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Thursday, 10 August 2006 (dreaded impediment) 7:44am I may be running away, but at least I'm running on the high road.
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Wednesday, 9 August 2006 (insuperiority complex) 4:15pm My library card has vanished, which sucks primarily because it means I can't use the self-checkout machines, so the librarians get to see how many DVDs and comic books I go through. On the plus side, my submission for Instant City has been accepted. I just need to expand it a little, from six hundred words to seven hundred. I think can manage that.
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Tuesday, 8 August 2006 (white city fighting) 7:14pm So, I did it. I signed up for the three-month thing at my alma mater, the 24 Hour Fitness on Ocean, and not a moment too soon. The decay is spreading, and fast. Of course, I have to wait for my card to arrive in the mail. And then there's the niggling detail that my cancellation from Crunch doesn't seem to have gone through yet, in spite of having done it over a month ago. Seems they're held up on certain paperwork issues. Figures. Dancing with the devil and all. Speaking of soul-selling, a friend who works at a casting agency sent me the script for a independent feature they're working on. The part they had in mind for me was rather vaguely described as a "transgender person" applying for a job at a barbershop. The character is referred to in the script as "Cross-Dressing Applicant," with male pronouns are used. That would turn me off right there—the part calls for a boy in a wig, which I am not—but within three lines of dialog, it's established that the character is collecting hair to create "commemorative wig." Nice little Silence of the Lambs shout-out there. Oh, and the character reappears later, when the oh-so-masculine hero of the film is sent to jail, and who should be there but the hair fetishist? Good lord. It's amazing how little effort is necessary to create a truly hateful caricature. Seriously. The script wants me to hurt. It wants to come over and kick Perdita, then go across town to Unimatrix Zero to kick Oscar and Mina. Believe it or not, I'm not offended that they thought of me for the part (after all, very few people seem to realize that I identify as female and that I'm so politically persnickety), and I don't begrudge whoever auditions for it. It's just that...no. I couldn't begin to do something like that. I couldn't play a part referred to as a cross-dresser even if it wasn't the butt of insulting, anachronistic jokes. I think that's the part that gets me the most—this shit has been tired for years. It's the kind of thing that made me afraid to come out of the closet in the first place, and I refuse to contribute to someone else's fear, to risk the possibility of some hypercloseted tranny seeing it and having all their fears reinforced. Fuck that noise. Not that I claim to be any sort of a role model. I'm far too flawed/human. Week before last, Cindy advertised the Queer Open Mic on the Women Seeking Women section of Craigslist. This is not a section I look at otherwise, as I'm a good little minority and stick to the "Casual Encounters" ghetto. Anyway, she included pictures of us, and someone (presumably a woman) asked if I was single. I responded that I'm not single, but in an open relationship and thus not unavailable. Crickets. That's how it's gone for me on Craigslist, a chorus of crickets. Ads I've responded to have been met with silence, and the ads I've posted have been largely ignored. Thus far, after posting for four consecutive weeks, I've received all of two responses. One was from someone I know (and we've decided to keep it at friends without benefits), and the other kinda disappeared. On a Sunday she said that by Monday she'd let me know what her schedule looked like, but she never did. I sent a brief how-ya-doin' ping that Tuesday, and, nothing. Admittedly, I was a little unsure about that one. I'm upfront in my ad that I'm an m2f tranny (like I said, I stick to Casual Encounters, as the WSW section policies seem patterned after Osento and Michigan), and in her initial email she said that she'd "never been with an f2m but was open-minded." I speculated aloud that she'd mistyped and meant to say she'd never been with an m2f. She assured me that, no, she'd intended to say that she'd never been with an f2m but that she was, as previously established, open-minded. Okay, sure. I'm just accepting it as further reminder of the marginal status of the m2f in the queer world. As for the regular world, well, I don't really need a reminder of that. My pathology tells me that if I get into shape, I'll start getting more responses. Which, of course, makes not a damn bit of sense. But there it is.
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Monday, 7 August 2006 (blotted out from the sky) 7:59pm Last week, Vash and I went to see Strangers with Candy at the Parkway. Superman Returns was also playing on another screen, so I stuck around for that. Vash, not as interested, went back home and picked me up when it was over. The only reason I risked a theater to see it was nostalgia, really; born in 1973, I'm rather fated to love the Superman movies, or at least the first two. I kinda wish I'd waited for DVD on this one, though. It may not have been in a googolplex, but it sure felt like a googolplex crowd. And I just couldn't get past the fact that the people playing the leads are significantly younger than Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve. I mean, Kate Bosworth, is cute enough, but she looks all of sixteen years old. And if they were going to have to cast a natural blonde, my vote would be for Maria Bello, whose scene in the cheerleader outfit in A History of Violence redefined "hot." Of course, she's pushing forty, so she's practically dead by Hollywood standards. Before Bad Movie Night, I bought a jacket at the Goodwill down from The Dark Room. Of all the ones I tried on (including a dead ringer for Gillian Anderson's jacket from the X-Files movie, which I've coveted since '98) it was not my favorite, but it came closest to fitting—if need be I can actually close it and I won't look like I'm about to burst out. Some of others wouldn't close at all, never mind whether or not I could move my shoulders comfortably. That's a fundamental problem: no matter how much weight I lose (or gain), there are fundamental things about my body that will not change. Like, my skeletal structure, my ribcage, my wingspan, this genetically large male body. When Summer and I used to go thirfting, she would get frustrated with me because I wouldn't try on a lot of stuff. She insisted I fit into a lot more things than I realized. Not true then, not true now. Most of what's out there that appeals to me aesthetically does not fit people of my size, because the manufacturers assume that genetics is fairly consistent and the majority of women are not built like me. (Again, we're talking bone structure.) They're right, of course. After Goodwill, I jaywalked to Cancun. There was a little platinum blonde girl ahead of me in line who quite effortlessly demolished whatever was left of my ego. I wasn't exactly attracted to her, but by god, she unintentionally brought into sharp relief everything that I dislike about myself. We were both waiting for our food at the same time, and I was at first standing next to her in front of the jukebox, but before long I moved to the ATM. I couldn't stand the thought of the contrasting picture we created.
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Sunday, 6 August 2006 (extracurricular) 7:57pm Like the Paul Reubens Day show at The Dark Room last week. Great fun, actually more than I expected. I was never entirely satisfied with the piece I wrote, but as a visual aid I used a clip from an eighties pr0n movie referenced in the story, and the audience response was strong. Later in the show, I was one of the judges of both the Costume and Miss Yvonne Lookalike Conests, along with Will Franken, Anamoly and Dr. Hal. At that moment, I think I was about as hip as I can possibly get. All downhill from there. Anyway, earlier in the day at the march, I'd been wearing a rather tight dress, a red velvetish number I'd gotten for a few bucks at a thrift store in Fresno. When Vash and I went back to my place for a while after the march and before the show, I decided to change into more understated, loose-fitting clothes. I knew that I'd be onstage (though not how much I'd be on stage, as I also I spun the contestants in the Pin the Bowtie on Pee-Wee game, and danced with Lady Monster as Miss Yvonne), and that actually made me all the more self-conscious about my body, especially my stomach. I like wearing clothes which require a somewhat fit body. I'm shallow like that. My stomach does not currently allow for that, though, particularly given the relatively small amount of clothes which even fit on an irregular meatbag such as mine. So. Back to the gym, one where I won't be spooked by having to undress and use the shower and hope that people won't look at me and think I'm suited to play a butler. 11:14pm Hosted Bad Movie Night this evening. Bad Ronald. Pretty good one, as these things go. Next week is Cool as Ice, oh my yes.
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Saturday, 5 August 2006 (dying for it) 8:16pm Here I go, again. The 24 Hour Fitness on Ocean Avenue is approximately four miles away as the undead blue Neon drives. Driving time is fifteen minutes, barring unforeseen traffic problems. All of this is the same as when I used to go there in the late nineties, but it felt necessary to make the exploratory drive this morning. I didn't use their locker room or shower then, either, preferring to drive back home and not subject anyone else to my noodlety. The hours are twenty-one rather than twenty-four, closed from two to five in the morning. One upon a time I was likely to show up at a quarter to four in the morning, but I was a brash young twenty-four year-old at the time. At the rickety age of thirty-three, I would consider it a miracle if I got there by five. Going at nine or ten in the evening seems a little more plausible, not to mention their tiny-ass parking garage (which is engaged in a turf war with the Rite Aid next door, with a Line of Death drawn through the middle like a seventies sitcom) will be likely to have some spaces open, which it did not around ten thirty this mornign. They have a rope-'em-in introductory rate of three months for a hundred and fifty bucks, without the "processing" or "initiation" fees. Three months ought to be just about right to see if I can work it into my style of life. If not—well, heaven knows they'll try their best to make it difficult for me to get out of an actual membership after three months, and probably charge me some other fee. But that's how they operate, and I recognize that going in. It's just that I'm going slightly mad not exercising. Like, you know, hamster-wheel exercise, road to nowhere and all, the only kind that works on me. My body's lack of a noticeable metabolism requires it. It's not that I necssarily look horrible right now, but I know what can happen. I know what my body's capable of in both directions, both here and there.
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Friday, 4 August 2006 (breathe me) 8:37am Bad Porn Night made it into The Guardian's Best of the Bay 2006. Go us. BEST STICKY CELLULOIDThe phrase "slippery bodies" cracks me up, since if the bodies on the screen are anything at all, they ain't slippery. If what I've seen thus far of seventies pr0n is any indication, lube wasn't invented until the eighties.
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Thursday, 3 August 2006 (cloud four) sometime after midnight I haven't put on so much as a smidgen of makeup this week. (I haven't done a lot of things.) Vash and Maddy both say I look really good without it. Freckles are popular.
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Wednesday, 2 August 2006 (a rarefied field) 12:01pm Alive? Living.
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