Sorry sorry, falling behind

AH! I have like three minutes to type this!

Been working a lot, keeping the shanty clean without running water, trying to decorate the bare walls. I've been spending a LOT of time with Tiger Paw getting her online presence ready; we just got done with the first draft of her group's profile.

Had a very close encounter with homophobia. So close that I could smell the motherfucker's hateful breath. More details on this later.

I have been bonding with Aaron like crazy. She healed me from my fever! With the touch of her hands! Incredible!

I'm getting incredibly tan, and I've already started visibly losing weight. Perfect fitness, here I come!

My three minutes are up! ADIEU!

Quick update!

I am sort of falling behind here! Just a quick update for now; I’ll try to time my typing and my internet access better next time!

I have worked with my hands to improve the place that I am living every day I’ve been here, whether it is by swapping out natural wood load-bearing beams for 4x4s, putting up walls, or building a bed frame. My work has been supervised by our landlord and friend, Tino. He laughs readily, is incredibly skilled with his hands, and has hands down one of the best jobs ever: transforming mostly-inert lava into arable and buildable land.

I’ve also exercised every day I’ve been here, mostly by busting my ass up and down steep hills. My first experience with a humongous hill was on the evening of Monday the 23rd, after meeting a wonderful woman named Tiger Paw. She is Aaron/Panda’s drum instructor, as well as a co-masseuse (more on the frequency and nature of work exchanges on the island later). She has wanted to create an online presence for herself for quite a while; this has now become one of my jobs! Keep a look out for her on blogger and facebook, and become her fan; she’s fabulous! That said, the hill up from her house was one of the most punishing physical endeavors I’ve ever gone through. I was running on fumes, with every last calorie sucked from the meal I’d eaten earlier that day. It was an intense, humbling experience; I cannot for the life of me have more respect for folks who run marathons, compete in triathlons, or go through boot camp and into the armed services. I woke up the next day refreshed, with just a healthy tinge of tenseness in my legs.

Panda/Aaron and I have been recording some video, and we are working on getting it serviceable for the web. We’ve also been doing some sound recording as well, which will be much easier to get into your greedy little ears! And photos are on facebook!

Right now, I am sitting at Shankari’s artists bungalow, surrounded by beautiful gardens, intricate tilework, babbling fountains, and even a moat! Most of all, I have been meeting the most wonderful people, including another B. Conversations have been stimulating, work has been minimal in duration but intense, snacks have been fed to me regularly—B has served me more cups of tea and island hors d’oeuvres than I’ve ever been served!—and I’ve produced more opportunities for learning: a woman who owns a macadamia nut farm near the ocean needs some WFFERS (is that how that’s spelled? Pronounced WOOF-ers) to help pick nuts.

Soon, guests will arrive and a potluck will start, and my stomach is more than ready for the endeavor. I still haven’t seen a beach; the ocean remains a far-off reminder of what I have yet to explore. Even living surrounded by relative desolation, I feel more vibrant and alive than I have in years.

Aloha!

B

Proper social networking

As some of you may know, I am a pretty traditional person. I like to

BAAAAHAHAHAHAHA! *WHEEEEZE* A HA! HA! Ha haaa! Heh heh heh...whoo! Boy, I really had me going there for a second!

But in all seriousness, there are a few things that I am stubbornly traditional about. I always take my shoes off when entering someone's house. I think text messaging is used by many people in a profane and unconscionable way that has on more than one occasion driven me to the brink of insanity. And I think that social networking is ruining the way that humans have been interacting for thousands of years.

Or at least I used to. You see, I am a huge fan of words. I like speaking them, I like typing them, I like listening to them. Alliteration allures me. I use the rule of three so much, I essentially made a blog about it. Et cetera. (By the way, world, it's etc, not ect. Even the spellchecker knows that! GET IT RIGHT OR GTFO!) More than the words themselves, though, do I appreciate the narrative that they comprise. The continuity, the spontaneity, the sense of oneness with your fellow person as you both let down your barriers just a little bit and commune with one another.

Facebook doesn't much care for this. Facebook comes at you in pokes and IMs and wall posts, a rapid-fire assault of stimuli whose only sense of continuity comes in the form of a "news feed", which is to online communication as the news ticker is to broadcast journalism: fleeting, incomplete, and ultimately a distraction from what's really going on: Rachel Maddow's undeniable nerdy grace and beauty, or Anderson Cooper's steely, seductive gaze. Rawr.

The point is, I always thought a strong adherence to facebook was sort of shallow. I thought it was a symptom of what these damn kids are doing with their new-fangled technologies: missing out on all the fun that we old people had speaking to one another with our mouths to one another's faces.

However, I've come to change my tune. I realize now that what I once saw as a competitor to age-old communication styles has become an augmentation to our abilities, a neural implant into the brain of the collective consciousness. When I used to scowl at people who would dare break the barrier between internet and IRL, I now openly discuss things that originated on the facebooks. "Did you see that thing that I sent you?" I'll say. "Let's talk about it!"

In this sense, facebook can be used not as an end to itself, but the means to an end; that end, of course, is the free exchange of ideas, the sharing of opinions, the communal delight that comes from exploring new sensations and stimuli with your fellow people.

So the next time you see me, be all like "Dudechick, that thing you sent me on the weberverse is totally radical!" and I'll be all like "CHYEAH, riiight?!" In a manner of speaking

I never thought I'd see "proper" in the title of anything with my name on it...

Also: You're damn right I used nested colons in the fifth paragraph! EAT IT!

Life grants, Pt2

Oh man, here it comes, the first idea...

I want to have a Gender Awareness Day of sorts on campus. It would require a lot of people and a lot of time to get it to be something people would be really into, but I'm thinking a full-day event, spread across campus. Check it out:

• Heavy advertising: Chalking, Collegian, flea market booth
• Make little awareness buttons. I'm thinking it'd be fun to cut out little outlines of pants, skirts, blouses, and shirts out of pink and blue paper (yeah, I know, it enforces the binary, but we gotta start small with the general population) and then have people come up and assemble their own combination of two pieces of clothing. Or something similar...we could sell them pre-made, but I want this to be as interactive as possible! And, we would ask for a dollar donation for them, so we'd have to make them look kinda snazzy.
• A booth on the mall with people painting nails. Again, requested dollar donation.
• If we're really ambitious, a booth doing makeup: drag, women's makeup, and transman makeup (facial hair, whatever techniques can be used to masculinize a face). $1
• It would be great to have education booths with big posters about the different nonbinary gender identities that exist.
• If someone was willing to sit down with me and devise a sort of "curriculum", we could even have panels, a sort of "Ask A Transperson" format. Visible Voices participants, anyone??
• It could culminate on a campus-wide genderfuck day, with everyone dressing with a different gender expression than they normally do.

This is just off the top of my head. It would be easy to get SOGLBT in on it, as well as the feminist club, the women's studies office, and I'm sure other diversity offices would be down as well.

This is something I've wanted to do for a while, but I think this could also be an opportunity to legitimize the idea of life grants, or, if I may narrow the focus, Transgrants. We could make a club on campus dedicated to the exploration of gender and gender-related issues. We could get money from the school. We could raise a lot of awareness. We could throw fundraisers, we could invite speakers, we could plan events, and best of all, we could have a lot of fun!

No, scratch that. BEST of all, we could use the money that we raise to help up-and-coming transkids who need a little financial assistance to navigate life.

Who's with me?!

>That last question was rhetorical. IT'S YOU!!!

Life grants

I was just pondering the rant I wrote the other day--the one posted just below this post--and the feelings of anger and frustration it brought up. They weren't directed towards Barbie, really. While I found the general attitude towards life that she exuded to be incredibly vapid and distasteful, her self-absorption wasn't my biggest beef.

It was the thought that so much miscommunication and displaced frustration gets slung around at the people closest to us. Because honestly, we don't need infighting. We don't need to police ourselves. We need to band together, because god damn it, it's hard being trans in this country! As if the very real social stigma of gender plasticity weren't enough, many--if not most--of us have to struggle with the additional expenses involved in modifying our gender and sex. (Here I must give props to Zane for getting my gears turning by posting on facebook about the various expenses of getting his transition letters.) We're talking makeup, clothing, shoes, hair removal, binders, hormones, doctor visits, therapy, surgery...it adds up!

When I dwell on the difficulties of life for too long in one sitting, I have to kick back and imagine a world where those difficulties don't exist, just to keep optimistic. Sometimes those fantasies are solely that: fantastical. But sometimes--my hope is that it happens more often than not--certain pragmatic solutions will come to my mind. As the last week of class before finals draws to a close and my mind is consumed with study, I thought...

I wonder if there exists a group of forward-thinking benefactors of the future who provide "life grants". They would be similar to college scholarships in that they would fund an individual's pursuit of higher education, except education being funded would be of a much more material and lasting sort. It would be a way to, as the teachings of the Oracle of Delphi would beseech us to do, better know ourselves.

Or better yet, get some of those Obamabucks into funding Pell grants for transfolk! I can think of nothing more adherent to the first amendment--that is, nothing more American--than to support the right of transpeople to speak with a mouth, to present with a body, that most accurately matches the mind that does the speaking.

Does anybody know if there is a precedent for this? Have banks, for example, ever given loans with the express purpose of being spent on transitioning? Are grants given for educational pursuits that are not sanctioned by any major college, as a sort of "DIY higher ed"? And if so, how could gender transition be presented such that it would satisfy the requirements?

And if nothing currently exists that would even vaguely satisfy my curiosity, then I say...

Come! O siblings of all shapes and sizes, genders and genes! Come! and let us begin to form financial bonds amongst us, such that we might offer the transchildren of the future a better life, the sort of life we no doubt wish we had ourselves! Let us not tarry, but make haste towards our full self-realization, to finish our education, to emerge lettered and powerful into the world so that we might shape it to our fancy! Let us emerge AT ONCE!

*Ahem*...sorry, got a little olde schoole there.

"Genders and genes." I like that! With "genes" substituting for "sex". Get it?? Well don't, it's mine, you can't have it, nyah!