­ing to like three peo­ple and giv­ing a bunch of infor­ma­tion, they worked it out to where if I repay $50 a month via auto­mated bank draft for nine months, after that time, they’ll remove the defaulted sta­tus of my loan, wipe it from my credit, and then give me another nine years to pay off the rest, with­out the bad credit.

Wipe the stu­dent loan blem­ish away in nine months? Go back to school on a loan maybe within a year or two? Fix my life?

Okay, so I agreed to do it. $50 a month hurts, though. $50 I have to make sure is in the bank at the end of each month, because like it or not, it’s com­ing out. Fuck. But, I think this is going to work out if I really try. I’m won­der­ing how this is going to work out.

Only prob­lem now is that, hav­ing done this, I’m about $5 or $6 short of being able to get a refill on my pre­scrip­tions, so I’m fucked for this month. Just fucked. Sigh.

Posted in Random | Tagged , , | Comments closed

HRT Recount

By Emily S. | Published: 25 Sep 09

Okay, I don’t know what’s going on. I was count­ing what few pills I have left for HRT so I know when to go back to the phar­macy. Once again, for the sec­ond month in a row, I’ve ended up with way less spirono­lac­tone left­over than estra­diol. So the ques­tion is, why?

Pos­si­ble conclusions:

  • I’m not tak­ing spirono­lac­tone and estra­diol at an even rate. Very unlikely. I always swal­low them together, and not doing so would seem weird. Am I so drugged out I would forget?
  • Some­one is steal­ing my spirono­lac­tone. But who the fuck would do that?
  • Some­one is slip­ping extra estra­diol into my bot­tle dur­ing the month. This bor­ders on impos­si­ble, but it’s a tech­ni­cally log­i­cal conclusion.
  • Along the same lines as the point above, the phar­macy could be count­ing out too much estra­diol when I refill. Some­what more likely, but not really much.
  • The phar­macy is count­ing out too lit­tle spirono­lac­tone. Seems the most likely sce­nario, but fuck, it’s expen­sive shit, and if this is the case, I’m pissed.

So yes. Either I’m so bad at remem­ber­ing things, keep­ing track of what I’m doing, that I’m swal­low­ing pills I’m not aware of, or else my phar­macy blows even harder than I thought. The only solu­tion is to count my pre­scrip­tion care­fully when I get it next time, and if it’s cor­rect, keep it with me at all times, dili­gently use my pill reminder, and make sure I stick to a regimen.

God, I hate my life.

Posted in Transition | Tagged , | Comments closed

Traveling

By Emily S. | Published: 22 Sep 09

I think I’ve fig­ured some­thing out. The abil­ity to travel is some­thing that my life sorely misses. It’s one of those ways that’s very obvi­ous to me about how my class, my means, and my resources really hurt me. (The rest come with some thought, of course. Every aspect of my life is cramped inside of tiny pay­checks, and I have to think weeks ahead when I want to do some­thing like go out one night or have a pizza, but this is a digression.)

It seems like the more I think about it, there’s so many places scat­tered over this coun­try I wish I could visit. Mostly, I wish I could go see a Namoli Bren­net con­cert in Tuc­son, at least once, and tell her how awe­some she is in per­son. (This celeb-crush fright­ens me.) I wish I could visit my friends I have in New Mex­ico, whom I’ve only ever known online, once. I’m dying to see Port­land and visit my friends there. I’d like to see Philadel­phia and visit one or two peo­ple there, as well. If I think hard for like five sec­onds, I can pop up more places where I know far-away peo­ple, or places I just want to visit. I also have a weird urge to see Colum­bus again, for some weird rea­son, although I’d have noth­ing and no one to see there, and I’d have no idea what to do.

Hell, I haven’t seen a sin­gle fam­ily mem­ber or my home­town in almost a year. I have mixed feel­ings about that. But it’s easy to not go back when you don’t have a choice.

Most days, though, I don’t jour­ney out­side of less than a mile from my house, if that. I go every­where by bike (or increas­ingly in Luke’s truck, but only as far as the gro­cery store).

It’s start­ing to feel con­fin­ing and lim­it­ing, and it’s one of those things that stings and makes me won­der how I could pos­si­bly ever scrape myself up out of this rut. It reminds me I’m unpro­duc­tive and feel tired and depressed all the time. It reminds me my own body and mind are poi­son to me and my ambi­tions, and time slips away so fast that my life is unrec­og­niz­able before I can even do any­thing, and years have gone by, and I feel older, and my choices dis­ap­pear every day—

That went down­hill fast. So, to inter­rupt that, now the begin­nings of a shop­ping list. Some rice. Sugar, maybe. Limeade sounds really good right now. Pos­si­bly booze. Ice cream. Bread. More peanut but­ter? A bit more tuna. Tor­tilla chips, yes, a few bags. Crack­ers for work. Maybe some pasta and sauce.

Okay, now, what was I talk­ing about?

Posted in Random | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

H1N1, I’m Guessing

By Emily S. | Published: 8 Sep 09

I woke up yes­ter­day with a tiny tinge of a sore throat. That was the only clue. I felt fine, otherwise.

I went to work early, cycling there with Luke (uni­cy­cle and bicy­cle side by side). While I was there, I started sneez­ing a lot. My hours got cut way down due to a lack of work, and so I was out of there by one. We came home. I still felt mostly fine, but start­ing to get tired, and mys­te­ri­ously, a headache was com­ing on.

Upon get­ting home, I pro­ceeded to feel extremely worn down, as if I were very sleepy, and I even­tu­ally crawled into bed. I slept three or four hours. When I woke up, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

I attrib­uted this to the effect of the nap at first, but after an hour or two, I only was feel­ing worse instead of bet­ter. I finally real­ized I was sick, most likely, and it was com­ing on fast. By the time it was time go to to bed, I had filled up a gro­cery sack of used tis­sues. I ached all over. I felt really weak. I had chills so bad I couldn’t get warm. By the time I tried to go to sleep, I was com­pletely, unam­bigu­ously sick with a flu.

Now I’ve woken up, and I don’t feel any bet­ter. I feel like death warmed over.

I’m assum­ing if I have some­thing that presents exactly like the flu, that it’s prob­a­bly a flu, and that fur­ther­more, it’s likely that pan­demic H1N1. Fun times. Now I just need to get out of work. I hope it works.

Posted in Random | Tagged | Comments closed