10 february 2024
This comes up for me every year in my Facebook memories, and this
year I'd like to make it into a blog post that can be more widely shared.
This is a big long thing, but I think it's important, so please bear with me if you will.
As you grow up, particularly when you are a child, but throughout your life, you are a sponge. You take in experiences and kinda store them in your brain. Think of it as a database. You take in all this information, and it gets stored. The stuff that's going on around the information itself, it also gets stored. People's reactions to what you do and say and how you portray yourself, they all get attached to this information. Think of it as metadata. The stuff that happens to you, the stuff that you do, all the reactions to it, and how it makes you feel, that all gets stored in your brain and attached to that data.
You also develop a worldview. Something that works to make sense of the information that's been stored. Call that a schema. You have this schema, and every once in a while, you'll run through some of that information in your brain, and the schema helps you to make sense of it, and the information itself helps to verify that your schema is correct.
So - what's happened in my life, quite a few times, is that my schema gets changed. My view of myself, who I am, and how I interact with the world changes. That will usually prompt me to take my internal database - all the information that's stored in my brain about myself and my experiences - and check that metadata against my schema.
This is how sexuality and gender identity work in my mind. I had ideas about how those things worked when I was younger, and when I ran that schema against my internal database, it helped me make sense of the world and my place in it. Then that schema changed (quite a few times, actually) and I re-ran that database against it, and was able to make more sense of the world. It also means that every time I re-run through that set of information, I reevaluate the metadata that's been set on it. Particularly the sets of metadata around attraction, identity, and self. Sometimes that reevaluation means that I set new and different metadata around those events based on my new understandings of myself and the world around me.
The point being, it's all right. It's okay to be a different person than you were five, ten, fifteen years ago - hopefully life is full of learning and changing. There's nothing wrong or deceptive about coming to new understandings of previous information about yourself based in the light of a new schema and understanding of who you are and what you are about.
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03 january 2024
I got an email today from Medium saying that "You've got a story, now's the time to write it." and
"There's arguably no better habit than writing. Do it every day and you'll grow as a thinker,
communicator, and human being."
I agree with you, Medium. What I disagree with you about is where to do it. I don't want to write on
Medium, have my thoughts owned and monetized by Medium. I want to write here, on tilde, where it's
not as serious an endeavor, and where I can post without any sort of subscription or tracking or other
crap that most blogging platforms inflict upon you.
I want to write more. I feel like I've got things to say, and maybe they are worth listening to, but a lot
of it falls in the category of "feels".
I want to tinker more. I want to putter around more. I did that a lot during my time off from work, and
it was not just really nice, it helped me to parse and think about how I'm doing and my
relationship/understanding of the world. I need to figure out how to do more of that in days that I have
at work, and maybe even do some of that during work.
I want to be more gentle to myself. If I don't get a lot of writing and tinkering done this year, I'm
not going to beat myself up over it. I'm sick of things that are regretful, I'm sick of hard resolutions
where "I'm going to do this thing, and if I don't, I will feel really bad."
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12 december 2023
This is somewhat of last night's feels, but still something I wanted to write about.
Last night I felt off, and was really struggling to figure out what was going on
with me. This happens a lot, and I've never been quite sure how to handle it.
One of my favorite books for attempting to deal with self-crisises is Kate Bornstein's
101 Alternatives to Suicide. While I was definitely not suicidal, it's still a useful
reference for what to do when I just... don't feel right.
One of the things that she talks about is doing a diagnostic. That's usually in the sense
of something that can tell you about your current state -- a tarot reading or some other
kind of self evaluation. Last night, I took the idea of a diagnostic literally.
I think of myself sometimes as more technology than person. It's an abstraction -- I don't
literally think of myself as technology, but I understand and identify sometimes more with
technology than I do with people. One of the things you can do with technology is run a
literal diagnostic -- in the 80's and 90's this was often in the form of a "Diagnostics
Diskette". You'd put this diskette in the machine, turn it on, and it would run through
an analysis of all of the component systems of the machine. RAM, CPU, Disk, Video, Keyboard,
Serial interfaces, etc, etc.
So last night I divided myself into a variety of systems. I went with the following list:
Cognitive,
Emotional,
Gastrointestinal,
Endocrine,
Sartorical (clothing),
Physical Plant (the body),
Social,
Belief
and I went through each trying to discover in a brief sentence or two what the operational status
was of each. I think it exposed that there are a lot of complex reasons for how I'm feeling
lately. A lot about how I'm feeling has nothing to do with mysel per se, but more about how
I'm relating to "the state of the world". In short, a lot of systems are currently strained or
taxed, and that means that they are often having erratic behavior or other symptoms of being
overloaded.
With that data, I was able to write out a "repair plan". It's going to take a while, as most
long-term repairs do, but it at least gives me something that identifies the problem and comes
up with something I can actually do about it.
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01 october 2023
I've been struggling a bit today to figure out how to sum up a lot of my feels lately.
There's been a lot this last week, and I'm not sure quite how to untangle them and understand
them, but I figured that doing a bit of writing here might be the best way to deal with them.
So, here we go.
Monday morning, $job laid off 75 people. Rational me knows that tech companies have been laying
people off a lot lately, and is astonished that $job has gone for so long without some kind of
action like this. Emotional me was shattered. I've spent the week mostly being a shoulder,
trying to process, and trying to reconcile what exactly my values are with regards to work.
I had done some work on myself earlier this year and came to the realization that my primary
purpose at work is to reduce the toil and pain of other people as much as possible. Making
money for the company is secondary, maybe even tertiary. So, when this news hit, I felt more
than anything else. People I knew, hell, people I interviewed, no longer had a job.
I'm not a fan of capitalism. And I'm not a fan of grind culture, which is absolutely pervasive
in the tech industry. I think when people are stressed and squashed in the way that grind
culture demands, they actually increase risks, take shortcuts, and most importantly, they
ignore the signs of danger and burnout that their body/mind is giving them. I know, because
it's happened to me.
I'm trying to resolve my internal conflicts around working for a tech company and wanting
to live a more sufficent-ish life. I like the principles of Permacomputing and Hopepunk,
so the question is -- how can I make our home and lives more in alignment with what I want?
I have been thinking a lot about the idea of a home as an organic being. I think about
places like Howl's Castle, or Hooty (the Owl House), and while I don't necessarily
want a sentinent home, I do want one that is cozy and does its' best to take care
of its inhabitants.
And I'm not sure how to get there. But I'm thinking and working on it. I'm resting and
dreaming about it. And I'm actively pursuing rest in opposition to capitalism
(something I have learned from Tricia Hersey's Rest is Resistance).
Deep churning feels, y'all.
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10 september 2023
It's my birthday.
d8888 .d8888b.
d8P888 d88P Y88b
d8P 888 888
d8P 888 888d888b.
d88 888 888P "Y88b
8888888888888 888
888 Y88b d88P
888 "Y8888P"
(This looks great in the feels app. It looks terrible on the web.)
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28 may 2023
Today, some thoughts about Amateur Radio:
I've been dipping my toe back into Amateur Radio this weekend. It's been
a long time since I've done anything with it, and I've definitely had some
hangups around getting back into it.
I started tinkering around with radio and computers in the early 90's. At
the time, I was using a piece of software called JNOS to talk to other
folks via packet radio using something called the AMPRnet. This is all
a fancy way of saying that were were talking back and forth using
TCP/IP over ham radio, and because the internet was in it's infancy,
it was one of the ways that I could communicate with folks all over
the world.
It's tied into my feelings about my grandfather, and masculinity as a
whole. His basement was the typical "mad scientist" area growing up through
the end of his life. All sorts of experiments and projects were always going
on, sometimes at the expense of other things that could be going on in his life.
I also find it an intensely political hobby, even though there's a understood
norm that we're supposed to keep politics out of it. It tends to attract folks
who tend towards the right-wing, and I get tired of the intersection of
second amendment and radio talk.
So I'm trying some new things. There's a Rainbow Amateur Radio Club, (rara.org),
and I've joined. I've got a little JNOS server set up on a raspberry pi (not
transmitting yet) that I'm tinkering with. I'm cleaning up and charging old
equipment, and trying to figure out what I want to be doing with things --
what are the old interests worth dusting off, and what are the things that
it's time to let go of?
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23 april 2023
Haven't written in a while. Feels as of late:
Had friends over to our house for dinner and games last night. First time
we've had anyone who wasn't working on the house over since the start of
the global pandemic. Felt nice. But also exhausted. Afterwards I just
conked out in bed, and woke up with a bunch of joint pain.
Shifting responsibilities at work. I took on leadership of the LGBTQ+
DEI subcommittee at work, which won't mean much for when appraisals and
promotions come around, but means a great deal to me personally.
Also taking on a project that involves writing a bunch of Scala. It's been
really hard to wrap my head around things, but it's also been very rewarding.
The total feels are optimistic, but cautious. There's a lot going on, but
the things that are going on are feeding my soul.
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05 february 2023
The trip for work is upon me. Monday, I get in a metal tube
and fly to Salt Lake City. Home of the first ban on HRT
for teenagers.
I'm trying to have a bit of hope - my work is actually pretty
decent when it comes to issues around diversity... at least
they talk a good talk. We'll see what they're actually like
and about in person for the next few days.
It is also bringing about a bunch of feels around myself
and my identity (thanks brain, let's question everything!
again! some more!). I just recently realized that some
strange feelings when I present over-femme might be
categorized as dysphoria that's reminding me, that oh,
yeah, my gender falls more in the "nonbinary" space
than it does in anything called "woman." idk,
"woman adjacent", or "cacusing with the women" is probably
more accurate.
oof. feels.
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28 december 2022
So... yesterday PDX had the largest number of people without power anywhere in the
United States. And we were some of them. We went 11 hours without power in our
home, and it was late into the night before we had the return of home internet.
There are a few things that come to mind from this experience. The first one
being resilience. When confronted with a lack of power, we figured out how to
keep going. We ate food from cans (sardines for lunch, yum!), we dug out lamps
and candles, we listened to the radio a little, talked a lot, and played board
games by the light of LEDs charged by a little solar panel.
Part of this going as smoothly as it did is planning. It wasn't an accident
that we have emergency food stored, solar lighting ready to go (that's more to
do with my mom being obsessed with all things solar, but I digress), an obsession
with keeping up-to-date with the world regardless of what state it's in, and so
on. We've had my father-in-law staying with us, and our practices of resilience
scaled very well to accomodate him.
That's not to say it wasn't rough. Lack of heat and entertainment does things to
people. When the internet came back on in the morning, I realized how much I miss
bits and pieces that it contributes to my daily routine. Without the devices that
I rely on for contact and services, I felt diminshed.
Today is maybe back to normal, but not quite. There's debris scattered around
our condo complex, it's still rainy and cold out, there's still various weather
related warnings that my phone is yelling at me about today. But all-in-all,
I feel pretty good about today and what it might bring.
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14 november 2022
Lost a friend this week. She was so full of life and energy, and there's
a bit of me that's really sad that I wasn't able to spend more time with
her over the years. Also a reminder that whatever it is I want to be doing
with my life, I'd better get on with doing it.
I have to travel for work in February and be out and about as a trans
person in a not-entirely-welcoming environment. I'm doing things like
ordering new pants, looking for shoes, and just generally trying to
see if there are things that I can do to feel ready. It also means
flying on a plane for the first time in more than two years, and that
experience was massively anxiety-inducing for me even at the best of
times.
My spouse and I went to Brown's Ferry Park, a little bit south of us,
and were able to see some amazing views from a little dock on the
Tualatin River. It makes my heart feel good to finally be seeing
the leaves change and everything feeling a lot like fall.
Work tomorrow starts a week where I must get critical things done.
I feel like I'm juggling all sorts of things, and worried about dropping
a few of them as I go. Relying on others the best that I can.
Glum, anxious, and moody are my feels right now.
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28 october 2022
Been feeling very impostory at work today. Talked it through
with a friend that's been visiting, and recognizing that
some of it is about knowledge gaps where I need to figure out
what I need to know and how I get there. Food for thought.
Working on not being self-deprecating at work, not getting
in the way of my own success, not treating myself as lesser.
It's hard work, exacerbated by holding a marginalized identity
(which is something I don't allow myself to think about often).
It's rainy here in the PNW, and I'm loving it. Got today off
and looking forward to a lovely weekend, and then maybe coming
back to work with a bit more energy.
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16 october 2022
Finally getting to my hair today. My hair is usually dyed a bright red, which
requires bleaching it first before applying the deeply colored hair dye.
I'm in the bleaching part today, which means my scalp hurts a little
and I need to sit still and not lean against anything for a half hour.
Yesterday I tested out livestreaming a DJ set on Twitch for the first
time. It was more of a feeling out of the technology and seeing how
I feel about live performance. The technology part is a bit difficult -
I've got the DJ software running on an older Mac, and the stream
software running on an older PC, which means I need to get the Mac video
and audio over to the stream PC somehow. Turns out there's a piece of
software called NDI made by NewTek that makes the video easy, but the
audio part has been a pain. Latency is always going to be an issue,
but I'm quite pleased with the results and looking forward to maybe
trying it again later. The performing part was only a little nervewracking -
the part that I most dislike is trying to talk while playing, and
doing that over chat instead of voice actually made it a lot better.
There's also a bit of... idk, embarassment at my hacked together
setup which is then balanced a bit by a kind of pride in hacking
together a setup that works. I can stream successfully without
going out and buying a whole bunch of equipment. That makes me
feel good.
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02 september 2022
Behold, the bag of mixed feels!
Vacation!
I've been off of work since Friday of last week, and it's been really nice,
but also exhausting. We've been going out and doing a lot of things, and
today's plan is to just have a very chill sort of day with not a lot
going on. It's also highlighted how much I needed a break from work,
how much I've needed something to change about work, and how much burnout
I might actually be having right now.
Gender!
There's this interesting thing that has happened to me where I'm a little
hesitant to "put on feminitity" when going out. I'm not terribly fond of
makeup -- there's a component of how much work it takes, and the question
of whether it's for me, or for someone else. However, I'm also considering
whether or not I need to seriously invest in wearing a bra for protection
and support purposes, and that's a new and fun endeavor. By fun I mean
terrifying. I'm... well, I'm not constructed like your typical cisgender
woman, and that means that whatever bra I'm going to need will be probably
in an atypical size, and navigating all of that sounds absolutely exhausting.
Tl;Dr - the further I get in my gender journey, the more I feel like I
haven't gotten as far as I thought.
Technology!
This is mostly my petty ranting about how my current phone has had terrible
wifi for months now and also just started outright ignoring the one wifi
network that was working for a while. So, new phone ordered, and... it's
past the estimated delivery date, and the phone company is not giving me
any helpful information about, oh, idk, the location of the phone right
now or when it might show up. Grr!
There's a lot of other stuff going on as well, so suffice it to say that
I'm a bit of a mish-mashy-mess of feels and goings-on.
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03 july 2022
I've been thinking a lot lately about hair, queerness, and
working in tech.
My hair is currently saturated with bleach and sitting on
top of my head. My spouse shaved the sides of my head, and
my plan is to dye the rest of it a deep deep red. There's
a bit there where hair is the thing about my body where I
have been able to exert the most control. It's where I can
express my bodily autonomy most easily. There's no need
for a prescription to change my hair, just the willingness
to go through the time and energy for the process of making it be
what I want it to be.
I'm struggling with the aloneness of being queer and working
in tech. I think I realized this morning that I'm having to
figure out my own direction in my job mostly by myself. I mean,
there are others that have some ideas about where to point me
and what I should be doing, but the reality of it is that
it's mostly self-directed. Kinda like beeing queer. Kinda
like being trans. And instead of pursuing any sort of
direction right now, I've been kinda stuck just
doing whatever comes up.
Today is going to be this sort of "let's get everything
done today so that we have nothing to do tomorrow" day,
and that means all of my hair needs, household cleaning,
and any sort of chores need to happen today. I like the
idea of having the time free of obligations, but I'm
a bit crusty about having to get any of it done.
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05 june 2022
Yesterday evening, something arrived from Amazon that
I've been waiting for close to 37 years for. I had preordered
an Amiga 500 mini (from Amazon because they were the only
place I could find in the US that were going to stock them)
and it finally arrived.
I had this absolute sense of awe and wonder around the Amiga
from the time I had heard about the thing. Adolescent and
teenage me was obsessed with various kinds of computers,
and I owned tons of magazines detailing how the Amiga
worked, what software was the best, and how people were
using their Amigas. But what I never actually had was
the physical computer. Closest I ever got were a few
Commodore 64s that I had owned over the years.
So I unpacked this thing last night, set it up, played a
few games, and then felt strangely melancholy about it.
I've been spending some time since then trying to suss
out what is going on - why am I not having the jubliation
that my 10 year old self would have imagined had that person
fufilled the dreams of owning one of these.
A partial answer is that time has moved on. I'm still
enamored by older computing technology, but for different
reasons. I think that the charm of the Amiga, the C64,
and computers like them was that they were really never
mainstream in the way that the Apple II, the Macintosh,
and the IBM PC became. Computing has now become this thing
where outside of a few places (tilde.town being one of them)
computers are a gateway to the WWW and not much else in
and of themselves. Innovation now requires a market.
It comes from a time of hacking - and I mean that in the
sense of taking something and tweaking and twisting and
hammering and investigating until it fits your needs
and desires. I had patience for that kind of hacking of
that kind of thing during that time in my life, but now
I'm spending my time hacking other things. I see being
trans as a way of hacking gender, for example. I see
some applications of technology that I do currently
that are hacking as a more immediate and pertinent
part of my self and my identity than I do this device
that harkens to long ago.
So I'm struggling with where to put it, not in a physical
sense but in a "where in my life does this fit" sense.
I'm going to power it up every now and then, poke at it,
feel some nostalgia, but I don't see it becoming a daily
driver in the sense that it would have been when I was
younger. It's nice to place it into a library of tools,
thoughts, and ideas and see what became of them. A lot
of modern game studios originally cut their teeth on
the Amiga, and it's interesting to see the lineage between
these older games and where they're at today. I'm also
interested in the multimedia and digital art aspects
of the Amiga - how did we craft a vision of the future
back then, and in what ways has that differed from where
we found ourselves?
Edit:
I just found out about the mass shooting in Philadelphia
last night. Fuck guns. Fuck gun apologists. Fuck gun
hobbyists. Fuck our culture of death. But mostly fuck
guns.
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30 may 2022
So, $work has been on a documentation kick lately, and of course
being the nerdy and geeky person that I am, I've been working
a bit today around some internal documentation for our home.
Stuff around how to access things on the network, what the network
even is, what the retrocomputing and radio projects lying around
the house actually are.
The feels get a bit heavy here. CW: death of a loved one.
When my Grandfather passed away, I became the person in charge
of clearing out "the basement" -- all of the tech and belongings
that he has accumulated in a lifetime. It was a difficult and
emotionally heavy task. There was a wide variety of stuff there
that spoke of his curiosity about the world. And he spent his
life down in that basement, and my Grandmother spent her life
upstairs, and it became a physical barrier between the two.
This morning, I've been thinking about how much easier it
would have been for me for there to be documentation around
everything and what it was about/for - hence my own internal
documentation project. It struck me that this kind of
documentation, while it's useful for myself and tracking down
obscure commands and software packages, it's really about
making sure that my loved ones can also have access to the
same things and, if need be, carry on without me. It's an
act of caring, really.
I also recognize that I don't ever want to be in the situation
of being squirreled away in a basement or a cave when
pursuing my interests. There's some parallel play happening
in our house right now even - my spouse is playing a game
on the Switch, our kiddo is on the couch playing on his iPad,
and I'm sitting on the stairs typing out my feels. Occasionally,
one of us pops our head up and shares what they are doing.
I would much rather have that then see us all hide away into our
own little parts of the world.
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30 april 2022
Insomnia sucks. I always have thought of it as having the lightbulb
on inside of the refrigerator when it is closed. My experience is
usually that my brain just won't turn off, and the best thing to
do is actually get up and try to do something. So - I got up at 3am
this morning and listened to podcasts on my backlog.
I've got a lot going on. My spouse had a proceedure the Friday before
yesterday to remove their toenails from their big toes because there
was infection trapped underneath. It's been a long amount of healing,
and while I enjoy being the person that is able to help and support,
it also takes a lot out of me.
And then there's my father-in-law. He went into the hospital Thursday,
and had double bypass coronary surgery yesterday. Last we heard the
surgery went well and he's in the ICU healing.
The pandemic is eating away at my mental health. It's been months since
a trip outside the house hasn't been a store or doctor trip. I'm kinda
sick of it. Case counts in Oregon keep going up. The weather, however,
is getting better and better and I'm very hopeful that as it improves,
we are going to be able to get outside and do things with friends.
I am also feeling this desperate need for community, along with the
feeling that I really struggle to put myself out there and believe
that anyone else would actually like my authentic self. It's a
recurring thing for me that tends to come in cycles. Hopefully
I can do something about it really soon.
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01 january 2022
CW: Covid
I'm trying to sort through my feelings right now, and hey, this
thing is called "feels", right?
I just got done watching two TikToks in a row, of people in
tears, talking about how they've had two shots of the vaccine,
and had their booster, and wear masks everywhere, and now, both
of them have testing positive for Covid.
My twitter feed is chock full of people talking about how they've
now caught it, and they're scared, and it's happening more and
more...
There's this disappointed sadness, where I feel like our culture
and our governments aren't willing to take the necessary measures
to ensure our safety, all because it would "hurt the economy."
Economy isn't going to matter if we are all sick and dying. And
yes, I get that most people will survive this, but you know what,
some people won't. And they don't deserve this. Even the worst
anti-vaccine hate spewing pundit doesn't deserve the kind of
visceral death that awaits them with this disease.
And the feels quickly morph to anger. Anger at inaction. Anger
at the callousness. I read reddit posts full of servers who
are being made to work while still positive and contagious.
It's profits over lives on a massive scale, it's profits
over lives on the small scale too. It's the unnerving lack
of compassion that I keep seeing.
My feels don't seem of much use to me right now. Maybe sitting
with them will lead to some kind of action, but for right now,
I'm doing the few things that I can do - staying home as much
as possible, getting the booster when I can.
I don't know how we heal from this. I don't know how to give
forgiveness and grace to someone who adamantly refuses to
do the right thing. I don't know how to live in this capitalist
system that is grinding people to death for it's profits.
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19 november 2021
Anger.
That's my feels today. My feels are angry. Angry at
a society that has decided it's okay to go somewhere
for the express purpose of shooting people you don't
agree with and get off free because they can claim
"self-defense."
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18 november 2021
I took a big chunk of vacation time from work, it started this
morning, and I'm becoming more and more aware how desperately
I needed it and how many of my needs I've been shoving aside
in order to just get through work lately. Not even be successful,
just get through the day to day.
The need for a legal name change is becoming more and more relevant.
I've got a prescription in $LEGAL_NAME, and my other prescriptions
in $OLD_PREFERRED_NAME, and that is causing hassles when trying to
deal with insurance claims and just getting the damn medications
I need from the pharmacy. I'm hopeful that if I can get a legal
name change to $NEW_NAME and then change it everywhere, I can
get it all sorted out. Names are a pain in the ass.
I had strange dreams last night, some of them about people at
work withholding critical information from me. I'm not sure
what exactly that's about, and if anything else it's underlining
that I need to take a large break from work. I've been thinking
that I need to figure out my reason for being at my job - why
am I doing the things that I'm doing beyond "it pays the bills".
There's some kernel of truth about myself that I need to uncover
in order to figure out how I'm going to keep going at it. Work
needs to be about more than making money for "the man" and other
things capitalism related.
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08 november 2021
Some feels for a November morning.
First off, about the name and gender change that I
talked about in my last feels. Turns out I live in
the only county in Oregon where you must file a
name and gender change in person in the physical
courthouse. Bleah. So that has been on hold for
the last little while.
We adopted two lovely kitties - Lauren and Selina.
Laurel came home with us the day that we went in
to adopt. Selina has had some eating issues that
they wanted to address before sending her home with
us, so we're waiting to hear from the Cat Adoption
Team (actual name of the organization) in the next
day or two so that she can come home to live with us.
I've switched my personal daily driver to a brand new
Chromebook - it's a Lenovo 2-in-1 that easily becomes
a tablet. I was looking for something that I could
use as an e-reader at night, but I despise electronics
that are only good for a single task, so this
little friend came home with us this weekend. The
really nice thing I didn't realize about chromebooks
before is that they have a linux container that's
built in and is a fully functional version of
Debian, so there might be a few more feels and
more hanging out on tilde.town in general.
Transition is going well. I've switched from
estradiol pills to patches, and I feel like that
has gone very well for me. Physical transition
changes have felt like they are moving along
much faster now then they were on the pills.
I have labs scheduled for early December, so
I'm hoping to see some tangible changes in
my bloodwork.
The pandemic seems to just continue on. It seems
relentless, and I am astonished at how people just
continue to refuse to take the vaccine. If it was
just folks that were harming themselves by their choices
I don't think I would care quite as much, but it's
obvious to me that part of the problem has been that
unvaccinated folks are continuing to spread the virus.
We knew the vaccine wasn't a fix-all, it works in
conjunction with the social distancing, mask wearing,
contact tracing, and other precautions. But we are
accustomed to quick and easy fixes, and this is a
place where we've become really complacent.
Arrrgh. Fall is absolutely beautiful here in the
Pacific Northwest, and I'm trying to enjoy every
bit where I can. Winter will soon be here, and
with it lights and holiday foods and decorations
and things to look forward too.
Tl;Dr - feels range from mildly optimistic to
irritated with bureaucracy and people.
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05 september 2021
Really odd feels today. I'm feeling really withdrawn -
father-in-law is staying with us, kiddo and spouse are
playing video games in the living room, and I'm just in the
back chilling in the bedroom. I don't know if it's hormonal
(entirely possible), social exhaustion, or something else
going on.
I filed my name and gender change this morning. The name change
isn't actually a big deal, it's shortening my first name to what
people actually call me, and so I don't have to deal with the
longer version of my first name (which causes some dysphoria.)
The gender change is a big deal - it means (at least in the eyes
of the state of Oregon) that I would legally be nonbinary.
My gender marker on legal documents that require one would have
an "X" on them. I feel... pretty dang good about it. But also
a bit strained, strange, and tired.
permalink
03 september 2021
Today's feels are about politics.
So, I saw an opportunity on twitter to join a Discord around
Solarpunk. I like the ideals of Solarpunk, and I think that
a more hopeful vision of integrating technology and living
more closely with the natural world. I also think it's a
more plausible transformation for the future than a lot of
other frameworks for living.
This discord had a survey. Three questions, the last question
being different every time. Mine were:
- Are you over 18?
- What are your politics?
- What do you think about trans liberation?
My answers to questions 1 and 3 seemed sufficient to the
moderators. My initial answer to 2 was poked at twice
and then I was given provisional membership.
I then left. If I had said "anarcho-communism" or some
variant of it, I would have been let right in. But instead
I explained that my politics are complicated.
Politics are extremely personal for me. I think there's
a huge amount of theory bandied about in modern politics,
and I get really tired of it. What I think politically
is more about what I do in my daily life and not about
the different theories about why I do things. Stringent
adherence to a dogmatic ideology seems very dangerous
to me.
The whole exchange bothers me a bit. I keep wondering if
my refusal to reduce what I think and believe and do
into a easily digestable form. Also, the things that I
do on a daily basis to align with what I believe politically
are nobody else's fucking business.
permalink
24 august 2021
A very long week at work this week.
Back of the napkin math says I worked 58 hours between Monday and
Saturday, and then another 12-14 hours on Sunday. Needless to
say, I didn't do a whole lot of work today and I'm taking
tomorrow off. I'm trying to model folks who have to work long
hours taking care of themselves afterwards, and also just
trying to take care of myself overall. It's been a bit of
a brutal schedule, but it meant that the project I was
working on went off nearly without a hitch.
permalink
12 may 2021
My feels are sporadic because... my feels are sporadic. That's
kinda just how it is.
A few updates. I've since gotten the butterstick, and put it on
the old HP Elitebook, which has now benefitted from moving
to an SSD. The performance gain is amazing. I also put
our "utility" computer on an SSD and it's become much faster
and more reliable because of it. The butterstick does hurt
my brain a bit, and I wish I had more time to spend on it,
but I don't right now.
I built a nifty household backup solution. We're using a
Pi 4 that has a few big USB disks attached and running in
a RAID 1 config that backs everything up to AWS weekly.
This runs syncthing, and everything in the house is
running syncthing as well, so I get the added benefit of
having all of my files synchronized between all the places
that I'm at.
Medical stuff. March was one year on feminizing HRT.
I sometimes wish that things would hurry up, but time
being the way it is, it hasn't. Two new issues as of late:
- Migraine headaches. I've had the worst headaches
of my life in the past few weeks, and have been liberally
taking Aleve to help take care of them.
- Stomach problems. My stomach has been in pain a lot
lately, and I'm on a multi-month course of Omeprazole to
try and calm things down a bit.
Getting older kinda sucks.
Work is stretching me a bit. I'm studying algorithms
and data structure, because it's something I've never had
to learn before now, and I'm really enjoying it.
Exercising my brain in a different way than I have in the
past.
Otherwise, feels are... odd. I've had my first COVID-19
vaccination, and will be getting the second next week.
It's heartbreaking to see what's going on in India
right now. I'm also struggling with what things are
going to be like trying to go back into the world.
Reconciling all of that is going to take a bit
of doing.
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27 january 2021
The following is a bit of a ramble that's been rattling around in my
head for a while. The concepts are probably ones that are familiar
to townies, but I'm also inputting text to screen here to help
with focusing those ideas and getting them out into the ether.
The cloud is other people's computers.
That phrase keeps sticking in my mind, but the important piece of it is
that the cloud is computers that other people own. And those other people
are not giving you access to their computers out of the kindness of their
hearts. They want to use their resources to make as much money as they can.
They accomplish this through a few key tactics that are important to
recognize.
The freemium model is probably the most obvious. You become reliant upon
a certain service that is free to a point, and then becomes something
you have to pay for if you exceed certain metrics. Dropbox and Google
Drive do this, to an extent. You get an amount of data storage that you
can use for free, but if you exceed that cap, we're going to want to
charge you a bit for your data.
Then there's the moving goalposts model. Your data cap is currently
50GB, but starting at arbitrary date we are going to make it 25GB
and start charging you for the overage. It's a common tactic paired
with the above model, and it's hard for users to get away from. You're
already comfortable with their infrastructure, so it's a no brainer
to just keep with them and pay the small amount of money they're
asking to hold onto your data.
Which leads nicely into analytics. Cloud companies are all about
analytics. Every concievable piece of how you are interacting
with their software is being recorded, aggregated, and scrutinized
with the purpose of figuring out how best to make money from you
and others. It's interesting to me that people are often so
focused on keeping the content of their data private, they
don't realize that one of the biggest money makers for companies
is the anayltics around the data. It's also pretty key in terms
of police and other surveillance - what you've actually said
isn't as important a lot of the times as who you're saying
it to.
So, what to do? It helps to know some of these things, and keep
in mind that there's no such thing as a free cloud service,
just as there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's some
ways that you can get away from the cloud -- I've been working
on a personal project to get my family's storage out of the cloud
and into something that we have real direct control over while
retaining the ubiquity and utility that cloud providers give.
permalink
03 january 2021
So.
I’ve got this idea for a few different kinds of technology blogs that I want to write,
and maybe this is just two different kinds of posts for the same blog. They’re mostly
based around things that I’m looking at and thinking about right now. I’m trying to
figure out where to put them in terms of hosting, and how to go about doing them.
First idea: I want to write about the cloud, using it for some things, and getting
away from it for some things. This is coming about for a few reasons. The catalyst
has really been Google Photos moving away from unlimited uploads, but it’s not the
only reason. I think there’s a lot of benefit to using something like FreedomBox,
and hosting your own utilities and data within your own personal network.
I’m also interested in how to “safely” use things like social media,
varying technological ecosystems, etc.
The second idea is that I want to write about tools. I’ve been using a lot of
different kinds of digital tools in the last while, and I’d like a space to
talk about some of them. It gets dangerously close to “review” territory,
and while there’s some crossover for that, I think I want to talk more about
the how and why of picking a piece of technology for your needs, and less
about pros and cons of a specific device. I think there’s a space for that
line of thinking, but I’m not sure where and in what format.
For now, I think watch this space for details. I’ve got an upcoming project
centered around FreedomBox that might be the both the right starting point
for idea #1, and the space to host the whole shebang.
permalink
23 december 2020
Too many things floating about in my braiiiiin...
Been thinking a lot about walled gardens and computers. Kiddo
got one of the new iPads for Yule with the Apple Pencil, and the
Apple Pencil doesn't work properly. There's no user-facing way
of doing any sort of meaningful diagnosis of it, there's only
making sure that it pairs properly through bluetooth. "Fixing" it
means taking both devices to an Apple Store so that they can
dink around with it and figure out what's going on.
There's some new device envy that I've been having about this,
but also the recognition that I'm probably better off fixing
and improving my existing devices that I dearly love. I have an
old HP EliteBook 2760p that's been an absolute tank that needs
a replacement keyboard and could benefit from upgrading to an
SSD... and is that "better" than something else that's new
and shiny...? I mean, I tend to think so, but then again this
disposable technology culture is pretty disgusting to me.
Then there's some human-computer interface stuff. I got a new
keyboard for my birthday, and it's been going really well, but I'm
also fascinated by some of the stuff coming out of G Heavy Industries
(gboards.ca). If I have some extra holiday cash, it might be going
that direction for either the Butterstick (a 20% keyboard that's only
two rows) or a Ginny (10% keyboard - 12 total keys). It's a bit
user-hostile, but there's something in going to a more minimal
typing arrangement. I'm also the kind of person that's into
styluses and touchscreens (see the 2760 above), as well as
trackballs, trackpads, etc.
I wish there was a more robust solution to having the same environment
across multiple devices. I can get that in my text/terminal world
from having a tmux session running on a raspberry pi that keeps my
chat, feels, and mastadon sessions up and running, but it would be
really nice to have that kind of persistent session available across
multiple other devices as a GUI thing. Google does a sort of tab sharing
that gets me part of the way there, but I think a kind of "ubiquitous
computing" model is still a ways off. It's also not terribly profitable,
as you wouldn't need to consume quite as many devices in order for
things to work well for you. A while ago I played around with LTSP
under Ubuntu, which allowed for things like that, but it's been a while
and I'm not even sure what's out there anymore.
I've also been re-reading Donnna Haraway's
_Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_MeetsOncoMouse(tm), which
I have failed to read quite a few times, but might have enough context
now as a transgender person in my 40s to tackle. In my 20s I picked
this up after my Women's Studies professor suggested that Haraway's
new book was exceedingly difficult to parse, and I of course took
that as a challenge, ordered the book, and then proceeded to figure out
that yes, Haraway's writing is super dense and beyond my grasp. It's
still super dense to me, and I struggle with some of the concepts, but
there's the wonderfully delicious merging of techological, sociological,
gender studies, cultural studies, the arts, and a whole slew of other
contextual discourses. I also took this kind of writing and work
very very seriously when I was younger, and can afford now to take
this bit of reading as fun (and give myself the right to skip about
or ignore things that are either too much of a struggle, or just plain
not interesting to me).
I'm also intentionally rebalancing things at work for 2021 to more align
with what's going on with me as a person. There's going to be more D+I work
next year, as I'm part of the LGBTQ+ subcommittee there, and feel that I
want to bring my more radical activist attittude into that particular space.
There's also a need for me to do more teaching, training, mentoring, and
managing as we continue to grow and move forward. It's a pivot away from
things that I was doing as more of an individual contributor, and more of
a leader-type role.
That's a lot of feels going on all at once, not to mention the holidays
and this sort of sense that with the pandemic going on, all the
celebratory type stuff is feeling fairly muted. I'm hoping that it
will get better soon, but without massive social changes that I think
are really really needed, it's going to be a hollow victory over Covid,
with not a lot of real progress or change coming because of it.
permalink
04 december 2020
My father in law, his two brothers, and the one brother's wife have all
tested positive for COVID-19.
I'm an emotional wreck. I'm not sure what's keeping me going on right
now, aside from trying to support my spouse and kiddo. We are all not
doing okay. I took the day off of work to... idk, help, process...?
I don't have much else in the way of feels, aside from that y'all
need to wear a mask, and don't go anywhere unless it's essential,
and certainly don't gather in any groups anywhere.
permalink
11 october 2020
We had lunch with friends today.
Okay, maybe "had lunch" is strong. We sat under our bulding's
carport in our parking spot, about eight feet away from our
friends that we haven't seen in person since well before
the pandemic started.
It was nice, but it was also very strange. Not having had
a lot of in-person interaction except for going out
grocery shopping has really taken a bit of a toll.
I'm glad to be in one of the states that's continuing to
take the pandemic seriously. I have friends teaching
in states where kids are still going to school
physically, and they continue to be terrified.
There's that meme going around about how it seems
like we're hallucinating a pandemic. I totally
feel like that lately. We have been so careful,
we don't leave the house except for groceries,
the pharmacy, and the occasional vet visit.
Everything continues to be so relentlessly
strange.
permalink
28 september 2020
World: "I do not like the thing you are doing can you do a different thing that I like."
Me: "I will fucking increase the fucking thing."
https://floccinaucinihilipilificationa.tumblr.com/post/96040472380
permalink
25 september 2020
I'm feeling depressed by the stupidity of others.
Case #1: I'm watching the 8-Bit Guy on Youtube. Not one of my
favorite retrocomputing folks, but he at least has some
amount of production value to his videos. He finds this
incredibly rare computer at Computer Reset, and he takes
it home. When he plugs it in, it gives two beeps on post
and then it refuses to display anything (it's an IBM Model
that nobody has ever heard of that has an integrated
monitor). The power switch for the system is inside of the
integrated monitor. He takes the machine apart, finds where
the power supply connects to the monitor, tests continuity
on the monitor side with the switch open, and the proceeds
to short the power supply side with a paper clip. He then
turns on mains power to hear a sharp snap noise.
I'm irritated because this is a well-followed Youtube personality
doing something EXTREMELY STUPID AND DANGEROUS and then just
proceeding to Dremel the power supply open because he can't be
arsed to find a security bit to open the thing up. He then gets
to tinker with the remaining rare computers from Computer Reset
because he's, guess what, a famous Youtuber. Ugh.
Case #2: Been having yelly fits with our kiddo over Zoom and School
So, our kiddo has online school right now, and yesterday the school
district sent out an email on how to approach entering Zoom calls.
The problem now is that somehow Zoom is losing authentication when it
closes, and something about the order of operations of when you sign
into Zoom is causing a problem. The Zoom desktop client has been a
piece of junk for as long as I've been using it on Linux, and it's not
much better on kiddo's Chromebook. This escalated this morning into
kiddo and I yelling at each other about what the right thing to
do was in order to get into class. I am so tired of online school
right now, and I know it's totally the right thing to do, but I don't
have time or energy to be doing my own work AND playing household IT
person all day long.
On a brigher note, it's raining today here in Beaverton, and I'm quite
happy with that. This is the kind of "gloomy" fall weather that I really
enjoy, and I hope that it keeps up for a bit.
permalink
20 september 2020
It's been a week. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we've been
having terrible, terrible air quality. Most days the air quality
index (AQI) has been in the "Hazardous" range, and we've been
feeling lucky to be in the "Very Healthy" category on
Thursday. Yesterday and today, we finally got into the
"Normal" category for air quality. It means that there's
been a lot of stuff that we've been putting off that we
now have been able to do.
I spent part of this morning baking gluten-free bread, and
also making dairy free cheese. My partner has celiac,
and I'm lactose intolerant. We're a fun pair at restaurants,
not that we've gone out anywhere that we can sit down and eat
since March. We also did a bunch of sitting around the house,
but also took a walk and had several lovely chats. We went
on a walk through the condo complex today, and it was nice to
feel the air and see the sky.
My birthday was last week, and several of the things that I
ordered for myself finally arrived today. I got myself a
new mechanical keyboard that I'm absolutely loving
(it is giving me a lot of joy while I'm writing down my
feels), and a bunch of odd art supplies intented both
for making my weekly planner more enjoyable, and some
for doing sketches. I had never considered sketching before
a friend started doing a sketching "spa" every Sunday
morning on Twitch full of exercises. Since then I've
been avidly following the exercises and see some improvement
in my art. Actually, I'm seeing myself make art, and I
like it. I think I put off making art for so long, that I
convinced myself that making art was not something that I
cam actually capable of. Turns out, it's yet another
of those things where the process is often more
rewarding than the end result.
In terms of feels, now that the air has cleared, I'm
actually feeling pretty good, all things considering.
I have a long and stressful work week ahead, with
three major projects that I need to wrap up by
Thursday.
(FYI: The sketch spa is 10am PST on Sundays at
twitch.tv/rebeccahicksprime)
permalink
05 september 2020
Spent this morning cleaning up some keyboards. Not anything
really collectable, notable, or rare. One is an Apple USB
keyboard that originally came with the original iMac,
the other is a Dell Bluetooth keyboard that I've had for
ages (I'm typing on the Dell right now).
My work issued keyboard was truly terrible - it was one
of those flat Logitech ones that were absolutely painful
to type on. My current work keyboard is a cheap gaming
keyboard with imitation Cherry MX Blues and really nice
trans-flag-colored keycaps. It makes me so happy to sit
down and use it.
I've been diving deep into the rabbit hole of mechanical
keyboards and come to the realization that I've got a
lot of underrated keyboards in the house that I've got
emotional attachements to.
This thing where I take out old stuff, clean it up,
and put it to use is something that tends to come up
around my birthday every year. I'm turning 43 this year,
and there's some amount of pressure in my brain to justify
my being - what use am I? There's a reality that I'm
of course just perfectly useful and valuable in and
of myself as I get older. It's a thing to wrestle with
every year, and I don't expect to ever figure it out
or fully silence that voice.
permalink
01 september 2020
Well, it's September. It's my birth month, I'll be 43 this month.
Yesterday was the first time in a long while that I felt at peace
in my body. It was a strange experience, but also really really
good.
I forget how much I loathe summer and the heat until autumn is
just around the corner. There are going to be a few more
warm days this month, but knowing that will change soon is
giving me some hope.
I see all these think pieces about how the United States is
on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime. I think it's
already happened. We are keeping kids in cages. We are
disappearing people off the streets. We have the most
sophisticated intellegence network (powered in part by
information that we're voluntarily feeding into it,
thanks Google and Facebook).
I haven't left the house for something that wasn't a necessary
errand since March. Okay, that's not entirely true. My spouse,
kiddo, and I went to the nature park last month so that we
could breathe in some fresh air from near the trees. I miss
seeing all the reasons that we moved the Oregon - all the
landmarks, all the nature, all the food, all the coastline.
I miss it, but I'm not going to relax being careful and
vigilant to go out and see it. If my spouse got covid, they'd
probably be dead. I also cannot fathom the idea of being
so irresponsible to cause the infection of people you love.
I couldn't live with myself if I did that. It would haunt me.
It's early in the morning as I'm writing this, and I'm about
to get ready for work. Work has been pretty steady, and the
routine is both helpful and somewhat monotonous. This quarantine
has been an exercise in patience, mindfulness, accepting what we
can change and do right now. I'd like to see it end, but I am
skeptical of the effectiveness of the vaccines that are going to
be pushed on us as soon as clinical trials are done. I think I'd
like to see them out in the wild for a few months and their effect
on the infection and mortality rates before deciding that they are
the right thing to do. Hopefully I'm not alone in that assessment.
Sorry, all the feels this morning. That's kinda how things are right
now.
permalink
20 august 2020
My spouse and I went to the drug store tonight. They needed pads,
and we wanted to get some chips and stuff for us and our kiddo.
I picked up a bag of pickle chips, thinking mmm... pickles.
So we get home, and later in the evening I go to grab my bag
of chips. And I read the ingredients. And I see that they have
milk ingredients (whey) listed. And I'm allergic to milk products.
Not in a mild upset stomach way. In a stop breathing way.
I threw a fit. It's been a shitty day, it's been a shitty week,
it's been a shitty month, it's been a shitty year, and I just
want my damn pickle chips to not have milk in them.
It's 100% petty. It's childish. I threw the bag against the wall
in disgust.
permalink
01 august 2020
My last feels entry was in March, the start of all of this, what
feels like years ago but has only actually been months.
My family and I have been spending nearly all the time at home.
We go out when we need to get groceries, or take things out to
the dumpster or recycling or check the mail. My spouse and I both
have jobs that were already remote, and our kiddo has a school
district that will be starting fully remote and has the option
for kids to stay that way regardless if they're allowed to
go back into the physical school or not.
I wonder about how much we are staying in and how much that's
eroding at our selves. I had a small fit today as I was yearning
for the feeling of being in a bustling city full of interesting
foods and shops and people, and that feels completely
inaccessable right now. There's this feeling that we are...
idk, silly, strange, outsiders, for not going out into the
world right now and doing things, but at the same time, the
number of COVID-19 cases just keeps going up with no end in
sight.
Today has just been a strange strange day. First time in a long
time that I haven't tied my long hair back into a ponytail.
I dug out some "old" radio equipment -- it's old SDR stuff that
used to belong to my late grandfather, and I used it to listen
to the local weather and a jazz station. I miss the time when
you could look around and find something interesting or
unique when listening to the radio. Now everything seems
streamed in addition to broadcast. Except for maybe folks that
still use two-way radios like police or fire departments.
I've been on HRT since March, and feel more myself than I have
well, ever. I like the feel and touch of my body and don't
think about it as much as a mind driving around some sort
of meat vehicle.
I've been reading the Wayfarers series of books by Becky
Chambers, and the one I'm reading right now (A Close
and Common Orbit) is really themed about the relationship
between mind and body. It's certainly resonating with where
I'm at right now and how I'm feeling about my body/self.
Feels are complicated and strange right now.
permalink
08 march 2020
In the words of 10,000 Maniacs:
Theeeese
ahh-re
deeeaaays...
That you'll remember...
I had group therapy last week for the first time. It was a group
specifically geared towards transfeminine folk, and the
conversations there must have sparked something in me. A
catalyst for change. Unapologetic demand for respect and
competency in care. It felt good.
That was what, Tuesday? Thursday I had an appointment with my GP.
There was a conversation. It went something like this:
"Doc, I would like the HRT."
"Cool. Get the letter from your therapist and I will write you a
script ASAP. Let's do this."
Mind. Blown.
So then, I had been planning to come out at work. It was this item
on my to-do list that kept being put off and put off. I had planned
on doing it Friday. Friday morning comes around and I get an email
that one of our coworkers is transitioning, these are the pronouns
to use, this is the name that they would like.
Wow.
Is there something in the air right now? So, I went to my boss
and bosses boss and had another conversation. It went something
like this:
"I would like to be referred to with she/her pronouns."
Boss: "Okay."
Bosses' Boss: "Honestly, I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner."
Okay. After years of feeling like I'm in a rut in terms of gender
and expression, in the space of a week everything is suddenly
shifting and working towards the things that I've wanted for a long
time.
Never before, and never since,
I promise.
Will the whole world be warm as this.
permalink
12 january 2020
Yesterday and today have been strange.
Yesterday, I had two passes of really cool stuff on Twitter. First, a bunch of
trans folks followed me (and I followed them) and second, I posted about
folks that I follow in Women's Soccer, and that got reposted by the LA NWSL account.
Today, we all sat around the house and watched a bunch of TV and didn't do
much of anything. I know that we need days like that some days, but somehow
I now feel... a bit worse. I didn't get anything done, and there is still stuff
on my list that "needs doing", and that pressure is growing... and...
and I know that the sort of performance culture that makes me feel like shit
when I don't get things done is a load of crap. But it still eats at me. And
I still feel crappy about it, and I do know that there's no real reason
that I should.
permalink
09 january 2020
Today has been rough emotionally. Last night my twitter feed was full of public trans figures
commenting on the awfulness of various things, and then criticism of other public trans
folks that I happen to follow, and... felt like deleting twitter from my life for a
while. It's the primary means for me figuring out what's going on in the wider world, and
that's admittedly a problem. I should probably change that soon.
Struggled a lot with dysphoria in the bathroom getting ready for work this morning.
I don't like my facial hair, I don't like my body hair, and I was really in a bad place
about how I was feeling about my body overall. I keep going around about which things I'd
like to change -- I've got painted fingernails and plan on re-dying my hair soon, but
there's bigger issues about whether HRT would be right for me, and if I need to
present more femininely than I do or not... argh.
My therapist and I have talked a lot about "activating community" recently - the need to be
around and involved with other trans foks, but I'm currently pretty terrible at it. I don't
feel much of a connection with the larger queer community in Portland, and being in the
suburbs makes getting to any sort of thing that isn't nearby a hassle. There are times that
I wonder about our decision to live in the suburbs instead of the city (although we would
have never been able to afford city living, so we would never have moved).
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01 january 2020
Happy new year!
I don't know about resolutions - I've never been very good at keeping things
like that. I'm working on figuring out some things using a Passion Planner
(https://passionplanner.com - they sell them there, but also have .pdf
versions for you to print out so that cost is not an issue). I'm trying to
slowly layer things into my life that will lead to better health.
I think the focus for me this next year is feeling healthy. That's a bigger
mess of things than it looks at first glance. It includes things like
exercise, eating healthier, losing weight - but also feeling more congruent
in gender expression and how I present myself to the world. I've been
hesitant to pursue HRT, but I've finally gotten myself a therapist
and there's a possibility that's the right thing for the future. It would
certainly complicate things at work - I work remotely, but present in a
more masculine way (since that's how I was when I got hired). That will
probably have to change in the future, but I find that incredibly scary.
I think the first step in that is activating existing community that I
have and see where that goes.
Spend more time on tilde.town is on my short term list as well. I miss
this place, and I really need to work on being part of an active
community. I had ideas for art and writing that I wanted to do last
year for the zine that I never got around to. I'm kinda sick of
never getting around to things that are important to me, so I'm going
to be making explicit time for them in the coming year.
<3
Allie.
P.S. - I've made an account change. I've used the moniker frankblues
around the net for many years, and it doesn't feel quite right anymore.
alliesanders makes a lot more sense for me, and it's what I'll be using
from here on out.
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24 november 2019
I keep coming back to tilde after getting tired of and sick of
other online communities. I've tried waaaay too many discords
and slack channels and don't ever get the feeling I get
when I'm tinkering around here.
And I have not been spending enough time tinkering. I've
been spending time working and working and dealing
with depression and home stuff and gender and gender
and more gender all the time gender.
Now, if I could merge the tinkering and gender shit...
that would be transhumanism, wouldn't it? ;)
I'm making space to be not okay, I'm honoring when
I feel that way, and I'm doing work to feel and actually
be much better.
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02 july 2019
I miss writing and reading about feels.
Hello again town! I missed you terribly. My raspberry pi that I use for a bastion box
got into a bad state and I couldn't remotely ssh into it, so tonight I finally
hooked it up to something with HDMI and fixed it all up.
I have a doctor's appointment this month, for the first time in at least 5 years.
I'm going to chat about maybe some low-dose HRT further down the road. I've
been feeling more and more that I want and need the effects of estrogen,
but I'm not buying into the whole gender binary for myself. We'll see how that goes.
I
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25 october 2018
"You're misunderstood and when you're used you are abused or just ignored.
Yours is a lonely crowded life.
You sit alone between and watch them not know how to treat you.
How does no one understand
That it must suck to be an apostrophe..."
- The Doubleclicks, "Apostrophe"
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09 october 2018
Monday night: apocalypse dreams. Trump blew up the moon. Gravity was suspended.
Then I woke up and my brain processed things for about two hours. Then I never
got back to sleep.
The conclusions:
Elon Musk's SpaceX is not about research or exploration. It is about the rich
being able to evacuate the planet after it is so fucked as to be uninhabitable.
If he thought it was the right thing to do, for whatever reason, Donald Trump
would not hesitate to lay waste the entire surface of the planet, whether by the
current means of extracting every last bit of value from it, or the execution of
mankind through the use of nuclear weapons. His administration has pretty much
stated outright that the planet is lost and there is no point in trying to
change our behaviors in order to fix it.
Our only hope is in each other. The only thing that will save the planet is a
stark change in our behaviors. It may come down to a desparate need to remove power
from the rich in order to survive.
I was watching an episode of Grand Designs where a woman was building a brand
new house in a protected forest. The building standards were something that
were referred to as "code 6." It was a very stringent set of requirements
that basically ensured that the new home was completely carbon neutral.
I thought about it, and that just doesn't fly here in the US. If we ever tried
to legislate the construction of new homes in such a stringent way, people
would howl. We are so so so concerned with preserving the rights of the
individual (and the wealthy individual in particular) that we're willing to
set fire to the planet in order to preserve it.
I'm sorry, rest of the world. I'm sorry you have to put up with this shit.
I'm sorry that we've doomed us all.
I'm trying to be a bit more upbeat here this morning, but it's hard.
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26 september 2018
Today just feels really crappy.
We're hiring someone with 20 years experience and who will make double the amount of a "regular hire" -
he's going to report to me and learn how to do my job in order to "be my backup."
I'm feeling a bit sick about this. I've been working my ass off at work lately and I'm not sure
that I'm getting treated fairly anymore. Or was ever treated fairly in the first place. The tech
world pisses me off most days.
Personally, I also feel like shit. My neck hurts, I'm still feeling stuck where I'm at and not able
to figure out how to move forward and grow. I'm also 41 now, thanks, birthday.
I want to end on a high note here but it's rough.
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26 august 2018
Just finished up a family trip to Seattle. It's big, it's loud,
it's expensive, it's not home. I feel so much better about
Portland (and living in the suburbs means access to Portland
on my terms) and living here now that I've visited somewhere
else.
There were good bits, though. I was astonished by the amount
of diversity there. Just people going about their business
being people. I know that happens here, but idk - it seemed
almost amplified somehow in Seattle.
I'll be 41 soon, and I'm still ruminating on the idea of
going on HRT. There's a vein of discourse where the thought
of someone NB or "not sure" about HRT should avoid it like the
plague (and subsquently, be avoided like the plague). There's
a contrasting viewpoint, more supported by informed consent,
that if you think HRT might be right for you, go ahead and
go for it. There shouldn't be adverse physical changes from
a low dose for the first month, and the potential for a positive
reaction outweighs the potential impacts of a negative one.
I can either waste time not living my best possible life,
or take a risk on whether something is right for me or not.
There's this thing that happened around my 39th birthday
where I looked in the mirror and decided that I didn't want
to die as a grizzled old man. That somehow, the idea of
myself as this patriarchal elder was so repugnant and
sickening, that I needed to somehow avoid that fate.
I need to take ownership of this meatbag that I drive around
with my soul from day to day. And part of that may be
trying to run it on a non-factory speced endocrine system.
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02 august 2018
I am feeling a certain loss of autonomy today. It's assumed
that I'll just mosey along with what everyone else in my
life wants me to be doing right now, but that's both not
what I want and not fair to me.
It doesn't help that it seems like right now my life
is this hellish mix of depression, anxiety, dysphoria,
the hot weather sucking the life out of me, and various
other obligations on my life. At 40 (almost 41 now) I feel
like I sound like a whiny teenager. It's all the same shit
and doesn't really ever change, you know?
There was this tweet yesterday from @alicegoldfuss where she
talked about gender as if it were an OS. I joked that my
gender was several VMs running on a hypervisor, but I think
there's something deeper there. The process of building up
a gender is somewhat exhausting, and the process of tearing
another down is also unapealling. I'd like to just randomly
gender about and not have to think about any work or social
consequences. Because it's fucking 2018 and we should be able
to be who we want to be without worrying about getting the
shit beat out of us at the fucking McDonalds or losing our
job and suddenly becoming homeless.
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18 july 2018
I've been watching a bit of Ted Nelson on youtube today, and I've been
wondering a bit... did we get this whole modern technology thing
wrong? Is there an alternative universe where the World Wide Web was
actually NOT the thing that took off, and gopherspace, SSH, using
text, actually communicating - those things stayed around
and thrived? What would have happened if the interent had NOT
gone commercial? What's the alternative universe where non-PC computers
didn't die out? What kind of modern Amiga or Sun or SGI machine
could we be using now to surf the multiplicities of not-web information?
What if the Newton had stayed around, and the iPad never happened?
Where's my color Newton with high-speed internet access and
excellent handwriting recognition or dictation abilities?
When did data become a thing we consume, voraciously, instead of a
thing we create or make sense of?
Can I have my alternative technological universe?
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08 july 2018
It's Sunday morning here in the Pacific Northwest. I'm struggling
with a whole miasma of stuff stuck in my head today. I'm writing my
thoughts here, in a text editor on a community-based *nix server
using a Bondi Blue iMac because sometimes really really good tools
remain good long after their practical use goes away.
Our country's situation sucks right now, and I'm not doing as much about
it as I would like. We've got a ten-year old kid, and there's a lot of time
and energy invested in making sure that they are going to be alright and have
some sort of positive future ahead of them. I donate to causes, I try to
amplify things online - I'm not on the front lines protesting right now,
but I'm doing little things where I can. Things are bad, and it's been a long
and slow process that's actually gotten us there.
We're growing some food on the balcony, and that's a revolutionary act
in and of itself. It's something that's probably going to become more
and more important - can you sustain yourself using very basic tools? It's
one of the things I really like about spaces like this that are community
driven and "lo-fi" - getting here and doing stuff doesn't take a whole lot
of resources. It also keeps it under the radar a bit, and I like that.
I'm still struggling with gender shit. Demigirl seems most appropriate right
now. My presentation is fairly androgynous right now, compared to pictures
of about a year ago where I was putting on makeup and wearing dresses and
skirts everywhere. I think I'm seeking a place where I feel settled and
okay, and I still haven't found that yet. I've thought a bit about trying
to seek out an informed consent clinic and trying out low-dose HRT to
help alleviate some dysphoria and maybe make me feel like I belong in
my skin. I dunno. It's part of the human experience in the 21st century -
the feeling like your body is just a meatbag that carries your brain,
thoughts, and self about - but one of the things that chronic illness
has taught me is that my body IS myself. There's no distinction between
mind, body, and person. It makes dealing with gender and the parts of
my body that feel incongruent harder.
Sorry for the braindump, but it feels good to say some of this and this
seems like a good place to do so. The little things are good - coffee,
the weather, having a nice place to live. Moving here (PDX area) from Utah
has been... lifegiving. It'll be a year in August. I wonder what another
year here will bring / encourage / flourish.
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05 november 2017
Todays gender is genderblah.
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02 november 2017
With apologies to Miley Cyrus (and it's stuck in my head
right now, arrrgggh):
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31 october 2017
I am Queer. Queer as fuck.
What do I mean by Queer?
Queer meaning I'm sexually fluid and attracted to people of varied and
diverse genders.
Queer meaning my own gender is in flux. Masculine is right out - no matter
how much I've tried to fit in that box, it never ever ever has worked correctly.
I've tried identifying fully feminine, and that doesn't quite work right
either.
Queer meaning fuck gender norms anyway. I'll wear and behave and think
and use the pronouns (she/her, btw) that I fucking want.
Queer meaning fuck the patriarchy.
Queer meaning I believe in my body's amazing capacity for love and pleasure.
I'm sure there's more to add to this definition, but this is what I've got
so far.
I think writing this out is more for myself, but hopefully also for others
to see that you aren't alone out there. We all have different struggles
but seeing that others are struggling too helps sometimes.
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22 september 2017
It's the weekend.
I have leftover testing work that needs to be done before Monday morning.
Guess who has two thumbs and is going to be working some this weekend.
That'd be me.
I've been reprogramming old ham radio equipment (by old I mean 2000s vintage)
for the new area we live in, instead of the Salt Lake valley. There's
a lot more traffic here given any random time than there was living in
Utah. Kinda nice to see.
I'm trying to invest in my own interests and have a break from all the other
work crap I have to deal with, but it's hard.
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20 september 2017
Greetings from Beaverton Oregon, where it's pouring rain right now.
Not just a little drizzle, but actually pouring a ton of rain.
This is entirely why my partner and I and our child up and left our
lives in Salt Lake City and moved here.
Well, that and the politics.
They (my partner) are non-binary and got a driver's license with
a non-binary gender marker. Didn't have to supply any paperwork
or anything, just said that's what they wanted and that's what
they got. I find that completely amazing.
My gender feels? I have no idea. I was assigned male at birth,
went through a period feeling genderfluid, tried living as a woman
for a while, and now I'm in this strange jumbled state where I don't
know what I am. It's all a big blurry mess, and right now I just
feel like some sort of plug-in employee that does my job and gets paid.
I'd like for that to change and feel more like a human being, but
I'm not in that place right now. I'm hoping that typing out more of
my feels will make me feel more human in the long run.
I dunno.
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02 november 2016
Writing my feels in plaintext... heh.
Today felt like a long day. My work day involved getting none of the things
that I wanted to get done, done. I work as a software tester for a "cloud"
company, and I didn't get my major bit of work done today. The testing
team is going out for a team activity tomorrow, playing vintage arcade
games, so not sure I'm getting much done tomorrow either.
Home, with kiddo. She's watching Ninjago - an action adventure Lego
ninja things. We're going to play video games a bit tonight. She's
eight years old, and really an amazing kid.
There are times that I feel like my life is a huge grind. Work, home, sleep.
Work home sleep. Workhomesleep. For millions of us right now, this holding
pattern seems to be our lives. I have to admit that I am terrified to see
what will become of the world around us after Tuesday - after the
election. That dread seems to be around all the time. More about that
later, maybe.
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