The local filk gang has been holding basement gatherings and I went last night. It’s a group that is at least aware that COVID exists, and while it’s the worst air quality room I’ve spent any significant time in since pre-COVID days, they do require a negative COVID test before attending. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one using a nucleic acid amplification test (I use Metrix) and a negative on a rapid antigen test is pretty meaningless, but at least we’re trying to avoid people who are just obviously ill showing up, which is more than pretty much anyone else is doing, and I wear a Flo Mask and bring my portable Clean Air Kits Exhalaron air filter and friends don’t hassle me about it.
Also bonus to wearing the Flo Mask is I could play with these adorable kitties without any allergy problems!
Anyway it’s super nice to actually see people and get to chat in person and to hug friends, it’s really nice to get some touch. And hang out with one of my old trans friends from way back and have that kind of chat you can have with someone who really knows.
And of course singing, I’ve been away from it for a while. Aside from needing more practice making music I’ve realized I used to try to sing as far down toward the bottom of my range as I could, because, uh, you know, but as a woman now I don’t really want to do that so I’ve been doing some exploring of where in the range I want things.
It was super nice to hear some songs I hadn’t heard in a long long time, and do some singing again. I think everything I sang was written by Cat Faber, what can I say, she’s written a lot of good ones, everyone likes them!
I always feel a bit uncertain about how to relate to this sort of thing, because, after, uh, literally a decade now of trying transition stuff, I guess I’ve figured out that I’m pretty much a woman. We women, we are all unique individuals, though, to be fair, some of us, maybe more “unique” than others… But also I spent much of the first Trump administration (fucking hell I have to say which one) going about life as, I’m just gonna say it, a dude in a dress, so, like, I’ve got some very real genderqueer enby experience.
Also a reminder that I guess I’ve never kissed a boy. I mean, I’m basically a lesbian, but, like, if you are a queer boy who has known me a while and might want to kiss a queer trans girl, like, if you asked nicely I’d consider it…
I saw a Facebook memory from seven years ago about my trip to Arizona to take care of things when my mother died. By then I was far enough into transition to be wearing dresses at work and so I had decisions to make about how visible I was going to while traveling and in unfamiliar places, and I figured it would be easier to dial back on the femininity and attract less attention.
And then I had a series of mostly basically nice, occasionally confusing, sometimes baffling, experiences in which I was clearly getting noticed. I was not very good at boy mode, and honestly had rather little idea how people perceived me. I guess if you have long hair, wear a floral print shirt and bright colored pants, carry a purse, and have a beard, you still get noticed, even if back at work I’d probably be wearing a dress and compared to that I felt like I was being much more careful. I figured wearing a dress at the airport would be taunting the TSA! But I still got a comment expressing some sort of surprise (though no actual problems going through).
I’d look at the other women around me and not really know what to expect my experiences might be like. As much as the Tumblr enbies wanted to insist that “passing” is bullshit, and as complicated a thing as it is, it still is really a thing. The cis women around me overwhelmingly got seen differently from me, that one guy who was so feminine he was more-or-less an honorary woman. And now that as far as I can tell I’m nearly always seen as an actual woman rather than a man who is sort of an honorary woman, I can tell you, it really is a different experience. As well as the honorary woman experience went for me, it’s a different experience.
I don’t think I’ve ever written a link in markdown correctly on the first try. It’s brackets and then parentheses, because it’s backwards from what you might think from the usual precedence, right? First the link then the text, or the other way around?
This time of year there is a short bit of road on my drive to work where, if the sky is clear, I get the bright rising sun glaring into my peripheral vision from the left and the bright reflected sun off the windows of a building glaring into my peripheral vision from the right! It’s an experience!
We’ve had some clear mornings lately and I noticed I was not being blasted by the sun from both sides like this, and it’s because of the whole thing with the seasons and now the sun is rising farther to the south and it doesn’t line up with the windows like that anymore!
I’ve long had a bunch of unwatched or just very partly watched DVDs and Blurays and I’ve been thinking about what I find uncomfortable about watching movies, but I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked because I finished I Saw the TV Glow and that’s a heck of an emotional experience for a trans person. I’ve also started reading Wrath Goddess Sing.
I keep saying it’s an amazing joy to be able to feel emotions now, on HRT, in a way I never did before in my life, and I am still getting used to it. Something I noticed fairly early on was having very strong feelings listening to songs that have long been familiar. That’s now become a familiar and treasured thing. But I think it’s one thing to have these feelings listening to a four-minute song with lyrics I memorized decades ago, now experiencing an hour-and-twenty minute movie by a trans woman telling a trans story and just designed to induce strong feelings in trans viewers, this is a different thing. I’m not used to this. It’s an intense experience. And similarly now about 50 pages into a 450 page trans story by a trans author.
Really in the previous decades of my life, I only felt this sort of emotional intensity when something bad was happening to me, or something dangerous, or at the least frightening. I’m still learning to understand the feelings. It’s still new to me. It’s amazing, it’s so amazing, things I never experienced, never imagined earlier in my life.
I went into my closet and turned on the light and … no light! I was mystified. I flipped the switch up and down, wondered if the power had failed and looked back into the room to see that the rest of the lights were on, and then I realized that probably the bulb had failed.
I grew up with incandescent bulbs, they failed all the time, I don’t remember it being a surprise or a mystery. Flip switch, no light, oh, bulb burned out. These days, it doesn’t happen very often, and every time I’m weirdly confused that the light isn’t working for some unknown reason!
I climbed up and removed the globe, which very much needed cleaning, and found an old tiny spiral-tube compact fluorescent that must have been in there for a long long time now. I often write the date of installation on bulbs and batteries but didn’t on that one, unfortunately. It’s got an LED now!
Sound is a wave. Unlike light or magnetism, this kind of wave needs physical matter, a medium, through which to travel. That property of sound waves, of course, led to the brilliant tagline for the 1979 movie, Alien: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” There’s nothing to vibrate and carry the sound waves in space; hence, no sound transmission.
So, the best way to reduce sound transmission would be to live in a vacuum. You’d have a short life but you wouldn’t be bothered by noise. In addition to being dead, you’d also be broke because turning your house into a vacuum chamber wouldn’t be cheap. Therefore, I’m going to take a leap and assume the vacuum technique won’t work for you.
So a bunch of actually useful information follows this.
