Hey, check to see when Manor House is showing on your local PBS station. It's very entertaining. J and I keep making scullery maid jokes.
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I suspect that not a whole lot of people really "understand" Catholic school. They think of Catholic school, they think of rulers and penguins. They think of Sister Mary Ignatius.
They think of Hell.
And of course it's true that Catholic school contains all those things in varying amounts. But public school kids in religious families probably got more of all those things than I did, going to a religious school but having non-religious parents.
No, when I think of my elementary school years, which were all at the same catholic school, the thing that was probably the most unique was the class size. My entire grade never contained more than about 25 people. More than half of those went through the entire time together. The result wasn't always pleasant.
I suspect that kids going to a larger public school have a few more options socially. If the 10 cool girls won't give you the time of day, there's 20 or 30 other ones that might. But when there are only 12 girls in your class, getting the short end of the stick involved getting the REALLY short end of the stick. I'm able to mentally forgive the kids that ragged on me in high school--I had other friends, so I had someone to share the hatred with. With the hundreds of subtle gradations of popularity present in high school, I managed to stay somewhere in the middle. The number of people who hurt me was vastly smaller statistically than the ones who didn't. So I survived, and left intact, and harbor no grudges.
It's much, much harder to cope when it's just you and one or two other girls being openly rejected and made fun of. As a result, I still get all riled up even thinking about the things they did and said to me. And I wasn't even the most put-upon--that honor was left for the only girl that was actually poorer than me.
So when the leader of the pack put her name up on that Classmates website recently, yeah, I got a little thrill out of seeing that she didn't have a college on the list of places she's gone to school. Is that a little cold-blooded? Sure is. But it's still about 1000 times less cold blooded than the way she treated me for years and years.
Incidentally, she's not the only one whose name is up there. There's less than 50 people listed from the entire school over its entire history (which goes back about 45 years), but there's 4 people in my class, and 2 or 3 other familiar names. The rest of them are cool in my book--a popular girl that was the only one that occasionally sat on our side of the table now has happy babies, someone a year younger than me that I was in the latchkey kid program with graduated from one of the local colleges, the boy who had leukemia in 3rd grade that cried and covered his peach-fuzzed head with his hands when some boys stole his hat in church is also in grad school. I wish everyone the best--except the ones that made my life so hard. It's a part of myself I'm not fond of, but I have to acknowledge that it's there.
I repeat, I'll never understand Japanese culture. You'll have to scroll down past the text-heavy region to see what I'm talking about.
(link via Asparagirl)
Doctors are annoying. I think that they think I'm a drug fiend or something, because they were being pretty dang rude when I went in on Friday after hurting so bad the night before I could hardly form complete sentences. So, I'm grumpy, and don't have anything nice to say, so I'll be quiet.
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(ok, I just revised this, so if you read it before this parenthetical mark was up, reread the last few paragraphs.)
One other thing.
Ok, so, I know that everyone knows this already and all, but do I really ALWAYS have to end up being manly? Just once in awhile, I'd like the world to look at me and say "Hey, that's a female!".
This test says the same thing, too. I've gone through so much junk just trying to be myself, who happens to be a noisy, sloppy, whimsical, honest brain attached to a body that has boobs and a girl-place, and to be content with that. And I usually am. Being a not particularly girlish girl is fine.
Usually.
Just that, the idea that my own personality and way of interacting with people could so frequently betray this mostly-internal struggle for identity gets tiring. The whole spectrum of gender and gender expression is a beautiful thing, and blah blah blah, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm a strange fit in this society. It must be nice for those people that see identities comparable to their own every day, and never have to analyze things too deeply.
I have a tendency to tiptoe around the concept of "outness" with respect to myself. The simple and overly simplistic thing to say is "I'm a straight woman". Since I have all the requisite items for this to be true, it's easy to say, and easy to believe. This sentence sounds nice when I give LGBT presentations, because it shows those folks that DON'T have to analyze things too deeply that they can still support their local queer and be "normal".
Of course "I'm a straight woman" also rejects a large and complex portion of my personality that I consider to be non-gendered. It was this part of my personality that lead me to believe that I wasn't a real girl or was going to turn into a boy through most of my childhood. If the topic comes up, I'll talk about it without too much discomfort, but it's not something that I'll bring up out of the blue (except here, apparently). Having people I interact with on a daily basis not understand this major part of my being is frustrating and can be very sad and alienating.
So why not say "I'm a transgendered person that 98% of the time is attracted to people that identify as men"? First off, it's way WAY more complicated for me to try and explain my whole concept of gender as society views it versus the way I view it, and would involve a long conversation with every dang person that walked by. Second, identifying as transgendered when all my outward manifestation is "somewhat nerdy straight girl" seems disrespectful to the trans community, who tends to be WAY more visible than I'll ever be and therefore gets pooped on by society a lot more readily. Me calling myself trans seems too much like the straightest acting gay guys or the whitest-acting minorities being the most socially-acceptable advocates of their group. The flamers and the ghetto punks deserve just as much of, if not more of a voice, because they're the ones that are getting noticed every day. I don't plan on dressing differently, or taking male hormones, or getting surgery to change my outward gender manifestation anytime in my lifetime. Looking like a man is no truer to myself then looking like a woman. Considering it's about 100,000 bucks cheaper for me to look like a woman, that's just fine with me.
So, what to do? Do I consider myself out? Not really. Do I dislike that? Well, yeah. Do I have a better idea? Well, no.
In that case, I guess I better deal with being a female that every online test thinks is a man.
ps--found the first test via Ultra Mundane, and also thanks to Adam's recent post on outness that got me re-thinking my way of interacting with the world.
pps--Family/friends--I'm not running away and joining the queer circus. If you're worried, please read the post from the 24th that's just below this one.
Call the postal authorities--I recieved a package whose interior was coated with a thin layer of powder!
Actually, it's quite tasty, I already licked it off some of the items contained inside.
Joe and Elaine sent us a little care package. It had lunch-sized packs of cookies, apple sauce, juice boxes..... and cocoa packets. Needless to say, one of the cocoa packets didn't quite survive the journey, so everything was lightly dusted with chocolatey goodness. It took me a minute to figure out what had happened though. You know, with all the news people's hysteria about SCARY POWDER, getting something that actually had powder coating every available surface was kind of disturbing, even though it ended up being something totally innocent.
I'm not allowed to write anything about Jeremy's recent search for some, uh, protection for his, mmm.... area, in order to, uh, keep it safe during the fairly violent sparring they do in his tae kwon do lessons.
Ahem.
Speaking of taboos, it seems like I'm getting yelled at by my family a lot recently for things I'm saying about them here, or even just things I'm writing in general. To be honest, I'm not particularly bothered, since I'm A: not saying anything bad, and B: Not revealing enough about their location, etc, to be personally disturbing. The exception to this was one poorly written thing that made it sound like my mom kicked me out of the house that I've fixed. Granted, I like getting email about the site, because it makes me feel like people actually read it, which is exciting, but family: I'm all right. I know I complain sometimes, but really--my life is about as ideal as it can be for a young married grad student. In other words, busy, but satisfying.
Like everything in life, though, the things I write about aren't all happy-slappy. I am more likely to share the more entertaining things I collect in my Internet wanderings, but that doesn't mean that I never get introspective, or sad, or grumpy.
Looking through some recent things I've talked about, I've noticed that even when I'm complaining, I'm usually just thinking things out (even though some folks think I'm going through a Huge Personal Crisis because I recognize the hypocrisy in hating materialism while buying a new car). There are a lot of things in the world that deserve some thought. And there's a lot of things available online that help me get thinking. I used to have a journal that I wrote in once in awhile to think things through, but now I use this. And I never write anything down beforehand, and I almost never go back to erase or fix things once I've saved. I kind of like it that way, because when I write I try to picture this situation:
You--my friend, family member, or friendly stranger--and I are sitting somewhere that we're both comfy. The kitchen at the cottage on the Cape, a grocery store in Ithaca, a local coffee shop. You know the place I mean. We're knitting, or doodling on a piece of paper, or having a snack, or waiting for the cookies to bake, just killing time on a quiet day. We get to talking about something. It just happens to be the exact thing that's been running around in both of our minds. What's my opinion on the matter?At least, that's roughly the state of mind I'm in when I write something long like this. I don't get so complicated when I just need to tell you that I'll never understand Japanese culture.
Anyway, you get the idea. All this is just thinking out loud, and is mostly stuff that involves me trying to figure out how I feel about something. Things I feel more strongly self-assured about--my vegetarianism, anti-homophobia, the value of science in the world--these are things that I don't NEED to write as much about, since they're set into mental stone, so to speak. Seeing an article online that either demonstrates my sentiments or refutes them will occasionally result in a mention, but my long, drawn-out essays are usually the result of my mental counterpart sitting across the table from me, coffee mug in hand, looking up from his/her crossword puzzle and saying "so, what do you think?"
So, what do you think?
I'm back. And I should mention that codeine is my new best friend. Don't worry, I'm being excessively careful with it--in other words, I'm almost constantly uncomfortable, and wait until I'd actually describe myself as "in pain" before taking another one (which takes about an hour to kick in, which means I'm in pain for about 2 waking hours a day). And I haven't been taking any at night, since my reaction to pain appears to be sleep.
To be honest, I think I would be better able to operate heavy machinery right now than without any drugs at all in my system. I was a little woozy when we went to see Ira Glass on Monday, but that's been the worst of it. That may have just been my puppy-like excitement at going to see a Real Live NPR Person. I wasn't disappointed.
Oh, Ira. How I love you. How I wish I could make each and every entry here in the This American Life Style--tell a good story, and analyze the larger meaning at the very end. I try my best but know I'll never measure up, and ironically, he made almost the same exact comment himself, only with reference to David Sedaris. I love Sedaris too, but Ira's my new daddy.
Now, on an entirely unrelated note: this is an interesting late-Earth Day entry. Apparently I use 3.3 planet's worth of resources. Way less than the average American, but still, yikes.
So the painful jaw/ear thing turns out to be a swollen infected lymph node, that in the process is managing to make everything around it hurt.
Yuck.
So, I'm going home early today, after my class. The kind of strange thing is, I don't actually feel ILL--my head is pretty much clear, because I'm not feverish or anything. But I'm almost ready to take an axe to the lower half of my head when the pain medication wears off.
Home contains a hot pack, Tylenol with codeine, and marshmallow Peeps. Just the right combination to make me feel all better.
Home also has pillows and blankets. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
It's apparently Homosexual Day here at TChemGrrl's Spot. Come join me, won't you?
Oh please, oh please, can someone get me a t-shirt that says "Gay Pimp" on it? (don't worry, it's mostly safe for work, and thanks to Doug for the link )
Screamingly gay music reminds me--where's my Pansy Division tape? Unfortunately I think it's home in CT. I need to hear "Have a Homo Christmas", and soon.
Random gay-related information #3, my best friend is coming to grad school in the midwest this fall! We'll both be about 4 hours from Chicago, so our plan is to meet there and schmooze from time to time. Watch your hearts and buns, Midwestern Men. Danny's coming to steal them all away.
YAY!!
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I thought I was done with my weekly dose of THE GAY. Then I saw this quote from Madonna (I know, I know, I'm trafficking in stereotypes. What-ev.) Ahem:
"Whenever something gave him the retarded tingles, he was not shy about letting me know."I can't decide if I love this quote or hate it. I also can't decide if the "retarded tingles" is a good thing or a bad thing.
Those of you that couldn't tell that Madonna has been studying mystical Judaism for years now might be curious to click the link (maybe the boobies hanging out all over made you think she wasn't). I knew, but just because I mostly hang out with Jews n' Fairies.
Every once in awhile, I run into some young person's website, or see a comment by a kid on a message board, and I can only really think one thing to myself--
Thank God the Internet hadn't fully hit until I was in college.
I wrote, said, and did plenty of embarassing things when I was little--mostly in the realm of the dorky-embarassing. It's just nice to know that the evidence is either in landfills, somewhere under my bed at home, or rattling around in my own mind.
There are a lot of things that can still make me cringe. And, granted, there will probably be things on this website that will make me cringe in the future. But at least I'm an adult, and I have at least some minimal ability to keep my mouth shut so Future Me won't think too poorly of my ramblings. This way, at least, I can pretend that Big Emotional Upheavals About Nothing were less a big deal than they acutally were, at the time.
Best of all, no one ELSE has to know just how big a deal they were.
So, hooray, for coming of age mere moments before the information boom.
Jeremy has a doppelganger.
Last night we were at the laundromat, reading and waiting for our stanky clothes to come out of the dryer. I looked up from time to time to see if the dryer was still on, then went back to my book.
Then I saw Jeremy across the room, messing with the dryer next to ours. I started to get up but then realized that no, he was actually still sitting right next to me. I had a second or two of extreme mental discordancy before I realized that yes, the person whose underwear was currently spinning around with mine was still exactly where he had been for the last 20 minutes, and the person across the room putting his own separate clothes in the dryer was just some guy.
Some really pale guy in his early 20's that was about 5'8, with close-cropped light brown hair, a short reddish goatee, dark wiry glasses, and a skinny oval for a head.
The Doppelganger.
I pointed him out to Jeremy, who just looked up and said "hm." I guess seeing your own doppelganger isn't as interesting as when your wife sees him.
Just then our dryers finished. Because he was still transferring his clothes into the dryer next to ours, this meant that I had to interact with Jeremy's doppelganger.
"Excuse me," I said.
"Oh, sorry," Doppelganger replied, as he threw in a dryer sheet, closed the door, and moved aside.
I was then overcome with a fit of giggles and needed to cover my face with some socks to recover.
Who knew that meeting a doppelganger would be so entertaining?
Do your taxes, you dang procrastinators! We already have our checks back, actually, so we're quite relaxed right now. I'm SO glad to be married to someone who wastes less time than I do.
Record high temperatures today--it was snowing like gangbusters last Wednesday or so, now it's 80 outside. I smell like the beach. For some reason the first few days of summery and/or springy weather make me want to dress all girly. So I'm in a linen dress and matching sleeveless shirt. They're terribly wrinkly but technically girl-like.
Tooth is still grumpy. In fact, now the whole right side of my jaw is sore, because the tooth gives me a little zap every 30 seconds or so, and I tense my jaw and say "ow". Repeat for 6 days, and you can understand why my jaw is sore. It's a vicious, vicious cycle.
My body is unused to the heat--it'll take some readjusting. Sorry for the nonsensical-ness.
Today is the Day of Silence.
Give the nearest survivor of homophobia a hug. Give the nearest practitioner of homophobia a smack upside the head. And remember in your hearts all of the people that have been silenced over the years because of who they loved, or what gender they are versus what parts they were born with. (thanks to John for reminding me).
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I went to the dentist's first thing this morning about my unhappy tooth. X-rays, extensive poking, and making my teeth cold with alcohol ensued. The verdict? There's nothing wrong with it that they can find.
This is both good and bad. On the one hand, I don't have to get my head drilled into and messed with, or pay for medical bills, or any of that. On the other hand, I have no course of action open to me that will make this irritation GO AWAY. The dentist said "try some aspirin". That's it.
Nothing like uncontrollable pointy pain to grumpify yourself. Not that it's unbearable, or anything--it kind of feels like I have a little piece of sand under one of my teeth--and I've been eating and sleeping without too much trouble, but it's frustrating.
Very frustrating.
Rabble rabble.
I have a toothache, which I've never had before. I'm calling the dentist when I get home, as it seems to be slightly worse than yesterday, not better as I hoped. It's making me nervous.
And, it would be nice if my advisor found me interesting enough to ever come to a meeting I'm speaking at. I was presenting at group meeting today, and had a bunch of questions for him, but he didn't even come in late. Growl.
Things lately have been adding up in such a way that right now I'm feeling very... quiet. Which is bad, because my brain tends to shut my personality down when I'm about to lose it. I can almost hear the whirring fans slowing down, like when you sit in a house as the power goes out. Shouting and flailing my arms around in response to stress is good, or at least, my experience has been that it's good for me. Feeling myself get quiet is a little bit frightening. I misinterpreted the feeling as getting a cold yesterday, partly because I couldn't quite place the tooth pain--sometimes it's the tooth, but it feels kind of like it's my jaw or glands or throat sometimes. Now I think it's just all my brain-fans whirring more slowly.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe going out and knitting with some women tonight will give me the required Zippy.
Jeremy says: "It's an American tragedy. The flag cannot wipe away my tears. Is this the nation our forefathers died for?"
He then goes on to say: "Hee, hee."
This whole "new car" thing is making me very nervous. I don't feel like we SHOULD be able to afford a new car, like I missed some very important part of the equation and all of a sudden I'm going to turn into my dad and be past my eyeballs in debt. I feel like I've somehow managed to shoot up three or four class strata in about 3 years--I mean, my senior year of college I was still cleaning out grease traps in the dining hall dish room and eating for free at the dining hall because I didn't have the money to pay for food for every meal. Since when is a car reasonable? Granted, it's just about the most inexpensive new car there is, but still. I'm starting to feel kind of hypocritical, even just describing myself as working class. I make money by thinking, more or less, and my husband makes money by writing grants that sound like an Ivy Leaguer wrote them. We have a new car and an apartment with a picture window that has simultaneous views of the Capitol Building and lakeside sunsets. I eat out a few times a week. We buy organic produce frequently. We have hobbies. We have a DVD player (or will in the next week). And, we're NOT IN DEBT. Even with the car payments we'll be putting a few hundred dollars away each month. We talk about what part of Boston we want to end up in after I graduate. I mean, I can't quite even comprehend it. I'm not poor anymore.
All these things that I just assumed I'd never end up with, suddenly I have in spades. How did this happen? Even more importantly, is it possible for me to hate the class system now that it's being so kind to me? I still wouldn't mind eating the rich, but three years ago my definition of "rich" would have been ME NOW.
I'm a fat capitalist American pig.
How did this HAPPEN?
Change your clocks, don't get confused like me.
I was waiting for the bus this afternoon, and watched two men walking two identical tiny dogs together (think Wishbone dogs). I watched as one of the tiny dogs attempted to mark every step of the walk as his territory--which included peeing on the dog he was being walked with. The pee-ee didn't seem to enjoy this too much, but they were both so tiny that they couldn't really hurt each other too badly.
We have a new car! Well, we will on Monday. The Baubemobile was just getting too grumpy, so it was time for a change. The link above is pretty close to what we have, although the car's a little bit darker and less purply in natural light--more like a metallic eggplant.
Boy, Metallic Eggplant would be a good name for a band.
I've been thinking in letter-words today for some reason. I may have dreamed about them last night. O, LX&R! KT! CDB? Y, E S BZ!
An interesting useless tidbit: Apparently Google's automatic translator thinks that Gaelic is Portugese.
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I don't know who's writing this, but I think I'm in love.
(link via Mr. Omnipresent Blogger )
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J and I will be buying a car this weekend. Our current one has decided to crap out too often lately--3 times in the last week and a half, which, considering that the use of the car is limited to about 4 times a week for groceries and/or tae kwon do lessons, is pretty significant. Plus, it's a gas guzzling Baube-mobile and it always bottoms out on our driveway because it's so low to the ground. And the tires hate us. And, it's an American car, and I honestly don't know of a single person that's had a good experience with American cars except for the 2 people in the world that always buy American, just because.
So, we're looking for a smallish 4-door Japanese car that isn't too fancy. J has a few ideas. His parents are really pushing for us to get a new car, because there are so many good deals with loans and things right now. Frankly, I'm not convinced that we'll be able to get a loan for a new car, not that we don't pay the bills on time, but just that we haven't ever had a significant loan before, so I assume they'll think we're "risky", despite the amount of money we put into the bank per month. I really have no idea how these things work, all I know is that Dan always yells at me for not knowing that the JQZRK standing of MRxL's is way WAY down this year, or something equally meaningful.
I finally managed to make it to the Knit and Bitch that's on campus. I found out about it practially a month ago, but I was in Austin, then I was busy, then I had beam time, and I just never got around to it. But it was fun, the women there were nice, and I got to show off my newfound ability to make cabley looking things. I want to try a Fisherman-type sweater for Jeremy, once I finish the one I'm doing currently. At the rate I work on these types of projects, however, I probably won't finish this one before the summer, and knitting in the summer is absolute torture, so he'll probably get his sweater in time for NEXT summer. Whoopie.
A pictureful day:
This is a picture of my dad's high school band (my dad's the one on the far right with his face all covered). Considering that several of them went on to become professional musicians, they were a pretty good high school band. Go listen, and see.
I mentioned recently about trying to find some of my genealogy stuff on the Italian side of the family. One of my grandfather's brothers sent me all of this amazing stuff yesterday--a copy of the passport of my great-grandmother that includes the names of her parents and a picture of her with my grandfather as a baby, and a bunch of random little pictures of grampa as a young man.
Here are two of my favorites.
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The mayoral race here was held yesterday, and yes, many jokes were made about a town that chooses to hold elections on April Fool's. I caught most of the loser's concession speech last night, in which he managed to blame local women, his opponent, the people who campaigned for him, the people he ran against in the primary, and a local elected official for him not achieving what he was OBVIOUSLY supposed to achieve. In short, he wanted everyone to hand their vote to him on a platter.
This is exactly why I DIDN'T vote for him.
Every time I saw him on tv or quoted in the news, the interview went something like this:
"So how do you feel about xyz construction project?"
"I bring 15 years of experience as mayor to this office."
"How will you try to recruit industry to the area?"
"A lot of great things happened in this town when I was mayor."
"And what about the school budget? What will you cut, with so much less state funding?"
"I'm proud of the part I've had to play in the history of this great city."
We GET it already. You're OLD and BORING and HAVE NO OPINIONS.
Time to give Mr. Unpronouncable a shot.
Oh, you wouldn't believe anything interesting I said today anyway. Poisson D'avril!