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Saturday, 20 May 2000 (discontents) 7:23am I guess it was bound to happen, considering how many sick people I've been around lately: my throat has started to hurt. Should prove an interesting sensation while Phil is working on my neck this morning, since it often seems like I can feel the pressure from the needle on my throat. At least it'll be over soon, but that's only because it'll be starting soon. The appointment was originally set for 11am, but had to be rescheduled for 9am because of a death in the family. Seems to me that would be sufficient reason to cancel it altogether, and I even offered as much, but he insists he's up for it. Okay. If he's up for it, so am I. Talked to my brother jonco last night, and he had some interesting tidbits about my parents. Our father and his wife were in his neighborhood last week, and they had lunch. "They said, 'We only have one question: what's a transsexual? We looked it up in a dictionary, but it didn't make sense.' I told them to think of Christine Jorgensen, and that seemed to help." Which was an excellent approach, all things considered; Jorgensen was a tabloid sensation, but that wasn't her fault, and it least it introduced the subject to the public consciousness. In any event, dog forbid they actually ask me what a transsexual is. No, the J-name question was surely more relevant. I'm used to that kind of detatchment from my father. When he told me that my mother is going to marry her current boyfriend, sell her condo (the purchasing of which was a very big deal for her in '93) and move in with him—well, to be honest, I was a little surprised I hadn't heard it from her already. (I guess that's what I get for not having called her a second time on Sunday.) If my transitioning was too much for Earl to handle, and I've always suspected it was among the proverbial straws, then Carl doesn't seem quite as bothered. Well, good. Anyway, according to jonco the wedding is tentatively planned for November, which means it'll come shortly after Dana's. Somehow, though, I seriously doubt my mother's going to ask me to be a bridesmaid. There is such a thing as too weird...
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Friday, 19 May 2000 (windmill aggression) 6:04am I feel like Aesop is laughing his ass off right now. i tried to warn you, but you didn't wanna listen... 8:02am Yes, I know that Cervantes wrote Man of La Mancha, not Aesop. 9:13am Lights. Someone's been turning on lights around here. The designer who just quit happened to sit on the other side of the front cubicle wall from The Fidget Queen (face to face but for the wall between them, kinda where The Big Guy used to sit compared to me), and the big awful painful flourescent light next to his cubible has been turned on. My immediate thoughts are of the The Fidget Queen and The Den Mother; both of them do love their bright shiny light. As for TFQ, I'll grant that it's in his immediate area and he has a certain right to have it on if he so desires. It'll make me resent him that much more, but at least I can play fair. TDM, however, would have no right whatsoever beyond her obvious fondness for micromanagement. Since she has no real skills or experience in this field, she has no choice but to tweak tiny things to make herself seem relevant. She'd probably be happy to get all the lights here turned on, if only to give herself a sense of accomplishment. Brian has the same need/fondness for low light that I do, and a few weeks back she walked into his office and flipped on the overheads. Brian and I both cringed—those lights hurt. She'd started to leave without turning them back off (of all people not to follow the principle of leaving a room the way she found it!), and by the time Brian asked her to it no longer mattered, because the moment she turned around I practially leapt over to the light switch. My freakish reputation combined with (if I may say so) my excellent track record in terms of actual job performance has resulted in her mostly keeping her distance from me. I know that she'd love to get a bit more light on me, and she's also suggested upping the brightness level on my monitors. Granted, this last was part of an ill-fated attempt to create a "standard" for monitor levels in the office. Again, her lack of actual experience or knowledge about the internet makes it a typical move for her.
Anyway, Brian's theory is that the light was turned back on by the exiting employee
since he had to do a lot of crawling under his desk. Probably true; I unplugged
the light this morning before anyone else arrived, and it hasn't been turned back on.
Now, if I could just drown out TFQ's typical baby-whining...I swear, that pouty voice
makes me want to puncture my eardrums with an icepick...
2:35pm It's not a question of being unproductive. Believe me, if I had something to produce, I'd be doing so. Even that classic timekiller, furtive masturbation, isn't an option. (I used to think that if not for the compulsion to masturbate I'd get so much more accomplished during the day. Ha! I don't miss it, but I haven't exactly written the Great American Novel in the beaucoup extra time, either.) And there's this site that jonco pointed me towards called ClassicGaming.com because it has Apple ][+ emulators and romsof games we used to play on his computer, but it also has a lot more than that, and one thing lead to another... I'm not much of a gamer now, but I used to be hardcore. Back when arcades didn't suck. Hell, I even remember when the Me & Ed's at Shaw & West in Fresno had Battlezone and Star Castle. One of my favorites didn't appear until a couple years later, though, and for me it's no surprise: Star Trek. Look, I was a fan during the dark days of the early to mid-eighties, when the best we could hope for was a movie every couple of years, and lord knows it didn't help my social status at all. At the time, only geeks were into Star Trek; most geeks still are, but now being into Star Trek does not by definition make one a geek. Chip, my homophobic and psychotically jealous first roommate in college, actually had a poster of the Enterprise-D on his side of the room. Anyway, the long-dormant Shulgin now has something to do. The neat thing is, it's not just a simulation—or all intents and purposes, it IS the Star Trek arcade game upon which I spent so much money when growing up. The gameplay is completely functional, but beyond that the code being running is the exact same as was used in the original machines. It's like reaching into an unpleasant past and bringing into the present those precious few things which brought me joy, however fleeting it might have been. And if I get bored with it, I can always switch over to Battlezone.
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Thursday, 18 May 2000 (resumption) 6:48am Two days' growth. I can only hope that by time I get used to it, it'll be gone forever. 8:38am The backwards logic of that statement just struck me. Get used to what, exactly? Facial hair? Like I've never had facial hair, or haven't been at least ten times furrier than I am right now? I've got the pictures to prove it. 10:46am Which, rather unpleasantly, brings Sondra to mind. She'd originally told me about Phil, though insisted that she would never use his services because her ability to grow a beard was too important. I've sorta kept tabs on her since the unpleasantness a couple years back. (In retrospect, for as painful as '99 was, it seems like a breeze compared to '98.) In addition to occasionally going to her website, she is now in fact a customer of Phil's. Occasionally the temptation has arisen to contact her, especially now that she seems to have at least begun to overcome her denial about being transsexual. More or less: she describes herself as a "bigendered transsexual," and intends to try to pass as male occasionally when post-op. Ummm...okay. (Mmm'kay? Mmm'kay.) Far be it for me to cast aspersions on anyone else's definition of self. I'm probably at odds with a large segment of the community as it is—certainly Maggie was willing to turn her back on me when the opportunity presented itself. (Although I suspect her crush on The Ex had a lot to do with it.) I don't entirely understand the concept of the "bigendered transsexual," but then again I'm a TS who doesn't necessarily want surgery. PotkettleBLACK!
As for Sondra, I wish the kid well, I really do. The main thing keeping me from contacting her
is my intense fear of getting involved in someone else's drama. There's just way
too much of it out there, and eventually it finds its way to me without my help. I don't need
to go hunting. If I'm going to start going to Phil on more of a regular basis, I may
run into her there anyway. I won't exactly be at my best, but hey, neither will she.
Leaving in a little bit. Can't trust Bridge traffic, and if I get there too early, the worst that'll happen is I'll have a bit of extra reading time. Either that or we'll get an early start and get more done. Two vicodin down so far. I still have my appointment for Saturday, and I think I'll see if he has an opening next Monday, too. You see, it's like this: there's always some regrowth, and if it's not visible within a few hours then it certainly will be within a day or two. Every few weeks, twice a month, once a month, none of these frequencies are working. This is a job, a mission, which requires dedication, repetition, and extreme fucking prejudice. I can't give 'em a chance.
sometime after midnight For no reason I could identify, I was practically chipper when I got to Phil's. Maybe it was the four vicodin I'd already taken, but I don't think so. I was just in a good mood, not a common reaction to the thought of electrolysis. It must have been the ramifications of the procedure, not the procedure itself. I do seem to be extremely focused on it these days. Even Phil being ultra-conservative with the painkiller spray didn't bring me down—I had to ask him to use it, and then only reluctantly did he spritz me a little. Almost out, it seems. Still, aided by the now six vicodin in my system, my pain management facilities were very much up to the task. (It did cross my mind that it may be related to my apparent propensity for self-harm, a disturbing but very familiar concept I've been reading about. But I'm not quite up to theorizing on that level right now.) Bloodflowers was playing, and it was easy to lose myself in it—I'm looking forward to listening to it while frying. Phil was also unusually quiet, so I didn't get distracted much. Indeed, there were moments when I almost dozed... ...unfortunately, one of the moments was rudely interrupted by someone who thought it made more sense to stand right outside the open door and yell "Phil!" rather than simply walk in. I jumped involuntarily, dangerous when electrified needles are being used. My mood dropped a little when I left, though. Getting out there had been simple enough, but getting home proved more problematic. My original plan had been for Phil to take me to the BART station in Oakland like he always does, but it turns out his car is quite dead. Fine, no problem; the last Transbay bus from Alemeda to San Francisco, the same line I'd taken to get out there to begin with, picked up around the corner right before 11pm. So I could take that. I haven't tried to take that particular bus at night for well over a year, though, because if I had, I would have noticed the signs at the bus stops announcing that certain tunnels in and out of Alameda were closed at night for repairs, and as such the Transbay bus was heavily detoured and I had to pick it up somewhere else entirely. The sign was kind enough to specify which bus to take to get to the new stop, but it was all dependent upon said bus coming along on time. If it didn't, and I missed the Transbay, I'd have to try to make it to the BART station via one of the other bus lines, and hope that it was still running, lest I find myself semi-stranded in Oakland late at night. Heavy thoughts for someone in the early stages of the Vicodin Crash to have to deal with. I did make it onto the Transbay bus on time, although I was feeling a bit more self-conscious of my post-electro orange face than usual. It might have been the people staring. (Just because you're paranoid...) As I descended into the Muni station back in the City, my weird optimism from earlier in the evening was gone. I was a mutant, a freak. Every girl I saw was a reminder of what I was not. There's nothing wrong with being a tranny, but I saw in them a simple grace which I could never hope to achieve, and so long as I had this damn fur coming out of the lower half of my head I'd never even get close. And even when it's all gone, who can say for sure that it'll make a difference? Perhaps I'm mythologizing electrolysis in the same way that other trannies mythologize SRS: as some kind of magical process which will make everything better. It's a terrifying thought, the notion that even when my face is sans hair, I'll still be so obviously a big male... Perhaps the most unsettling part of the ride home was the guy who looked like The Ex's father. Not quite a dead ringer, but close, particularly in the way he dressed and the shadow the ball cap cast across his face and those beady little eyes...and, of course, I'm convinced he was looking at me. (You were expecting otherwise?) And in his eyes I imagined I could see the disgust and disapproval with which the actual item had no reacted when being told why I broke up with his daughter...the same disgust and disapproval with which so many people learned to regard me last year... I'm going back on Saturday morning, and I went ahead and scheduled another appointment on Monday. He suggested I may not need to come in on Monday since he'd probably clear me on Saturday, but I can already see growth. So I'm going in on Monday no matter what. Now, sleep.
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Wednesday, 17 May 2000 (big sky) 5:11am Have you ever felt disconnected? Like you weren't quite a part of the world around you? 8:48am New girl behind the counter last night when I picked up my 'mones. I think she was nervous, based on the number of times she said "sir" and "Mr. Connelly." I supposed I could have pulled a Ravensglow on her and went ballistic, but the name on the bottle is "Jeffrey" (well, they spelled it "Jeffery," pick pick) and my shadow was poking through, so I didn't see the point.
Besides, at long last (and just as I was beginning to come
to terms with the loss), they've started carrying Street
Wear Tar eyeliner again. Based on the printing on the pencil
itself, it looks Revlon stopped making them for a while.
At $4 a pop they're entirely too expensive, but I don't care.
Right now, it's a comfort I require.
I just made an appointment for 7pm tomorrow night, and I'm still scheduled for Saturday. It's time to get serious. Pain, finances, emotions—nothing but cheap excuses. I know what needs to be done, I know what I need to do.
Vicodin, pain, oblivion...
3:25pm My earliest memory of it would be junior high school. It was a very bad period for me; among other things, my brother was two grades ahead of me and had cut a swatch of social destruction for which many people felt I should be held responsible. I was completely unprepared for it, and my own inherent clumsiness combined with the onslaught of adolescence didn't help. It wasn't a suicide attempt. I didn't want to die—I just wanted to be able to live, somehow, with these intense, confusing emotions and their involuntary effect on my motor functions. The energy they were creating had to go somewhere. And, for reasons alien to me, my wrist was very inviting. My fingernails did nothing but cause a little redness, yet at the time it was enough.
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Tuesday, 16 May 2000 (rouge) 4:47am I know how you feel, Laurel. Someday, mine's going to get me killed. 9:32am Argh. Why is it on days when I go without makeup, I end up meeting important people from other departments? I hate giving them the wrong impression. I'm not wearing any foundation or anything on my lips, but I've done an emergency fix on my eyes to compensate. It's all about presentation. 12:15pm I guess I must be feeling better than yesterday. 5:37pm Good lord, another designer just quit. They're dropping like flies around here. Pretty soon it'll just be me and The Fidget Queen. And then the taste of lead... 10:48pm alienation. self-harm.
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Monday, 15 May 2000 (like a possum) 9:06am I went into Dark Garden for the first time a few years ago. It was for an open house or show of some sort, and I think we may have gone with Louise. If nothing else, Pandora had told me about it, and got her corsets made there. Probably still does. That time, I couldn't have felt more out of my element. I was witnessing a world which I had almost no chance of entering, and I felt I must look like just another big hairy guy from off the street, maybe collecting masturbatory images for later. When Madeline and I went in on Saturday, my personal vibe was a little different; I felt more like a flat-out poseur. (I really don't like that word, and would never use it to describe anyone other than myself.) Like in my passe black lipstick and department-store waist-cincher and ungainly body I had no business being there, a place where the real goth girls come to get down to business. Of course, they're nowhere near that elitist—my money's as good as anyone else's, I know a number of trannies who go there—but it's still hard not to feel intimidated as hell. One of these days, I just need to take the plunge and spend a couple hundred on the real thing. The tempation was strong to do it right then and there, but I resisted. (In the meantime, I'm dying for the Foxy Lady Boutique to call and tell me my order's arrived...) From there, we walked a couple blocks to Borderlands Books, a sci-fi/horror/fantasy bookstore I'd gone to once before with Summer for a Richard Laymon reading. (I've also missed at least one John Shirley reading there.) If Dark Garden was the candy store filled with imported delicacies that we couldn't afford on our allowance, then this was the place where you can get a handful of peanut butter cups for a nickel, and what more do you need than that? Indeed, I think it seemed to Maddy like I'd been holding out on her: she's lived in San Francisco since December and I've only brought her here NOW? After having mildly praised myself for not getting anything at Dark Garden, I apparently made up for it at the bookstore: I bought new copies of John Shirley's Eclipse, Kim Newman's Apocalypse Movies and ordered Still Dead, the followup to Book of the Dead. I'd been considering ordering that and Eclipse on the internet anyway, so the support of brick-and-mortar stores seemed a good enough justification. As the newer and especially evil forms of capitalism run rampant, it's important to do one's part to keep the older and more traditionally evil forms alive. And, boy, have I. On Tuesday evening after I left Daljeet's I still had some time to kill, so I engaged in some heavy browsing at the cat-filled bookstore across the street. (One of the cats was snuggled into a space between some books on a shelf, and taped to that spot on the shelf was a note which says "Cat is not for sale!" When I read that at first, I jumped, thinking that maybe the cat was stuffed. Nope, it's a regular, living cat who knows where it likes to be.) I left with six books, although I spent less on them altogether than I did on a single book at Borderlands: Graffiti by Robert Reisner, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli, Civilization and Its Discontents by ol' Sigmund, McDonald's: Behind the Arches by John F. Love and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher. It was actually the book on McDonald's which drew me into the store, as it was on the sale cart on the sidewalk and at first I thought it was McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial, the book on the famous and extremely absurd McLibel case in which the McDonald's Empire sued a pair of activists for slander because they handed out leaflets exposing some of their less savory corporate policies. I borrowed the book from the library a while back and have been looking for a copy ever since, but reading the history of the company is proving equally fascinating. (Nutritionally speaking, we're all doomed.)
The Machiavelli book is also one I've always been curious about. I'm not fond of politics
and power, but it can't hurt to have a better understanding of them. Who knows, maybe
it'll have that profound, life-changing impact on me that I always seem to be looking for
in books. Its presence on a bookshelf will certainly make me look like I'm smart (an illusion which
I always strive to maintain), and best of all, it fits into my jacket pocket so I can
take it with me to the restroom. Who says
teevee has had a negative impact on my generation's feelings about books?
If I wasn't entirely sure before Saturday night, I became sure. The magic time is when my face is no longer scorched from electro, but the shadow hasn't returned yet. Well, the shadow's back. I shaved on Saturday evening when getting ready for Shrine, and there it was. Particularly visisble on the upper lip, since there's nothing new under the sun. I have an appointment with Phil this Saturday, and (once again?) I'm strongly considering upping the frequency of sessions. When I was first getting cleared in the summer of '98, I was going on average of twice a week. Considering what a bitch of a commute that was (bus from Autodesk to the San Rafael depot, another bus across the Richmond Bridge to the El Cerrito BART, BART to the 12th Street Station in Oakland, bus from the station to Phil's), this one would be a breeze (a twenty-minute walk to the Transbay Terminal, and a single bus to Phil's). Granted, at the time I had a full face 'o fur, so there was always something for him to get at, and one area would be healing from the last time while he worked on another. At this point I may or may not have enough growth over all to make going more than once a week feasible. Then there's the issue which I'd hoped to avoid by starting electro long before going full-time was an option: I'll look like hell on a regular basis, and be blatantly unshaven before appointments. Hardly anybody at Autodesk ever asked why my face would frequently be red and swollen (typically much worse than it gets now), and as such I didn't feel quite as self-conscious as I would have otherwise. I had bangs and dressed in black, but I wasn't quite as...noticeable then as I am now. Oh, tell the truth and bumfuck the devil: I wasn't nearly as vain then as I am now. For good reason, I suppose. In any event, it's exactly why I'm not full-time. There's only so much I can expect out of people when I have obvious facial hair.
(I was standing in line at a camera shop a while back when the woman ahead
of me in line told the clerk her name was "Ravensglow." After mentally flipping a coin,
the clerk quite asked for her first name. "Ravensglow" got extremely agitated
and snapped, "That's my full name!" I couldn't help thinking that every day
must be an endless source of frustration if she can't give people the necessary
slack to handle a name like that. I'm sure she's sick of people asking—and
I got the impression she has something of a chip on her shoulder to begin
with—but can you really blame them? She has as much right as anyone to define
herself however she wants, certainly a right which I've indulged to a
much larger degree, but you've gotta expect a certain learning curve with the
public.)
For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what I was going to wear. (The shallowest of crises, that of fashion.) I couldn't find the particular top I'd had in mind, and one of my fishnet stockings had up and disappeared. I wasn't quite in the mood for stripeys, but I wanted to wear my slit skirt, hence a dress wasn't an option, and what's more if I couldn't find my stockings then wearing a fishnet shirt under the top would throw off the balance... I seem to be somewhat phobic about displaying my actual body and try to cover it up as much as possible. This time, though, it wasn't quite going to work. So I decided to go basic, to remove unnecessary pluralities. Buetz without stockings, slit skirt, and a Lenore babydoll t-shirt. With the waist-cincher underneath, of course, and my hair in pigtails just to make the quasi-schoolgirl thing all the more perverse. Otherwise, bare arms for the first time in months and bare legs in public for the first time in at least two years. Like most ideas of mine regarding what to wear, I think it came from looking at how certain women are dressed, pointing and saying "I wanna do that." (Usually it's more a case of nudging Maddy and nodding in the general direction. I don't have many subtle bones in my body, but they're mostly in the right places.) And I was seeing a whole host of them earlier that day as we continued our candy store tour at Rainbow, a hippie supermarket of the sort where you can find things like liquid amino acids and Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps. Every time I saw someone in buetz and a skirt either sans stockings or in nude hose, I felt a small sense of envy. The fact that my shadow was coming back in so strong wasn't helping matters much, either. For better or for worse, in my mind the presence of one precludes me being able to do the other. It's probably, like Anodyne and many others have suggested about my height issues, something I just need to get over. Eventually, I probably will. We weren't at Shrine for very long, but it was nice while we were there. Tania and Whitman showed up for the first time in a few months, and Tiff and I surprised each other with our presence. I was surprised because I figured she'd be at Bound, and she was surprised because I was out two weeks in a row, a rare occurence at best. Laurel was also there in full battle gear, and Anodyne was working the door. I discovered later that she let Maddy in for free ("2 for 1," technically), which was incredibly cool of her. The fashion show obviously didn't happen. I don't know when it's going to happen. I'm sure when it does, I'll be told ahead of time. Whitman was a bit schnookered, but like any good goth Scotsman in latex pants all he needed was a puke followed by some 7-Up and fresh air to get him back on his feet. The aforementioned puke occured right next to me in the booth at Shrine, and by some conflagaration of angles and vectors which surely can never be repeated, my bare legs managed to avoid being splattered. After giving him and Tania a ride home, Maddy and I went to Sparky's for a post-club snack. It was packed, as it always is at two on Sunday morning. We were seated close to the window (close enough to be seen by Brigid when she arrived shortly after us), and even closer to the patrons on our immediate left and right. The ones on my right weren't so bad, and like many people over the course of the evening had asked where Maddy got her Betty Page lunchbox. The people on my left, however, were assholes who needed to die. They were dot-commies of the worst sort: young, white, rich, male and presently very drunk. (All of this is based on empirical evidence from listening to them talk, and I've been in this business long enough to tell.) Seated about ten minutes after us, the one next to me asked if Maddy was going to drink her water. She was away from the table just then, so I informed him that yes, she was, and that if he wanted water I was sure the staff of the restaurant would be more than happy to provide him with some. The paranoid part of me was wondering if it was just a ruse to find out if I was a boy or a girl, but judging from they way they were glancing at my legs I suspect it might have been a moot point. you can look all you want, boys... Maddy returned to the table right after our food was brought out. (Note to myself: the chinese chicken salad at Sparky's sucks ass. It's not always bad at non-chinese restaurants, believe it or not. The one I ordered at the Bob's Big Boy in Fresno on xmas day was actually really damn good. You never can tell.) She got an omelette of some kind, and apparently the guy next to her was determined to find out what kind, since he spent an inordinate amount of time leaning over and staring at her plate. In a remarkable display of willpower, Maddy said nothing. She figured it wouldn't have been worth whatever trouble it may have caused, and she's right. Next time, though, it's Denny's or Grubsteak.
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Sunday, 14 May 2000 (baton rouge) 8:26am No fair. This is so not fair: we were promised it would be a rainy Mother's Day. So what the fuck is with the sunlight coming through the windows? Is it so much to ask, just once? Goddamned Sundays... 11:05am In a dream, someone was trying to get me to audition for (I think) Damn Yankees. This is just getting silly. On the plus side, it's started to rain... 10:15pm A day spent on the couch watching movies and teevee. Apparently this is what the rest of the population does on a fairly regular basis. Go figure. And, yeah, I called my mom. Got the answering machine, so it went well.
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Saturday, 13 May 2000 (rock minuet) 9:12am My father was in my second-sleep dreaming this morning. He said it was "nice to meet me," which bothered me a great deal. if it feels like you've never met me, it's because you were never paying attention before. Many members of my extended family were involved, a scenario which strikes me as unlikely in real life.
As usual, my dreams when I go back to bed after having awakened in the
middle of the night are the most fucked up, the most realistic and
most surrealistic at the same time. This may begin to result in me not
going to back to bed—when I get up at 4am, I'll just stay
awake—and I find that thought the most disturbing
of all. Why should I be afraid of such things? Beyond knowing that they're
just dreams, shouldn't I be embracing them, particularly the scary
or unsettling ones? One director whom I admire and another whom I don't
think has made a good movie since the mid-eighties but whom I must admit has
a terrific visual style (John Waters and Jim Cameron, respectively)
both love their bad dreams and draw inspiration from them, so surely
the worst thing I can do is try to avoid them...
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Friday, 12 May 2000 (white prism) 9:12am As she promised she would, The Den Mother has posted the scores to the pop quiz. (Since we're a high-tech company, it's a piece of paper taped to the wall.) It fills me with no small amount of pride to see that I did in fact get the lowest score: 47%. We actually went over the quizzes answer by answer in a meeting, thus proving that she has absolutely no qualms about treating us like we're in high school. In that respect, I get the impression that I'm being regarded as something of the class underachiever, the punker kid that most teachers will mostly ignore and pass at the end of the year just to get them out of their hair. (It also goes to show that standardized tests are inherently prejudicial; except for me, Byron and Leigh, everyone in the department works on a Macintosh and work on printed rather than online material, and as such most of the questions don't apply to my job. I'm a webmonkey on Win95, so how the fuck am I supposed to know the shift key command for an Officina astrophe on a Mac?) In this case, of course, there's no graduation per se—if I'm going to be getting out of this, it's up to me.
I'm somewhat tempted to write "Get on the short bus!" underneath my name on the list of scores,
but I probably won't.
What happened was, although her primary shock was my newly cut bangs, she was
still desperately trying to get me to stop coloring my hair. But she swore that
coloring my hair was causing it to fall out. Although I'm at least
six or seven inches taller than her, she looked up at my head and pronounced that
I was going bald, that she could see the bald spot developing. I guess she figured
that blatantly lying to me (on top of the insults) was justified, since it was for a good cause—i.e.,
me looking the way she wanted me to look. This was, after all, the worst family crisis
since Tom picked up a crack pipe.
Ebert's always good for it. Not that he frequently gives bad reviews; indeed,
he's more generous than most famous film critics, because he's willing to
admit it if he enjoyed a cheesey movie. Heck, he gave The Phantom Menace
3 1/2 out of 4 stars. Still, the real fun comes when he genuinely
hates a movie. Occasionally I like to go to the Search the Ebert Movie Files page, set the search
paramaters to "0 Stars to 1/2 Stars" and browse through the results. His
ability to find new ways to insult movies is quite inspiring.
My brother loaned me the book a few years back, raving about it as being the most accurate description of the Big Dumb Rock Guy life as he'd ever read, and the funniest. He was right on both counts—something on almost every page made me laugh, and if I wasn't recognizing myself, I was recognizing him. (Although set in a record store, the obsessive fanboy milieu is something I'm intimately familiar with from years in the video business.) Now, however, I find I'm identifying much more strongly with the female characters. Which I suppose is to be expected and a good sign, but still feels peculiar. It's not that they're not unsympathetic, no more so than any of the male characters, and I suppose that's part of the power of both the book and the movie: they're just people. I know people like this... Actually, a better way to put it is that I'm recognizing that there are aspects to relationships which go very much beyond gender. Though presented in this particular story as a male-female dynamic (such as why would someone like them want to be with someone like me?, the great Freud/Groucho conundrum), what's between the person's legs is quite irrelevant. Always has been, always will be.
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Thursday, 11 May 2000 (turning time around) 6:40am The nice thing about not being beholden to one particular interpretation of a subculture's rules? Of not giving a shit, in this case, whether something is "not really goth" or "too goth" or, god forbid, plain old "goth?" It means I can be excited about Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor reuniting and neither have to wrestle with my own conscience (gosh, i thought i had better taste than that! what will my friends think?) nor fear being rejected by the crowd (gosh, we thought you had better taste than that! what are we supposed to think about you now?).
Anyway, I'm not getting my hopes up about Manson appearing at the show next month, but
it's certainly a nice thought...
In fact, the only one I've seen is Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and that only barely qualifies because at the time nobody in America was entirely aware of what was going on. More accurately, Chaplin couldn't have been fully aware. The government knew, but saving the Jews from genocide didn't seem to be enough of a reason to get involved. But I digress. Anyway, I've never seen Life is Beautiful nor Jakob the Liar. (Nobody else saw the latter, so I'm hardly unique.) Quite frankly, the only one I'm really interested in is the only one I'll probably never get to see: Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried, a legendary if almost entirely unseen film directed by ol' Dr. Kelp himself in which plays a clown in a Nazi concentration camp enlisted to lure children to the gas chambers. For various reasons (legion, depending on how many different people you ask) the film has never been released. Howard wasn't even able to track it down, which means it almost certainly ain't out there. My cinema education may never be complete.
1:02pm
Mother's Day weekend, 1998. Friday, after a bitter fight which very nearly resulted in a (premature?) breakup, The Ex and I drove to Fresno. Saturday morning, my mother saw my bangs for the first time. I almost came out to her then and there but didn't, partially because I wanted to get into gender therapy first and partially because I for some reason didn't want to violate the sanctity of Mother's Day. Sunday, we went to a very uncomfortable brunch. Monday, I wrote about it.
3:10pm Turns out I got 47% on the pop quiz from last week. Much higher than I expected, really. The Big Boss made a rather disturbing announcement, disturbing to those of us who'd been trying to convince ourselves otherwise: "The Den Mother is now running this department." Somehow I managed not to audibly react.
Perhaps this means I've nested here long enough.
I should really know better than to smoke on nights we get pictures back.
honestly.
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