Fourth of July

So, last year, my partner and I decided to have a shindig at our house. We bought a ton of food, I fired up the grill, and nobody showed up. We have some sucky local friends. This year, I wanted to have a quiet fourth. No party. Just grilling for ourselves, and then a walk down to the park for the fireworks. I don't even have to park for this; it's right down the street.

Unbeknownst to me, my partner decided that we were having a party this year, and suddenly, I'm cooking for ten people. I can't say that I'm happy about this, but I'll get over it. I hope they show, because we have a LOT of food. I don't know if I have room in the fridge for the leftovers if we get last year's turnout, but I think I can get creative. I'm cooking pulled pork this year. I've never made pulled pork. I'm trying it two ways, one with a crock pot, the other with the oven. I don't have a smoker, unfortunately, but I've been tempted to build one a la Alton Brown's homemade smoker on Good Eats. The process of making both of these is a two day affair. Right now, in the home stretch, the house smells divine. I'm also making "atomic baked beans," which are actually chili without the chili peppers. Kind of baked beans on steroids, with a serious kick. I'm mainly making this for me, because nothing else I'm making will have a zing to it. Felicia doesn't like hot food. I love hot food. Compromises have to be made.

I'm probably going to be tasked with picking a movie, too. I wanted to watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly last year, but the folks who DID show up don't like Westerns. Their loss. I'm thinking The Dirty Dozen this year, or maybe I'll just go back to last year's plan. TGTB&TU is one of those Westerns for people who don't like Westerns, after all.

In honor of the date, here's a couple of blips for you.

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A quick shout out to a couple of my friends who are going through some trouble in their lives. Let me know if you need anything from me. I'm always here for you.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

We interrupt our usual angsty transgender shit for this bulletin...

The inimitable Man...or Astroman?



Oh, and for what it's worth, I'm taking a short break from blogging after last week's Japanese film blogathon on my movie blog.

On the Downhill Side

After a long period period of feeling amazingly good about things, I've been kinda down this week. Actually a lot down. It's the summer. It's hot. I hate hot weather. There are other things, too, but not that I'm willing to discuss in public. For the most part, I've been feeling very awkward in my own body. I'm well past due for making the change in how I face the world, and I'm getting more and more anxious as days go by.

Time is my enemy.

Keeping Up With the Joneses

I had an interesting lunch with my boss on Tuesday. She, my co-worker B, and I were pretty much keen to get the hell out of the office, so we went to a local microbrewery for lunch. They both had vanilla bean ale, while I had a super yummy bacon cheeseburger. And we spent the hour bitching about some of our co-workers.

Like most everyone else, our office is feeling the economic pinch, and some of the conversation revolved around who would be on the chopping block if things head south. Our entire IT department is vulnerable, it seems. One guy in particular hasn't endeared him to our management. We'll call him D. I'm not going to regale you with D's misdeeds. It's beside the point. D has several character flaws that make him just a JOY to work with, but for my purposes, this is the one that's relevant: he measures himself against other people by their possessions. If you let on that you're going to buy a spiffy TV, he'll buy a spiffier TV before you. Or, rather, one he deems to be spiffier, because, frankly, he doesn't know what he's looking at half the time. He's a dilettante. He's the kind of guy who picks up a copy of The Killer and thinks he knows something about Chinese movies. A lot of people are like this, and for the most part, they're harmless. I don't think this is true of D. D is a single parent by choice. He has two foster kids that he's trying to adopt (I presume). Why? I'm not really sure, but my boss suspects that he's doing it to one-up her and her husband, who have had two children in the last three years. Which, of course, is a completely psychotic reason. She and B speculated as to why he wasn't trying to have kids the old-fashioned way, but I don't want to go there. Anyway, that's all preface.

At this point in the conversation, I wonder aloud: "I wonder if he'll want to get a vagina when I get mine."

B: "Oh, if he does, he'll want a better one than yours."

Me: "Hah! Maybe he'll do some research and go for the multi-orgasmic model from Thailand that he can get for cheap."

My boss: "--" She was trying to keep from spewing vanilla bean ale through her nose.

After that, after hearing the various misdeeds of our IT department, I thought, "Okay. What I'm planning this year seems completely insignificant in comparison." And a second after I thought it, I said it aloud.

So, I guess my boss knows now. I think it's WAAAAAY down her list of worries.

Human Resources

I always cringe at the words "Human Resources." Is there a more dehumanizing phrase in the English language? Every time I hear it, I think that I'm a pristine mountainside about to be strip-mined. Ugh.

Unfortunately, we all have to deal with the HR department eventually, and today, I did exactly that. I walked in and asked to speak to someone about my impending on-the-job transition. I should probably back up for a minute here.

One of the many things that resulted from my vacation last month was the setting of a date for me to transition totally, everywhere. December 7 is the the date I picked. Far enough off to be an abstraction at the time, but now within the next six months. I think I'll be at a point with the physical stuff by then that I can step into the role without a hiccup. It also has some symbolic value to me.

Obviously, the pitfalls ahead are something I haven't reckoned on, so I have no idea what they'll be, and I'm pretty sure that they'll be work-related. So today, I let my employer know what I'm planning.

I went to the office and told the woman at the reception desk what I wanted to talk about and she steered me to a woman under whose aegis I fall. I told her when I'm planning to make the change, what my issues are, and I asked about their policies concerning what I'm planning.

It turns out, there ARE no policies.

Hrm.

Well, okay. So we discussed the current non-discrimination language in the employment policies, as well as their human rights statement, and we both kind of agreed that "sexual orientation" sorta covered me, but not really. Some of the language in the human rights statement seems like it goes even further:

"It is the expectation of the University that all employees and potential employees will be treated on the basis of their contribution or potential contribution without regard to personal characteristics not related to competence, demonstrated ability, performance, or the advancement of the legitimate interests of the University."

That's fairly encouraging.

And then I asked the bathroom question. The woman I was talking to offered an eminently sensible solution: "When you're presenting male, use the men's room; when you're presenting female, use the women's room." She's young. She doesn't have some of the ingrained prejudices some people have. My response was "I hope it's that easy." I know that it won't be. There isn't a unisex bathroom in the building where I work, and I'm sure that I'm going to make SOMEONE uncomfortable. We shall see.

In any event, I told her that I would forward the employment guidelines recommended by HRC to her (bitch all you want about them--I do too--but their employment guidelines are actually really useful). She recommended some on-campus resources. And I left it there. I still need to tell my immediate supervisors, and she assured me that it would be me, not them, who would initiate that when I'm ready.

All told, a baby step forward. Here's hoping it goes as smoothly in the future.

I'm Not Old Enough for This, Dammit!

So, one of the students in our office wasn't even born when I graduated from college.

Sheesh, time flies.

I went over to the house of some friends of ours who we haven't seen in a while. I was greeted, as expected, by their very friendly chocolate lab, but she wasn't walking so good and she wasn't nearly as full of piss and vinegar as I remembered. It dawned on me that it has been almost ten years since we sat in their living room watching the election returns in 2000.

Sheesh, time flies.

Maybe this is why the first fifteen minutes of Up had such an effect on me. But you can read about that on my movie blog. Life? It's what happens while you're busy making other plans.

Vacation Reveries

All things considered, I think my vacation went better than it had any right to go. Let me explain. Last Tuesday, two days before I was scheduled to hit the road and travel to Michigan, I started to come down with a cold. In past years, I used to shrug off colds in a couple of days, but this bastard hung on. I still have the remnants of the cold and I still wake up sounding like a lunger trying to heave up the last pieces of her useful lung tissue. Not fun. And for the first day or two of the vacation, this colored my experience. I felt like crap. I looked like crap. I had no confidence in my presentation to the world. Couple this with the awkwardness of getting to know my friend, Renee, as something more than a pattern of phosphor dots on a screen or a voice on the phone, all the while living in her home, and you have a situation that could have been terrible. Braining myself on the soap dish of her shower and shattering it in the process on the second day certainly didn't help things, either, and I feel awful about the prospect of her losing her deposit if her landlords are dicks when she eventually moves out.

But all of that was really for naught.

I was NOT going to have a sucky vacation. I wasn't. And Renee was a big part of the reason why. It's always hard to get a feel for a person over the internet, even people who talk and correspond with each other as often as the two of us. People edit their behavior on the net and you don't get the body language and the subtle changes in facial expressions. You don't FEEL them. Not really. Renee went to great pains in the weeks leading up to my visit to somehow deride herself so that she wouldn't be a disappointment of some sort when I met her in the flesh. She often describes herself as Godzilla. She thinks she is gigantic. And, well, she IS tall. She's a foot taller than I am. She had to bend over to hug me when I arrived and for a moment, I felt like I was being hugged by my mother when I was seven years old and only 4 feet tall. She welcomed us to "the Land of the Giants," because her furnishings are scaled to her and bid fair to swallow us up. In the pictures we took, we have a kind of mismatched Mutt and Jeff or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser look to us. But, really, Felicia and I are small people to start with, so whatever she believes of herself shouldn't be measured against my petite frame. Beth, Renee's roommate/soon-to-be-ex-wife is tall, too. You'd think she'd get the hint from living with someone who's in the same range. As I always say, we all have our crosses to bear, but she did herself a disservice. She's a lovely woman, and she has put herself back into society in a way that I admire to pieces. It's a testament to how much we liked each other that, after living together in fairly small space for a week, she wasn't ready for us to leave and I wasn't ready to go. I say "liked," but that's totally insufficient, because I've loved Renee as the sister I never had for a while now, and this trip only served to cement that.

Anyway, our original plan was to lounge around and watch movies and cook and talk for five days. We had a gathering of her friends for a gaming party to go to on Friday and Saturday, but beyond that, I had no ambitions to do anything else. The gaming party was great fun. It was interesting being introduced to Renee's friends and acquaintances with no preface as to my status. I was treated very nicely, and no one I met got the pronouns wrong (about which I will have more to say somewhere below). These are people who have no frame of reference, no image of the "before" me, only the after. It's a valuable lesson. Watching movies was great fun, too, though I'll refrain from discussing this because I'll be writing about all of it on my movie blog sometime this weekend or next.

The only kink in this plan is the fact that I wasn't alone. This was Felicia's vacation, too, and even though I told her that this wasn't going to be a sight-seeing vacation for me, she had her expectations and I'm sure that the prospect of sitting around with both of us while we watched horror movies and talked about transgender shit was not appealing. This was exacerbated by the fact that SHE was sick, too, and not in the same way I was. She was vomiting sick. Bad. Fortunately, that cleared up for her in time to do some of the things that she wanted to do. One of those things was a visit to the Detroit Zoo, which had a pretty cool dinosaur exhibit that inspires a horror-movie kind of mind like mine to imagine a true conflation of Westworld and Jurassic Park in which the dinosaurs are killer robots run amok. Felicia also wanted to do some shopping and we went into Ann Arbor for a visit to a pretty swanky used book store. I could have dropped a LOT of money there.

If I Ran the Zoo:

The zoo provided us with what turned out to be our only real photo op and we made the most of it. Renee suggested that she needed a picture of her zebra print jacket with a real zebra in the frame:

And, of course, the dinosaurs were irresistible:

You can see the difference in our sizes in that picture.

This one was the most fun:

There are a lot of other things about our trip to the zoo that I could write about, from the kids that snickered at us (I don't mind being clocked, but don't be an asshole) to the penguin porn, but I'll leave that for another time.

Pronoun Trouble:

In spite of the fact that I've been telling people that pronoun usage isn't important to me, or that it "wouldn't bother me much," it turns out that that isn't really true. As I mentioned above, none of Renee's friends got it wrong. The person who consistently got it wrong was Felicia. I feel a little bad for her in this regard, because she's trying her best and she has ten years of me being someone else to contend with. But it still irks me. I like to think that it wouldn't irk me as much as it does if something else hadn't happened to me prior to leaving on vacation.

Some of you may remember the video I made with my friend, Kevin Lee, and that that video was shown in Berlin last month. Kevin posted the introductions he made while he was in Berlin on his web site. He filmed them and posted them to YouTube. While he is very complimentary to me (for which I'm thankful; thanks Kevin), he consistently genders me male:



Coming on the heels of this, getting gendered wrong by the person I live with began to grate on me. Renee had her own issue with this, but I'll leave that for her to explain.

"How long have you been an activist?"

Felicia asked me this on the way home. This kind of blindsided me for two reasons. First, it points out to me that even though we live together (and have for seven years), there are a lot of things about me that Felicia doesn't know. I'm not exactly surprised by this--we really don't spend as much time together as we would like--but it's a shock none the less. Second, I'm not entirely sure I am an activist, though I've given money to the usual suspects and there's an argument to be made that the act of being an openly transsexual woman--a publicly transsexual woman, no less--is an activist act. Visibility IS activism in some ways. This question arose because Felicia was questioning me on some of the things that Renee and I discussed during the week (the use of the word "cisgender," for instance, a word which she had never heard). Inevitably, my interest in politics intersects with my queer identity, and I suppose there's an activist element to many of my beliefs. Perhaps I should act on them more often than I actually do.

Book Club:

The capstone to the trip was a stop in the Chicago area to meet my friend Shelly, who I know from the IMDB horror boards. She's only the second contributor to the IMDB that I've met in person, and I wish I could have spent more time with her and maybe watched a movie or two. Instead, we had lunch at an awesome Dixie Kitchen in Lansing, IL. I had jumbalaya. Shelly is a contributor to an eighties nostalgia blog, and one of the first things she told me when she arrived was that she had given me a shout out for ideas on her latest post. If you like horror movies, check it out, because she approaches the subject with the rigor of an academic and the enthusiasm and love of a fan.

Oddly enough, we didn't discuss horror movies all that much.

We talked about my transition, we talked about politics, we talked about books. She and I are reading Moby-Dick together this summer as a kind of book club (others are welcome to join, but right now it's just us). She's a huge fan of Melville and so am I. We also found one of those lacunae in my knowledge of culture. I have a big blind spot for the important black women writers. I've read one book by Zora Neale Hurston and I hated Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I do love Toni Morrison, although I had to work at it. I suspect that once we finish with Moby-Dick, we may move on to Their Eyes Were Watching God. This is probably a good thing, because one of Felicia's areas of academia is African American lit, so this can be a bonding experience for us, too. And I hate not being able to talk knowledgeably on, well, anything, but that's my egomania for you.

The visit was fabulous, but it was all too short. Soon enough we were back on the road, Shelly back to Michigan (we had to go to Chicago to meet; go figure) and us back to Missouri.

So, all told, it went better than it should have.

Addendum:

I mention the word "cisgender" above. It's not a word I particularly like, even though I understand, and even approve of the motivations for its coinage. The reason I don't like it is because I think it sounds awful. It's a clumsy word to say when measured purely in the realm of rhythm, cadence, and pronounceability. And even if it fixes itself in the transgender lexicon (and all those glossaries that inevitably wind up at the beginning or end of books on transgenderism), if the rest of the world doesn't understand it--which it doesn't--it's all for naught. Why do I mention this? Because Blogger's spellchecker kicks it out. That says something to me.

Namaste.

King of the Road

Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let...fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah, but..two hours of pushin' broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road.

--Roger Miller, "King of the Road"

I'm off on vacation tomorrow. I'm traveling up to Michigan to visit my friend, Renee Knipe. I've never met Renee face to face, and I'm very excited about it. I'm all packed. Felicia is downstairs packing her stuff. We'll head out tomorrow just after eight, just after we drop the dogs at the vet to be boarded while we're gone. I doubt I'll be posting anything on the internet before I get home next Wednesday, but you never know. Renee has an internet connection, after all, and I'm sure we'll be taking pictures. We'll be driving through Chicago, where a nest of my online correspondents live. I wish I could stop there. There are awesome things to do in Chicago. Some other time, I guess. At the very least, I'll stop there to have lunch on the way back with my friend, Shelly, who I met through the IMDB. I've never met her face to face, either. This is going to be an interesting trip.

Still more art stuff...

Well, here's the finished version of the drawing I did a couple of days ago. He came out more or less how I saw him in my head, which is ALWAYS satisfying. This is pretty much pure vector. It may look like I've indulged in some Photoshop-y effects, but believe me, I haven't. This was a gas to draw.

Enjoy.

Sketching Over Lunch (Again)

I drew this guy to get an idea of what I want a character for my secret project to look like. He more or less looks like what was in my head, which is a victory. This is an unusually tight sketch for me (I'm notoriously sloppy when I use physical media). I'll ink and color this in Illustrator, probably tonight.

Negative Space

I've done a fair amount of cartooning, so I'm always interested to see the nuts and bolts of how other people approach the art of making comics. Now, I've never worked on a production line, which is the way that the major comic book companies like to make their books, so there are a lot of things that they do that are flat-out alien to my process. I was thinking about this when I stumbled across a page of DC's new Metal Men strip for their Wednesday Comics book, set to debut in a couple of months. This page is by the very, very good Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, who I've admired for some time (you can click to make it bigger):

This page is really elegant, old-school superhero stuff. Clean and unfussy. But one of the things that just floors me is the fact that Garcia-Lopez doesn't include the word balloons in his layout. Mind you, I know why he doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that not designing around the word balloons and captions is completely alien to the way I do things. When I lay out a comics page, word balloons are often the first thing I draw so I can integrate them into the design of the page and the flow of the narrative. This is fairly common among people that are creating comic as a kind of one-person band, but it also has some benefits. My favorite letterer in comics is Dave Sim, who also wrote and drew every issue of Cerebus the Aardvark. Here's a panel that's characteristic of some of his wilder lettering fancies:

This sort of thing is, to say the least, verrrrry difficult if you design and draw your pages without the balloons and captions. Sim makes the words integral to the image. This idea really comes from Will Eisner, who used to put a ton of verbal information into elements of the page design, like in this splash page for a Spirit story:


In any event, going back to the Garcia-Lopez page: this way of doing things forces the artist to guess where the balloons and captions are, and it requires an act of faith that the letterer is going to do a good job of adapting his work to the design provided by the artist. I've seen some good comics pages go horribly wrong at this stage, but it's usually invisible. Still, I can't help but think that it's limiting.

Not that I think anyone reading this gives two hoots about any of this, but I think it's interesting.

Cheers.

Some random musings for the start of May

It took a while, but I finally got a message from someone asking me what the meaning of my blog's title is. "Scheherezade's Sister" is taken, obviously, from the 1,001 Nights. Scheherezade was the clever storyteller who forestalled her death and the death of her sister by telling her husband, the Sultan a story every night, ending before the end so that the Sultan would have to spare her to hear how it came out. She did this under the pretext of telling a story to her younger sister, Dunyazad (which is a user name I occasionally use, in addition to "Dr. Morbius"). I'm a sucker for the Arabian Nights, and Scheherezade is one of my very favorite fictional characters. I mean, sure, she's a framework for gathering together hundreds of stories, but her own story outshines almost all of the tales she told. In any event, when I first got a home computer, I named it Scheherezade and when I got on the internet, I realized that I was in the position of Dunyazad. It was telling me stories. The super jumbo computer I use at work these days is NOT named Scheherezade. It's named Colossus, after the computer that takes over the world in the movie, Colossus: The Forbin Project.

While I'm at it, "Dr. Morbius" comes from Forbidden Planet. He's the Prospero character who conjures monsters from the id, which is the name of my movie website (which I've been neglecting). My sister blog, Krell Laboratories, predates this blog, and since it was linked in with my original web site, you can see where the name comes from. Anyway...

I've also had a couple of conversations about why I don't seem to write about TG issues much. Well, I write more than I thought I would, but the simple fact of the matter is that there's no drama for me in this. Oh, sure, I could catalogue the physical stuff, but to what end? For the most part, my transition has been as smooth as you could imagine, so I don't know that my experience is terribly useful to anyone. I mean, I read a lot of TG blogs, and their experience is drastically different from mine. As a result, I'll probably continue blogging about art and movies and politics and just about anything else but angsty tranny shit. 'Cause I'm just not feelin' it.

I'm greatly looking forward to going to visit Renee Knipe next week. I've known her for four years now and she's one of my very best friends, but we still haven't met face to face. That's social networking for you, I guess. We're going into business together, so hopefully I'll be able to write this trip off on my taxes next year. We need to make some money first, I suppose. Felicia is wondering what there is to do in Detroit, because she's not terribly down with our plan of cooking, watching movies, playing games with some of Renee's friends, and so on. We'll probably visit a museum or two, and maybe the zoo. But I don't have any set itinerary right now. I'm just looking forward to meeting Renee. At some point in time, I'd love to stage a huge week-long party for all of my scattered friends on the net, but my house isn't really big enough for it. I'm sure the dogs would have a gas. If this business venture goes off and I suddenly find myself wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, I'll have to take up the idea for real. For now it's just a pipe dream.

Ah, well.